The Eleventh Hour

Chapter five

Conway wakened slowly, dazedly, from a heavy, druglike sleep. Something in his subconscious kept jabbing him with a reminder that he must get up, but some part of his nervous system refused to let him move, to disturb the utter pleasure of this trancelike state. How long this tug of war went on, he did not know, but suddenly he was all awake, with a full realization of where he was, what had happened, and what still remained to be done. He sat up in bed and listened for a moment; for what, he did not quite know. He heard nothing but a wonderfully peaceful silence.

He called the Hollywood police station after breakfast, and was not surprised to learn that they had no report on either his wife or his car. At lunch time he decided it was simple prudence to avoid people as much as possible: no matter how well he played it, it was too easy to make a slip. He was in the clear, he knew that; discovery was possible only if he gave himself away. The fewer people he saw, the less chance of anything going wrong. He wanted to stay out of restaurants and bars, so he went to the nearest market and laid in a supply of meat and canned goods which would last him several days.

The neighbors, fortunately, were no problem: both he and Helen had retained the New Yorker’s habit of aloofness with neighbors who, because of propinquity, might conceivably impinge on one’s privacy. He barely knew by sight the people in the houses next door.

When he returned home, the house seemed cold and a little musty, although it was hot outside. After his dutiful call to the police station, he opened the windows in the living room, and the warm breezes flowed in and through the house. He got a bottle of beer and sat with his feet up on a table, and was suddenly conscious that he liked this place which had so recently been a prison. He was free and relieved of care; he had never known a feeling of such complete well-being. Perhaps, once — yes, it reminded him of that time. They had been fighting north of Rome; the outfit was relieved, sent to a rear area, and the gang got furloughs together. They’d gone to recently liberated Rome, and had rooms in a hotel, and even had baths. They had been clean and free: the grim weariness, the discipline, the fear of death which had been the most important things in life for so long were suddenly effaced. They had all felt it then: the ineffable peace, the sensation of being in a world where there was no war, no conflict, no unpleasantness even; where there were no orders to obey, no one to please or propitiate. It had been a Godsend then, for without those few blissful days they might all have cracked, as he did... This present surcease had come none too soon; he might, indeed, as Helen had predicted, have cracked again.

But not now. Not any more. He took a long pull at the beer. He was free now. He had peace. He could live, now, and work. And it was time to get to work.

He went upstairs and sat down before the typewriter. But he was hearing the ring of every telephone in the neighborhood, and between going to the stairs to be sure it was not his, and looking out the window every time it seemed a car might be stopping, he accomplished almost nothing. About five o’clock his phone did ring, and he had to rehearse his “Hello” three times before he dared lift the instrument and speak the word into the mouthpiece. But it was a wrong number, and he returned to his room nervous and let down.

He found he had neither the ambition to cook dinner nor the appetite to eat it. He had a sandwich and then tried, first, writing, then reading, then solitaire. Finally he sat and stared at the ceiling.

By one o’clock he felt that he might sleep. He dozed off almost as soon as he was in bed, and was wide-awake in half an hour. He spent the rest of the night alternately smoking, reading, drinking hot milk, pacing the floor, drinking beer, and trying to sleep; giving up, and then repeating the whole routine. A little after seven he did doze off, and was awake at eight. He got up then and faced the bloodshot, dark-ringed eyes in the mirror. Because he was so sure it was only a matter of minutes, he shaved, showered and dressed before he went downstairs. He called the police station, and it was no longer a routine call. Because his anxiety was so genuine, he tried to curb it, and wondered, as he did, whether it sounded less convincing than when he was play-acting.

The morning was as interminable as the night had been. How long, he wondered, could one stand going on in this vacuum? He puttered about the house, emptying ashtrays, washing dishes. It had been two days before the waitress had been found, he knew; he had even counted on a similar lapse of time. He opened the windows, but the breezes that wandered in had lost their magic. That couple who had seen him park the car: how long would they wait before reporting it? The longer the better, he tried to tell himself. He wished that he might go into the garden and do some physical labor; it might get his mind off this gnawing worry. But he might be spoken to by one of the neighbors; better not to risk it. He stared at the sheet of paper in the typewriter, and told himself that as soon as the suspense was over, he’d be able to work.

