Phantom lady (22 page)

"Help yourself, as long as you don't get in the way of anyone coming in or going out."

Slam.

The Eighth Day Before the Execution / The Seventh Day Before the Execution / The Sixth Day Before the Execution

He got off the train at the end of a three-hour ride from the city, looked around him doubtfully as soon as it had taken itself out of the way. This was one of those small outlying

hamlets close to a large center that, for some reason or other, often give an impression of far greater sleepiness and rusticity than places that are actually much farther out. Possibly because the contrast is too sudden, the eye hasn't become conditioned to the change yet. It was still close enough in to have certain typical features of the metropolitan scene; a well-known five and ten cent store, an A and P, a familiar chain orange-juice concession. But they only seemed to emphasize its remoteness from the originals, instead of tempering it.

He consulted the back of an envelope, with a list of names jotted down it perpendicularly, each with an accompanying address. They were all approximations of one another, although in two different languages. All but the last two had been lined out. They ran something like this:

Madge Payton, millinery (and address) Marge Payton, millinery (and address) Margaret Peyton, hats (and address) Madame Magdax, chapeaux (and address) Madame Margot, chapeaux (and address)

He crossed the tracks to a filling station, asked the grease monkey, "Know of anyone around here makes hats and calls herself Marguerite?"

"There's a boarder down at old Mrs. Hascom's got some sort of sign in the window. I don't know if it's hats or dresses, I never noticed it very closely. It's the end house, on this side of the road. Just keep going straight down."

It was an unlovely looking frame building, with a pitiful hand-printed placard in a corner of one of the lower windows. "Marguerite, hats." A trade name, for a whistle stop like this. Even in an out of the way place like this, he reflected curiously, they still had to be French. Peculiar convention.

He went up under the gloomy porch shed and knocked. The girl who came out was she herself, if Kettisha's descrip-

tion was to be trusted. Plain and timid-looking. Lawn shirtwaist and dark-blue skirt. He caught sight of a little metal cap topping one of her fingers; a thimble.

She thought he wanted the person who owned the house, told him unasked, "Mrs. Hascom's gone down to the store. She ought to be back in—"

He said, "Miss Peyton. I had quite a time finding you."

Instantly she was frightened, tried to withdraw and close the door. He blocked it with his foot. "I don't think you have the right person."

"I do think I have." Her fright alone was proof enough of that, although he couldn't understand the reason for it. She kept shaking her head. "All right, then I'll tell you. You used to work for Kettisha, in their sewing room."

She got white as a sheet, so she had. He reached down and caught her by the wrist, to keep her from running in and closing the door, as he saw she was about to do.

"A woman approached you and induced you to copy a hat that had been made for Mendoza, the actress."

She kept swinging her head faster and faster; that was all she seemed capable of doing. She was straining terrifiedly away from him, at an acute backward slant. His grip on her wrist was all that was holding her there in the door opening. Panic can be as stubborn as courage, its opposite.

"I just want that woman's name, that's all."

She was beyond reasoning with. He'd never seen anyone plunged head-long into such depths of terror. Her face was gray. Her cheeks were visibly pulsing, as though her heart were in truth in her mouth, as the expression went. It couldn't be the design theft that was doing this to her. Cause and effect were too unrelated. A major apprehension for a minor infraction. He could sense, vaguely, that he'd stumbled on some other story, some other story entirely, lying across the path of this quest of his. That was the most he was able to make out of it.

"Just the name of the woman—" He could tell by her fear-blurred eves that she didn't even hear the words. "You're

in no danger of being prosecuted. You must know who it was."

She found her voice at last. A strangled distortion of one, anyhow. "I'll get it for you. It's inside. Let me go a minute—"

He held the door so that she couldn't close it. He opened the hand that had been choking her wrist, and instantly he was alone. She'd gone like something windswept, blown from sight.

He stood there waiting for just a moment, and then something that he was unable to account for, some tension that she'd left behind her in the air, made him spurt forward, rush down the gloomy central hallway, fling open the door to one side she had just closed behind her.

