Phantom lady (3 page)

Henderson quickly dug the ember out for him himself, and put a dollar bill in his hand to make amends. "Sorry, old timer, that wasn't intentional," he murmured. Then noting that the sufferer was still blowing ruefully on his smarting finger, he added a second bill to the first, simply because the incident could have been so easily misconstrued as the height of calloused mockery, and he could tell by looking at her it hadn't been intended as such.

He followed her into the cab and they drove off. "Wasn't that pathetic?" was all she said.

He had given the driver no direction as yet.

"What time is it?" she asked presently.

"Going on quarter of twelve."

"Suppose we go back to Anselmo's, where we first met.

We'll have a night cap and then we'll part there. You go your way and I'll go mine. I like completed circles."

They're usually empty in the middle, it occurred to him, but it seemed ungallant to mention this, so he didn't.

The bar was considerably more crowded now, when they got there, than it had been at six. However, he managed to secure a stool for her all the way around at the very end of the bar, up against the wall, and posted himself at her shoulder.

"Well," she said, holding her glass just an inch above bar level and eyeing it speculatively, "hail and farewell. Nice having met you."

"Nice of you to say so."

They drank; he to completion, she only partially. "I'll remain here for a short while," she said by way of dismissal. She offered him her hand. "Good night—and good luck." They shook briefly, as acquaintances of an evening should. Then just as he was about to turn away, she crinkled her eyes at him in remonstrative afterthought. "Now that you've got it out of your system, why don't you go back and make up with her?"

He gave her a slightly surprised look.

"I've understood all evening," she said quietly.

On that note they parted. He moved toward the door, she turned back to her drink. The episode was over.

He glanced back when he had reached the street entrance, and he could still see her sitting there, all the way over against the wall at the end of the curved bar, looking down pensively, probably fiddling idly with the stem of her glass. The bright orange of the hat showed through a V-shaped opening left between two pairs of shoulders around the turn of the bar from her.

That was the last thing of all, the bright orange of her hat peering blurredly through the cigarette haze and shadows, all the way back there behind him, as in a dream, as in a scene that wasn't real and never had been.

2 The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution

MIDNIGHT

Ten minutes later and only eight blocks away in a straight line—two straight lines: seven blocks up one way and then one over to the left—he got out of the cab in front of an apartment house on the comer.

He put the change left over from the fare into his pocket, opened the vestibule door with his own key, and went inside.

There was a man hanging around in the lobby waiting for somebody. He was on his feet, drifting aimlessly around, from here to there, from there to the next place, the way a man waiting in a lobby does. He didn't live in the building; Henderson had never seen him before. He wasn't waiting for the car to take him up, because the indicator was un-lighted; it was motionless somewhere up above.

Henderson passed him without a second glance, and pushed the button for himself, to bring it down.

The other had found a picture on the wall now, and was staring at it far beyond its merits. He stood with his back to Henderson. In fact he made it a point to seem unaware there was anyone else in the lobby with him at all, which was overdoing it a little.

He must have a guilty conscience, Henderson decided. That picture wasn't worth all that close attention. He must be waiting for someone to join him down here, someone whom he had no right to escort out.

Henderson thought: what the hell did he care, what was it to him anyway?

The car arrived and he stepped in. The heavy bronze

door swung closed by itself after him. He thumbed the six-button, the top of the rack. The lobby started to drop from sight, seen through the little diamond-shaped glass insert let into the shaft door. Just before it did so he saw the picture-gazer, evidently impatient at being kept waiting this long by his prospective date, jSnally detach himself and take a preliminary step over toward the switchboard. Just a vignette that was no possible concern of his.

He got out on the sixth floor and fumbled for his latch key. The hall was quiet; there wasn't a sound around him but the slight tinkle of the loose change in his own pocket as he sought for the key.

He fitted it into his own door, the one to the right as you came off the car, and opened it. The lights were out, it was pitch dark on the other side of it. At this, for some reason or other, he gave a sound of scornful disbelief, deep in his throat.

He snapped a light switch, and a small neat foyer came into existence. But the light only took care of just this one cubicle. Beyond the arched opening facing him across it, it was still as dark, as impenetrable, as ever.

He closed the door behind him, flung down his hat and coat on a chair out there. The silence, the continuing darkness, seemed to irritate him. The sullenness was starting to come back into his face again, the sullenness that had been so conspicuously there at six, out on the street.

He called out a name, called it through into the darkness lying beyond the inscrutable arched opening. "Marcella!" He called it imperatively, and not particularly friendlily.

The darkness didn't answer.

He strode into it, speaking in that same harsh, demanding tone as he went. "Come on, cut it out! You're awake, who do you think you're kidding? I saw the light in your bedroom window from the street jusl now. Grow up, this isn't going to get us anywhere!"

The silence didn't answer.

He cut diagonally through the dark, toward some partic-

ular point on the wall, known to him by heart. He was grumbling in a less strident voice now. "Until I come back, you're wide awake! The minute you hear me, you're sound asleep! That's just dodging the issue!"

His arm was reaching out before him. The click came before it had touched anything. The sudden bath of light made him jump slightly; it had come too soon, before he was expecting it.

He looked along his own arm. and the switch was still inches out past it; they hadn't come together yet. There was a hand just leaving it, sidling away from it along the wall. His eyes raced up the sleeve the hand protruded from and found a man's face.

He gave a startled half turn, and there was another one looking at him from that direction. He gave an additional turn, still further rearward, having nearly reversed himself now. and there was a third, directly behind him. The three stood impassive, motionless as statues, in a half circle around him.

