Phantom lady (19 page)

There was a channel of clearance left between him and the blessed door. She was afraid to trust herself into it, but she was more afraid not to. Those hands of his, flat for a moment, lay partly in the way. She jumped around him, just past his clawing fingers, got to it.

An instant can be so long. An instant can be so short. For an instant he lay helpless like that, flat on his face, an instant only. She could feel her hands wrangling the key like something in a dream: they didn't seem to belong to her at all. She turned it the wrong way first, it wouldn't work; had to reverse it, bring it all the way around to the

other side. He was rippling his belly along the floor, trying to close the couple of inches gap between them from where he lay, without getting up; trying to grab her by the ankles and bring her down to him.

The key clicked, she pulled, and the door swung in. Some-think pecked futilely across the rounded back of her shoe, it was like the tapping of fingernails, as she plunged out through the new-made opening.

Then the rest was a blurred welter of mingled horror and relief; horror at anticipated pursuit that didn't come. She was careening down dimly lighted stairs, more by impetus than any clear sight of them. She found a door, opened it, and it was cool, and it was night, and she was safe, but she kept staggering on, away from that place of evil, that would haunt her a little bit forever. She was zigzagging along an empty sidewalk, like a drunk, and she was drunk—with overpowering terror.

She remembered turning a corner, and she wasn't sure where she was any more. Then she saw a light ahead and went toward it, running now, in order to get to it quick, before he had a chance to overtake her. She went in and found herself looking at glass cases holding salami and platters of potato salad, so it must have been an all-night delicatessen.

There was no one in it but a man dozing behind the counter. He opened his eyes and found her standing there dazedly, her dress still diagonally down off one shoulder where he'd torn it. He jumped, came forward, peered, palms to counter.

"What's the matter, miss? You been in an accident? Something I can do for you?"

"Give me a dime," she sobbed brokenly. "Please give me a dime—to use your phone."

She went over and dropped it in, still sobbing by reflex diaphragm action.

The kindly old man called inside to the back, "Momma,

come out front, yess? Is here a child in zome kind of trouble."

She got Burgess at his home; it was nearly five in the morning by now. She didn't even remember to tell him who she was, but he must have known. "Burgess, will you please come here for me? I've just had a terrible time, and I don't think I can manage it the rest of the way by myself—"

The delicatessen keeper and his wife, the latter in curl papers and bathrobe, were holding a diagnostic consultation over her in the background, meanwhile, "Black coffee, you think?"

"Sure, iss the only thing. Aspirin we ain't got."

The woman went over and sat down across the table from her, patted her hand sympathetically. "What they do to you, dolling? You got a mudder?"

She couldn't help smiling wanly at the thought, even while she continued to sniff. The only mother she had was a supposedly hard-boiled detective.

Burgess came in alone, collar up around his ears, to find her huddled over a thick mug of steaming black coffee. Shivers that had nothing to do with the temperature had set in. but were now waning again. He'd come by himself because this was not official; it was personal, off the record stuff as far as he was concerned.

She greeted him with a little whimper of relief.

He sized her up. "Ah, poor kid." he said throatily. shoving out the chair next to her and sitting down on it sidewise. "Bad as all that, huh?"

"This is nothing; you should have seen me five or ten minutes ago." Then she brushed that aside, leaned over toward him absorbedly. "Burgess, it was worth it! He saw her! Not only that. Somebody came around afterward and bribed him. Some man, acting on her behalf, I suppose. You can get all that out of him, can't you?"

"Come on," he said briskly. "If I don't it won't be for lack of trying. I'm going up there right now. I'll put you in a taxi first and—"

"No, no, I want to go back with you. It's all right now, I'm over it."

The delicatessen couple came out to the doorway after them, watched them go down the street together in the paling dawn. There was a dark disapproval of Burgess plainly to be read on both their faces.

