The end of the night (14 page)

As Nanette described it, "It was the most I'd seen. It kept you out there. Everything, every little thing, like a stone or a bottle, looked bright and important in a funny way, and you could laugh and understand things the squares couldn't. He changed it a little for me, different from the way he took it, and kept asking me, and changing it, until he had it just right for me, and I could float all day and all night. But he couldn't give much to Shack, because Shack went c^az}^ Sandy said he was going to patent it. You couldn't get hooked on it. But sometimes my heart thumping would scare me a little. And anything you did—it didn't seem to really count. Do you know what I mean? You could step off a building and laugh all the way down. We put Stass on it, and we both kept asking him, and Sandy kept changing it, but we never got it to him just right We'd have him either all shaky and hopped, or falling asleep."

So the regimen of the stimulants and depressants was another catalytic agent. It was a queasy rapture.

I must make one further point about Nanette Koslov which involves a reappraisal of my own thijiking. It is a truism that

men do not understand women. But until I met Nan Koslov, I had been content with one generalization which I felt fitted all women, from whore to princess. I had felt that women had a strong drive for stabiHty and security. I beheved it was a primitive heritage. They, I thought, were the undiluted conservatives in this world, the apostles of "things as they are." They play safe. They do not gamble. They each want a safe nest somewhere in the world, and when they do not have it, they work and yearn for it.

But Nan Koslov falls completely outside this pattern, thus voiding my comfortable generalization. She is disconcertingly complete within herself. I can detect in her no yen for any kind of security or stability. She was content to wander, to stake no claim on any man, to take what she was given and make do with it.

It is only logical to relate this to her sexual attitude. I realize that every culture has its owri violent superstitions about sex. The incestuous practices of the ancient Egyptians appall us. We are sickened when we learn that the dynastic line was maintained through the offspring of father-daughter copulation. We feel utterly superior to primitive races, and call their sex play "dirty habits." Even in our own times, we cannot comprehend the frank, uncomplicated, casual attitude of the Scandinavian countries toward unregulated sexual promiscuity. Even as we condemn their young people, they condemn us for what they term our "obsession" with sex. They think we are the twisted ones. They smile and say it just does not have the importance we give it.

Perhaps we are twisted, but I personally find it a suitable way to live. I respect continence. The sexual act in its purest sense should be a sacred act, an act of devotion, a ceremony of love. A coin passed too often from hand to hand loses its mint-sharpness. The inscription can no longer be read. If it is agreed that life should contain acts or symbols of value, is not the sexual act a suitable thing to be so acclaimed? If nothing in hfe has great meaning, then life itself is denigrated.

To Nanette Koslov, the act of sex has no emotional significance. It is, to her, a way of achieving a mild, unselective pleasure. For several years she has been, to the men around her, an uncomplicated convenience—like a free lunch in the old-time saloons. If the man who was housing and feeding her preferred that she reserve herself for him, either through some emotional quirk, or through that same fastidiousness that pre-

vents the sharing of a toothbrush, she was agreeable. Should he wish to share her, she was co-operative. Love talk bored her. Jealousy was an emotion she could not comprehend. She wanted men to want her. It was the only sort of reassurance she seemed to need. She could have followed the legions of the Romans on remote campaigns. The hfe would have suited her. Thus, to me, she is an uncomplicated evil, and a new thing in the world—a denial of most of what we mean when we say Woman. From what she has told me, I now beUeve that she is one of a multitude. This is a terrifying thing to contemplate. It is more than a revolt against the puritan aspects of our culture. She does not feel that she is in revolt. She feels that she is honest and natural. If she is legion, what is happening to us all? What is happening to a familiar world? She has reduced the magic of life to a low and dirty denominator, made of herself an idle receptacle, and feels neither shame nor regret. She is, to use a word she could not comprehend, godless.

It is unprofessional of me to feel satisfaction in knowing that she is now very afraid. She is afraid of death, the way an animal is afraid. She does not have the imagination to fear life imprisonment.

She asks me many questions. She bites her thick lip, and then asks if you feel anything when you are electrocuted. I tell her it is very sudden. She asks if I can get them off. I tell her I will try. And she asks me again if it will hurt. She asks the way a child might ask about a whipping.

