Phantom Lady

15 The Ninth Day Before the Execution

Lombard

It was one of those incredible luxury hotels, its single slender tower rising to disdainful heights above the mass of more commonplace buildings like a tilted aristocratic nose. It was a plush and jeweled perch on which birds of paradise flying east from the movie colony were wont to alight. Bedraggled birds of equally rich plumage, flying west before the storm broke, had also sought refuge here in droves while they were still able to make it.

This, he knew, was going to require a finesse all its own. It needed just the right touch, just the right approach. He didn’t make the tactical mistake of trying to gain admission on demand, sight unseen. It wasn’t the kind of place in which anyone was ever received by anyone just at request or at first try. You had to campaign, pull wires.

He sought out the flower shop first, therefore, entering it from the lobby itself through a curved door of blue glass. He said, “What would you say are Miss Mendoza’s favorite flowers? I understand you deliver a great many to her.”

“I couldn’t say,” the florist demurred.

Lombard peeled off a bill, repeated what he’d just said, as though he hadn’t spoken loudly enough the first time.

Apparently he hadn’t. “Callers are always sending up the usual sort of thing, orchids, gardenias. I happen to know, though, that in South America, where she comes from, those flowers aren’t highly regarded, they grow wild. If you want a tip of real value—” He dropped his voice, as though this were of incalculable import, “The few times she has ordered flowers for herself, to brighten up her apartment, they have always been deep salmon-pink sweet peas.”

“I want your whole stock,” Lombard said immediately. “I don’t want a single one left over. And let me have two cards.”

On one he roughed out a brief message in English. Then taking out a small pocket dictionary, he transcribed it into Spanish, word for word, on the second card. Then he threw the first away. “Put this in with them, and see that they go right up. About how long should that take?”

“They should be in her hands within five minutes. She’s in the tower and the page will take an express up.”

Lombard returned to the lobby and poised himself before the reception alcove, head bent to his watch like someone taking a pulse count.

“Yes, sir?” the clerk inquired.

“Not yet,” Lombard motioned. He wanted to strike her at white heat.

“Now!” he said after a moment’s wait, so suddenly the clerk gave a startled jump backward. “Phone Miss Mendoza’s suite and ask if the gentleman who sent the flowers may come up for a moment. Lombard’s the name, but don’t leave out about the flowers.”

When the clerk came back again he seemed almost stunned with surprise. “She said yes,” he reported limply. Apparently one of the unwritten laws of the hotel had just been broken. Somebody had been received at first try.

Lombard, meanwhile, was shooting upward like a rocket into the tower. He got out, slightly shaky at the knees, and found a young woman standing waiting at an open door to receive him. Evidently a personal maid, judging by her black taffeta uniform.

“Mr. Lombard?” she inquired.

“That’s me.”

There was evidently a final customs inspection to be passed before he was cleared for admission. “It is not a press interview, no?”

“No.”

“It is not for an autograph, no?”

“No.”

“It is not to obtain a testimonial, no?”

“No.”

“It is not about some bill that has, er” — she hesitated delicately — “escaped the señorita’s mind, no?”

“No.”

This last point seemed to be the crucial one; she didn’t go any further. “Just a moment.” The door closed, then in due course reopened again. This time all the way. “You may come in, Mr. Lombard. The señorita will try to squeeze you in between her mail and her hairdresser. Will you sit down?”

He was by now in a room that was altogether remarkable. Not because of its size, nor the stratospheric view from its windows, nor the breath-taking expensiveness of its decor, though all those things were unusual; it was remarkable because of the welter of sounds, the clamor, that managed to fill it while yet it remained unoccupied. It was in fact the noisiest empty room he had ever yet found himself in. From one doorway came a hissing and spitting sound, that was either water cascading from a tap or something frying in fat. Probably the latter, since a spicy aroma accompanied it. Mingled in with this were snatches of song, in a vigorous but not very good baritone. From another doorway, this one of double width and which opened and closed intermittently, came an even more vibrant blend. This consisted, to the best of his ability to disentangle its various skeins, of a program of samba music coming in over short waves, admixed with shattering shots of static; of a feminine voice chattering in machine-gun Spanish, apparently without stopping to breathe between stanzas; of a telephone that seemed not to let more than two and a half minutes at a time go by without fluting. And finally, in with the rest of the melange, every once in a while there was a nerve-plucking squeak, acute and unbearable as a nail scratching glass or a piece of chalk skidding on a slate. These last abominations, fortunately, only came at widely spaced intervals.

He sat patiently waiting. He was in now, and half the battle was won. He didn’t care how long the second half took.

The maid came darting out at one point, and he thought it was to summon him, and half rose to his feet. Her errand, however, was apparently a much more important one than that, judging by her haste. She flitted into the region of the sputtering and baritone accompaniment to shriek warningly, “Not too much oil, Enrico! She says not too much oil!” Then raced back again whence she had come, pursued by malevolent bass tones that seemed to shake the very walls.