"Yah, fine brudder she's got!" the man snorted contemptuously. "First leaffs her out alone at fife in the morning! Now he comes when it's too late to make trouble with the fellow what done it! A loafer he iss if he can't look after her any better than that!"

Burgess moved stealthily up the stairs, well ahead of her, motioning her backhand to go easy. By the time she'd caught up to him he'd already been listening intently at the door for several moments, head bent over motionless against it.

"Sounds as if he's lammed out," he whispered. "Can't hear him. Get back a little, don't stand too close, in case he starts up with something."

She retreated a few steps lower down on the staircase, until only her head and shoulders were above floor level. She saw him take something to the door and work it carefully, with little sound if any. Suddenly a gap showed, he thrust his hand back to his hip, held it there, and trod guardedly forward.

She came on up in his wake, holding her breath for the flare-up of violence, even the ambushed onslaught, that she expected from one moment to the next. She was even with the threshold herself when the sudden flare of electric light through the opening made her jump spasmodically, though it was soundless. He'd lit the place up.

She peered through, in time to see him disappear into that doorway in the adjoining wall that she had by-passed herself in her mad circuit of the room a while ago. She ventured in past the door sill, emboldened, for his uninterrupted transit showed this first room to be vacant.

There was a second soundless flare of electricity, and the

dark place he'd gone into became a gleaming white-surfaced bathroom. She was in a straight line with it and him; for a moment she could see into it. She could see an old-fashioned four-legged tub. She could see the rump of a figure folded like a clothespin over the rim of it. The soles of its shoes were turned back and up, she could see them too. The tub could not have been marble, in such a place, and yet it gave a curious optical illusion of being marbled even on the outside. That might have been due to the thin red vein or two discernible down its outside surface. Red-veined marble—

For a moment she thought he'd gotten sick and passed out. Then as she moved to go in after him, Burgess's sharp "Don't come in here, Carol; stay where you are!" stopped her like the crack of a whip. He came back a step or two, gave the door a corrective push-to, narrowing it enough to keep her from looking in any more, without closing it entirely.

He stayed in there a long time. She remained where she was, waiting. She noticed her own wrist was shaking a little, but it wasn't due to fear any more, it was with a sort of emotional tension. She knew what that was in there, now. She knew what must have brought it about. A paroxysm of drug-magnified fear, insupportable once she'd made good her escape and the unseen tentacles of retribution seemed to be closing in on him. All the more dreadful because they were unidentifiable.

A scrap of torn paper lying there on the table that caught her eye confirmed it. Three almost illegible words, trailing off" into a meaningless wavy line that overran the paper and ended in a pencil stub lying on the floor. Ther after me —

The door widened grudgingly and Burgess came out to her again at last. His face looked whiter than before he'd gone in there, she thought. She noticed that he crowded her before him, without overtly seeming to, so that she found herself moving backward toward the outer door without

any volition of her own. "Did you see that?" she asked, about the note.

"Yeah, on the way in."

"Is he--

For answer he poked a finger up under one ear, then swept it all the way around his neck to the other.

She drew in her breath sharply.

"Come on, get out of here," he said with kindly meant gruffness. "This is no place for you." He was closing the outside door after the two of them, the way he'd found it just now. "That tub," she heard him murmur under his breath, as he guided her down the stairs to the fore of him with both hands to her shrinking shoulders. "I'll never be able to think of the Red Sea again without—" He realized that she was listening to him, and shut up.

He put her in a taxi around the corner. "This'll get you home. I've got to get right back and break out with the notification."

"It's no good now, is it?" she said almost tearfully, leaning toward him through the cab window.

"No, it's no good now, Carol."

"Couldn't repeat what he told me—?"

"That would be just hearsay. You heard somebody say he'd seen her, been bribed to deny it. Second-hand evidence. It's no good that way; they won't accept it."

He'd taken a thickly folded handkerchief out of his pocket, opened it in the palm of his hand. She saw him looking at something resting within it.

