by Joeseph Hays
“You’ve thought of it all, haven’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Cindy. No one can think of everything. That’s the thing that can-” He broke off. “I’ll call you when the next mail comes in.”
“Yes.”
“Eat some lunch, Cindy. You had no breakfast.”
“Yes.”
When she replaced the phone, Cindy sat staring at it, but seeing instead the house ten miles away. In five hours the money would arrive. Would or would not. Until then, she prayed silently, please God make them all stay away. Everybody. The police most of all, but also peddlers, salesmen, insurance men, everyone, everyone.
“I saw him snooping around those damn windows,” Robish said, and he was trembling. “We got to grab him, Griffin. Listen ! He was up on his toes, looking in the garage. Just before he got back in the truck. Don’t you believe me?”
“Mr. Patterson?” Eleanor said, still seated at the kitchen table. “He just came to collect. He picks up the trash every Thursday morning and then he comes back just after lunch every other Thursday to collect.”
“You always pay him with a check, Mrs. Hilliard?” Glenn asked, speaking first.
“Yes. Almost always. It prevents my having to have a lot of cash around the house, and being out here like this-” She had almost said it was safer not to have cash in the house, but a giddiness rose in her and she stopped herself.
“I know what I seen,” Robish said, his voice murky. “He saw the car. I’m going to get him. Let me have your gun.”
“Hank,” Glenn shouted into the dining room, “where’d the old guy go?”
“House next door. Behind the trees. I can see the back end of the truck at the curb down there.”
“Calling the cops!” growled Robish.
“No,” Eleanor said hastily. “The Wallings aren’t home. I know.”
“Then maybe I can catch him, Glenn.”
“Glenn,” Hank called from the next room, “why take any chances anyway? Let’s just blow.”
Eleanor’s eyes were fixed on Glenn’s face, which was locked in indecision.
“Mr. Patterson wouldn’t be suspicious. He … you saw him … a man like that.”
“Shut up,” Glenn Griffin said and extended his gun toward Robish. “Mrs. Hilliard, you want the old guy to bring the cops up on your lawn? Use your head. What else can we do?”
Robish shoved the gun into the side of Dan’s gray jacket. He took a step toward the back door. Glenn’s voice halted him.
“If you get into trouble, don’t come back here, Robish.”
“Me? I don’t know what trouble is.”
Just before she collapsed over the table, Eleanor thought that she had never heard Robish’s voice so light-hearted, so pleased and excited and not in the least menacing or-
At approximately this time—which was the peak of the noon hour in the downtown area—Dan Hilliard stepped into a hotel where he was not likely to be known, asked for a messenger, then spoke quickly but quite distinctly and directly to a middle-aged man who wore a maroon-colored uniform with brass buttons; the man nodded, showing no surprise but taking a closer, longer look at Dan Hilliard as he accepted from him a white envelope and a five-dollar bill. Then the messenger went to put on a raincoat and Dan Hilliard walked briskly out the side door into the steady but now windless downpour. In less than a minute the messenger was walking west on Washington Street toward Alabama, toward the offices of the city police department, directly across the street from the Marion County jail and the offices of the Sheriff.
The Wallings were not at home, which was no surprise to Mr. Patterson because Mrs. Walling was an active clubwoman, pictures always in the paper, that sort of thing. Mr. Patterson returned to his truck and started to climb in, a little stiffly because this rain raised merry hell with his arthritis; then he saw the man sitting in the cab of his truck.
“Just get in, Jack,” the man said.
Mr. Patterson saw the revolver, and he frowned as he lifted himself up.
“Drive, Jack, and no hurry. Drive out east.”
Mr. Patterson started the motor and glanced sideways at the huge man slouched down in the seat beside him. The man wore an expensive suit that didn’t fit him. Mr. Patterson recognized the face, after perhaps ten seconds, and then he remembered the car parked in the Hilliard garage and the radio reports and the pictures in this morning’s paper.
Why did I wait? he asked himself. What was I waiting for? Why did I stop at the Wallings’?
