Phantom Lady

22 The Hour of the Execution

10.55 p.m. The last of anything, ah the last of anything, is always so bitter. He was cold all over, though the weather was warm, and he was shivering, though he was sweating, and he kept saying to himself over and over, “I’m not afraid,” more than he was listening to the chaplain. But he was and he knew he was, and who could blame him? Nature had put the instinct to live in his heart.

He was stretched out face downward on his bunk, and his head, with a square patch shaved on the top, was hanging down over the edge of it toward the floor. The chaplain was sitting by him, one hand pressed consolingly against his shoulder as if to keep the fear in, and every time the shoulder shook, the hand would shake in sympathy with it, although the chaplain was going to live many more years yet. The shoulder shook at regularly spaced intervals. It’s an awful thing to know the time of your own death.

The chaplain was intoning the 23rd Psalm in a low voice. “Green pastures, refresh my soul—” Instead of consoling him, it made him feel worse. He didn’t want the next world, he wanted this one.

The fried chicken and the waffles and the peach shortcake that he’d had hours ago felt like they were all gummed up somewhere behind his chest, wouldn’t go down any further. But that didn’t matter, it wouldn’t give him indigestion, there wouldn’t be time enough for it to.

He wondered if he’d have time to smoke another cigarette. They’d brought in two packs with his dinner, that had been only a few hours ago, and one was already crumpled and empty, the second half gone. It was a foolish thing to worry about, he knew, because what was the difference if he smoked one all the way down or had to throw it away after a single puff? But he’d always been thrifty about things like that, and the habits of a lifetime die hard.

He asked the chaplain, interrupting his low-voiced chant, and instead of answering directly the chaplain simply said, “Smoke another, my boy,” and struck the match and held it for him. Which meant there really wasn’t time.

His head flopped down again and smoke came out of the hidden gray gash of his lips. The chaplain’s hand pressed down on his shoulder once more, steadying the fear, damming it. Footsteps could be heard coming quietly and with horrible slowness along the stone-floored passage outside, and a sudden hush fell over Death Row. Instead of coming up, Scott Henderson’s head went down even further. The cigarette fell and rolled away. The chaplain’s hand pressed down harder, almost riveting him there to the bunk.

The footsteps had stopped. He could sense they were standing out there looking in at him, and though he tried not to look, he couldn’t hold out, his head came up against his will and turned slowly. He said, “Is this it now?”

The cell door started to ease back along its grooves, and the warden said, “This is it now, Scott.”

Scott Henderson’s program. Poor Scott Henderson’s program, returning like bread cast upon the waters. He stared at it. The handbag he had wrenched from her lay unnoticed at his feet.

The girl, meanwhile, was writhing there beside him, trying to break the soldered grip of his hand on her shoulder.

He put it carefully away in his inside pocket first of all. Then he took two hands to her, trundled her roughly along the sidewalk and over to where his car stood waiting. “Get in there, you heartless apology for a human being! You’re coming with me! You know what you’ve nearly done, don’t you?”

She threshed around for a moment before he got the door open and pushed her in. She went sprawling knees first, turned and scrambled upward against the seat. “Let me go, I tell you!” Her voice went keening up and down the street. “You can’t do this to me! Somebody come here! Aren’t there any cops in this town to stop a guy like him—!”

“Cops? You’re getting cops! All the cops you want! You’ll be sick of the sight of them before I get through with you!” Before she could squirm out at the opposite side, he had come in after her, yanked her violently back so that she floundered against him, and crashed the door shut after him.

He took the back of his hand to her twice to silence her; once in threat, the second time in fulfilment. Then he bent to the dashboard. “I never did that to a woman before,” he gritted. “But you’re no woman. You’re just a bum in feminine form. A no-good bum.” They swerved out from the curb, straightened and shot off. “Now you’re going to ride whether you want to or not, and you better see that you ride quiet. Every time you howl or try anything while I’m bucking this traffic I’ll give you another one of those if I have to. It’s up to you.”