“Do I cook for her tongue or do I cook for the shaky clock on the bathroom floor she step on?”

Both coming and going she was accompanied by an intimate garment of feathery pink marabou, held extended in her hands as though someone were about to ensconce themselves in it, but which seemed to have nothing whatever to do with her mission. All the way over and back it shed generously, filling the air with small particles of feathers which drifted lazily to the floor long after she was gone.

Presently the hissing stopped short with one final spit, there was a deep-drawn “Aaah!” of satisfaction, and a rotund coffee-colored little man in a white jacket, towering chefs cap on his head and weaving his head with satisfaction, marched out, around, and in again at the next door up, carrying something on a domed salver.

There was a momentary lull after that. Momentary only. Then an upheaval that made the previous clamor seem to have been golden silence, detonated. It had everything previous in it and some new additions of its own: soprano shrieks, baritone bellows, nail-head squeaks, and the deep gonglike clash of a violently thrown chafing dish cover striking the wall and rolling halfway around the room, after that giving out fractured chimes.

The small rotund man came out, fast and outraged; no longer coffee complected but streaked with what looked like egg yolks and red peppers. His arms were going around like windmills. “This time I go back! On the next ship I go back! This time she can get down on her broken knees to me and I do not stay!”

Lombard bent slightly forward in his chair and tried stopping up his ears with the points of his pinkies, to give them a rest. After all, the human eardrum is a delicate membrane, it can stand just so much abuse and no more.

When he uncovered them again he found to his relief that the establishment had toned down once more to the state of only partial frenzy that was seemingly its norm. At least you could hear what you were thinking again. Presently the doorbell rang by way of variation instead of the telephone, and the maid admitted a dark-haired, daintily mustached individual who sat down and joined him in waiting. But with much less fortitude than Lombard himself was displaying. He got up again almost at once and began walking briskly back and forth, but with paces that were just a trifle too short to fit comfortably into the laps he was giving himself. Then he discovered one of the aggregations of Lombard’s sweet peas, stopped, extracted one, and put it to his nose. Lombard at this point promptly broke off all further thought of entering into diplomatic relations, even if any had been contemplated.

“Will she be ready for me soon?” the newcomer demanded of the maid on one of her flying visits. “I have a new idea. I would like to get the feel of it between my hands before it escapes me.”

“So would I,” thought Lombard, eyeing his neck truculently.

The sweet pea smeller sat down again. Then he stood up again, with every appearance of vibrating impatiently down around the knees. “It’s leaving me,” he warned. “I am losing it. Once it goes, I will have to go back to the old way again!” The maid fled inside with these dire tidings.

Lombard murmured half audibly, “You should have gone back to the old way long ago.”

It worked, at any rate. The maid came out again, beckoned with suppressed urgency, and he was in. Lombard swung at the sweet pea he had dropped, caught it neatly with the toe of his shoe, and kited it upward with grim zest, as though doing that made him feel a lot better.

The maid came out and bent over him confidentially, to salve his impatience. “She will positively squeeze you in between him and her costume fitter. He’s hard to handle, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lombard demurred, twitching his extended foot slightly and eyeing it longingly.

There was a good long lull after that. At least, comparatively. The maid only came out once or twice and the telephone only rang once or twice. Even the machine-gun Spanish only came in disconnected salvos now. The private chef who had been going back on the next ship appeared, more rotund than ever in beret, muffler, and fuzzy overcoat, but only to inquire with injured mien, “Ask if she is dining in tonight. I cannot do it myself, I am not speaking with her.”

Lombard’s predecessor emerged finally, small kit in hand, and departed. Not without detouring first and hijacking another one of the sweet peas. Lombard’s foot crept toward the receptacle that held the rest of them, as though he were aching to let him have all of them at once, but he conscientiously curbed the impulse.

The maid reappeared outside the holy of holies, announced, “The senorita will see you now.” He found, when he tried to stand up, that his legs had gone to sleep. He slapped at them fore and aft a couple of times, straightened his tie, shot his cuffs, and stepped through.

He had no more than glimpsed a figure stretched out Cleopatra-like on a chaise-longue, when a soft furry projectile of some sort shot through the air at him and landed on his shoulder with a squeaking sound. One of those same nail-on-glass squeaks that had reached him outside every now and then. He shied nervously at the impact. Something that felt like a long velvet snake coiled itself affectionately around his throat.

The figure on the chaise beamed at him, like a fond parent watching its offspring cut up. “Don’t be alarmed, señor. Is unly little Bibi.”

Giving it a pet name was only partial reassurance as far as Lombard was concerned. He kept trying to turn his head to get a look at it, but it was too close in. He managed a grin of strained geniality, for the sake of furthering his own cause.