“Good Lord,” he said aloud, in a cracked breath. “Good Lord, those poor people.”
The man seemed pleased by this; he even chuckled heavily. “I was right, wasn’t I, Jack?”
Mr. Patterson had forgotten everything but Mrs. Hilliard’s face as she wrote out his check a few minutes ago at the kitchen table while he waited, as usual, in the small back hall. The gun had been pointed at her then, from the next room. Why hadn’t he guessed that? Why was his mind so slow nowadays?
If he’d gone straight to a drug store and called Jesse Webb, he might have helped them. Those poor people. Mr. Patterson had even jotted down the license number on a scrap of paper that was now in his pocket; he meant to ask Jesse Webb, who would remember him because many was the night he’d played pinochle with young Jesse’s father, whether the license was the one Mr. Patterson suspected it might be. Being deputy sheriff now, Jesse’d have that sort of information; and if Mr. Patterson had made a mistake, well, he was an old man, getting crotchety, getting suspicious.
But it was no mistake. And he had done nothing. If anything happened to those people, he’d never forgive himself.
It was then that he realized that what was going to happen now was to happen to him. His breathing became irregular and the arthritis pain clenched in his right knee. In the drafty cab of the truck, behind the steady swish-swash of the windshield wipers, Mr. Patterson heard a strange sound: the man beside him was humming, softly, a blurred sort of tune, but with a mounting excitement in it, a pleasure-filled anticipation. Mr. Patterson even guessed the meaning of the excitement.
He didn’t shudder. He didn’t grow panicky. He made a silent plan.
They were east of the city now, on a country road. With his left elbow, but very quietly and cautiously, he pressed his weight down on the door handle. Timing the click, he spoke simultaneously with it, and in a loud tone: “Mister, I swear to God I’m not going to say a word to anybody! I’m an old man. I didn’t do anything to you.”
The man beside him laughed then. “Why don’t you get down on your knees and pray, Jack?”
Mr. Patterson had not liked saying those words, but they seemed the ones a man might say under the circumstances. The door was open now. Ahead, he saw two blue gasoline pumps set alongside the road, fairly close to the edge. There was a weathered, clapboard service-station building, too. He gauged his distance carefully, tried not to take the deep breath that his lungs ached for.
Mr. Patterson waited till he was almost abreast of the pumps, then in one movement that was co-ordinated through his frail old body, he whipped the wheel to the right, trounced hard on the accelerator, and fell from the truck just as its nose struck the first pump. He hit the gravel and rolled, twisting, with the stiffness of his right leg forgotten, hearing the metallic crash above and behind him. He kept his body crouched low and ran toward the building, feeling the rain cold and pleasant against his face, wondering why there was no explosion, no burst of flame.
He was within two yards of the weathered wood when the first bullet reached him; then he heard the cracking, earbursting sound. He knew he had been hit; in his mind he could see the big man standing back there, legs planted apart in the gravel, leveling the gun. But what surprised Mr. Patterson, in the only moment he had left for surprise or any other emotion, was that the bullet did not burn or sear or scorch. It was more like a paralyzing but painless blow against his back. He didn’t feel the second bullet at all. Nor the third.
No one but the killer a
nd the killed heard those shots, and as a result almost an hour passed before the report of the murder, which was thought to be an accident, reached Deputy Sheriff Jesse Webb. He kept asking for more facts on the two-way radio in his car, but he could learn very little, only that the truck had, apparently, gone out of control in front of the old deserted and boarded-up filling station, had plowed into the pumps which were no longer in use; there had been no explosion. The body, evidently, had been thrown clear. As yet it had not been identified, no police officer had reached the scene, and perhaps it wasn’t worth his time to drive all the way across the city to make a personal investigation.
But Jesse had worked his way by now through the important telephone numbers on his list, with no results, and he was coming to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Helen Lamar had made no telephone call to Indianapolis from Columbus, Ohio, last night. Even more reluctantly he was concluding that Griffin was not in or near the city.
