Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 11, November 1960

30,000,000 Witnesses by Talmage Powell

Detectives watch mystery shows on TV. The following morning their behaviour, as a consequence, is more dramatic and interesting — though it is not broken into by commercials. Murderers also swell the murder-mystery viewing ranks, for they are always but to learn whatever they can.

Thirty million television viewers saw the reenactment of my crime Sunday evening.

I’m sure they were entertained. Its high standards have made Tales of Suspense the most respected weekly thirty minutes in television. Last Sunday’s production was superb, as usual.

The murder was neatly executed. The ending had a twist. No one suspected the murderer, but then in the final seconds there was a hint that his future held a terrible doom for him. This hovering calamity was also beautifully ironic because the villain had no inkling of what was in store for him.

Along with 29,999,999 other people I tuned this show in and settled in a comfortable chair to enjoy myself. The opening scene, at a rambling resort hotel beside a lake, annoyed me. The annoyance became irritation, and as details of setting and. incident piled up, the irritation turned to apprehension.

By the middle commercial break, I was afraid for the show to continue and reveal everything else about the murder I’d committed. And I was more afraid of switching the television set off. I told myself that the latter part of the show would surely be different, departing from the memory that, until this moment, I’d been sure I shared with no other living human being.

But the memory returned, to the picture tubes in thirty million homes, and in a dry-mouthed state I watched it to its end.

How had they known?

With a bad case of the shakes, I heard the closing music swell to full volume. The credit lines began to roll across the screen, the names of unseen people whose brains and energies had conceived the story and made its production possible.

I don’t believe in mind-reading, people with supernatural gifts, or other such hogwash. But it came to me that among those names was someone who shared my secret — and my future.

None of the names meant anything to me, until a single name stood on the screen for an instant, bold and alone:

The name Leslie Parker had a familiar ring, as if I’d heard it before.

Still, I was unable to place the name! And I was so upset, that it was almost too much for me to make it out to the kitchen, of the apartment that I no longer shared with Maria — or with anyone.

I poured a stiff slug of Scotch, steadied my hand enough to toss it off, and followed that one with another. Gripping the edge of the sink, I waited for the liquor to dissolve some of the icy stuff in my veins. In the living room, I could hear the television set yammering the first commercial on the next program. TV suddenly disgusted me. I never wanted to see another TV show as long as I lived.

Leslie Parker... Leslie Parker...

I couldn’t quite remember where we’d met — or be sure that we had. And the name went on being tantalizingly familiar, continued to remain just beyond recognition’s reach.

Then as the Scotch began to relax me, I went at the job in a business-like fashion of pinning that name down. I tried association. Leslie Parker... the TV show... murder... Maria’s death in the lake... lake... hotel... hotel...

I had it.

I’d gone to Crayton Lake openly only one time — controlling my rage, to do it — to ask Maria to come back. Waiting in a secluded corner of the hotel’s terrace, I’d heard a bellhop paging Leslie Parker.

Before the bellhop appeared, I’d noticed and been curious about a couple at a nearby table. The girl was beautiful and blonde and young enough to be the daughter of the man she was with. He was robust, ruddy-faced, with close-cropped, prematurely gray hair. They’d been having tall, cool drinks, laughing together. Feeling as I did, their laughter and obvious happiness irritated me.

The bellhop had come onto the terrace with its potted palms and sweeping lake view, paging Leslie Parker. The man with the blonde had called, “Over here, boy”, and the bellhop had delivered a message, his smiling, obsequious reaction indicating the generosity of Parker’s tip.

In spite of all my arguments, Maria hadn’t returned home with me that day. Two weeks later she was dead. I’d killed her. The county coroner had ruled accidental drowning during a moonlight swim.

Two weeks later — plenty of time for Parker to have gotten to know her. He might very well have planned to meet her for drinks, on the night she was killed. He might have come down to the lakeshore to see if she were still swimming.

I shuddered, and had another jolt of Scotch.

Yet in these intervening weeks he hadn’t come forward.

Why?

Because the sense of the dramatic in him kept him from the direct action of going to the police?

I doubted it. Such a supposition was nonsense.

Because he’d fallen so deeply in love with Maria he planned a special doom for her murderer?

I doubted that also. There was the blonde, he had to remember that.

The blonde. If Parker were married, to someone besides the blonde, he’d have a very practical reason for covering the details of his stay at Crayton Lake — or for even letting it be known that he had been there, for that matter.

I’d identified the sharer of my secret, but I could do nothing more at the moment. With a sudden, strange fear of the darkness and silence of the bedroom, I carried the Scotch into the living room with me.

I sat down and began belting the Scotch. The TV set was still on the next morning. I groaned awake with a vague memory of having talked back to the set, of cursing it, sometime during the very late hours of night.

I gagged down more Scotch, had dry toast and coffee, black, for breakfast, and drove down the valley to Hollywood.

From a drugstore phone booth on Las Palmas I got in touch with the Tales of Suspense production office.

I told the secretary, “This is Zenith Writer’s Service. We have the typing ready for Mr. Leslie Parker. He asked us to call as soon as. possible.”

“He isn’t here. Please try his hotel.” She added the name of the hotel, and I hung up.

