Phantom Lady

20 The Third Day Before the Execution

The last-minute drink he’d gulped just now right after getting off the train at the prison stop wasn’t any help. What could a drink do? What could any number of drinks do? It couldn’t alter facts. It couldn’t turn bad news into good. It couldn’t change doom into salvation.

He kept wondering as he trudged up the steep road toward the gloomy pile of buildings ahead: How do you tell a man he’s got to die? How do you tell him there’s no more hope, the last ray has just faded out? He didn’t know, and he was on his way right now to find out — by first-hand experience. He even wondered whether it wouldn’t have been kinder not to come near him again at all, to let him go without seeing him this useless one last time.

This was going to be ghastly, and he knew it. He was in the place now, and he already had the creeps. But he’d had to come, he couldn’t be that yellow about it. Couldn’t leave him dangling in suspense for three agonizing days more; couldn’t let him be led out on Friday night still looking back over his shoulder the whole way, metaphorically speaking, for the last-minute cancellation that would never come now.

He passed the back of his hand slowly across his mouth as he trudged after the guard up to the second-floor tier. “Am I going to get drunk tonight after I leave here!” he swore bitterly to himself. “I’m going to get so full I’ll be an alcoholic case at one of the hospitals until it’s over and done with!”

And now the guard was standing by, and he went in to face the music. Funeral music.

This was the execution right now. A bloodless, white one preceding the other by three days. The execution of all hope.

The guard’s footsteps receded hollowly. After that the silence was horrible. Neither of them could have stood it for very long.

“So that’s it,” Henderson said quietly at last. He’d understood.

The rigor mortis was broken, at least. Lombard turned away from the window, came over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Look, fellow—” he started to say.

“It’s all right,” Henderson told him. “I understand. I can tell by your face. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“I lost her again. She slipped away — this time for good.”

“I said you don’t need to talk about it,” Henderson urged patiently. “I can see what it’s done to you. For the love of pete, let’s drop it.” He seemed to be the one trying to buck Lombard up, instead of vice versa.

Lombard slumped down on the edge of the bunk. Henderson, being the “host,” let him have it, got up and stood leaning the curve of his back against the wall opposite.

The only sound in the cell for a while after that was the rustle of cellophane, as Henderson kept continuously folding over the edge of an emptied cigarette package back on itself, until he’d wound it up tight, then undoing it again pleat by pleat until he had it open once more. Over and over, endlessly, apparently just to give his fingers something to do.

No one could have stood it for long in that atmosphere. Lombard said finally, “Don’t, will you? It’s making me go nuts.”

Henderson looked down at his own hands in surprise, as though unaware until then what they’d been up to. “That’s my old habit,” he said sheepishly. “I never was able to break myself of it, even in good times. You remember, don’t you? Any time I ever rode a train, the time table would end up like that. Any time I had to sit and wait in a doctor’s or a dentist’s office, the magazines would end up like that. Any time I ever sat in a theater, the program—” He stopped short, looked dreamily across at the wall, just over Lombard’s head. “That night at the show with her, I can remember doing it that night too— It’s funny how a little thing like that should come back to me now, this late, when all the more important things it might have helped me to remember all along— What’s the matter, what are you looking at me like that for? I’ve quit doing it.” He threw the tormented wrapper aside, to show him.

“But you threw it away, of course? That night with her. You left it behind you, on the seat or on the floor, as people usually do?”

“No, she kept both programs, I can remember that. It’s funny, but I can. She asked me to let her have them. She made some remark to the effect of wanting to glory in her impulsiveness. I can’t recall just what it was. But I know she kept them, I distinctly saw her put them in her bag.”

Lombard had risen to his feet. “There’s a little something there, if we only knew how to get at it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the only thing we know for sure she has in her possession.”

“We don’t know for sure she still has it in her possession, do we?” Henderson corrected.

“If she kept it to begin with, then it’s likely she still has it. People either do or don’t keep such things as theater programs. Either they throw them away at once, or they keep them indefinitely, for years after. If there was only some way we could make this thing the bait. What I mean is, it’s the only common denominator linking her to you — because it will have its upper right-hand corners neatly winged back from cover to cover, without missing a page. If we could only get her to come forward with it, without guessing — she will stand revealed to us automatically.”

“By advertising, you mean?”

“Something along those lines. People collect all sorts of things; stamps, seashells, pieces of furniture full of worm-holes. Often they’ll pay any price for things that to them are treasures but to others are trash. They lose all sense of proportion, once the collector’s lust gets hold of them.”

“Well?”

“I’m a collector of theater programs, say. A freak, an eccentric, a millionaire throwing my money away right and left. It is more than a hobby, it is an obsession with me. I must have complete sets of programs for every play produced at every theater in town, all the way back, season by season. I suddenly appear from nowhere, I open a little clearing depot, I advertise. Word spreads around. I’m a nut, I’m giving away something for nothing. There’s a free for all to get in on it while it lasts. The papers’ll probably puff it up, with pictures; one of those screwball incidents that pop up every now and then.”

“Your whole premise is full of flaws. No matter how phenomenal the prices you offer, why should that attract her? Suppose she’s well off?”

“Suppose she no longer is well off?”

“I still don’t see how she can fail to smell a rat.”

“To us the program is ‘hot.’ To her it isn’t. Why should it be? She may never even notice those tell-tale little folds up at the corner, or if she does, never dream that they’ll tell us what we want to know. You didn’t remember about it yourself, until just a few minutes ago. Why should she? She’s not a mind reader; how is she going to know that you and I are here together in this cell talking about it right now?”

“The whole thing is too flimsy.”

“Of course it’s flimsy,” Lombard agreed. “It’s a thousand to one shot. But we have to take it. Beggars can’t be choosers. I’m going to try it, Hendy. I have a strange feeling that... that this’ll work, where everything else has failed.”

He turned away, went over to the bars to be let out.

“Well, so long—” Henderson suggested tentatively.

“I’ll be seeing you,” Lombard called back.

As he heard his tread recede outside behind the guard’s, Henderson thought: He doesn’t believe that. And neither do I.

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