"What's that?" she said.

"You tell me what it is."

"A razor blade."

"Not enough."

"A—a safety razor blade?"

"That's it. And when a man takes a swing at his throat with one of the old-fashioned open kind—such as I found lying under him at the bottom of the tub—what's one of these doing overlooked under the shelf-paper in the cabinet?

A guy uses either one type or the other, not both." He put it away again. ''Suicide, they'll say. And I think I'll let them —for the present. You go home, Carol. Whichever it is, you weren't here tonight, you're staying out of it. I'll see to that."

In the taxi, riding homeward through streets tin-plated in the quickening dawn, she let her head hang futilely downward.

Not tonight, darling, not tonight after all. But maybe tomorrow night, maybe the night after.

10 The Ninth Day Before the Execution

LOMBARD

It was one of those incredible luxury hotels, its single slender tower rising to disdainful heights above the mass of more commonplace buildings like a tilted aristocratic nose. It was a plush and jeweled perch on which birds of paradise flying east from the movie colony were wont to alight. Bedraggled birds of equally rich plumage, flying west before the storm broke, had also sought refuge here in droves while they were still able to make it.

This, he knew, was going to require a finesse all its own. It needed just the right touch, just the right approach. He didn't make the tactical mistake of trying to gain admission on demand, sight unseen. It wasn't the kind of place in which anyone was ever received by anyone just at request or at first try. You had to campaign, pull wires.

He sought out the flower shop first, therefore, entering it from the lobby itself through a curved door of blue glass. He said, "What would you say are Miss Mendoza's favorite flowers? I understand you deliver a great many to her."

"I couldn't say," the florist demurred.

Lombard peeled off a bill, repeated what he'd just said, as though he hadn't spoken loudly enough the first time.

Apparently he hadn't. '"Callers are always sending up the usual sort of thing, orchids, gardenias. I happen to know, though, that in South America, where she comes from, those flowers aren't highly regarded, they grow wild. If you want a tip of real value—" He dropped his voice, as though this were of incalculable import, "The few times she has ordered flowers for herself, to brighten up her apartment, they have always been deep salmon-pink sweet peas."

"I want your whole stock," Lombard said immediately. "I don't want a single one left over. And let me have two cards."

On one he roughed out a brief message in English. Then taking out a small pocket dictionary, he transcribed it into Spanish, word for word, on the second card. Then he threw the first away. "Put this in with them, and see that they go right up. About how long should that take?"

"They should be in her hands within five minutes. She's in the tower and the page will take an express up."

Lombard returned to the lobby and poised himself before the reception alcove, head bent to his watch like someone taking a pulse count.

"Yes, sir?" the clerk inquired.

"Not yet," Lombard motioned. He wanted to strike her at white heat.

"Now!" he said after a moment's wait, so suddenly the clerk gave a startled jump backward. "Phone Miss Men-doza's suite and ask if the gentleman who sent the flowers may come up for a moment. Lombard's the name, but don't leave out about the flowers."

When the clerk came back again he seemed almost stunned with surprise. "She said yes," he reported limply. Apparently one of the unwritten laws of the hotel had just been broken. Somebody had been received at first try.

Lombard, meanwhile, was shooting upward like a rocket

into the tower. He got out, slightly shaky at the knees, and found a young woman standing waiting at an open door to receive him. Evidently a personal maid, judging by her black taffeta uniform.

"Mr. Lombard?" she inquired.

"That's me."

There was evidently a final customs inspection to be passed before he was cleared for admission. "It is not a press interview, no?"

"No."

"It is not for an autograph, no?"

"No."

"It is not to obtain a testimonial, no?"

"No."

"It is not about some bill that has, er"—she hesitated delicately—"escaped the senorita's mind, no?"

"No."

This last point seemed to be the crucial one; she didn't go any further. "Just a moment." The door closed, then in due course reopened again. This time all the way. "You may come in, Mr. Lombard. The sefiorita will try to squeeze you in between her mail and her hairdresser. Will you sit down?"

