Jodie was already at the cottage — she’d gone there the day before and stayed overnight. At 18, she was interested in folk singing and had performed here and there as an amateur; but she hadn’t been serious about it as a career until she met Frank London. He had a good voice, he was an experienced performer, and on some level he and Jodie clicked. Their voices complemented each other, but more than that, they gave each other style. London’s stature grew as some part of him softened and gained understanding, while Jodie acquired some of his confidence and bravura. They were a team, and fast becoming the sensation of the small hootenannies.
Jodie had told her family that Frank was meeting her at the cottage, that they wanted to rehearse some new numbers. The older people had never liked London, but they realized you don’t have to like your colleagues in order to work with them. And Jodie had assured them there was nothing serious between her and Frank, and never would be.
“He likes me,” she’d said. “Maybe a little too much, but I know he’s a heel. Except the times we’re singing together, he rubs me the wrong way. So you’ve nothing to worry about, any of you.”
And they didn’t. They loaded the picnic basket in their boat, and went upriver. They didn’t take watches, didn’t know what time it was. That was part of the fun, part of what made their outings so carefree.
“We go upriver,” Dr. Finley said, “and land wherever we feel like, or else we just drift back. We do it every week-end. Sometimes we swim, sometimes we birdwatch, sometimes we just talk. We eat when we’re hungry. Occasionally we stay out overnight. We never know. But we’re free, we’re completely emancipated from time.”
Brother, Decker thought. What a day to be emancipated!
They had returned after dark. They had no idea what time it was. Ten — twelve — two — they couldn’t say. They’d been immersed in a dream world and their senses were drugged, suspended, heavy with sound and sight and the richness of their own living. Until they turned on the light in the living room of the cottage and saw Jodie.
She’d been stabbed with a kitchen knife. There was blood. There had been a fight. She’d resisted. Her clothes were torn. In the course of the struggle her foot had apparently caught the cord of the electric clock, unplugged it, and sent it crashing down. The cord was still hooked around her leg.
What the four grownups had subsequently gone through, they themselves could hardly relate. Dr. Finley had examined Jodie. Respiration had not entirely ceased. The doctor took over, and with the help of the others he improvised emergency techniques. First-aid equipment and some of his basic instruments were in the cottage, so he tried to accomplish a medical miracle.
There was no phone, and even if there had been, no one would have bothered to summon the police. Time was too important — a transfusion and manual massage of Jodie’s heart were the only possible hopes, and they had to be done immediately, without moving her.
Natalie Finley had formerly been a nurse. She assisted; she was familiar with the delicate and unusual operation that Dr. Finley had performed before, in hospitals. He made the incision and they stood by and did what he told them to. They gave blood, under primitive conditions.
How long Finley worked on Jodie, none of them could tell. An hour, three hours? They hadn’t the slightest idea. But it was dawn when Finley finally gave up and told Judge Dorkin to trudge up the hill to the nearest phone and notify the police.
When Decker got the call from headquarters, he tumbled out of bed and drove to the scene. He saw the two women briefly, then got the basic facts from Judge Dorkin and Dr. Finley. Frank London had presumably been there. The clock had always kept accurate time. Decker didn’t touch it. Jub Freeman would dust it for fingerprints and examine it and the cord for any possible physical evidence, no matter how minute. The hands pointed to nine o’clock.
Decker had four homicide men at the scene before he and Mitch Taylor left to pick up London. London was the obvious suspect and Decker woke him up, heard him mutter sleepily that he’d rehearsed with Jodie and left her around seven, maybe a little earlier, that she’d failed to show up at the Red Grotto, and so he’d gone on alone, and what the hell was this all about?
Decker told him and hauled him off to headquarters. Decker’s grilling was expert. London was reticent about details and insolent in his general behavior, but Decker thought he had a pretty good case. London had stabbed her, then set the hands of the clock to indicate nine, and figured he had a pretty good alibi.
He spent the day in jail while Decker gradually learned how a man can come to hate a clock.
His first theory — that London had set the clock after the stabbing-ran into immediate difficulty. The time-set button was jammed and bent, and couldn’t be moved. Decker decided it was jammed because, when the clock fell, the button had hit the arm of a wicker chair. Fragments of the wicker were wedged against the stem of the time-set, and there were clear marks on the chair to show where the clock had hit.
Microscopic examination made it seem highly unlikely that London had scraped off tiny bits of wicker and inserted them in such a way as to make the time-set inoperative. It was just one of those accidents. Therefore, London must have set the clock at nine before he committed the murder. That was Decker’s first conclusion, in what he now thought of as his hours of innocence.
Medical evidence was consistent with placing the time of attack between seven and nine p.m. London had been there until almost seven, and everything in his background was against him. He’d been a juvenile delinquent in Chicago and had spent time in a reformatory. Later, he’d gone to New York and had become something of a Greenwich Village character. He sang and strummed in bars, drank too much, got into fights. He’d been arrested for assaulting a woman, but she’d refused to prosecute. There were rumors of other, similar incidents, although they hadn’t got as far as a police blotter. He’d finally left New York, gone on tour, landed here, and met Jodie.
He was in love with her, according to everybody who knew the pair of them, but she would have no part of him. He’d made a few scenes at the Red Grotto, but she’d always managed to hold him off. To Decker, the picture of the murder was crystal-clear. Jodie and Frank London had been alone in that isolated river cottage. He’d tried to make love to her, she’d resisted, and he’d grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed her in a violent rage.
So much for London. But granting him his nine o’clock alibi, it was reasonable to believe that a prowler had walked into the cottage after London had gone. The Homicide Squad combed the neighborhood for evidence of a stranger who might have assaulted and killed Jodie. No trace of an intruder had been found.
Which brought everything back to the clock.
It was an old battered clock, hexagonal in shape, and the numbers on the dial were indistinct. Nevertheless they were there, and the clock had stopped at nine. Decker bought two similar clocks and offered five bucks to any of his squad who could figure out how London could have jammed the time-set button in exactly the way it had been found. Nobody collected the five bucks.
It was a noisy clock, and the judge told him the family used to joke about it, referring to its death rattle. But it kept good time and they were sentimental about it, so they never replaced it.
“The electricity might have been cut off,” the judge said.
“It wasn’t,” Decker said. “We checked that, for the last month. And we checked your fuse box. If it was keeping accurate time earlier in the afternoon, when you were still here, we have to assume it remained accurate.”