Phantom lady (21 page)

She looked up to find him already crossing the adjoining room on his way out. He was an opportunist; after all, her contribution had been made, she was of no further value to him. On to the next link.

She hastened to the boudoir doorway to deliver a parting benediction on his enterprise. One motivated by spite, however, and not altruism. She would have followed him all the way to the outside door, only the uncompleted hoopskirt she wore got stuck in the opening, wouldn't let her pass through. "I hope you catch opp with her!" she shrilled after him vengefully, "I hope she find herself in plenty of trouble!"

A woman will forgive you anything—but wearing the same hat as she does, at the same time.

He felt like a fish out of water when he walked into the place, but he didn't let it deter him. He would have stalked into far more unlikely places than this to attain his goal. It was one of those establishments on a side street, housed in a former private residence converted to commercial purposes, whose expensiveness and exclusiveness always seem to be in inverse ratio to their lack of conspicuousness. The entire ground floor was given over to the display room, or whatever the trade name for it was. Having stated his business, he took shelter in a secluded corner of this, the most secluded corner he was able to find.

He'd walked in right in the middle of a showing. Or maybe they had one every day at this hour, for all he knew. It didn't help to put him at his ease. He was the only man there, or at least the only one of service age. There was what appeared to be a dessicated septuagenarian present among the sprinkling of clients seated here and there. The charming young thing with him, his granddaughter no doubt, must have brought him in with her to help her select a wardrobe. "The mind," thought Lombard, regarding him with a bilious eye, "can certainly work wonders." But with

that one exception, it was all distaff. Even a girl doorman and girl pages.

The mannequins would come forward slowly, one by one, from the rear, and make a complete circuit of the forepart of the room, turning this way and that with little graceful swirls. For some reason, it may simply have been the corner he had chosen, he kept getting swirls and even full halts, from every single one of them. He felt like saying, "I'm not here to buy anything," but didn't have the nerve. It made him acutely uncomfortable, the more so since he had to keep staring into their faces and there were lots of other places he would have preferred staring.

The young woman he'd spoken to came back and rescued him at last. "Madame Kettisha will see you in her private office, upstairs on the second floor," she whispered. A girl page showed him the way, knocked for him, then departed below again.

There was a buxom, middle-aged, redheaded Irishwoman sitting facing him from behind a large desk when he went in. She not only had nothing of the chic couturier about her, she even leaned slightly to the horsy, dowdy side. She probably had once been Kitty Shaw in some backstreet tenement and she deserved plenty of credit, he told himself, sizing her up. She probably was a wizard at making money; only an unqualified success could have afforded to flaunt such personal slovenliness as she was exhibiting. His first impression was altogether favorable and his relief was almost abject.

She was shuffling through a sheaf of crayon colored fashion sketches at lightning speed, discarding some to her right, okaying others to her left. Or vice versa. "Well, Mike, what can I do for you?" she grunted brusquely without looking up.

He was all out of tact by now. It was still the same day as the Mendoza interviews, and he hadn't had time to recuperate from them yet. It was getting late, anyway; nearly five in the afternoon.

"I came straight down here from one of your former

customers. The South American actress Mendoza."

She did look up at that. "Better use a whiskbroom," she suggested dourly.

"You did a hat for her, for last year's show, remember? One hundred bucks, and I want to know who got the chaser on it."

She put the sketches out of harm's way first, before she cut loose. The accepts into a drawer, the discards into a wastebasket. She had a temper, evidently, that could be turned off and on at will, and with a time limit set to it. At that, he liked it better than Mendoza's brand. It was more forthright. Her hand came down on the desk top with a bang like a hand grenade. "Don't you gimme any of that!" she roared. "I've had enough trouble out of that hat! I said then there was no copy made, and I still say now there was no copy made. When I produce an original, it stays original! If there was a copy made, it wasn't run up in this establishment or with my knowledge, and I'm not responsible! I may soak 'em, but I don't doublecross them!"

