Phantom lady (20 page)

"You know what time is it?" the dancer said accusingly. "I don't have told you to watch it closely? You are very careless. You nearly let it go past too far. The doctor said once itch hour, on the hour. Get the calomel—"

Before Lombard knew it, another of those seasonal typhoons that seemed to occur regularly in here, was swirling around him full blast. Machine-gun Spanish, nail-head squeaks, and the maid going around and around the room after Bibi, until Lombard felt as though he were the center pole of a carrousel.

He finally raised his own voice and added it to the din.

"Why don't you stop short, and turn back the other way?" he shouted above the racket.

That did it. Bibi ran into the maid—and the calomel ran into Bibi.

When that was over with, and the patient was clinging forlornly to his mistress, both arms about her neck, giving her a momentary resemblance to a bearded lady, he resumed his own job.

'i realize how hopeless it is to expect you to remember any particular individual out of that sea of faces before you each night. I realize you played six nights a week and two matinees, all season long, to packed houses—"

"I have never play to an empty house in my hull career," she contributed, with more of her characteristic modesty. "Even a fire cannot compete with me. Once in Buenos Aires the theater start to burn. You think they left—?"

He waited until that was out of the way. "My friend and this woman were sitting in the first row, on the aisle." He consulted something on a scrap of paper taken from his pocket. "That would be on your left, as you faced the audience. Now, the only help I can give you at all is this. She stood up in her seat, oh along about the second or third chorus of the song."

A speculative glint flickered across her eyes. "She stood opp? While Mendoza was on stage? This interests me very much. I have never known it to happen before." Her shapely fingers, he noticed, were beginning to claw tentatively at the velvet of her trouser leg, as if whetting themselves for reprisal. "She did not care for my singing, perhaps? She had a train to catch, perhaps?"

"No, no. no, you don't understand," he reassured her hastily. "Who could do that to you? No. here's what it was. It was during the Chica Chica Boom number. You forgot to throw one of the little souvenirs to her. and she stood up to attract your attention. For just a moment or two she stood there right in front of you, and we were hoping—"

She shuttered her eyes rapidly two or three times, trying

to recapture the incident. She even poked one long finger just behind her ear, careful not to disturb the hair-do. "I see if I can remember it for you." She obviously was doing her best. She did all the things likely to be conducive to memory quickening. She even lit a cigarette, although she was not, judging by the stiff way she handled it, a habitual smoker. She simply held it, letting it burn down in her fingers.

"No, I cannot," she said finally. "I'm sorry. I try hard. For me last season is like twenty years ago." She shook her head morosely, clicked her tongue compassionately a couple of times.

He started to return the futile scrap of paper to his pocket, glanced at it as he did so. "Oh, and here's another thing—although I suppose it's no more help than the first. She had on the same hat that you did, my friend tells me. I mean a duplication of it, an exact copy."

She straightened suddenly, as though she were on the point of getting something from that. He obviously had her whole undivided attention at last, if he hadn't before. Her eyes narrowed speculatively. Then they glittered behind their threadlike constriction. He was almost afraid to move or breathe. Even Bibi looked at her curiously from a fur huddle on the carpet at her feet.

Suddenly it came. She stabbed her cigarette out with a single vicious lunge. She emitted a strident, macawlike cry, that wouldn't have been out of place in a jungle. "A-a-ai! Now I remember! Now!" A flash flood of Spanish swept her off his conversational track. Finally, after a lot of eddying around, she got back onto it in English again. "That thing that stood up there! That criatura that stand in front of the hull house, in my hat, to show she is wearing it! She even stop the spotlight, clip some of it off from me! Hanh! Do I recall? You bet I recall! You think I'm going to forget a thing like that in a horry? Hanh! You don't know Mendoza!" She snorted with such violence that Bibi gave the appearance of being swept across the floor for a distance of several

feet like a dried leaf, although it was probably a scuttle for shelter under his own power.

The maid chose this most unpropitious moment to intrude. "The costumer has been waiting for some time now, senorita."