She quit wildcatting, deflating sullenly against the seat leather, glowered there, while they cut around corners, bypassed car after car going the same way they were. Once, when a light held them up for a minute, she said defeatedly, without renewing her previous attempts to escape, “Where’re you heading with me?”

“You don’t know, do you?” he said cuttingly. “It’s all news to you, isn’t it?”

“Him, hunh?” she said with quiet resignation.

“Yeah, him, hunh?! Some specimen of humanity you are!” He crushed the accelerator flat once more, and both their heads went back in unison. “You ought to be beaten raw, for being willing to let an innocent man go to his death, when you could have stopped it at any time from first to last, just by coming forward and telling them what you know!”

“I figured it was that,” she said dully. She looked down at her hands. After a while she said, “When is it — tonight?”

“Yes, tonight!”

He saw her eyes widen slightly, in the reflected dashboard light, as though she hadn’t realized until now it was that imminent. “I didn’t know it was — going to be that soon,” she gulped.

“Well, it isn’t now!” he promised harshly. “Not as long as I’ve got you with me at last!”

Another light stopped them. He cursed it, sat there wiping his face with a large handkerchief. Then both their heads flung back together again.

She sat there staring steadily before her. Not at anything before or beyond the car. Yet not at anything below the windshield either, although it was there her eyes were fixed. He could see her in the mirror on her side. She was staring inwardly at something. The past, perhaps. Summing up her life. There was no bar whisky at hand now to provide her with an escape. She had to sit and face it, while the car raced on.

“You must be something made of sawdust, without any insides at all!” he told her once.

She answered, unexpectedly and at length. “Look what it did to me. You haven’t thought of that, have you? Haven’t I suffered enough for it already? Why should I care what happens to him, or to anyone else! What is he to me, anyway? They’re killing him tonight. But I’ve been killed for it already! I’m dead, I tell you, dead! You’ve got someone dead sitting in the car next to you.”

Her voice was the low growl of tragedy striking in the vitals; no shrill woman’s whine or plaint; a sexless groan of suffering. “Sometimes in dreams I see someone who had a beautiful home, a husband who loved her, money, beautiful things, the esteem of her friends, security; above all, security, safety. That was supposed to go on until she died. That was supposed to last. I can’t believe it was me. I know it wasn’t me. And yet the whisky-dreams, sometimes, tell me that it was. You know how dreams are—”

He sat eyeing the darkness that came streaming toward them, to part in the middle over the silver prow of the headlights and come together again behind them, like a mystic undulating tide. His eyes were gray pebbles, that didn’t move, didn’t hear, didn’t give a rap about her trouble.

“Do you know what it means to be thrown out into the street? Yes, literally thrown out, at two in the morning, with just the clothes you have on your back, and to have the doors locked behind you and your own servants warned not to admit you again on pain of dismissal! I sat on a park bench all night the first night. I had to borrow five dollars from my own former maid the next day, so that I could get a room, find shelter at least.”

“Why didn’t you come forward then, at least? If you’d already lost everything, what more did you have to lose?”

“His power over me didn’t end there. He warned me that if I opened my mouth, did anything to bring notoriety or disgrace on his good name, he’d sign me over into an institution for alcoholics. He could easily do it too, he has the influence, the money. I’d never get out again. Straitjackets and cold-water treatments.”

“All that’s no excuse. You must have known we were looking for you; you couldn’t have avoided knowing it. You must have known this man was going to die. You were yellow, that’s what you were. But if you never did a decent thing in your life before, and if you never do a decent thing in your life again, you’re going to do one now. You’re going to speak your piece and save Scott Henderson!”

She was silent for a long moment. Then her head went over slowly. “Yes,” she said at last, “I am. I want to — now. I must have been blind all these months, not to see it as it really is. Somehow I didn’t think of him all along until now, I only thought of myself, what I had to lose by it.” She looked up at him again. “And I would like to do one decent thing at least — just for a change.”

“You’re going to,” he promised grimly. “What time did you meet him at the bar that night?”

“Six-ten, by the clock in front of us.”