"There was a copy made," he insisted. "It showed up in a theater, face to face with hers across the footlights!"

She leaned down heavily over the desk, both elbows in air. "What does she want me to do, sue her for slander?" she shouted. "I will if she keeps this up! She's a liar, and you can go back and tell her I said so!"

Instead he took his hat and pitched it onto a chair over in the corner, to show her he intended staying until he had what he'd come here to get. He even unbuttoned his coat, to give himself plenty of free arm action. "She has nothing to do with it, so let's just forget her. I'm here for purposes of my own. There was a copy, because a friend of mine was with the very woman who had it on in the theater. So don't tell me there wasn't. I want to know who she is, I want her name from your list of customers."

"It isn't on it. It couldn't be, because there was no such transaction entered into by us. What're you going to do, keep this up all day?"

He hitched his chin out into second, brought his own hand down in an answering blow to hers that made the whole desk structure jar. "For the love of God, there's a man counting his life by hours! What the hell do I care about your business ethics at such a time. You're not going to sit there and head me off, not if I've got to lock this door and stay in here with you all night! Don't you understand me? There's a man going to be executed in nine days' time! The wearer of that hat is the only one can save him. You've got to give me her name. It's not the hat, it's the woman I want!"

Her voice suddenly dropped to a reasonable level. She'd evidently turned her temper off. He'd caught her interest. "Who is he?" she asked curiously.

"Scott Henderson, for killing his wife."

She wagged her head in recognition. "I remember reading about that at the time."

He struck the desk again, less shatteringly than before. "The man's innocent. It's simply got to be stopped. Mendoza bought a certain specially designed hat here, that couldn't have been reproduced elsewhere. Somebody popped up in the theater with an exact copy of that same hat. He was with this somebody, he was with her all that evening, but he never found out her name or anything about her. Now I've got to find that person, at all costs. She can prove that he wasn't home when it happened. Is that clear enough for you? If it isn't I can't make it any clearer!"

She gave him the impression of being a person with few, if any, moments of indecision. She was having one of them now, but it was of brief duration. She asked one more question, to safeguard herself. "You're sure this isn't some legal trick on that hellcat's part? The only reason I haven't filed suit against her, for non-payment and also for assault that day she came down here, was so that she wouldn't file cross-suit against me. The publicity would be harmful to my establishment's good name."

"I'm not a lawver," he assured her. "I'm an engineer from

South America. I can show you who I am, if you're in any doubt." He took things out of his pocket for identification purposes, presented them to her.

"Then I can talk confidentially to you," she decided.

"Absolutely. My only interest in the matter is Henderson. I'm sweating myself skinny to get him out of it. Your wrangle with her doesn't mean anything to me, from either party's side. It's just that it happens to lie across my own path of investigation."

She nodded. She glanced at the door to make sure it was discreetly closed. "Very well, then. Here's something that I wouldn't admit to Mendoza for the world, that I can't afford to, understand? There must have been a leak around here some place. The copying did originate here. But not officially; on the sly, by some member of the organization. Now I'm telling you this, but I don't want it to go any further. I'd have to deny it, of course, if it was ever brought out publicly. My designer, the girl that does the sketches, is in the clear; I know it wasn't she who sold us out. She's been with me ever since I first opened my own place, she's bought into it. It wouldn't pay her, for a measly fifty, seventy-five, or whatever it was, to peddle around her own ideas like that. She'd be competing against herself. The two of us, she and I, investigated on the q.t. after Mendoza was down here raising an uproar that day, and we found that particular sketch gone from her album, missing, when we went to look. Somebody had deliberately swiped it, to use over again. We figured it for the seamstress, the girl who did the actual needlework on that number in the shop. She denied it naturally, and we had no evidence to prove it. She must have run the thing up at home on her own time. I suppose we caught her before she'd had time to slip the borrowed sketch back into the album again. Well, to be on the safe side, to make sure we didn't get into hot water like that again, we shipped her." She thumbed over her shoulder.

