Phantom lady (10 page)

He quirked his head at the detective. "For a fellow in your line of work, you seem to have quite a few illusions left intact, haven't you? That would be asking something, wouldn't it? Expect someone to come back three thousand miles and can his whole immediate future, to go to bat for a

friend at the drop of a hat. And not a current friend either, mind you. Remember, you get thicker skinned as you get older. Some of the idealism peels off. The man of thirty-two isn't the same pal to you the lad of twenty-five was, and you're not to him."

Burgess cut across his objections. "Just answer one thing. Would he have once done it?"

"He would have once done it."

"Then if he would have once done it, he'll still do it. I tell you again there's no age limit on that kind of loyalty. If he had it, then he has it. If he hasn't it, then that only proves he never did have it."

"But that's an unfair test, that's putting the hurdle too high."

"If he's the sort of a guy that would weigh a five-year contract against your life," Burgess argued, "then he's no good to you anyway. If he isn't, then he's the guy you need. Why not give him a chance to come through first, before you start to talk as though he won't?"

He took a memorandum book out of his pocket, tore off a blank leaf, poised his knee for a writing rest, foot to the edge of the bunk.

NN29 22 CABLE VIA NBN = , SEPT 20

NLT JOHN LOMBARD =

Compania Petrolera Sudamericana Head Office, Caracas, Venezuela

Have been sentenced for Marcellas death since you left a certain key witness can clear me if found my lawyer here has reached the end of his resources this is to ask you to come up and help me have no one else to turn to and no other chance of pulling through sentence set for third week in October and appeal has been turned down give me a hand will you

SCOTT HENDERSON

The Eighteenth Day Before the Execution

He still had some of the tan on him from warmer latitudes. He'd come up so quick he'd brought it with him, like people do when they travel nowadays; a cold in the head flies with them from the West Coast to the East; a three-day boil on the neck lasts from Rio to La Guardia Field before it pops.

He looked about the age Scott Henderson had once been; the former Scott Henderson of five or six months ago, not the pinched death-mask lingering on in a cell, who counted years by hours.

He was still wearing the clothes he'd put on in South America. A snowy panama that was out of season up here right now, and a gray flannel suit that was too light, both in shade and weight, for an American autumn. It needed the blazing Venezuelan sunshine to make it seem less conspicuous.

He was moderately tall, and easy moving with it; no effort at all to get around. You could think of him as always chasing after a street car, even when it was already a block away, because it was so easy for him to catch up with it. He was anything but a natty dresser, in spite of his vernal clothes. His small mustache could have stood a touch of the scissors, and his necktie needed steaming, it kept curling around on itself all the way down, like a spiral of spun-sugar candy. The impression he gave, in short, was that he'd be a lot better at bossing a crew of men or poring over a draughting board than dancing on a ballroom floor with the ladies. There was a certain gravity about him that indicated that, if outward indications are ever any good. What used to be called, in the days of simpler cataloguing, a man's man.

"How's he taking it?" he asked the guard in an under-

tone as he followed him along the tier.

"Just about." Meaning, what can you expect?

"Just about, eh?" He shook his head, muttered under his breath, "Poor cuss."

The guard had reached it, was opening it up.

He held back a moment, swallowed hard as if to get his throat working smoothly, then turned the corner of the cell grate into view. He went into the cell with a wry grin on his face and an outstretched hand leading the way. As though he were running in to him in the lounge of the Savoy-Plaza.

"Well, lookit old Hendy," he drawled. "What're you doing, trying to be funny?"

There was none of the bitterness present in Henderson's reaction there had been the day the detective had visited him. You could tell this man was an old friend. His drawn face lighted up. He answered him in kind. "I live here now. How d'ye like that?"

They pumped hands as if they'd never get through. They were still working away at it after the guard had locked up and gone off again.

That link of hands carried messages for them, unspoken but plainly understood. Henderson's was a warmly grateful, "You came. You showed up. So that stuff about a real friend isn't the bunk."