He was by now in a room that was altogether remarkable. Not because of its size, nor the stratospheric view from its windows, nor the breath-taking expensiveness of its decor, though all those things were unusual; it was remarkable because of the welter of sounds, the clamor, that managed to fill it while yet it remained unoccupied. It was in fact the noisiest empty room he had ever yet found himself in. From one doorway came a hissing and spitting sound, that was either water cascading from a tap or something frying in fat. Probably the latter, since a spicy aroma accompanied it. Mingled in with this were snatches of song, in a vigorous but not very good baritone. From another doorway, this one of double width and which opened and closed intermittently, came an even more vibrant blend. This consisted, to the best of his ability to disentangle its

various skeins, of a program of samba music coming in over short waves, admixed with shattering shots of static; of a feminine voice chattering in machine-gun Spanish, apparently without stopping to breathe between stanzas; of a telephone that seemed not to let more than two and a half minutes at a time go by without fluting. And finally, in with the rest of the melange, every once in a while there was a nerve-plucking squeak, acute and unbearable as a nail scratching glass or a piece of chalk skidding on a slate. These last abominations, fortunately, only came at widely spaced intervals.

He sat patiently waiting. He was in now, and half the battle was won. He didn't care how long the second half took.

The maid came darting out at one point, and he thought it was to summon him, and half rose to his feet. Her errand, however, was apparently a much more important one than that, judging by her haste. She flitted into the region of the sputtering and baritone accompaniment to shriek warningly, "Not too much oil, Enrico! She says not too much oil!" Then raced back again whence she had come, pursued by malevolent bass tones that seemed to shake the very walls.

"Do I cook for her tongue or do I cook for the shaky clock on the bathroom floor she step on?"

Both coming and going she was accompanied by an intimate garment of feathery pink marabou, held extended in her hands as though someone were about to ensconce themselves in it, but which seemed to have nothing whatever to do with her mission. All the way over and back it shed generously, filling the air with small particles of feathers which drifted lazily to the floor long after she was gone.

Presently the hissing stopped short with one final spit, there was a deep-drawn "Aaah!" of satisfaction, and a rotund coffee-colored little man in a white jacket, towering chefs cap on his head and weaving his head with satisfaction, marched out. around, and in again at the next door

Up, carrying something on a domed salver.

There was a momentary lull after that. Momentary only. Then an upheaval that made the previous clamor seem to have been golden silence, detonated. It had everything previous in it and some new additions of its own: soprano shrieks, baritone bellows, nail-head squeaks, and the deep gonglike clash of a violently thrown chafing dish cover striking the wall and rolling halfway around the room, after that giving out fractured chimes.

The small rotund man came out, fast and outraged; no longer coffee-complected but streaked with what looked like egg yolks and red peppers. His arms were going around like windmills. "This time I go back! On the next ship I go back! This time she can get down on her broken knees to me and I do not stay!"

Lombard bent slightly forward in his chair and tried stopping up his ears with the points of his pinkies, to give them a rest. After all, the human eardrum is a delicate membrane, it can stand just so much abuse and no more.

When he uncovered them again he found to his relief that the establishment had toned down once more to the state of only partial frenzy that was seemingly its norm. At least you could hear what you were thinking again. Presently the doorbell rang by way of variation instead of the telephone, and the maid admitted a dark-haired, daintily mus-tached individual who sat down and joined him in waiting. But with much less fortitude than Lombard himself was displaying. He got up again almost at once and began walking briskly back and forth, but with paces that were just a trifle too short to fit comfortably into the laps he was giving himself. Then he discovered one of the aggregations of Lombard's sweet peas, stopped, extracted one. and put it to his nose. Lombard at this point promptly broke off all further thought of entering into diplomatic relations, even if any had been contemplated.

