The Desperate Hours

by Joeseph Hays

  “Charles Wright,” Jesse read aloud. “Business?”

  “Attorney. Hepburn and Higgins. Guaranty Building.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Anything else what?”

  In a swift and unreasonable wave of irritation, Jesse Webb untangled his legs and stood up. “Look, Mr. Wright, we’re not in court. Let’s not be cagey. It makes me suspicious. I’ve got things to find out. Play ball. I reckon you can’t get in any trouble unless you got something to hide. What have you been up to the last hour? Let’s have it.”

  “I’ll play ball, Deputy,” Charles Wright said then, “but I don’t want to be used for the ball. I’ve got nothing to hide. But I ought to know what this is all about.”

  “It’s none of your business what-” But Jesse heard Tom Winston clear his throat in warning, and he broke off, his voice dropping. “Okay, okay. Your firm handle criminal cases, Mr. Wright?”

  “We’re strictly corporation law. You haven’t answered my question, Deputy.”

  “Don’t get fresh,” Tom Winston put in mildly. “What Deputy Webb is asking is whether you’d take on a criminal case, maybe try to help some rat for a fancy fee.”

  “What rat are you referring to?”

  Jesse Webb took over again. He spoke evenly, and his voice was hoarse now. “We’re referring to three rats who broke out of the Federal pen in Terre Haute yesterday morning. Don’t you read the papers, man? Don’t you listen to the radio?” As Charles Wright shook his head, Jesse caught—or wondered whether he caught—a certain quick alertness in the gray eyes. “Well, we have reason to believe these men are in town, or damn close to town. The fact is, Mr. Wright”—and Jesse was leaning forward on his fists—“we have some reason to think they might be in this neighborhood, maybe in one of the houses around here. So when someone starts cruising around-”

  But he stopped then, certain for a second that a change had taken place on the face before him. “What’s up, kid?” he asked curtly, and in his stomach something turned completely over.

  “Nothing.”

  “You know something?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Suspect something?”

  “No.”

  “Damn it, don’t lie to me!” Jesse barked. “Your face looks like I just kicked you!”

  “Well, it is a kind of shock, I guess. I just never—thought of anything like that.”

  “What were you doing in that car, Mr. Wright? What’s the deal?”

  Charles Wright smiled then, a tight sort of smile that never reached the grave eyes. “Well, it just happens that my girl friend lives around here, that’s all. And I got the crazy idea just now, when you said—”

  “What’s her name, Wright?”

  There was a slight pause then, a pause that Jesse Webb didn’t like.

  “Her name’s Allen,” Charles Wright said then, and very firmly and convincingly. “Constance Allen. But I saw her go into her house just a little while ago. I’m sure she’s all right, Deputy.”

  “You saw her go in? You brought her home?”

  “Well, no. Y’see, that’s the pitch. I might as well tell the truth. She was out with another guy tonight. That’s why I’ve been hanging around. Connie and I are almost engaged. At least I thought-” He shook his head and the smile came again, but still it didn’t rise into the steady gaze. “It’s just one of those things. I guess I ought to be ashamed. Being jealous, I mean.”

  “What’s her address, Mr. Wright?” Jesse asked wearily as he sat down again.

  “I don’t see that-”

  “Where does she live, Mr. Wright?” Jesse drawled.

  “I don’t know the exact number,” Charles Wright said, and the smile had vanished. “But she works in our office downtown, and of course I know the house. I could look up the number, if you like.”

  “On the boulevard?”

  “Just off it. On Oxford.”

  “Okay,” Jesse said slowly, heaving a sigh and reaching for his coffee. “I reckon we can look it up. Go on home now, kid, and go to sleep. Forget this happened, hear? Forget it.”

  Charles Wright turned to the rear door, but the deputy’s voice stopped him.

  “One more thing. Just in case you might think about talking about this, Mr. Wright. I want you to read this letter and then think about the way this guy feels, the one who wrote it. Maybe then you won’t be tempted to talk this up anywhere tonight, some bar—or tomorrow in your office.”