And Lombard's was a fervent, encouraging, "I'm with you. I'm damned if they're going to do it."

After that, they steered clear of the subject the first few minutes. They said everything but what they really wanted to. A sort of skittishness, a diffidence, that a particular topic when it is too vital, bleeding, and raw, will sometimes bring about.

Thus Lombard said, "Gee, that was a dusty ride on the train, getting up here."

And Henderson, "You look good. Jack. Must agree with you down there."

"Agree, hell! Don't talk about it, will you? Of all the lousy, God-forsaken holes! And the food! And the mos-

quitoes! I was a sucker ever to sign up for five years like I did."

"But there was good money in it, I suppose, wasn't there?"

"Sure. But what am I going to do with it down there, anyway? Nowhere to spend it. Even the beer has a kerosene flavor."

Henderson mumbled, "I feel low, spiking it for you, though."

"You did me a favor," Lombard protested gallantly. "The contract's still on, anyway. This is just time off I wangled."

He waited a moment or two more. Then finally he edged up to it; the it that was on both their minds. He quit looking at his friend, looked somewhere else instead. "What about this thing anyway, Hendy?"

Henderson tried to smile. "Well, there's a member of our class who's going to take part in an electrical experiment two and a half weeks from today. What was it they gave me in the year book? 'Most likely to get his name in the papers.' Good prophecy. I'll probably make every edition that day."

Lombard's eyes turned to stare at him truculently. "No, you won't. Let's quite horsing around. We've known each other half our lives; may as well kick off our shoes and drop the company manners."

"Sure," Henderson agreed forlornly. "What the hell, life's so short." He belatedly realized the unintentional appropriateness of that, grinned sheepishly.

Lombard slung one hip across the rim of the washbowl in the corner and relieved the leg that supported it of floor duty. He took it by the ankle with both hands and held it up. "I only met her once," he said thoughtfully.

"Twice," Henderson corrected. "There was that time we ran into you on the street, remember?"

"Yeah, I remember. She kept pulling you by the arm, from behind, to break it up."

"She was on her way to buy some clothes, and you know how they are when that's in the wind. Neither time nor

tide—" Then he apologized still further, in behalf of someone who was dead and gone, apparently without realizing how perfectly unimportant it was now. "We were always going to have you up for dinner, but I dunno—somehow— you know how those things are."

"I know how it is," Lombard agreed with diplomatic understanding. "No wife ever yet liked her husband's premarriage friends." He took out the pow-wow cigarettes, threw them across the narrow cell. "Don't mind if they make your tongue swell up and your lips blister. They're from down there; part gunpowder and part insecticide. I haven't had time to change back to ours yet."

He took a thoughtful drag. "Well, I guess you better give me the dope."

Henderson pulled up a sigh from way in. "Yeah, I guess I better. I've been over it so many times already, I think I could reel it off backward, or in my sleep."

"To me it's like a blackboard without anything written on it yet. So don't skip anything if you can help it."

"That marriage of mine and Marcella's was just a prelim, not the main event it should have been at all. A guy don't usually go around admitting that, even to his friends, but this is the death house and it seems foolish to have reticences here. A little over a year ago, the main bout suddenly came up. And too late for me to take part in. You never met her, don't know her, so there's no reason for me to mention her name. They were decent enough to do that for me at the trial, too. All through it they just called her The Girl. I'll do that here, I'll call her My Girl to you."

"Your Girl," Lombard assented. He had his arms folded, cigarette sticking out from behind his elbow, and was staring down broodingly at the floor, listening hard.

"My Girl, poor girl. It was It, the real thing, the McCoy. If you're not married, and It comes along—you're safe. Or if your marriage itself happens to be It, that's better still, you're on pure velvet. Or if you're married, and It never comes along—you're still safe, even if you're only half

alive and don't know it. It's when you're married, and It shows up only after it's too late—that you want to look out."

