Phantom Lady

19 The Fifth Day Before the Execution

There was no sound of arrival. There was a sound of departure, the faint hum of a car drawing away outside past the glass doors. He looked up and there was someone already standing there in the inner entrance, like a wraith against the glass doors. She’d partly opened them to step through, was standing there half in, half out, head turned to look behind her at the receding vehicle that had brought her.

He had a feeling that it was she, with nothing further than that to substantiate it for a moment. The fact that she was coming in alone, like the lady free-lance he’d gathered she was. She was stunningly beautiful, so beautiful that all delight was taken from her beauty by its excess amount, as anything overdone is apt to. Just as the profile of a cameo or the head of a statue fail to move the emotions, except as an artistic abstraction, so did she. One had the feeling that, the law of compensation being what it is, she had few inner merits, must be full of flaws, to be that peerless on the outside. She was a brunette, and tall; her figure was perfection. Almost it must have made life barren, to be without so many of the problems, the strivings, that plagued other women. She looked that way, as though life was barren, a burst soap bubble leaving the unpleasant taste of soap upon her lips.

Her gown was like a ripple of fluid silver running down the slender gap between the wings of the door, as she stood there between them. Then, the car having gone, she turned her head forward again and finished entering.

She had no look for Lombard, a wan “Good evening” without spirit for the hallman.

“This gentleman has been—” the latter began.

Lombard had reached her before he could finish it.

“Pierrette Douglas.” He stated it as a fact.

“I am.”

“I’ve been waiting to speak to you. I must talk to you immediately. It’s urgent—”

She had stopped before the waiting elevator, with no intention, he could see, of allowing him to accompany her any further than that. “It’s a little late, don’t you think?”

“Not for this. This can’t wait. I’m John Lombard, and I’m here on behalf of Scott Henderson—”

“I don’t know him, and I’m afraid I don’t know you either — do I?” The “do I?” was simply a sop of urbanity thrown in.

“He’s in the death house of the State Penitentiary, awaiting execution.” He looked across her shoulder at the waiting attendant. “Don’t make me discuss it down here. Out of common ordinary decency—”

“I’m sorry, I live here; it’s one-fifteen in the morning, and there are certain proprieties— Well, over here then.” She started diagonally across the lobby toward a small inset furnished with a settee and smoking stands. She turned to him there, remained standing; they conferred erect.

“You bought a hat from a certain employee of the Kettisha establishment, a girl named Madge Peyton. You paid her fifty dollars for it.”

“I may have.” She noticed that the hallman, his interest whetted, was doing his best to overhear from the outside of the alcove. “George,” she reprimanded curtly. He withdrew reluctantly across the lobby.

“In this hat you accompanied a man to the theater, one night.”

Again she conceded warily, “I may have. I have been to theaters. I have been escorted by gentlemen to them. Will you come to the point, please?”

“I am. This was a man you’d only met that same evening. You went with him without knowing his name, nor he yours.”

“Ah no.” She was not indignant, only coldly positive. “Now you can be sure you are mistaken. My standards of conduct are as liberal as anyone else’s, you will find. But they do not include accompanying anyone anywhere, at any time, without the formality of an introduction first. You have been misdirected, you want some other person.” She thrust her foot out from underneath the silver hem, to move away.

“Please, don’t let’s split hairs about social conduct. This man is under sentence of death, he’s to be executed this week! You’ve got to do something for him—!”

“Let’s understand one another a little better. Would it help him if I falsely testify I was with him, on one certain night?”

“No, no, no,” he breathed, exhausted, “only if you rightly testify you were with him, as you were.”

“Then I can’t do it, because I wasn’t.”

She continued to gaze at him steadily. “Let’s go back to the hat,” he said finally. “You did buy a hat, a special model that had been made for somebody else—”

“But we’re still at cross-purposes, aren’t we? My admitting that has no bearing on my admitting that I accompanied this man to a theater. The two facts are entirely unrelated, have nothing to do with one another.”

That, he had to admit to himself, could very well be. A dismal chasm seemed to be on the point of opening at his feet, where he had seemed to be on solid ground until now.

“Give me some more details of this theater excursion,” she had gone on. “What evidence have you that the person accompanying him was myself?”

“Mainly the hat,” he admitted. “The twin to it was being worn on the stage, that very night, by the actress Mendoza. It was an original made for her. You admit that you secured a duplication of it. The woman with Scott Henderson was wearing that duplication.”

“It still does not follow that I was that woman: your logic is not as flawless as you seem to believe.” But that was simply by way of an aside; her thoughts, he could see, were busy elsewhere.

