Phantom lady (24 page)

A man in suspenders and undershirt was standing a few steps off, regarding him sympathetically, arrested pipe in hand, a dog peering out from around his legs.

Lombard looked up wanly as Burgess's hastening footfalls drew up beside him. Then he turned his head away again, as though it were too much effort even to speak.

"Is this it? What's the matter? You been in there yet?"

"No, it's that one back there." He indicated a cavernous opening, occupying almost the full width of the building it was set into. Within, to one side, could be made out a glistening brass upright, set into the bare concrete flooring. Across the facade, in gilt letters backed with black sandpaper, was inscribed the legend: Fire Department, City of New York.

"That's number —." Lombard said, flourishing the tab of paper he still held in his hand.

The dog, a spotted Dalmatian, edged forward at this point to muzzle at it inquiringly.

"And that's Flora, these men tell me."

Burgess opened the car door and pulled it out behind him, forcing him to his feet to avoid being unseated.

"Let's get back," he commented tersely. "And fast."

He was flinging himself bodily against the door, with futile wrenches of breath, when Burgess came up with the passkey and joined him outside it.

"Not a sound from in there. Has she answered them below on the announcer yet?

"They're still ringing."

"She must have lammed."

"She can't have. They would have seen her leave, unless she went out some roundabout way— Here, let me use this. You'll never get it that way."

The door opened and they floundered inside. Then they stopped short, taking the scene in. The long living room, which was a continuation of the entrance gallery with simply a one-step drop in height, was empty, but it was mutely eloquent. They both got it right away.

The lights were all on. An unfinished cigarette was still alive and working, sending up lazy spirals of bluish-silver from the rim of an ash stand with a hollow stem. The floor-length windows were open to the night, showing an expanse of black, with a large star piercing it in one corner, a smaller one in another, like a black-out cloth held in place by a couple of shiny thumbtacks.

Directly before the windows lay a silver shoe, turned on its side like a small, capsized boat. The long narrow runner of rug that bisected the polished flooring, from just past the drop-step to just short of the windows, showed corrugated ridges, frozen "ripples" that marred its evenness, at one end. As though a misstep had sent a disturbance coursing along it.

Burgess went to the window, detouring around the side of the room to get there. He leaned out over the low, inadequate, decorative guard-rail on the outside of it, stayed that way, bent motionless, for long minutes.

Then he straightened, turned back into the room again, sent a quiet nod across it to where Lombard had remained, as if incapable of further movement. "She's all the way down below there. I can see her from here, in the service alley between two deep walls. Like a rag off a clothesline. Nobody seems to have heard it, all the windows on this side are still dark."

He didn't do anything about it, strangely enough, didn't even report it at once.

There was only one thing moving in the room, outside himself. And it wasn't Lombard. It was the skein from the cigarette. It was that fact, perhaps, that attracted his eye

to it. He went over to it, picked it up. There was still enough to hold, a fraction of an inch. He murmured something under his breath that sounded like, "Must have just happened as we got here."

The next thing, he had taken out a cigarette of his own, was holding the two upright side by side, their bases even, with the fingers of the same hand. He took a pencil, notched off the length of the remnant against the intact one.

Then he put the latter into his own mouth, lit it, and took a single, slightly ritualistic puff to get it going. After which he carefully set it down in the same curved trough the former one had occupied, left it there, and glanced at his watch.

"What're you doing that for?" Lombard asked in the listless voice of someone for whom nothing holds any interest any more.

"Just a home-made way of figuring out how long ago it happened. I don't know if it's reliable or not, if any two of these things burn down at the same rate of speed. Must ask some of the guys about that."

He went over, glanced closely at it once, moved away again. The second time he came back he picked it up, looked at it in air like a thermometer, looked at his watch, then tapped it out and discarded it, its purpose served.

"She fell out exactly three minutes before we got in here. That's taking off a full minute while I was looking out the window, before I got over to it and measured it. And that's giving her just one puff, as I took. If she took more then that brings it down even closer."

"It may have been king-size," Lombard said, from a great distance away.

"It's a Lucky, there's enough of the trademark left down at the mouth end to be visible. Think I would have wasted my time doing it if I hadn't seen that before I started?"

Lombard didn't answer, was back in the distance again.

"This makes it look as though it was our very ring on the downstairs announcer that killed her." Burgess went on. "Startled her and caused her to make that false move in front

of the window that sent her over. The whole story's here in front of our eyes, without words. She'd gone over to them and was standing there looking out, possibly in an expansive mood, drinking in the night air, making plans, when the ring came from downstairs. She did something wrong. Turned in too much of a hurry, or with her weight thrown badly. Or maybe it was her shoes did it. This one looks a little warped, unsteady from overlong wear. Anyway, the rug skidded over the waxed flooring. One or both of her feet shot out from under her, riding the rug. The shoe came off completely, went up in the air. She overbalanced backward. It wouldn't have been anything, if she hadn't been that close to the open windows. What would have been otherwise just a comical little sit-down became a back somersault into space and a death fall."

Then he said, "But what I don't get, is about the address part of it. Was it a practical joke, or what? How'd she act; you were with her."

"Nah, she wasn't kidding," Lombard said. "She was serious about wanting that money, it was written all over her."

"I could understand her giving you a spiked address that would take you a long time to investigate, so she'd have time to cash the check and beat it. But a thing like this, only a few blocks from here—she might've known you'd be back in five or ten minutes. What was the angle?"

"Unless she figured she could get more from the lady in question herself, more than I was offering, by warning her, tipping her off, and just wanted to get me out of the place long enough to dicker with her."

Burgess shook his head, as though he found this unsatisfactory, but he contented himself with repeating what he'd said to begin with. "I don't get it."