“Are you going to tell them that? Are you willing to swear to that?”

“Yes,” she said in an exhausted voice, “I’m going to tell them that. I’m willing to swear to that.”

All he answered was, “God forgive you for what you’ve done to that man!”

Then it came. It was as though something frozen within her had melted, crumbled. Or maybe it was that hard crust that he had noticed forming on the outside of her, smothering her slowly to death. Her hands flew up to her already lowered face, stayed that way, covering it. She made very little sound. He’d never seen anyone shake so. As though she was being torn apart internally. He thought she was never going to stop shaking like that.

He didn’t speak to her. He didn’t look at her, except by indirection in the mirror.

After a while he could tell it was over. Her hands had dropped again. He heard her say, more to herself than him, “It makes you feel so clean, when you’re going to do a thing you’ve been afraid to do—”

They raced on in silence, just the two of them in the faint dashlight. Traffic was thinner now, and all coming one way, toward them, instead of along with them, as heretofore. They were out past the city limits, flying along the sleek, straight artery that led upcountry. The cars passing them left streaks of light on their side windows, they were going so fast.

“Why are we going this far out?” she asked presently, with only dulled awareness. “Isn’t the Criminal Courts Building the place where—?”

“I’m taking you straight up there to the penitentiary,” he answered tautly. “It’s the quickest in the end. Cut through all the red tape—”

“It’s right tonight — you said?”

“Sometime within the next hour and a half. We’ll make it.”

They’d hit full wooded country now; trees with whitewashed waistbands to give the road a boundary in the dark. No more terrain lights, only an occasional inbound car blurring into incandescence as it approached, then dousing its lights in that wayside salute so reminiscent of an ambulant tipping his hat.

“But suppose something happens to delay us? A tire goes out or something? Wouldn’t it be better to telephone?”

“I know what I’m doing. You sound quite anxious all at once.”

“Yes, oh yes, I am,” she breathed. “I’ve been blind. Blind. I see which was the dream, now, and which the reality.”

“Quite a reformation,” he said grudgingly. “For five months you didn’t lift a finger to help him. And now all at once, within fifteen minutes, you’re all hot and bothered.”

“Yes,” she said submissively. “It doesn’t seem to matter, all at once. About my husband, or the threat of being put into an institution, or any of the rest of it. You’ve made me see the whole thing in a different light.” She drew the back of one hand weariedly across her brow, said with infinite disgust, “I want to do at least one brave thing, I’m so sick of being a coward all my life!”

They rode in silence after that. Until presently she asked, almost with anxiety, “Will just my sworn testimony be enough to save him?”

“It’ll be enough to postpone — what they have scheduled for tonight. Once that’s been accomplished, we can turn it over to the lawyers, they’ll see it through the rest of the way.”

Suddenly she noticed they had swung off left, at a fork, onto a desolate, poorly surfaced cross-country “feeder.” It had already occurred several moments before, by the time she became aware of it. The motion of the car had become less even. The occasional passing road-mate had diminished to none. There was no sign of life on it.

“But why this? I thought the north and south highway we were on was the one that takes you up to the State Prison. Isn’t he at—?”

“This is a shortcut,” he answered briefly. “A sort of shuttle that’ll save time.”

The humming of the wind seemed to rise a little, take on an apprehensive moaning quality, as they rushed through, displacing it.

He spoke again, chin almost to wheel, eyes motionless and emotionless over it. “I’ll get you where we’re going in plenty of time.”

There were no longer just two of them in the car. At some indeterminate point in the previous silence, a third presence had entered it, was in it now, sitting between them. The icy, shrouded shape of fear, its unseen arms enfolding the woman in cold embrace, its frigid fingertips seeking out her windpipe.

There hadn’t been any lights but their own for ten minutes past now. There hadn’t been any word between them. The trees were a smoky, billowing mass on each side of them. The wind was a warning message, unheeded until too late. Their two faces were ghosts reflected side by side on the windshield before them.