In his office, Dan Hilliard received a phone call from home. He listened, frowning, a coldness climbing his legs.
Then he said, “How can I do that, Ellie? The money should be here in less than an hour now. It’s almost 2 o’clock.”
He listened again, this time gripping the phone until a spasm of pain shot up the clenched muscles of his arm and reached his neck. He swore without realizing that he had spoken. He couldn’t believe what his wife told him; the incredibility of what she said smashed into the tension of his mind that had been straining toward 2:45 for endless hours now.
“You will do it, won’t you?” his wife said, with urgency.
“I’ll pick up Cindy right away,” Dan replied.
When he replaced the instrument and stood up, Dan Hilliard did not know what had happened, or why he was being instructed by Glenn Griffin, through Eleanor, to do what he was now going to do. None of it made any sense at all, but what brought the sour choking rage up in him now was the realization that he had been tricked. The money wasn’t coming today. Griffin had known all along. The money had not been mailed until after Griffin had talked to that woman on the phone last night. It could not arrive and be delivered until tomorrow.
Glenn Griffin had lied in order to get him out of the house today, in order to make it appear a normal day, without incident.
Now, however, there was an incident of some sort, and Dan refused to think what it might be. In half an hour he and Cindy were to be parked in an area in front of the stores that formed a shopping center on the far east of the city. That was all he knew. Why they were to be there, for whom they were to wait, what would happen—Glenn Griffin had not told him. And very likely Eleanor didn’t know or had been commanded not to say on the phone.
In the employees’ elevator Dan pushed a button and rested his burning forehead against the cool metal grating and felt a scalding behind his eyes. You can only push a man so far, he warned Glenn Griffin in his mind. A man can only take so much. Any man. Any man in the world. He was approaching the edge of something and he knew it, without being fully aware of what it was; but he did know, as he tugged at his hat brim and squared his shoulders before leaving the privacy of the elevator, that he could not step over that edge, or precipice. If he took that step, everything he had already done, all that the others had been through, would be wasted effort. By playing their game—whatever it was now—he had a chance, however slight.
It’s as simple as that, he told himself savagely. Remember it! He stepped out of the elevator.
Robish was unable, at that same moment, to step from the cubicle that held him. The panting was over now, the wild animal terror was behind him. Back there a bit, crashing through the woods after he realized the truck wouldn’t start and he would have to go on foot, he had been scared. Sure, scared. And sore. Mostly sore at that old guy with his wise ideas. Thinking he could pull a fast one on Robish. Remembering the old guy sent a warm pleasant flush down his massive soaked body in the woods: the way the old guy’d tried to run, stifflike, and then the way he stopped, kicking up the gravel with one foot, those skinny little arms going up, and then the way he sprawled while Robish pounded the other two bullets into the jerking body. That memory had caused Robish to grin. They’d all get it just that way, wise bastards.
Glenn thought he was dumb. Oh, Robish knew what Griffin thought. But was he? Hadn’t he come out of the edge of the woods, picked the shopping center, found the telephone in the service station, made his call? Wasn’t he waiting here now, cozy and tight in the men’s room, until the little redhead’s car came for him?
From the window he could watch the parking area. His clothes were soggy, his body wet; his breath was getting back to normal; and all he had to do was watch the women climbing in and out of their cars, skittering across puddles, clutching their kids and their groceries. He liked the secret feeling it gave him —the small hot room, the still damp coldness outside, the thought of three bullets left in the gun. He had those bullets earmarked. One for Hilliard, the guy who had slugged him; one for the kid, that brat that caused it. Let Hilliard watch the kid get it first. That’d pay him off. And if Griffin objected— that damn young fool risking their necks just so he could get at some copper who’d busted his good-looking jaw—well, there was a third bullet, wasn’t there? He was going to hold the gun from now on. That third bullet could just as easy be for Glenn Griffin.
Robish was feeling great.
Glenn had said a half-hour. Robish had no way to estimate time, but he figured maybe ten minutes had passed since he talked to Griffin, maybe twenty.
