Phantom Lady

13 The Eleventh Day Before the Execution

Lombard

Lombard had been following him for the past hour and a half and there’s nothing slower to be followed on the face of the earth than a blind mendicant. He moved like a tortoise that counts its life span by centuries, instead of a man that counts his by years. It took him an average of forty minutes to traverse each block length, from one corner to the next. Lombard timed it with his watch several times

He didn’t have a seeing eye dog. He had to rely on his fellow pedestrians to get him safely over the crossings, each time he came to one. They never failed him. Cops held up traffic well into the green, if he hadn’t quite made it by the time the change over came. Hardly anyone that passed failed to drop something into his cup, so it paid him to walk slow.

It was painful to Lombard in the extreme; he was active, unhandicapped, and with an acutely heightened sense of time value these days. Several times it was all he could do to hang back in the wake of this endless, creeping progress that was like a variation of the Chinese water-drop torture. But he curbed himself, kept him grimly in sight, sucking impatiently at cigarettes for a safety valve, standing immobile for long stretches at a time in doorways and shop-window indentations to let him accomplish some distance then closing in rapidly again in a few hectic strides, and falling motionless once more, to once more let his quarry eke out a little further microscopic progress. Breaking it up that way into fits and starts took a little of the curse out of it.

It couldn’t keep forever, he kept reminding himself. It couldn’t last through the whole night. That figure up ahead of him was a human being in a human being’s body. He had to sleep sometime. He’d have to turn in out of the open and go behind walls and lie down to rest sometime. His kind didn’t beg straight through the night hours until day break, the law of diminishing returns alone would be enough to discourage that.

And finally it came. Lombard had thought it never would, but it did at last. He turned aside, went within walls, and quitted the open. It was in a sector that had unnoticeably become so derelict as they both advanced through it, that no bounty could be expected from it. It was in need of alms itself, instead of being able to bestow. It was blocked off at one end by overhead railway tracks carried on a viaduct of rough-faced granite blocks.

His burrow was a mouldering tenement just short of this. Lombard had had to be careful, although he hadn’t realized even yet that the end was this close at hand. He’d had to remain well back, for the streets were desolate hereabouts, with few other footsteps to blur his own, and he knew they had supersensitive ears as a rule.

When he saw him enter, therefore, he was further back than he would have wished to be. He hurriedly closed in for the last time, trying to reach it in time to ascertain which floor it was, if possible. He stopped at the doorway and cautiously entered in turn, just deep enough within to be able to listen.

The cane taps were still going up, with infinite slowness. They sounded a little like drops of water from a faulty spigot striking into an empty wooden bucket. He held his breath, listening. He counted four breaks in them, changes of tempo, one for each turn of the stairs. They were duller on the level landings than on the incline of the stairs themselves. Then they dwindled off to the back, not the front, of the building.

He waited until he’d heard the faint closing of a door up there somewhere, then he started up in turn, treading stealthily but fast, with all the energy he’d had to hold suppressed until now unleashed at last. The acutely tilted flights of worn stairs would have prostrated anyone else; he was hardly aware of them.

There were two of them at the back, but he could tell which it was, because one of them, even at this distance, was obviously a water-closet.

He waited a moment at the top step until his rapidity of breath was completely quelled again, then advanced carefully toward it. Again he reminded himself how acute of hearing they were said to be. But he accomplished his purpose to perfection; not a floorboard wavered, due more to his superb muscular co-ordination than to any particular lightness of weight. He was and always had been a swell machine; something that belonged under the hood of a racing car instead of in a flimsy sack of skin.

He put his ear over against the door seam and listened.

There was no light coming from it, of course, because for him in there was never any light, so it would have done him no good to put it on. But he could hear an occasional sound of moving about. It put him in mind of an animal that withdraws into a hole, and then keeps turning for some little time afterward, getting itself comfortable, before it finally settles down for good.

There were no sounds of voice. He must be in there alone.

This was long enough. Now for it. He knocked.

The moving around died instantly, and there was nothing more. A cessation. A place trying to make itself seem empty. A frightened, bated stillness, that he knew would go on for as long as he was out there — if he permitted it to.

