The Desperate Hours

by Joeseph Hays

  On the corner he stopped, out of habit, and bought a morning paper from the blind newsdealer. He went on, rolling the paper and placing it in the pocket of his coat. The plan he had devised in those sleepless hours now seemed a shadowy impossible figment of his sickened imagination. The scheme was a form of blackmail, really, but its success depended on something that, through the night, had disappeared: the cold, cruel but fundamentally rational mind of Glenn Griffin. After the stupefying metamorphosis that had taken place in Glenn Griffin after his brother’s desertion, could he be expected to comprehend the meaning of Dan’s threat in those last frantic minutes after the money was in hand and he was ready to leave the house? Dan still intended to use the idea, for what it was worth. Look, Griffin, he would say then, you are not going to take anyone along with you in that car. And when Glenn Griffin grinned at this, with his gun pointing, after he imagined that he had won a point and that Dan had nothing more to say about it, Dan would go on: “Then you had better take me, Griffin, and only me, because I’m the one who can set the police on the man you’re paying to kill that policeman.” Would the grin flicker, fade? “I know both the killer’s name and the name of the policeman now, Griffin. You let them both slip out last night when you were yelling at your brother. None of the others will remember those names, but I do. And if you take anyone but me on this ride, I’ll put the police on the killer, and then all your sticking around here will have been for nothing.” Would that do it then? Or would Griffin insist on taking someone else along, too? In that case: All I have to do is speak the two names, Griffin, to whoever stays behind, and you can’t take all of us.” What Griffin could do then, if he dared risk the noise, was to kill Dan Hilliard outright and do whatever he wished with the others.

  Dan turned into the side entrance of the department store. The killer-to-be was named Flick, the man to whom Cindy, a half-hour from now, was to deliver $3,000 of that money that was even now approaching this building in the 9:30 mail. The policeman, whom Griffin was set on murdering in this manner, was named Webb. Last night, in that nightmarish scene between the brothers, the two names had lodged in a corner of Dan’s retentive brain.

  But as he rode up on the elevator, Dan was disturbed by the coolness of his own thinking. In view of the altered facts of the day, it didn’t seem to make good sense. Yesterday, the threat might have forced Glenn Griffin, out of fear that his warped revenge would not be carried out, to do as Dan insisted. But today the cool intelligence was gone from the young man. He appeared to be cracking up. There was a blurred look about his eyes, a harsh red line on his underlids, a loose wetness about his lips. His brooding wildness this morning threatened, given the proper stimulus, to become more unpredictable and violent than Robish’s.

  Dan was at his desk now, sitting as he sat yesterday morning, waiting for the hands of his watch to reach 9:30. He was recalling, though, the way Glenn Griffin had snatched the phone from his hands last night—it must have been 2 o’clock—and the way he had spoken into it, with mounting alarm, over and over: Hello, hello, who is it? But there had, apparently, been no answer from the other end, and as Glenn Griffin replaced the phone, his eyes a great distance from that hallway, Dan had realized fully that he was then, and from that point on, dealing with another and quite different young man.

  This realization, in focus now, frightened him; he felt some of the numbness wear away and he could feel his heart hammering at his ribs. There was also that other telephone call last night, much later, the one placed by Glenn Griffin to someone in Cincinnati. Griffin had made that call himself, the crazy desperation reaching such proportions that he risked snarling and cursing at the operator. After the conversation, which Dan had not been able to hear, Glenn had shouted from the front hall to the den: Hey, Robish! She’s still there. She’s waiting. There’s someone won’t let a man down. Hear me, Robish?

  Twenty-one minutes after 9.