He slowed, backed, turned aside once more, this time onto an unpaved dirt lane, little better than a defile through the trees. They jounced along over its unevenness of surface, dried leaves hissing in their wake, stirred by the exhaust tube; the wheels climbing over half-submerged roots, the fenders grazing trunks impinging on the right of way. The headlights played over a grottolike profundity of trees, bleaching the nearer ones into dazzling stalagmites, leaving the inner ones black and enshrouded. It was like some evil, bewitched glade in a fairy tale for children; woods of supernatural import where bad things were about to happen.

She said in a smothered voice, “No, what’re you doing?” Fear locked its embrace about her tighter, breathed glacially down her neck. “I don’t like the way you’re acting. What’re you doing this for?”

Suddenly they’d stopped, and it was over. The sound of the brakes only reached her senses after the fact had been accomplished. He killed the engine, and there was stillness all around. Inside the car and out. They were motionless, all of them; the car, and he and she, and her fear.

Not quite; there was one thing moving. The three fingers of his hand, that had remained upon the wheel rim, kept fluttering restlessly, rising and falling in rotation, like somebody striking successive keys on the piano over and over.

She turned and began to pummel at him, in impotent fright. “What is it? Say something! Say something to me! Don’t just sit there like that! What did we stop here for? What are you thinking, why are you looking like that?”

“Get out.” He gave the order with a hitch of his chin.

“No. What are you going to do? No.” She sat there staring at him in ever widening fright.

He reached across her and unlatched the door on that side. “I said get out.”

“No! You’re going to do something. I can see it on your face—”

He flung her before him with one stiffly locked arm. A moment later they were both standing there beside the car, toe deep in sandpapery tan and yellow leaves. He cracked the car door shut again after him. It was damp and penetrating under the trees, pitch-black around them in all directions but one: the ghostly tunnel ahead made by the projecting headlight beams.

“Come this way,” he said quietly. He started walking down it. He held her by the elbow, to make sure that she accompanied him. The leaves sloshed and spit under them in the unnatural quiet. The car fender fell behind them, they were clear of it now, walking ahead. She went turned unnaturally sidewise, staring into his unanswering face. She could hear her own breath, echoing under the canopy of the trees. His was quieter.

They walked like that in silent, unexplained pantomime until they’d reached a point where the projected headlight shine thinned out, was about to disappear. On this boundary line between light and shadows he stopped, took his hand off her. She went down convulsively a few inches, he caught her, straightened her, took his hand off her a second time.

He took out a cigarette and offered it to her. She tried to refuse. “Here,” he insisted roughly, thrusting it at her mouth. “Better take one!” He lit it for her, holding his hands cupped over the match flame. There was something ritualistic about the little attention that only struck redoubled fear into her, instead of reassuring her. She took one puff, then the cigarette dropped from her unmanageable lips, she wasn’t able to retain it. He made a precautionary pass at it with his foot, ground it out because of the leaves.

“All right,” he said. “Now go back to the car. Walk up that pathway of light from here, and get back in the car, and wait for me in it. And don’t look around, just keep walking straight ahead.”

She didn’t seem to understand, or else was too undone by terror to be able to move of her own volition. He had to give her a slight push away from him to start her off. She tottered a few uncertain steps through the shuffling leaves.

“Go ahead, keep walking straight back along those lights like I told you,” his voice came after her. “And don’t look back!”

She was a woman and a frightened one. The admonition had an opposite effect to that intended; it brought her head around, uncontrollably.

He already had the gun out in his hand, although he hadn’t quite brought it all the way up yet, it was still at half position. It must have come out silently behind her back as she was moving away.

Her scream was like a bird, clawed and dying, that manages to spiral up through the trees for one last flutter before it drops down dead. She tried to close in toward him again, as though nearness was a guarantee of immunity and the danger lay in being detached from him.

“Stay there!” he warned flintily. “I tried to make it as easy for you as I could, I told you not to look back.”

“Don’t! What for?” she wailed. “I told you I’d tell them everything you want me to! I told you I would! I will, I will—!”

