The Eleventh Hour

by Robert Bruce Sinclair

  After lunch he took Betty in the car and began searching for an apartment; late in the afternoon, after a dozen stops, he saw her walk toward the car smiling, for the first time since they had started out.

  “I’ve taken it,” she said. “It’s not much, but it’s not too bad, I can almost afford it, and I can get in right away. If you don’t mind a little more taxi service, I’ll pick up my bags and move in now.”

  Conway knew that he was being irrational before he spoke. “Must you?” he asked. “Why don’t we have dinner, and then after it’s dark I’ll drive you over.”

  She turned to him and smiled, that warm, adorable smile he was finding more and more irresistible. “If you like,” she said.

  Conway expected Bauer to appear the moment they reached home, but when, after dinner, the table had been cleared, and he and Betty again sat over coffee and cigarettes, he became optimistic that he might have the evening alone with her. Her youthful enthusiasm, her mature tranquillity, he found more endearing than ever, and it required conscious effort to refrain from making love to her.

  He had not told her about Helen and Taylor, not for the reasons Bauer had advanced, but simply because there had been no time to go into it. Now, because he wanted to be as honest as he dared be, there seemed no reason to withhold it.

  “I got rather a shock this morning,” he said. “The police picked up a man who’s admitted he was having an affair with Helen.”

  Betty looked up at him slowly. “Oh?” she said.

  “You don’t seem very surprised.”

  “Not particularly. Who was it?”

  “A man named Taylor — I’d met him a couple of times. I didn’t even recognize him in the line-up. I’m afraid he’s in for rather a bad time.”

  “You don’t think he had anything to do with it?”

  Conway shook his head. “Regardless of your faith in the law of averages, I still think it was a maniac.”

  “You didn’t suspect anything?”

  “It never occurred to me. That’s what worried me this morning — that they wouldn’t believe me; that they’d start thinking they’d found a motive for me to kill her, and then go on from there. It’s a good thing they weren’t as suspicious as you.”

  She looked at him soberly. “They didn’t know Helen as I did. I’m not surprised she had a lover, but she’d be too clever to let you find out, because then you could have divorced her. She couldn’t have endured that. No, I’m sure you didn’t know about it.”

  “I don’t want to turn your pretty head with flattery,” he said, “but that’s the first logical observation you’ve made since you’ve been here.”

  “Do you mind very much? I know it must have been a shock, but — do you care terribly?”

  “I don’t care anything about any woman in the world — except you,” he said.

  “Oh, my darling—” She was at his side in an instant. “I’ve so needed to hear that.” Her lips entreated a kiss and her arms encircled him fiercely. Then, “I’ve needed that even more,” she said.

  “I wasn’t sure, after last night,” he said. “I didn’t know how you felt about it today.”

  “I couldn’t stop loving you overnight. I don’t think I can stop loving you ever.”

  “I’ve been afraid, a dozen times today, that I’d lost you.”

  “You’ll never lose me,” she whispered. “Unless you want to.”

  “I’m going to tonight — when you leave here.”

  “I don’t want to leave you.” Her eyes lifted to his. “Oh, why can’t you have faith in me? What must I do to make you trust me?”

  No man on earth, Conway thought, could doubt her. Or resist her. He could tell her, prove his faith in her, and she would be a haven where he could put aside his fears, his suspicions, his constant vigilance. He had to tell her: he was starving for this love she offered.

  “I do trust you, my dearest,” he said, and at that moment the clangor of the doorbell echoed from the house.

  They sprang apart guiltily. “It’s Bauer, damn him,” Conway said. “Stay here. I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can.”

  It was not Bauer, but Larkin and another detective whom Conway saw when he opened the door.

  “Want you at Headquarters right away,” Larkin said.

  “What’s up?”

  “I dunno. They never tell me anything.”

  “I’ll get a coat and turn out some of these lights,” Conway said. He went into the dining room and noticed Larkin move to keep him in view. He stepped out onto the patio and blew out the two candles which were still alight on the table. Betty, on the settee, was out of sight of the detective.