“I go by Bibi,” his hostess confided. “Bibi is, how you say it, my welcoam committee. If Bibi don’t like, he duck under sofa; I get rid of them queek. If Bibi like, he jomp to their neck; then is all right they stay.” She shrugged disarmingly. “You he must like. Bibi, come down off the man’s neck,” she coaxed insincerely.

“No, let him stay, I don’t mind him in the least,” he drawled tolerantly. It would have been a faux pas of the first water, he realized, to have taken her reproach at face value. His nose had identified the encumbrance as a small monkey by now, in spite of the cologne it had been saturated with. The tail reversed, to rewind itself the other way around. He had evidently made a hit. He could feel strands of his hair being painstakingly separated and examined, as if in search of something.

The actress crowed delightedly. If anything could put her in a receptive mood, this simian seemed able to, so Lombard felt he couldn’t afford to resent the way it was getting personal with him. “Sit down,” she urged cordially. He walked rather stiffly to a chair and sank into it, careful not to disturb his head balance. He got his first good look at her. She had on a shoulder-cape of pink marabou over black velvet pajamas, each trouser leg of which was the width of a full skirt. A somewhat horrifying arrangement that looked like molten lava had been deposited on top of her head by the sweet pea fiend who had been in here before him. The maid was standing behind her fanning at it with a palm leaf as if to cool it off. “I have a minute while this sets,” the wearer explained graciously. He saw her surreptitiously consult the card he had sent up with the flowers a while ago, to remind herself of his name.

“How nice it was to get my flowers in Spanish for a change, Senor Lombard. You say you have just come up from mi tierra. We met down there?”

She had, fortunately, glided past this point before it was necessary for him to commit himself outright. Her large dark eyes took on a soulful expression, went searchingly upward toward the ceiling; she made a cushion of her hands and pressed one cheek against them. “Ah, my Buenos Aires,” she breathed, “my Buenos Aires. How I miss it! The lights of the Calle Florida shining in the even-ning—”

Not for nothing had he spent several hours poring over travel folders before coming up here. “The beach at La Plata, down by the shore,” he supplied softly, “the races at Palermo Park—”

“Don’t,” she winced. “Don’t, you make me cry.” She wasn’t just acting. Or at least she wasn’t entirely acting, he could tell. She was simply dramatizing emotions that were already there, that were basically sincere, as is the way with the theatrical temperament. “Why did I leave it, why am I opp here so far away?”

Seven thousand dollars a week and ten per cent of the show might have had something to do with it, it occurred to him, but he wisely kept that to himself.

Bibi, meanwhile, having failed to find anything that required exterminating on his scalp, lost interest, ran down his arm, and took a flying leap off on to the floor. It made conversation a lot easier, even though his thatch was left looking like a haystack that had been hit by a high wind. He refrained from smoothing it down lest this give offense to the pest’s mercurial mistress. She was now in as soft a mood as he could ever hope to get her into, on such short acquaintance, so he took the plunge.

“I have come to you because you are known to be as intelligent as you are talented and beautiful,” he said, laying it on with a shovel.

“It is true, nobody has ever said I am a dunce.” the celebrity admitted with refreshing unselfconsciousness, studying her fingernails.

He hitched his chair slightly forward. “You recall a number you did in last season’s show, in which you threw nosegays, little flowers, to the ladies in your audiences?”

She poised a warning finger toward the ceiling. Her eyes sparkled. “Ah, Chica Chica Boom! Si, si! You like? Wasn’t it good?” she agreed warmly.

“Perfect,” he assented, with a concealed fluctuation of his Adam’s apple. “Now one night a friend of mine—”

That was as far as he got on that try. The maid, who had just quit fanning a moment before, stepped in again. “William would like his orders for the day, señorita.”

“Excuse me a minute.” She turned her head toward the doorway. A stalwart individual in chauffeur’s uniform stepped forward, stood at attention. “I won’t nidd you until twelve. I go to the Coq Bleu for launch, so you be downstairs at ten to.” Then she added without any change of inflection, “And you better take that with you while you here, you left it behind.”

He stepped over to the vanity table she had indicated, removed a hammered silver cigarette case, spaded it into his pocket and stepped outside again, all with perfect nonchalance.

“It didn’t come from the five and ten, you know,” she called after him, with, it seemed to Lombard, a slight touch of asperity. Judging by the snap in her eyes, he didn’t give William much longer.

She turned back to him again, let her filaments slowly darken.

“I was saying, a friend of mine attended a performance one night with a certain woman. That is why I have come to you.”

“Ah?”

“I am trying to find her for him.”

She misunderstood. Her eyes coruscated with renewed zest. “Ah, a romance! I loave a romance!”

“I’m afraid not. It’s a matter of life and death.” As with all the rest, he was afraid to give her too many details, lest she shy away from it.

She seemed to like this even better. “Ah, a mees-tirry! I loave a mees-tirry” — she shrugged — “as long as it don’t happen to me.”

