Phantom lady Read online

  He was so stunned for a minute by the triple, deathly silent apparition that he stared questioningly around the room in search of recognition, of orientation, to see if he was in the right place at all, if it was his own apartment he’d entered.

  His eyes came to rest on a cobalt blue lamp base on a table over by the wall. That was his. On a low-slung chair cocked out from a corner. That was his. On a photograph folder standing on a cabinet. One panel held the face of a beautiful, pouting, doe-eyed girl with masses of curly hair. The other held his own face.

  The two faces were looking in opposite directions, aloofly, away from one another.

  So it was his own home he’d come back to.

  He was the first one to speak. It seemed as if they were never going to. It seemed as if they were going to stand staring at him all night. “What’re you men doing in my apartment?” he rapped out.

  They didn’t answer.

  “Who are you?”

  They didn’t answer.

  “What do you want here? How’d you get in?” He called her name again. This time parenthetically, as though demanding of her an explanation of their presence here. The door toward which he’d turned his head as he did so, the only other door that broke the walls besides the arched opening through which he’d just come, remained obliviously closed. Secretively, inscrutably closed.

  They’d spoken. His head snapped back to them. “Are you Scott Henderson?” They had narrowed the semicircle about him a little now.

  “Yes, that’s my name.” He kept looking around toward that door that didn’t open. “What is it? What’s up?”

  They continued, with maddening deliberation, to ask their own questions instead of answering his. “And you live here, is that right?”

  “Certainly I live here!”

  “And you’re the husband of Marcella Henderson, is that right?”

  “Yes! Now listen, I want to know what this is about.”

  One of them did something with his palm, made some sort of a gesture with it that he failed to get in time. It only struck him after it was already over.

  He tried to get over to that door and found that one of them, somehow, was in his way. “Where is she? Is she out?”

  “She’s not out, Mr. Henderson,” one of them said quietly.

  “Well, if she’s in there, why doesn’t she come out?” His voice rose exasperatedly. “Talk, will you? Say something!”

  “She can’t come out, Mr. Henderson.”

  “Wait a minute, what was that you showed me just now, a police badge?”

  “Now, take it easy, Mr. Henderson.” They were executing a clumsy sort of a group dance, the four of them. He’d shift a little one way, and they’d shift with him. Then he’d shift back again the other way, and again they’d shift with him.

  “Take it easy? But I want to know what’s happened! Have we been robbed? Has there been an accident? Was she run over? Take your hands off me. Let me go in there, will you?”

  But they had three pairs of hands to his one. Each time he’d get rid of one pair, two more would hold him back somewhere else. He was rapidly working himself up into a state of unmanageable excitement. The next step would have been blows. The rapid breathing of the four of them filled the quiet room.

  “I live here, this is my home! You can’t do this to me! What right’ve you got to keep me out of my wife’s bedroom—”

  Suddenly they’d quit. The one in the middle made a little sign to the one nearest the door, said with a sort of reluctant indulgence, “All right, let him go in. Joe.”

  The obstructive arm he had been pressing against dropped so suddenly, he opened the door and went through almost off-balance, careening the first step or two of the way.

  Into a pretty place, a fragile place, a place of love. All blue and silver, and with a sachet clinging to the air that he knew well. A doll with wide-spread blue satin panniers, sitting plumped on a vanity table, seemed to look over at him with helpless wide-eyed horror. One of the two crystal sticks supporting blue silken shades had fallen athwart her lap. On the two beds, blue satin coverlets. One flat and smooth as ice, the other rounded over someone’s hidden form. Someone sleeping, or someone ill. Covered up completely from head to foot, with just a stray wisp or two of curly hair escaping up at the top. like bronze foam.

  He’d stopped short. A look of white consternation crossed his face. “She’s—she’s done something to herself! Oh, the little fool—!” He glanced fearfully at the nightstand between the two beds, but there was nothing on it, no drinking glass or small bottle or prescription box.

  He took sagging steps over to the bedside. He leaned down, touched her through the coverlet, found her rounded shoulder, shook it questioningly. “Marcella, are you all right—?”

  They’d come in past the doorway after him. Vaguely he had an impression everything he did was being watched, being studied. But he had no time for anyone, anything but her.

  Three pairs of eyes in a doorway, watching. Watching him fumble with a blue satin coverlet. His hand whipped down a narrow triangular corner of it.

  There was a hideous, unbelievable moment, enough to scar his heart for life, while she grinned up at him. Grinned with a cadaverous humor that had become static. Her hair was rippling about her on the pillows in the shape of an open fan.

  Hands interfered. He went backward, draggingly. a step at a time. A flicker of blue satin and she was gone again. For good, forever.

  “I didn’t want this to happen.” he said brokenly. “This wasn’t what I was looking for—”

  Three pairs of eyes exchanged glances, jotted that down in the notebooks of their minds.

  They took him out into the other room and led him over to a sofa. He sat down on it. Then one of them went back and closed the door.

