The desperate hours, a novel (2 page)

"Sorry, old fellow," Dan said.

"And blotto means tight. Tight means drunk. Have I drunk enough milk?"

Eleanor was laughing, behind her napkin, and nodding. Ralphie was up, jarring the table, kissing his mother's hair swiftly; then he turned grave eyes on Dan and gave him a swift salute, half defiance and half apology, and turned on his heel.

"I'll ride my bike. I've got a whole half-hour, almost." He disappeared onto the rear porch, clumped down the three steps and was gone. Dan heard the garage door sliding up and was reminded again that he had to oil the runner mechanism soon.

Eleanor said, "Our son Ralph, spelled R-a-l-p-h, is too old to kiss a man—that's you—good-bye or good night."

"Well," Dan said wryly, but feeling a pinch somewhere inside, "that seems to be that."

"A milepost," Eleanor said, her eyes on him steadily now, studying him.

"We seem to be flying past mileposts darned fast, old girl," he said.

What Eleanor saw was a man of average height with heavy shoulders, the bulk of his body fitting finely under the double-breasted suit; she looked into the familiar deep blue eyes and was conscious of the mahogany-red hair above and the freckles climbing over and across the rather broad nose and the deep fine lines that added, she thought, so much character to an otherwise very ordinary but very appealing face.

Reading his mind, she said, "Cindy'd like to ask him for Thanksgiving dinner, Dan."

Dan downed the last swallow of coffee, stood up, yanked at his suit coat like a boy dressed for a party and determined to impress.

"Should she?" Eleanor asked.

Dan shrugged, but not successfully. "Ellie, I don't want to jump in and start opposing this thing and get Cindy's back up. But—well, Thanksgiving's a sort of family day."

Eleanor hfted her face for his kiss, then walked to the kitchen window while Dan went out the rear door, his topcoat thrown over his arm instead of over his shoulders.

When she opened the window, the gusty warning of winter swept through the kitchen. She watched from an angle as Dan backed the blue car out of the garage, maneuvering it around Cindy's black coupe in the driveway. Then, for absolutely no reason at all except that it was a ritual between them, meaning at the same time more and less than the word itself, she called, "Careful. And I mean it."

His hat pulled at its usual not quite proper angle, Dan shouted back, "Close the window," and swept out of her line of vision.

Eleanor complied, as she did every morning, five days a week. She never caught colds, and Dan knew this, just as she knew that there was no particular reason for him to be careful. Careful of what?

As she set a fresh place for Cindy, Eleanor decided against mentioning Chuck Wright this morning, especially in view of Dan's unspoken rejection of the Thanksgiving-dinner idea. All the words that occurred to her seemed stereotyped and flat, anyway—that Chuck Wright had a reputation for being wild, that he was the type that would never settle down. Cindy would only reply again, from the summit of nineteen years, that you could blame the war for that, hinting at some great tragedy and dramatic feat that, if known, would explain Charles Wright completely and utterly and make him totally acceptable in every far corner of the land.

Eleanor flipped on the radio, punching the buttons one after the other, finally settling for a news report as she prepared to drink her second cup of coffee.

After listening for perhaps five minutes—her attention not caught by the report of three escaped convicts in Terre Haute or attracted by the warning that these men were armed and dangerous—she heard Cindy descending the uncarpeted back stairs that only the family used, her heels a quick tattoo. Eleanor turned off the radio and set down her cup. As soon as Cindy was out of the house, Eleanor's own day would really begin.

In the office of the Sheriff, which was attached to the Marion County jail building in downtown Indianapolis, the day had started long before. Through the morning, Jesse Webb had kept in close contact with the state police, the city police, the teletypes, the news reports, and the local office of the FBI. They had now a very accurate description of the gray sedan, its license number, and the approximate time of its theft from a farm south of Terre Haute.

Jesse hated waiting. It went against the grain. There was a helplessness about it that worked like sandpaper on his nerves. The roadblocks had been set up on all the main highways, there were no reports of further thefts, no sports stores robbed for guns, no clothing shops or cleaning shops broken into for suits; in short, everything that could be done was being done. But Jesse was not satisfied.

