Phantom lady Page 5

  “Come on, stir!” one of the others ordered Henderson, in a voice like a buzz saw going through a pine knot. “Burge don’t burn very often,” he added half humorously, “but when he does, he burns good and strong.”

  “Am I under arrest?” Scott Henderson asked Burgess as he got up and moved toward the door in the grasp of the other man.

  Burgess didn’t answer him directly. The answer was to be found in the parting instruction he gave the third man, over his shoulder.

  “Turn out that lamp, Joe. There won’t be anybody using it around here for a long time to come.”

  4 The Hundred and Forty-Ninth Day Before the Execution

  SIX P.M.

  THE car was standing waiting there by the corner when the unseen belfry somewhere close at hand began tolling the hour. “Here it comes,” Burgess said. They’d been waiting about ten minutes for this, motor running.

  Henderson, neither free nor indicted yet. sat on the rear seat between him and one of the other two headquarters men who had taken part in the questioning up at his apartment the previous night and morning.

  A third man whom they referred to as “Dutch” stood outside the car, on the sidewalk, in a sort of fatuous idleness. He had been kneeling crouched in mid-sidewalk tightening up his shoelaces just before the first stroke sounded. He straightened now.

  It was the same kind of a night like the one before. The get-together hour, the sky with its make-up on in the west, everyone going some place all at one time. Henderson gave no sign, sitting there between two of his captors. It must have occurred to him, though, what a difference a few hours can make.

  His own address was just a few doors behind them, at the next corner to the rear. Only he didn’t live there any more; he lived in a detention cell in the prison attached to police headquarters now.

  He spoke dully. “No, a store length further back,” he said to Burgess. “I’d just come up to that lingerie store window when the first stroke hit. I can remember that, now that I’m looking at it—and hearing the same sound—over again.”

  Burgess relayed it to the man on the sidewalk. “Back up one store length and take it from there, Dutch. That’s it. All right, start walking!” The second stroke of six had sounded. He did something to the stop watch he was holding in his hand.

  The tall, rangy, redheaded man on the sidewalk struck out. The car at the same time eased into gliding motion, keeping abreast of him out beyond the curb.

  “Dutch” looked self-conscious for a moment or two. his legs worked a little stiffly; then it wore off gradually.

  “How is he for pace?” Burgess asked presently.

  “I think I was a little faster than that,” Henderson said. “When I’m sore I walk fast, I notice, and I was going at a pretty good clip last night.”

  “Quicken it up a little, Dutch!” Burgess coached.

  The rangy one accelerated slightly.

  The fifth stroke sounded, then the last.

  “How is it now?” Burgess asked.

  “That’s about me,” Henderson concurred.

  An intersection sidled past under them. A light held the car up. Not the walker. Henderson had disregarded them the night before. The car caught up with Dutch midway down the next block.

  They were on Fiftieth now. One block of it ticked off. Two.

  “See it yet?”

  “No. Or if I have, it doesn’t click. It was awfully red, redder than that one. The whole sidewalk was like red paint.”

  The third block. The fourth.

  “See it?”

  “It doesn’t click.”

  Burgess warned, “Watch what you’re doing, now. If you string it out very much longer, even your theoretical alibi won’t be any good. You should have been inside it already by now; it’s eight and a half past.”

  “If you don’t believe me anyway,” Henderson said dryly, “what’s the difference?”

  “It don’t hurt to figure out the exact walking time between the two points,” the man on the other side of him put in. “We might just happen to find out when you actually got there, and then all we do is subtract.”

  “Nine minutes past!” Burgess intoned.

  Henderson was holding his head low, scanning the slowly moving belt of sidewalk fronts from under the car ceiling.

  A name drifted by, colorless glass tubes unlighted. He turned quickly after it. “That’s it! I think that’s it. but it’s out. Anselmo’s, it was something like that. I’m almost sure of it. Something foreign—”

  “In. Dutch!” Burgess hollered. He drove the plunger down, killed his stop watch. “Nine minutes, ten and a half seconds.” he announced. “We’ll give you the ten and a half

  seconds to allow for variations, such as the density of the crowd you had to buck and the cross traffic at intersections, which is never the same twice. Nine minutes flat, walking time, from the corner below your apartment to this bar. And we’ll give you another minute from the apartment itself down to that first corner, where the first chime stroke caught you. We’ve already tested that lap out. In other words”—he turned and looked at him—“you find some way of proving that you got into this bar as late as six-seventeen —but no later—and you’ll still clear yourself automatically, even now.”

  Henderson said, “I can prove I got in here as early as six-ten, if I can only find that woman.”

  Burgess swung open the car door. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  “Ever see this man before?” Burgess asked.

  The barman held his chin in a vise. “Looks kind of familiar,” he admitted. “But then, my whole job is just faces, faces, faces.”

  They gave him a little more time. He took an angle shot at Henderson. Then he went around the opposite side and took it from there. “I don’t know,” he still hesitated.

  Burgess said, “Sometimes the frame counts as much as the picture. Let’s try it differently. Go on back behind the bar. barman.”

  They all went over to it. “Which stool were you on, Henderson?”

