Phantom lady (28 page)

Was he in love with Marcella? She'd never met him more than twice in her whole life, as far as I know."

"As far as you know," Burgess said dryly.

"You mean it was one of those things on the side?"

"Didn't you notice she was out a lot?"

"Yes, but I didn't think anything of it. She and I weren't living on cordial terms any more."

"Well, that was it, right there." He took a turn or two about the room. 'There's one thing I think ought to be made clear to you, though, Henderson. For what it's worth at this late date. It was strictly a one-sided affair. Your wife was not in love with Lombard. If she had been, most likely she would still be alive today. She was not in love with anyone but herself. She liked admiration and flattery; she was the type that likes to flirt and string people along, without meaning it seriously. That's a harmless game with nine men. And with the tenth it's dangerous. To her he was just someone to go out with, and a handy way of getting back at you in her own mind: to show herself that she didn't need you. Unfortunately, he was the tenth man. He was the wrong type for it altogether. He'd spent most of his life around oil fields in God-forsaken parts of the world; and he hadn't had much experience with women. He didn't have any sense of humor about things like that. He took her seriously. And of course she liked that part of it all the better, that made the game more real.

"There's no question about it, she gave him a raw deal. She led him on until the very last, long after she must have seen where it was leading. She let him
arrange his whole future around her, knowing darn well she wasn't going to be there to share it with him. She let him sign on for five years with this oil company in South America. Why, he even had the bungalow they were going to live in down there picked out and furnished up for them. The understanding was she was to divorce you as soon as they got there, and marry him. After all, when a guy's that age, and not a kid

any more, he takes it hard when you kick his heart around like that.

'Instead of tapering off, breaking it to him by degrees, giving him a sporting chance to get over it, she went about it the worst possible way. She hated to give up her cake any sooner than she had to; his rings on the phone, their luncheon meetings, their dinner dates, his kisses in a taxi. Her ego needed all that. She'd got used to it, and she would have missed it. So she put off and put off. She waited until the very night they were due to sail together to South America; waited until he called for her at the flat—as soon as you'd gone—to take her to the pier with him.

"I'm not surprised it cost her her life. I would have been surprised if it hadn't. He says he got there even before you left, side-stepped you by waiting on the upper flight of stairs past your floor, until after you'd come storming out. It just so happened there was no hallman on duty that night. So no one saw him come in. And as we all very well know, no one saw him leave again either.

"Well anyway, she let him in, went back to her mirror again, and when he asked her if she was all packed and ready, laughed at him. That seems to have been her day for laughing at people. She asked him if he'd really seriously believed she was going to bury herself in South America, place herself at his mercy, to marry or not as he saw fit, once her bridges were burned behind her? Above all, free you to go to someone else? She liked the situation the way it was. She wasn't giving up a sure thing for a gamble.

"But more than anything else, it was the laughter that did it. If she'd cried when she told him all this, or even if she'd just kept a straight face, he says he thinks he would have let it go at that. Just gone out and drunk himself stone-blind, maybe, but she would still have been alive behind him. And I think so too."

"So he killed her," Henderson said quietly.

"So he killed her. Your discarded necktie was still lying there on the floor behind her, where you'd dropped it. He

must have absently picked it up at one point or another just before this, been holding it in his hands without noticing it, when the snap came." He gave an expressive snap of his own fingers."

"I don't blame him altogether," Carol breathed, looking down at the floor.

"I don't either," Burgess admitted. "But that was no excuse for doing what he did next. For deliberately turning on the man who had been his lifelong friend, going out of his way to see that he was framed for it."

"What did I do to him?" Henderson asked, without any trace of rancor.

"What it amounts to is this. He didn't understand then, and he still doesn't today yet, even this long after, what it really was that made her act the way she did. Jilt him so heartlessly. He failed to see that it was in perfect keeping with her own character to do so, that that was the way she was built. He mistakenly thought it must be because of a renewal of her love for you. Therefore he blamed you for it. You were responsible for his losing her. That made him hate you. He wanted to take it out on you. A distorted form of jealousy, that was only made more insane by the coveted one's death, is about the closest you can get to it."

"Whew," said Henderson softly.