He knocked again.

“Come on,” he said sternly.

His third knocking was harshly imperative. The fourth would be blows.

“Come on,” he said brutally in the silence.

The flooring creaked timidly in there, and then a voice, almost with breath accompanying it, it was emitted so close to the door seam, asked, “Who’s out there?”

“A friend.”

The voice became more frightened at that, instead of less. “I haven’t any. I don’t know you.”

“Let me in. I won’t hurt you.”

“I can’t do it. I’m alone in here and helpless. I can’t let anyone in.” He was worried about his day’s gleanings, Lombard knew. You couldn’t blame him for that. It was a wonder he hadn’t lost them, in the way that he took this to be, long before now,

“You can let me in. Come on, open up a minute. I only want to talk to you.”

The voice on the other side quavered, “Get away from here. Go on away from my door or I’ll holler down for help from the window.” But it was pleading rather than threatening.

There was a short stalemate. Neither of them moved. Neither of them made a sound. They were acutely aware of each other’s nearness. Fright on one side of the door, determination on the other.

Lombard took out his wallet finally, scanned it thoughtfully. The largest denomination in it was a fifty-dollar bill. There were some smaller ones he could have taken out in place of it; he chose the larger one instead. He dropped to his heels, worked it through the crack under the door until there was nothing left of it to hold on to any more.

He straightened up again, said, “Reach down and feel along the bottom of the door. Doesn’t that prove I don’t want to rob you? Now let me in.”

There was a postscript of hesitancy, then a chain head slid off its groove. A bolt sidled back, and last of all a key turned in the keyhole. It had been well barricaded.

The door opened grudgingly, and the sightless black lenses that he’d first marked out on the streets hours ago stared at him. “Anyone else with you?”

“No, I’m alone. And I haven’t come here to harm you, so don’t be nervous.”

“You’re not an agent, are you?”

“No, I’m not a police agent. There’d be a cop with me if I was, and there’s nobody with me. I just want to talk to you, can’t you get that through your head?” He pushed his way in.

The room was invisible in the darkness, nonexistent, a pall of sightlessness, just as the other’s whole world must be. For a moment a wedge of dull amber-tan lying along the floor from the hall light outside helped a little, then that went too as the door closed.

“Put on a light, can’t you?”

“No,” the blind man said, “this makes us more even. If you just want to talk, what do you need a light for?” Lombard heard a decrepit bedspring sing out somewhere near by, as he sank down on it. He was probably sitting on his day’s take, nested under the mattress.

“Come on, cut out the foolishness, I can’t talk like this—” He groped around him at knee level, finally located the arm of a rickety wooden rocker, shifted it over, and sank into it.

“You said you wanted to talk,” the other voice said tautly in the dark. “Now you’re in, now go ahead and talk. You don’t have to see to be able to talk.”

Lombard’s voice said, “Well, at least I can smoke, can’t I? You don’t object to that, do you? You smoke yourself, don’t you?”

“When I can get it,” the other voice said wearily.

“Here, take one of these.” There was a click, and a small lighter-flame peered out in his hand. A little of the room came back.

The blind man was on the edge of the bed, his cane crosswise on his lap in case it should be required as a weapon.

Lombard’s hand came away from his pocket holding, instead of cigarette’s, a revolver. He held it in close, but pointed directly at the other. “Here, help yourself,” he repeated pleasantly.

The blind man became rigid. The cane rolled off his knees and hit the floor. He made a spasmodic warding motion of the hands, up toward his face. “I knew you were after my money!” he said hoarsely. “I shouldn’t have let you in—”

Lombard put the gun away again, as calmly as he had taken it out. “You’re not blind,” he said quietly. “I didn’t need that stunt to prove it to myself either. But I needed it to prove to you that I was already on to you. The mere fact that you opened the door for a fifty-dollar bill was proof enough. You must have struck a match for a minute and scanned it. How could you know it wasn’t a one-dollar bill, if you weren’t a fake? A one is the same size and shape, feels the same, as a fifty. A one wouldn’t have made it worth your while to open the door, you probably came in with more than that on you yourself just now. But a fifty was worth taking a chance for; that was more than you’d collected.”

