Phantom Lady

14 The Tenth Day Before the Execution

The Girl

It was on a slip of paper that Burgess had given her.

And then two telephone numbers. One a police precinct, up until a certain hour. The other his own home number, in case she needed him after he’d gone off duty.

He’d said to her, “I can’t tell you how to go about it. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. Your own instinct will probably tell you what to do better than I can. Just don’t be frightened, and keep your wits about you. You’ll be all right.”

This was her own way of going about it, here in front of the glass. This was the only way she could figure out, sight unseen. The clean, tomboyish look was gone from her. The breezy sweep of the hair from an immaculate part over to the other side of her face, that was missing. In its place was a tortured surface of brassy rolls and undulations, drenched with some sort of fixative and then hardened into a metallic casque. Gone too was the youthful, free-swinging, graceful hang there had always been to her clothes. Instead she had managed to achieve a skin-tight effect that appalled her, even alone here in her own room. Excruciatingly short, so that when she sat down — well, she would be sure to catch his eye in a way that would do the most good. A big red poker chip on each cheek, as obvious as a pair of stop lights, but whose effect was intended to be the opposite: go ahead. A string of beads that clacked around her throat. A handkerchief with too much lace on it, saturated in a virulent concoction that made her own nose crinkle in distaste as she hastily stuffed it into her bag. She had made herself heavy lidded with some blue stuff she had never used before.

Scott Henderson had been watching her throughout the proceeding, from a frame to one side of the glass, and she was ashamed. “You wouldn’t know me, darling, would you?” she murmured contritely. “Don’t look at me, darling, don’t look at me.”

And now one final ghastly item, to complete the catalogue of sleazy accessibility. She put up her leg and slipped a garter of violently pink satin complete with a rosette up it, left it at a point just below visibility. At least when seated.

She turned away fast. His Girl shouldn’t look like that thing she had just seen in the glass, not His Girl. She went around putting lights out, outwardly calm, inwardly keyed up. Only someone that knew her well could have guessed it. He would have known it at a glance. He wasn’t here to see it.

When she came to the last one of all, the one by the door, she said the little prayer she always said, each time she started out. Looking over at him there, in the frame, across the room.

“Maybe tonight, darling,” she breathed softly, “maybe tonight.”

She put out the light and closed the door, and he stayed behind there in the dark, under glass.

The marquee lights were on when she got out of the cab, but the sidewalk under them was fairly empty yet. She wanted to get in good and early, so she’d have time to work on him before the house lights went down. She only half knew what was playing, and when it was over and she came out again she knew she wouldn’t know very much more than she had when she went in. Something called “Keep on Dancing.”

She stopped at the box office. “I have a reservation for tonight. First row orchestra, on the aisle. Mimi Gordon.”

She’d had to wait days for it. Because this wasn’t a matter of seeing the show, this was a matter of being seen. She took out the money and paid for it. “Now you’re sure of what you told me over the phone? That’s the side of the house the trap drummer is on, and not the other?”

“That’s right, I checked on it for you before I put it aside.” He gave her the leer she’d known he would. “You must think quite a lot of him. Lucky guy, I’d say.”

“You don’t understand; it’s not him personally. I don’t even know him from Adam. It’s... how’ll I explain? Everybody has some sort of a hobby. Well, mine happens to be the trap drums. Every time I go to a show I try to sit as close to them as I can get, I love to watch them being played, it does something to me. I’m an addict of the trap drums, they’ve fascinated me ever since I was a child. I know it sounds crazy but” — she spread her hands — “that’s how it is.”

“I didn’t mean to be inquisitive,” he apologized, crestfallen.

She went inside. The ticket taker at the door had just come on duty, the usher had just come up from the locker room downstairs, she was so early. Whatever the status of the balcony, where the unwritten rule of being fashionably late did not hold sway, she was definitely the first patron on the orchestra floor.

She sat there alone, a small gilt-headed figure lost in that vast sea of empty seats. Most of her gaudiness was carefully concealed, from three directions, by the coat she kept huddled about her. It was only from the front that she wanted it to have its full lethal effect.