"Will she be ready for me soon?" the newcomer demanded of the maid on one of her flying visits. "I have a

new idea. I would like to get the feel of it between my hands before it escapes me."

"So would I," thought Lombard, eyeing his neck truculently.

The sweet pea smeller sat down again. Then he stood up again, with every appearance of vibrating impatiently down around the knees. "It's leaving me," he warned. "I am losing it. Once it goes, I will have to go back to the old way again!" The maid fled inside with these dire tidings.

Lombard murmured half audibly, "You should have gone back to the old way long ago."

It worked, at any rate. The maid came out again, beckoned with suppressed urgency, and he was in. Lombard swung at the sweet pea he had dropped, caught it neatly with the toe of his shoe, and kited it upward with grim zest, as though doing that made him feel a lot better.

The maid came out and bent over him confidentially, to salve his impatience. "She will positively squeeze you in between him and her costume fitter. He's hard to handle, you know."

"Oh, I don't know," Lombard demurred, twitching his extended foot slightly and eyeing it longingly.

There was a good long lull after that. At least, comparatively. The maid only came out once or twice and the telephone only rang once or twice. Even the machine-gun Spanish only came in disconnected salvos now. The private chef who had been going back on the next ship appeared, more rotund than ever in beret, muffler, and fuzzy overcoat, but only to inquire with injured mien, "Ask if she is dining in tonight. I cannot do it myself, I am not speaking with her."

Lombard's predecessor emerged finally, small kit in hand, and departed. Not without detouring first and hijacking another one of the sweet peas. Lombard's foot crept toward the receptacle that held the rest of them, as though he were aching to let him have all of them at once, but he conscientiously curbed the impulse.

The maid reappeared outside the holy of holies, an-

nounced, "The senorita will see you now." He found, when he tried to stand up, that his legs had gone to sleep. He slapped at them fore and aft a couple of times, straightened his tie, shot his cuffs, and stepped through.

He had no more than glimpsed a figure stretched out Cleopatra-like on a chaise-lounge, when a soft furry projectile of some sort shot through the air at him and landed on his shoulder with a squeaking sound. One of those same nail-on-glass squeaks that had reached him outside every now and then. He shied nervously at the impact. Something that felt like a long velvet snake coiled itself affectionately around his throat.

The figure on the chaise beamed at him, like a fond parent watching its offspring cut up. "Don't be alarmed, senor. Is unly little Bibi."

Giving it a pet name was only partial reassurance as far as Lombard was concerned. He kept trying to turn his head to get a look at it, but it was too close in. He managed a grin of strained geniality, for the sake of furthering his own cause.

"I go by Bibi," his hostess confided. "Bibi is, how you say it, my welcoam committee. If Bibi don't like, he duck under sofa; I get rid of them queek. If Bibi like, he jomp to their neck; then is all right they stay." She shrugged dis-armingly. "You he must like. Bibi, come down off the man's neck," she coaxed insincerely.

"No, let him stay, I don't mind him in the least," he drawled tolerantly. It would have been a faux pas of the first water, he realized, to have taken her reproach at face value. His nose had identified the encumbrance as a small monkey by now, in spite of the cologne it had been saturated with. The tail reversed, to rewind itself the other way around. He had evidently made a hit. He could feel strands of his hair being painstakingly separated and examined, as if in search of something.

The actress crowed delightedly. If anything could put her in a receptive mood, this simian seemed able to, so Lombard

felt he couldn't afford to resent the way it was getting personal with him. "Sit down," she urged cordially. He walked rather stiffly to a chair and sank into it, careful not to disturb his head balance. He got his first good look at her. She had on a shoulder-cape of pink marabou over black velvet pajamas, each trouser leg of which was the width of a full skirt. A somewhat horrifying arrangement that looked like molten lava had been deposited on top of her head by the sweet pea fiend who had been in here before him. The maid was standing behind her fanning at it with a palm leaf as if to cool it off. "I have a minute while this sets," the wearer explained graciously. He saw her surreptitiously consult the card he had sent up with the flowers a while ago, to remind herself of his name.