  He sat there quietly, shading his eyes with one hand as though the light in the room was too strong. They didn’t seem to be watching him. One stood at the window, staring out at nothing. The other was standing beside a small table, leafing through a magazine. The third one was sitting down across the room from him, but not looking at him. He was prodding at one of his fingernails with something, to clean it. The way he pored over it. it seemed the most important thing in the world to him at the moment.

  Henderson took his shielding hand away presently. He found himself looking at her wing of the photograph portfolio. It slanted his way. He reached over and closed it.

  Three pairs of eyes completed a circuit of telepathic communication.

  The ceiling of leaden silence began to come down closer, to weigh oppressively. Finally the one sitting across from him said, “We’re going to have to talk to you.”

  “Will you give me just a minute more, please?” he said wanly. “I’m sort of shaken up—”

  The one in the chair nodded with considerate understanding. The one by the window kept looking out. The one by the table kept turning the pages of a woman’s magazine.

  Finally Henderson pinched the corners of his eyes together as if to clear them. He said, quite simply, “It’s all right now. You can begin.”

  It began so conversationally, so offhandedly, it was hard to tell it had even begun at all. Or that it was anything but just a tactful chat to help them fill in a few general facts. “Your age, Mr. Henderson?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Her age?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Five years.”

  “Your occupation?”

  “I’m in the brokerage business.”

  “About what time did you leave here tonight, Mr. Henderson?”

  “Between five-thirty and six,”

  “Can you come a little closer than that?”

  “I can narrow it for you, yes. I can’t give you the exact minute the door closed after me. Say. somewhere between quarter of and five of six. I remember I heard six o’clock striking when I’d gotten down as far as the corner, from the little chapel over in the next
block.”

  “I see. You’d already had your dinner?”

  “No.” A split second went by. “No—I hadn’t.”

  “You had your dinner out, in that case.”

  “‘I had my dinner out.”

  “Did you have your dinner alone?”

  “I had my dinner out, without my wife.”

  The one by the table had come to the end of the magazine. The one by the window had come to the end of the interest the view held for him. The one in the chair said with tactful overemphasis, as if afraid of giving offense, “Well, er, it wasn’t your usual custom, though, to dine out without your wife, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Well, as long as you say that, how is it you did tonight?” The detective didn’t look at him, looked at the cone of ash he was knocking off his cigarette into a receptacle beside him.

  “We’d arranged to take dinner out together tonight. Then at the last minute she complained of not feeling well, of having a headache, and—I went alone.”

  “Have words, anything like that?” This time the question was inaudible, it was so minor keyed.

  Henderson said, in an equally minor key, “We had a word or two, yes. You know how it is.”

  “Sure.” The detective seemed to understand perfectly how little domestic misunderstandings like that went. “But nothing serious, that right?”

  “Nothing that would make her do anything like this, if that’s what you’re driving at.” He stopped, asked a question in turn, with a momentary stepping-up of alertness. “What was it. anyway? You men haven’t even told me yet. What caused—?”

  The outside door had opened and he broke off short. He watched with a sort of hypnotic fascination, until the bedroom door had closed. Then he made a half start to his feet. “What do they want? Who are they? What are they going to do in there?”

  The one in the chair had come over and put his hand to his shoulder so that he sat down again; without, however, any undue pressure being exerted. It was more like a gesture of condolence.

  The one who had been by the window, looked over, mentioned. “A little nervous, aren’t you, Mr. Henderson?”

  A sort of instinctive, natural dignity, to be found in all human beings, came to Henderson’s aid. “How should I be—at ease, self-possessed?” he answered with rebuking bitterness. “I’ve just come home and found my wife dead in the house.”

  He’d made that point. The interlocutor by the window noticeably had nothing further to say on that score.

  The bedroom door had opened again. There was awkward, commingled motion in it. Henderson’s eyes dilated, then slowly coursed the short distance from door to arched opening leading out into the foyer. This time he gained his feet fully in a spasmodic jolt. “No, not like that! Look what they’re doing! Like a sack of potatoes— And all her lovely hair along the floor—she was so careful of it—!”

  Hands riveted to him, holding him there. The outer door closed muffledly. A little sachet came drifting out of the empty bedroom, seeming to whisper. “Remember? Remember when I was your love? Remember?”

  This time he sank down suddenly, buried his face within his two gouging, kneading hands. You could hear his breath. The tempo was all shot to pieces. He said to them in helpless surprise, after his hands had dropped again, “I thought guys didn’t cry—and now I just have.”

  The one who had been in the chair before passed him a cigarette, and even lit it for him. His eyes looked bright, Henderson’s, in the shine of the match.

  Whether it was that that had interrupted it. or it had died out of its own accord for lack of anything further to feed on. the questioning didn’t resume. When they resumed talking again, it was pointless, inane, almost as though they were talking just to kill time, for the sake of having something to say.

  “You’re a very neat dresser, Mr. Henderson.” the one in the chair observed at random.

  Henderson gave him a half-disgusted look, didn’t answer.

  “It’s great the way everything you’ve got on goes together.”

  “That’s an art in itself,” the former magazine reader chimed in.

