Phantom lady Read online

  Henderson dug wearied fingers through his hair, let his head droop over in futility.

  Burgess came out of the bathroom, tucking his shirt in. He took his wristwatch out of his pocket, strapped it on. He scanned it idly, then he drifted aimlessly out into the foyer. He must have picked up the house phone. His voice came back. “All right now, Tierney.” Nobody paid any attention, least of all Henderson. He was half asleep there with his eyes open, staring down at the carpet.

  Burgess sauntered in again, moved around after that as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. Finally he ended up at the window. He adjusted the shade a little, to get more light in. There was a bird on the sill outside. It quirked its head at him knowingly. He said, “C’mere a minute, Henderson. What kind of a bird is this, anyway?” And then when Henderson didn’t move the first time, “C’mere. Hurry up, before he goes away.” As though that were the most important thing in the world.

  Henderson got up, and went over and stood beside him, and thus his back was to the room. “Sparrow,” he said briefly. He gave him a look as if to say: That wasn’t what you wanted to know.

  “That’s what I figured it was,” Burgess said. And then, to keep him looking forward, “Pretty decent view you got from here.”

  “You can have it, bird and all,” Henderson said bitterly.

  There was a noticeable lull. All questioning had stopped.

  Henderson turned away, then stopped where he was. There was a girl sitting there on the sofa, in the exact place where he’d just been himself until now. There hadn’t been a sound to mark her arrival. Not the creak of a door hinge, not the rustle of a garment.

  The way the eyes of the three men dug into his face, all the skin should have peeled off it. He got a grip on it from the inside, held it steady. It felt a little stiff. Like cardboard, but he saw to it that it didn’t move.

  She looked at him, and he at her. She was pretty. She was the Anglo-Saxon type, more so even than the Anglo-Saxons themselves are any more. Blue-eyed, and with her taffy colored hair uncurled and brushed straight across her forehead in a clean looking sweep. The part was as distinct as a man’s. She had a tan camel’s hair coat drawn over her shoulders, with the sleeves left empty. She was hatless, but was clutching a handbag. She was young, at that stage when they still believe in love and men. Or maybe she always would, was of an idealistic temperament. You could read it in the way she looked at him. There was practically incense burning in her eyes.

  He moistened his lips slightly, nodded barely perceptibly, as to a distant acquaintance whose name he could not recall, nor where they had met, but whom he didn’t want to slight.

  He seemed to have no further interest in her after that.

  Burgess must have made some esoteric sign in the background. All of a sudden they were alone together, there was no one else in the room with them any more.

  He tried to motion with his hand, but it was too late. The camel’s hair coat was already propped up empty in the corner of the sofa, without her inside it. Then it slowly wavered and collapsed into a huddle. She had flung herself against him like some sort of a projectile.

  He tried to get out of the way, side-step. “Don’t. Be careful. That’s just what they want. They’re probably listening to every word—”

  “I have nothing to be afraid of.” She took him by the arms and shook him slightly. “Have you? Have you? You’ve got to answer me!”

  “For six hours I’ve been fencing to keep your name out of it. How did they come to drag you into it? How did they hear of you?” He smacked himself heavily on the shoulder. “Damn it, I would have given my right arm up to here to keep you out!”

  “But I want to be in things like this with you, when you’re in them. You don’t know very much about me, do you?”

  The kiss kept him from answering. Then he said, “You’ve kissed me before you even know whether or not—”

  “No, I haven’t,” she insisted, breathing close to his face. “Oh, I couldn’t be that wrong. Nobody could be. If I could be that wrong, then my heart ought to be put in an institution for mental defectives. And I’ve got a smart heart.”