She semaphored violently, crossing and recrossing her arms over her head. "She should keep on wetting some more! I am listening to something I don't like to hear!"

She climbed down the chaise-lounge toward Lombard, balancing on one bent knee over the lower end of it. She even seemed to regard her own overheated state of mind as a prideful accomplishment. She flung out her arms to show him, then tapped herself like a woodpecker on the chest. "Look how I get! Look how angry it still make me, even sotch a long time after! Look what it do!"

After which she rose to her feet, squeezed herself tightly around the waist with both arms in a belligerent embrace, as if holding herself in, and began to stalk back and forth, turning at the end of each short heat with a great fanning out of her wide trouser bottoms. Bibi crouched in a far corner, head bowed in desolation and his skinny arms flung up over it.

"And what you want her for, you and this friend of yours?" she demanded suddenly. "You haven't told me yet!"

He could tell by her challenging inflection that if it was anything that had to do with making the style pirate happy, he wasn't going to get any help from Mendoza, even if she had been in a position to give it. He wisely marshaled the facts in such a way that her purpose would swing over to coincide with his, even though both had not quite the same end in view. "He is in serious trouble, believe me, sefiorita. I won't bore you with the details, but she is the only one who can get him out of it. He has to prove that he was with her that night, and not where they say he was. He only met her that night; we don't know her name, we don't know where she lives, we don't know anything about her. That's why we're looking high and low—"

He could see her mulling it over. After a moment she informed him, "I like to help you. I give anything to tell you who she is." Then her face dropped, she spread her hands helplessly. "But I never see her before. I never see her after. I just see her stand opp like that. That's all, I can't tell you no more about her than that." At least facially, she seemed to be even more disappointed than he was about it.

"Did you notice him at all, the man with her?"

"No, I never even give him a look. I couldn't say who was with her. He stay in the shadow down below."

"You see, there's as big a link as ever missing, only it's the other way around now. Most of the others remembered him, but not her. You remember her, but not him. It's still no good, wouldn't prove anything. Just that a woman stood up in a theater one night. Any woman. She might have been alone. She might have been with someone else entirely. It doesn't mean a thing. I've got to get the two linked up together by one witness." He clapped his hands to his knees frustratedly, rose to leave. "Looks like it ends there, where it began. Well, thank you for your time."

"I keep trying for you, anyway," she promised, giving him her hand. "I don't know what I can do, but I keep at it."

He didn't either. He shook hands briefly, passed through the outer room in a mist of depression. He felt the let-down, the sudden reversal, all the more keenly because he had come closer to getting on to something tangible just now than he had at any other time so far; it had been almost within his grasp, only to be snatched away at the last moment. Now he was right back where he'd been before.

The operator had turned and was looking at him expectantly, so he knew he'd come all the way down without feeling it, and was supposed to get out of the car. Somebody propelled a door for him and he was outside in the street. He stood there for a moment without moving away from the entrance, simply because he couldn't decide which direction to take next. One offered as little as the other, so they checkmated each other. And his ability to make even

such a minor decision as that was wallowing helplessly in a trough just then.

A taxi came along and he hailed it. It had someone in it, he had to wait for another. That kept him there a minute longer. And sometimes a minute can make an awful lot of difference. He hadn't left any tracer with Mendoza, she wouldn't have known where to contact him.

He was already seated in the second taxi and it was just about to take off, when the revolving door of the hotel blurred like a propellor in motion and a bellboy came darting out to him. "Are you the gentleman that just left Miss Mendoza's suite? She called down a minute ago after you'd gone by. She'd like you to come back again, if you don't mind."

He went inside again and up fast. The same fur snowball launched itself at him, in fond recollection. He didn't even mind that this time. The pajamas were gone and she was in the middle of trying something or other on. She looked like a half-finished lampshade standing in the middle of the floor, but he had no eye for any of that.