  Dan stood up and dabbed at the wetness that had gathered under his chin. He went to the files, stood uncertainly before them, knowing that there was work to be done, people to interview today, orders to be given. But he couldn’t seem to move. Standing there, his eyes fell on the morning paper in the pocket of his topcoat. He reached for it, flipped it open, and looked directly into the face of young Hank Griffin. Over the photograph were the words:

  FUGITIVE KILLED: TROOPER WOUNDED IN GUN BATTLE

  There was a knock on the door; it seemed to come from a great and hollow distance. Then Dan Hilliard’s bluff and middle-aged secretary said, “Letter for you, Mr. Hilliard. It came Special Delivery during the night. The night watchman signed for it.” She broke off, frowning. “Mr. Hilliard, if you ask me, you’re catching the flu. Why don’t you let me cancel appointments and you go home to bed?”

  “Do that,” Dan said, accepting the envelope, which was surprisingly light in weight. “I’ll be leaving for a while. After I’ve taken care of some business at the bank I’m going home.”

  “If it’s something I can-”

  “No.”

  “Yes, Mr. Hilliard.”

  The door closed gently and Dan made it back to the desk with difficulty. He leaned there, slack and spent, remembering one more astonishing fact about Glenn Griffin, the one that explained the others: he had spent much of the night with his ear close to the radio. Glenn Griffin knew then—and had known all morning—what had happened to his brother. And it was this knowledge that had turned him into the hysterical stranger who was beyond reason. And in the house now with Eleanor and Ralphie.

  Dan slit open the envelope and counted five one-thousand-dollar bills and one five-hundred-dollar bill. He slid three of the one-thousand-dollar bills into a plain white envelope from his drawer, carefully placed both envelopes in his breast pocket. The action brought back some of the numbness, and as he stood up, he was grateful for that. But his thoughts remained with Eleanor.

  Eleanor was upstairs with Ralphie, at 9:30, acutely aware of the time. While she played rummy with the boy, she could hear what was said below. There was the steady hum of the radio, and then, above it, Glenn Griffin’s voice—higher now, different somehow: “Robish. Stick to the window but listen. There’re a couple of guys up on the roof of the house next door.” Robish swore heavily from the direction of the den, where he was watching the side and rear yards. “Coppers?”

  “How the hell do I know? They got on yellow coveralls. They’re working on one of those television things.”

  “Then what you crying about?”

  “Who’s crying? You just can’t tell, that’s all. You had more sense, you’d know that.”

  “I got sense,” Robish replied from the distance. “Me, I got more sense’n you think, Griffin. No gun, but a lot of brains.”

  “That supposed to mean something?”

  When Robish didn’t answer at first, Ralphie said, to his mother, “Your play.” But she held up a hand, straining to hear.

  “Means,” Robish called at last, “that your kid brother got his last night cause he got scared, that’s all. You been gettin’ jumpier ever since. An me, I figure the heat’s off us for a while. All depends on Hilliard now.”

  “Hilliard?”

  “You think that big bastard’s gonna—”

  “Hilliard pulls anything now—”

  “Now I guess you’re wishing you’d let me keep that there gun, huh, Griffin?”

  Above, Eleanor sensed, rather than concluded, that in this brief and broken exchange she had heard the command shift from Glenn Griffin, who possessed the only gun, to Robish, who had none. It was the Griffin boy who was nervous and unstrung this morning, Robish who remained calm and sure of himself, as though he were making his own separate plans now. All this Eleanor realized without being able to grasp the meaning this shift might hold for her and her family.

  Glenn grumbled again, on a lower key: “If that Hilliard tries to pull anything. If he ain’t doing just what I told him—”

  Dan Hilliard, at this point, was doing exactl
y what he had been instructed to do: he was handing over to his daughter, Cindy, an envelope containing $3,000. They were in the corridor of the building in which she worked, speaking together quietly in one corner while the old elevators groaned up and down.

  “Careful now,” he said quietly, his eyes holding hers.

  Then he walked down the three flights of stairs, and at ten minutes to 10 he entered his bank, where he was well known. He carried a leather brief case, empty now. He spoke to a teller who had served him for ten years.