About one o’clock he went to the kitchen, looked at the steaks and chops and cold chicken he had brought home, and made himself a cheese sandwich. He ate in the kitchen; the cheese seemed dry and tasteless and it was an effort to down it. He gave up when he had eaten half of it, threw the remainder away, and took the plate and the knife he had used to the sink.

He was holding the plate under the faucet when the bell rang. It sounded with such clarion loudness that he dropped the plate, smashing it, and stood staring at the source of the startling sound. It was the front doorbell, which happened to be on the wall over the sink, and he had heard it so seldom in all the time he had lived in the house, that it was several moments before he realized what it was. He dried his hands and went to the door.

“Mr. Arthur Conway?” Conway nodded wordlessly. “My name’s Larkin. Homicide Bureau. Mind if I come in?”

Conway opened the door wider and stepped aside. He had expected a telephone call; that would have given him time to prepare himself for the inevitable police interview. He’d had two days to prepare, true, but he needed those few minutes between the call and the meeting. This detective, here without warning — did it mean something had gone wrong?

“What is it?” he said, and his mouth was dry.

“Sit down, Mr. Conway,” the detective said. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you.”

“You’ve found her?” Conway sat, but only so that he could watch the detective’s eyes more closely. He had to determine how much the other knew.

“We’ve found your car.”

“But Helen — Mrs. Conway—”

“This is going to be a shock, Mr. Conway. There was a body in the car, and I’m afraid it’s your wife. I’d like you to come down with me now to identify her — if it is her.”

“What happened?” Larkin hesitated and looked at the floor. “Tell me,” Conway insisted.

“Found the car a little over an hour ago. Then they discovered her, on the floor, covered with a coat. She’d been strangled.” The detective seemed to have finished.

“But — what else? I mean, how did it happen — and when? Tell me.”

The detective rose. “There’s no use your getting all upset when we don’t even know for sure if it’s her. You come along now — then if it is — well, we’ll talk about it.”

Conway looked at him for a moment, trying to assay how much the detective was withholding. The eyes were guileless, but he might be acting, too. “I’ll get a tie and my coat,” Conway said. “I’ll be right down.”

A uniformed patrolman was at the wheel, and Conway and Larkin sat in the back for the long ride downtown. They drove for some time in silence, with Conway staring out the window. That, he was sure, was all right — normal behavior. But he was conscious that the detective was eying him from time to time, and he had to make another effort.

“Isn’t there anything else you can tell me?” Conway asked. “No clues? Nothing?”

“Not yet. Time we get downtown, they might have something.”

“When did it happen? How long had she been—?” He stopped himself, remembering that, in fiction at least, the bereaved next of kin were always unable to utter the word “dead.”

“Don’t know yet.”

Conway turned and again stared out the window. So the police had not yet got to the couple who had been on the porch. Or perhaps Detective Larkin simply hadn’t been told about it. If the car had been found only an hour ago, there had been little time for investigation. He was chilled momentarily at the realization of how important that couple were to him: they were the crucial figures in his whole scheme, for it was they who had to establish when the car had been parked. And that, in turn, was what Conway counted on to prove — if it had to be proved — that the man who had parked the car could not have been himself. But he refused to be alarmed; he enjoyed the sense of relief that the waiting was over.

The session at the Morgue was mercifully brief. He steeled himself before they went in; someone lifted the cloth which covered her face, he nodded, and then they were in an office. He signed some forms, and they went out to the street and got into the car.

“We’ll go over to Headquarters now,” Larkin said. “They’ll want to get all the information you can give ’em.”

Conway was inwardly, as well as outwardly, calm when they went through the door lettered HOMICIDE BUREAU. He was ushered into a private office, and there Larkin introduced him, quite formally, to two plainclothesmen, a lieutenant in uniform, and Captain Ramsden, Chief of the Homicide Bureau. Almost immediately the door opened and a youngish man, who looked like a salesman and a none too successful one, entered.

“This is Mr. Conway, Sergeant Bauer,” Ramsden said. Bauer acknowledged the introduction, took a small notebook from his pocket, and sat down at the side of the captain’s desk.

They asked Conway to tell everything that had happened from the time Helen and he had left the house to go to the movie, and he did. The story was not too pat; he would skip some detail, then remember it a little later, and fit it in chronologically. He was not too accurate about times; he knew they could, and would, check those later. He made it very clear that their marital life was completely happy. He gave the names of their few acquaintances and friends; he knew of no enemies. They asked further questions about parts of his account, and he repeated or enlarged on what he had already told them.