Something suddenly stopped her dead. Apparently some calamity, judging by the effect it had. She eyed a tiny diamond studded particle on her wrist. Suddenly she had reared upright, begun snapping her fingers all over the place, like a string of firecrackers going off. The maid came running in on the fly. Lombard thought he was about to be unceremoniously dismissed, in favor of the next comer.

“You know what time is it?” the dancer said accusingly. “I don’t have told you to watch it closely? You are very careless. You nearly let it go past too far. The doctor said once itch hour, on the hour. Get the calomel—”

Before Lombard knew it, another of those seasonal typhoons that seemed to occur regularly in here, was swirling around him full blast. Machine-gun Spanish, nail-head squeaks, and the maid going around and around the room after Bibi, until Lombard felt as though he were the center pole of a carrousel.

He finally raised his own voice and added it to the din. “Why don’t you stop short, and turn back the other way?” he shouted above the racket.

That did it. Bibi ran into the maid — and the calomel ran into Bibi.

When that was over with, and the patient was clinging forlornly to his mistress, both arms about her neck, giving her a momentary resemblance to a bearded lady, he resumed his own job.

“I realize how hopeless it is to expect you to remember any particular individual out of that sea of faces before you each night. I realize you played six nights a week and two matinees, all season long, to packed houses—”

“I have never play to an empty house in my hull career,” she contributed, with more of her characteristic modesty. “Even a fire cannot compete with me. Once in Buenos Aires the theater start to bum. You think they left—?”

He waited until that was out of the way. “My friend and this woman were sitting in the first row, on the aisle.” He consulted something on a scrap of paper taken from his pocket. “That would be on your left, as you faced the audience. Now, the only help I can give you at all is this. She stood up in her seat, oh along about the second or third chorus of the song.”

A speculative glint flickered across her eyes. “She stood opp? While Mendoza was on stage? This interests me very much. I have never known it to happen before.” Her shapely fingers, he noticed, were beginning to claw tentatively at the velvet of her trouser leg, as if whetting themselves for reprisal. “She did not care for my singing, perhaps? She had a train to catch, perhaps?”

“No, no, no, you don’t understand,” he reassured her hastily. “Who could do that to you? No, here’s what it was. It was during the Chica Chica Boom number. You forgot to throw one of the little souvenirs to her, and she stood up to attract your attention. For just a moment or two she stood there right in front of you, and we were hoping—”

She shuttered her eyes rapidly two or three times, trying to recapture the incident. She even poked one long finger just behind her ear, careful not to disturb the hair-do. “I see if I can remember it for you.” She obviously was doing her best. She did all the things likely to be conducive to memory quickening. She even lit a cigarette, although she was not, judging by the stiff way she handled it, an habitual smoker. She simply held it, letting it burn down in her fingers.

“No, I cannot,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. I try hard. For me last season is like twenty years ago.” She shook her head morosely, clicked her tongue compassionately a couple of times.

He started to return the futile scrap of paper to his pocket, glanced at it as he did so. “Oh, and here’s another thing — although I suppose it’s no more help than the first. She had on the same hat that you did, my friend tells me. I mean a duplication of it, an exact copy.”

She straightened suddenly, as though she were on the point of getting something from that. He obviously had her whole undivided attention at last, if he hadn’t before. Her eyes narrowed speculatively. Then they glittered behind their threadlike constriction. He was almost afraid to move or breathe. Even Bibi looked at her curiously from a fur huddle on the carpet at her feet.

Suddenly it came. She stabbed her cigarette out with a single vicious lunge. She emitted a strident, macawlike cry, that wouldn’t have been out of place in a jungle. “A-a-ai! Now I remember! Now!” A flash flood of Spanish swept her off his conversational track. Finally, after a lot of eddying around, she got back onto it in English again. “That thing that stood up there! That criatura that stand in front of the hull house, in my hat, to show she is wearing it! She even stop the spotlight, clip some of it off from me! Hanh! Do I recall? You bet I recall! You think I’m going to forget a thing like that in a horry? Hanh! You don’t know Mendoza!” She snorted with such violence that Bibi gave the appearance of being swept across the floor for a distance of several feet like a dried leaf, although it was probably a scuttle for shelter under his own power.

The maid chose this most unpropitious moment to intrude. “The costumer has been waiting for some time now, senorita.”

She semaphored violently, crossing and recrossing her arms over her head. “She should keep on wetting some more! I am listening to something I don’t like to hear!”

She climbed down the chaise-longue toward Lombard, balancing on one bent knee over the lower end of it. She even seemed to regard her own overheated state of mind as a prideful accomplishment. She flung out her arms to show him, then tapped herself like a woodpecker on the chest. “Look how I get! Look how angry it still make me, even sotch a long time after! Look what it do!”

After which she rose to her feet, squeezed herself tightly around the waist with both arms in a belligerent embrace, as if holding herself in, and began to stalk back and forth, turning at the end of each short heat with a great fanning out of her wide trouser bottoms. Bibi crouched in a far corner, head bowed in desolation and his skinny arms flung up over it.