He saw a misshapen remnant of candle, went over and touched the lighter to it while he was still speaking.

“You are an agent,” the beggar faltered, wiping sweat from his forehead harassedly with the back of his hand. “I might have known—”

“Not the kind you mean, interested in whether you’re out taking the public’s money under false pretenses or not. If that’s any consolation to you.” He came back and sat down again.

“Then what are you? What do you want with me?”

“I want you to remember something you saw — Mr. Blind Man,” he added ironically. “Now listen to this. You were hanging around outside the Casino Theater, working the audience as it came out, one night last May—”

“But I’ve been around there lots of times.”

“I’m talking about one night only, one particular night. That’s the only one I care about, I don’t give a damn about the rest. This night that I mean, a man and a woman came out together. Now here’s the woman: she had on a bright orange hat with a tall black feeler sticking up from it. You put the bite on them as they were getting into a taxi, a few yards down from the entrance. Listen carefully, now. Without thinking what she was doing, she dropped a lighted cigarette into the cup you shoved at her, instead of the donation she intended. It burned your finger. The man quickly dug it out for you, and to make it up to you, gave you a couple of dollars. I think he said something like this: ‘Sorry, old man, that was a mistake.’ Now surely you remember that. It isn’t every night your finger gets burned by a live cigarette landing in your cup, and it isn’t every night you get two dollars in a lick from just one passerby.”

“Suppose I say I don’t remember?”

“Then I’m going to haul you out of here with me right now and turn you in at the nearest police station as an impostor. You’ll get a stretch in the workhouse, you’ll be down on the police blotter from then on, and you’ll be picked up each time they see you trying to work the streets.”

The man on the bed clawed at his own face distractedly, momentarily displacing the dark glasses upward past his eyes. “But isn’t that like forcing me to say I remember, whether I do or not?”

“It’s only forcing you to admit what I’m sure you do remember anyway.”

“Then suppose I say I do remember, what happens then?”

“First you tell me what you remember, then you repeat it to a certain plainclothesman, a friend of mine. I’ll either bring him down here or take you up there with me to see him—”

The mendicant jolted with renewed dismay. “But how can I do that, without giving myself away? Especially to a plainclothesman! I’m supposed to be blind, how can I say I saw them? That’s the same as what you were threatening to do to me if I didn’t tell you!”

“No, you’ll just be telling it to this one guy, not the whole force at large. I can strike a bargain with him, get him to promise you immunity from prosecution. Now how about it? Did you or didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did,” the professional blind man admitted in a low voice. “I saw the two of them together. I usually keep my eyes closed, even behind the glasses, when I’m near bright lights, like there were outside that theater. But the cigarette burn made me open them good and wide. I can see through the glasses, and I saw them both, all right.”

Lombard took something out of his wallet. “Is this him?”

The blind man hitched his glasses up out of the way, scrutinized the snapshot critically. “I’d say it was,” he said finally. “Considering how short a glimpse I had of him, and how long ago it was, it looks to me like the same guy.”

“What about her? You’d know her again if you saw her?”

“I already have. I only saw him that one night, but I saw her at least once more after that—”

“What!” Lombard was suddenly on his feet, leaning over him. The rocker swayed emptily behind him. He grabbed him by the shoulder, squeezing as if trying to get the information out of his skinny frame in that way. “Let me hear about it! Come on, quick!”