His uncle, Frank Pritchard, telephoned him after the lo o'clock radio news. Jesse listened to the tired voice he could barely recognize, nodding his lean head occasionally, his hat 13

tilted back, his feet pressed against the edge of the roll-top desk in his office. Then he said, "I haven't forgotten a thing, Uncle Frank. Go to sleep."

Afterwards, he sat with his lanky frame folded eaglelike over the desk, smoking until his cigarette burned his fingers.

"Was that Frank P?" Tom Winston, the deputy who shared the small office, had heard the conversation—what there was of it—and his curiosity finally broke forth. "Bet he'd Hke to be back in the business today."

"Yeah," Jesse said slowly, contemplating an invisible spot on the high, bare plaster ceiling. "Yeah. With two good hands and his gun."

"Why'd you tell him to go to sleep?"

Tom Winston started at the suddenly fierce brown eyes that Jesse Webb turned on him. "I told him to go back to sleep," Jesse said, and he was not drawling but biting the words so that they came out like bullets from an automatic, "because he's got a job he has to keep. A night-watchman job at the meat-packing plant. I don't want him to lose that one because of Glenn Griffin."

Winston picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk, and retreated. "I didn't know what had become of old Frank P," he said apologetically.

Jesse stared after his friend as Winston slouched down the corridor toward Records. Don't blame Winston, Jesse reminded himself, breathing hard now; blame the guy who did it. He could see it happening again, all of it. Uncle Frank had been behind the parked car when Glenn Griffin came out the bleak-faced little apartment-hotel on the south side. Even in his blue uniform, Uncle Frank had looked too small, too old and too wispy for the .38 he held in his hand. Then he shouted. Glenn Griffin had whirled, firing, and two bullets had ripped into Uncle Frank's arm, permanently injuring a nerve so that now the right arm was a hanging, limp, useless thing, hardly a part of that frail httle body at all.

Jesse had blamed himself for not letting go then, blasting; but he had been temporarily stunned and surprised to hear Uncle Frank scream like a child, a terrible unashamed shriek that still haunted Jesse in dreams. Glenn Griffin had leaped back inside the doorway, graceful as a dancer, despite the roar and whine and thwack of the other guns. Then Glenn Griffin, while Uncle Frank lay writhing on the ground, had shouted for a chance to surrender, even throwing his gun into the street.

Jesse recalled the blank wall of unreason that had come smashing down on him as he stepped over the gun on the pavement and approached the unarmed young hoodlum; he had been helpless despite the shouts of the other officers, including his lieutenant, ordering him to stop, not to fire. The wall had lifted slightly then and he had not fired. But it was not until he had yanked the cowering Glenn Griffin to his toes with one thin but clawlike hand and brought his other, a twisting fury in itself, full into the prisoner's handsome but distorted face that Jesse Webb had felt a momentary relief from the grip of rage.

Thinking about it now, more than two years later, left him pale and shaken, the sweat gathering at the back of his neck. More calmly he remembered what had followed: the way Uncle Frank had been eased off the city force because of his dangling and soon-withered arm, the unreasonable way he himself had turned in his badge. He recalled, too, the trial of Glenn Griffin, with the boy smiling blandly at the jury box through the bandages that held his broken jaw in place while his attorney pointed dramatically to this "indisputable evidence of police brutality." Even after the jury had brought in the guilty verdict—it was Griffin's third major conviction—the young man had kept up his front. At the sentencing, his kid brother, captured with him that same night, had gone pale and begun to tremble. But not Glenn.

The only time Glenn Griffin had shown any emotion at all was that day in the corridor of the city jail when the Federal 15

Marshal was taking him away. Jesse, although he was by then with the Sheriff's office and no longer on the city force, had made a point of being present. The bandages were no longer on the boy's face, but it was white and strained and he spoke carefully, stiffly.

"You got yours coming, copper," he said—not spitting out the words, nothing dramatic or violent about it.

Finished with memories, elbowing them aside in his mind, Jesse Webb stood up from his desk. He rubbed the back of his neck with the palm of his hand; it came away hot and wet. Then he left the office and, his long lean body pitched slightly forward as usual, he walked out of the building, across the center of town, around Monument Circle, toward the State House. He could have telephoned; he could have taken his car. He needed the walk, and the sharp, pinpointed air.

