“I think you’re taking us for a ride, aren’t you?” one of the others suggested stonily. “It was only last night. Not last week or last year.”
“I never did have a very good memory for faces, even when I’m — at peace, nothing to bother me. Oh, she had a face, I suppose—”
“No kidding?” the one who had assumed the role of end man jeered.
He kept going from bad to worse, because he was making the mistake of thinking aloud, instead of rehearsing his words. “She was shaped like other women, that’s about all I can tell you—”
That did it. Burgess’s face had been slowly lengthening for some time, without his giving any other sign of truculence. He was evidently of a slow-moving temperament. Instead of reclipping his stymied pencil into his pocket, he flung it with a sort of angered deliberateness, almost as if taking aim, at the wall opposite him. Then he got up and went over and got it. His face had turned good and red. He shrugged into his long discarded coat, pulled the knot of his tie around frontward.
“Come on, boys,” he said surlily, “let’s get out of here, it’s getting late.”
He stopped a moment at the arched opening leading out to the foyer, eyed Henderson flintily. “What do you take us for anyway?” he growled. “Easy marks? You’re out with a woman, for six solid hours, only last night, and yet you can’t tell us what she looked like! You’re sitting shoulder to shoulder with her at a bar, you’re sitting across a table from her for a whole table d’hote meal from celery to coffee, you’re in the seat right next to her for three full hours at a show, you’re in the same taxi with her coming and going — but her face is just a blank space under an orange hat! You expect us to swallow that? You try to hand us a myth, a phantom, without any name or form or height or width or eyes or hair or anything else, and we’re supposed to take your word for it you were with that and not home here when your wife was getting killed! You’re not even plausible about it. A ten-year-old kid could see through what you’re trying to put over. It’s one of two things. Either you weren’t with any such person, and just made her up out of your own mind. Or more likely still, you weren’t with any such person but did see her in the crowd around you sometime during the evening, and are trying to foist her on us as having been with you, when she wasn’t at all. Which is why you’re purposely making her blurred, so we can’t get a very good line on her and find out the truth!”
“Come on, stir!” one of the others ordered Henderson, in a voice like a buzz saw going through a pine knot. “Burge don’t burn very often,” he added half humorously, “but when he does, he burns good and strong.”
“Am I under arrest?” Scott Henderson asked Burgess as he got up and moved toward the door in the grasp of the other man.
Burgess didn’t answer him directly. The answer was to be found in the parting instruction he gave the third man, over his shoulder.
“Turn out that lamp, Joe. There won’t be anybody using it around here for a long time to come.”
4
The Hundred and Forty-Ninth Day Before the Execution
Six p. m.
The car was standing waiting there by the corner when the unseen belfry somewhere close at hand began tolling the hour. “Here it comes,” Burgess said. They’d been waiting about ten minutes for this, motor running.
Henderson, neither free nor indicted yet, sat on the rear seat between him and one of the other two headquarters men who had taken part in the questioning up at his apartment the previous night and morning.
A third man whom they referred to as “Dutch” stood outside the car, on the sidewalk, in a sort of fatuous idleness. He had been kneeling crouched in mid-sidewalk tightening up his shoelaces just before the first stroke sounded. He straightened now.
It was the same kind of a night like the one before. The get-together hour, the sky with its make-up on in the west, everyone going some place all at one time. Henderson gave no sign, sitting there between two of his captors. It must have occurred to him, though, what a difference a few hours can make.
His own address was just a few doors behind them, at the next corner to the rear. Only he didn’t live there any more; he lived in a detention cell in the prison attached to police headquarters now.
He spoke dully. “No, a store length further back,” he said to Burgess. “I’d just come up to that lingerie store window when the first stroke hit. I can remember that, now that I’m looking at it — and hearing the same sound — over again.”
Burgess relayed it to the man on the sidewalk. “Back up one store length and take it from there, Dutch. That’s it. All right, start walking!” The second stroke of six had sounded. He did something to the stop watch he was holding in his hand.
The tall, rangy, redheaded man on the sidewalk struck out. The car at the same time eased into gliding motion, keeping abreast of him out beyond the curb.
“Dutch” looked self-conscious for a moment or two, his legs worked a little stiffly; then it wore off gradually.
“How is he for pace?” Burgess asked presently.
“I think I was a little faster than that,” Henderson said. “When I’m sore I walk fast, I notice, and I was going at a pretty good clip last night.”
“Quicken it up a little, Dutch!” Burgess coached.
The rangy one accelerated slightly.
The fifth stroke sounded, then the last.
“How is it now?” Burgess asked.
“That’s about me,” Henderson concurred.
An intersection sidled past under them. A light held the car up. Not the walker. Henderson had disregarded them the night before. The car caught up with Dutch midway down the next block.
They were on Fiftieth now. One block of it ticked off. Two.
“See it yet?”
“No. Or if I have, it doesn’t click. It was awfully red, redder than that one. The whole sidewalk was like red paint.”
The third block. The fourth.
“See it?”
“It doesn’t click.”
Burgess warned, “Watch what you’re doing, now. If you string it out very much longer, even your theoretical alibi won’t be any good. You should have been inside it already by now; it’s eight and a half past.”
“If you don’t believe me anyway,” Henderson said dryly, “what’s the difference?”
“It don’t hurt to figure out the exact walking time between the two points,” the man on the other side of him put in. “We might just happen to find out when you actually got there, and then all we do is subtract.”
“Nine minutes past!” Burgess intoned.
Henderson was holding his head low, scanning the slowly moving belt of sidewalk fronts from under the car ceiling.
A name drifted by, colorless glass tubes unlighted. He turned quickly after it. “That’s it! I think that’s it, but it’s out. Anselmo’s, it was something like that, I’m almost sure of it. Something foreign—”
“In. Dutch!” Burgess hollered. He drove the plunger down, killed his stop watch. “Nine minutes, ten and a half seconds.” he announced. “We’ll give you the ten and a half seconds to allow for variations, such as the density of the crowd you had to buck and the cross traffic at intersections, which is never the same twice. Nine minutes flat, walking time, from the corner below your apartment to this bar. And we’ll give you another minute from the apartment itself down to that first corner, where the first chime stroke caught you. We’ve already tested that lap out. In other words” — he turned and looked at him — “you find some way of proving that you got into this bar as late as six-seventeen — but no later — and you’ll still clear yourself automatically, even now.”