Seats began to slap down behind her more and more frequently; there was that rustle and slight hum that always marks a theater slowly filling up. She had eyes for one thing and one thing only: that little half-submerged door down there under the rim of the stage. It was over on the opposite side from her. Light was peering through the seams of it now, and she could hear voices behind it. They were gathering there, ready to come out to work.

Suddenly it opened and they began filing up into the pit, each one’s head and shoulders bent acutely to permit his passage. She didn’t know which one was he, she wouldn’t know until she saw him seat himself, because she’d never seen him. One by one they dropped into the various chairs, disposing themselves in a thin crescent around the stage apron, heads below the footlights.

She was seemingly absorbed in the program on her lap, head lowered, but she kept peering watchfully up from under her sooty lashes. This one, coming now? No, he’d stopped one chair too short. The one behind him? What a villainous face. She was almost relieved when he’d dropped off at the second chair down from her. Clarinet, or something. Well, then this one, it must be he — no, he’d turned and gone the other way, bass viol.

They’d stopped emerging now. Suddenly she was uneasy. The last one out had even closed the door behind him. There weren’t any more of them coming through. They were all seated, they were all tuning up, settling themselves for work. Even the conductor was on hand. And the chair at the trap drums, the one directly before her, remained ominously vacant.

Maybe he’d been discharged. No, because then they’d get a substitute to take his place. Maybe he’d been taken ill, couldn’t play tonight. Oh, just tonight this had to happen! Probably every night this week, until now, he’d been here. She mightn’t be able to get this same particular seat again for weeks to come; the show was selling well and there was great demand. And she couldn’t afford to wait that long. Time was so precious, was running so short, there was too little of it left.

She could overhear them discussing it among themselves, in disparaging undertones. She was close enough to catch nearly everything they said, to get in under the tuning-up discords that covered them from the rest of the house.

“D’jever see a guy like that? I think he’s been on time once since the season started. Fining don’t do any good.”

The alto saxophone said, “He probably chased some blonde up an alley and forgot to come out again.”

The man behind him chimed in facetiously, “A good drummer is hard to get.”

“Not that hard.”

She was staring at the credits on her program, without their focusing into type. She was rigid with suppressed anxiety. Ironical, that every man in the orchestra should be on hand but the single one, the only one, that could do her any good.

She thought, “This is the same sort of luck poor Scott was in the night he—”

The lull before the overture had fallen. They were all set now, light rods turned on over their scores. Suddenly, when she was no longer even watching it any more, it seemed so hopeless, the door giving into the pit had flickered open, closed again, so quickly it was like the winking of an intermittent light, and a figure scuttled deftly along the outside of the chairs to the vacant one before her, bent over both to increase its speed and to attract the conductor’s attention as little as possible. Thus there was something rodentlike about him even at his first appearance within her ken, and he was to stay in character throughout.

The conductor gave him a sizzling look.

He wasn’t abashed. She heard him pant in a breathless undertone to his neighbor, “Boy, have I got a honey for the second tomorrow! A sure thing.”

“Sure, and the only sure thing about it is it won’t come in,” was the dry answer.

He hadn’t seen her yet. He was too busy fiddling with his rack, adjusting his instrument. Her hand dropped to her side and her skirt crept up her thigh an unnoticeable fraction of an inch more.

He got through arranging his set-up. “How’s the house tonight?” she heard him ask. He turned and looked out through the pit railing for the first time since he’d come in.

She was ready for him. She was looking at him. She’d hit him. There must have been an elbow nudge beyond her radius of downcast vision. She heard the other man’s slurred answer. “Yeah, I know, I seen it.”

She’d hit him hard. She could feel his eyes on her. She could have made a graph of the wavy line they traveled. She took her time. Not too fast now, not right away. She thought, “Funny how we know these things, all of us, even when we’ve never tried them before.” She concentrated on a line on her program as though she could never get enough of its mystic import. It was mostly dots, running from one side of the page over to the other. It helped to keep her eyes steady.