“And what you want her for, you and this friend of yours?” she demanded suddenly. “You haven’t told me yet!”

He could tell by her challenging inflection that if it was anything that had to do with making the style pirate happy, he wasn’t going to get any help from Mendoza, even if she had been in a position to give it. He wisely marshaled the facts in such a way that her purpose would swing over to coincide with his, even though both had not quite the same end in view. “He is in serious trouble, believe me, señiorita. I won’t bore you with the details, but she is the only one who can get him out of it. He has to prove that he was with her that night, and not where they say he was. He only met her that night; we don’t know her name, we don’t know where she lives, we don’t know anything about her. That’s why we’re looking high and low—”

He could see her mulling it over. After a moment she informed him, “I like to help you. I give anything to tell you who she is.” Then her face dropped, she spread her hands helplessly. “But I never see her before. I never see her after. I just see her stand opp like that. That’s all, I can’t tell you no more about her than that.” At least facially, she seemed to be even more disappointed than he was about it.

“Did you notice him at all, the man with her?”

“No, I never even give him a look. I couldn’t say who was with her. He stay in the shadow down below.”

“You see, there’s as big a link as ever missing, only it’s the other way around now. Most of the others remembered him, but not her. You remember her, but not him. It’s still no good, wouldn’t prove anything. Just that a woman stood up in a theater one night. Any woman. She might have been alone. She might have been with someone else entirely. It doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve got to get the two linked up together by one witness.” He clapped his hands to his knees frustratedly, rose to leave. “Looks like it ends there, where it began. Well, thank you for your time.”

“I keep trying for you, anyway,” she promised, giving him her hand. “I don’t know what I can do, but I keep at it.”

He didn’t either. He shook hands briefly, passed through the outer room in a mist of depression. He felt the let-down, the sudden reversal, all the more keenly because he had come closer to getting on to something tangible just now than he had at any other time so far; it had been almost within his grasp, only to be snatched away at the last moment. Now he was right back where he’d been before.

The operator had turned and was looking at him expectantly, so he knew he’d come all the way down without feeling it, and was supposed to get out of the car. Somebody propelled a door for him and he was outside in the street. He stood there for a moment without moving away from the entrance, simply because he couldn’t decide which direction to take next. One offered as little as the other, so they checkmated each other. And his ability to make even such a minor decision as that was wallowing helplessly in a trough just then.

A taxi came along and he hailed it. It had someone in it, he had to wait for another. That kept him there a minute longer. And sometimes a minute can make an awful lot of difference. He hadn’t left any tracer with Mendoza, she wouldn’t have known where to contact him.

He was already seated in the second taxi and it was just about to take off, when the revolving door of the hotel blurred like a propellor in motion and a bellboy came darting out to him. “Are you the gentleman that just left Miss Mendoza’s suite? She called down a minute ago after you’d gone by. She’d like you to come back again, if you don’t mind.”

He went inside again and up fast. The same fur snowball launched itself at him, in fond recollection. He didn’t even mind that this time. The pajamas were gone and she was in the middle of trying something or other on. She looked like a half-finished lampshade standing in the middle of the floor, but he had no eye for any of that.

She was only mildly disconcerted, if at all. “I hope you’re a married man? Pouf, if you’re not, you will be some day, so it’s all the same.” He couldn’t quite grasp the fine point of propriety involved, but let it go at that. She picked up a length of material and draped it negligently across one shoulder, where it would do the least good, as a protection. Then she dismissed some shadowy third person kneeling at her feet with a mouthful of pins.

“A minute after you left I got something,” she told him as soon as they were alone. “I was still kind of” — she twisted her hand this way and that, as though she were trying a doorknob — “you know — sore.”

William, occurred to him unspoken at this point.

“So I let it out, like I always do when I’m sore, by breaking a couple of little things.” She motioned with perfect unconcern to numerous crystal fragments littering the floor, with a disembodied atomizer bulb lying in their midst. “Then the fonniest thing happen. It bring back another time I am sore, about that woman we were talking about. Because I throw things now, I remember how I throw things that other time.” She hitched her shoulders. “Is peculiar, no? It remember to me what I do with the hat. I think maybe it help you to know.”

He waited, shifting one foot out toward her in leashed intensity.

She shook an explanatory finger at him. “So that night, when that woman do like that to me, I go back to my dressing room and, immh—” She inhaled deeply. “I nidd to be tied opp. I take everything on the table and I go like this!” She made a clean horizontal sweep with one arm. “You onderstand how I feel, no? You don’t blem me?”

“I don’t blame you at all.”

She trip-hammered the flat of her hand between the circumflex accents formed by the brassiere she had on. “You think anyone is going to do that to me in front of a houseful of people? You think I, Mendoza, let them get away with that?”

He didn’t, now that he’d had a sample or two of her combustive temperament.