  “Well, tell your heart for me it’s okay,” he said sadly. “I didn’t hate Marcella. I just didn’t love her enough to go on with her, that’s all. But I couldn’t have killed her. I don’t think I could kill anyone, not even a man—”

  She buried her forehead against his chest, in a sort of ineffable gratitude. “Do you have to tell me that? Haven’t I seen your face when a stray dog came up to the two of us on the street? When a dray horse standing at the curb— Oh. this is no time to tell you, but why do you suppose I love you? You don’t think it’s because you’re so handsome, do you? Or so brilliant? Or so dashing?” He smiled and kept stroking her hair. And he’d interrupt the strokes, softly, with his lips. “It’s all inside you, what I love, where no one but me can see it. There’s so much goodness in you, you’re such a swell fellow—but it’s all inside, for me alone to know, to have to myself.”

  She raised her face at last, and her eyes were all wet.

  “Don’t do that,” he said gently, “I’m not worth it.”

  “I’ll set my own price tags, don’t try to beat me down,” she rebuked him. She glanced over at the oblivious door, and the light on her face dimmed a little. “What about them? Do they think—?”

  “I think it’s about fifty-fifty, so far. They wouldn’t have kept at me this long— How did they come to drag you into it?”

  “Your message was there from six o’clock, when I got in last night. I hated to go to sleep without knowing one way or the other, so finally I called you back here, around eleven. They were already here in the place, and they sent someone right over to talk to me. I’ve had someone with me ever since.”

  “That’s great, keeping you up all night long!” he said resentfully.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to be asleep, knowing you were in trouble.” Her fingers swept the curve of his face. “There’s only one thing that matters. Everything else is beside the point. It’ll be straightened out, it’s got to be. They must have ways of finding out who actually did it— How much have you told them?”

  “About us, you mean? Nothing. I was trying to keep you out of it.”

  “Well, maybe that’s what the hitch has been. They could sense you were leaving out something. I’m in it now, so don’t you think it’s better to tell them everything there is

  to know about us? We have nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. The quicker you do, the quicker it’ll be over with. And they’ve probably already guessed, from my own attitude, we’re pretty off-base about each—”

  She stopped short. Burgess was back in the room. He had the pleased look of a man who has gained his point. When the other two followed him in, Henderson even saw him give one of them the wink.

  “There’s a car downstairs that’ll take you back to your own address, Miss Richman.”

  Henderson stepped over to him. “Look, will you keep Miss Richman out of this? It’s unfair, she really has nothing—”

  “That depends entirely on yourself,” Burgess told him. “We only brought her over here in the first place because you made it necessary for us to remind you—”

  “Anything I know, anything I can tell you, is yours,” Henderson assured him earnestly, “if you see that she’s not annoyed by newspapermen, that they don’t get hold of her name and make a big thing of it.”

  “Always providing it’s the truth,” Burgess qualified.

  “It will be.” He turned to her, said in a softer voice than the one he’d been using, “You go now, Carol, Get some sleep, and don’t worry, everything’ll be all right in a little while.”

  She kissed him in front of all of them, as though proud to show the way she felt toward him. “Will you let me hear from you? Will you let me hear from you as soon as you can—sometime right today if you can?”

  Burgess went to the door with her, said to the cop posted outside it, “Tell
Tierney nobody is to come near this young lady. No name, no questions answered, no information of any kind.”

  “Thanks,” Henderson said fervently when he’d come back, “you’re a regular guy.”

  The detective eyed him without acknowledgement. He sat down, took out a notebook, ran a wavy cancellation line down two or three closely scribbled pages, turned over to a fresh one. “Shall we start in?” he said.

  “Let’s start,” Henderson acquiesced.

  “You said you had words. Does that stand?”

  “That stands.”

  “About two theater tickets? Does that stand?”

  “About two theater tickets and a divorce. That stands.”

  “Now that comes in it. Then there was bad feeling between you?”

  “No feeling of any kind, good or bad. Call it a sort of numbness. I’d already asked her for a divorce some time ago. She knew about Miss Richman. I’d told her. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I was trying to do it the decent way. She refused the divorce. Walking out was no good. I didn’t want that. I wanted Miss Richman for my wife. We stayed away from each other all we could, but it was hell, 1 couldn’t stand it. Is all this necessary?”