  “Socks, and shirt, and pocket handkerchief—”

  “All but the tie,” the one by the window objected.

  “Why do you have to discuss anything like that at a time like this?” Henderson protested wearily.

  “It should be blue, shouldn’t it? Everything else is blue. It knocks your whole get-up silly. I’m not a fashion plate, but y’know just looking at it does something to me—” And then he went on innocently, “How’d you happen to slip up on an item as important as the tie, when you went to all the trouble of matching everything else up? Haven’t you got a blue tie?”

  Henderson protested almost pleadingly. “What’re you trying to do to me? Can’t you see I can’t talk about trifles like—”

  He asked the question again, as tonelessly as before. “Haven’t you got a blue tie, Mr. Henderson?”

  Henderson ran his hand up through his hair. “Are you trying to drive me out of my mind?” He said it very quietly, as though this small talk was almost unendurable. “Yes, I have a blue tie. Inside, on my tie rack, I think.”

  “Then how’d you come to skip it when you were putting on an outfit like this? It cries out for it.” The detective gestured disarmingly. “Unless, of course, you did have it on to begin with, changed your mind at the last minute, whipped it off”, and put on the one you’re wearing instead.” • Henderson said, “What’s the difference? Why do you keep this up?” His voice went up a note. “My wife is dead. I’m all cracked up inside. What’s the difference what color tie I did or didn’t put on?”

  It went on, as relentlessly as drops of water falling one by one upon the head. “Are you sure you didn’t have it on originally, then change your mind—?”

  His voice was smothered. “Yes, I’m sure. It’s hanging from my tie rack in there.”

  The detective said guilelessly, “No, it isn’t hanging from your tie rack. That’s why I’m asking. You know those little vertical notches running down your tie rack, like a fish’s backbone? We found the one it belongs on, the one you usually kept it strung through, because that was the only vacant one on the whole gadget. And that was the lowest one of all, in other words all the ties on the upper ones overlapped it as they hung down straight. So you see. it was removed from under all the other ties, which means you must have gone there and selected it originally, not just pulled it off at random from the top. Now what bothers me is why, if you went to all the trouble of lifting up all your other ties and selecting that one from underneath, and withdrawing it from the rack, you then changed your mind and went back to the one you’d already been wearing all day at business, and which didn’t go with your after dark outfit.”

  Henderson hit himself smartly at the ridge of the forehead with the heel of one hand. He sprang up. “I can’t stand this!” he muttered. “I can’t stand any more of it. I tell you! Come out with what you’re doing it for, or else stop it! If it’s not on the tie rack, then where is it? I haven’t got it on! Where is it? You tell me, if you know! What’s the difference where it is, anyway?”

  “A great deal of difference, Mr. Henderson.”

  There was a long wait after that; so long that he started to get pale even before it had come to an end.

  “It was knotted tight around your wife’s neck. So tight it killed her. So tight it will have to be cut loose with a knife to get it off.”

  3 The Hundred and Forty-Ninth Day Before the Execution

  DAYBREAK

  A THOUSAND questions later, the early light of day peering in the windows made the room look different, somehow, although everything in it was the same, including the people. It looked like a room in which an all-night party had taken place. Cigarette ends spilling over in every possible container, and many that weren’t intended as such. The cobalt blue lamp was still there, looking strange in the dawn with its halo of faded electric light. The pho
tographs were still there: hers a He now, a picture of someone that no longer existed.

  They all looked and acted like men suffering from a hangover. They had their coats and vests off, and their shirt collars open. One of them was in the bathroom, freshening up at the cold water tap. You could hear him snorting through the open door. The other two kept smoking and moving restlessly around. Only Henderson was sitting quiet. He was still sitting on the same sofa he’d been on all night. He felt as though he’d spent all his life on it, had never known what it was to be anywhere but in this one room.

  The one in the bathroom, his name was Burgess, came to the door. He was pressing drops of excess water out of his hair, as though he’d ducked his whole head in the wash basin. “Where’re all your towels?” he asked Henderson, with odd sounding commonplaceness.

  “I was never able to find one on the rack myself,” the latter admitted ruefully. “She— I’d always be given one

  when I asked for it, but I don’t know to this day just where they’re kept.”

  The detective looked around helplessly, dripping all over the doorsill. “D’you mind if I use the edge of the shower curtain?” he asked.

  “I don’t mind,” Henderson said with a sort of touching wistfulness.

  It began again. It always began again just when it seemed to have finally stopped for good.

  “It wasn’t just about two theater tickets. Why do you keep trying to make us believe it was that?”

  He looked up at the wrong one first. He was still used to the parliamentary system of being looked at when spoken to. It had come from the one who wasn’t looking at him.

  “Because it was that. What should I say it was about, if that’s all it was about? Didn’t you ever hear of two people having words about a pair of theater tickets? It can happen, you know.”

  The other one said, “Come on, Henderson, quit stalling. Who is she?”

  “Who is who?”

  “Oh, don’t start that again,” his questioner said disgustedly. “That takes us back an hour and a half or two hours, to where we were about four this morning. Who is she?”