The four of them, during their brief career, were a strange, interrelated group. She was Sander Golden's from the beginning. I have learned that his use of her was as unimportant to him as to her, and it was infrequent, as might be expected in a man whose vital energies have been depleted by years of abuse. Though she was of no importance to him, he would not let Hernandez have her. This was a game Golden was playing, a cruel and rather dangerous game. Hernandez wanted her badly. Golden apparently wanted to prove to himself that he could control Hernandez even with this additional strain upon their relationship. He flaunted his possession of the Koslov girl, and blocked every effort Hernandez made to possess her. The girl was aware of the game, and idly amused by it, and increased the tension by flirting with Hernandez, teasing him the way one might tease a caged bear. Hernandez was caged by his great regard for Sander Golden. Sander had to learn how stout the bars were.

After Kirby Stassen joined them, Sander Golden was able to increase the pressure on Hernandez by sharing the girl with Stassen. This had the effect of directing all Hernandez' sullen rage at Stassen, rather than Golden. I feel that Hernandez would have murdered Kirby Stassen sooner or later, had not the tension been broken by the acquisition of Helen Wister.

Of course, the first I knew of the invasion of our county by this foursome was when, on Sunday morning, I read the frontpage account of the murder of Arnold Crown and the abduction of Paul Wister's daughter. As a matter of professional interest, I had been followmg the news stories of their track of violence. Until the murder of Crown the authorities were not certain whether it was two men or three men or four men and a girl involved. It was a stroke of luck that the Crown murder had occurred in front of unseen witnesses. As yet no positive identification of any of them had been made. I had expected to read that Sunday morning of their having been trapped and captured. Their luck was incredibly good. Their crimes had the mark of the amateur, plus that curious frenzy of the unbalanced mind. Individuals have run amuck in every society the world has known, and will continue so to do. It is unusual for four crazed ones to join forces.

Back on that twenty-sixth day of July, on that hot still Sunday morning, I had no idea that I would find myself defending them. The authorities were tackling the problem with great energy. . . ,

EIGHT

By ten o'clock on Sunday morning, July 26, the provisional headquarters of the FBI team assigned to the Wolf Pack case had been transferred from Nashville to Monroe. The FBI had come into the case as a result of the previous kidnap-murder near Nashville. Several agents remained in the Nashville area locking up the details of that investigation. The Special Agent in Charge was Herbert Dunnigan, a tidy, tailored, rather nondescript-looking man with graying auburn hair and a very

slight stammer. He arrived by plane at the Monroe airport along with four agents just twenty minutes before the three more agents he had requested arrived from Washington headquarters.

He took over three offices on the third floor of the Monroe National Bank Building, adjacent to the offices occupied by the small FBI staff resident in Monroe. He called in city, county and state law enforcement officials and made it quietly clear to them that he was in charge of the case. He requested their co-operation, and stated that any information released to the press would be released through him.

Herbert Dunnigan, as a roving specialist in kidnap cases, was the first to admit that this case was far outside the usual pattern of such crimes. No one was taking a cold risk for fat profit. This was like trying to shoot mad dogs.

And, in talking to the local officials, he had felt considerably less brisk and confident than he had sounded. Of late he had begun to feel that his public personality was like one of those movie sets where only the fronts of the buildings are erected. But the two-dimensional fronts were tilting and sagging in a high wind, and Herbert Dunnigan was racing back and forth, out of sight of the camera, strengthening the braces, tightening the guy wires.

He had gone into the bureau right from law school, back when it had seemed a bold and satisfying adventure. But over the years he had tired of both bureaucracy and violence. The criminals were always the same—vicious, stupid, subhuman. The victims were uniformly hysterical, or irreparably dead. The newspaper people were tiresome and repetitious. Violence had so little meaning. It was a little area of decay in the great soft body of society, a buildup of pressure, and then a gaseous belch.