  The teller complied without question, but after Mr. Hilliard, whom the teller had had some little difficulty recognizing this morning, had left the bank with the brief case bulging, the teller examined the two one-thousand dollar bills, which were quite good, and allowed himself to wonder where a man like Mr. Hilliard had obtained them and why he would need that much small cash.

  Three minutes later he was wondering even more because in that time he had spoken through the grilled window to a fat deputy from the Sheriff’s office who simply asked him to place those large bills aside until he received further instructions regarding them.

  Less than five minutes later, Tom Winston was speaking by radio from his office to an FBI agent, not Carson but a new man who had appeared this morning, in the cold attic of the Wallings’ residence. This agent, whose name was Merck, went downstairs and outside and motioned to Deputy Sheriff Jesse Webb from the lawn.

  Jesse was on the topmost rungs of a high ladder placed against the front of the structure and in clear view of the windows in the Hilliard house; the ladder was much taller than the highest peak of the Wallings’ roof, and Jesse, wearing a yellow coverall with printing across the back, seemed to be measuring the upright antenna and giving instructions, with gestures, to two assistants who stood off to one side, their backs turned carelessly to the Hilliard home.

  Actually, Jesse was studying the Hilliard house and garage— he could see it all from this vantage point—and in this way was working off some of the tension that was eating in him steadily like a hungry, vicious animal he could not control. He was thinking, too, of the long-range rifles with telescopic sights and of the binoculars that must be kept out of sight.

  He descended the ladder and walked into the side door of the Wallings’ house with the man Merck, nodding as he listened. In the side hall he tore off the coverall and reached for his trench coat, aware of Lieutenant Fredericks’ eyes upon him from the dining room where three troopers and Carson sat in a huddle. But what Jesse Webb was considering was not the information just received—although the money angle explained why the two men were staying in the house—but of a movement he had seen behind the Hilliard garage while he stood on that ladder. He hadn’t dared use the binoculars then, but he had his own idea as to what that movement was. And he was not sure there was anything he should, or safely could, do about it.

  Shortly after 8:30 Chuck Wright had become aware of the activity atop the Walling house—long before Glenn Griffin, inside, had noticed it. Chuck, behind the Hilliard garage, had hoped then that this did not mean that the police had found out and were setting up a way to attack. But he knew, below the hope, that this was very likely. It wouldn’t take that Webb long, he admitted grudgingly.

  Now, at six minutes after 10, stiff with the waiting, he was bristling with impatience. He had been hoping that if one of the two men in the house spotted the activity on that roof beyond the trees, the man who was at the rear window, in Mr. Hilliard’s den, would go to the front of the house to investigate. This had not happened. Chuck Wright decided that he would have to find a way to create the diversion that would leave the rear of the house free for the very brief space of time it would take him to let himself into the back hall.

  He was prodded, too, by the certainty, mounting in him with the minutes, that Cindy would return to the house. Perhaps that’s what they were waiting for in there. If so, and if those police were planning to close in, Chuck intended to be inside, with his gun. As a matter of fact, it occurred to him that the one way now in which no member of the house would be killed or injured was for the police to keep those two inside occupied in an attack from without; their guns then would be turned on the police, the family forgotten, and if he was inside at that point, he gave himself a chance, a slim one, but well worth taking when you considered all the odds. He left behind all hesitation and doubt.

  But where was Cindy now? Did she intend to return to the house? When? And what was she doing?

  It was a long, narrow room with a bar along one side, booths along the other. There was a raw whisky smell about it and an atmosphere that added to Cindy’s sickening apprehension. Behind the bar a man wearing a plaid vest over a once white shirt looked her over, and she turned abruptly away and crossed to sit in the first booth, to sit very straight there with her hands on the table, her eyes fixed. Presently a waitress appeared at her elbow, a spindly girlish-looking woman with fuzzy dyed hair and tired, defensive eyes. Cindy ordered an old-fashioned, the though^ of it stirring the nausea in her. With the glass before her on the nicked table-surface, she looked at her wrist watch. 10:29.