“It was not very long after that same night, that’s how I knew it was she. It was in front of one of the big swanky hotels, and you know how bright they are. I heard a pair of footsteps coming down the steps, a man’s and a woman’s. I heard the woman say, ‘Wait a minute, maybe this’ll bring me luck,’ and I knew she meant me. I heard her footsteps turn aside and come over to me. A coin went in. A quarter. I can tell the different coins by the sounds they make. And then the funny part of it happened, that made me know it was she. It’s such a little thing, I don’t know if you’ll be able to catch on like I did. She stood still for just a tiny minute there in front of me, and they never do. The coin was already in, so I knew she must be looking at me. Or something about me. I was holding the cup in my right hand, the one with the burn on it, and the burn was one of those big water-blisters by that time. I think it must have been that she saw, on the side of my finger. Anyway, here’s what happened. I heard her say under her breath — not to me, but to herself — ‘Why, how very odd—!’ And then her footsteps turned and went back to where the man’s were. That was all—”

“But—”

“Wait a minute, I’m not finished yet. I opened my eyes just a slit, to look down at the cup. And she’d added a dollar hill to the original quarter she’d put in the first time. I knew it was she, because it hadn’t been in there until then. Now why should she change her mind and add a dollar bill after she’d already put in a quarter? It must have been the same woman; she must have recognized the blister and remembered what had happened a few nights be—”

“Must have, must have,” gritted Lombard impatiently. “I thought you said you saw her, could tell me what she looked like!”

“I can’t tell you what she looks like from the front, because I didn’t dare open my eyes. The lights were too bright around there, it would have been a give away. After she turned away and I saw the dollar bill, I peered up a little higher under my lashes and saw her from the back, as she w as getting into the car.”

“From the back! Well, tell me that at least, what was she like from the back!”

“I couldn’t see all of her even from the back, I was afraid to look up that high. All I saw was just the seam of a silk stocking and one heel, as she raised it to step in. That was all that was in focus with my downcast eyelids.”

“An orange hat one night. A stocking-seam and the heel of her shoe another night a week later!” Lombard gave him a fling back onto the bed. “At this rate, after about twenty years we’ll have a whole woman to stick in between the two!”

He went over to the door, flung it open. He looked back at him balefully. “You can do a lot better than that, and I’m sure of it! What you need is the professional touch, to bring it out. You certainly did see her full eye-width the first night, outside the theater. And the second time you must have heard the address given to the driver of the car, as she stepped in—”

“No I didn’t.”

“You stay here, get it? Don’t move from here. I’m going down and call up this fellow I told you about. I want him to come over here and listen to this with me.”

“But he’s a bull, isn’t he?”

“I told you that’s all right. We’re not interested in you, either one of us. You’ve got nothing to be nervous about. But don’t try to run out before I get back, or then we will make it hot for you.”

He closed the door after him.

The voice at the other end sounded surprised. “You got something already?”

“I’ve got something already, and I want you to hear it for what it’s worth. I think you can probably get a lot more out of it than I can. I’m way up here at a Hundred and Twenty-Third Street and Park Avenue, the last house short of the railroad tracks. I’d like you to get over here as fast as you can, and see what you think of it. I’ve got the beat-cop posted at the door watching it for me until I can get back. I’m talking from around the corner, nearest phone I could find. I’ll be waiting down there by the street entrance for you.”

Burgess dropped off a patrol car with a running slowdown a few minutes later. The car went on without stopping and he came over to where Lombard and the cop were standing waiting in the doorway.

“In here,” Lombard said, turning to go in without any further explanation.

“Well, I guess I can get back on the line,” the cop said, turning away.

“Thanks a lot, officer,” Lombard called out to him. They were already in at the stairs by that time. “All the way up at the top,” he explained, taking the lead. “He’s seen her twice, that night and another time, a week later. He’s a blind man; don’t laugh, phony of course.”

“Well, that was worth coming over for,” Burgess admitted.

They made the first turning, one behind the other, hands coasting along the rail. “Wants immunity — about the blindness. Scared of cops.”

“We can work something out, if it’s worth it,” Burgess grunted.

Second landing. “One more.” Lombard checked off gratuitously.

They saved their breath for climbing on the next.

Third landing. “What happened to the lights from here on up?” Burgess heaved.

A hitch snagged the rhythm of Lombard’s ascent. “That’s funny. There was one still on when I came down. Either the bulb died, or it was tampered with, turned off.”

“You sure it was still on?”

“Absolutely. I remember he had his room dark, but light from the hall came in through the open door.”

“Better let me go first. I’ve got a pocket light.” Burgess detoured around him, took the lead.

