Phantom Lady

1 The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution

Six p. m.

The night was young, and so was he. But the night was sweet, and he was sour. You could see it coming from yards away, that sullen look on his face. It was one of those sustained angers, pent-up but smoldering, that last for hours sometimes. It was a shame, too, because it was all out of tune with everything around him. It was the one jarring note in the whole scene.

It was an evening in May, at the get-together hour. The hour when half the town, under thirty, has slicked back its hair and given its billfold a refill and sauntered jauntily forth to keep that date. And the other half of the town, still under thirty, has powdered its nose and put on something special and tripped blithely forth to keep that same date. Everywhere you looked, the two halves of the town were getting together. On every corner, in every restaurant and bar. outside drugstores and inside hotel lobbies and under jewelry store clocks, and darned near every place there was that somebody else hadn’t beat them to first. And the same old stuff went around and around, old as the hills but always new. “Here I am. Been waiting long?” “You look swell. Where’ll we go?”

That was the kind of an evening it was. The sky was rouge red in the west, as though it was all dolled up for a date itself, and it was using a couple of stars for diamond clips to hold up its evening gown. Neons were beginning to wink out along the street vistas, flirting with the passers-by like everyone else was tonight, and taxi horns were chirping, and everyone was going some place, all at one time. The air wasn’t just air, it was aerated champagne, with a whiff of Coty for good measure, and if you didn’t watch out it went to your head. Or maybe your heart.

And there he went, pushing that sore face in front of him, spoiling the whole scene. People glancing at him as he strode by wondered what he had to be that ill-tempered about. It wasn’t his health. Anyone that could swing along at the gait he was, must be in the pink of condition. It wasn’t his circumstances. His clothes had that carelessly expensive hang that can’t be faked. It wasn’t his age. If he had thirty beat at all, it was by months, not years. He wouldn’t have been half bad looking if he’d given his features a chance to unpucker. You could tell that around the edges where the scowl was thin.

He went striding along with that chip-on-the-shoulder look, his mouth a downturned ellipse, a horseshoe stuck under his nose. The topcoat slung across the crook of his arm bobbed up and down with the momentum of his pace. His hat was too far back on his head and it had a dent in the wrong place, as though he’d punched it on without adjusting it afterward. Probably the only reason his shoes didn’t strike sparks from the pavement was because they were rubber heeled.

He hadn’t intended going in where he finally did. You could tell that by the abrupt way he braked as he came opposite to it. There was no other word for the way he halted; it was as though a brace down his leg had locked, jamming him still. He probably wouldn’t have even noticed the place if the intermittent neon over it hadn’t glowed on just then, as he was passing. It said Anselmo’s in geranium red, and it dyed the whole sidewalk under it as though somebody had spilled a bottle of ketchup.

He swerved aside, on what was obviously an impulse, and went barging in. He found himself in a long, low-ceilinged room, three or four steps below street level. It wasn’t a large place nor, at the moment, a crowded one. It was restful on the eyes; the lighting was subdued, amber-colored, and directed upward. There was a line of little bracketed nooks with tables set in them running down both walls. He ignored them and went straight back to the bar, which was semicircular, facing toward the entrance from the rear wall. He didn’t look to see who was at it, or whether anyone was at it at all. He just dumped his topcoat on top of one of the tall chairs, dropped his hat on top of it, and then sat down on the next one over. His attitude plainly implied he was there for the night.

A blurred white jacket approached just above the line of his downcast vision and a voice said, “Good evening, sir.”

“Scotch,” he said, “and a little water. I don’t give a damn how little.”

The water stayed on untouched, after its companion glass was empty.

He must have, subconsciously at the moment of sitting down, glimpsed a bowl of pretzels or some sort of accessory like that over to his right. He reached out that way without looking. His hand came down, not on a twisted baked shape but on a straight smooth one that moved slightly.

He swung his head around, took his hand off the other one that had just preceded his into the bowl. “Sorry.” he grunted. “After you.”

