Джон Макдональд: The End of the Night

The only surprising thing about his history is that this is his first arrest for a major offense. The rest of it is what you would expect. Foster homes. Three years of schooling. At twelve he looked like a man, and began to live like a man. Trucker’s helper, stevedore, farm hand, warehouse work, road work, pipelines. A drifter, with arrests for drunkenness, assault and the like.

His voice is thin, and pitched rather high. He has only the most vague idea of his own personal history, where he has been and what he has done. He has a low level of verbal communication. Such a creature is wasted in our culture. Attila could have found good use for him.

The interesting and significant aspect of his relation to the group in his attachment to Sander Golden. Apparently he had fallen in with Golden a month or so before Kirby Stassen, the final member of the group, joined them and the Koslov girl in Del Rio, Texas. He had met Golden in Tucson and from then on they had lived by Golden’s wits. It was, I believe, similar to but less wholesome than the relationship of Lennie and what’s-his-name in Of Mice and Men.

My question about Golden brought the best response from Hernandez — best in that for a few moments the wariness was lessened. “Sandy’s a great guy. Only good buddy I ever had. Keep you laughing all the time, man.” I did not care to inquire what would give this creature cause for apelike laughter.

His attitude was stolidly pessimistic. They’d been caught. When you killed people and got caught, they turned around and killed you. That was the rule. And it was worth it, because they’d had a “ball” before they were caught. He was indifferent as to who defended him. If it was all right with Sandy, it was all right with him.

I knew he would make a terrifying bad impression in court, but I did not see what I could do about it. He had to be there.

During most of the time we were in the cell, Hernandez kept staring at Miss Slayter with a focused intensity that, in time, made her visibly uncomfortable. She kept licking her lips and turning her head from side to side like a cornered animal. I saw the shininess of perspiration on her upper lip, and heard her sigh of relief when we were at last able to terminate the interview and leave him alone.

Sander Golden is twenty-seven, but he looks much younger. He is five foot eight, with sharp sallow features, mousy, thinning hair, bright eyes of an intense blue behind bulky, loose-fitting spectacles which are mended, on the left bow, with a soiled winding of adhesive tape. He gives a deceptive impression of physical fragility, but there is a wiry, electrical tirelessness about him. He is a darting man, endlessly in motion, hopelessly talkative. He can apparently sustain a condition of manic frenzy indefinitely. I hasten to add that this frenzy is pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-philosophical rather than personal and emotional.

He has a high order of intelligence, a restless, raging curiosity and a retentive memory. These attributes are crippled by his unstable emotional pattern, his lack of formal education and his childishly short attention span. He does not seem to appreciate the extent of his personal danger. He is enormously stimulated by the more subjective implications of his situation. His mind moves so quickly speech cannot keep up. During the time I was with him he lectured me in his pyrotechnic, disorderly fashion on the nature of reality as it applies to murder, on the entertainment value of criminal cases, on the special rights of the creative individual, on violence as a creative outlet.

I cannot attempt to reproduce his manner of speech, but I must report that it causes a curious condition of exhaustion and exasperation in the listener. After we left Miss Slayter covered it quite aptly, I thought, by saying that talking to Sandy Golden was like trying to swat a roomful of flies with a diving board.

It is difficult to reconstruct Golden’s past. He veers away from all objective discussion, registering impatience with such trivia. He says he has no family. I do not believe Golden is his original name, but there seems to be no way to check it out easily, or any special reason for so doing. He has a record of two arrests, both on narcotics charges. He claims ten thousand close friends, most of them in San Francisco, New Orleans and Greenwich Village. His speech is a curious mixture of beatnik, psychiatric jargon and curious, sometimes striking, similes.

He seems unable to explain why, after staying out of serious trouble for so long, he and these relatively new companions embarked on what the papers have termed “a cross-country reign of terror.” He seems to feel that it started with the incident of the salesman near Uvalde, and just went on from there, as though some waiting mechanism had been triggered by that flash of violence.

He darted, whirled, paced, all the time we talked, pausing in a jerky way to fix us with his bright-blue eyes and speak of Zen and love, making such violent washing motions with his soiled hands that his knuckles cracked loudly.

It is too easy, I am afraid, to look upon this Sander Golden as a ridiculous being, an inadvertent comedian. After we left his cell, Miss Slayter categorized him as “spooky.” There is an aptness to her word. Under the clown exterior there is a crawling, restless, undirected evil.

It is far too trite to say that life is a series of accidents and coincidences. It would take the largest electric calculator at M.I.T. to estimate the probability not only of these four disturbed people joining forces, but then driving through Monroe on their route from the southwest to the northeast in a stolen car at exactly the right time, the right instant in eternity, to intersect the path of Helen Wister’s life.

I have known the Wister family all my life. And so I know that nothing in Helen’s past could have prepared her for that unholy quartet which came upon her and took her out of the summer night. By then they had nothing more to lose. They were aware of the widening police search. They were out of control. One has only to summon up the image of her, a captive of Hernandez, Golden, Koslov and Stassen, to begin to imagine the totality of her terror and her despair.

She was taken on Saturday night, the twenty-fifth day of July, just a few days after her pending marriage to Dallas Kemp had been announced. We can assume that up until the moment when her life was struck by this ugly lightning, it was, for her, a normal day in the life of a young woman, spiced undoubtedly by her excited anticipation of the wedding...

Helen Wister, at mid-morning on the twenty-fifth day of July, drifted slowly, warmly, up through the final mists of sleep, emerging without haste into wakefulness, until an anticipatory tingle of excitement, like kitten-feet along her spine, brought her quickly to a focused awareness of time and place.

She sat up in her bed, stretched until she creaked, yawned vastly, knuckled her eyes, then combed a tousled blond mop back with her fingertips and looked sidelong at the slant of sun on the floor. She checked the sun against the clock. Ten-thirty. Eight hours and a bit. Save your energies, girl. Stay in training. Nineteen days to wedlock. Why did they call it lock? Sounds like chains and things. Ball and chain.

She swung smooth, brown legs out of the bed and stood up in her pale-blue shortie nightgown, padded to the nearest window, turned one slat of the blinds and looked out at the day. The sky was an empty, misty blue. Sprinklers turned on the green lawn that sloped down to the fish pool and the rock garden. Far beyond the roof peak of the Evans house, just visible above the line of maples, she could see a little red airplane heading south. She yawned again, hiked up the right side of the nightgown and slowly scratched her hip, her nails making a whispery sound against smooth flesh.