After a little more than an hour, Captain Ramsden rose from his desk.

“I guess that’s about all we can do here now,” he said. “We’ll want your fingerprints, or course. After you get them, Sergeant, you’d better take Mr. Conway out to the parking lot and go over the ground with him.”

Conway broke in. “Can’t you tell me anything, Captain? Any clues? Any suspects? It won’t bring her back, I know, but I’d hate to see whoever did this get away with it.”

“I can understand how you feel. But it’s too soon yet to have anything much. The car was found over on Fulton Street, about three miles from the theatre. One of our squad cars recognized the license as being on the stolen car list, then they found the body. A girl, a Miss — er—”

“Elsie Daniels,” Bauer prompted.

“Yes — was sitting on the porch Monday evening—”

“With her boy friend, Fred Bissell,” Bauer added.

“Yes — when the car was left there.” Conway surmised that that was the extent of Ramsden’s information, for the captain turned to Bauer. “Have you talked to her yet?”

“Sure,” said Bauer, with the air of a man about to take his rightful place at the center of the stage. “We can nail down the time within a couple minutes.” Conway glowed inwardly: this was more than he had hoped for. “They’d been listening to some music on the radio, and then Senator Taft came on. They took a couple minutes of that, and then she went in and switched over to another station. She came back out on the porch and just barely sat down when they heard this scraping noise, and noticed the car parking. Then he—”

“Wait a minute,” Ramsden interrupted. “Senator Taft was on at ten o’clock Monday night — I listened to him myself.”

“I didn’t have time to check it yet,” Bauer said.

“That’s when it was,” Ramsden said. “Somebody introduced him — short introduction, no more than a minute, and then he started speaking. So if she says they listened for a couple of minutes — well, it must have been between ten-two and, say, ten-five.”

“Yeah,” said Bauer, and Conway was unable to tell whether he was disgruntled because of the captain’s firsthand information, or merely because he had been interrupted. “Anyhow,” Bauer continued, “the guy started away from the car, and then went back and locked the door. Then he just walked off.”

“Any description?” Ramsden asked.

“Well, for once it’s not that medium-size guy in a dark suit. He had a dark suit, all right, but at least we got a little something to go on. She says he had a mustache, and was stoop-shouldered, almost hunchbacked.”

Conway was conscious that every pair of eyes in the room had been turned on him as Bauer spoke.

“That’s more than we usually get on one of these cases,” Ramsden said. Conway realized that the remark was addressed to him, and in a more friendly tone than Ramsden had used previously. He also had a moment of sympathy for every round-shouldered man in Los Angeles County, a good many of whom, he knew, would find themselves in the police line-up in the course of the next week.

“And that’s all?” he asked.

“All so far,” Bauer said.

“We’ll have something in the next day or so,” Ramsden said. “We’ve got a good man in charge of this case, Mr. Conway.” He indicated the sergeant. “Sergeant Lester R. Bauer. The R. stands for Right.” He and the lieutenant laughed; the others, who were evidently outranked by Bauer, permitted themselves no more than smiles, and Conway’s face betrayed the fact that he did not get the joke. “ ‘Right’ Bauer,” the captain explained patiently. “You’ll understand if you see much of him.”

Bauer obviously was not amused, and had started for the door when Ramsden stopped him. “Wait a minute, Sergeant,” he said, and turned to Conway. “There’s probably a flock of reporters out there. You’ve had a pretty bad couple of hours — if you don’t feel like facing them right now, the sergeant could take you down the back way, and you’ll miss them.”

“Thanks,” said Conway, genuinely surprised at this consideration. “I’d be very grateful if I could duck them.”

Bauer crossed to a door at the other side of the office, and Conway stopped and held out his hand to the captain.

“I certainly hope you can find him, whoever it was, and quickly,” he said. “I’ll do anything I can to help — you know that.”

“I’m sure of it,” Ramsden said, and then shook hands. “We’ll do our best.”