He swung his head around to his own business once more. Then he turned again, gave her a second look. He kept on looking from then on, didn’t quit after that. Still in a gloomy, calculating way, though.

The unusual thing about her was the hat. It resembled a pumpkin, not only in shape and size but in color. It was a flaming orange, so vivid it almost hurt the eyes. It seemed to light up the whole bar, like a low-hanging garden party lantern. Stemming from the exact center of it was a long thin cockerel feather, sticking straight up like the antenna of an insect. Not one woman in a thousand would have braved that color. She not only did, she got away with it. She looked startling, but good, not funny. The rest of her was toned down, reticent in black, almost invisible against that beacon of a hat. Perhaps the thing was a symbol of some sort of liberation to her. Perhaps the mood that went with it was, “When I have this on, watch out for me! The sky’s the limit!”

Meanwhile, she was nibbling a pretzel and trying to seem unaware of his steady scrutiny. When she broke off nibbling, that was the only sign she gave of being aware that he had quitted his own chair, come over, and was standing beside her.

She inclined her head very slightly, in a listening attitude, as if to say, “I’m not going to stop you, if you try to speak. Whether I do after that or not, depends on what you have to say.”

What he had to say, with terse directness, was, “Are you doing anything?”

“I am, and I’m not.” Her answer was well-mannered, but not encouraging. She didn’t smile nor commit herself to receptiveness in any way. She carried herself well; whatever else she was, she wasn’t cheap.

There was no trace of the masher in his own manner, either. He went on, briskly impersonal. “If you’ve got an engagement, just say so. I’m not trying to annoy you.”

“You’re not annoying me — so far.” She got her meaning across perfectly: my decision is still held in the balance.

His eyes went to the clock up over the bar, facing both of them. “Look, it’s ten after six, right now.”

Her own eyes sought it in turn. “So it is.” she agreed neutrally.

He had taken out a wallet, meanwhile, extracted a small oblong envelope from one of the compartments. This he opened in turn, and prodded forward two salmon-colored pasteboard strips, forking them apart as he did so. “I have two perfectly good tickets here for the show at the Casino. Row Double-A, aisle seats. Care to take it in with me?”

“You’re abrupt about it.” Her eyes went from the tickets to his face.

“I have to be abrupt about it.” He was scowling as deeply as ever. He wasn’t even looking at her at all, he was looking at the tickets with an air of resentment. “If you have a previous engagement say so, and I’ll try to find somebody else to share them with me.”

A flicker of interest showed in her eyes. “These tickets must be used up at all costs?”

“It’s a matter of principle,” he said sullenly.

“This could be mistaken for a very crude attempt at, shall we say, striking up an acquaintanceship,” she let him know. “The reason I don’t think it is, is it’s so blunt, so unvarnished, it couldn’t be anything but just what you say it is.”

“It isn’t.” His face was still set in flinty lines.

She had veered slightly toward him on her chair by now. Her way of accepting was to remark, “I’ve always wanted to do something of this sort. I’d better do it now. The chance mayn’t recur — at least not in a genuine form — for a long time.”

He armed her down. “Shall we make an agreement before we start? It may make it simpler afterward, when the show is over.”

“That depends on what it is.”

“We’re just companions for an evening. Two people having dinner together, seeing a show together. No names, no addresses, no irrelevant personal references and details. Just—”

She supplied, “Two people seeing a show together, companions for an evening. I think that’s a very sensible, in fact necessary, understanding, so let’s abide by it. It does away with a great deal of self-consciousness, and perhaps even an occasional lie.” She offered him her hand, and they shook briefly on it. She smiled for the first time. She had a rather likable smile; reserved, not too sugary.

He motioned the barman over, tried to pay for both drinks.

“I’d already paid for mine before you came in.” she told him. “I was just coasting along on it.”

The barman took a small tablet out of the pocket of his jacket, penciled 1 Scotch — 60 on the top leaf, tore it off and presented it to him.

