Phantom lady (11 page)

Lombard's pencil moved. "Give me that sort of thing. That's exactly the sort of thing I want. Can you tell me anything else about this girl?"

"No. Even less than the woman I was with. Just the turn of a head."

"Come on, now."

"The taxi. That's been used up. He was the big comic relief at the trial."

"The restaurant comes next. Was there a hat-check girl at this Maison Blanche?"

"She's one of the few with a legitimate excuse for not remembering her. I was alone when I went up to her alcove; the phantom had separated from me to go into the powder room."

Lombard's pencil moved again. "There may have been an attendant in there. Still, if she wasn't noticed with you, there's even less chance she was noticed without you. Now how about the restaurant, any heads turn there?"

"She joined me separately." ^ "That brings us to the theater."

"There was a doorman with funny fish-hook mustaches, I remember that much. He did a double take on her hat."

"Good. He's in."

He jotted something. "How about the usher?"

"We got there late. Just a pocket light in the dark."

"No good. How about the stage itself?"

"You mean the performers? I'm afraid the show ran off too fast."

"When she stood up like that it might have been seen. Were any of them questioned by the police?"

"No."

"It won't hurt for me to check. We're not passing up anything in this, understand, anything? If a blind man was anywhere near you that night, I'd want— What's matter?"

"Hey," Henderson had said sharply.

"What is it?"

"You just brought something back to me then. One was. A blind pan-handler tagged us as we were leaving—" Then as he saw Lombard's pencil briefly scrawl something, "You're kidding," he protested incredulously.

"Think so?" Lombard said levelly. "Wait and see." He cocked his pencil once more.

"That's all there is, there isn't any more."

Lombard put the list away in his pocket, stood up. I'll make a dent in that somewhere along the line!" he promised grimly. He went over and whacked at the grate, to be let out. "And keep your eyes off that wall!" he added, catching the direction of Henderson's inadvertent glance, over to where the erased box-score had once been kept. "They're not going to get you in there." He thumbed the opposite direction along the corridor from the one he was about to take.

"They say they are," was Henderson's ironically murmured answer.

Personal Columns, all newspapers: Will the young lady who was seated in a wall booth at An-selmo's Bar with a companion, at or around 6:15 in the evening. May 20th last, and who may recall an orange hat that caused her to turn her head as its wearer was leaving, kindly get in touch with me. She was facing toward the back. If she remembers this it is vital that I hear from her without delay. A person's happiness is involved. All replies held in strictest confidence. Communicate J. L., Box 654, care of this newspaper.

No replies.

The Fifteenth Day Before the Execution

LOMBARD

A blowzy woman, with her graying hair in her eyes and an aura of cabbage around her, opened the door. "O'Bannon? Michael O'Bannon?"

That was as far as he got. "Now listen. I've already been over to your office once today, and the man there said he'd give us until Wednesday. We're not trying to gyp the poor penniless company that needs the money so bad. Sure it must be down to its last fifty thousand bucks, it must!"

"Madam. I'm not a collector. I simply wish to speak to the Michael O'Bannon who worked as doorman at the Casino last spring."

"Yes, I can remember when he had that job," she agreed ^. caustically. She turned her head slightly aside, raised her voice a little, as if she wished someone other than Lombard to overhear her. "They lose one job, and then they never move the seat of their pants off the chair from that day on to try and get another. They sit and wait for it to come to them!"

What sounded like the hoarse grunt of a trained seal came from somewhere in the interior.

"Someone to see you, Mike!" she bellowed. And then to Lombard, "You better go in to him yourself, he's got his shoes off."

Lombard advanced down a "railroad" hall that threatened to go on indefinitely, but didn't. It ended finally in a room whose center was occupied by an oilcloth covered table.