She hadn't locked it, fortunately. He swept it back just in time to see the shears flash in air, a little over her head. He never knew how he got over in time, but he did. He managed to deflect the blow with an outward fling of his arm, slashing his sleeve and drawing a fleshy cut for his pains. He pulled them away from her and threw them over in the corner with a tinkle. They probably would have gone in deep enough to get her heart, at that, if she'd hit the right place.

"What was that for?" he winced, stuffing a handkerchief down his sleeve.

She caved in like a stepped-on ice cream cone. She dissolved into a welter of tears and incoherence, "I haven't seen him since, I don't know what to do with it. I was afraid of him, afraid to refuse him. He told me just a few days and now it's been months— I've been afraid to come forward and tell anyone, he said he'd kill me—"

He clamped his hand across her mouth, held it there a minute. This was that other story, the one he didn't want. Not his. "Shut up, you frightened little fool, I only want the name, the name of the woman for whom you made a plagiarized hat at Kettisha's. Can't you get that through your head?"

The reversal was too sudden, the prospect of renewed

security too tantalizing for her to be able to believe in it fully at once. "You're just saying that, you're just trying to trick me—"

A muted wailing, almost unnoticeable it was so thin, had started in somewhere near by. Ever^lhing seemed to have power to frighten her. He saw her cheeks get white all over again at that, although it was scarcely loud enough to penetrate the eardrum.

"What faith are you?" he asked.

"I was a Catholic." The tense she gave it held home kernel of tragedy, he could tell.

"Have you a rosary? Bring it out." He saw he'd have to convince her emotionally, since he couldn't through reasoning.

She offered it to him resting in her hand. He placed his own two over and under it, without removing it. "Now. I swear that all I want of you is what I've told you. Nothing else. That I won't harm you in any other matter. That I'm not here on any other matter. Is that enough?"

She'd grown a little calmer, as though the contact of the object was a steadying influence in itself. "Pierrette Douglas, Six Riverside Drive," she said unhesitatingly.

The wailing was beginning to grow louder little by little. She gave him one last look of dubious apprehension. Then she stepped into a small curtained alcove to one side of the room. The wailing stopped short. She came back as far as the entrance, holding a long white garment or garments trailing from her enfolded arms. There was a small pink face topping it, looking trustfully up at her. She was still frightened, vastly so, when she looked at Lombard. But when she looked downward at that face under her own, there was unmistakable love in the look. Guilty, furtive, but stubborn: the love of the lonely, that grows steadily stronger, more unbreakable, day by day and week by week.

"Pierrette Douglas, Six Riverside Drive." He was shuffling out money. "How much did she give you?"

"Fifty dollars," she said absently, as if speaking of a long-forgotten thing.

He dropped it contemptuously into a reversed hat-shape she'd been working on. "And next time," he said from the doorway, "try to use a little more self-control. You're only laying yourself wide open this way."

She didn't hear him. She wasn't listening. She was smiling, looking downward at an answering little toothless smile that met her own.

It didn't bear the slightest resemblance to hers, that other little face directly under her own. But it was hers, hers from now on; hers to have and hers to keep and hers to banish loneliness with.

"Good luck to you," he couldn't resist calling back to her from the outer door of the house.

It had taken him three hours to ride out. It only took thirty minutes to ride back. Or so it felt. The wheels racketed around under him, talking out loud the way train wheels do. "Now I've got her! Now I've got her! Now I've got her!"

A conductor stopped beside him, one time. "Tickets, please."

He looked up, grinning blankly. "It's okay," he said. "Now I've got her."

Now I've got her. Now I've got her. Now I've got her. . . .

The Fifth Day Before the Execution

There was no sound of arrival. There was a sound of departure, the faint hum of a car drawing away outside past the glass doors. He looked up and there was someone already standing there in the inner entrance, like a wraith against the glass doors. She'd partly opened them to step through,

was standing there half in, half out, head turned to look behind her at the receding vehicle that had brought her.