She was only mildly disconcerted, if at all. "I hope you're a married man? Pouf, if you're not, you will be some day, so it's all the same." He couldn't quite grasp the fine point of propriety involved, but let it go at that. She picked up a length of material and draped it negligently across one shoulder, where it would do the least good, as a protection. Then she dismissed some shadowy third person kneeling at her feet with a mouthful of pins.

"A minute after you left I got something," she told him as soon as they were alone. "I was still kind of--. She twisted her hand this way and that, as though she were trying a doorknob—"you know—sore."

William, occurred to him unspoken at this point.

"So I let it out, like I always do when I'm sore, by breaking a couple of little things." She motioned with perfect unconcern to numerous crystal fragments littering the floor, with a disembodied atomizer bulb lying in their midst.

"Then the fonniest thing happen. It bring back another time I am sore, about that woman we were talking about. Because I throw things now, I remember how I throw things that other time." She hitched her shoulders. "Is peculiar, no? It remember to me what I do with the hat. I think maybe it help you to know."

He waited, shifting one foot out toward her in leashed intensity.

She shook an explanatory finger at him. "So that night, when that woman do like that to me, I go back to my dressing room and, immh—" She inhaled deeply. "I nidd to be tied opp. I take everything on the table and I go like this!" She made a clean horizontal sweep with one arm. "You onderstand how I feel, no? You don't blem me?"

"I don't blame you at all."

She trip-hammered the flat of her hand between the circumflex accents formed by the brassiere she had on. "You think anyone is going to do that to me in front of a houseful of people? You think I, Mendoza, let them get away with that?"

He didn't, now that he'd had a sample or two of her com-bustive temperament.

"They have to huld me back by both arms, the stage manager and my maid, to keep me from rushing out the stage door in my wrapper just like I am, to see if I can find her in front of the theater, for to pull her to pieces betwinn my two hands!"

He'd half hoped, for a minute, that that was what it was going to develop had happened, that she'd tangled with the cipher at the theater entrance. But he knew it hadn't, or Henderson would have mentioned it to him, and she herself would have recalled it sooner than this.

"I would have showed her a thing or two, you bet!" She still looked capable of doing it even at this late day. Lombard even drew back a precautionary step or two, the way she was crouched facing him. fingers working convulsively in lobster-claw formation. Bibi was clasping and unclasp-

ing his own tiny digits in apprehensive supplication.

She straightened, threw her arms outward in breast-stroke position. "The next day I'm still sore. With me it lasts. So I go to the modiste, the designer, that make opp the hat for me, and I blow off stimm there instead. I throw it in her face in front of hull room full of customers. I say, 'So you make me an original for my production number, ha? The only one of its kind, ha? Nobody else is going to have one like it, ha?' And I wipe it all over her face, and when I leave she is still spitting out pieces of the material, she can't talk."

She shoveled her hands at him inquiringly. "So that's good for you, is no? That helps you, no? This cheat of a designer, she must know who is the person she sell the copy to. You go to her and you find out who this woman is you look for."

"Swell! Great! At last!" he yelled, so enthusiastically that Bibi dove head-first under the chaise and pulled his tail in after him. "What's her name? Give me her name!"

"Wait, I dig it opp for you." She tapped the side of her head apologetically. "I work in so many different shows, I have so many different costumers, I can't keep track." She called the maid in, instructed her, "Look among my bills for a hat, from last year's show, see you can find one."

"But we don't keep them that long, do we, sefiorita?"

"You don't have to go all the way back to when it start from, stupid," said the star, as unselfconsciously as ever. "Look it opp among last month's, it probably still kipp coming in."

The maid came back after a moderately lengthy—and to Lombard, excruciating—wait. "Yes, I found it, it did come in this month again. It says, 'One hat, a hundred dollars,' and the letterhead reads 'Kettisha.' "

"Good! That's it!" She passed it to Lombard. "You got it?" He copied the address, returned it to her. Her hands went into hysterics, and a blizzard of tiny pieces of paper snowed all over the floor. Then she ground her foot down into the middle of them. "I like the nerve! Still sending me bills a year later! She's got no shem, that woman!"