Lombard hadn't waited to listen. He'd turned away and was moving listlessly off to the side, with the dragging shamble of a drunk. The other man watched him curiously. He seemed to have lost all interest in what was going on around him, to have gone completely flat. He arrived at the wall and

stood there for a moment before it, sagging, like someone who has been disappointed too often, is finally licked, finally ready to quit.

Then before Burgess could guess his purpose, he had tightened one arm, drawn it back, and sent it crashing home into the inanimate surface before him, as though it were some kind of an enemy.

"Hey, you fool!" Burgess yelped in stupefaction. "What're you trying to do, bust your hand? What'd the walls do to you?"

Lombard, writhing in the crouched position of a man applying a corkscrew to a bottle, his face contorted more by helpless rage than pain even yet, answered in a choked voice while he nursed his flaming hand against his stomach, "They know! They're all that's left that knows now—and I can't get it out of them!"

The Third Day Before the Execution

The last-minute drink he'd gulped just now right after getting off the train at the prison stop wasn't any help. What could a drink do? What could any number of drinks do? It couldn't alter facts. It couldn't turn bad news into good. It couldn't change doom into salvation.

He kept wondering as he trudged up the steep road toward the gloomy pile of buildings ahead: How do you tell a man he's got to die? How do you tell him there's no more hope, the last ray has just faded out? He didn't know, and he was on his way right now to find out—by first-hand experience. He even wondered whether it wouldn't have been kinder not to come near him again at all, to let him go without seeing him this useless one last time.

This was going to be ghastly, and he knew it. He was in the place now, and he already had the creeps. But he'd had to come, he couldn't be that yellow about it. Couldn't leave him dangling in suspense for three agonizing days more; couldn't let him be led out on Friday night still looking back over his shoulder the whole way, metaphorically speaking, for the last-minute cancellation that would never come now.

He passed the back of his hand slowly across his mouth as he trudged after the guard up to the second-floor tier. "Am I going to get drunk tonight after I leave here!" he swore bitterly to himself. "I'm going to get so full I'll be an alcoholic case at one of the hospitals until it's over and done with!"

And now the guard was standing by, and he went in to face the music. Funeral music.

This was the execution right now. A bloodless, white one preceding the other by three days. The execution of all hope.

The guard's footsteps receded hollowly. After that the silence was horrible. Neither of them could have stood it for very long.

"So that's it," Henderson said quietly at last. He'd understood.

The rigor mortis was broken, at least. Lombard turned away from the window, came over and clapped him on the shoulder. "Look, fellow—" he started to say.

"It's all right," Henderson told him. "I understand. I can tell by your face. We don't have to talk about it."

"I lost her again. She slipped away—this time for good."

"I said you don't need to talk about it," Henderson urged patiently. "I can see what it's done to you. For the love of pete, let's drop it." He seemed to be the one trying to buck Lombard up, instead of vice versa.

Lombard slumped down on the edge of the bunk. Henderson, being the "host," let him have it, got up and stood leaning the curve of his back against the wall opposite.

The only sound in the cell for a while after that was the rustle of cellophane, as Henderson kept continuously fold-

ing over the edge of an emptied cigarette package back on itself, until he'd wound it up tight, then undoing it again pleat by pleat until he had it open once more. Over and over, endlessly, apparently just to give his fingers something to do.

No one could have stood it for long in that atmosphere. Lombard said finally, "Don't, will you? It's making me go nuts."

Henderson looked down at his own hands in surprise, as though unaware until then what they'd been up to. "That's my old habit," he said sheepishly. "I never was able to break myself of it, even in good times. You remember, don't you? Any time I ever rode a train, the time table would end up like that. Any time I had to sit and wait in a doctor's or a dentist's office, the magazines would end up like that. Any time I ever sat in a theater, the program—" He stopped short, looked dreamily across at the wall, just over Lombard's head. "That night at the show with her, I can remember doing it that night too— It's funny how a little thing like that should come back to me now, this late, when all the more important things it might have helped me to remember all along— What's the matter, what are you looking at me like that for? I've quit doing it." He threw the tormented wrapper aside, to show him.

"But you threw it away, of course? That night with her. You left it behind you, on the seat or on the floor, as people usually do?"

"No, she kept both programs, I can remember that. It's funny, but I can. She asked me to let her have them. She made some remark to the effect of wanting to glory in her impulsiveness. I can't recall just what it was. But I know she kept them, I distinctly saw her put them in her bag."

Lombard had risen to his feet. "There's a little something there, if we only knew how to get at it."

"What do you mean?"

"It's the only thing we know for sure she has in her possession."

"We don't know for sure she still has it in her possession, do we?" Henderson corrected.

"If she kept it to begin with, then it's likely she still has it. People either do or don't keep such things as theater programs. Either they throw them away at once, or they keep them indefinitely, for years after. If there was only some way we could make this thing the bait. What I mean is, it's the only common denominator linking her to you— because it will have its upper right-hand corners neatly winged back from cover to cover, without missing a page. If we could only get her to come forward with it, without guessing—she will stand revealed to us automatically."

"By advertising, you mean?"

"Something along those lines. People collect all sorts of things; stamps, seashells, pieces of furniture full of worm-holes. Often they'll pay any price for things that to them are treasures but to others are trash. They lose all sense of proportion, once the collector's lust gets hold of them."

"Well?"

"I'm a collector of theater programs, say. A freak, an eccentric, a millionaire throwing my money away right and left. It is more than a hobby, it is an obsession with me. I must have complete sets of programs for every play produced at every theater in town, all the way back, season by season. I suddenly appear from nowhere, I open a little clearing depot, I advertise. Word spreads around. I'm a nut, I'm giving away something for nothing. There's a free for all to get in on it while it lasts. The papers'll probably puff it up, with pictures; one of those screwball incidents that pop up every now and then."