They were numbered, he noticed, and he saw that he’d drawn a large, beetling, black 13 in the upper corner. He gave a wry grin, handed it back with the requisite amount, turned and went after her.

She had preceded him toward the entrance. A girl ensconced with a companion in one of the wall booths leaned slightly outward to stare after the glowing hat as it went by. He, coming up in the rear, was just in time to catch that.

Outside she turned to him, questioningly. “I’m in your hands.”

He forefingered a taxi waiting a few car lengths away. One cruising past at the moment, for whom the signal had not been intended, tried to chisel in on the hail. The first one frustrated it by rolling up into position ahead of it, but not without a slight scraping of fenders and snatches of belligerent repartee. By the time the competition had sidled off again and the first driver had cooled sufficiently to turn his attention to his fares-to-be, she was already ensconced inside.

Her host had waited a moment by the driver’s seat to give him the destination. “Maison Blanche,” he said, and then followed her in.

The light was on, and they let it stay that way. Perhaps because to have turned it out would have been a suggestion of intimacy, neither one felt a dim-out was appropriate to the occasion.

Presently he heard her give a little gratified chuckle, and following the direction of her eyes, grinned sparingly in accompaniment. Cabmen’s license-photos are seldom examples of great portrait beauty, but this one was a caricature, with its pitcher ears, receding chin, and pop eyes. The name identifying it was memorably curt and alliterative: Al Alp.

His mind took note of it, then let it go again.

The Maison Blanche was an intimate type dining room, renowned for the excellence of its food. It was one of those places over which a hush of appreciation seems to hang, even at their busiest hours. No music nor distraction of any other sort was allowed to interfere with its devotees’ singleness of purpose.

In the foyer she separated from him. “Will you excuse me a moment while I go in and repair the ravages of time? Go in and sit down awhile, don’t wait, I’ll find you.”

As the powder room door opened to admit her, he saw her hands start upward toward her hat, as if she intended to remove it. The door closed after her before she completed the gesture. It occurred to him that a temporary lapse of courage was probably the real reason behind this whole maneuver; that she had separated from him and was about to remove the hat in order to be able to enter the dining room singly after he did, and thereby attract a degree less attention.

A headwaiter greeted him at the dining room entrance. “One, sir?”

“No, I have a reservation for two.” And then he gave the name. “Scott Henderson.”

He found it on his list. “Ah, yes.” He glanced over the guest’s shoulder. “Are you alone, Mr. Henderson?”

“No,” Henderson answered noncommittally.

It was the only vacant table in sight. It was in a secluded position, set back into an indentation in the wall, so that its occupants could only be seen frontally, were screened from the rest of the diners on three sides.

When she appeared at the dining room entrance presently, she was hatless, and he was surprised at how much the hat had been able to do for her. There was something flat about her. The light had gone out; the impact of her personality was soggy, limp. She was just some woman in black, with dark brown hair; something that blocked the background, that was all. Not homely, not pretty, not tall, not small, not chic, not dowdy; not anything at all, just plain, just colorless, just a common denominator of all feminine figures everywhere. A cipher. A composite. A Gallup poll.

Not a head that turned remained turned a second longer than necessary, or carried back any continuing memory of what it had seen.

The headwaiter, momentarily engaged in tossing a salad, was not on hand to guide her. Henderson stood up to show her where he was, and she did not strike directly through the room, he noticed, but made her way unobtrusively around two sides of it, which was the longer but the far less conspicuous way.

The hat, which she had been carrying at arm’s length beside her, she placed on the third chair of their table, and partly covered it with the edge of the cloth, possibly to protect it from stains.

“Do you come here often?” she asked.

He pointedly failed to hear her.

“Sorry,” she relented, “that comes under the heading of personal background.”

Their table waiter had a mole on his chin. He couldn’t help noticing that.

He ordered for them without consulting her. She listened attentively, gave him an appreciative glance when he had finished.