She counted the dots. Twenty-four of them, from character name over to performer name. There, that was about long enough. That had given it time to work. She let her lashes come up slowly and unveil her eyes.

They met his. They stayed with his. His had expected them to turn away, frost over. Instead, they accepted his glance, sustained it for as long as he cared to give it. They seemed to say, “Are you interested in me? All right, go ahead, I don’t mind.”

He was a shade surprised for a moment at this ready acceptance. He kept on looking for all he was worth. He even tried a tentative smile, that was ready to be rubbed out at a moment’s notice too.

She accepted that in turn. She even sent him one back, of about the same degree as his. His deepened. Hers did too.

The preliminaries were over, they were getting into— And then, damn it, the buzzer signaled from back curtain. The conductor tapped out attention, spread his arms holding them poised. Flounced them, and the overture was under way, he and she had to break it off.

That was all right, she consoled herself. So far so good. The show couldn’t be straight music all the way through, no show was. There would be rest spells.

The curtain went up. She was aware of voices, lights, figures. She didn’t bother with what was going on onstage. She wasn’t here to see a show. She minded her own business strictly, and her business was making a musician.

He turned and spoke to her at the start of the intermission, when they were filing out for a rest and a smoke. He was the furthest over, so he was the last to go; that gave him the chance to do it undetected behind the others’ backs. The people next to her had gotten up and gone out, so he could tell she was alone, even if her conduct had left him any doubts on that point until now, which it certainly should not have.

“How do you like it so far?”

“It’s real good,” she purred.

“Doing anything afterwards?”

She pouted. “No, I only wish I was.”

He turned to go out after his fellow bandsmen. “You are,” he assured her smugly, “now.”

She gave her skirt a corrective downward hitch with considerable asperity as soon as he was gone. She felt as though she could have used a scalding shower and plenty of Lifebuoy.

Her face lines slipped back to where they belonged. Even the make-up couldn’t hide the alteration. She sat there, pensive, alone, at the end of the empty row of seats. Maybe tonight, darling, maybe tonight.

When the house lights went on again at the final curtain, she lingered behind, pretending to have dropped this, pretending to be adjusting that, while the rest of the audience siphoned slowly up through the aisles.

The band finished playing them out. He gave the cymbal atop his drum a final stroke, steadied it with his fingers, put down his drumsticks, snapped off the light over his rack. He was through for the night, he was on his own time now. He turned around to her slowly, as if already feeling himself the dominant factor in the situation. “Wait for me around at the stage alley, lovely,” he said. “Be with you in five minutes.”

There was ignominy attached even to the simple act of waiting for him outside, for some reason she couldn’t quite ascertain. Perhaps it was something about his personality that tinged everything that way. She felt crawly, walking up and down out there. And a little afraid. And the way all the other bandsmen, coming out ahead of him (he couldn’t even spare her that embarrassment, he had to be the last one out), looked at her as they passed added to her discomfort.

Then suddenly he’d swept her off with him by surprise. That is to say, before she’d even seen him coming, he had her arm possessively under his and was towing her along with him, without even breaking stride. That was probably characteristic of him, too, she thought.

“How’s my new little friend?” he began breezily.

“Fine, how’s mine?” she gave him back.

“We’ll go where the rest of the gang goes,” he said. “I’d catch cold without ’em.” She got the idea. She was like a new boutonnière to him, he wanted to show her off.

This was at twelve.

By two o’clock she decided he’d been softened up enough by beer for her to begin to go to work on him. They were in the second of two identical places by then, the gang still in the offing. A peculiar sort of etiquette seemed to govern things of this sort. He and she had moved on when the rest of them moved, and yet once they were in the new place they continued their separateness, at a table by themselves. He would get up and join the others every once in a while, and then come back to her again, but the others never came over and joined him, she noticed. Probably because she was his, and they were supposed to stay away from her.

She’d been watching carefully for her opening for some time. She knew she’d better get going at it; after all, the night wouldn’t last forever, and she couldn’t face the thought of having to go through another one like it.

