Benny Knox went to the door of the cell and grabbed his bars, rattling the door loudly. Even more loudly he yelled, "Policemen! Policemen! Come here and see. Now do you believe me? Now will you try to tell me I never killed nobody?"
This time they believed him.
2:45 A.M.
In his office off the kitchen of the restaurant, George Mikos paced a while, too keyed up to sit down and type, which was what he'd come here to do. Finally he sat down at the desk, took the cover off the typewriter and put fresh paper into it. He began to type:
Dear Perry:
This has been the damnedest night. If you'll forgive the cliché, hell has been popping right and left.
Yes, this is a new letter and not a continuation of the one I started to you earlier. Everything has changed so completely that it would seem silly to go on with that one. But I'll enclose it, uncompleted, with this, so you'll have the background to understand what this one is about.
It started a few minutes after eleven-thirty, when I'd just closed up and was starting to check the register. There was a phone call and a man's voice—not her husband's—asked for Ruth Fleck. She was still here, getting ready to leave. I called her to the phone but there was no one on the line when she got there.
You can deduce what I guessed from that, when she admitted she could think of no possible reason why any man except her husband should be calling her at that time of night.
I insisted on driving her home, and I also had her wait in the car while I went up and searched her flat to make sure there wasn't a reception committee waiting for her there. (I had told her I was bringing a gun so she wouldn't worry about me doing this; actually I don't even own one.) Then I escorted her upstairs, made sure she bolted herself in, and left.