  “Somewhere along about here. The clock was straight over and the pretzel bowl was about two up from me.”

  “All right, get on it. Now try it, barman. Forget about us, take a good look at him.”

  Henderson inclined his head morosely, stared down at the surface of the bar, the way he had the other time.

  It worked. The barman snapped his fingers. “That did it! Gloomy Gus. I remember him now. Only last night, wasn’t it? Must have been just a one-drink customer, didn’t stick

  around long enough to sink in.”

  “Now we want the time.”

  “Sometime during my first hour on duty. They hadn’t thickened up yet around me. We had a late start last night; sometimes happens.”

  “What is your first hour on duty?”

  “Six to seven.”

  “Yeah, but about how long after six, that’s what we want to know.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, gents. I only watch the clock toward the end of my shift, never around the beginning. It might have been six, it might have been six-thirty, it might have been six forty-five. It just wouldn’t be worth a damn for me to try to say.”

  Burgess looked at Henderson, raised his eyebrows slightly. Then he turned to the barman again. “Tell us about this woman that was in here at that time.”

  The barman said with catastrophic simplicity, “What woman?”

  Henderson’s complexion went slowly down the color scale, from natural to pale to dead white.

  A flick of Burgess’s hand held him mute.

  “You didn’t see him get up and go over and speak to a woman?”

  The barman said, “No sir, I didn’t see him get up and go over and speak to anyone. I can’t swear to it, but my impression was there was no one else at the bar at that time for him to speak to.”

  “Did you see a woman sitting here by herself, without seeing him get up and go over to her?”

  Henderson pointed helplessly two bar stools over. “An oran
ge hat,” he said, before Burgess could stop him.

  “Don’t do that,” the detective warned him.

  The barman was suddenly becoming irritable, for some reason or other. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been in this business thirty-seven years. I’m sick of their damn faces, night after night, just opening and closing, opening and closing, throwing the booze in. Don’t come in and ask me what color hats they had on, or if they picked each other up or not. To me they’re just orders. To me they’re just drinks, see, to me they’re just drinks! Tell me what she had and I’ll tell you if she was in here or not! We keep all the tabs. I’ll get ‘em from the boss’s office.”

  They were all looking at Henderson now. He said, “I had Scotch and water. I always have that, never anything else. Give me just a minute now, to see if I can get hers. It was all the way down near the bottom—”

  The barman came back with a large tin box.

  Henderson said, rubbing his forehead, “There was a cherry left in the bottom of the glass and—”

  “That could be any one of six drinks. I’ll get it for you. Was the bottom stemmed or flat? And what color was the dregs? If it was a Manhattan the glass was stemmed and dregs brown.”

  Henderson said, “It was a stem glass she was fiddling with. But the dregs weren’t brown, no, they were pink, like.”

  “Jack Rose,” said the barman briskly. “I can get it for you easy, now.” He started shuffling through the tabs. It took a few moments; he had to sift his way through them in reverse, the earlier ones were at the bottom. “See, they come off the pads in order, numbered at the top,” he mentioned.

  Henderson gave a start, leaned forward. “Wait a minute!” he said breathlessly. “That brought something back to me just then. I can remember the number printed at the top of my particular pad. Thirteen. The jinx number. I remember staring at it for a minute when he handed it to me, like you would with that number.”

  The barman put down two tabs in front of all of them. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Here you are. But not both on the same tab. Thirteen—one Scotch and water. And here are the Jack Roses, three of them, on number seventy-four. That’s one of Tommy’s tabs, from the shift before, in the late afternoon; I know his writing. Not only that, but there was some other guy with her. Three Jack Roses and a

  rum, this one says, and no one in their right mind is going to mix those two drinks.”

  “So—?” Burgess suggested softly.

  “So I still don’t remember seeing any such woman, even if she stayed over into my shift, because she was Tommy’s order, not mine. But if she did stay over, my thirty-seven years’ experience tending bar tells me he didn’t get up and go over and speak to her, because there was already a guy with her. And my thirty-seven years’ experience also tells me he was with her to the end, because nobody buys three Jack Roses at eighty cents a throw and then walks out and leaves his investment behind for somebody else to cash in on.” And he took a definitive swipe to the counter with his bar rag.

  Henderson’s voice was shaking. “But you remembered me being here! If you can remember me, why can’t you remember her? She was even better to look at.”

  The barman said with vicious logic, “Sure I remembered you. Because I’m seeing you now over again, right before my eyes. Bring her back in front of me the same way, and I’ll probably remember her too. I can’t without that.”

  He was hanging onto the rim of the bar with both hands, like a drunk with unmanageable legs. Burgess detached one of his arms, grunted, “Come on, Henderson.”

  He still clung to it with the other, straining toward the barman. “Don’t do this to me!” he protested in a choked voice. “Don’t you know what the charges are? Murder!”

  Burgess quickly sealed a hand to his mouth. “Shut up, Henderson,” he ordered curtly.

  They led him out backward. He kept straining away from them toward that bar.

  “You sure did draw the thirteen tab,” one of them grunted in a wry undertone, as they emerged to the street with him, pressed closely around him in a sort of perambulatory vise.