"He came out of there, unseen, and he deliberately set out after you, to try and overtake you. That quarrel which he'd overheard from the stairs was too good an opportunity to be passed up. Too good an opportunity of saddling you with what he'd just done. His original idea, he says, was to join you as if by accident, as if he'd just happened to run into you, and stick around with you long enough to give you a chance to convict yourself out of your own mouth. At least implicate yourself seriously. He would have said, 'Hullo, I thought your wife was going to be with you. And then, quite naturally, you would have answered, 'I had a fierce row with her before I left.' It was necessary for that row to come out. He wanted it to. He couldn't bring it out, otherwise.

without implicating himself as having been within eavesdropping distance out on the stairs. It had to come through your telling him, in the first person, do you understand?

"He would have seen to it that you got quite tanked— if you still needed any additional encouragement—while he was with you. Then he would have accompanied you back to your own door. So that when you made the grim discovery, he'd be there; be on hand to reluctantly repeat to the police what he'd heard you say about having a terrific blowup with her just before leaving. You would have been acting as a shock-absorber for him. That's a neat little touch there, that idea of accompanying the husband back to where he's just finished murdering the wife. Automatically relegating himself to the position of innocent bystander at someone else's crime. It would have been practically foolproof as a suspicion disinfectant.

"All this he tells quite freely—and I've got to admit quite unremorsefully even yet—in his confession."

'"Nice." said Carol somberly.

"He thought you'd be alone. He already knew two of the places you'd said you'd be. You'd mentioned that afternoon, when you ran into him, that you were taking the missis to the Maison Blanche for dinner, and then afterward to the Casino. The bar he didn't know about, because you didn't yourself until you turned and went in there on the spur of the moment.

"He went straight to the Maison. and he cased it cautiously from the foyer, without showing himself. He saw you in there. You must have just arrived. He saw you were with someone. That changed things around. He not only could not join you now with any hope of profiting from any possible revelation on your part, but this unknown third person might even provide you with a degree of immunity altogether, depending on just how soon you'd met her after leaving your own door. In other words, that early, almost at sight, he sensed her paramount importance in the matter,

both from his point of view and your own. And acted accordingly.

"He withdrew, and hovered around outside on the street, far enough away to command the entrance without any danger of being caught sight of himself. He knew your next stop was slated to be the Casino Theater, but he couldn't be sure, of course. Couldn't afford to take it for granted.

"The two of you came out, taxied over, and he taxied over in your wake. He followed you into the theater. Listen to this, it's an exciting thing. He bought a standing room ticket, as people often do who have only time to catch one act. He stood up back there, at the rear of the orchestra, sheltered by a post, and kept the back of your heads in sight throughout the performance.

"He saw you leave when you did leave. He almost lost you in the crowd when you left, but luck was with him. The little incident of the blind man he missed altogether, for he dared not tread that closely behind you. Your taxi had such a hard time pulling clear of the jam that he was able to keep you in sight from another.

"You led him back to Anselmo's finally, although he still didn't know that that was the pivot of the whole thing. Again he loitered outside, for in the closer quarters of the bar he couldn't have hoped to avoid your spotting him. He saw you leave her there, presently, and could guess by that fact alone, if he hadn't already, that you'd carried out the threat he'd heard you yell back at the apartment: that you'd invite the first stranger you met along in your wife's place.

"He had to decide quickly now whether to keep on after you, and run the risk of losing her in the shuffle, or to switch his attention to her, find out just how much good she could do you, how much harm she could do him.

"He didn't hesitate long. Again his good luck held, and he did the right thing almost by instinct. It was too late to attach himself to you any more with any degree of plausibility. Instead of helping to incriminate you, he'd only be incriminating himself. His ship was being warped out of

the pier at that very minute, and he should have been on it by this time.

"So he let you go and he chose her, never dreaming how unerringly right he was, and he bided his time outside, watching her covertly, knowing she could not stay in the bar all night, knowing she would have to have some final destination.

"Presently she emerged, and he drew back out of sight to give her leeway enough. He was shrewd enough not to accost her then and there; he would only be identifying himself to her. In case it turned out she could absolve you, he would only be incriminating himself indelibly for later on by the mere fact of having questioned her on the subject at all. shown any interest in it. So he wisely decided that this was the thing to do: learn her identity and destination first of all, so that he would know where to find her again when he wanted her. That much done, leave her undisturbed for a short while. Then discover, if possible, just how much protection she was able to give you. This by retracing your steps of the evening, seeking to ferret out if possible your original meeting place, and above all how soon after your leaving the apartment the meeting had taken place. Then thirdly, if the weight she could throw in the matter was enough to count, take care of it by a little judicious erasing. Seek her out wherever it was he had traced her to the first time, and ascertain whether or not he could persuade her to remain silent. And if she proved not amenable, he admits there was already a darker method of erasure lurking in the back of his mind. Immunizing one crime by committing a second.

