The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 10)

Brill stepped inside Scanlon’s private office, leaving
the door open. The three of us remained where we
were, staring at the telephone on the desk between
us.
Scanlon looked at Barbara, the gray eyes flinty. “I
never thought I’d use the sheriff’s office for a routine
like this. If I didn’t have a dirty hunch you could be
right, I’d lock you up.”
The Long Saturday Night — 135
She made no reply. She glanced at me and tried to
smile, but it didn’t quite come off. A minute went by.
At this hour on Sunday morning you could drive
anywhere in town in less than three minutes. It had to
be before then. Two minutes. The silence began to
roar in my ears. The room was swollen and bulging
with it, like some dark and suffocating pressure.
Three minutes. I stared at the telephone, and then
away, and back at it again. Barbara had lowered her
head, and I saw her eyes were closed. Her elbows
rested on the desk, and she was raising and lowering
her fists, so tightly clenched the knuckles were white,
bumping the heels of them gently against the wood in
some rhythmic and supplicant cadence she apparently
wasn’t aware of or didn’t know how to stop. The
telephone rang. I saw her gulp. Her shoulders shook,
and she groped for her handkerchief and pressed it
against her mouth.

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 9)

That did it. Without turning his head, Scanlon
snapped to Mulholland. “Get that girl in here.”
Mulholland went out, on the double. When Scanlon
used that tone, he meant jump, and jump fast.
I turned to George. “I realize I’m probably making
your job tougher, but it was necessary.” Obviously,
Doris’ confirmation of the telephone call to me would
nail down the two things the prosecution would be
overjoyed to prove: motive and premeditation. “But
since I didn’t kill her,” I went on, “it doesn’t make any
difference anyway.”
They all looked at me pityingly—everybody except
George. He took a cigarette from a silver case,
studied it thoughtfully as he tapped it on a thumbnail,
and said, “Well, my hands are more or less tied here,
Duke, since I can’t interfere with the investigation,
but perhaps it would have been better. . . .” He let his
voice trail off. In other words: I’ll do my best, but
you’ve probably already hanged yourself.

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 8)

I groped my way to the bathroom. There was no
window here, and I could turn on a light. I washed the
blood off my hand. It was only a superficial cut from a
piece of that falling glass; in all the uproar I’d been so
charged with adrenalin I hadn’t even felt it. I rooted
around in his medicine chest for a Band-aid and stuck
it on, but the blood continued to ooze out around the
edges, so I wrapped a towel around it. I wouldn’t
bleed to death from a scratch like that.
There were two windows in the apartment, one in
the living room-bedroom, facing Montrose, and the
other in the kitchen, looking out into the alley. I
closed the door from the kitchen, tore a blanket off
the bed and draped it across the curtain rods of the
window in here to cut off any seepage of light, and
switched on a lamp. The furnishings were meager; it
wouldn’t take long to search the place. A dresser
stood against the front wall, next to the door going
The Long Saturday Night — 110

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 7)

“Yes. Probably an hour before George and I left.”
“But on the other hand, it’s almost certain she
called somebody the minute you left the house. That’s
why the line was busy when I tried to call you,
because I’m positive it was after eleven-forty-five. So
it could have been anybody. Now, remember carefully
—how long do you think it was from the time you
called George Clement until he arrived in the Sheriffs
office?”
“Not over ten minutes,” I said, and then did a
delayed take. “George?”

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 6)

“Long distance?”
“Yes. El Paso is calling. For Miss Bentley.”
The Long Saturday Night — 78
‘This is Miss Bentley, but—”
“Go ahead, please.”
“Hello,” I said. “Hello, Doris?” I heard her gasp. “It
took me a long time to remember where I’d heard
your voice before.”
“Who are you?” she demanded. “And what are you
talking about?”
“You know who I am, so let’s get down to cases. And
don’t hang up on me, because if you do Scanlon’s
going to pick you up. I’ve still got a friend or two
there, and he might get a tip; you didn’t invent the
anonymous telephone call.”
“Just a moment, please,” she said sweetly. I heard
her put down the phone, and then the rattle of coins
from the change dispenser.
She came back. “You wouldn’t dare! I’d tell him
where you are.”
“Try me and see. After all, they’re going to catch me
sooner or later, so I haven’t got much to lose. But you
have, haven’t you?”