"That you want to look out," murmured Lombard with a sort of musing compassion.

"It was a clean little thing. I told My Girl about Marcella the second time I saw her. That was supposed to be the last time we saw each other. The twelfth time we saw each other we were still trying to make it the last time. We tried to steer clear of each other—like steel filings try to steer clear of a magnet.

"Marcella knew about her within thirty days after it had started. I saw to it that she did. I went and told her. It wasn't a case of any sudden shock, get that. She just smiled about it a little, and she waited. Like someone watching two flies under a tumbler turned upside down.

"I went to her and asked for a divorce. This was at about mid-point. That slow, thoughtful smile came out on her again. She hadn't seemed to set any particular store by me until then, that I could notice. Just that thing that dropped shoes in the next aisle over from her. She said she'd have to think it over. She thought it over. The weeks went by, the months. She took her time thinking it over, she kept me dangling like that. I'd get that slow, mocking smile every now and then. She was the only one of the three of us having a good time out of it.

"It was pulling me inside out. I'm a grown man, and I wanted My Girl. I wasn't going to let myself be gypped. I didn't want any affair, I wanted my wife. And the woman in my house, she wasn't my wife."

The hands before his face that he stared down through, they shook a little even at this late day.

"My Girl said to me. There must be some way out. We're in her hands and she knows it. This sullen silence on your part, that's the wrong attitude. That brings out an equally sulky opposition on her part. Go to her as a man goes to a friend. Take her out some night, have a heart-to-heart talk with her. When two people once loved one another, as you

and she did, there must be something left of it, if it's only a memory in common. There must be some vestige of good will, of kindly feeling for you, you can reach in her. Make her see it's the best thing for her own sake, as well as yours and mine.'

"So I bought tickets for a show, and I reserved a table for us at our old place, where we used to go in the days before our marriage. And I went home and said, 'Let's go out together again, shall we? Let's go out tonight like we used to.'

"Came that slow smile again, and she said 'Why not?' As I stepped into the shower, she was sitting there at the glass beginning to get ready. All the old ways I knew by heart, the first little touches here and there. I whistled in the shower. I liked her very much in the shower. I realized what the trouble was; I saw I'd always liked her, and I'd mistaken it for love."

He let the cigarette fall from his hand, flattened it. Then kept looking there. "Why didn't she refuse at once? Why did she let me whistle in the shower? Watch me in the glass take pains with the part in my hair? Get satisfaction out of the way my handkerchief looked in the breast pocket of my coat? Be happy all over for the first time in six months? Why did she pretend she was going, when she knew from the first she didn't intend to? Because that was her way. That was her. Because she loved to keep me dangling in suspense. Even about that smaller matter, as well as the larger one.

"I caught on little by little. Her smile, reflected in the glass. The way she wasn't really getting anywhere with those little touches of hers. I was holding my necktie out in my hands, ready to sline it on. And finally even the little touches had quit, she was sitting there not moving her hands any more, just sitting there doing nothing. Only the smile stayed on, the smile at a man in love. A man in love and at your mercy.

"There are two stories, theirs and mine. And both are identical up to that point; not a hairsbreadth variation between the two. They didn't bring out a single detail that

wasn't true. Every slightest motion I made, up to there, they had down pat. They did their research work well, perfect. And then, as I stood behind her looking into the same glass with my necktie stretched out between my hands, the two stories split as far apart as the hands of a clock at six. Mine goes all the way over this way, theirs goes all the way over that.

"I'm telling you mine now. I'm telling you the true one.

"She was just waiting for me to ask her. That's all she was sitting there for like that. The smile, the still hands, demurely folded on the table edge. Finally I did, after I'd watched her for a moment. I said, 'Aren't you going?'

"She laughed. Gee, how she laughed. How hard, how long and hearty. I'd never known until then what a terrible weapon laughter can be. I could see my face, over there above hers in the glass, getting white.