“No,” he contradicted with horrifying calm, “you won’t, and I’ll make sure you don’t. Tell it to him instead, when he catches up to you in the next world, about half an hour from now.” His arm stretched out at firing position with the gun.

She made a perfect silhouette against the fuzzy headlight glare. Trapped, unable even to flee aside into the protective darkness beyond the beams in time, for they were so wide, she floundered around where she stood in a complete, befuddled circle, that brought her around facing him once more as she had been before.

That was all there was time for.

Then the shot echoed thunderously under the ceiling of trees overhead. Her scream was its counterpoint.

He must have missed, as fairly close to one another as they were. There was no smoke at his end, as there should have been, though her mind had no time to reason about that. She felt nothing; she still staved up, too dazed to run or do anything but waver there, like a ribbon streamer before an electric fan. He was the one stumbled sideways against a near-by tree trunk, leaned there inertly for a minute, face pressed against the bark, as though in remorse for what he had just attempted. Then she saw that he was holding his shoulder with the other hand. The gun winked harmlessly from the bed of leaves where he had dropped it, like a lump of coal in the light flare.

A man’s figure glided swiftly past her from the rear, went down the path of light toward him. He was holding a gun of his own, she saw, centered on the crumbling figure against the tree. He dipped for a minute, and the wink was gone from the leaves underfoot. Then he stepped in close, there was a flash of reflected light down by their wrists, and something made the sound of a twig snapping. Lombard’s sagging figure came away from the tree, leaned soddenly against him, then straightened itself.

In the leaden quiet the second man’s voice reached her clearly.

“I arrest you for the murder of Marcella Henderson!”

He put something to his lips, and a whistle sounded with doleful, long drawn out finality. Then the silence came down on the three of them again.

Burgess leaned down solicitously and raised her from the kneeling position she had collapsed into on the bed of leaves, hands pressed tightly over her sobbing face.

“I know,” he said soothingly. “I know it was pretty bad. It’s over now. It’s over. You did the job. You’ve saved him. Lean on me, that’s it. Have a good cry. Go to it. You’ve got it coming to you.”

Womanlike, she stopped then and there. “I don’t want to now. I’m all right, now. It’s just that — I didn’t think anyone would get here in time to—”

“They wouldn’t have just by tailing the two of you. Not the way he drove.” A second car had braked somewhere farther up the lane only moments before; its occupants hadn’t even reached the spot yet. “I couldn’t take any chances on that. I was riding right with you the whole way out, didn’t you know that? I was right in the trunk compartment. I heard the whole thing. I’ve been in it ever since you first walked inside the store.”

He raised his voice, shouted back to where flashlights were winking fitfully under the trees as the second party descended. “Is that Gregory and the rest of you fellows? Go back — don’t waste time getting out and coming over here. Get over to the highway fast and get on the nearest telephone. Get the District Attorney’s office. We only have a few minutes. I’ll follow you in the other car. Tell them I’m holding a guy named John Lombard, self-confessed killer of Mrs. Henderson, to get word to the warden—”

“You haven’t got a bit of evidence against me,” Lombard growled, wincing with pain.

“No? What more do I need than what you’ve just given me? I caught you in the very act of murdering in cold blood a girl whom you never even set eyes on until just an hour ago! What could you have possibly had against her, except that her evidence was the one thing that could have still saved Henderson, absolved him of the crime? And why were you determined not to let that happen? Because that would have meant reopening the whole case, and your own immunity would have been endangered. That’s my evidence against you!”

A State Trooper came thudding up to them. “Need a hand here?”

“Carry the girl over to the car. She’s just been through a pretty rocky experience and needs looking after. I’ll take care of the guy.”

The husky trooper picked her up bodily, cradled her in his arms. “Who is she?” he asked over his shoulder, as he led the way back along the glowing headlight carpet.

“A pretty valuable little person,” Burgess answered from the rear, jarring his prisoner along beside him, “so walk gently with her, officer, walk slow. That’s Henderson’s girl, Carol Richman, you’re holding in your arms. The best man of us all.”