“My foot was, by then, trying to push the brake pedal through the floor, and the damn Jag was starting to slue and make up its mind whether to go end over end or what. But hell, no matter how fast your reactions are—and mine are pretty good—you can barely start to slow down a car in a few yards if you’re going forty. I must have still been going over thirty when I hit her—it was a hell of an impact.
“And then bump-crunch, bump-crunch, as first the front wheels of the Jag went over and then the back wheels. The bumps were her, of course, and the crunches were the bicycle. And the car shuddered to a stop maybe another thirty feet on.
“Ahead of me, through the windshield, I could see the lights of the precinct station only a block away. I got out of the car and started running for it. I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to look back. There was no point to it; she had to be deader than dead, after that impact.
“I ran into the precinct house, and after a few seconds I got coherent enough to get across what I was trying to tell them. Two of the city’s finest left with me and we started back the block to the scene of the accident. I started out by running, but they only walked fast and I slowed myself down because I wasn’t anxious to get there first. Well, we got there and—”
“Let me guess,” the attorney said. “No girl, no bicycle.”
Kane nodded slowly. “There was the Jag, slued crooked in the street. Headlights on. Ignition key still on, but the engine had stalled. Behind it, about forty feet of skid marks, starting a dozen feet back of the point where the alley cut out into the street.
“And that was all. No girl. No bicycle. Not a drop of blood or a scrap of metal. Not a scratch or a dent in the front of the car. They thought I was crazy, and I don’t blame them. They didn’t even trust me to get the car off the street; one of them did that and parked it at the curb—and kept the key instead of handing it to me—and they took me back to the station house and questioned me.
“I was there the rest of the night. I suppose I could have called a friend and had the friend get me an attorney to get me out on bail, but I was just too shaken to think of it. Maybe even too shaken to want out, to have any idea where I’d want to go or what I’d want to do if I got out. I just wanted to be alone to think and, after the questioning, a chance to do that was just what I got. They didn’t toss me into the drunk tank. Guess I was well enough dressed, had enough impressive identification on me, to convince them that, sane or nuts, I was a solid and solvent citizen, to be handled with kid gloves and not a rubber hose. Anyway, they had a single cell open and put me in it, and I was content to do my thinking there. I didn’t even try to sleep.
“The next morning they had a police head-shrinker come in to talk to me. By that time I’d simmered down to the point where I realized that, whatever the score was, the police weren’t going to be any help to me, and the sooner I got out of their hands the better. So I conned the head-shrinker a bit by starting to play my story down instead of telling it straight. I left out sound effects, like the crunching of the bicycle being run over and I left out kinetic sensations, feeling the impact and the bumps, gave it to him as what could have been purely a sudden and momentary visual hallucination. He bought it after a while, and they let me go.”
Kane stopped talking long enough to take a pull at the silver flask and then asked, “With me so far? And, whether you believe me or not, any questions to date?”
“Just one,” the attorney said. “Are you, can you be, positive that your experience with the police at the Forty-fourth is objective and verifiable? In other words, if this comes to a trial and we should decide on an insanity defense, can I call as witnesses the policemen who talked to you, and the police psychiatrist?”
Kane grinned a little crookedly. “To me, my experience with the police is just as objective as my running over the girl on the bicycle. But at least you can verify the former. See if it’s on the blotter and if they remember it. Dig?”
“I’m hip. Carry on.”
“So the police were satisfied that I’d had an hallucination. I damn well wasn’t. I did several things. I had a garage run the Jag up on a rack and I went over the underside of it, as well as the front. No sign. Okay, it hadn’t happened, as far as the car was concerned.
“Second, I wanted to know if a girl of that description, living or dead, had been out on a bicycle that night. I spent several thousand dollars with a private detective agency, having them canvass that neighborhood—and a fair area around it—with a fine-tooth comb to find if a girl answering that description currently or ever had existed, with or without a red bicycle. They came up with a few possible red-headed teenagers, but I managed to get a gander at each of them, no dice.
“And, after asking around, I picked a head-shrinker of my own and started going to him. Allegedly the best in the city, certainly the most expensive. Went to him for two months. It was a washout. I never found out what he thought had happened; he wouldn’t talk. You know how psychoanalysts work, they make you do the talking, analyze yourself, and finally tell them what’s wrong with you, then you yak about it a while and tell them you’re cured, and they then agree with you and tell you to go with God. All right if your subconscious knows what the score is and eventually lets it leak out. But my subconscious didn’t know which end was up, so I was wasting my time, and I quit.
“But meanwhile I’d leveled with a few friends of mine to get their ideas, and one of them—a professor of philosophy at the university—started talking about ontology, and that started me reading up on ontology and gave me a clue. In fact, I thought it was more than a clue, I thought it was the answer. Until last night. Since last night, I know I was at least partly wrong.”
“Ontology—” said Mearson. “Word’s vaguely familiar, but will you pin it down for me?”
“I quote you the Webster Unabridged, unexpurgated version: ‘Ontology is the science of being or reality; the branch of knowledge that investigates the nature, essential properties, and relations of being, as such.”
Kane glanced at his wrist watch. “But this is taking longer to tell than I thought. I’m getting tired talking, and no doubt you’re even more tired of listening. Shall we finish this tomorrow?”
“An excellent idea, Larry.” Mearson stood up.
Kane tilted the silver flask for the last drop and handed it back. “You’ll play St. Bernard again?”
“I went to the Forty-fourth,” Mearson said. “The incident you described to me is on the blotter, all right. And I talked to one of the two coppers who went back with you to the scene of the—uh—back to the car. Your reporting of the accident was real, no question of that.”
“I’ll start where I left off,” Kane said. “Ontology, the study of the nature of reality. In reading up on it, I came across solipsism, which originated with the Greeks. It is the belief that the entire universe is the product of one’s imagination—in my case, my imagination. That I myself am the only concrete reality, and that all things and all other people exist only in my mind.”
Mearson frowned. “So then the girl on the bicycle, having only an imaginary existence to begin with, ceased to exist—uh, retroactively, as of the moment you killed her? Leaving no trace behind her, except a memory in your mind, of ever having existed?”
“That possibility occurred to me, and I decided to do something which I thought would verify or disprove it. Specifically, to commit a murder, deliberately, to see what would happen.”