Something had happened to her. Something was having a surprisingly favorable effect on her. Either something that he had said, or something that had occurred to her in her own mind. She had suddenly become strangely alert, interested, almost one might say feverishly absorbed. Her eyes were sparkling watchfully.

“Tell me. One or two more things. It was the Mendoza show, is that right? Can you give me the approximate date?”

“I can give you the exact date. They were in the theater together on the night of May twentieth last, from nine until shortly after eleven.”

“May,” she said to herself, aloud. “You interest me strangely,” she let him know. She motioned, even touched him briefly on the sleeve. “You were right. You’d better come upstairs with me a minute, after all.”

During the ride up in the car she only said one thing. “I’m very glad you came to me with this.”

They got out at the twelfth floor or so, he wasn’t sure just which one it was. She keyed a door and put on lights, and he followed her in. The red fox scarf that had been dangling over her arm, she dropped carelessly over a chair. Then she moved away from him over a polished floor that reflected her upside down like a funnel of fuming silver being spilled out across it.

“May the twentieth, is that right?” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll be right back. Sit down.”

Light came from an open doorway, and she remained in there awhile, while he sat and waited. When she returned she was holding a handful of papers, bills they looked like, sorting them from hand to hand. Before she had even reached him, she had apparently found one that suited her purpose more than any of the rest. She tossed all but one aside, retained that, came over to him with it.

“I think the first thing to establish, before we go any further,” she said, “is that I was not the person with this man at the theater that night. Suppose you look at this.”

It was a bill for hospitalization, for a period of four weeks commencing on the thirtieth of April.

“I was in the hospital for an appendectomy, from the thirtieth of April to the twenty-seventh of May. If that isn’t satisfactory, you can check with the doctors and nurses there—”

“That’s satisfactory,” he said, on a long breath of defeat.

Instead of moving to terminate the interview, she joined him in sitting down.

“But it was you who bought the hat?” he said finally.

“It was I who bought the hat.”

“What became of it?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She seemed to become lost in thought. An odd sort of silence descended on the two of them alike. Under cover of it he studied her and her surroundings. She, also under cover of it, studied some inward problem of her own.

The room told him things. Luxury keeping its head above water only by the sheerest nerve. No compromise permitted. Outside, a good, if not the smartest of possible addresses. In here, not quite enough carpeting to cover the polished lake of the floor. Not quite enough period pieces to go around. Gaps, where perhaps some had been sold off, one by one. But no shoddier stuff allowed to fill out the spaces. And even on the woman herself, as he looked at her, there were the same tell-tale signs. Her shoes were forty-dollar custommades, but they had been worn too long. Something about the heels and luster, you could tell that. The dress had lines that nothing in the lower brackets could have hoped for, but again it had been used too much. He could read it plainest of all in her eyes. They had an unhealthy alertness, as of one reduced to living by her wits; never knowing from which direction the next chance might come, and desperately afraid of not being quick enough to seize it when it did. These were the little things about her that stated the case, if one could read. All of them could be denied, singly, but taken together they told the tale irrefutably.

He sat there almost listening to her thoughts. Yes, listening to them. He saw her look at her hand. He translated it: she is thinking of a diamond ring that once adorned it. Where is it now? Pawned. He saw her raise one instep slightly and glance at it. What thought had occurred to her just then? Silk stockings, probably. Some daydream of being deluged with silk stockings, scores of pairs, hundreds of pairs, more than she could ever hope to use. He translated it: she is thinking of money. Money for all these things and more.

She has decided, he said to himself, watching her expression closely.

She answered his question. The silence ended. Only a moment had gone by.

“The story of the hat is simply this,” she resumed. “I’d glimpsed it, it took my fancy, and I wangled a copy of it out of a girl down there. I’m a creature of impulse that way, when I can afford to be. I wore it once, I think, not more than that, and” — her shoulders glittered in a coruscating silver shrug — “it wasn’t meant for me. It just wasn’t, that was all. Something wrong about it. I wasn’t the type. It wasn’t very tragic, I didn’t let it bother me too much. Then, a friend of mine was up here one day, just before I went to the hospital. She came across it, happened to try it on. If you were a woman you’d understand how that sort of thing goes. While one is waiting for the other to finish her dressing, we try on one another’s latest buys. She fell in love with it at sight, and I let her have it.”

Ending it, she shrugged again as she had near the beginning. As though that was all there was to it, there was to be no more.

“Who is she?” he asked quietly. Even as he spoke the simple, casual words, he knew they were both fencing with one another, that the answer wouldn’t be given readily, that this was bargaining.