"So you see, Lombard—that your name, again?—as far as the sales records here in the office go. there never was any

second buyer for that particular hat. That's dead on the level. I couldn't help you there if I wanted to. All I can suggest is, if you want that woman, your best bet is to tackle that former sewing apprentice of ours. As I say, I can't guarantee that she actually does know anything about it. All I know is we ourselves felt strongly enough convinced that she did, at the time, to dismiss her. If you want to take the chance, it's up to you."

Again it had jumped a lap ahead of him, just when he thought he was safely up to it at last. "I have to, I haven't any choice," he said dismally.

"Maybe I can give you a hand with it," she said helpfully. She snapped on her desk speaker. "Miss Lewis, look up the name of that girl we discharged right after we had all that trouble with Mendoza. Address too."

He leaned his head sideward, elbow to desk, while they were waiting. She must have seen something in his attitude. "You think quite a lot of him, I guess," she said, almost gently. It was a seldom used inflection with her; she had to clear her throat to get it to transmit in the right key.

He didn't answer. That was one of those things that didn't need answering.

She shot a drawer, pulled out a squat bottle of Irish whisky. "The hell with that sissy champagne they serve downstairs. A nip of this is what's in order when you're up against something that needs tall bucking. It's an example I learned from my old man, rest his bones—"

The speaker signaled back. A girl's voice said, "That was Madge Peyton. The address on record for her when she worked here is four-nine-eight Fourteenth Street."

"Yeah, but which Fourteenth Street."

"That's all it says here: Fourteenth Street."

"Never mind," he said, "there's only two to choose from, east and west." He took it down, went over and reclaimed his hat, buttoned up with renewed purpose, the brief rest period over.

She was sitting there shading her eyes lengthwise. "Let me

see if I can give you an angle on her. She won't come through willingly, you know." She dropped her hand, looked up. "Yeah, I've got her now. She was one of these quiet mousy little things. Shirtwaist and skirt type, know what I mean? They're the kind that are always apt to pull a stunt like that for money, quicker than the good-lookers are, because money don't come as easy to them. You'll find they're usually scared of guys, and don't give themselves a chance to get to know them; then when they do get in with one, it's always the wrong kind, because they haven't had any previous sampling experience."

She was a shrewd woman, he had to admit. That was why she probably wasn't Kitty Shaw in some backstreet tenement at this very moment.

"We soaked Mendoza a hundred for it originally. She probably didn't get more than fifty for repeating on it. There's an angle for you, right there. Try her with another fifty, that ought to get it out of her—if you can find her."

"If I can find her," he agreed, plodding dispiritedly down the stairs.

A rooming-house keeper opened a door painted black to resemble ebony, with a square of glass set into the upper half and a tawny roller shade backing that. "Un?" she said. "I'm looking for a Madge Peyton." She just shook her head to conserve energy. "A girl that—well, a sort of plain-looking mousy girl." "Yeah, I know who you mean. No, she's not here any more. Used to be, but she's gone quite some time now." She kept scanning the street while she was talking to him. As if, now that she'd taken the trouble of coming to the door, she might as well get something out of it before she went back inside again. That was probably why she continued to stand there as long as she did, and not because of any interest in his problem.

"Any idea where she moved to?"

"Just left, that's all I can tell you. I don't keep strings on 'em."

"But there must be some sort of a trace. People don't just go up in smoke. What took her things away?"

"One arm and both her feet." She jerked a thumb. "Down that way, if it's any good to you."

It wasn't very much. There were three more intersecting avenues "down that way." And then a marginal thoroughfare. And then a river. And then fifteen to twenty states. And then an ocean.

She'd had enough air and sightseeing now. "I can make something up, if you want me to," she offered. "But if it's facts you're after—" She bunched fingers to her lips, blew them apart, to denote emptiness.

She started to close the door, added, "What's the matter, mister? You look kind of white."

"I feel kind of white," he assented. "Mind if I sit on your doorstep here a minute?"