One offered itself finally, just what she wanted, in one of the rancid compliments he’d been shoveling at her all evening — whenever he thought of it. Somewhat like an absent-minded stoker keeping a fire going.

“You say I’m the prettiest thing ever sat in that seat. But there must have been other times you turned around and saw someone you liked sitting there right behind you. Tell me about some of them.”

“Not in it with you, wouldn’t waste my breath.”

“Well, just for fun, I’m not jealous. Tell me: if you had your choice, out of all the attractive women you ever saw sitting behind you, in that same seat where I was tonight, since you’ve been playing in theaters, which was the one you would have rather taken out?”

“You, of course.”

“I knew you’d say that. But after me; which would your second choice be? I want to see just how far back you can remember. I bet you can’t remember their faces from one night to the next.”

“Can’t I? Well just to show you. I turn around one night and there’s a dame sitting there right on the other side of the rail from me—”

Under the table she was holding the soft inside curve of her arm with her own hand, squeezing it tightly as though it ached unendurably.

“This was at the other house, the Casino. I don’t know, something about her got me—”

A succession of attenuated shadows slipped across their table one by one; the last one of all stood still for a minute. “We’re going to pitch a jam-session downstairs in the basement. Coming?”

Her gripping hand relaxed its hold on her arm, fell away frustratedly down by the side of her chair. They’d all gotten up, were piling in through a basement entrance at the back.

“No, stay up here with me,” she urged, reaching out to hold him. “Finish what you—”

He’d already risen. “Come on, you don’t want to miss this, snooks.”

“Don’t you do enough playing all evening at the theater?”

“Yeah, but that’s for pay. This is for myself. You’re going to hear something now.”

He was going to leave her anyway, she saw, this had a stronger pull than she had, so she rose reluctantly to her feet and trailed after him down narrow brick-walled stairs to the restaurant basement. They were all in a large room down there, with instruments in it already that they must have used at previous times. Even an upright piano. There was a single large but smoky bulb hanging on a loose wire from the center of the ceiling, and to supplement this they had candles stuck in bottles. There was a battered wooden table in the middle, and they put bottles of gin on it, nearly one to a man. One of them spread a piece of brown wrapping paper out and dumped quantities of cigarettes on it, for anyone to help themselves at will. Not the kind the world upstairs smoked; black-filled things; reefers, she heard them call them.

They closed and bolted the door, as soon as she and Mil-burn had come in, to keep themselves free from interruption. She was the only girl among them.

There were packing cases and empty cartons and even a keg or two to sit on. A clarinet tootled mournfully, and mania had begun.

The next two hours were a sort of Dantesque Inferno. She knew as soon as it was over she wouldn’t believe it had actually been real at all. It wasn’t the music, the music was good. It was the phantasmagoria of their shadows, looming black, wavering ceiling high on the walls. It was the actuality of their faces, possessed, demonic, peering out here and there on sudden notes, then seeming to recede again. It was the gin and the marihuana cigarettes, filling the air with haze and flux. It was the wildness that got into them, that at times made her cower into a far corner or climb up on a packing case with both feet. Certain ones of them would come at her at times, individually, crowding her back, driving her before them shrinking against the wall, singling her out because she was a girl, blowing their wind instruments full into her face, deafening her, stirring her hair with them, bringing terror into her soul.

“Come on, get up on the barrel and dance!”

“I can’t! I don’t know how!”

“It don’t have to be your feet. Do it with what else you’ve got, that’s what it’s for. Never mind your dress, we’re all friends.”

“Darling,” she thought, sidling away from a rabid saxophone player until he gave up following her any more with a final ceilingward blat of unutterable woe, “Oh, darling, you’re costing me dear.”

She managed to work her way around two sides of the room until she got to the boiler factory that was the trap drum. She caught his pistoning arms, held them down, restrained them long enough to make herself heard. “Cliff, take me out of here. I can’t stand it! I can’t stand any more of it, I tell you! I’m going to keel over in another minute.”

