Phantom lady Read online

  The black centers of his eyes were as steady as buckshot fired deep into his face and lodged there. He turned to Burgess. “Well, if there is any doubt, I can show you my reservation list for last night. You can see for yourselves.”

  Burgess said with an exaggeratedly slow drawl that meant he liked the idea very much, “I don’t think that would hurt.”

  The headwaiter went across the dining room, opened a drawer in a buffet, brought back a ledger. He didn’t go out of the room, he didn’t go out of their sight. He handed it to them unopened, just as he had found it; let them open it for themselves. All he said was, “You can refer to the date at the top.”

  They all formed a cluster of heads over it but himself. He remained detached. It was kept in impromptu pencil, but it was sufficient for its purpose. The page was headed 5-20, Tues. Then there was a large corner-to-corner X drawn across the page, to show that it was over and done with. It canceled without impairing legibility.

  There was a list of some nine or ten names. They went like this, columnarly:

  Table 18 — Roger Ashley, for four. (Lined out)

  Table 5 — Mrs. Rayburn, for six. (Lined out)

  Table 24 — Scott Henderson, for two. (Not lined out)

  Beside the third name was this parenthetic symbol: (1).

  The headwaiter explained, “That tells its own story. When a line is drawn through, that means the reservation has been completed, filled up. When there is no line drawn through, that means they never showed up. When there is no line drawn through. and a number is added, that means only part of them showed up, the rest are still expected. Those

  things in the little brackets are for my own guidance, so I will know where they go when they do show up, where to put them, without having to ask a lot of questions. No matter if they come only at the dessert, so long as they come at all, the line goes through. What you see here means, therefore: m’sieu had a reservation for two, m’sieu showed up by himself, and the other half of his party never reached here.”

  Burgess traced hypersensitive finger-pads over that particular section of the page, feeling for erasures. “Texture unmarred,” he said.

  Henderson pronged his hand, elbow to tabletop; let it catch his head as it toppled forward.

  The headwaiter shoveled with his hands. “My book is all I have to go by. My book says—to me—Mr. Henderson was alone in this dining room last night.”

  “Then your book says that to us, too. Take his name and address, usual stuff, case wanted further questioning. All right, next. Mitri Maloff, table waiter.”

  A change of figures before Henderson’s eyes, that was all. The dream, the practical joke, the whatever it was, went on and on.

  This was going to be comedy stuff. To the rest of them, anyway, if not to him. He caught sight of one of them writing something down. He hooked his finger around to his thumb, like in that old hair-tonic ad. “No, no. Beg pardon, shentlemen. There is a D in it. It is silent, you don’t speak it.”

  “Then what’s the good of having it?” one of them wondered to the man next to him.

  “I don’t care what there is in it,” Burgess said. “All I want to know is, do you have table twenty-four?”

  “From ten, over there, all the way around to twenty-eight, that is me.”

  “You waited on this man at twenty-four last night?”

  He was going to make a social introduction of it. “Ah, sure, certainly!” He lighted up. “Good evening! How are you? You coming back again soon, I hope!” He evidently

  didn’t recognize them as detectives.

  “No, he isn’t,” said Burgess brutally. He flattened his hand, to kill the flow of amenities. “How many were there at the table when you waited on him?”

  The waiter looked puzzled, like a man who is willing to do his best but can’t get the hang of what is expected of him. “Him.” he said. “No more. Shust him.”

  “No lady?”

  “No. no lady. What lady?” And then he added, in perfect innocence, “Why? He lose one?”

  It brought on a howl. Henderson parted his lips and took a deep breath, like when something hurts you unbearably.

  “Yeah, he lost one all right,” one of them clowned.

  The waiter saw he had made a hit, batted his eyes at them coyly, but still, apparently, without any very clear idea of how he had chalked up his success.