“They have to huld me back by both arms, the stage manager and my maid, to keep me from rushing out the stage door in my wrapper just like I am, to see if I can find her in front of the theater, for to pull her to pieces betwinn my two hands!”

He’d half hoped, for a minute, that that was what it was going to develop had happened, that she’d tangled with the cipher at the theater entrance. But he knew it hadn’t, or Henderson would have mentioned it to him, and she herself would have recalled it sooner than this.

“I would have showed her a thing or two, you bet!” She still looked capable of doing it even at this late day. Lombard even drew back a precautionary step or two, the way she was crouched facing him, fingers working convulsively in lobster-claw formation. Bibi was clasping and unclasping his own tiny digits in apprehensive supplication.

She straightened, threw her arms outward in breast-stroke position. “The next day I’m still sore. With me it lasts. So I go to the modiste, the designer, that make opp the hat for me, and I blow off stimm there instead. I throw it in her face in front of hull room full of customers. I say, ‘So you make me an original for my production number, ha? The only one of its kind, ha? Nobody else is going to have one like it, ha?’ And I wipe it all over her face, and when I leave she is still spitting out pieces of the material, she can’t talk.”

She shoveled her hands at him inquiringly. “So that’s good for you, is no? That helps you, no? This cheat of a designer, she must know who is the person she sell the copy to. You go to her and you find out who this woman is you look for.”

“Swell! Great! At last!” he yelled, so enthusiastically that Bibi dove head-first under the chaise and pulled his tail in after him. “What’s her name? Give me her name!”

“Wait, I dig it opp for you.” She tapped the side of her head apologetically. “I work in so many different shows, I have so many different costumers, I can’t keep track.” She called the maid in, instructed her, “Look among my bills for a hat, from last year’s show, see you can find one.”

“But we don’t keep them that long, do we, señorita?”

“You don’t have to go all the way back to when it start from, stupid,” said the star, as unselfconsciously as ever. “Look it opp among last month’s, it probably still kipp coming in.”

The maid came back after a moderately lengthy — and to Lombard, excruciating — wait. “Yes, I found it, it did come in this month again. It says, ‘One hat, a hundred dollars,’ and the letterhead reads ‘Kettisha.’ ”

“Good! That’s it!” She passed it to Lombard. “You got it?” He copied the address, returned it to her. Her hands went into hysterics, and a blizzard of tiny pieces of paper snowed all over the floor. Then she ground her foot down into the middle of them. “I like the nerve! Still sending me bills a year later! She’s got no shem, that woman!”

She looked up to find him already crossing the adjoining room on his way out. He was an opportunist; after all, her contribution had been made, she was of no further value to him. On to the next link.

She hastened to the boudoir doorway to deliver a parting benediction on his enterprise. One motivated by spite, however, and not altruism. She would have followed him all the way to the outside door, only the uncompleted hoopskirt she wore got stuck in the opening, wouldn’t let her pass through. “I hope you catch opp with her!” she shrilled after him vengefully, “I hope she find herself in plenty of trouble!”

A woman will forgive you anything — but wearing the same hat as she does, at the same time.

He felt like a fish out of water when he walked into the place, but he didn’t let it deter him. He would have stalked into far more unlikely places than this to attain his goal. It was one of those establishments on a side street, housed in a former private residence converted to commercial purposes, whose expensiveness and exclusiveness always seem to be in inverse ratio to their lack of conspicuousness. The entire ground floor was given over to the display room, or whatever the trade name for it was. Having stated his business, he took shelter in a secluded corner of this, the most secluded corner he was able to find.

He’d walked in right in the middle of a showing. Or maybe they had one every day at this hour, for all he knew. It didn’t help to put him at his ease. He was the only man there, or at least the only one of service age. There was what appeared to be a dessicated septuagenarian present among the sprinkling of clients seated here and there. The charming young thing with him, his granddaughter no doubt, must have brought him in with her to help her select a wardrobe. “The mind,” thought Lombard, regarding him with a bilious eye, “can certainly work wonders.” But with that one exception, it was all distaff. Even a girl doorman and girl pages.

The mannequins would come forward slowly, one by one, from the rear, and make a complete circuit of the forepart of the room, turning this way and that with little graceful swirls. For some reason, it may simply have been the corner he had chosen, he kept getting swirls and even full halts, from every single one of them. He felt like saying, “I’m not here to buy anything,” but didn’t have the nerve. It made him acutely uncomfortable, the more so since he had to keep staring into their faces and there were lots of other places he would have preferred staring.

The young woman he’d spoken to came back and rescued him at last. “Madame Kettisha will see you in her private office, upstairs on the second floor,” she whispered. A girl page showed him the way, knocked for him, then departed below again.