He had a feeling that it was she, with nothing further than that to substantiate it for a moment. The fact that she was coming in alone, like the lady free-lance he'd gathered she was. She was stunningly beautiful, so beautiful that all delight was taken from her beauty by its excess amount, as anything overdone is apt to. Just as the profile of a cameo or the head of a statue fail to move the emotions, except as an artistic abstraction, so did she. One had the feeling that, the law of compensation being what it is, she had few inner merits, must be full of flaws, to be that peerless on the outside. She was a brunette, and tall; her figure was perfection. Almost it must have made life barren, to be without so many of the problems, the strivings, that plagued other women. She looked that way, as though life was barren, a burst soap bubble leaving the unpleasant taste of soap upon her lips.

Her gown was like a ripple of fluid silver running down the slender gap between the wings of the door, as she stood there between them. Then, the car having gone, she turned her head forward again and finished entering.

She had no look for Lombard, a wan "Good evening" without spirit for the hallman.

"This gentleman has been—" the latter began.

Lombard had reached her before he could finish it.

"Pierrette Douglas." He stated it as a fact. I am.

"I've been waiting to speak to you. I must talk to you immediately. It's urgent—"

She had stopped before the waiting elevator, with no intention, he could see, of allowing him to accompany her any further than that. "It's a little late, don't vou think?"

"Not for this. This can't wait. I'm John Lombard, and I'm here on behalf of Scott Henderson—"

"I don't know him. and I'm afraid I don't know you either —do I?" The "do I?" was simply a sop of urbanity thrown in.

"He's in the death house of the State Penitentiary, awaiting execution." He looked across her shoulder at the waiting attendant. "Don't make me discuss it down here. Out of common ordinary decency—"

"I'm sorry, I live here; it's one-fifteen in the morning, and there are certain proprieties— Well, over here then." She started diagonally across the lobby toward a small inset furnished with a settee and smoking stands. She turned to him there, remained standing; they conferred erect.

"You bought a hat from a certain employee of the Ket-tisha establishment, a girl named Madge Peyton. You paid her fifty dollars for it."

"I may have." She noticed that the hallman, his interest whetted, was doing his best to overhear from the outside of the alcove. "George," she reprimanded curtly. He withdrew reluctantly across the lobby.

"In this hat you accompanied a man to the theater, one night."

Again she conceded warily, "I may have. I have been to theaters. I have been escorted by gentlemen to them. Will you come to the point, please?"

"I am. This was a man you'd only met that same evening. You went with him without knowing his name, nor he yours."

"Ah no." She was not indignant, only coldly positive. "Now you can be sure you are mistaken. My standards of conduct are as liberal as anyone else's, you will find. But they do not include accompanying anyone anywhere at any time, without the formality of an introduction first. You have been misdirected, you want some other person." She thrust her foot out from underneath the silver hem, to move away.

"Please, don't let's split hairs about social conduct. This man is under sentence of death, he's to be executed this week! You've got to do something for him—!"

"Let's understand one another a little better. Would it

help him if I falsely testify I was with him, on one certain night?"

"No, no, no," he breathed, exhausted, "only if you rightly testify you were with him, as you were."

"Then I can't do it, because I wasn't."

She continued to gaze at him steadily. "Let's go back to the hat," he said finally. "You did buy a hat, a special model that had been made for somebody else—"

"But we're still at cross-purposes, aren't we? My admitting that has no bearing on my admitting that I accompanied this man to a theater. The two facts are entirely unrelated, have nothing to do with one another."

That, he had to admit to himself, could very well be. A dismal chasm seemed to be on the point of opening at his feet, where he had seemed to be on solid ground until now.

"Give me some more details of this theater excursion," she had gone on. "What evidence have you that the person accompanying him was myself?"

"Mainly the hat," he admitted. "The twin to it was being worn on the stage, that very night, by the actress Mendoza. It was an original made for her. You admit that you secured a duplication of it. The woman with Scott Henderson was wearing that duplication."