  “I have to go to Headquarters,” he whispered. “Wait for me, my darling.” In the darkness, he saw her nod her head. “I won’t be long.” He pretended to lock the door to the patio, picked up a coat, and rejoined the detectives in the hall.

  Larkin drove and the other detective sat in back with Conway. Both men were unusually taciturn. Or perhaps, Conway thought, it seems that way because I’m used to Bauer. But try as he might, he was unable to elicit a shred of information from either of them.

  The two men accompanied him to Ramsden’s office, and Larkin knocked before opening the door. He went inside for a moment, and then the door opened again, and he motioned for Conway to enter.

  Ramsden, seated behind his desk, looked steadily at him as he came in. “Good evening, Captain,” Conway said.

  “Hello, Conway.” The “Mister” was conspicuous by its absence, and Conway wondered whether this indicated familiarity or — or what? Bauer was seated at one side of the captain’s desk, and a young man at the other.

  Ramsden indicated the young man. “This is Mr. Davis,” he said, and Conway noted that the young man was tall and thin, with a very high forehead and a collar to match. “He’s the assistant district attorney,” Ramsden continued.

  “Good evening, Mr. Davis,” Conway said, and felt his throat begin to tighten even as he spoke.

  “Hello, Conway,” Davis said. “I understand you murdered your wife.”

  “What!” The word leaped involuntarily from Conway’s lips. He looked at Bauer, whose expression did not change, and then at Ramsden.

  The captain nodded. “That’s right, Conway.”

  Davis rose from his chair. “Sit down, Conway.” Larkin brought a chair and Conway sank into it. “We’ve got the whole thing taped,” Davis said as he sat on the edge of Ramsden’s desk. “You might as well make a full confession.”

  He’s bluffing, Conway thought. They’ve got something, but he’s bluffing. He remembered the other times he had almost panicked because of something Bauer had said or done, and resolved that it would not happen again. “I don’t know how much you know about this case, Mr. Davis,” he was able to say in an almost completely normal voice. “But I didn’t murder my wife, and the captain and the sergeant know that I couldn’t have. They just happened to mention that only this morning.”

  “That was this morning,” Ramsden said.

  “Yes,” Davis said, “and since this morning, thanks to some excellent detective work by Sergeant Bauer, the picture has changed. What was not possible then has become very possible indeed.”

  “I know. The Einstein theory.”

  “Look, pal,” Bauer said, “there was a little mistake made — a lucky mistake for you, up to now. You been on borrowed time since the day after the body was discovered. If it hadn’t been that somebody put the right facts together wrong, I’d of had this wrapped up in twenty-four hours.”

  “Would someone mind translating this doubletalk?” Conway asked.

  “We’ll begin at the beginning,” Davis said. “We’ll tell you exactly what you did and when you did it. There are a few details still missing, of course — we haven’t had time to check everything since this afternoon — and if you want to help us out with those, maybe we can help you out a little. Might even make some sort of a deal. Sergeant Bauer seems to think you rate a bre
ak.”

  “That’s very kind of him,” Conway said.

  “It starts in the drugstore, when you went over to get that cup of coffee because you were early for the picture. You had to ask your wife for money to pay the check. She was careless and you saw that she had a roll. You asked where she’d gotten it, and, because she wasn’t sticking with you much longer anyway, and didn’t care what you thought about it, she told you. She told you that she’d cleaned out your joint account, and, naturally, you got sore, and you had a fight. That we label Motive Number One.”

  “One hundred per cent wrong so far,” Conway said. “I knew about the money an hour after she’d withdrawn it. I got a little upset because she was carrying it around. I told the sergeant all this.”

  “Yeah,” Bauer said. “You told me.”