  Chuck had never come into the office this late. Mr. Hepburn had asked about him several times, but neither Cindy nor Constance Allen could tell Mr. Hepburn why he had not appeared. And Cindy did not know what his absence meant. She didn’t dare let herself conjecture.

  She could only think of the man who was to meet her here in one minute, at 10:30, in this shabby and deserted bar on a dead-end side street alongside the stage door of a motion-picture theater. She knew what the man wanted, why she was meeting him; in a sense, she was committing a murder. Certainly she was aiding in the crime. But these accusations had attacked her before, and there was one answer, itself a question: What else could she do?

  The anger was still in Cindy Hilliard, and it rose chokingly as she watched the little man who entered now, glanced carelessly around, his dim and very pale eyes sliding over her. The waitress had disappeared, and the man in the vest behind the bar had his back turned. Cindy sensed all this, her eyes meeting those of the newcomer; she knew that she could not control the contempt and disgust in her glare, but the little man who approached frightened her. She couldn’t say how; perhaps it was only her knowledge of his mission, of what he was going to do for the money she was about to give him.

  “Mind if I sit a spell, miss?” he asked.

  Cindy felt her head shaking, inviting him to do what he did next: slide into the space opposite her, across the table.

  “You know my name, miss?” he asked.

  Again she shook her head. She did not know it, or want to know it. She wanted to get away from him, to get back to her father’s office, to get into the taxi with him and to return to the house, as they had been told to do. She couldn’t quite believe, though, that this innocuous-looking man—small, with a smooth, rather rounded face atop a short, thin body—could be a murderer. A paid killer. He looked and spoke, too, more like a salesman, a bill collector, a clerk in the store where her father worked.

  “Turning cold,” the man commented, and his pale eyes, which she saw were blue, remained on her face as he straightened his rather flashy tie and pointed to the glass on the table. “You’re not going to drink that?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks, miss.”

  He drank delicately, almost smiling, but those depthless pale eyes remained on her. She did not know what she was to do now. She was not sure, suddenly, that this was the man; perhaps he was only a traveling salesman trying to pick her up.

  “I’m a messenger,” the man said then, finally. “You have something for me to deliver?”

  When he said that—perhaps because it appeared so transparently true—she knew that he was lying, that he was the man, that those same hands now resting flatly and without nerves on the table would pull the trigger, killing another man whose name she did not know, either.

  She opened her purse, drew out the white envelope. The man took it, nodding, plac
ed it in his pocket without so much as glancing into it. She watched him and the actions of her own hands like a person viewing a motion picture when the sound apparatus has broken down. This dreamlike quality seemed a part of her whole life now.

  Then, without warning, an enormous shadow fell across the table, and she looked up. She saw the man across from her glance up, saw those unnaturally faded eyes meet those of the big man standing there, saw them half close in disinterest.

  “What you got in your pocket, Flick?” the big man asked, and his voice was hoarse and ugly but somehow gentle. “What’d the lady give you?”

  “A letter, Sergeant,” the one named Flick replied.

  Cindy noticed that the big man, who was evidently a detective, had not removed his hands from the pockets of his coat. And in the back of her mind a voice whispered, This can’t be, this isn’t happening.

  “Come along to the station,” the detective said. “And you can hand over the envelope, Flick.”

  The astonishment in her broke then, the rage took over, the blank rebellion. This can’t be. They can’t do this! They re ruining everything now! She stood up.

  “You can’t—” she began.

  The big man only looked at her out of very dark but not unfriendly eyes. “I’m only following orders, miss. They didn’t say anything about bringing you in, but I’m doing it to play safe, understand. If you’ve done nothing, they won’t hold you long.”

  “No,” she said, trying to slip past his hulk of body.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” the big man said, and the anger gave way to hopelessness in Cindy Hilliard then.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not yet. Not technically. Unless you refuse to come to the station like a nice girl.” He looked down on Flick, who was finishing the drink. “I hope they don’t judge you by the company you keep, miss.”