The Eleventh Hour

by Robert Bruce Sinclair

  “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.

  Chapter six

  A half-dozen cars were parked in front of the house when they drove up, and eight or ten men and two women were dispersed among the cars, the porch, and the front lawn. Bauer said, “I’ll help you handle ’em,” which came as no surprise at all to Conway.

  Bauer herded the group into the living room and took charge. The police, he said, were anxious to know if any private citizen had seen, or given a ride to, a suspicious character in the neighborhood where the car had been found. “Be sure to print that, and tell ’em to call the Homicide Bureau — right? Right.”

  Conway told his story then; he answered questions and posed for photographs, and was photographed un-posed. The flashlights went off without warning, but Bauer was never caught off guard; he was at Conway’s elbow for every picture.

  The only photograph Conway had of Helen was the one on his desk; the reporters agreed to pool it, and one photographer took it with solemn promises to the others that they would have their cuts in time for their deadlines, and an even more solemn promise to Conway that the original would be returned. And if it’s not returned, I suppose I’ll have to keep after them for it, because it might seem strange that I never want to set eyes on her again, Conway thought.

  The departure of the press was the signal for the neighbors to begin calling, and the Burkes, who lived next door, arrived as Conway was standing at the door with Bauer.

  “I’ll let you know if anything happens,” the detective said as he left. “Stay close to the phone.”

  A little after six the last of the callers departed. Conway locked the door, drew the shades, and retired to the kitchen; he drew the shades there also before turning on the light. He had no notion that this would convince anyone that he was not at home; it would, however — particularly if he did not go to the door — persuade any further callers that he wished to be alone with his grief. This idea was followed by the thought that he should have something to be alone with: he put together the components of a Martini, and decided that he could wish for no more pleasant companion for such a moment.