  “Very.”

  “I had a talk with Miss Richman night before last. She saw it was getting me. She said, ‘Let me try, let me talk to her.’ I said no. She said, Then you try again yourself. Try in a different way this time. Talk to her reasonably, try to win her over.’ It went against the grain, but I gave it a spin. I telephoned from work and reserved a table for two at our old place. I bought two tickets to a show, first row on the aisle. At the last minute I even turned down an invitation from my best friend to go out on a farewell party with him. Jack Lombard, he’s going to be in South America for the next few years; it was my last chance of seeing him before he sailed. But I stuck to my original intention; I was going to be nice to her if it killed me.

  “Then when I got back here, nothing doing. She wasn’t having any reconciliation. She liked things the way they were, and she was going to keep them that way. I got sore, I admit. I blew up. She waited until the last minute. Let me go ahead and shower and change clothes. Then she just sat there and laughed. ‘Why don’t you take her instead?’ she

  kept needling me. ‘Why waste the money?’ So I phoned Miss Richman from here, right in front of her.

  “I didn’t even have that satisfaction. She wasn’t in. Marcella laughed her head off. She made me know it.

  “You know how it is when they laugh at you. You feel like a fool. I was so sore I couldn’t see straight any more. I yelled, ‘I’m going out on the street and invite the first girl I run into to come with me in your place! The first thing in curves and high heels that comes along, no matter who it is!’ And I slammed on my hat and slammed out the door.”

  His voice ran down like a clock that needs winding. “And that’s all. I can’t do any better than that for you, even if I tried. Because that’s the truth, and the truth can’t be improved on.”

  “And after you left here, does that timetable of your movements you already gave us still go?” Burgess asked.

  “That still goes. Except that I wasn’t alone, I was with someone. I did what I’d told her I’d do: stepped up to someone and invited her along. She accepted, and I was with her from then until just about ten minutes before I came back here.”

  “What time did you meet her, about?”

  “Only a few minutes after leaving here. I stopped in at some bar or other, over on Fiftieth Street, and that was where I met her—” He did something with his finger. “Wait a minute, I just remembered. I can give you the exact time I met her. We both looked at the clock together, as I was showing her the theater tickets. It was ten after six, to the dot.”

  Burgess ran his nail along underneath his lower lip. “What bar was this?”

  “I couldn’t say, exactly. It had a red come-on over it, that’s all I can remember at the moment.”

  “Can you prove you were in there at ten after six?”

  “I’ve just told you I was. Why? Why is that so important?”

  Burgess drawled, “Well, I could string you along, but I’m funny that way. I’ll give it to you. Your wife died at exactly eight after six. The small wristwatch she wore shattered against the edge of the vanity table as she fell to her death. It stopped at exactly—” He read from something, “six—eight—fifteen.” He put it away again. “Now nothing with two legs, or even wings, could have been here at that time, and over on Fiftieth Street one minute and forty-five seconds later. You prove you were over there at ten past, and all this is over.”

  “But I’ve told you! I looked at the clock.”

  “That isn’t proof, that’s an unsupported statement.”

  “Then what would proof be?”

  “Corroboration.”

  “But why does it have to be at that end? Why can’t it be at this?”

  “Because there’s nothing at this end to show that anyone but you did it. Why do you suppose we’ve been sitting up with you all night?”

  Henderson let his wrists dangle limp over his knees. “I see,” he breathed at last. “I see.” The silence coursed and swirled around the room after that, for a while.

  Burgess spoke again at last. “Can this woman you say you met in the bar corroborate you on what time it was?”

  “Yes. She looked at the clock when I did. She must remember that. Yes, she can.”

  “All right, then that’s all there is to it. Providing she satisfies us, her corroboration is given in good faith, and you didn’t put her up to it. Where does she live?”

  “I don’t know. I left her where I first met her, back at the bar.”

  “Well, what was her name?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask, and she didn’t give it to me.”