"She said, 'But don't waste the tickets. Why throw out good money? Take her instead. She can have the show. She can have the dinner. She can have you altogether. But she can't have you in the only way she wants you.'

"That was her answer. That was always going to be her answer from then on, I knew it then. Forever, for the rest of our lives. And that's an awful long time.

"Then here's what happened next. I clenched my teeth and drew my arm back, in a line with the side of her jaw. I don't remember what happened to the necktie I'd been holding. It must have dropped to the floor. I only know it didn't go around her neck.

"I never let fly. I couldn't. I'm not that way. She even tried to get me to. I don't know why. Or maybe because she knew she was safe, I was incapable of doing it. She'd seen me in the glass, of course, she didn't have to turn her head. She jeered, 'Go ahead, hit me. Casey at the bat. That won't get it for you either. Nothing will get it for you; whether you're sweet or whether you're sour, whether you're gentle or whether you're rough.'

"Then we both said things we shouldn't have, like people

do. But it was just mouth fireworks, that was all. I never laid a hand on her. I said, 'You don't want me; then what the hell are you hanging on to me for?'

"She said, 'You might come in handy, in case of burglars.' "I said, 'You bet that's all there'll be to it from now on!' "She said, 'I wonder if I'll be able to tell the difference?' "I said, 'That reminds me. You've got something coming to you,' I took two dollars out of my wallet and I threw them on the floor behind her. I said, 'That's for being married to you! And I'll pay the piano player on my way downstairs.'

"Sure, it was low, it was rotten. I grabbed mv hat and coat and I got out of there fast. She was still laughing there at the glass when I left. She was laughing. Jack. She wasn't dead. I didn't touch her. Her laughter followed me through the door, even after I'd closed it. It drove me down the stairs on foot, without waiting for the car to come up. It drove me nuts, I couldn't get away from it fast enough. It even followed me all the way down to the next landing, and then finally it faded away."

He stopped for a long time, while the scene he had rekindled slowly cooled and died again, before he could go ahead. There were traces of sweat in the creases running across his contracted forehead.

"Then when I came back," he said quietly, "she was dead and they said I did it. They said it happened at eight minutes and fifteen seconds after six. Her watch told them. It must have happened within ten minutes after I'd slammed the door behind me. That part of it still gives me the creeps, even now, when I think of it. He must have been lurking right there inside the building already, whoever he was—" "But you say you went down the stairs yourself?" "He might have been hidden up on the last stretch, between our floor and the roof. I don't know. Maybe he heard the whole thing. Mavbe he even watched me go. Mavbe I slammed the door so hard it rebounded instead of catching, and he got in that way. He must have been in on her before

she knew it. Maybe the very sound of her own laughter helped to cover him up, kept her from hearing anything until it was late."

"That makes it sound like some sort of a prowler, doesn't it?"

"Yes, but what for? The cops were never able to figure out what for, that's why they wouldn't give it any serious consideration. It wasn't robbery; nothing was taken. There was sixty dollars in cash right in the drawer in front of her, not even covered over. It wasn't attack, either. She was killed right where she'd been sitting, and left right where she'd been killed."

Lombard said, "One or the other could have been intended, and he got frightened off before he carried out the object of the intrusion. Either by some outside sound or by the very act he had just committed itself. That's happened a thousand and one times."

"Even that won't do," Henderson said dully. "Her diamond solitaire was lying there loose on the dressing table the whole time. It wasn't even on her finger. All he had to do was scoop it up as he ran out. Frightened or not, how long would that take? It stayed behind." He shook his head. "The necktie damned me. It came out from underneath all the others on the rack. And the rack was fairly deep within the closet. And that particular tie went with every stitch I had on. Sure, because I took it out myself. But I didn't twist it around her. I lost track of it in the heat of the quarrel. It must have fallen unnoticed to the floor. Then I grabbed up the one I'd come home with, and whipped that around my collar, and stormed out. Then he came creeping in, and it caught his eye as he advanced unsuspectedly on her, and he picked it up— God knows who he was, and God only knows why he did it!"