She answered him equally simply, equally casually. “Do you think that would be fair of me?”

“There’s a man’s life involved. He’s dying Friday,” he said, in such a low, expressionless voice that it was almost wholly lip motion.

“Is it because of her, is it through her in any way? Is she to blame, has she caused it? Answer me.”

“No,” he sighed.

“Then what right have you to involve her? There can be a form of death for women too, you know. Social death. Call it notoriety, loss of reputation, whatever you will. It isn’t over with as quickly. I’m not sure it isn’t worse.”

His face was getting continually whiter with strain. “There must be something in you I can appeal to. Don’t you care if this man dies? Do you realize that if you withhold this information—”

“After all, I do know the woman and I don’t know the man. She is my friend, he isn’t. You’re asking me to jeopardize her, to save him.”

“Where does the jeopardy come in?” She didn’t answer. “Then you refuse to tell me?”

“I have neither refused, nor agreed to, yet.”

He was suffocating with a sense of his own helplessness. “You’re not going to do this to me. This is home base. It ends here. You know, and you’re going to tell me!” They had both risen to their feet. “You think because I can’t hit you, like I would a man, I can’t get it out of you. I’m going to get it out of you. You’re not going to stand here like this and—”

She glanced meaningfully down at her own shoulder. “See here,” she said with cold indignation.

He relaxed his grip on it. She readjusted the silver peninsula that clothed it. She looked him straight in the eye, in withering disparagement. A blundering, easily dealt with male. “Shall I call down and have you removed?”

“If you want to see a good brawl up here, try it.”

“You can’t compel me to tell you. The choice rests with me.”

That was true up to a point, and he knew it.

“I’m a free agent in the matter. What’re you going to do about it?”

“This.”

Her face changed for a minute at sight of the gun, but it was just the flicker of shock that would have crossed anyone’s. It changed right back again to normal. She even sat down slowly, but not in the crumpled way of the vanquished; in a way that expressed patient assurance: as though this would take some time and she intended sitting it out.

He’d never seen anyone like her before. After that first momentary contraction of the facial muscles, she was still the one remaining in control of the situation, not he, gun or no gun.

He stood over her with it, trying to bear down on her mentally if nothing else. “Aren’t you afraid to die?”

She looked up into his face. “Very much,” she said with perfect composure. “As much as anyone, at any time. But I’m not in any danger right now. You can’t afford to kill me. People are killed to keep them from telling something they know. They are never killed to force them to tell something they know. For then, how can they tell it afterward? That gun still leaves the decision with me, not with you. I could do many things. I could call the police. But I won’t. I’ll sit and wait until you put it away again.”

She had him.

He put it away, scrubbed a hand across his eyebrows. “All right,” he said thickly.

She uttered a note of laughter. “Which one of us got most of the effects of that? My face is dry, yours is shining. My color is unchanged, yours is pale.”

About all he could find to say, once more, was, “All right, you win.”

She continued to hammer the point home. Or rather, tap it delicately, hammering being a heavy handed procedure at best; and she was deft, she was chic. “You see, you can’t threaten me.” She paused, to permit him to hear between the lines. “You can interest me.”

He nodded. Not to her, in inward confirmation to himself. He said, “Can I sit here a minute?” and motioned to a small table desk. He took something out of his pocket and snapped it open. He carefully tore out something along a punctured line. Then he snapped the folder closed again and returned it to his pocket. A blank oblong remained before him. He uncapped a fountain pen and began to write across it.

He looked up once to ask, “Am I boring you?”

She gave him the wholly natural, unforced smile that comes when two people understand one another perfectly. “You’re being very good company. Quiet, but entertaining.”

This time he was the one smiled, to himself. “How do you spell your name?”

“B-e-a-r-e-r.”

He gave her a look, then bent to his task once more. “Not quite phonetic, is it?” he murmured deprecatingly.

He had written the numeral 100. She had come closer, was looking down on the bias. “I’m rather sleepy,” she remarked, and yawned artificially and tapped her hand over her mouth once or twice.

“Why don’t you open the windows. It may be a little close in here.”

“I’m sure it isn’t that.” She crossed over to them, however, and did so. Then came back to him again.

He had added another cipher. “How do you feel now, better?” he questioned with ironic solicitude.

She glanced briefly downward. “Considerably refreshed. You might almost say revivified.”

“It takes so little, doesn’t it?” he agreed acidly.

“Surprisingly little. Next to nothing at all.” She was enjoying her own pun.

He didn’t go ahead writing. He allowed the pen to flatten against the desk without taking his hand from it. “This is preposterous, you know.”