He was already doped with marihuana. She could tell by his eyes. “Where’ll we go, my place?”

She had to say yes, she could see that was the only thing that would get him out of there.

He got up, guided her before him toward the door, stumbling a little. He got it open for her, and she fled through it like something released from a slingshot. Then he came out after her. He seemed free to leave at will, without an explanation or farewell. The rest didn’t even seem to notice his defection. The closing of the door cut the frenzied turmoil in half, as with the clean sweep of a knife, and there was sudden silence, so strange at first.

The restaurant upstairs was dark and empty, save for a night light left burning far at the back, and when she had gained the sidewalk in front, the open air made her almost light-headed, it was so cool and rare and crystal clear after that fever chamber. She thought she’d never breathed anything so sweet and pure before. She leaned there against the side of the building, drinking it in, her cheek pressed to the wall like someone prostrated. He took a moment longer to come out after her, adjusting the door or something.

It must have been four by now, but it was still dark and the town was asleep all around them. For a moment there was a temptation to flee for dear life down the street, away from him, and have done with the whole thing. She could have outrun him, she knew; he was in no condition to go after her.

She stayed there, passive. She had seen a photograph in her room. She knew that was the first thing that would meet her eyes when she opened the door. Then he was beside her, and the chance was gone.

They went over in a cab. It was in one of a row of old houses done over into apartments, a single one to a floor. He took her up to the second floor and unlocked it and turned on the lights for her. It was a depressing sort of place; age-blackened flooring underneath a thin application of varnish, remote ceilings, high, coffinlike window embrasures. It wasn’t a place to come to at four in the morning. Not with anyone, much less him.

She shivered a little and stood still, close by the door, trying not to be too aware of the over-elaborate way he was securing it on the inside. She wanted to keep her thinking as clear and as relaxed as she possibly could, and that thought would only muddy it.

He’d finished locking her in. “We don’t need these,” he said.

“No, leave it on,” she said matter-of-factly, “I’m cold.”

There wasn’t very much time.

“What’re you going to do, just stand there?”

“No,” she said with absent-minded docility, “no, I’m not going to just stand here.” She moved one foot inattentively forward, almost like a skater trying out the ice.

She kept looking around. Desperately looking around. What would start it? The color. Orange. Something orange.

“Well what’re you looking for?” he said querulously. “It’s just a room. Didn’t you ever see a room before?”

She’d found it at last. A cheap rayon shade on a lamp far over at the other end of the room. She went over to it, turned it on. It cast a small glow in the shape of a halo above itself against the wall. She put her hand on it, turned to him. “I love this color.”

He didn’t pay any attention.

She kept her hand on it. “You’re not listening. I said this is my favorite color.”

This time he looked blearily over. “All right, what about it?”

“I wish I had a hat this color.”

“I’ll buy you one. T’morrow or the next day.”

“Look, like this, this is how I mean.” She picked up the small base bodily, held it riding on her shoulder with the light still on inside the shade. Then she turned toward him so that the shade seemed to be topping her head. “Look at me. Look at me good. Didn’t you ever see anyone wearing a hat this color? Doesn’t this remind you of someone you once saw?”

He blinked twice, with owl-like solemnity.

“Keep looking,” she pleaded. “Just keep looking like that. You can remember if you want to. Didn’t you ever see anyone sitting right behind you in the theater, in the same seat I was in tonight, wearing a hat this color?”

He said, quite momentously, quite incomprehensibly. “Oh... that was that five hundred smackeroos I got!” And then suddenly shading his eyes with one hand as if in perplexity, “Hey, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about that.” Then he looked up and asked with a sort of trustful blankness, “Have I already told you?”

“Yes, sure.” That was the only answer to give. He might balk at telling her the first time, but not at repeating it, if the damage was already done. Those cigarettes probably did something to their powers of memory.

