Linda said, “No, he didn’t come here at all. Thanks for letting us know. I guess this proves how sick he is.”
They took me back. A photographer snapped pictures of me as fast as he could change bulbs and plates as they took me into the county building. They didn’t unmanacle me until they had shoved me into the cell opposite the one I had escaped from. Vernon came and asked questions. Journeyman came and talked to me. I answered neither of them. I had begun to understand that peculiar psychology of the criminal which enables him to close an unseen door, closing out the world. I had nothing to say to them, and no interest in what they were saying to me. Their words came from far away, and meant nothing.
I was sleeping heavily when David Hill arrived. When I awakened he was in the cell, smoking quietly, watching me. He took the pipe out of his mouth and grinned, said, “I was the one who was going to make an unexpected move, not you.”
“It didn’t do any good,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken since my capture.
“What did you do?”
I told him. I told him how I had gimmicked the lock, how I had gotten out, about the ride in the truck, the long walk, hiding under the boat. I told him, as nearly as I could remember, what had been said. I told him how they had grabbed me near the bridge.
He filled his pipe again, lit it carefully. “I might have had a few small doubts before,” he said. “But now I know you’re innocent, Cowley.”
“How do you know that?”
“You’re a steady and logical man, but you’re not very imaginative. You scored low on that. You had a hell of a job at those ink blots and seeing anything other than an ink blot. It would take a pretty active creative imagination to make up the conversation you’ve just told me. That’s good enough proof, to me, but not to anybody else. Not to Vernon or Shepp or any of them. They’d laugh in my face. Those jokers would have to have an actual playback of that conversation before they’d buy it. Then they’d be reluctant.”
“She was afraid somebody had wired the cottages, somehow. I wish I’d had some kind of tape recorder or something with me. Then that nonsensical escape would have worked.”
He looked at me for a long time, the pipe motionless in his hand, two deep wrinkles between his eyebrows. “Told anybody else about this?” he asked.
“No.”
He got up and paced back and forth. From time to time he would stop and look at nothing, and then pace again.
“It’s worth a try, anyway,” he said.
“What’s worth a try?”
“You did have a tape recorder with you. But first I have to do one hell of a sales job on Vernon and Shepp.”
It took him over an hour. He came back with paper, a clip board, pencils. He pretended to snap sweat off his brow. “A sales job indeed,” he said. “According to them I am, at best, a dreamer, a sucker, a soft-head. I pulled out all the stops. Indignant, servile, haughty, scornful. In effect, I’ve bet my job on you, Paul.”
“I don’t think you should—”
“Here. Start writing. I want the script of that talk. Every damn word you can remember.”
I took the pencil and looked at the empty paper. “I can’t remember,” I said.
“Look. You’re under a boat. It’s dark. You’re soaking wet. They walk by you, close enough to talk. They sit on the dock. Who spoke first?”
I looked at the paper. I put down on “L” to indicate Linda, put a dash after it and wrote, “Tomorrow you’re going to move to Bosworth. It wasn’t smart to move back here.” I looked at Hill. I said, “I don’t know if that was the exact wording or not.”
“Is it the way she could have said it? Is it in character?”
“Yes, but—”
“What makes you think their memories will be better than yours? Write what they said. Keep is as close as you can.”
I wrote, “I’ll stay here. We were stupid to give anybody a chance to guess anything about us.”
J— “He didn’t suspect anything. It’s buggy here. Why don’t we go up to the cottage?”
He left me alone to work on it. It was amazingly difficult. I could remember a lot of things, but I couldn’t seem to get them in the right order. It was easiest to remember what Linda said, like, “You said you had good nerves. Sure. Nothing could rattle you. Just plan and wait. No loose ends.” And the part about the cigarette butts. And about being so demure it sickened her.
I kept thinking of things I had forgotten, and then making marginal notes about where they should be inserted.
It was dusk when Hill and a guard came and got me and took me down to the small room where they had first interviewed me. He read over what I had written. He had me wait there with the guard. He was gone over an hour. When he came back he had four typed copies of what I had written. He had four people with him, two young girls and two men. He didn’t introduce them. He merely said, “Paul, these people are professionals. I got them down here from Sarasota. I’ve briefed them a little. I want you to check the voices, pick the two closest to Linda and Jeff.”
One of the girls was pretty good. Neither of the men seemed close. I told Hill that and he said I didn’t have to worry too much about that, just to pick the one which sounded nearest. Hill thanked the two who weren’t right, and they asked if they could stay and listen. He said they could, but when all of them left, they should remember that this was a very confidential matter.
I do not know how many times they went over it. Sandwiches and coffee were brought in. The guard lost interest and kept yawning. I got over my original reticence and coached them as to how the lines were said. The girl kept trying to sound too dramatic, and the man had a tendency to speak too slowly. I could tell that some parts were surprisingly right, and others weren’t so good. It seemed that they didn’t sound right because I didn’t have the words right. And it surprised me the way the right words came back to me when they would say the wrong ones.
Finally, I was as satisfied as I could get, even though I knew that those two didn’t actually sound anything like Linda and Jeff. They had the emphasis right, and the speed and the sort of secretive sound of it, but it just wasn’t right.
It was then that Hill brought in the machine. It was an ordinary dictation machine, of a kind seen in many offices. He had them do a portion of it and then he played it back. He said, “We’ll have to take it further from the mike, kids. You come through too clearly. Let me erase what we’ve got, and then we’ll try it about here. Okay?”
He made a second test, erased, and let them go all the way through it. It shocked me when he played it back. Their voices, through the imperfections of the recording equipment, had lost that individual tone quality that set them apart from Linda and Jeff. They could have been Linda and Jeff. It was uncanny. Some parts were so vividly real that my neck tingled. Other parts were not so good.
After I had heard all of it, Hill played it again, telling me to listen closely and indicate the best part, the most perfect part. It was where he said, “Yes, you really have to think about it, don’t you?”
And she said, “Now don’t start that. From the point of view of the law, my friend, it was our finger on the trigger, not just mine. Ours. Please, Jeff. Try to take it easy. Nothing can happen to us. We planned it too carefully. And don’t fret about Paul. He hasn’t got the guts of a rabbit.”