"So he set out after her. She went on foot, for some inscrutable reason, late as the hour was: but this only made it easier for him to keep her in sight. At first he thought it might be because she lived in the immediate vicinity, a stone's throw away from the bar. but as the distance she covered slowly lengthened, he saw that couldn't be it. Presently he wondered if it mightn't be that she had become

aware there was someone following her, and was deliberately trying to mislead them, throw them off the track. But even this, he finally decided, couldn't be the case. She showed absolutely no awareness nor alarm about anything, she was sauntering along too aimlessly, almost dawdling, stopping to scan the contents of unlighted showcases whenever she happened upon them, stopping to stroke a stray cat, obviously improvising her route as she went along, but under no outward compulsion whatever. After all, had she been seeking to rid herself of him, it would have been simple enough for her to have hopped into a cab, or stepped up to a policeman and said a word or two. Several of them drifted into sight along the way and she didn't. There was nothing left for him to ascribe her erratic movements to, finally, than that she had no fixed destination, she was wandering at random. She was too well dressed to be homeless, and he was completely at a loss what to make of it.

"She went up Lexington to Fifty-Seventh, then she turned west there as far as Fifth. She went north two blocks, and sat for some time on one of the benches on the outside of the quadrangle around the statue of General Sherman, just as though it were three in the afternoon. She was finally driven off from there again by the questioning slowing-up of about every third car that passed her on its way in or out of the park. She ambled east again through Fifty-Ninth, ab-sorbedly memorizing the contents of the art-shop windows along there, with Lombard slowly going mad behind her.

"Then at last, when he almost began to think she intended going over the Queensborough Bridge on foot into Long Island, she suddenly turned aside into a very grubby little hotel at the far end of Fifty-Ninth, and he detected her in the act of signing the register when he peered in after her. Showing that this was as much of an improvisation as all the rest of her meandering had been.

"As soon as she was safely out of sight, he went in there in turn and. as the quickest way of finding out what name she'd given and what room she'd been assigned to, took one

for himself. The name immediately above his own, when he'd signed for it, was 'Frances Miller' and she'd gone into 214. He managed to secure the one adjoining, 216, by a deft process of elimination, finding fault with the two or three that were shown him at first until he'd secured the one he had his eye on. The place was in the last stages of deterioration, little better than a lodging house, so that was excusable enough.

He went up for a short while, chiefly to watch her door from the hallway outside his own and convince himself that she was finally settled for the rest of the night and would be here when he came back. He couldn't have hoped for more proof than he obtained. He could see the light in her room peering out through the opaque transom over the door. He could, without any difficulty in that weatherbeaten place, hear every move she made, almost guess what she was doing. He could hear the clicking of the wire hangers in the barren closet as she hung her outer clothing up. She had come in without any baggage, of course. He could hear her humming softly to herself as she moved about. He could even detect now and then what it was she was humming. Chica Chica Boom, from the show you had taken her to earlier that night. He could hear the trickle of the water as she busied herself preparing to retire. Finally the light went out behind the transom, and he could even hear the creak of the springs in the decrepit bed as she disposed herself on it. He goes into all this at great and grim length in the final draft of his confession.

"He crossed his own unlighted room, leaned out the window, which overlooked a miserable blind shaft, and scrutinized what he could see of her room from that direction. The shade was down to within a foot of the sill, but her bed was in such a position that by straddling the sill of his own and leaning far out, he could see the glint of the cigarette she held suspended over the side of the bed in the darkness in there. There was a drain pipe running down between their two windows, and the collarlike fastening which held it to

the wall offered a foot rest at one point. He made note of that. Made note it was possible to get in there in that way, if he should find it necessary, when he came back.

"Sure of her now, he came out of the place again. This was a little before two o'clock in the morning.

"He hurried straight back to Anselmo's in a cab. The place was going into the death-watch now, and there was plenty of opportunity to become confidential with the bartender and find out what, if anything, he knew. In due course he let drop some casual remark about her, you know the sort of thing. 'Who was that lonely looking number I saw sitting up at the end there all by herself a little while ago?' or something on that order. Just as an opening wedge.

"They're a talkative race anyway, and that was all the barman needed to go the rest of the way under his own speed. That she'd been in there once before, around six, gone out with someone, he'd brought her back, and then he'd left her.