As he followed Bauer down the corridor to the fingerprint division, Conway was sanguine. He had been treated with more consideration than he had dared hope for; obviously they did not consider him a suspect, although he was, undoubtedly, at least under technical suspicion until they had had time to check his story. When his fingerprints had been taken, they made their way to the car which was waiting, with Larkin at the wheel. As he got into the back seat with the sergeant, Conway decided it would be wise to try to make friends with him, to pump him for whatever information the detective might be able to supply. But Bauer saved him the trouble.

“Wiseguy,” he murmured.

“How’s that?” Conway asked.

“That comic captain. With his jokes.”

Conway was genuinely curious, and, in addition, this seemed too good an opening to be missed. “What did he mean, ‘The R stands for Right’?”

“Some of the boys started calling me that because I’m practically always right about everything.” He said it as a simple statement of fact. “Only he thinks it’s funny or something.”

For the first time Conway looked carefully at the young man whose unimpressive facade concealed this rather staggering ego. His first impression had been justified; Sergeant Bauer did look like one of those ineffectual, already defeated salesmen who plod from door to door, endlessly and aimlessly, all their lives. He was of somewhat less than medium height, with a chin and forehead which receded almost equally; the forehead seemed to have a slight edge, but that may have been because his hairline had reached a point just above the ears. His cheeks were full and his nose broad and flat so that, from a three-quarter angle, his face looked rather like the blunt end of an egg. In his pale eyes there was nothing that remotely resembled alertness or intelligence; rather, there were placidity and self-satisfaction to an unusual degree. Conway decided that in all the world, Sergeant Bauer was the one man he would most like to have assigned to this case. And it shouldn’t be too hard to get on a friendly footing with him.

“The captain must have a pretty good opinion of you, to put you on a case like this.”

“He’s got a good opinion of me all right. But that’s not the reason he stuck me with this one.”

“No?”

“He figures I’m getting ahead too fast, so this will slow me down. There’s not a chance in a million of cracking this one, and he knows it. This was some sex maniac, or plain maniac, and there’s nothing at all to go on. There’s no reason it should have been your wife; might just as well of been any woman who was at that theatre that night, and was left alone a few minutes. It didn’t even have to be that theatre — coulda been any theatre, or any parking lot in town. But I have to go through all the motions, and waste a lot of time and energy and make up a thousand reports, but it keeps me off a case where I might really do something, and maybe get a promotion out of it, and the papers would start asking why Bauer ain’t head of the Homicide Bureau.” It was said without a trace of rancor.

Conway realized that with Bauer, at least, he was not even under technical suspicion. Here was certainly an ally to be cultivated. “If anyone can clear up this case,” he said, “you’re the man to do it.”

“Oh, sure,” the sergeant conceded. “Remember that case the papers called. ‘The White Rose Murder,’ about a year ago?” Conway did. “Well, I cracked that one single-handed. I got promoted to sergeant, and for six months he practically had me investigating overtime parking.” Conway made a sound which he hoped would be interpreted as sympathy.

“At least there’ll be some publicity out of this,” Bauer said. “My girl likes to see my name in the papers,” he added — an explanation which Conway found singularly unconvincing.

“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.

But he had let himself in for this, and he had to carry it through. He led the detective to the entrance to the parking lot and from there pointed out the course he had taken from the time he discovered the car to be missing, until the police car arrived. “After they left,” he said, “I went on looking around — in the alley back here, the parking lot next to the theatre, up and down these side streets. It doesn’t make sense, I know, and I realized it didn’t make sense then. So when I saw this trolley coming along, I hopped on it and went down to the station.”

“Um-m.” Bauer had seemed somewhat bored by the whole recital, and now he led the way back to the car. “Might as well go now. I’ll drop you home.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Conway climbed into the car and they started off. One point remained to be got on the record; he had omitted it previously because he had feared it might make his story overprecise. He leaned back in the seat.

“I do appreciate the lift,” he said. “When you’re used to a car out here, you’re lost without it. I don’t even know how to get around. Why, the night of — the night it happened, after the police car left, I thought I’d go crazy waiting for that trolley. When I got on it, the trip took forever. Then when we got there, I didn’t even see Wilcox Avenue till we were going across it, so I had to ride an extra block. That was the last straw.”

“Um-m.”

Conway was satisfied that the statement sounded simply like the garrulity of a man under a nervous strain, and that the sergeant attached no importance to it. Nevertheless, it was on the record.