Lt. Van Dorn of the State Police, ruddy-faced and gray-haired, grinned at Jesse's scowl from behind the counter. "The city can't pick up any trace of this Helen Lamar, Jess. They've ripped whole buildings apart. We can't get anything from the roads except the usual—the car's been spotted thirty-two times since 7 o'clock. North, East, South and West. But not officially. My guess is the woman's out West somewhere, maybe CaU-fornia, and we're beating our tails ragged over nothing around here. They're on their way to her, probably all the way across IlHnois by now." Then he turned his head and peered at Jesse from the corner of his eyes. "You look like hell yourself. Bad night?"

"No," Jesse answered slowly. "No," he drawled, thinking of Kathleen.

Then something struck him between the eyes. It was only a possibility, and a very slight one at that. But he was taking no chances. He picked up the telephone from the counter, dialed his office.

"Tom," he said when Winston answered, "send a car out to pick up my wife. Bring her to the office. Tell her I'm okay. I just want to see her. And Tom—don't scare the girl, hear?" Anything was possible. You could never tell when it came to a mind like Griffin's. But if that sonofabitch came near Kathleen . . .

By selecting only the most unlikely and untraveled back roads, the locations of which Glenn Griffin seemed to have traced on the fiintlike surface of his mind, he had by now maneuvered the gray sedan all the way around the city, staying for the most part forty or fifty miles south, and later, twenty miles east. By noon, however, he was approaching the city on a small road northeast of town, a road so small that the actual boundary of the city was not designated by one of the black-on-white signs reading "INDIANAPOLIS, CITY LIMITS."

It was now ten minutes after twelve. Robish slept, snoring. Hank, in the back seat, had fallen into the habit of rubbing the palms of his hands down the sides of his shirt over his ribs as though to wipe off some invisible stain or sHme that clung to the rough cloth. Driving, Glenn Griffin was whistling, softly, steadily.

It had taken more than six hours by this roundabout route to reach a destination only seventy-two miles from their starting point. But they had progressed without incident, as smoothly and easily as if they had been flying a plane over the hundreds of alert and watchful eyes.

All three had begun to feel the emptiness of hunger, but Glenn refused to stop.

Kathleen Webb, at the white counter of a restaurant around the comer from the Courthouse, kept urging her husband to eat up. Instead, he sipped his fifth cup of bitter black coffee and stared into it, imagining again a scene that had not and would not occur: Glenn Griffin stepping onto the miniature porch of Jesse's and Kathleen's small home, knocking, entering, smiling at Kathleen as blandly as he had once smiled at the jury box.

But Jesse should have learned long ago, he told himself with a taut, secret smile, that the things you fear the most are those least likely to happen.

On the other hand, those scenes that are beyond the reach of a man's imagination, once he has fallen into the secure routine of a way of Ufe, do actually occur and with more frequency than anyone is likely to acknowledge. Dan Milliard, immersed in an interview with an applicant for a responsible position in the shipping department, sat behind his desk in his comfortable sixth-floor office of the department store and concentrated on the task at hand, all the while letting his mind wander in and around the personahty of the man before him. He had a warranted reputation for being able to judge character, and the secret of how he accomplished this was hidden even from him. At any rate, he had no thought at the moment, certainly no concern about what might be happening on his own front porch on Kessler Boulevard north of the city, ten miles from his office.

Eleanor Hilliard was about to go up the front stairs to change into her gardening clothes—too many leaves had fallen on the flower beds under the maples—when she heard the step on the porch. The front doorbell rang. She pushed a strand of Hght hair off her forehead and sighed. It was that blissful moment after lunch when Ralphie had returned to school and she felt a certain treasured sense of freedom until 3: 30. The front door was a solid panel, without window, and although there was a safety chain attached to the door frame, she never bothered to use it. It annoyed her that anyone had come to the front door. The family and tradesmen normally used the side entrance, because it connected the driveway directly with the sun porch and was more convenient.

The man who faced her on the porch, a very young man with short-cropped but soft-looking and glistening black hair, wore faded blue farmer's overalls and he was smiling almost apologetically. He looked boyish, and so miserable about his errand that Eleanor smiled, too.