  Jesse Webb watched the younger man read the letter. He saw the face lift afterwards, and he saw going through Charles Wright the same feelings that he himself had experienced and continued to experience even’ time he even thought of those pitiful words on that sheet of white paper.

  “Don’t make any more fuss about starting your car than you have to, Mr. Wright.”

  “But … even if you did know the house, Deputy—”

  “Yeh?”

  “I guess it’d be pretty dangerous to try to close in, wouldn’t it?”

  “Dangerous for those scum,” Jesse Webb said grimly, angry that the young lawyer had put his own feelings into words.

  “I was thinking of-” But Charles Wright didn’t finish;

  he turned on his heel and opened the door.

  “Stay away from here now,” Jesse called after him. “That’s an order.” Then he took a long swallow of coffee, emptying the cup.

  “The boy’s got a good question there, Jess. What do you have in mind? If they were nice and cozy in that Allen house on Oxford Street, let’s say.”

  “Let’s take a look at that map, Tom.”

  “Here we are. But I’ve been thinking about that off and on myself all day, Jess. What would we-”

  “We’re not at that point yet,” Jesse snapped. “Did you get the rest of the names filled in on the map?”

  “Most of them are there. But you can’t be sure, Jess. We haven’t had time to do all the cross-checking we should. And you didn’t want us asking too many questions. People move in, move out, names change. No directory’s up to the minute, Jess. You can see-”

  “Oxford Street. Kessler. Here we are.”

  They studied it together, heads bent over the table. Finally Jesse stood up and took his cup to the urn, stood with his back to Tom Winston. “I don’t see any Allen on Oxford, Tom,” he said, very slowly, placing the cup under the spigot.

  “No, but—”

  “Now, Tom, you’ve got something to do. Find out where that kid lives, who his girl friend really is, where she lives. If nothing breaks around here by morning, I might want to talk to young Mr. Wright again. Also, check his story about that law firm. And I wonder if we could get hold of a city directory.”

  “Jess, I told you this map can’t be accurate. There’s no way in the world-”

  “Move your fat can, Tom,” Jesse said easily, suddenly grateful for Tom Winston, glad to have him along on this. “Anything’s better than sitting waiting for the bomb to go off.” Tom Winston shrugged hugely and shambled toward the swinging door into the front of the restaurant. “This keeps up, we’ll be suspecting each other,” he said. “You’re not a cop, you bastard, you’re a bulldog.”

  Jesse laughed then. There was a fresh excitement in the sound.

  Behind the wheel of the convertible again, Chuck Wright drove, waiting for the dazed blankness to thin in him. Until it did, no feeling stirred.

  You’ve got it now, he kept telling himself over and over; you’ve got the whole picture and it’s worse than you imagined, much worse than anything you could have dreamed of. But these words didn’t seem to reach him. Or the idea, either.

  He drove south to his father’s house, parked the convertible in the garage as his father had asked him to do. He saw himself doing these things, but he did not seem to be a part of them. He was remembering, as he climbed into his small black car, the way he’d lied to the police. In that split instant of time, while he was still rocking with the blow of actuality, incredible and unreal after al
l the shadowy suspicions, he had recalled the look on Cindy’s face last night and he had known what it meant. The cold coherence of his lie amazed him slightly now: it had leaped full-formed and detailed to his lips, complete with the name of Constance Allen, who worked with Cindy in the office but lived on a farm south of the city. He had lied, he realized now, with the same instinctual cleverness and cunning that had prompted Mr. Hilliard to invent that story of his drunkenness.

  Now he started the motor, backed into the street, fully intending in the back of his mind to drive downtown to his club. That’s what the police had advised. Then the numbness began to wear away, to slacken off.

  Cindy is in that house. Now. Cindy is in that house with those three men.

  He brought the car to a halt, hearing again Cindy’s words, Do you have a gun, Chuck? He jumped out of the car, walked up the front steps of his parents’ house, opened the door, climbed to the attic. Only Mattie, the maid, was there and she stood by watching, question marks all over her old and querulous face. Chuck came down in about ten minutes. It had taken him that long to find the rather odd-shaped Japanese automatic he had brought home from the Orient, a war souvenir. When he climbed back into the car, he had the gun in his hip pocket, loaded.