  Henderson spoke, in a desolate, beaten down sort of voice. “You drew out her chair for her. You opened the menu card, offered it to her.” He tapped his own skull a couple of times. “I saw you do those things. But no, you didn’t see her.”

  The waiter began to expostulate with Eastern European warmth and lavishness of gesture, but without any rancor. “I draw out a chair, yes, when there is a lady there for it. But when there is no lady there, how can I draw out a chair? For the air to sit down on it, you think I’m going to draw out a chair? When is no face there, you think I’m going to open bill of fare and push it in front of?”

  Burgess said, “Talk to us, not him. He’s in custody.”

  He did, as volubly as ever, simply switching the direction of his head. “He leave me tip for one and a half. How could there be lady with him? You think I’m going to be nice to him today, if is two there last night and he leave me tip for only one and a half?” His eyes lit with Slavonic fire. Even the supposition seemed to inflame him. “You think I forget it in a harry? I remember it for next two weeks! Hah! You

  think I ask him to come back like I do? Hah!” he snorted belligerently.

  “What’s a tip for one and a half?” Burgess asked with jocular curiosity.

  “For one is fifty cents. For two is a dollar. He give me seventy-five cents, is tip for one and a half.”

  “Couldn’t you get seventy-five cents for a party of two?”

  “Never!” he panted resentfully. “If I do, I do like this.” He removed an imaginary salver from the table, fingers disdainfully lifted as if it were contaminated. He fixed a baleful eye on the imaginary customer, in this case Henderson. Sustained it long enough to shrivel him. His thick underlip curled in what was meant for a lopsided leer of derision. “I say, Thank you, sor. Thank you very motch, sor. Thank you very very motch, sor. You sure you able to do this? And if is lady with him, he feel like two cents, he stick in some more.”

  “I kind of would myself,” Burgess admitted. He turned his head. “How much do you say you left, Henderson?”

  Henderson’s answer was forlornly soft-spoken. “What he says I did; seventy-five cents.”

  “One thing more,” Burgess said, “just to round the whole thing out. I’d like to see the check for that particular dinner. You keep them, don’t you?”

  “Manager got them. You have to ask him.” The waiter’s face took on an expression of conscious virtue, as though now he felt sure his veracity would be sustained.

  Henderson was suddenly leaning alertly forward, his licked listlessness was gone again.

  The manager brought them out himself. They were kept in sheaves, in little oblong clasp folders, one to a date, apparently to help him tally his accounts at the end of each month. They found it without difficulty. It said Table 24. Waiter 3. I Table d’hote — 4.25. It was stamped in faint purple. Paid — May 20th in a sort of oval formation.

  There were only two other checks for table twenty-four

  in that day’s batch. One was 1 tea — 0.75, from late afternoon, just before the dinner hour. The other was dinner for four, a party that had evidently come in late, just before closing.

  They had to help him get back into the car. He walked in a kind of stupor. His legs were balky. Again there was the dreamlike glide of unreal buildings and unreal streets moving backward past them, like shadows on glass.

  He broke out suddenly, “They’re lying—they’re killing me, all of them! What did I ever do to any of them—?”

  “Y’know what it reminds me of?” one of them said in an aside. “Them Topper pictures, where they fade off and on the scr
een right in front of your eyes. Did y’ever see one of them. Burge?”

  * * *

  Henderson shuddered involuntarily and let his head go over.

  There was a show going on outside, and the music, and laughter, and sometimes handclapping. would trickle into the small, cluttered office, diluted.

  The manager was sitting waiting by the phone. Business was good, and he tried to look pleasantly at all of them, savoring his cigar and leaning far back in his swivel chair.

  “There can be no question that the two seats were paid for.” the manager said urbanely. “All I can tell you is that nobody was seen going in with him—” He broke off with sudden anxiety. “He’s going to be ill. Please get him out of here as quickly as you can, I don’t want any commotion while there’s a performance going on.”

  They opened the door and half carried, half walked Henderson toward it, his back inclined far over toward the floor. A gust of singing from out front surged in.