"An adroit further question or two brought out the point he was mainly interested in. That you had accosted her without any time lag, immediately upon coming in, and that it had been only a very few minutes past six. In other words, his worst fears were exceeded. She was not only a potential protection to you, she was your absolute, unqualified salvation. It would have to be taken care of. And without delay." He broke off to ask, "Am I boring you by rehashing it at this length?"

"It was my life," Henderson observed dryly.

"He didn't let any grass grow under his feet. He made the first deal then and there, under the very eyes of the few remaining customers still lingering in the place. The barman was the type that bribes easy, anyway, as the saying goes; he was ripe and ready to fall into his hand. A few guarded words, a palming of hands across the bar, and it was done. 'How much would you take to forget you saw that woman meet that fellow in here? You don't need to forget he was in here, just forget she was.' The barman allowed he'd take a

modest enough sum. 'Even if it turned out to be a police matter?' The barman wasn't quite so sure after he'd heard that. Lombard made up his mind for him with a sum of fifty times larger than he'd expected to get out of it. He gave a thousand dollars in cold cash. He had a considerable wad of it on him, ready at hand, the stake he'd been intending to use to set the two of them up in South America. That cinched it as far as the barman was concerned, of course. Not only that, Lombard cemented it with a few quiet-spoken but blood-chilling threats. And he was evidently a good threat-ener. Maybe because his threats weren't idle, they were the McCoy, and his listener could sense that.

"That barman stayed fixed from then on, long after he knew all the facts in the case, and nothing we nor anyone else could do could get a word out of him. And it wasn't entirely due to the thousand dollars by any means. He was good and frightened, and so were all the rest of them. You saw the effect it finally had on Cliff Milburn. There was something grim about this Lombard. He was a man with absolutely no sense of humor. He'd stayed too close to nature all his life.

"The barman taken care of, he went on from there, backtracking over the route you had taken not very many hours before. There's no need of giving you all the details at this late date. The restaurant and the theater were closed, of course, by that time of night, but he managed to learn the whereabouts of the individuals he was after and seek them out. In one case he even made a quick trip all the way out to Forest Hills and back, to get one of them out of bed. By four o'clock that morning the job was complete; he'd contacted three more of the key figures whose collusion it was necessary for him to have: the taxi driver Alp, the head-waiter from the Maison Blanche, and the box-office man from the Casino. He gave them varying amounts. The taxi driver simply to deny having seen her. The headwaiter to give a split to the table waiter, whose job depended on him after all, and make sure that he stayed in line. The box-office

man he fixed so liberally he practically made him an ally. It was through him that Lombard learned one of the house musicians had been heard shooting his mouth off, bragging what a hit he'd made with this particular woman—as he saw it—and added a suggestion that perhaps he'd better be taken care of too. Lombard wasn't able to get around to that until the second night after the murder, but luckily for him, we had overlooked the man entirely, so there was no harm done by the delay.

"Well, now it's an hour before daybreak and his job's done, he's caused her to disappear from view, as far as it's humanly possible. The only one who remained to be taken care of was she herself. He went back there where he'd left her, to attend to that part of it. And he admits, his mind was already made up. He wasn't going to buy her silence, he was going to make sure of it in a more lasting way—by death. Then the rest of his structure wouldn't be in any danger. Any of the others could welsh, but there wouldn't be any proof left.

"He let himself back into the room he'd taken next to hers, and sat there in the dark for a moment or two, thinking it out. He realized that he ran a far greater risk of being detected as the murderer in this case than in the case of your wife, but only as an unknown man who had signed the register downstairs under an assumed name, not as John Lombard. He intended overtaking his ship, he would never be seen around here again, so what chance was there of identifying him later? It would be suspected that 'he' had killed her, but it wouldn't be known who 'he' was. See what I mean?

"He went outside and listened at her door. The room was quiet, she was asleep by now. He tried it very carefully, but as he'd half expected, the door was locked, he couldn't get in that way. There remained that drain pipe stepping-stone outside their two windows, which had been in the back of his mind all along anyhow.

"The shade was still down to within a foot of the sill, as it

had been before, when he looked out. He climbed quietly and agilely out the window, rested his foot on the necessary drain pipe support, and was able without very much difficulty to swing himself onto her sill and lower himself into the room under the shade. He didn't take anything with him, he intended using just his bare hands and the bedclothes.