Sidewise to this lolled the object of his visit, stretched across two straight-backed wooden chairs in a suspension bridge arrangement, the unsupported part of him curving downward. He had off a good deal more than just his shoes; in fact, his upper attire consisted solely of an oatmeal-colored union suit with elbow length sleeves, and immediately over that a pair of braces. Two white-toed socks tilted acutely upward from the chair seat opposite him. He laid aside a nink racing form and a rancid pipe as Lombard entered. "And what can I do for you, sirr?" he rumbled accommodatingly.

Lombard put his hat on the table and sat down without being asked. "A friend of mine wishes to get in touch with

someone," he began confidentially. It would be poor policy, he felt, to overawe these people ahead of time with mention of death sentences, consultations with the police, and all that; they might become intimidated and chary of telling him anything, even if they were able to. "It means a lot to him. It means everything. Now. This is why I'm here. Can you recall a man and woman getting out of a taxi in front of the theater, while you were working there, one night in May? You held the door for them, of course."

"Well now, I held the door for everybody that drove up, that was my job."

"They were a little late, probably the last people you greeted that particular night. Now this woman had on a bright orange hat, A very peculiar hat, with a thin tickler sticking straight up from it. It swept right in front of your eyes as she got out, she passed so close to you. Your eyes followed it like this: slowly, from one side over to the other. You know, like when something passes too close to you, and you can't make out what it is."

"Leave it to him," his wife put in challengingly from the doorway, "If it was anything on a pretty woman he'd do that anyway, whether he could make out what it was or not!"

Neither of the men paid any attention. "He saw you do that," Lombard went on. "He happened to notice it at the time, and he told me about it." He pressed his hands to the oilcloth, leaned toward him. "Can you remember? Does it come back to you? Can you remember her at all?"

O'Bannon shook his head ponderously. Then he gnawed his upper lip. Then he shook his head some more. He gave him a reproachful look. "D'ye know what you're asking, man? All those faces night after night! Nearly always two by two, lady and gent."

Lombard continued leaning across the table toward him for long minutes, as though the intensity of his gaze would be enough to bring it back to him of itself. "Try, O'Bannon. Think back. Try, will you, O'Bannon? It means everything in the world to this poor guy."

The wife began to draw slowly nearer, at that, but still held her peace.

O'Bannon shook his head once more, this time with finality. "No," he said. "Out of my whole season there, out of all them people I opened car doors for, I can only recall today one single individjule. A fellow who showed up by himself one night, full of booze. And that was because he fell out of the cab face first when I opened the door, and I had to catch him in me arms—"

Lombard stemmed the flow of unwanted reminiscence that he suspected was about to follow. He got to his feet. "Then you don't, and you're sure you don't?"

"I don't, and I'm sure I don't." O'Bannon reached for the reeking pipe and the racing chart again.

The wife was at their elbows by now. She had been eyeing Lombard speculatively for some moments past. The tip of her tongue peered forth in calculation for an instant at the corner of her mouth as she spoke. "Would there have been anything in it for us. now, if he had been able to?"

"Well, yes. I don't suppose I would have minded doing a little something for you, if you'd been able to give me what I wanted."

"D'ye hear that, Mike?" She pounced on her husband as though she were going to attack him. She began to shake him strenuously by one shoulder, using both hands for the purpose, as though she were kneading dough or massaging a sprain. "Try, Mike, try!"

He tried to ward her off. backing an arm defensively before his head. "How can I, with you rocking me like an empty rowboat? Even if it was in me head somewhere, lying low, you'd shake it clean out of me mind!"

"Well—no go, I guess," Lombard sighed. He turned away and moved disappointedly down the long defile of hall passage.

He heard her voice rise to an exasperated wail there in the room behind him, as she renewed her assault on her husband's obdurate shoulder. "Look, he's going! Oh, Mike,

what's the matter with you! All the man wants you to do is remember something, and you can't even do that!"

She must have vented her disappointment on the inanimate objects about him. There was a roar of anguished protest. "Me pipe! Me handicap sheet!"

Their voices were loud in disputation as Lombard closed the outer door after him. Then, suspiciously, there was a sudden conspiratorial hush. Lombard's face took on a slightly knowing look, as he started down the stairs.