  “Even if she shows up from now on, at any later point in

  the evening, it’s already too late to do you any good,” Burgess warned him as they sat waiting for the taxi driver to be traced and brought in. “It had to be in that bar by six-seventeen. But I’m curious to see whether she will show up at some later point, and if so, just how long after. That’s why we’re going to retrace your movements, step by step, throughout the entire evening, from beginning to end.”

  “She will, she’s got to!” Henderson insisted. “Somebody’ll remember her, in one of the other places we went that night. And then, once you get hold of her in that way, she herself will be able to tell you just where and at what time she first met me.”

  The man Burgess had sent out on the assignment came in, reported, “The Sunrise Company has two drivers on the line outside Anselmo’s. I brought them both down. Their names are Budd Hickey and Al Alp.”

  “Alp,” Henderson said. “That’s the funny name I’ve been trying to think of. That’s the name I told you we both laughed at.”

  “Send Alp in. Tell the other guy never mind.”

  He was as funny looking in real life as on his license picture: even funnier, for he was in full color in real life.

  Burgess said, “Did you have a haul last night from your stand to the Maison Blanche Restaurant?”

  “Mason Blantch, Mason Blantch—” He was going to be a little doubtful at first. “I pick ‘em up and put ‘em down so many times a night—” Then a memory quickening method of his own seemed to come to his aid. “Mason Blantch; about sixty-five cents on a dry night,” he mumbled. He went back into full voice again. “Yeah, I did! I had a sixty-five cent haul last night, in between two thirty-cent pulls.”

  “Look around you. See anyone here you gave it to?”

  His eyes slid past Henderson’s face. Then they came back again. “It was him, wasn’t it?”

  “We’re asking you, don’t ask us.”

  He took the question mark off. “It was him.”

  “Alone or with somebody else?”

  He took a minute with that. Then he shook his head slowly. “I don’t remember noticing nobody else with him. Alone, I guess.”

  Henderson gave a lurch forward, like somebody who suddenly turns an ankle. “You must have seen her! She got in ahead of me and she got out ahead of me, like a woman does—”

  “Sh, quiet,” Burgess tuned him out.

  “Woman?” the driver said aggrievedly. “I remember you. I remember you perfect, because I got a dented fender picking you up—”

  “Yes, yes.” Henderson agreed eagerly, “and maybe that’s why you didn’t see her step in, because your head was turned the other way. But surely when we got there—”

  “When we got there,” the driver said sturdily, “my head wasn’t turned the other way, no cabman’s ever is when it comes time to collect a fare. And I didn’t see her get out either. Now how about it?”

  “We had the light on, all the way over,” Henderson pleaded. “How could you help seeing her, sitting there in back of you? She must have shown in your rear-sight mirror or even against your windshield—”

  “Now I am sure,” the driver said. “Now I’m positive— even if I wasn’t before. I been hacking eight years. If you had the top light on, you were by yourself. I never knew a guy riding with a woman to leave the top light on yet. Any time the top light’s on, you can bet the guy behind you is a single.”

  Henderson could hardly talk. He was feeling at his throat as though it bothered him. “How could you remember my face, and not remember hers?”

  Burgess stepped all over that, before the man could even answer. “You didn’t remember her face yourself. You were with her six solid hours— you say. He had his back to her for twenty minutes.” He ended the interview. “All right. Alp. Then that’s your statement.”

  “That’s my statement. There was nobo
dy with this man when I had him in my cab last night.”

  They hit the Maison Blanche at the dismantlement stage. The cloths were off the tables, the last long lingering gourmets had departed. The help was eating in the kitchen, judging by the unbridled sounds of crockery and silverware at work that emanated from there.

  They sat down at one of the denuded tables, drawing up chairs like a peculiar ghost party of diners about to fall to without any visible utensils or comestibles.

  The headwaiter was so used to bowing to people that he bowed now as he came out to them, even though he was off duty. The bow didn’t look so good because he’d removed his collar and tie, and had a lump of food in one cheek.

  Burgess said, “Have you seen this man before?”

  His black-pitted eyes took in Henderson. The answer came like a finger snap. “Yes, surely.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Last night.”

  “Where did he sit?”

  He picked out the niche table unerringly. “Over there.”

  “Well?” Burgess said. “Go on.”

  “Go on with what?”

  “Who was with him?”

  “Nobody was with him.”

  There was a line of little moist needle pricks starting out along Henderson’s forehead. “You saw her come in a moment or two after me, and join me. You saw her sitting there during the whole meal. You must have. Once you even passed close by and bowed and said, ‘Everything satisfactory, m’sieu?”

  “Yes. That is part of my duties. I do it to each table at least once. I distinctly recall doing it to you, because your face was, how shall I say, a little discontented. I also distinctly recall the two vacant chairs, one on each side of you.

  I believe I straightened one a little. You have quoted me yourself. And if I said ‘monsieur,’ as I did, that is the surest indication there was no one with you. The correct inquiry for a lady and gentleman together is ‘m’sieu-et-dame.’ It is never altered.”