  “Chica chica boom boom Chica chica boom boom —”

  “Ah. don’t,” he pleaded chokingly. “I can’t stand any more of it!” He toppled onto the back seat of the police sedan, made a knot of his two hands, gnawed at them as if seeking sustenance for his sanity.

  “Why not break down and admit there was no dame with you?” Burgess tried to reason with him. “Don’t you see how much simpler it would be all around?”

  Henderson tried to answer him in a rational, even voice, but he was a little shaky at it. “Do you know what the next step would be after that, if I did, if I could, make such an admission as you’re asking me to? My sanity would start to leave me. I’d never be sure of anything again in my life. You can’t take a fact that you know to be true, as true as— as that your name is Scott Henderson—” He clapped himself on the thigh; “—as true as that this is my own leg, and let yourself begin to doubt it, deny it. without your mental balance going overboard. She was beside me for six hours. I touched her arm. I felt it in the curve of my own.” He reached out and briefly tweaked Burgess’s muscular underarm. “The rustle of her dress. The words she spoke. The faint fragrance of her perfume. The clink of her spoon against her consommé plate. The little stamp of her chair when she moved it back. The little quiver of the shaky taxi chassis when she stepped down from it. Where did the liquor go to. that my eyes saw in her glass when she raised it? When it came down again, it was empty.” He pounded his fist against his knee, three, four, five times. “She was. she was, she was!” He was almost crying; at least his face was wreathed in those lines. “Now they’re trying to tell me she wasn’t!”

  The car glided on through the never-never land it had been traversing all evening.

  He said a thing that few if any suspects have ever said before. Said it and meant it with his whole heart and soul. “I’m frightened; take me back to the detention pen, will you? Please, fellows, take me back. I want walls around me, that you can feel with your hands. Thick, solid, that you can’t budge!”

  “He’s shivering,” one of them pointed out with a sort of detached curiosity.

  “He needs a drink,” Burgess said. “Stop here a minute; one of you go in and bring him out a couple fingers of rye. I hate to see a guy suffer like that.”

  Henderson gulped it avidly, as though he couldn’t get it down fast enough. Then he slopped back against the seat “Let’s go back, take me back,” he pleaded.

  “He’s haunted,” one of them chuckled.

  “That’s what you get when you raise a ghost.”

  Nothing further was said until they were out of the car again and filing up the steps at Headquarters in phalanx. Then Burgess steadied him with a hand to his arm, as he fumbled one of the steps. “You better get a good night’s sleep, Henderson,” he suggested. “And a good lawyer. You’re going to need both.”

  5 The Ninety-First Day Before the Execution

  “… YOU have heard the defense try to claim that the accused met a certain woman, in a place called Anselmo’s Bar. at ten minutes after six on the night the murder was committed. In other words, two minutes and forty-five seconds after the time established by police investigation as that of the death of the victim. Very clever. You can see at once, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that if he was at Anselmo’s Bar, Fiftieth Street, at ten past six, he could not have been at his own apartment two and three-quarter minutes before then. Nothing on two legs could have covered the distance from one to the other in that length of time. No, nor on four wheels, nor with wings and a propellor either, for that matter. Again I say, very clever. But; not clever enough.”

  “Convenient, wasn’t it, that he should just happen to meet her on that one night, and not any other night during the year. Almost as though he had a premonition he was going to need her on that particular night. Strange things. premonitions, aren’t they? You have heard the defendant admit, in answer to my questions, that he did not go out and accost unknown women other nights of the year. That he had never done such a thing before during the entire course of his married life. Not once, mind you. Those are the accused’s own words, not mine. You heard them yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. Such a thought had never even entered his mind until then. It was not his habit to do that sort of thing. It was foreign to his nature. On this one night of all nights, however, they would have us believe that he did. Quite a handy coincidence, what? Only—”

  Shrug, and a long pause.

