“To say the least,” Conway said.
“Then you went to the parking lot, found your car gone, which it certainly was — it had been gone for an hour and a half — went through the motions of looking for your car and your wife — very convincingly, I got to hand it to you — called the police, got on a trolley and went to the police station. Eight? Eight.”
The facts were so wrong, and the deductions made from them so ridiculous, that Conway could almost relax. That he was suspected at all was disturbing, but they were, as yet, so far from knowing the real facts of the murder that he saw no reason to be too perturbed.
“You have a great future as a fiction writer,” he said to Bauer. “That makes a very nice story — except that at nine-o-four I was in the movie with my wife, and at nine-thirty I walked with her to the parking lot and the car was there. How do you explain that?”
“Very simply,” Davis said. “ You’re the fiction writer. You weren’t in the movie at nine-o-four, or any other time, because you didn’t go back to the theatre after you left the drugstore. The doorman remembers you when you started to go in and your wife found out you were early, and called you an idiot, and walked off, with you following her. But he didn’t see you come back.”
“We went back just before the picture started. There was a crowd going in.”
“And neither he nor anyone else saw you leave,” Davis continued. “And you said you left before the end of the picture, so there was no crowd coming out then.”
“He was—” Conway stopped himself in time. He had said they had left only a minute before the end of the picture; if he said that the doorman was at the popcorn counter when they left, his lie might be revealed, which could lead to other disclosures.
“How could the doorman be expected to remember everyone who walked past him in the course of the evening?” he said. “You’d have a fine time convincing a jury I wasn’t in the theatre just because the doorman doesn’t remember my going in or coming out.”
“You’ve got something there,” Davis agreed. “That would be quite an assignment. But” — he paused and smiled affably — “the joke’s on you. Because I don’t have to prove you weren’t in the theatre. You just go ahead and try to prove you were. We haven’t been able to, and” — the smile vanished utterly — “you won’t be able to either, because you weren’t there. But — I can prove everything eke.” He took a long drag on his cigarette and looked at Conway speculatively. “And now, do you want to play ball?”