"In the dark he edged his way to the bed, and he poised his arms, and he gripped the tortured mass of the bedclothes tight to prevent any outcry. They collapsed under him; they were empty. She wasn't there. She'd gone. As erratically as she'd come into this place, she'd gone again, in the hour before dawn, after lying in the bed awhile. Two cigarette butts, a few grains of powder on the dressing stand, and the rumpled bedclothes, were all that was left of her.

"When the worst part of the shock had worn off and he went downstairs again and asked about it more or less openly, they told him she'd come down not long before his return, handed in her key, and calmly walked out to the street once more. They didn't know which way she'd gone, nor where she'd gone, nor why she'd gone; only that she'd gone—as strangely as she'd come.

"His own game had boomeranged on him. The woman whom he had spent all night and hundreds of dollars in trying to turn into a ghost as far as you, Henderson, were concerned, had turned into a ghost—but as far as he himself was concerned now. Which wasn't what he'd wanted at all. It left things too dangerously indefinite. She might pop back into the picture at any moment.

"He went through hell in those few short hours that were all he could spare before he had to plane out, if he was still to overtake his ship. He knew how hopeless it was. He knew, as you and I know, what a place New York is to find someone in, on short order.

"He hunted for her high and low, with the remorselessness of a maniac, and he couldn't find her again. The day

went, and the second night went, and his time was up, he couldn't stay behind any longer. So he had to let it go under the heading of unfinished business. An ax hanging over him from then on, threatening to fall at any moment.

"He planed out of New York the second day after the murder, made the short overwater hop from Miami to Havana that same day, and was just in time to board his own ship when it touched there on the third day out. His excuse to the shipboard officials was that he'd got drunk the night of sailing and missed it.

"That was why he was so ripe for that come-on message I sent in your name; that was all he needed to drop everything and come back. He'd been panicky all along, and that gave him the finishing touch. They talk about murderers being drawn back to the scene of their crime. This pulled him back like a magnet. Your asking for help gave him just the excuse he needed. He could come back openly now and help you 'look' for her. Finish the death hunt he hadn't had time to complete the first time. Make sure that if she was ever found, she'd be found dead."

"Then you already suspected him when you came to my cell that day and drafted that cable in my name. When did you first begin to suspect him?"

"I can't put my finger on it and give you the exact day or hour. It was a very gradual thing, that came on in the wake of my change of mind about your own guilt. There was no conclusive evidence against him from first to last, that's why I had to go at it in the roundabout way I did. He left no fingerprints at the apartment; must have wiped the few surfaces he touched off clean. I remember we found several doorknobs without any marks on them at all.

"To start with, he was just a name you'd dropped, in the course of being questioned yourself. An old-time friend, whose invitation to join him in a farewell tour of the town you'd conscientiously passed up, much to your regret, on her account. I had a routine inquiry made for him, more to have him help us fill in a little of your background for our

record than anything else. I learned he'd sailed, as you'd mentioned he intended to. But I also found out, quite unintentionally, from the steamship line, that he'd missed the sailing here and caught up with his ship at Havana three days later. And one other thing. That he'd originally booked passage for two, himself and a wife, but that when he'd overtaken the ship he was alone, and had finished out the rest of the trip unaccompanied. Incidentally, there was no record of his ever having been married or having had a wife up here, when I checked a little further.

"Now there was not necessarily anything glaringly suspicious in all that, you understand. People do miss ships, especially when they celebrate too copiously just before sailing time. And people's brides-to-be do change their minds at the last minute, back out, or the contemplated marriage is postponed by mutual consent.

"So I didn't think any more about it. And yet on the other hand I did. That little detail of his missing the ship and then overtaking it alone, lodged in the back of my mind and stayed with me from then on. He had, a little bit unluckily for himself, managed to attract my attention. Which seldom turns out to be beneficial, with cops. Then later, when my belief in your own guilt began to evaporate, there was a vacuum left behind. And a vacuum is something that has to be filled, or it will fill by itself. These facts about him began to trickle out, and before I knew it, the empty space had begun to fill up again."

"You sure kept me in the dark," Henderson admitted.

"I had to. There wasn't anything definite enough, until just recently. In fact until that night he drove Miss Richman into the woods with him. Confiding in you would have been a bad risk. Most likely you wouldn't have shared my feelings about him, and for all I knew might have warned him off" in some burst of misguided loyalty. Or even if you had strung along with me, had shared my belief, knowledge of what was up might have made you a poor actor. He might have detected something in your manner toward him, and