There was a buxom, middle-aged, redheaded Irishwoman sitting facing him from behind a large desk when he went in. She not only had nothing of the chic couturier about her, she even leaned slightly to the horsy, dowdy side. She probably had once been Kitty Shaw in some backstreet tenement and she deserved plenty of credit, he told himself, sizing her up. She probably was a wizard at making money; only an unqualified success could have afforded to flaunt such personal slovenliness as she was exhibiting. His first impression was altogether favorable and his relief was almost abject.

She was shuffling through a sheaf of crayon colored fashion sketches at lightning speed, discarding some to her right, okaying others to her left. Or vice versa. “Well, mike, what can I do for you?” she grunted brusquely without looking up.

He was all out of tact by now. It was still the same day as the Mendoza interviews, and he hadn’t had time to recuperate from them yet. It was getting late, anyway; nearly five in the afternoon.

“I came straight down here from one of your former customers. The South American actress Mendoza.”

She did look up at that. “Better use a whiskbroom,” she suggested dourly.

“You did a hat for her, for last year’s show, remember? One hundred bucks, and I want to know who got the chaser on it.”

She put the sketches out of harm’s way first, before she cut loose. The accepts into a drawer, the discards into a wastebasket. She had a temper, evidently, that could be turned off and on at will, and with a time limit set to it. At that, he liked it better than Mendoza’s brand. It was more forthright. Her hand came down on the desk top with a bang like a hand grenade. “Don’t you gimme any of that!” she roared. “I’ve had enough trouble out of that hat! I said then there was no copy made, and I still say now there was no copy made. When I produce an original, it stays original! If there was a copy made, it wasn’t run up in this establishment or with my knowledge, and I’m not responsible! I may soak ’em, but I don’t doublecross them!”

“There was a copy made,” he insisted. “It showed up in a theater, face to face with hers across the footlights!”

She leaned down heavily over the desk, both elbows in air. “What does she want me to do, sue her for slander?” she shouted. “I will if she keeps this up! She’s a liar, and you can go back and tell her I said so!”

Instead he took his hat and pitched it onto a chair over in the corner, to show her he intended staying until he had what he’d come here to get. He even unbuttoned his coat, to give himself plenty of free arm action. “She has nothing to do with it, so let’s just forget her. I’m here for purposes of my own. There was a copy, because a friend of mine was with the very woman who had it on in the theater. So don’t tell me there wasn’t. I want to know who she is, I want her name from your list of customers.”

“It isn’t on it. It couldn’t be, because there was no such transaction entered into by us. What’re you going to do, keep this up all day?”

He hitched his chin out into second, brought his own hand down in an answering blow to hers that made the whole desk structure jar. “For the love of God, there’s a man counting his life by hours! What the hell do I care about your business ethics at such a time. You’re not going to sit there and head me off, not if I’ve got to lock this door and stay in here with you all night! Don’t you understand me? There’s a man going to be executed in nine days’ time! The wearer of that hat is the only one can save him. You’ve got to give me her name. It’s not the hat, it’s the woman I want!”

Her voice suddenly dropped to a reasonable level. She’d evidently turned her temper off. He’d caught her interest. “Who is he?” she asked curiously.

“Scott Henderson, for killing his wife.”

She wagged her head in recognition. “I remember reading about that at the time.”

He struck the desk again, less shatteringly than before. “The man’s innocent. It’s simply got to be stopped. Mendoza bought a certain specially designed hat here, that couldn’t have been reproduced elsewhere. Somebody popped up in the theater with an exact copy of that same hat. He was with this somebody, he was with her all that evening, but he never found out her name or anything about her. Now I’ve got to find that person, at all costs. She can prove that he wasn’t home when it happened. Is that clear enough for you? If it isn’t I can’t make it any clearer!”

She gave him the impression of being a person with few, if any, moments of indecision. She was having one of them now, but it was of brief duration. She asked one more question, to safeguard herself. “You’re sure this isn’t some legal trick on that hellcat’s part? The only reason I haven’t filed suit against her, for non-payment and also for assault that day she came down here, was so that she wouldn’t file cross-suit against me. The publicity would be harmful to my establishment’s good name.”

“I’m not a lawyer,” he assured her. “I’m an engineer from South America. I can show you who I am, if you’re in any doubt.” He took things out of his pocket for identification purposes, presented them to her.

“Then I can talk confidentially to you,” she decided.

“Absolutely. My only interest in the matter is Henderson. Tm sweating myself skinny to get him out of it. Your wrangle with her doesn’t mean anything to me, from either party’s side. It’s just that it happens to lie across my own path of investigation.”