  “Not even a first name, not even a nickname? You were with her for six hours, what did you call her?”

  ” ‘You,’ ” he answered glumly.

  Burgess had got out his notebook again. “All right, describe her for us. We’ll have to send out after her ourselves and have her brought in.”

  There was a long wait.

  “Well?” he said finally.

  Henderson’s face was getting paler by the minute. He swallowed hard. “My God, I can’t!” he blurted out finally. “I’ve lost her completely, she’s rubbed out.” He circled his hand helplessly in front of his own face. “I could have told you when I first came back here last night, maybe, but now I can’t any more. Too much has happened since. The shock of Marcella— And then you guys pegging away at me all night. She’s like a film that’s been exposed to too much light, she’s completely faded out. Even while I was with her I didn’t notice her very closely, my mind was too full of my own affairs.” He looked from one to the other of them, as if in search of help. “She’s a complete blank!”

  Burgess tried to help him out. “Take your time. Think hard. Now, here. Eyes?”

  Henderson flexed his clenched hands open, in futility.

  “No? All right, hair, then. What about hair? What color hair?”

  He plastered hands to his eye sockets. “That’s gone too. Every time I start to say one color, it seems to me it was another: and then when I start to say the other. I think it was the first again. I don’t know; it must have been sort of in-between. Not brown, not black. Most of the time she had it under a hat.” He looked up half hopefully. “I can remember the hat better than anything else. An orange hat. will that do any good? Yeah, orange, that’s it.”

  “But suppose she’s taken it off since last night, suppose she don’t show up anywhere in it for the next six months? Then where are we? Can’t you remember anything about her herself?”

  Henderson kneaded his temples in brain agony.

  “Was she fat? Skinny? Tall? Short?” Burgess peppered at him.

  Henderson writhed his waist, first to one side, then the other, as if to get away from the questions. “I can’t, that’s all, I can’
t!”

  “I think you’re taking us for a ride, aren’t you?” one of the others suggested stonily. “It was only last night. Not last week or last year.”

  “I never did have a very good memory for faces, even when I’m—at peace, nothing to bother me. Oh, she had a face, I suppose—”

  “No kidding?” the one who had assumed the role of end man jeered.

  He kept going from bad to worse, because he was making the mistake of thinking aloud, instead of rehearsing his words. “She was shaped like other women, that’s about all I can tell you—”

  That did it. Burgess’s face had been slowly lengthening for some time, without his giving any other sign of truculence. He was evidently of a slow-moving temperament. Instead of reclipping his stymied pencil into his pocket, he flung it with a sort of angered deliberateness, almost as if taking aim, at the wall opposite him. Then he got up and went over and got it. His face had turned good and red. He shrugged into his long discarded coat, pulled the knot of his tie around frontward.

  “Come on, boys,” he said surlily, “let’s get out of here, it’s getting late.”

  He stopped a moment at the arched opening leading out to the foyer, eyed Henderson flintily. “What do you take us for anyway?” he growled. “Easy marks? You’re out with a woman, for six solid hours, only last night, and yet you can’t tell us what she looked like! You’re sitting shoulder to shoulder with her at a bar, you’re sitting across a table from her for a whole table d’hote meal from celery to coffee, you’re in the seat right next to her for three full hours at a show, you’re in the same taxi with her coming and going—but her face is just a blank space under an orange hat! You expect us to swallow that? You try to hand us a myth, a phantom, without any name or form or height or width or eyes or hair or anything else, and we’re supposed to take your word for it you were with that and not home here when your wife was getting killed! You’re not even plausible about it. A ten-year-old kid could see through what you’re trying to put over. It’s one of two things. Either you weren’t with any such person, and just made her up out of your own mind. Or more likely still, you weren’t with any such person but did see her in the crowd around you sometime during the evening, and are trying to foist her on us as having been with you, when she wasn’t at all. Which is why you’re purposely making her blurred, so we can’t get a very good line on her and find out the truth!”