He was not satisfied. He wanted Hoag to speak so that he could interrupt him and continue the tirade. “Are you there, Hoag?”
“Uh, yes.”
“I wanted to add this: Maybe you think that it is a joke to catch a woman alone in a hallway and scare the daylights out of her. I don’t! But I’m not going to turn you over to the police — no, indeed! Just as soon as Mrs. Randall gets well, I’m going to look you up myself and then — God help you, Hoag. You’ll need it.”
There followed such a long silence that Randall was sure that his victim had hung up. But it seemed that Hoag was merely collecting his wits. “Mr. Randall, this is terrible — ”
“You bet it is!”
“Do you mean to tell me that I accosted Mrs. Randall and frightened her?”
“You should know!”
“But I don’t know, truly I don’t.” He paused, and then continued in an unsteady voice. “This is the sort of thing I have been afraid of, Mr. Randall, afraid that I might discover that during my lapses of memory I might have been doing terrible things. But to have harmed Mrs. Randall — she was so good to me, so kind to me. This is horrible.”
“You’re telling me!”
Hoag sighed as if he were tired beyond endurance.
“Mr. Randall?” Randall did not answer. “Mr. Randall — there is no use in my deluding myself; there is only one thing to be done. You’ve got to turn me over to the police.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve known it ever since our last conversation; I thought about it all day yesterday, but I did not have the courage. I had hoped that I was through with my…my other personality, but today it happened again. The whole day is a blank and I just came to myself this evening, on getting home. Then I knew that I had to do something about it, so I called you to ask you to resume your investigations. But I never suspected that I could possibly have done anything to Mrs. Randall.” He seemed most convincingly overcome by shock at the idea. “When did…did this happen, Mr. Randall?”
Randall found himself in a most bewildered state of mind. He was torn between the desire to climb through the phone and wring the neck of the man he held responsible for his wife’s desperate condition and the necessity for remaining where he was to care for her. In addition to that he was bothered by the fact that Hoag refused to talk like a villain. While speaking with him, listening to his mild answers and his worried tones, it was difficult to maintain the conception of him as a horrid monster of the Jack-the-Ripper type — although he knew consciously that villains were often mild in manner.
Therefore his answer was merely factual. “Nine thirty in the morning, about.”
“Where was I at nine thirty this morning?”
“Not this morning, you so-and-so; yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday morning? But that’s not possible. Don’t you remember? I was at home yesterday morning.”
“Of course I remember, and I saw you leave. Maybe you didn’t know that.” He was not being very logical; the other events of the previous morning had convinced him that Hoag knew that they were shadowing him — but he was in no state of mind to be logical.
“But you couldn’t have seen me. Yesterday morning was the only morning, aside from my usual Wednesdays, on which I can be sure where I was. I was at home, in my apartment. I didn’t leave it until nearly one o’clock when I went to my club.”
“Why, that’s a — ”
“Wait a minute, Mr. Randall, please! I’m just as confused and upset about this as you are, but you’ve got to listen to me. You broke my routine — remember? And my other personality did not assert itself. After you left I remained my…my proper self. That’s why I had had hopes that I was free at last.”
“The hell you did. What makes you think you did?”
“I know my own testimony doesn’t count for much,” Hoag said meekly, “but I wasn’t alone. The cleaning woman arrived just after you left and was here all morning.”