Lombard said, "It may have been some impulse without rhyme or reason, just an urge to kill for the sake of killing, unleashed in some stray mental case hanging around outside. It may have been whipped up by the very scene of vio-

lence between you, especially after he had detected that the door wasn't securely closed. He realized he could commit it almost with impunity, and you'd be blamed for it. There have been things like that, you know."

"If it was anything along those lines, then they'll never get him. That kind of killers are the hardest to track down. Only some freak or fluke will ever open it up. Some day they may get him for something else entirely, and then he'll confess this one along with it, and that's the first inkling they'll have. Long after it'll do me any good."

"What about this key witness you mentioned in your message?"

"I'm coming to that now. It's the one slim ray of hope in the whole thing. Even if they never get on to who really did it, there's a way for me to be cleared of it. The two findings aren't necessarily one and the same in this case; they can be separate and distinct, and yet equally valid each in its own right."

He began punching one hand into the flat of the other, over and over while he spoke. "There's a certain woman, somewhere or other, right at this moment, as we sit here in this cell talking it over, who can clear me—simply by telling them at what time I met her at a certain bar eight blocks from where I lived. That time was ten minutes after six. And she knows it just as I know it; wherever and whoever she is, she knows it. They proved, by re-enacting it, that I couldn't have reached that bar at that time and still have committed the murder back at my house. Jack, if you hope to do anything for me, if you want to pull me through this, you've got to find that woman. She and she alone is the answer."

Lombard took a long time. Finally he said, "What's been done about finding her, so far?"

"Everything," was the devastating answer, "everything under the sun."

Lombard came over and slumped down limply on the edge of the bunk beside him. "Whew!" he said, blowing

through his clasped hands. "And if the police failed, your lawyer failed, everyone and everything failed, right at the time it happened and with all the time they needed—what a chance I have, months after it's cold and with eighteen days to do it in!"

The guard had showed up. Lombard stood up, let his hand trail off Henderson's slumped shoulder as he turned away to be let out.

Henderson raised his hand. "Don't you want to shake hands?" he said falteringly.

"What for? I'll be back again tomorrow."

"You mean you're going to take a fling at it, anyway?"

Lombard turned and gave him a look that was almost scathing, as if irked by the obtuseness of such a question. "What the hell gave you the idea I wasn't?" he growled surily.

10 The Seventeenth, the Sixteenth Days Before the Execution

Lombard shuffled around the cell, hands in pockets, looking down at his own feet as though he'd never noticed how they worked before. Finally he stopped and said, "Hendy, you've got to do better than that. I'm not a magician, I can't just pull her out of a hat from nothing."

"Listen," Henderson said weariedly, "I've gone over the thing in my own mind until I'm sick of it, until I dream about it at nights. I can't squeeze a drop more detail out of it."

"Didn't you look at her face at all?"

"It must have gotten in the way plenty of times, but it didn't take."

"Let's start in again at the beginning and run through it once more. Don't look at me like that, it's the only thing we can do. She was already sitting on a stool at the bar when you walked in. Suppose you give me your first impression of her if you can. Try to recapture it. Sometimes there's a clearer visualization to be gained from a fleeting first impression than from all the more deliberate studies you can make later on. Well then, your first impression?"

"A hand reaching for pretzels."

Lombard eyed him scathingly. "How can you leave your own bar stool, walk over to another, and accost somebody, without seeing them? Show me that trick sometime. You knew it was a girl, didn't you? You didn't think it was a mirror you were addressing? Well how did you know it was a girl?"

"She had on a skirt, so she was a girl, and she wasn't using crutches, so she was able-bodied. Those were the only two things I cared about. I was looking through her, seeing My Girl in my mind's eye the whole time I was with her; what do you expect me to be able to tell you?" Henderson flared in turn.