Then, in the distance, he heard, very faintly, the wail of a siren. A long way off. It made him grin.
But the grin twisted and left his face sagging. A lot could happen in half an hour. Maybe those cops’d try to surround the woods, figuring that was the way he’d run. He had no idea how long he’d spent plowing through them. Maybe in a half-hour the cops’d work their way through them, out onto the street.
Where was that redhead, Goddammit!
“Cindy’ll be back in a minute or two, Mr. Hilliard,” Chuck Wright said. “Why don’t you wait in my office?”
“Where is she?”
Chuck stood back as Dan Hilliard entered his office. He hadn’t missed the sharp note of demand in the normally easygoing voice. Nor had he missed the sleepwalking aspects of the man’s appearance and manner.
“She’s taking dictation from Mr. Hepburn right now,” Chuck replied easily and offered cigarettes.
Dan Hilliard either did not want one or did not see them. “How much longer?”
Chuck felt a twitch of annoyance at the man who still stood, hat on head, eyes staring hollowly from under the dripping brim. “I couldn’t say,” he said, the irritation roughing his words. But he felt it ebb. Why? He could not have said. But the stolid way the other man stood, the slope of those heavy shoulders, and the lined, tired face with the freckles clear on the pale skin, all sent an odd start of alarm through him. “You look-” He started, then stopped himself. “Won’t you sit down, sir?” he said.
The sir had slipped out, surprising him. He never addressed anyone, even Mr. Hepburn, or his own father, as sir. Point of honor. Pride. Whatever it was, there it was, that was Chuck Wright, take it or leave it.
“Could you interrupt her, Chuck?” Dan Hilliard asked. “It’s —important.”
“Mr. Hilliard.” Chuck took a deep breath. “Is something wrong?”
“Why do you ask that?” The words licked like lashes of a whip.
“I mean—with Cindy. Or you? Someone.” Chuck shook his head in a bewildered way and leaned against his desk crossed one ankle over the other. “I don’t mean to pry. Perhaps it’s none of my business. At first I thought maybe Cindy was just giving me the brush. Some other fellow. Something like that. Now-”
“Now what?”
“I’m damned if I know.”
And there it rested. It stayed there because all Dan Hilliard would say was what Cindy had said earlier in the afternoon, after she’d come wanderi
ng in ten minutes late after the lunch hour, looking haggard and very tired: “You’re imagining things, Chuck.” Her father used the same words now.
“It started last night,” Chuck said stubbornly, his teeth in it now and very little to bite them into. Then, while Dan Hilliard stood, dripping and unmoving, a raincoated statue in the office, Chuck Wright went over it all for him, what little he had to go over—the way she’d leaped out at him from the house, the way she’d insisted on being taken home after sitting in silence all evening, the abrupt and disturbing tears in the car, and the question about a gun. He watched closely, narrowing his gaze, when he mentioned the gun.
“It doesn’t figure, sir. That’s all.”
“It’s not your business, Chuck.”
“Maybe not, but—”
“No maybes about it. This is not your affair. Stay out of it.”
Chuck had not been spoken to in this manner, or with that much force behind the order, since his days in the Marines. He hadn’t liked it then, but it had been part of a pattern that he had to accept. He didn’t have to take it now.
“Its my business if it concerns Cindy, Mr. Hilliard.”
Then the hat tilted sidewise slightly; the blue eyes snapped to immediate attention, and some of the dazed hardness left them. “So. So it’s like that, is it, Chuck?”
“It’s like that,” Chuck said evenly, “whether you like it or not.”
“I don’t. I haven’t, that is. But I’ve no time to talk about it now. Or to think about it.” The earlier urgency returned to the man; he stepped to the door. “Where’s Hepburn’s office?”
“I’ll get her,” Chuck said, moving around the blocky figure, angry and confused but a new kind of suspicion troubling him, a feeling, as he tapped on Mr. Hepburn’s door, that whatever this thing was, it was bigger than any feeling Mr. Hilliard might bear toward him. It was, somehow, beyond that, more urgent and vital and desperate.