It was uphill work getting started. There were heavy restrictions on her choice of topics, and she had his leaden mood to combat as well. Manlike, he left most of the effort to her, made very little attempt to keep his own end up. Though he gave a sketchy appearance of listening, his thoughts were obviously elsewhere most of the time. He would bring them back again each time, and with an effort that was almost a physical wrench, only when his abstraction had become so noticeable it threatened to be flagrantly discourteous.

“Don’t you want to take your gloves off?” he said at one point. They were black, like everything else about her but the hat. They hadn’t appeared awkward with the cocktail or puree, but with the sole came a slice of lemon that she was trying to mash with her fork.

She stripped the right one off immediately. She took a little longer with the left, seemed about to leave it on after all. Then finally, with a touch of defiance, she followed suit with that.

He carefully refrained from seeing the wedding band, looked out and across at something else. But he could tell she knew that he had.

She was a good conversationalist, without being spectacular about it. She was dexterous, too, managed to eschew the obvious, the banal, the dry; the weather, the newspaper headlines, the food they were engaged with.

“This crazy South American, this Mendoza, in the show we’re seeing tonight: when I first saw her a year or so ago, she had hardly any accent at all. Now, with every engagement she has up here, she seems to unlearn more English, acquire a heavier one than the time before. One more season and she’ll be back in pure Spanish.”

He gave one third of a smile. She was cultured, he could tell that about her. Only someone cultured could have gotten away with what she was doing tonight and not made a ghastly mess of it, either in one direction or the other. She had balance, to take the place of either propriety or recklessness. And there again, if she had leaned a little more one way or the other, she would have been more memorable, more positive. If she had been a little less well-bred, she would have had the piquancy, the raffishness, of the parvenu. If she had been a little more, she would have been brilliant — and therefore memorable in that respect. As it was, polarized between the two, she was little better than two dimensional.

Toward the end, he caught her studying his necktie. He looked down at it questioningly. “Wrong color?” he suggested. It was a solid, without any pattern.

“No, quite good, in itself,” she hastened to assure him. “Only, it doesn’t match — it’s the one thing that doesn’t go with everything else you— Sorry, I didn’t mean to criticize.” she concluded.

He glanced down at it a second time, with a sort of detached curiosity, as though he hadn’t known until now, himself, just which one it was he had put on. Almost as though he were surprised to find it on him. He destroyed a little of the tonal clash she had indicated by thrusting the edge of his dress handkerchief down out of sight into his pocket.

He lit their cigarettes, they stayed with their cognacs awhile, and then they left.

It was only in the foyer — at a full-length glass out in the foyer — that she finally put her hat on again. And at once she came alive, she was something, somebody, again. It was wonderful, he reflected, what that hat could do to her. It was like turning on the current in a glass chandelier.

A gigantic theater doorman, fully six-four, opened the cab door for them when it had driven up, and his eyes boggled comically as the hat swept past, almost directly under them. He had white walrus-tusk mustaches, almost looked like a line drawing of a theater-doorman in the New Yorker. His bulging eyes followed it from right to left as its wearer stepped down and brushed past him. Henderson noted this comic bit of optic byplay, to forget it again a moment later. If anything is ever really forgotten.

The completely deserted theater lobby was the best possible criterion of how late they actually were. Even the ticket taker at the door had deserted his post by now. An anonymous silhouette against the stage glow, presumably an usher, accosted them just inside the door, sighted their tickets by flashlight, then led them down the aisle, trailing an oval of light backhand along the floor to guide their advancing feet.

Their seats were in the first row. Almost too close. The stage was an orange blur for a moment or two, until their eyes had grown used to the foreshortened perspective.

They sat patiently watching the montage of the revue, scene blending into scene with the superimposed effect of motion picture dissolves. She would beam occasionally, even laugh outright now and then. The most he would do was give a strained smile, as though under obligation to do it. The noise, color, and brilliance of lighting reached a crescendo, and then the curtains rippled together, ending the first half.