Lombard took a minute off to let the two of them calm down. Then. "What was her voice like. Did that tell you anything? Where she came from? What her background was?"

"That she'd been to high school. That she was city-bred. She talked like we all do here. Pure metropolitan. About as colorless as boiled water."

"Then this was her hometown, if you couldn't notice any variation in accent. Whatever good that does us. In the taxi, what?"

"Nothing; the wheels went around."

"In the restaurant, what?"

Henderson arched his neck rebelliously. "Nothing. It's no use. Jack. Nothing. It won't come. I can't. I can't. She ate and she talked, that was all."

"Yes, but about what?"

"I can't remember. I can't remember a word of it. It wasn't meant to be remembered. It was just meant to pass the time, keep silence at a distance. The fish was excellent. Wasn't the war terrible? No, she didn't care for another cigarette, thank you."

"You're driving me crazy. You sure must have loved Your Girl."

"I did. I do. Shut up about it."

"In the theater, what?"

"Only that she stood up in her seat: I've already told you that three times. And you said yourself, that doesn't tell you what she was like, that only tells you what she did at one point."

Lombard came in closer. "Yes, but why did she stand up?

That keeps eluding you. The curtain was still up, you say. People don't stand like that for no reason."

"I don't know why she stood up. I wasn't inside her mind."

"You weren't even inside your own, from what I can gather. Never mind, we can come back to that later. Once you've got the effect, the cause is bound to follow eventually." He moiled around for a while, letting a brief pause rest them up.

"When she stood up like that, you looked at her then at least?"

"Looking is a physical act, with the pupils of the eyes; seeing is a mental one, with the cells of the brain. I looked at her all night long; I didn't see her once."

"This is torture," Lombard grimaced, squeezing the bridge of his nose up close beneath the brows. "I can't seem to get it from you. There must be somebody I can get it from, somebody who saw you with her that night. Two people can't go around town for six hours together without somebody at least seeing them."

Henderson smiled wryly. "That's what I thought, too. I found out I was wrong. There must have been a case of mass astigmatism all over town that night. Sometimes they've got me wondering myself if there really was such a person, or if she wasn't just a hallucination on my part, a vagary of my own feverish imagination."

"You can cut that out right now," Lombard ordered curtly.

"Time's up," a voice said from outside.

Henderson got up. picked up a charred match stick from the floor, and carried it over to the wall, where there were rows of little charred dabs, in parallel rows. The top lines had all been intercrossed into .r's; the last few on the end were still single downward strokes. He added a cross line to one, and made that into an x.

"And cut that out too!" Lombard added. He spit forcefully into his own hand, took a quick step over, gave the

wall a violent sweep, and the whole bunch of them, crossed and uncrossed, were gone at once.

"All right, move over," he said, taking out pencil and paper.

"I'll stand for a change," Henderson said. "There's only room for one on the edge of that thing."

"Now you know what I want, don't you? Raw material, that hasn't already been worked over. Second-string witnesses, people who weren't subpoenaed to appear at the trial, people who were overlooked both by the cops and Gregory, your lawyer."

"You don't want much. Ghosts, once-removed. Second-degree ghosts to help us get a line on a first-degree ghost. We better get a medium in on this with us."

"I don't care if they only brushed elbows with you, walked past on one side of the street while you two walked past on the other. The point is, I want to be the first to get to them, if possible. I don't want anyone else's left-overs. There must be some place we can drive a wedge in, split this thing open. I don't care how diaphanous it is, I want to rig up some kind of a list between us. All right, here we go again. The bar."

"The inevitable bar," Henderson sighed.

"The barman's been used up already. Anyone else at it but the two of you?"

"No."

"Take your time. Don't try to force it. It won't come that way, when you try to force it. It drives it back."

(Four or five minutes)

"Wait. A girl in a booth turned her head to look around after her. I noticed that as we were leaving. Want that?"