“I haven’t gone to you for anything. You’ve come to me for something.” She nodded. “Good night.”

The pen upended again in his hand.

He was standing in the open doorway, facing inward in the act of taking leave of her, when the car arrived and the elevator door opened in answer to his ring. He was holding a small tab of paper, a leaf torn from a memo pad, folded once and held within the pronged fingers of one hand.

“I hope I haven’t been rude,” he was saying to her. A rueful smile etched into his profile for a minute. “At least I know I haven’t bored you. And please overlook the exceptional hour of the night. After all, it was rather an exceptional matter.” Then in answer to something that she said, “You don’t have to worry about that. I wouldn’t bother writing a check if I were going to stop payment on it afterward. That’s a pretty small dodge, any way you look at—”

“Down, sir?” the attendant reminded him, to attract his attention.

He glanced over. “Here’s the car.” Then back to her again. “Well, good night.” He tipped his hat to her decorously and came away, leaving the door ajar behind him. She closed it lingeringly in his wake, without looking out after him.

In the car he raised the tab of paper and glanced at it.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he blurted out, with a stab of the hand toward the carman. “She only gave me one name here—”

The operator slowed the car, prepared to reverse it. “Did you want to go back again, sir?”

For a moment he seemed about to assent. Then he scanned his watch. “No, never mind. I guess it’ll be all right. Go ahead down.”

The car picked up speed again and resumed its descent.

In the lobby below he stopped long enough to consult the hallman, flashing the paper at him for a moment. “Which way is this from here, up or down, any idea?”

On it were two names and a number. “Flora,” the number, and “Amsterdam.”

“It’s finally over,” he was telling Burgess breathlessly on the phone a minute or two later, from an all-night drugstore on Broadway. “I thought I had it, and there was one last link, but this time it’s the last. No time to tell you now. Here’s where it is. I’m on my way there now. How soon can you be there?”

Burgess, overreaching himself in the headlong sweep of the patrol car that had brought him over, recognized Lombard’s car standing out by itself in front of one of the buildings, at first sight empty; jumped hazardously off in full flight and came back. It was only when he’d gained the sidewalk and approached from that direction that he made him out sitting there on the running board, screened from the roadway by the car body at his back.

He thought he was ill at first, the way he was sitting there in a huddle on the car step; bowed over his own lap, head lowered toward the sidewalk underfoot. His posture suggested someone in the penultimate stages of being sick to his stomach; everything but the final climax.

A man in suspenders and undershirt was standing a few steps off, regarding him sympathetically, arrested pipe in hand, a dog peering out from around his legs.

Lombard looked up wanly as Burgess’s hastening footfalls drew up beside him. Then he turned his head away again, as though it were too much effort even to speak.

“Is this it? What’s the matter? You been in there yet?”

“No, it’s that one back there.” He indicated a cavernous opening, occupying almost the full width of the building it was set into. Within, to one side, could be made out a glistening brass upright, set into the bare concrete flooring. Across the façade, in gilt letters backed with black sandpaper, was inscribed the legend: Fire Department, City of New York.

“That’s number—,” Lombard said, flourishing the tab of paper he still held in his hand.

The dog, a spotted Dalmatian, edged forward at this point to muzzle at it inquiringly.

“And that’s Flora, these men tell me.”

Burgess opened the car door and pulled it out behind him, forcing him to his feet to avoid being unseated.

“Let’s get back,” he commented tersely. “And fast.”

He was flinging himself bodily against the door, with futile wrenches of breath, when Burgess came up with the passkey and joined him outside it.

“Not a sound from in there. Has she answered them below on the announcer yet?

“They’re still ringing.”

“She must have lammed.”

“She can’t have. They would have seen her leave, unless she went out some roundabout way— Here, let me use this. You’ll never get it that way.”

The door opened and they floundered inside. Then they stopped short, taking the scene in. The long living room, which was a continuation of the entrance gallery with simply a one-step drop in height, was empty, but it was mutely eloquent. They both got it right away.

The lights were all on. An unfinished cigarette was still alive and working, sending up lazy spirals of bluish-silver from the rim of an ash stand with a hollow stem. The floor-length windows were open to the night, showing an expanse of black, with a large star piercing it in one corner, a smaller one in another, like a black-out cloth held in place by a couple of shiny thumbtacks.

Directly before the windows lay a silver shoe, turned on its side like a small, capsized boat. The long narrow runner of rug that bisected the polished flooring, from just past the drop-step to just short of the windows, showed corrugated ridges, frozen “ripples” that marred its evenness, at one end. As though a misstep had sent a disturbance coursing along it.