She nodded. She glanced at the door to make sure it was discreetly closed. “Very well, then. Here’s something that I wouldn’t admit to Mendoza for the world, that I can’t afford to, understand? There must have been a leak around here some place. The copying did originate here. But not officially; on the sly, by some member of the organization. Now I’m telling you this, but I don’t want it to go any further. I’d have to deny it, of course, if it was ever brought out publicly. My designer, the girl that does the sketches, is in the clear; I know it wasn’t she who sold us out. She’s been with me ever since I first opened my own place, she’s bought into it. It wouldn’t pay her, for a measly fifty, seventy-five, or whatever it was, to peddle around her own ideas like that. She’d be competing against herself. The two of us, she and I, investigated on the q.t. after Mendoza was down here raising an uproar that day, and we found that particular sketch gone from her album, missing, when we went to look. Somebody had deliberately swiped it, to use over again. We figured it for the seamstress, the girl who did the actual needlework on that number in the shop. She denied it naturally, and we had no evidence to prove it. She must have run the thing up at home on her own time. I suppose we caught her before she’d had time to slip the borrowed sketch back into the album again. Well, to be on the safe side, to make sure we didn’t get into hot water like that again, we shipped her.” She thumbed over her shoulder.

“So you see, Lombard — that your name, again? — as far as the sales records here in the office go, there never was any second buyer for that particular hat. That’s dead on the level. I couldn’t help you there if I wanted to. All I can suggest is, if you want that woman, your best bet is to tackle that former sewing apprentice of ours. As I say, I can’t guarantee that she actually does know anything about it. All I know is we ourselves felt strongly enough convinced that she did, at the time, to dismiss her. If you want to take the chance, it’s up to you.”

Again it had jumped a lap ahead of him, just when he thought he was safely up to it at last. “I have to, I haven’t any choice,” he said dismally.

“Maybe I can give you a hand with it,” she said helpfully. She snapped on her desk speaker. “Miss Lewis, look up the name of that girl we discharged right after we had all that trouble with Mendoza. Address too.”

He leaned his head sideward, elbow to desk, while they were waiting. She must have seen something in his attitude. “You think quite a lot of him, I guess,” she said, almost gently. It was a seldom used inflection with her; she had to clear her throat to get it to transmit in the right key.

He didn’t answer. That was one of those things that didn’t need answering.

She shot a drawer, pulled out a squat bottle of Irish whisky. “The hell with that sissy champagne they serve downstairs. A nip of this is what’s in order when you’re up against something that needs tall bucking. It’s an example I learned from my old man, rest his bones—”

The speaker signaled back. A girl’s voice said, “That was Madge Peyton. The address on record for her when she worked here is four-nine-eight Fourteenth Street.”

“Yeah, but which Fourteenth Street.”

“That’s all it says here: Fourteenth Street.”

“Never mind,” he said, “there’s only two to choose from, east and west.” He took it down, went over and reclaimed his hat, buttoned up with renewed purpose, the brief rest period over.

She was sitting there shading her eyes lengthwise. “Let me see if I can give you an angle on her. She won’t come through willingly, you know.” She dropped her hand, looked up. “Yeah, I’ve got her now. She was one of these quiet mousy little things. Shirtwaist and skirt type, know what I mean? They’re the kind that are always apt to pull a stunt like that for money, quicker than the good-lookers are, because money don’t come as easy to them. You’ll find they’re usually scared of guys, and don’t give themselves a chance to get to know them; then when they do get in with one, it’s always the wrong kind, because they haven’t had any previous sampling experience.”

She was a shrewd woman, he had to admit. That was why she probably wasn’t Kitty Shaw in some backstreet tenement at this very moment.

“We soaked Mendoza a hundred for it originally. She probably didn’t get more than fifty for repeating on it. There’s an angle for you, right there. Try her with another fifty, that ought to get it out of her — if you can find her.”

“If I can find her,” he agreed, plodding dispiritedly down the stairs.

A rooming-house keeper opened a door painted black to resemble ebony, with a square of glass set into the upper half and a tawny roller shade backing that. “Un?” she said.

“I’m looking for a Madge Peyton.”

She just shook her head to conserve energy.

“A girl that... well, a sort of plain-looking mousy girl.”

“Yeah, I know who you mean. No, she’s not here any more. Used to be, but she’s gone quite some time now.” She kept scanning the street while she was talking to him. As if, now that she’d taken the trouble of coming to the door, she might as well get something out of it before she went back inside again. That was probably why she continued to stand there as long as she did, and not because of any interest in his problem.

“Any idea where she moved to?”

“Just left, that’s all I can tell you. I don’t keep strings on ’em.”

“But there must be some sort of a trace. People don’t just go up in smoke. What took her things away?”

“One arm and both her feet.” She jerked a thumb. “Down that way, if it’s any good to you.”

It wasn’t very much. There were three more intersecting avenues “down that way.” And then a marginal thoroughfare. And then a river. And then fifteen to twenty states. And then an ocean.

She’d had enough air and sightseeing now. “I can make something up, if you want me to,” she offered. “But if it’s facts you’re after—” She bunched fingers to her lips, blew them apart, to denote emptiness.

She started to close the door, added, “What’s the matter, mister? You look kind of white.”

“I feel kind of white,” he assented. “Mind if I sit on your doorstep here a minute?”

“Help yourself, as long as you don’t get in the way of anyone coming in or going out.”

Slam.