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.