  Davis appeared not to have heard the interruption. “Naturally, after that, you were in no mood to go to a movie. Nor was she. So you went back to the car. Somehow — this is one of the details you can help with — you found out about the affair with Taylor. I imagine that she probably taunted you with it — she was through with you, anyway. Motive Number Two.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bauer broke in. “I got it. That red scarf she was wearing, that you didn’t like—” He turned to Davis. “He told the waitress he couldn’t stand it, and they were arguing about it. I don’t know if I told you before, but Taylor gave her that. So here’s what happened. Conway’s beefing about the scarf, and she says, ‘You got good reason not to like it — if you only knew.’ So he wants to know what she’s talking about, and she lets him have it. One thing leads to another, and” — he turned to Conway — “that’s when you killed her, figuring the scarf made it poetical justice.”

  “I think that’s probably just about it, Sergeant,” Davis said. “How about it, Conway?”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried,” Conway said. “But I guess you are trying, at that. For your information, until this moment, I didn’t know anything about that scarf.”

  “There seem to have been a lot of things you didn’t know about,” Ramsden interjected.

  “At any rate,” Davis continued, “you took the scarf and choked her and killed her. And then you snapped out of your murderous rage, and realized you had a dead body in the car. You drove around for a while, wondering what to do about it, and then you remembered these maniac killings, and you got a brilliant idea. You figured it all out, and you figured you could make it look like one of them, and get away with it. So you just parked the car on the first quiet street you came to, and went back to the theatre.”

  “Let’s stop kidding,” Conway said. “I don’t know what you’re driving at; you must have something on your minds, but it certainly can’t be that you believe I did this thing. The car was parked at ten-o-four, remember? And you yourself, Sergeant, said I couldn’t have done it then.”

  “That’s right,” Bauer said. “You couldn’t of done it if the car was parked at ten-o-four. If. That’s what threw me, and it was a lucky break for you — for a while. You must of had a good laugh when you found out that’s what we were going on — you couldn’t of hoped for a break like that. But — and I don’t expect you to be surprised at this — that car wasn’t parked at ten-o-four, it was parked at nine-o-i our, as I found out only this afternoon. So now d’you see what’s changed since this morning?”

  Conway looked at them incredulously. “What did you do, bribe that couple to change their story?”

  “Wait a minute, Conway—” Ramsden half-rose from his chair. “We’ve taken enough lip from you.”

  “He’s naturally disappointed,” Bauer said placatingly, “after getting away with it this long. But don’t you go talking about bribes,” he said sternly to Conway. “You ought to know by this time that a man like me don’t have to pull stuff like that. Matter of fact, it was you tipped me off. You remember, you were talking about rebroadcasts this morning? It must of been your unconscious, thinking about it. Anyhow, I did a little checking up.

  “Remember, we were here in this office the day the body was found, and I said this Elsie Daniels told me they’d been listening to Senator Taft when they saw the car being parked. Well, somebody” — there was a barely perceptible glance at Ramsden — “figured that made it ten o’clock, because that’s when most people here heard the speech. But” — the sergeant paused professorially — “that was not a fact. When I got the real fact, this afternoon, all I had to do was take it and the other facts I had, and put ’em together right, like I told you. Senator Taft’s speech was broadcast from two local stations here at ten o’clock, all right. But those were rebroadcasts. By looking up the radio logs at the newspaper, I find out it was broadcast at nine o’clock from a Denver station which not many sets can pick up out here. But whaddaya know? Elsie’s family just got a big new radio that can get it, as I proved this afternoon. And to top it off, the Denver station is practically right next to KNX on the dial, which is what Elsie usually tuned to, on account of the music.

  “The other day, when I told Elsie and her boy friend it was ten o’clock when the car stopped, they both said, ‘Oh, it couldn’t of been as late as that.’ I figured that was because they’d been mushing and lost track of the time, but it turns out they were right. What happened was, they intended to tune in KNX, but, not being used to the new radio, they didn’t hit it right on the nose. What they got instead was Denver. So today when I asked ’em again what time they thought it was, they were positive it wasn’t ten. So it must of been nine, which all adds up and makes sense. At nine-o-four, or very close to it,” he was addressing Conway now, “you parked your car with your wife’s body in it, and got out and walked away.”

