It would work. Parts of the story might sound mildly strange to the police when they questioned him, but there'd be too many witnesses for them to have any serious doubts. Especially if Milt Corbett was there as one of the witnesses, as he probably would be; Milt was a prominent member of the city council and the strength of his word would be as the strength of ten, to the police.
He left a dollar tip on the bar, to make the bartender remember him; it wouldn't hurt to be able to extend his alibi backward a bit in case Ruth died very shortly after midnight, and left.
He'd timed it right; it was midnight on the head when he rang the bell of Harry Brambaugh's apartment.
Stella, Brambaugh's wife, opened the door. On a chain, of course, but she opened it the rest of the way when she recognized Ray. He was a little surprised to see that she was wearing a robe and had her iron gray hair in pin curlers; usually she stayed dressed and made coffee and sandwiches about one o'clock, and then went to bed.
"Cold on the stroke of midnight," Ray said. "Game been going on long?"
"Ray, I tried to call you but you weren't home. There isn't any game. Harry got a telegram while we were eating tonight; his brother is seriously hurt in a car accident and he had to leave right away, the first plane. He gave me a list of six men to call up, and I got all of them except you."
Ray frowned, thinking frantically. "Mrs. Brambaugh, I wonder if you could give me that list. I know all the boys on it, but not all their phone numbers. And maybe we can still get a game going, especially if you'd let me use your phone so I can call them right away."
She shook her head. "I might find the list in the wastebasket, but it wouldn't work anyway, Ray. Three of them said they wouldn't have been able to make it tonight anyway. I don't know whether Harry would have played four-handed or not; he'd probably have postponed it. But that leaves only two besides yourself, and they've probably got doing something else by now. Or gone to bed."
His mind went in frantic circles as he walked down the stairs and out into the night. What now? He could alibi himself by going to any tavern where he was well known, between now and one o'clock when the tavern would close. God, oh, God, what could he do? He could go to a hotel, but what good would that be as an alibi? The clerk could testify when he checked in and when he checked out, but could he give positive testimony that he had not sneaked out and back in again sometime during the night?
Of course if he picked up a woman and took her to a hotel, or to her own place—He considered that and abandoned it reluctantly. The testimony of a woman like that would be of only slight value, for one thing. For another, the chances of his finding such a woman were slight, especially since he had less than an hour to do it in. There'd been a recent crackdown and available pickups in bars were currently few and far between. Outside of bars, he didn't have the faintest idea where to start looking. He didn't have a little black book of addresses; for the last few years, his only extramarital adventures had been those with Dolly, and Dolly—well, he could forget Dolly tonight, if not forever.