She had to grab it on the fly, she daren’t let it go by, even though she didn’t know if this was it yet, or what this was. She put the lamp down fast, moved toward him equally fast, yet somehow managing to give an impression of leisureliness. “But tell me about it over again. I like to listen to it. Go on, you can tell me. Cliff, because you know I’m your new friend, you said so yourself. What harm is there?”

He blinked again. “What are we talking about?” he said helplessly. “I forgot for a minute.”

She had to get his drug-disconnected chain of thought in motion again. It was like a feeder line that slips its cogs every once in a while and dangles helplessly. “Orange hat. Look, up here. Five hundred — five hundred smackeroos, remember? She sat in the same seat I did.”

“Oh yeah,” he said docilely. “Right behind me. I just looked at her.” He gave a maniacal laugh, stilled it again as suddenly. “I got five hundred smackeroos just for looking at her. Just for looking at her and not saying I did.”

She saw that her arms were creeping slowly up his collar, twining around his neck. She didn’t try to stop them, they seemed to be acting independently of her. Her face was close to his, turned upward looking into it. How close you can be to a thought, it occurred to her, without guessing what it is. “Tell me more about it, Cliff. Tell me more about it. I love to listen to you when you’re talking!”

His eyes died away in the fumes. “I forgot again what I was saying.”

It was off again. “You got five hundred dollars for not saying you looked at her. Remember, the lady in the orange hat? Did she give you the five hundred dollars, Cliff? Who gave you the five hundred dollars? Ah, come on, tell me.”

“A hand gave ’em to me, in the dark. A hand, and a voice, and a handkerchief. Oh yeah, and there was one other thing: a gun.”

Her fingers kept making a slow sweep to the back of his head, and then returning each time. “Yes, but whose hand?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I never found out since. Sometimes I ain’t even sure it really happened. I think it musta been the weed made it seem like it happened. Then again, sometimes I know it did.”

“Tell it to me anyway.”

“Here’s what happened. I came home late one night, after the show, and when I come in the hall downstairs, where there’s usually a light, it was dark. Like the bulb went out. Just as I feel my way over to the stairs, a hand reaches out and stops me. Kind of heavy and cold, laying on me hard.

“I backed against the wall and says, ‘Who’s there? Who are you?’ It was a man, I could tell by the voice. After a while, when my eyes got a little more used to it, I could make out something white, like a handkerchief, up where his face should be. It made his voice sound all blurry. But I could hear him all right.

“He gave me my own name first, and what my job was; he seemed to know everything about me. Then he asked me if I remember seeing a certain lady at the theater a night ago, in an orange hat.

“I told him I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t reminded me, but now that he’d reminded me of it, I did.

“Then he said, still in that same quiet voice, without even getting excited at all, ‘How would you like to be shot dead?’

“I couldn’t answer at all, my voice wouldn’t work. He took my hand and put it on something cold he was holding. It was a gun. I jumped, but he made me hold my hand there a minute until he was sure I got what it was. He said, ‘That’s for you, if you tell anyone that.’

“He waited a minute and then he went on speaking. He said, ‘Or would you rather have five hundred dollars?’

“I hear paper rustling and he puts something in my hand. ‘Here’s five hundred dollars,’ he says. ‘Have you got a match? Go ahead, I’ll let you light a match, so you can see it for yourself.’ I did, and it was five hundred dollars all right. Then when my eyes started to go up to where his face was, about, they just got as far as the handkerchief, and he blew the match out.

“ ‘Now you didn’t see that lady,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t any lady. No matter who asks you, say no, keep saying no — and you’ll keep on living.’ He waited a minute and then he asked me, ‘Now if they ask you, what is it you say?

“I said, ‘I didn’t see that lady. There wasn’t any lady.’ And I was shaking all over.

“ ‘Now go on upstairs,’ he said. ‘Good night.’ The way it sounded through that handkerchief, it was like something coming from a grave.

“I couldn’t get inside my door fast enough. I beat it upstairs and locked myself in and kept away from the windows. I’d been blazing a reefer already before it happened, and you know what that does to you.”

He gave another of those chilling jangles of laughter, that always stopped dead again as suddenly. “I lost the whole five hundred on a horse the next day,” he added abjectly.

