Robert Sinclair - The Eleventh Hour

“What about the reporters?” he asked. “I suppose I’ll have to see them sooner or later.”

“Did you get to ’em, Larkin?”

“Yeah. They said they’d be there.”

“They’ll be waiting for us at your house,” the sergeant informed Conway.

“What!”

Bauer’s tone was conciliatory. “Like you just said, you got to see them sooner or later. Well, better now than having ’em wake you up all hours of the night. This way you see ’em all together, they get the pictures, and it’s over with.”

“Yes, but not now — after Captain Ramsden went to the trouble of keeping them away from me—”

“Oh, you thought he did that to make it easy on you ?” Bauer’s surprise was that of an adult who finds that a child is not quite so bright as he had been led to believe, but there was still no resentment in his voice as he went on. “Oh, no — he got us out of the way so’s he could see ’em alone, and the evening papers won’t have anything but ‘Captain Ramsden said—’ and ‘According to Captain Ramsden—’ and all like that. They won’t have any pictures, so they might even have to use his. Then in a week, when we’ve hauled in a couple dozen suspects and turned ’em all loose, and the papers are yelling ‘Why ain’t something being done?’ he can say ‘See Sergeant Bauer — he’s in charge of the case.’ Oh, well, the man’s gotta protect his job.”

“I must say you take a philosophical view of the matter.”

“He’ll only make the late editions of the evening papers. We’ll get the mornings — they’re better anyway.” Conway could think of no suitable comment. A moment later Bauer saw the theatre marquee ahead.

“Tell Larkin where you left your car,” he said. “The exact place — just the way you were parked.”

Conway complied, and Larkin pulled the car into the space at the end of the lot.

“Let’s start at the theatre,” Bauer said as they got out of the car. “Did you get hold of the manager?”

“He said he’d be here,” Larkin answered.

The theatre did not open until late afternoon, but the manager was waiting for them. “Hello there,” he said when he saw Conway.

“You know each other, eh?” said Bauer.

“Always try to remember the customers’ faces. What’s it all about?”

Bauer explained briefly, and the manager’s face took on a genuinely shocked expression. “All I want to do now,” Bauer continued, “is try to figure out, as close as I can, the time the car was taken. You said you left at the end of the picture, is that right?”

“No, we left a little before the end.” Conway turned to the manager. “We left right after that musical number, when Tommy Miller comes backstage and says something about ‘How could I ever have doubted you?’”

“That’s practically the finish,” the manager corroborated. “There’s not more than a minute after that. I could have the projectionist look at the film and tell you exactly.”

“That’s close enough,” Bauer said. “What time was the picture over?”

“I’ll have to look at my time sheet for — night before last, was it?” Bauer nodded and the manager disappeared into his office. Was it only night before last? Conway thought.

The manager was back in a moment. “Feature finished at nine twenty-eight exactly.” Bauer made an entry in his notebook, and then wound his wrist watch once or twice. Conway noticed it was also a stopwatch.

“I guess we’ll have to what they call re-enact the crime,” Bauer said. Conway started, but the detective went on, unheeding. “You do just exactly what you did from the time you left the theatre, and try to take the same amount of time doing it, so we can see where we’re at.”

Careful, Conway warned himself. This is the one spot that can be dangerous. There were four minutes he could not account for: the four minutes when he had been twisting the scarf around Helen’s throat and parking the car behind the plumbing shop. But he had said that they had stayed in the theater until the end of the number; there was, therefore, only a little over a minute of that time which he now had to fill with fictitious action. He knew what he was going to do; he hoped he could time it properly.

He walked at the pace they had taken: it seemed ridiculously slow to him, but the detective seemed to find it normal enough. He stopped as they had when the car had almost hit Helen. He went through the motions of unlocking the door for her and helping her in.

“I asked her to slam the door and she did,” he said. “I got her coat off the back seat and she put it around her shoulders. I started the motor and was about to back out when she discovered she couldn’t find her other glove. She rummaged through her bag,” — he pantomimed it — “and then she looked on the seat and on the floor, and then she thought it might have dropped out on the ground when she slammed the door. I got out and walked around and looked and it wasn’t there, so I got back in the car. Then she asked me if I’d go back to the theatre because she was sure she’d lost it there, and if there was anything in the world she hated it was losing one glove and having the other around to remind her of it. So I cut the motor, left the keys in the switch, and started back.”

“Just a minute.” Bauer clicked the stopwatch. “Time out. What about other people here? Did you notice?”

“I didn’t see anybody when we got here — I think we were the first ones. By the time I started back to the theatre, there were people here — a couple of cars drove out ahead of me as I was walking back to the street.” The beautiful thing, Conway reflected for the hundredth time, is that there’s no way of proving I’m lying. No one can say that I positively did not walk the length of this parking lot at nine-thirty-one Monday night, even if they round up the entire audience.

Bauer finished writing in his notebook. “Okay, let’s go on from here.”

The rest was velvet: Conway did exactly what he had done two nights before. He conversed with the absent ticketseller and doorman, and waited for their unspoken replies. He looked in the theatre himself, and then he and the manager did a very fair approximation of their conversation and search. He went through the motions of buying the popcorn, and returned to the parking lot.

“You left her for exactly ten minutes and forty seconds,” Bauer announced. “That cinches it.”

“Cinches what?”

“That it was a maniac.” Bauer’s tone implied that it must be obvious to anyone. “Had to be, to do it in that time. Some guy hanging around here, maybe sitting in one of the cars — maybe even his own. You wouldn’t notice him, but he sees you leave, waits for the other cars to get out, goes over, probably knocks her out, and away he goes. Right?” Bauer needed no confirmation, nor did he wait for any. “Right!” he affirmed.

“Yes — yes. Must be,” Conway said, readily bowing to this superior wisdom. “Shall I go on with the rest of it?”

“The rest of what?”

“What I did after that.”

“What difference does it make what you did? She was gone, wasn’t she?” The detective paused, and then said, in what seemed to Conway a slightly different tone, “Yeah, maybe you better tell me, at that — as long as we’re here.”

Conway silently cursed himself. He had prepared his story to cover every moment until he got to the police station; he had gone through the motions to cover himself if they checked on it. But Bauer was so lacking in suspicion that he had not thought to question anything Conway had told him. Now, by volunteering more than had been asked, he might have given the detective the idea that he had a prepared alibi; that his story was a little too perfect. He vowed that from here on, he would speak when spoken to, and no more.