Sure enough, in a moment more there was a swift onrush of footsteps in his wake along the inner hall, the door was flung open, and O'Bannon's wife called hectically down the stairwell after him, "Wait, mister! Come back! He just remembered! It just now came to him!"

"Oh, it did, did it?" Lombard said dryly. He stopped where he was and turned to look up at her, but without making any move to reascend. He took out his wallet, ran his thumb tentatively along its edge. "Ask him was it a black or a white sling she was holding her arm in?"

She relayed the question resoundingly back into the interior. She got the answer, sent it on down to Lombard —slight hesitancy of voice and all. "White—for the evening, you know."

Lombard put his wallet away again unopened. "Wrong number," he said firmly, and resumed his descent.

The Fourteenth, Thirteenth, Twelfth Days Before the Execution

THE GIRL

She'd already been perched on the stool several minutes when he first became aware of her. And that was all the more unusual, in that there were only a scattering of others at the bar as yet; her arrival should have been that much more conspicuous. It only showed how unobtrusively she must have approached and settled into place.

It was at the very beginning of his turn of duty, so her arrival must have occurred only moments after his own taking up of position behind the bar, almost as though she had timed it that way: to arrive when he did. She had not yet been there when he first stepped out of the locker room in freshly starched jacket and glanced about his domain-to-be, that much he was sure of. At any rate, turning away from waiting on a man down at the other end, he became aware of her sitting there quiescently, and immediately approached.

"Yes, miss?"

Her eyes held his in a peculiarly sustained look, he thought. And then immediately thought, in postscript, that he must be mistaken, he must be only imagining it. All customers looked at him when they gave an order, for he was the means of bringing it to them.

In this gaze of hers there was a difference, though; the impression returned a second time, after having been discarded once. It was a personalized look. A look in its own right, with the giving of the order the adjunct, and not just an adjunct to the giving of the order. It was a look at him,

the man to whom she was addressing the order, meant for him in his own right. It was a look that said, "Take note of me. Mark me well."

She asked for a little whisky with water. As he turned away to get it, her eyes remained on him to the last. He had a trivial and fleeting feeling of being at a loss, of being unable to account for her bizarre scrutiny, that evaporated again almost as soon as it had risen. That did not bother him much, it was just there and gone again at first.

Thus, the beginnings of it.

He brought her drink, and turned away immediately to wait on someone else.

An interval elapsed. An interval during which he did not think of her again, had forgotten her. An interval during which there should have been some slight alteration in her position, if only a shift of her hand, a raising or edging of her glass, a look elsewhere about the room. There wasn't. She sat there not moving. As still as a pasteboard cut-out of a girl seated on a bar stool. Her drink was not touched, remained where he had left it, as he had left it. Only one thing moved: her eyes. They went wherever he went. They followed him about.

A pause came in his activities, and he encountered them again, for the first time since his original discovery of their peculiar fixity. He found now that they had been on him all the while, without his guessing it. It disconcerted him. He could find no meaning for it. He stole a look into the glass, to see if there was anything awry with his countenance or jacket. There wasn't, he was as other times, no one else was looking at him in that prolonged steadfast way but she. He could find no explanation for it.

It was intentional, of that there could be no doubt, for it moved about as he moved about. It was no glazed, dreamy, inward mulling stare that just happened to be turned his way; there was intelligence behind it, directed at him.

Awareness of it having once entered his mind, it could not be dislodged again; it remained with him to stay and

trouble him. He began watching her covertly from time to time himself now, each time thinking himself unobserved. Always he found her already looking at him when he did, always he left her continuing to look at him after he had already desisted. His sense of being at a loss deepened, became discomfort, little by little.

He had never seen a human being sit so still. Nothing about her moved. The drink remained as neglected as though he had not brought it at all. She sat there like a young, feminine Buddha, eyes gravely, uninterruptedly on him.

Discomfort was beginning to deepen into annoyance. He approached her at last, stopped before her.