The house lights came on, and there was a stir all around them as people got up and went outside.

“Care for a smoke?” he asked her.

“Let’s stay where we are. We haven’t been sitting as long as the rest of them.” She drew the collar of her coat closer around the back of her neck. The theater was stifling already, so the purpose of it, he conjectured, was to screen her profile from observation as far as possible.

“Come across some name you’ve recognized?” she murmured presently, with a smile.

He looked down and found his fingers had been busily turning down the upper right-hand corner of each leaf of his program, one by one, from front to back. They were all blunted now, with neat little turned-back triangles superimposed one on the other. “I always do that, fidgety habit I’ve had for years. A variation of doodling, I guess you’d call it. I never know I’m doing it, either.”

The trap under the stage opened and the orchestra started to file back into the pit for the second half. The trap-drummer was nearest to them, just across the partition rail. He was a rodentlike individual, who looked as though he hadn’t been out in the open air for ten years past. Skin stretched tight over his cheekbones, hair so flattened and glistening it almost looked like a wet bathing cap with a white seam bisecting it. He had a little twig of a mustache that almost seemed like smudge from his nose.

He didn’t look outward into the audience at first; busied himself adjusting his chair and tightening something or other on his instrument. Then, set, he turned idly, and almost at once became aware of her and of the hat.

It seemed to do something to him. His vapid, unintelligent face froze into an almost hypnotic fascination. His mouth even opened slightly, like a fish’s, stayed that way. He would try to stop staring at her every once in a while, but she was on his mind, he couldn’t keep his eyes away very long, they would stray back to her each time.

Henderson took it in for a while, with a sort of detached, humorous curiosity. Then finally, seeing that it was beginning to make her acutely uncomfortable, he put a stop to it in short order, by sending such a sizzling glare at him that he turned back to his music rack forthwith and for good. You could tell, though, even with his head turned the other way, that he was still thinking about her, by the rather conscious, stiff way he held his neck.

“I seem to have made an impression,” she chuckled under her breath.

“Perfectly good trap-drummer ruined for the evening,” he assented.

The gaps behind them had filled up again now. The house lights dimmed, the foots welled up, and the overture to the second act began. He went ahead moodily pleating the upper corners of his dog-eared program.

Midway through the second half there was a crescendo build-up, then the American house orchestra laid down its instruments. An exotic thumping of tom-toms and rattling of gourds onstage took its place, and the main attraction of the show. Estela Mendoza, the South American sensation, appeared.

A sharp nudge from his seat mate reached him even before he had had time to make the discovery for himself. He looked at her without understanding, then back to the stage again.

The two women had already become mutually aware of the fatal fact that was still eluding his slower masculine perceptions. A cryptic whisper reached him. “Just look at her face. I’m glad there are footlights between us. She could kill me.”

There was a distinct glitter of animosity visible in the expressive black eyes of the figure onstage, over and above her toothsome smile, as they rested on the identical replica of her own headgear, flaunted by his companion there in the very first row where it couldn’t be missed.

“Now I understand where they got the inspiration for this particular creation,” she murmured ruefully.

“But why get sore about it? I should think she’d be flattered.”

“It’s no use expecting a man to understand. Steal my jewelry, steal the gold fillings from my teeth, but don’t steal my hat. And over and above that, in this particular case it’s a distinctive part of her act, part of her trademark. It’s probably been pirated, I doubt that she’d give permission to—”

“I suppose it is a form of plagiarism.” He watched with slightly heightened interest, if not yet complete self-forget-fulness.

Her art was a simple thing. As real art always is. And as getting away with something at times is, too. She sang in Spanish, but even in that language there was very little intellect to the lyric. Something like this:

Over and over. Meanwhile she kept rolling her eyes from side to side, throwing one hip out of joint at every step she took, and throwing little nosegays out to the women members of the audience from a flat basket she carried slung at her side.