He shifted harassedly, dislodging her from the chair arm she’d been perched on. “You’ve brought it back again, by making me talk about it. You’ve made me scared again and all shaky, like I was so many times afterward. Gimme another weed, I want to blaze again. I’m going down and I need another lift.”

“I don’t carry marihuana on me.”

“There must be some in your bag, from over there. You were just over there with me, you must have brought some away with you.” He evidently thought she’d been using them as well as he.

It was lying there on the table, and before she could get over and stop him he’d opened it and strewn everything out.

“No,” she cried out in sudden alarm, “that isn’t anything, don’t look at it!”

He’d already read it before she could pull it away from him. It was the forgotten slip of paper from Burgess. His surprise was guileless for a moment, he didn’t take in its full meaning at first. “Why, that’s me! My name and where I work and ev—”

“No! No!”

He warded her off. “And to call the precinct house number first, if not there call—”

She could see the mistrust starting to film his face, cloud it over. It was coming up fast, almost like a storm, behind his eyes. Behind it in turn was something more dangerous; stark, unreasoning fright, the fright of drug hallucination, the fright that destroys those it fears. His eyes started to dilate. The black centers of them seemed to swallow up the color of the pupils. “They sent you on purpose, you didn’t just happen to meet me. Somebody’s after me, and I don’t know who, if I could only remember who— Somebody’s going to shoot me with a gun, somebody said they’d shoot me with a gun! If I could only think what I wasn’t supposed to do— You made me do it!”

She’d had no experience with marihuana addicts before; she’d heard the word, but to her it had no meaning. She had no way of knowing the inflaming effect it has on emotions such as suspicion, mistrust and fear, expanding them well beyond the explosion point, providing they are latent already in the subject. She could tell by looking at him that she had somebody irrational to deal with, that much was apparent. The unpredictable current of his thoughts had veered dangerously, and there was no way for her to dam it, turn it aside. She couldn’t reach into his mind, because she was sane, and he — temporarily — wasn’t.

He stood misleadingly still for a moment, head inclined, looking up at her from under his brows. “I been telling you something I shouldn’t. Oh, if I could only remember now what it was!” He palmed his forehead distractedly.

“No, you haven’t, you haven’t been telling me anything,” she tried to soothe him. She had realized she’d better get out of the place without delay, and also, instinctively, that to make her purpose apparent was to invite interception. She began moving slowly backward, a surreptitious step at a time. She had placed her hands behind her back, so they would be in a position to find the door, try to unlock it, before he could realize her purpose. At the same time she tried to keep her gradual withdrawal from attracting his attention by staring fixedly into his face, holding his gaze with her own. She realized she was becoming increasingly taut at the horrible slowness of the maneuver. It was like backing away from a coiled snake, fearful that if you move too fast it will lash out all the quicker, fearful that if you move too slow—

“Yes, I did, I told you something I shouldn’t. And now you’re going to get out of here and tell someone. Somebody that’s after me. And they’ll come and get me like they said they would—”

“No, honest you haven’t, you only think you have.” He was getting worse instead of better. Her face must be growing smaller in his eyes, she couldn’t keep him from realizing she was drawing away from him much longer. She was up against the wall now, and her desperately circling hands, groping secretly behind her, found only smooth unbroken plaster surface instead of the door lock. She’d aimed wrong, she’d have to change directions. Out of the corner of her eye she placed its dark shape a few yards to her left. If he’d only stand there like that, where she’d left him, a second or two longer—

It was harder to move sidewise without seeming to than it had been rearward. She would sidle one heel out of true, then work the ball of the foot over after it, then do the same with the second foot, bringing them together again, all without letting any motion show in her upper body.

“Don’t you remember, I was sitting on the arm of your chair, smoothing your hair, that’s all I was doing. Ah, don’t!” she whimpered in a desperate last-minute effort to forestall him.