By the time he had begun to question the wisdom of what he was doing with his life, there were Ann and the kids and the house in Falls Church and the increasing comfort of seniority, and the prospect of retirement. So he had accepted the nagging feeling of waste and boredom as a part of his Ufe. When he was not on a field assignment, when he was working civil service hours in the Statistical Analysis Division, Domestic Crime Section, he had the time to make fine reproductions of Early American furniture in the tidy workshop in the basement of the brick house in Falls Church. Sometimes, as he worked, he thought of the other life he could have Uved. In that life he was a lawyer in a small Southern city, working on civil cases and

estate work, serving on boards and committees, taking an active interest in local politics.

He asked Sheriff Gustaf Kurby to wait in his temporary office while he made certain that his people were establishing the proper routines, setting up the communications net, analyzing the obsolete roadblocks, evaluating the police work already accomplished.

He went back and closed his office door and sat at his desk and looked at Sheriff Kurby. Another showboat sheriff, with the displaced ranch hat and the inlaid ivory grips on the inevitable .38 Special, and the big, bland, meaty, political face.

Dunnigan tapped the Sunday paper on his desk and said, "You took the ball and ran with it, Sheriff."

"Murder day," the sheriff rumbled. "Gus Kurby day."

The big man looked indolent, smug, content. Dunnigan felt a sharp twinge of annoyance. "Are you as stupid as you've acted, Sheriff^?"

Kurby shifted in his chair to face Dunnigan more directly. "Let's have your professional opinion, mister."

"Let's assume these people can read. We haven't made them yet. Now they read that a pair of hot-pants country kids can pick them out of a Hneup, and those kids have given a detailed description. Let's assume they have a Uttle sense left. What do they do, Sheriff?"

"Kill the girl and bury her deep. Ditch the car. SpUt up and run."

"You surprise me, Sheriff. Will you surprise me some more by admitting you've made a mistake?"

"No," Kurby said. His eyes were unexpectedly shrewd and aware. "You come in with your slide rule and see one side of it, Dunnigan. It's a good safe bet the girl was dead before the papers were on the street this morning. It would fit the pattern. Agreed?"

"I'll go along with that."

"A Httle over three months from now a hell of a lot of people in Meeker County are going to go behind the green curtains and pull the little levers. Kurby is a name they should remember, but you have to keep reminding them. They've got short memories. This will put me in for four more years, Dunnigan."

"And if it's at the girl's expense?"

"Don't look as if you tasted something bad. This will be a fifth term. I'm not a politician who happened to get to be sheriff. I'm a law man who has to mess with politics. This is a big

county, Mr. Dunnigan. I've fought like an animal for a big budget. There isn't a dime of it goes to waste. You won't find a cleaner county in the state. Monroe has exploded way beyond the city limits. Satellite communities all over hell and gone. It's all my baby, and I mean to keep on taking care of it, keeping the sharpshooters out, keeping the lid on. So I had to get to be a legend, sort of. Hell, that's why that Craft kid called me. He feels he knows me. If some hungry boy beats me at the polls, the organization will be shot. He won't know law work. I do. I've built up the finest lab this side of the state capital. This is one murder, Mr. Dunnigan. One stolen girl. There^s almost exactly a million people in Meeker County- So don't use hard words unless you know the whole picture."

"My job is to . . ."

"Hold it one minute. We aren't so far apart in age. Let's you hold it one minute and give a little thought to how you'd handle things if every four years you had to get voted back into your job by a lot of people who pay your budget out of taxes. Would that change the way you handle your job?"

Dunnigan looked at Kurby's knowing grin and found himself liking the man, liking him very much. He grinned back. "Okay, Sheriff. It just shouldn't be an elective office."

"I could do a better job if it wasn't. Now it's your baby. I got in there, front and center, while I had the chance. Now anything you want, we'll do our damnedest to do it for you, and do it right."

Under Dunnigan's direction, the investigation proceeded swiftly and logically. It was poor country for effective roadblocks. There were too many secondar}' and tertiary roads. It could be assumed that, through luck or cleverness, the Buick had slipped through one of the holes in the net. The possibility that they had holed up inside the roadblock area was not entirely discounted, but the chance was considered sufficiently remote to permit disbanding the roadblocks.