By the time she had run through two choruses of the thing, every woman in the first two or three rows was in possession of one of her floral tokens. With the notable exception of Henderson’s companion. “She purposely held out on me, to get even for the hat,” she whispered knowingly. And as a matter of fact, every time the hitching, heel-stamping figure on the stage had slowly worked her way past their particular vantage point, there had been an ominous flash, an almost electrical crackling, visible in her fuselike eves as they glided over that particular location.

“Watch me call her on it,” she remarked under her breath for his benefit. She clasped her hands together, just below her face, in vise formation.

The hint was patently ignored.

She extended them out before her, at half arm’s length, held them that way in solicitation.

The eyes on the stage slitted for a minute, then resumed their natural contour, strayed elsewhere.

Suddenly there was a distinct snap of the fingers from Henderson’s companion. A crackling snap, sharp enough to top the music. The eyes rolled back again, glowered maniacally at the offender. Another flower came out and winged over, but still not to her.

“I never know when I’m beaten,” he heard her mutter doggedly. Before he knew what she meant, she had risen to her feet, stood there in her seat, smiling beatifically, passively claiming her due.

For a moment there was a deadlock between the two. But the odds were too unequal. The performer, after all was said and done, was at the mercy of this individualistic spectator, for she had an illusion of sweetness and charm to maintain at all costs in the sight of the rest of the audience.

The alteration in the stature of Henderson’s seat mate also had an unforeseen result in another respect. As the hip-hiker slowly made the return trip, the spotlight, obediently following her and slanted low, cut across the head and shoulders of this lone vertical impediment, standing up on the orchestra floor. The result was that the similarity of the two hats was brought explosively to everyone’s attention. A centripetal ripple of comment began to spread outward, as when a stone is dropped into heretofore still waters.

The performer capitulated and capitulated fast, to put an end to this odious comparison. Up came a blackmail-extorted flower, out it went over the footlights in a graceful little curve. She covered up the omission by making a rueful little moue, as if to say, “Did I overlook you? Forgive me, I didn’t meant to.” Behind it, however, could be detected the subcutaneous pallor of a lethal tropical rage.

Henderson’s companion had deftly caught the token and subsided into her seat again with a gracious lip movement. Only he detected the wordage that actually emerged, “Thank you — you Latin louse!” He choked on something in his throat.

The worsted performer slowly worked her way off into the wings with little spasmodic hitches, while the music died down like the clatter of train wheels receding into the distance.

In the wings they glimpsed a momentary but highly revealing vignette, while the house was still rocking with applause. A pair of shirt-sleeved masculine arms, most likely the stage manager’s, were bodily restraining the performer from rushing back onstage again. Obviously for some purpose over and above merely taking bows. Her hands, held down at her sides by his bear-hug embrace, were visibly clenched into fists and twitching with punitive intent. Then the stage blacked out and another number came on.

At the final curtain, as they rose to go, he tossed his program into the discard, onto the seat he had just quitted.

To his surprise she reached down for it, added it to her own, which she was retaining. “Just as a memento,” she remarked.

“I didn’t think you were sentimental,” he said, moving slowly up the choked aisle at her heels.

“Not sentimental, strictly speaking. It’s just that — I like to gloat over my own impulsiveness at times, and these things will help.”

Impulsiveness? Because she had joined forces with him for the evening, without ever having seen him before, he supposed. He shrugged — inwardly, if not visibly.

As they were fighting their way toward a taxi, in the melee outside the entrance, an odd little mischance occurred. They had already claimed their cab, but before they could get into it, a blind beggar approached, hovered beside her in mute appeal, alms cup all but nudging her. The lighted cigarette she was holding was jarred from her fingers in some way, either by the beggar himself or someone nearby, and fell into the cup. Henderson saw it happen, she didn’t. Before he could interfere the trustful unfortunate had thrust probing fingers in after it, and then snatched them back again in pain.

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.