"How nice it was to get my flowers in Spanish for a change, Senor Lombard. You say you have just come up from mi tierra. We met down there?"

She had, fortunately, glided past this point before it was necessary for him to commit himself outright. Her large dark eyes took on a soulful expression, went searchingly upward toward the ceiling; she made a cushion of her hands and pressed one cheek against them. "Ah, my Buenos Aires," she breathed, "my Buenos Aires. How I miss it! The lights of the Calle Florida shining in the even-ning—"

Not for nothing had he spent several hours poring over travel folders before coming up here. "The beach at La Plata, down by the shore," he supplied softly, "the races at Palermo Park—"

"Don't," she winced. "Don't, you make me cry." She wasn't just acting. Or at least she wasn't entirely acting, he could tell. She was simply dramatizing emotions that were already there, that were basically sincere, as is the way with the theatrical temperament. "Why did I leave it, why am I opp here so far away?"

Seven thousand dollars a week and ten per cent of the show might have had something to do with it, it occurred to him, but he wisely kept that to himself.

Bibi, meanwhile, having failed to find anything that required exterminating on his scalp, lost interest, ran down his arm, and took a flying leap off on to the floor. It made conversation a lot easier, even though his thatch was left looking like a haystack that had been hit by a high wind. He refrained from smoothing it down lest this give offense to the pest's mercurial mistress. She was now in as soft a mood as he could ever hope to get her into, on such short acquaintance, so he took the plunge.

"I have come to you because you are known to be as intelligent as you are talented and beautiful," he said, laying it on with a shovel.

"It is true, nobody has ever said I am a dunce." the celebrity admitted with refreshing unselfconsciousness, studying her fingernails.

He hitched his chair slightly forward. "You recall a number you did in last season's show, in which you threw nosegays, little flowers, to the ladies in your audiences?"

She poised a warning finger toward the ceiling. Her eyes sparkled. "Ah, Chica Chica Boom! Si, si! You like? Wasn't it good?" she agreed warmly.

"Perfect," he assented, with a concealed fluctuation of his Adam's apple. "Now one night a friend of mine—"

That was as far as he got on that try. The maid, who had just quit fanning a moment before, stepped in again. "William would like his orders for the day, sefiorita."

"Excuse me a minute." She turned her head toward the doorway. A stalwart individual in chauffeur's uniform stepped forward, stood at attention. "I won't nidd you until twelve. I go to the Coq Bleu for launch, so you be downstairs at ten to." Then she added without any change of inflection, "And you better take that with you while you here, you left it behind."

He stepped over to the vanity table she had indicated, removed a hammered silver cigarette case, spaded it into his pocket and stepped outside again, all with perfect nonchalance.

"It didn't come from the five and ten, you know," she called after him, with, it seemed to Lombard, a slight touch of asperity. Judging by the snap in her eyes, he didn't give William much longer.

She turned back to him again, let her filaments slowly darken.

"I was saying, a friend of mine attended a performance one night with a certain woman. That is why I have come to you."

"Ah?"

"I am trying to find her for him."

She misunderstood. Her eyes coruscated with renewed zest. "Ah, a romance! I loave a romance!"

"I'm afraid not. It's a matter of life and death." As with all the rest, he was afraid to give her too many details, lest she shy away from it.

She seemed to like this even better. "Ah, a mees-tirry! I loave a mees-tirry"—she shrugged—"as long as it don't happen to me."

Something suddenly stopped her dead. Apparently some calamity, judging by the effect it had. She eyed a tiny diamond studded particle on her wrist. Suddenly she had reared upright, begun snapping her fingers all over the place, like a string of firecrackers going off. The maid came running in on the fly. Lombard thought he was about to be unceremoniously dismissed, in favor of the next comer.