  “Where is the woman? We’ve all been waiting to see her. Why don’t they show her to us? What’s keeping them? Have they produced such a woman here in court?”

  Singling out a juror at random with index finger. “Have you seen her?” Another. “Or you?” A third, in the second tier. “Or you?” Gesture of empty handed helplessness. “Has any one of us seen her? Has she been up there on that witness chair at any time from first to last? No, of course not, ladies and gentlemen. Because—”

  Another long pause.

  “Because there is no such woman. There never was. They can’t produce a person who doesn’t exist. They can’t breathe life into a figment, a figure of speech, a nebula, a thing that isn’t. Only the good Lord can create a full-grown woman in all her height and breadth and thickness. And even He needs eighteen years to do it, not two weeks.”

  Laughter, from all parts of the room. Brief smile of grateful appreciation on his part.

  “This man is being tried for his life. If there was such a woman, do you think they would have neglected to bring her here? Wouldn’t they have seen to it that she was on the job here, speaking her piece at the right time? You bet they would! If—”

  Dramatic pause.

  “—there was such a woman. Let’s leave ourselves out of it. We’re here in a courtroom, miles from the places that he insists he visited with her that night, and months have passed. Let’s take the word of those who were right there, at those same places, at the same time, as he supposedly was with her. Surely they should have seen her. if anyone did. Did they? You heard for yourself. They saw him. yes. Every one of them can recall, no matter how vaguely, no matter how hazily, glimpsing him, Scott Henderson, that night. It seems to end there, as though they all had a blindness in one eye. Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd. ladies and gentlemen? It does me. When people travel around in pairs, one of two things happens: either neither one of them is remembered afterward, or, if one is. then the other is also. How can the human eye see one person without seeing the other —if the other is right there alongside the first at the time? That violates the law of physics. I can’t account for it. It baffles me.”

  Coy bunching of the shoulders.

  “I’m open to suggestions. In fact I’ll make a few myself. Possibly her skin was of a peculiar transparency that let the light through, and so they looked right through her to the other side without—”

  General laughter.

  “Or possibly she just didn’t happen to be there with him. Nothing more natural than that they should fail to see her if she didn’t happen to be there at
the time.”

  Change of manner and of voice. General tightening-up.

  “Why go ahead? Let’s keep this serious. A man’s on trial here for his life. I’m not anxious to make a farce out of it. The defense is the one that seems to be. Let’s leave hypotheses and theories, and go back to facts. Let’s stop talking about phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps and mirages; instead let’s talk about a woman of whose existence there has never at any time been any doubt. Everybody saw Marcella Henderson in life, and everybody saw her just as plainly afterward in death. She was no phantom. She was murdered. The police have photographs showing that. That’s the first fact. All of us see that man over there in the prisoner’s dock, with his head bowed low through all of this—no, now he’s raising it to stare defiantly over at me. He’s on trial here for his life. That’s the second fact.”

  In a confidential, theatrical aside, “I like facts much better than fancies, don’t you, ladies and gentlemen? They’re much easier to handle.

  “And the third fact? Here’s the third fact. He murdered her. Yes, that’s as concrete, as undeniable a fact as the first two. Every detail of it is a fact, already proven once here in this room. We’re not asking you to believe in phantoms, in wraiths, in hallucinations, like the defense!” Raising his voice. “We have documents, affidavits, evidence, for every statement we make, every step of the way!” Bringing his fist crashing down on the rail before the jury box.

  Impressive pause. Then in a quieter voice. “You’ve already been made acquainted with the circumstances, the domestic background, immediately preceding the murder. The accused himself doesn’t deny their accuracy. You’ve heard him confirm them; under pressure, unwillingly perhaps, but confirm them nevertheless. There hasn’t been a false statement made about them; don’t take my word for that, take his. I asked him that yesterday on the stand, and you all heard his answer. I’ll run over them once more, briefly, for you.