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 5)

“I want you to send a telegram for me.”
“Hell, is that all?”
“It’s enough. Let’s see—you’re on Mountain Time
there, so send it about eight tomorrow morning,
straight wire. Phone it in from a pay phone, so there’s
no way they can trace it back to you. Got a pencil
handy?”
“Right. Commence firing.”
“TO WARREN REALTY COMPANY, CARTHAGE,
ALABAMA. IMPERATIVE YOU CONTACT LOUIS
NORMAN AGENCY NEW ORLEANS PHONE
CYPRESS FIVE EIGHT THREE TWO SEVEN
REGARDING PENDING DEAL FILE NUMBER W-511
The Long Saturday Night — 63
REPEAT WILLIAM FIVE ONE ONE STOP WILL CALL
YOU LATER SIGNED WEAVER.”
“Check.” He read it back. “Anything else I can do?”
“No,” I said. “Gracias, amigo.”
“Por nada. How bad is this thing, pal?”
“Real bad.”
“Okay. I’m holding it.”

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 4)

It was six-twenty and just growing light when I parked
the car in a lot at the New Orleans airport. I was
The Long Saturday Night — 50
hollow-eyed with fatigue and the nervous strain of
sustained highspeed driving with one eye cocked on
the mirror for the Highway Patrol, but still keyed up
mentally as I put the packet of bonds in the suitcase,
locked the car, and carried the bag into the terminal. I
had a cup of coffee at the lunchroom, asked the
cashier for some change, and headed for a telephone
booth, setting the suitcase down where I could watch
it through the door.
I dialed the long distance operator and put in a
person-to-person call to Ernie Sewell. I didn’t know
his number, but he lived on Springer Street, on the
edge of town, in a small ranch-style house he and his
wife were paying off. She worked for the county, in
the Tax Assessor’s office.

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 3)

There was no hope of sleeping, so I filled the
percolator, measured out the coffee, and plugged it in.
When I went back to the living room I noticed idly that
one of her gloves was lying on the sofa where she’d
dropped it when I lunged at her. I’d seen it when I
came in from the hall, but had paid no attention. The
other was lying on the rug in front of the sofa. She’d
been too scared and in too big a hurry to remember
them when she’d gathered up the suitcase and purse.
It was odd, though, that Mulholland hadn’t seen them;
he’d thought the suitcase was mine. Curious, I
stepped over to the hall doorway where he’d been
standing, and looked again. The sofa was Danish teak
with pearl-gray cushions, the glove was black, and he
would have been looking straight at it. Well, he was
too busy admiring himself to notice anything.
I remembered then what George had said about my
behaving as if I were jealous of him. Could people
have actually believed that? I disliked him for the
posing and arrogant jerk he was, but it went back a
long time before the Little Theatre production of
Detective Story, and had nothing to do with it.
Anyway, there weren’t many love scenes in the play,
at least between McLeod and Mary McLeod, the two
parts they’d had. I’d objected to her being in it, but
The Long Saturday Night — 37
only because of the long hours of rehearsals, five
nights a week for over a month.

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 2)

grabbed the telephone, and it wasn’t until the longdistance
operator was putting through the call that I
wondered what I was going to say to her. This had to
be done face to face. Well, I could tell her to come
home. The hotel switchboard answered.
“Mrs. Warren, please,” I said.
“I believe she’s checked out,” the girl replied. “One
moment, please; I’ll give you the desk.”
She’d said she was going to stay over till Sunday.
What had changed her mind so suddenly? “Desk,” a
man’s voice said.
“This is John Warren. I’m trying to reach my wife on
a very urgent matter. Could you tell me how long ago
she checked out?”

The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams 1962(page 1)

1
The day it began was January 5th. I’d gone hunting
that morning, and it was a little after one P.M. When I
got to the office.
Clebourne’s the main street, and the central
business district is about seven blocks long. Warren
Realty is in the second block from the west end, with
J.C. Penney’s on one side and Fuller’s cafe on the
other, and, except that it’s mine, it could be any smalltown
real estate office anywhere—the plate glass
window with a few of the current listings posted in it,
a split-leaf philodendron here and there, two
salesmen’s desks forever cluttered with papers, and,
as a sort of focal point like the medulla oblongata of
the human nervous system, another desk with a
typewriter, several telephones, a Notary sign, and a
girl who knows where everything is buried, including
the bodies. The girl in this case is Barbara Ryan, if girl
is the correct term for a 30-year-old divorcee. She has
reddish mahogany-colored hair that always seems a
little tousled, a wide mouth in a rather slender face,
cool blue eyes, and an air of good-natured cynicism,
as though she were still fond of the human race in
spite of the fact she no longer expected a great deal of
it. When I came in she was alone in the office,
speaking into one of the telephones.