“You left her for exactly ten minutes and forty seconds,” Bauer announced. “That cinches it.”
“Cinches what?”
“That it was a maniac.” Bauer’s tone implied that it must be obvious to anyone. “Had to be, to do it in that time. Some guy hanging around here, maybe sitting in one of the cars — maybe even his own. You wouldn’t notice him, but he sees you leave, waits for the other cars to get out, goes over, probably knocks her out, and away he goes. Right?” Bauer needed no confirmation, nor did he wait for any. “Right!” he affirmed.
“Yes — yes. Must be,” Conway said, readily bowing to this superior wisdom. “Shall I go on with the rest of it?”
“The rest of what?”
“What I did after that.”
“What difference does it make what you did? She was gone, wasn’t she?” The detective paused, and then said, in what seemed to Conway a slightly different tone, “Yeah, maybe you better tell me, at that — as long as we’re here.”
Conway silently cursed himself. He had prepared his story to cover every moment until he got to the police station; he had gone through the motions to cover himself if they checked on it. But Bauer was so lacking in suspicion that he had not thought to question anything Conway had told him. Now, by volunteering more than had been asked, he might have given the detective the idea that he had a prepared alibi; that his story was a little too perfect. He vowed that from here on, he would speak when spoken to, and no more.
But he had let himself in for this, and he had to carry it through. He led the detective to the entrance to the parking lot and from there pointed out the course he had taken from the time he discovered the car to be missing, until the police car arrived. “After they left,” he said, “I went on looking around — in the alley back here, the parking lot next to the theatre, up and down these side streets. It doesn’t make sense, I know, and I realized it didn’t make sense then. So when I saw this trolley coming along, I hopped on it and went down to the station.”
“Um-m.” Bauer had seemed somewhat bored by the whole recital, and now he led the way back to the car. “Might as well go now. I’ll drop you home.”