  But before he could swing the wheel about for a U turn on the wide and pleasant street where he had spent his childhood, he remembered, phrase by phrase, Mr. Hilliard’s anonymous letter to the police. He didn’t make the turn; he headed south, away from the Hilliards’ home. Take it slow now, Chuck, he was warning himself. Cindy doesn’t want the police to know. Mr. Hilliard is desperate that no one know. No one will thank you if you try to play hero here and something goes haywire. Cindy will hate you forever if you pull something wild and reckless now, something that could end in bloodshed. And not necessarily the bloodshed of those three, either, but of the Hilliards. What could you do, anyway? If Mr. Hilliard had wanted help, yours or anyone’s, he would have asked. And Cindy—Cindy didn’t care what you thought, Chuck, just so long as you didn’t think the truth. Trust them. Trust them both. They’re desperate people.

  But Cindy is in that house.

  He trounced on the gas and the car shot forward; he whipped it in a careening turn, going nowhere, aimless again, his body burning, his throat closed and dry.

  The police should be told. He was not doing the proper or legal thing in working against the police. But he couldn’t help recalling various stories he’d heard, or read. The police is not one man, a predictable human being; the police includes all sorts of human beings, each with his own ambitions and fears and nerves and courage. Take that lanky deputy in the restaurant. Dangerous for those scum, he had growled venomously. No thought of the Hilliards. His was a job to do. That job was to capture or kill those three wanted men. Probably the man was bucking for a promotion.

  Still, he showed you the letter, didn’t he? To keep your mouth shut, to make you realize the desperation of Mr. Hilliard. Perhaps then the deputy was capable of comprehending what Mr. Hilliard was up against. Perhaps-

  The decision is not yours, Chuck. It’s Mr. Hilliard’s. It’s his family. Certainly nothing has happened so far in that house, nothing final or fatal; that’s what Mr. Hilliard’s working against. He has his own ways. And he is determined that the police not come into this.

  Still, if they knew that the fugitives were holding hostages in the house-

  Hostages. Chuck slowed down. The word brought back a quick memory of war. And with it the thin edge of an idea: perhaps he could do something, after all. He himself. Working cautiously and alone. He recalled a certain wartime detail on the edge of the jungle in the Philippines. He recalled the way the Japs had held three officers hostage and the way-

  The car was crawling now. Would it work?

  No! Cindy is in that house. Chuck. Cindy is there with those three men. Cindy whom you love.

  He stepped on the gas again, turned the wheel about and brought the car to a halt in front of the club. The garageman came forward, nodded. Chuck went inside, picked up both the evening papers at the desk, took the self-service elevator to his room. He opened the papers, paged them swiftly and found in the Times—on page three tonight—the pictures of the men. A poisonous bitterness rose in him until he tasted it in his mouth as he studied the three faces. Then, in one sudden violent motion of his hand, his fist crashed into the floor lamp, sent it spinning across the room, against the far wall. The bulb exploded. The room was plunged into abrupt darkness. He stood panting, helpless, legs apart, the savage violence still unspent in him.

  That’s it, he told himself harshly, that’s fine, Chuck. Smash up the furniture. Go to pieces now. That’ll help a lot. Cindy didn’t crack up. Her father has taken more than you’ll ever know and he’s hanging on, hanging on and fighting in the only way those beasts have left him to fight. Look at the man. He went back into that house tonight, empty-handed, determined, alone.

  Chuck was looking at the man Dan Hilliard and he was beginning to breathe more steadily. The picture of Mr. Hilliard brought a slow but expanding respect that was almost a physical emotion in Chuck Wright now—and with it, something quite different, too. That something was shame. He remembered the way he had looked upon Mr. Hilliard and his life— conventional, dull, empty.

  A man doesn’t fight like that for an empty life. He fights for what is precious and vital to him, the way you are going to fight, by doing nothing, for someone who is precious and vital to you.

  You are not going to do a thing, Chuck. Nothing.

  He took the gun from his pocket and placed it on top of the bureau in the dark.