He must have been still in the process of getting it out. At the middle turn, between floors, where the stairs changed direction, he suddenly went floundering down on all fours. “Look out,” he warned Lombard. “Step back.”

The moon of his torch sprang up, bleaching the little oblong between end wall and bottom step. Spanning it lay an inert figure, grotesquely contorted. Legs trailing downward off the last few steps, torso proper on the level landing place, but head bent backward at an unnatural and acute angle by the impediment of the end wall at the turn. Dangling from one ear, but miraculously unbroken, was a pair of dark glasses.

“That him?” he muttered.

“It’s him.” agreed Lombard tersely.

Burgess bent over the figure, probed awhile. Then he straightened up again. “Broken neck.” he said. “Killed instantly.” He shot his light up the stair incline. Then he went up there, jittered it around on the floor. “Accident.” he said. “Missed his footing up here on the top step, went all the way down headfirst, and crashed head-on into that wall backing the turn. I can see the skid marks up here, over the lip of the top step.”

Lombard climbed slowly up to where he was, blew out his breath in a disgusted snort. “Fine time for an accident! I no sooner contact him—” He stopped short, looked at the detective searchingly in the battery light rays. “You don’t think it could have been anything else, do you?”

“Did anyone pass you or that other guy, while you were waiting down there at the door?”

“No one, in or out.”

“Did you hear anything like a fall?”

“No, we would have come in and looked if we had. But at least twice while we were waiting for you long trains went by on those overhead tracks, and you couldn’t hear yourself think until they’d gone by. It might have been during one of those times.”

Burgess nodded. “That’s what probably kept others in the building from hearing it, too. Don’t you see, there’s too much coincidence in it for it to be anything but an accident. He could have hit his head against that same wall down there ten times over and still lived; just been stunned without breaking his neck. He just happened to be killed instantly, but it couldn’t have been counted on.”

“Well, where does the bulb come in? I think that’s too much coincidence, isn’t it? I know what I’m saying, that light was still in working order when I tore down those stairs to phone you. If it hadn’t been, I would have had to pick my way down, and I didn’t; I went pretty fast.”

Burgess shot his light along the wall until he’d found it; it was on a bracket, sticking out from the side. “I don’t get what you mean,” he said, staring up at it. “If he was supposed to be blind, or at least went around most of the time with his eyes closed, which amounts to the same thing, how does the bulb enter into it one way or the other? How would darkness be any disadvantage to him? In fact he’d be more sure-footed in the dark, probably, than with the light left on; because he wasn’t used to using his eyes.”

“Maybe that’s just it,” Lombard said. “Maybe he came out fast, trying to make his get-away before I got back, and in his hurry forgot to close his eyes, left them open. With them open, maybe he was no better off than you or me.”

“Now you’re getting yourself all tangled up. For his sight to be dazzled, the light would have had to be on. And your whole kick has been that it isn’t. What would be the point, either way? How could anyone count on his missing a step, any more than they could count on his hitting in such a way that his neck snapped?”

“All right, it was a freak accident.” Lombard flung his hand out disgustedly as he turned to go down. “All I say is, I don’t like its timing. I no sooner catch up with him—”

“They will happen, you know, and they usually pick their own time for it, not yours.”

Lombard went thumping frustratedly down the stairs, letting his whole weight down at each step. “Whatever you might have been able to drill out of him is gone for good now.”

“Don’t let it throw you down. You may be able to turn up somebody else.”

“From him, it’s gone for good. And it was practically there, waiting to be found out.” He’d reached the landing where the body lay by now. He turned suddenly to look back. “What happened? What was that?”

Burgess pointed to the wall. “The bulb lit up again. Your vibration on the staircase jarred it on. Which explains what happened to it the first time: his fall broke the current. The wiring must be defective. That takes care of the light.” He motioned him on. “You may as well clear out. I’ll report it by myself. No sense of you getting all mixed up in it, if you want to keep working on the other thing.”

Lombard’s tread went dejectedly on down the rest of the way toward the street, all the lilt gone out of it. Burgess stayed behind up there, waiting beside the motionless form on the landing.