  “I have to hand it to you, Sergeant, for figuring that out,” Davis said. “It’s brilliant.” Conway expected Bauer to take a bow, but instead he ploughed along with his recital.

  “You got out of the car,” he continued, “and walked up to Santa Monica Boulevard—”

  “Wait a minute,” Conway interrupted. “The car wasn’t parked at nine o’clock because it was still in the parking lot. And I didn’t park it at nine or ten or any other time, because I couldn’t have. Why don’t you look for the man who did — at least you know he had a mustache and was practically hunchbacked.”

  Davis’s glance at Ramsden was somewhat disconcerted. They muffed that one, Conway thought. Bauer, however, did not hesitate.

  “There’s a dozen five-and-tens and souvenir stores along Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevard open that time of night,” he said. “And they all sell those disguise kits for kids. You parked around a corner on a dark street, locked the car, went into one of those places, paid your quarter, trimmed the mustache a little, and stuck it on. All you have to do to look like a hunchback is hunch up your coat, hunch over your shoulders, and, see?” — the sergeant demonstrated — “I’m a hunchback.

  “Another thing, just so you know I haven’t missed any details,” the detective continued to Davis, “he had a hat when he got out of the parked car. Naturally, to help hide his face. What happened was this: he left the hat in the car with her coat, so he had no hat in the drugstore. He wears the hat when he gets out of the car, after he’s parked it, and when he gets a couple blocks away from it, he takes off the mustache, throws it away, rips up the hat and gets rid of the pieces, and arrives at the theatre with no hat. I did a little looking around his house the other day — not a sign of a hat anywhere.”

  “I haven’t worn, or owned, a hat since I came to California — like thousands of other men,” Conway said.

  “Well, you coulda bought that, too,” Bauer said. “But I’m surprised a man like you would go in for kid stuff like that disguise. I s’pose you were pretty rattled, though. Must of been, to think we’d pay any attention to that.”

  Conway resolutely refused to let himself become panicked. But he could feel that all-too-familiar constriction of the throat begin to come on, and he wondered how much longer he could continue this s
how of nonchalance.

  “Anyhow, you walked up to Santa Monica Boulevard, which took you about twenty minutes,” the detective continued, and then added to Davis, “I checked that. You were shot with luck, because a trolley car came along there at nine twenty-two, which was just about when you hit Santa Monica, and got you back to the theatre at nine-thirty — just in time to let you see the audience leaving the theatre after the picture.”

  “No trick to it at all,” Conway said. “All I had to do was to be in two places at the same time.”

  “The doorman let you into the lobby,” Bauer went on, “you went into the theatre, threw the glove under a seat, got the manager, and let him watch you find the glove. All very neat.”

  “To say the least,” Conway said.

  “Then you went to the parking lot, found your car gone, which it certainly was — it had been gone for an hour and a half — went through the motions of looking for your car and your wife — very convincingly, I got to hand it to you — called the police, got on a trolley and went to the police station. Eight? Eight.”

  The facts were so wrong, and the deductions made from them so ridiculous, that Conway could almost relax. That he was suspected at all was disturbing, but they were, as yet, so far from knowing the real facts of the murder that he saw no reason to be too perturbed.

  “You have a great future as a fiction writer,” he said to Bauer. “That makes a very nice story — except that at nine-o-four I was in the movie with my wife, and at nine-thirty I walked with her to the parking lot and the car was there. How do you explain that?”

  “Very simply,” Davis said. “You’re the fiction writer. You weren’t in the movie at nine-o-four, or any other time, because you didn’t go back to the theatre after you left the drugstore. The doorman remembers you when you started to go in and your wife found out you were early, and called you an idiot, and walked off, with you following her. But he didn’t see you come back.”