I came out of the booth feeling better. The ruse had saved me the delay and trouble of watching the TV studio and shadowing Parker when he eventually went in and came out. Any delay increased my risk, and I decided to move fast while things were breaking my way.

Parker’s hotel was a comfortable, unpretentious building in North Hollywood. As I drove to it, I was thankful I’d been watching those screen credits as closely as I had. To the desk man at the hotel, I gave the name of someone who worked on the Tales of Suspense show. It took only a moment for the desk man to ring Parker’s room. He turned to me with a smile, saying, “You may go right up. Room 404.”

Without another glance at me, the desk man returned to his chore of sorting and boxing the mail delivery. I walked down the wide corridor that led off the lobby to the self-service elevator. I punched the “4” button and while the elevator crawled upward, I slid the coil of thin wire from my side coat pocket and checked it to make sure it was free of kinks. I tucked the coat pocket flap inside the pocket so it would not impede the wire, and slipped the wife just out of sight below the lip of the pocket.

The elevator stopped at the fourth floor and I stepped into the corridor. A man passed, saw little of my face, for I bent my head to light a cigarette.

When the elevator door slid closed behind this man, I moved quickly to 404.

Expecting a caller, Parker answered my knock at once. His brows raised. Coolly, he said, “Yes?”

“You were expecting Greenwood,” I said.

He frowned, looking at me closely as if trying to place me.

“He’s still downstairs,” I said. “A call from the studio caught him. He’ll be right up. I’m new on the production team and some quick changes are being made. Greenwood brought me over to introduce me.”

Uncertainly, Parker let me enter as I talked. I closed the door with an easy, natural motion.

“Please sit down,” I said. “Greenwood may be a few minutes and we might as well get acquainted. We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

The living room was large, air conditioned, comfortable. There was a long couch, several massive club chairs, a desk, a TV set, a cocktail table, a small, portable bar against the wall. The place, I noted, appeared to be soundproof.

As Parker walked to one of the club chairs, he moved with difficulty. Robust as he was, he needed a cane.

Parker reached the chair. He didn’t sit down, but turned and remained standing in front of the chair.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ll check the desk and see how long Greenwood is going to be.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m Robert Gaither. You’ve finally recognized me.”

He looked me up and down, his expression puzzled.

“Believe me,” he said, “I’ve never seen you before.”

“And you haven’t seen my wife either,” I said.

“No...”

“And I suppose you’ve never been to Crayton Lake.”

He paled. His hand groped behind him for the arm of the chair, for support.

“You can see,” I said, “that denials won’t help you. You were there. You know she wasn’t alone in the lake that night.”

“Maria Conway...”

“Her maiden name,” I said. “Maria Conway Gaither.”

He fell into the chair. Staring at me, he said, “It isn’t possible...”

“That I wouldn’t find you? It was easy.”

“That isn’t what I meant at all.” A crazy sound, part laugh, came from him suddenly. “We writers... the necessity of our job drives us to get inside people... to see as they see... feel as they feel... think as they think... What have I done? What on earth have I possibly done? You — killed her.” That sound came from him again. “Just like in the story I made up.”

“The story that thirty million people saw,” I said. “What did you think you were pulling?”

“Pulling? I was writing a story... Using the accidental death of a woman I’d come to know, as the springboard for a script. The details of setting and character were changed enough, I was sure. I’m still sure they were — if she had died accidentally, as they said. But I see that that TV show would have meant a great deal if she had been murdered — to the man who murdered her.”

“It was murder in the story,” I said.

“Of course. To use my real-life germ of an idea for a story, I had to change it, for the sake of drama, from accident to murder. But who would murder Maria? She was a fine person. She hadn’t an enemy in the world. She was not rich. There was no motive in the world for her murder except in the heart of the cruel person from whom she was running.”

“She told you all about me, I suppose,” I said.

Parker shook his head. “She discussed her personal affairs very little with me. We became little more than casual friends, that’s all. I knew that she’d experienced a recent unpleasantness, but I knew nothing more.”

“In the story you gave all the—”

“In the story, Gaither, the accident had to be murder. For murder there had to be a murderer. In Maria’s case there was only one possible murderer — a husband who’d kill before he’d give her freedom. It was all quite logical to the mind of a working writer who needed a story.”

“You’re lying!” I shouted at him. “You knew the facts all the time!”

“No,” he said, “not until you came here.”

“You knew— You didn’t spill it to the police because you were at the lake with a blonde.”

“Blonde? Oh — I see. Yes.”

“She wasn’t your wife, was she?”

“No,” he said. “She was my daughter. Fresh from school and taking a short vacation with her father.”

I felt as if the veins were bursting in my temples. To have let fear cloud my judgment, to have let it bring me here...

“I swear I didn’t know, Gaither,” he said. “You were safe. I wasn’t dangerous to you.”

“But you are now,” I said.

He struggled to his feet, faced me squarely.

I pulled the wire from my coat pocket.

I looked at the thick neck growing from those enormously powerful shoulders. Quickly, I moved in to kill. The cripple could not flee. His cries would go unheard.

Unfortunately, under the pressure of my intention, I forgot about the cane in his hand.

When I regained consciousness, the District Attorney’s downtown office was crowded with policemen. Later, the courtroom was jammed, with spectators and reporters. But this cell on death row — it vibrates with an emptiness all its own.