It was only a few seconds since this minuet of terror had begun. It seemed like all night. If she’d only had another of those devilish cigarettes to throw at him, maybe—

She grazed some small lightweight table or stand in her crabwise creep, and some little object fell off. That slight sound, that tick, that thud, that inadvertent betrayal of motion going on, did it; shattered the glaze, seemed to act as the signal his crazed nerves had been waiting for; unleashed what she’d instinctively known all along was coming from one moment to the next. He broke stance, like a figure in a waxworks toppling from its pedestal, came at her, arms out in a sort of off-balance lurch.

She floundered to the door with a muted, thin little cry that was no cry at all, only had time to ascertain one thing with her wildly flailing hands — that the key still projected, had been left in. Then she had to go on past it, he gave her no time to do anything with it.

She broke away from the wall, cut the corner of the room and made for the window, which was set into that next side. There was a blind down over it, effacing the exact outline of its sash frame, hampering the single, sketchy attempt to fling up the sash and scream out for help that was all his onrush allowed her. There was a stringy, dust laden drape hanging on each side of the embrasure. She flung one behind her at him, and it slowed him for a moment until he could get its hampering folds off his neck and shoulder.

There was a derelict sofa standing out diagonally across the next wall angle. She got in behind that, and before she could get out at the opposite end, he had sealed her in. They backed and filled along its length twice, she on her side, he on his, in a cat and mouse play, a Victorian beauty and the beast pantomime, that she would have laughed at until five minutes ago as being something that just didn’t occur, that belonged in “East Lynne,” but that she would never laugh at again for the rest of her life — although that apparently would only be for another two or three minutes.

“Don’t!” she kept panting. “No! Don’t! You know what they’ll do to you — if you do this to me up here — you know what they’ll do to you!”

She wasn’t talking to a man, she was talking to the aftereffects of a narcotic.

He suddenly took a short-cut by planting one knee on the seat of the sofa and grasping for her across the top of it. There wasn’t any room in the little triangle for her to withdraw far enough. His fingers caught under the neckline of her dress, at one shoulder. Before they could tighten, close on it, she had freed herself by flinging her body around in two or three complete revolutions. It pulled the whole thing down off her shoulder on that side, but the contact broke.

She flashed out past the gap at the lower end of the sofa while his body was still prone across the top of it, and skimmed along the wall on the fourth and final side of the room. She had now made a complete circuit of it, was coming back to the door again, on the next side. To cut out into the middle was to go toward him again, at any particular point, for he had the inside position.

There was an unlighted opening on this last side, the doorway to either a closet or bath, but after her experience with the sofa just now she flashed past it without stopping, fearful of being trapped even more quickly in whatever narrower space was offered on the other side of it. Besides, the outer door, the only way to final safety, lay just ahead.

She caught at a spindling wooden chair in passage, swung it around, flung it down behind her, in hopes of overthrowing him. He saw it in time, went out around it. It only gained her five extra seconds.

She was wearing down now. As she reached the final wall angle, turned to go along the side where this interminable game of puss-in-corner had first started, he cut out ahead of her, turned, and blocked her. She couldn’t reverse in time, went almost into him. He had her in a pocket now, between him and the wall. His arms scissored for her. She could go neither forward nor back, so she went down, the only direction there was left. She had dropped down through them before they could close, and darted out from below them, so close she grazed his side as she went.

She screamed a name. The one name of all that was most powerless to help her right now. “Scott! Scott, darling!” The door was ahead, but she’d never get to it in time. And she was too spent to go on past it any further—

The little lamp was still there, the one she’d tried to light his memory with before. It was too light to be able to harm him much, but she picked it up and flung it back at him. It failed even to hit him, dropped futilely wide of the mark, and the bulb in it didn’t even shatter against the dingy carpeting. He came on undeterred in the final surge that they both knew—

And then something happened. His toe must have caught in something. She didn’t see these things at the time, but remembered about them later. The unbroken lamp bucked violently on the floor behind him, there was a flash of bright blue from the foot of the wall, and he went sprawling down full-length between the two, arms at full reach.

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 I 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.