He was so stunned for a minute by the triple, deathly silent apparition that he stared questioningly around the room in search of recognition, of orientation, to see if he was in the right place at all, if it was his own apartment he'd entered.

His eyes came to rest on a cobalt blue lamp base on a table over by the wall. That was his. On a low-slung chair cocked out from a corner. That was his. On a photograph folder standing on a cabinet. One panel held the face of a beautiful, pouting, doe-eyed girl with masses of curly hair. The other held his own face.

The two faces were looking in opposite directions, aloofly, away from one another.

So it was his own home he'd come back to.

He was the first one to speak. It seemed as if they were never going to. It seemed as if they were going to stand staring at him all night. "What're you men doing in my apartment?" he rapped out.

They didn't answer.

"Who are you?"

They didn't answer.

"What do you want here? How'd you get in?" He called her name again. This time parenthetically, as though demanding of her an explanation of their presence here. The door toward which he'd turned his head as he did so, the only other door that broke the walls besides the arched opening through which he'd just come, remained obviously closed. Secretively, inscrutably closed.

They'd spoken. His head snapped back to them. "Are you Scott Henderson?" They had narrowed the semicircle about him a little now.

"Yes, that's my name." He kept looking around toward that door that didn't open. "What is it? What's up?"

They continued, with maddening deliberation, to ask their own questions instead of answering his. "And you live here, is that right?"

"Certainly I live here!"

"And you're the husband of Marcella Henderson, is that right?"

"Yes! Now listen, I want to know what this is about."

One of them did something with his palm, made some sort of a gesture with it that he failed to get in time. It only struck him after it was already over.

He tried to get over to that door and found that one of them, somehow, was in his way. "Where is she? Is she out?"

"She's not out, Mr. Henderson," one of them said quietly.

"Well, if she's in there, why doesn't she come out?" His voice rose exasperatedly. "Talk, will you? Say something!"

"She can't come out, Mr. Henderson."

"Wait a minute, what was that you showed me just now, a police badge?"

"Now, take it easy, Mr. Henderson." They were executing a clumsy sort of a group dance, the four of them. He'd shift a little one way, and they'd shift with him. Then he'd

shift back again the other way, and again they'd shift with him.

"Take it easy? But I want to know what's happened! Have we been robbed? Has there been an accident? Was she run over? Take your hands off me. Let me go in there, will you?"

But they had three pairs of hands to his one. Each time he'd get rid of one pair, two more would hold him back somewhere else. He was rapidly working himself up into a state of unmanageable excitement. The next step would have been blows. The rapid breathing of the four of them filled the quiet room.

"I live here, this is my home! You can't do this to me! What right've you got to keep me out of my wife's bedroom—"

Suddenly they'd quit. The one in the middle made a little sign to the one nearest the door, said with a sort of reluctant indulgence, "All right, let him go in. Joe."

The obstructive arm he had been pressing against dropped so suddenly, he opened the door and went through almost off-balance, careening the first step or two of the way.

Into a pretty place, a fragile place, a place of love. All blue and silver, and with a sachet clinging to the air that he knew well. A doll with wide-spread blue satin panniers, sitting plumped on a vanity table, seemed to look over at him with helpless wide-eyed horror. One of the two crystal sticks supporting blue silken shades had fallen athwart her lap. On the two beds, blue satin coverlets. One flat and smooth as ice, the other rounded over someone's hidden form. Someone sleeping, or someone ill. Covered up com-pleteh' from head to foot, with just a stray wisp or two of curly hair escaping up at the top, like bronze foam.

He took sagging steps over to the bedside. He leaned down, touched her through the coverlet, found her rounded shoulder, shook it questioningly. "Marcella, are you all right—?"

They'd come in past the doorway after him. Vaguely he had an impression everything he did was being watched, being studied. But he had no time for anyone, anything but her.

Three pairs of eyes in a doorway, watching. Watching him fumble with a blue satin coverlet. His hand whipped down a narrow triangular corner of it.

There was a hideous, unbelievable moment, enough to scar his heart for life, while she grinned up at him. Grinned with a cadaverous humor that had become static. Her hair was rippling about her on the pillows in the shape of an open fan.

Hands interfered. He went backward, draggingly. a step at a time. A flicker of blue satin and she was gone again. For good, forever.

"I didn't want this to happen." he said brokenly. "This wasn't what I was looking for—"

Three pairs of eyes exchanged glances, jotted that down in the notebooks of their minds.

They took him out into the other room and led him over to a sofa. He sat down on it. Then one of them went back and closed the door.

He sat there quietly, shading his eyes with one hand as though the light in the room was too strong. They didn't seem to be watching him. One stood at the window, staring out at nothing. The other was standing beside a small table, leafing through a magazine. The third one was sitting down across the room from him, but not looking at him. He was prodding at one of his fingernails with something, to clean it. The way he pored over it. it seemed the most important thing in the world to him at the moment.

Henderson took his shielding hand away presently. He found himself looking at her wing of the photograph port-

folio. It slanted his way. He reached over and closed it.

Three pairs of eyes completed a circuit of telepathic communication.

The ceiling of leaden silence began to come down closer, to weigh oppressively. Finally the one sitting across from him said, "We're going to have to talk to you."

"Will you give me just a minute more, please?" he said wanly. "I'm sort of shaken up—"

The one in the chair nodded with considerate understanding. The one by the window kept looking out. The one by the table kept turning the pages of a woman's magazine.

Finally Henderson pinched the corners of his eyes together as if to clear them. He said, quite simply, "It's all right now. You can begin."

It began so conversationally, so offhandedly, it was hard to tell it had even begun at all. Or that it was anything but just a tactful chat to help them fill in a few general facts. "Your age, Mr. Henderson?"