The detective eyed him without acknowledgement. He sat down, took out a notebook, ran a wavy cancellation line down two or three closely scribbled pages, turned over to a fresh one. “Shall we start in?” he said.
“Let’s start,” Henderson acquiesced.
“You said you had words. Does that stand?”
“That stands.”
“About two theater tickets? Does that stand?”
“About two theater tickets and a divorce. That stands.”
“Now that comes in it. Then there was bad feeling between you?”
“No feeling of any kind, good or bad. Call it a sort of numbness. I’d already asked her for a divorce some time ago. She knew about Miss Richman. I’d told her. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I was trying to do it the decent way. She refused the divorce. Walking out was no good. I didn’t want that. I wanted Miss Richman for my wife. We stayed away from each other all we could, but it was hell, I couldn’t stand it. Is all this necessary?”
“Very.”
“I had a talk with Miss Richman night before last. She saw it was getting me. She said, ‘Let me try, let me talk to her.’ I said no. She said, ‘Then you try again yourself. Try in a different way this time. Talk to her reasonably, try to win her over.’ It went against the grain, but I gave it a spin. I telephoned from work and reserved a table for two at our old place. I bought two tickets to a show, first row on the aisle. At the last minute I even turned down an invitation from my best friend to go out on a farewell party with him. Jack Lombard, he’s going to be in South America for the next few years; it was my last chance of seeing him before he sailed. But I stuck to my original intention; I was going to be nice to her if it killed me.
“Then when I got back here, nothing doing. She wasn’t having any reconciliation. She liked things the way they were, and she was going to keep them that way. I got sore, I admit. I blew up. She waited until the last minute. Let me go ahead and shower and change clothes. Then she just sat there and laughed. ‘Why don’t you take her instead?’ she kept needling me. ‘Why waste the money?’ So I phoned Miss Richman from here, right in front of her.
“I didn’t even have that satisfaction. She wasn’t in. Marcella laughed her head off. She made me know it.
“You know how it is when they laugh at you. You feel like a fool. I was so sore I couldn’t see straight any more. I yelled, ‘I’m going out on the street and invite the first girl I run into to come with me in your place! The first thing in curves and high heels that comes along, no matter who it is!’ And I slammed on my hat and slammed out the door.”
His voice ran down like a clock that needs winding. “And that’s all. I can’t do any better than that for you, even if I tried. Because that’s the truth, and the truth can’t be improved on.”
“And after you left here, does that timetable of your movements you already gave us still go?” Burgess asked.
“That still goes. Except that I wasn’t alone, I was with someone. I did what I’d told her I’d do: stepped up to someone and invited her along. She accepted, and I was with her from then until just about ten minutes before I came back here.”
“What time did you meet her, about?”
“Only a few minutes after leaving here. I stopped in at some bar or other, over on Fiftieth Street, and that was where I met her—” He did something with his finger. “Wait a minute, I just remembered. I can give you the exact time I met her. We both looked at the clock together, as I was showing her the theater tickets. It was ten after six, to the dot.”
Burgess ran his nail along underneath his lower lip. “What bar was this?”
“I couldn’t say, exactly. It had a red come-on over it, that’s all I can remember at the moment.”
“Can you prove you were in there at ten after six?”
“I’ve just told you I was. Why? Why is that so important?”
Burgess drawled, “Well, I could string you along, but I’m funny that way. I’ll give it to you. Your wife died at exactly eight after six. The small wristwatch she wore shattered against the edge of the vanity table as she fell to her death. It stopped at exactly—” He read from something, “six — eight — fifteen.” He put it away again. “Now nothing with two legs, or even wings, could have been here at that time, and over on Fiftieth Street one minute and forty-five seconds later. You prove you were over there at ten past, and all this is over.”
“But I’ve told you! I looked at the clock.”
“That isn’t proof, that’s an unsupported statement.”
“Then what would proof be?”
“Corroboration.”
“But why does it have to be at that end? Why can’t it be at this?”
“Because there’s nothing at this end to show that anyone but you did it. Why do you suppose we’ve been sitting up with you all night?”
Henderson let his wrists dangle limp over his knees. “I see,” he breathed at last. “I see.” The silence coursed and swirled around the room after that, for a while.
Burgess spoke again at last. “Can this woman you say you met in the bar corroborate you on what time it was?”
“Yes. She looked at the clock when I did. She must remember that. Yes, she can.”
“All right, then that’s all there is to it. Providing she satisfies us, her corroboration is given in good faith, and you didn’t put her up to it. Where does she live?”
“I don’t know. I left her where I first met her, back at the bar.”
“Well, what was her name?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask, and she didn’t give it to me.”
“Not even a first name, not even a nickname? You were with her for six hours, what did you call her?”
“ ‘You,’ ” he answered glumly.
Burgess had got out his notebook again. “All right, describe her for us. We’ll have to send out after her ourselves and have her brought in.”
There was a long wait.
“Well?” he said finally.
Henderson’s face was getting paler by the minute. He swallowed hard. “My God, I can’t!” he blurted out finally. “I’ve lost her completely, she’s rubbed out.” He circled his hand helplessly in front of his own face. “I could have told you when I first came back here last night, maybe, but now I can’t any more. Too much has happened since. The shock of Marcella— And then you guys pegging away at me all night. She’s like a film that’s been exposed to too much light, she’s completely faded out. Even while I was with her I didn’t notice her very closely, my mind was too full of my own affairs.” He looked from one to the other of them, as if in search of help. “She’s a complete blank!”
Burgess tried to help him out. “Take your time. Think hard. Now, here. Eyes?”
Henderson flexed his clenched hands open, in futility.
“No? All right, hair, then. What about hair? What color hair?”
He plastered hands to his eye sockets. “That’s gone too. Every time I start to say one color, it seems to me it was another: and then when I start to say the other. I think it was the first again. I don’t know; it must have been sort of in-between. Not brown, not black. Most of the time she had it under a hat.” He looked up half hopefully. “I can remember the hat better than anything else. An orange hat, will that do any good? Yeah, orange, that’s it.”
“But suppose she’s taken it off since last night, suppose she don’t show up anywhere in it for the next six months? Then where are we? Can’t you remember anything about her herself?”
Henderson kneaded his temples in brain agony.
“Was she fat? Skinny? Tall? Short?” Burgess peppered at him.
Henderson writhed his waist, first to one side, then the other, as if to get away from the questions. “I can’t, that’s all, I can’t!”