Burgess went to the window, detouring around the side of the room to get there. He leaned out over the low, inadequate, decorative guard-rail on the outside of it, stayed that way, bent motionless, for long minutes.

Then he straightened, turned back into the room again, sent a quiet nod across it to where Lombard had remained, as if incapable of further movement. “She’s all the way down below there. I can see her from here, in the service alley between two deep walls. Like a rag off a clothesline. Nobody seems to have heard it, all the windows on this side are still dark.”

He didn’t do anything about it, strangely enough, didn’t even report it at once.

There was only one thing moving in the room, outside himself. And it wasn’t Lombard. It was the skein from the cigarette. It was that fact, perhaps, that attracted his eye to it. He went over to it, picked it up. There was still enough to hold, a fraction of an inch. He murmured something under his breath that sounded like, “Must have just happened as we got here.”

The next thing, he had taken out a cigarette of his own, was holding the two upright side by side, their bases even, with the fingers of the same hand. He took a pencil, notched off the length of the remnant against the intact one.

Then he put the latter into his own mouth, lit it, and took a single, slightly ritualistic puff to get it going. After which he carefully set it down in the same curved trough the former one had occupied, left it there, and glanced at his watch.

“What’re you doing that for?” Lombard asked in the listless voice of someone for whom nothing holds any interest any more.

“Just a home-made way of figuring out how long ago it happened. I don’t know if it’s reliable or not, if any two of these things burn down at the same rate of speed. Must ask some of the guys about that.”

He went over, glanced closely at it once, moved away again. The second time he came back he picked it up, looked at it in air like a thermometer, looked at his watch, then tapped it out and discarded it, its purpose served.

“She fell out exactly three minutes before we got in here. That’s taking off a full minute while I was looking out the window, before I got over to it and measured it. And that’s giving her just one puff, as I took. If she took more then that brings it down even closer.”

“It may have been king-size,” Lombard said, from a great distance away.

“It’s a Lucky, there’s enough of the trademark left down at the mouth end to be visible. Think I would have wasted my time doing it if I hadn’t seen that before I started?”

Lombard didn’t answer, was back in the distance again.

“This makes it look as though it was our very ring on the downstairs announcer that killed her.” Burgess went on. “Startled her and caused her to make that false move in front of the window that sent her over. The whole story’s here in front of our eyes, without words. She’d gone over to them and was standing there looking out, possibly in an expansive mood, drinking in the night air, making plans, when the ring came from downstairs. She did something wrong. Turned in too much of a hurry, or with her weight thrown badly. Or maybe it was her shoes did it. This one looks a little warped, unsteady from overlong wear. Anyway, the rug skidded over the waxed flooring. One or both of her feet shot out from under her, riding the rug. The shoe came off completely, went up in the air. She overbalanced backward. It wouldn’t have been anything, if she hadn’t been that close to the open windows. What would have been otherwise just a comical little sit-down became a back somersault into space and a death fall.”

Then he said, “But what I don’t get, is about the address part of it. Was it a practical joke, or what? How’d she act; you were with her.”

“Nah, she wasn’t kidding,” Lombard said. “She was serious about wanting that money, it was written all over her.”

“I could understand her giving you a spiked address that would take you a long time to investigate, so she’d have time to cash the check and beat it. But a thing like this, only a few blocks from here — she might’ve known you’d be back in five or ten minutes. What was the angle?”

“Unless she figured she could get more from the lady in question herself, more than I was offering, by warning her, tipping her off, and just wanted to get me out of the place long enough to dicker with her.”

Burgess shook his head, as though he found this unsatisfactory, but he contented himself with repeating what he’d said to begin with. “I don’t get it.”

Lombard hadn’t waited to listen. He’d turned away and was moving listlessly off to the side, with the dragging shamble of a drunk. The other man watched him curiously. He seemed to have lost all interest in what was going on around him, to have gone completely flat. He arrived at the wall and stood there for a moment before it, sagging, like someone who has been disappointed too often, is finally licked, finally ready to quit.

Then before Burgess could guess his purpose, he had tightened one arm, drawn it back, and sent it crashing home into the inanimate surface before him, as though it were some kind of an enemy.

“Hey, you fool!” Burgess yelped in stupefaction. “What’re you trying to do, bust your hand? What’d the walls do to you?”

Lombard, writhing in the crouched position of a man applying a corkscrew to a bottle, his face contorted more by helpless rage than pain even yet, answered in a choked voice while he nursed his flaming hand against his stomach, “They know! They’re all that’s left that knows now — and I can’t get it out of them!”