  You are going to be quiet and calm and you are going to forget any ideas about going near that house until those men have gone.

  All the thin and stupid thinking that had built up for Chuck Wright such a phony and childish picture of Dan Hilliard, and other men like Dan Hilliard, now seemed to have been a part of his nature a long time ago. He knew, however, that he had left such thinking behind—and with it a part of his youth—in the space of the last forty-five minutes.

  Without turning on the overhead lights, Chuck began to empty his pockets, glad to be able to fall back on routine. But there was something about Mr. Hilliard’s letter that, so far, he had not taken into consideration. So far, he had been concentrating on the four people at the mercy of those three men in the house, but now he realized, abruptly and with a heart-freezing shock, that he had not thought about what would happen when those men left. Mr. Hilliard was taking precautions, such as they were, against that moment, but-

  What if they took Cindy along?

  Before the full impact of this possibility reached him, Chuck came across a foreign object in his pocket. He held it and examined it with his fingers for a full minute before he recognized it by touch. It was the key he had forgotten to give back to Cindy in the office today, the key to the rear door of the Hilliards’ house. He held it tight in his wet palm now, as though it were a part of the girl herself, and at the same time his mind shot ahead. Was there some way in which he could make use of it?

  One o’clock came. Dan Hilliard was gazing at the illuminated dial of his watch on the table beside his bed. Eight and a half more hours until the mail brought the money. Then-

  He used what he thought was the last strength in his will to bring his thoughts veering away from that time. Then he slept again, but it was not really sleep because he could not plunge himself far enough below the surface of consciousness. No matter how his body ached and yearned for the peace, he remained alert in every fiber, like a jungle animal in his lair. They’ve brought you to this, Dan thought. You’ve entered their world fully now. They’ve turned your house into a jungle, a wilderness of snarls and clashes and brutish fear. Every motor that passed became, until it was gone, danger, a threat— the police. Every faintest movement downstairs where Robish and Glenn Griffin remained sent a stiffening through him. Always in his mind was the sharp awareness of Eleanor in the other bed, of Cindy and Ralp
hie in Ralphie’s room together, behind the locked door across the hall.

  His plan, which he had not really devised but which had come to him in that half-awake dreaming state, was complete now. It amounted to little more than a threat, but it was the best he could invent. It might give Glenn Griffin pause if he did decide to take any of the family along tomorrow. In the morning Dan would carry out the details of that scheme. With that much out of the way, Dan wanted to fight against other thoughts that crept through his mind, the nightmarish memories of the evening just past. But he could not keep his thoughts rigid and marshaled now as he had been able to do earlier. He had passed a certain point, still another one, and he was a different man. The will didn’t crack; it weakened, grew soft, flexible.

  A hopelessness had worked its way inside, and there was nothing he could do about it. Before, it had been helplessness, which was something quite different; held in the grip of that, he had proved it wrong in some small ways. But this despair that had spread through him, rendering his mind as weak as his body now, was like a dark and powerful drug. No matter what happened, he didn’t have a chance. Oh, he’d go through with it all. He’d do what he had to do, and as carefully and thoroughly as possible; but in the end, in the pay-off tomorrow, his whole life, the life of his whole family, would be changed. He didn’t dare let himself think in just what way, because he didn’t know and it was probably better that he didn’t.

  You never know anything. There are so many factors involved. Not just fate, not just accident, not just character— but these and also a million other factors that are unfathomable and totally unpredictable. Who would have thought that the rebellion and departure of the younger Griffin would produce in Glenn Griffin that awesome quietness? He was not the same at all now; he had become a different person—the arrogance thin and unconvincing, the swagger an empty gesture, the cruelty more pronounced. Dan recognized—and faced—that quietness for what it was: the thin ice-crust over hysteria. Glenn Griffin then, the leader, on whose cold intelligence of a sort Dan had come to rely, was now crushed and driven by the absence of the brother whom he had dominated. During the evening Dan had caught the withering stare of contempt that Glenn Griffin had turned on Cindy. Was that warped mind beginning now to blame her for what Hank had done? And if so, what would this lead to?