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?”