Phantom lady (23 page)

"It still does not follow that I was that woman: your logic is not as flawless as you seem to believe." But that was simply by way of an aside; her thoughts, he could see, were busy elsewhere.

Something had happened to her. Something was having a surprisingly favorable effect on her. Either something that he had said, or something that had occurred to her in her own mind. She had suddenly become strangely alert, interested, almost one might say feverishly absorbed. Her eyes were sparkling watchfully.

"Tell me. One or two more things. It was the Mendoza show, is that right? Can you give me the approximate date?"

"I can give you the exact date. They were in the theater together on the night of May twentieth last, from nine until

shortly after eleven."

"May," she said to herself, aloud. "You interest me strangely," she let him know. She motioned, even touched him briefly on the sleeve. "You were right. You'd better come upstairs with me a minute, after all."

During the ride up in the car she only said one thing. "I'm very glad you came to me with this."

They got out at the twelfth floor or so, he wasn't sure just which one it was. She keyed a door and put on lights, and he followed her in. The red fox scarf that had been dangling over her arm, she dropped carelessly over a chair. Then she moved away from him over a polished floor that reflected her upside down like a funnel of fuming silver being spilled out across it.

"May the twentieth, is that right?" she said over her shoulder. "I'll be right back. Sit down."

Light came from an open doorway, and she remained in there awhile, while he sat and waited. When she returned she was holding a handful of papers, bills they looked like, sorting them from hand to hand. Before she had even reached him, she had apparently found one that suited her purpose more than any of the rest. She tossed all but one aside, retained that, came over to him with it.

"I think the first thing to establish, before we go any further," she said, "is that I was not the person with this man at the theater that night. Suppose you look at this."

It was a bill for hospitalization, for a period of four weeks commencing on the thirtieth of April.

"I was in the hospital for an appendectomy, from the thirtieth of April to the twenty-seventh of May. If that isn't satis-factory, you can check with the doctors and nurses there—"

"That's satisfactory," he said, on a long breath of defeat.

Instead of moving to terminate the interview, she joined him in sitting down.

"But it was you who bought the hat?" he said finally.

"It was I who bought the hat."

"What became of it?"

She didn't answer immediately. She seemed to become lost in thought. An odd sort of silence descended on the two of them alike. Under cover of it he studied her and her surroundings. She, also under cover of it, studied some inward problem of her own.

The room told him things. Luxury keeping its head above water only by the sheerest nerve. No compromise permitted. Outside, a good, if not the smartest of possible addresses. In here, not quite enough carpeting to cover the polished lake of the floor. Not quite enough period pieces to go around. Gaps, where perhaps some had been sold off, one by one. But no shoddier stuff allowed to fill out the spaces. And even on the woman herself, as he looked at her, there were the same tell-tale signs. Her shoes were forty-dollar custom-mades, but they had been worn too long. Something about the heels and luster, you could tell that. The dress had lines that nothing in the lower brackets could have hoped for, but again it had been used too much. He could read it plainest of all in her eyes. They had an unhealthy alertness, as of one reduced to living by her wits; never knowing from which direction the next chance might come, and desperately afraid of not being quick enough to seize it when it did. These were the little things about her that stated the case. if one could read. All of them could be denied, singly, but taken together they told the tale irrefutably.

He sat there almost listening to her thoughts. Yes, listening to them. He saw her look at her hand. He translated it: she is thinking of a diamond ring that once adorned it. Where is it now? Pawned. He saw her raise one instep slightly and glance at it. What thought had occurred to her just then? Silk stockings, probably. Some daydream of being deluged with silk stockings, scores of pairs, hundreds of pairs, more than she could ever hope to use. He translated it: she is thinking of money. Money for all these things and more.

She has decided, he said to himself, watching her expression closely.

She answered his question. The silence ended. Only a moment had gone by.

"The story of the hat is simply this," she resumed. "I'd glimpsed it, it took my fancy, and I wangled a copy of it out of a girl down there. I'm a creature of impulse that way, when I can afford to be. I wore it once, I think, not more than that, and her shoulders glittered in a coruscating silver shrug--"it wasn't meant for me. It just wasn't, that was all. Something wrong about it. I wasn't the type. It wasn't very tragic, I didn't let it bother me too much. Then, a friend of mine was up here one day, just before I went to the hospital. She came across it, happened to try it on. If you were a woman you'd understand how that sort of thing goes. While one is waiting for the other to finish her dressing, we try on one another's latest buys. She fell in love with it at sight, and I let her have it."

Ending it, she shrugged again as she had near the beginning. As though that was all there was to it, there was to be no more.

"Who is she?" he asked quietly. Even as he spoke the simple, casual words, he knew they were both fencing with one another, that the answer wouldn't be given readily, that this was bargaining.

She answered him equally simply, equally casually. "Do you think that would be fair of me?"

"There's a man's life involved. He's dying Friday," he said, in such a low, expressionless voice that it was almost wholly lip motion.

"Is it because of her. is it through her in any way? Is she to blame, has she caused it? Answer me."

"No," he sighed.

"Then what right have you to involve her? There can be a form of death for women too, you know. Social death. Call it notoriety, loss of reputation, whatever you will. It isn't over with as quickly. I'm not sure it isn't worse."

His face was getting continually whiter with strain. "There must be something in you I can appeal to. Don't you

care if this man dies? Do you realize that if you withhold this information—"

"After all, I do know the woman and I don't know the man. She is my friend, he isn't. You're asking me to jeopardize her, to save him."

"Where does the jeopardy come in?" She didn't answer. 'Then you refuse to tell me?"

"I have neither refused, nor agreed to, yet."

He was suffocating with a sense of his own helplessness. "You're not going to do this to me. This is home base. It ends here. You know, and you're going to tell me!" They had both risen to their feet. "You think because I can't hit you, like I would a man, I can't get it out of you. I'm going to get it out of you. You're not going to stand here like this and—"

She glanced meaningfully down at her own shoulder. "See here," she said with cold indignation.

He relaxed his grip on it. She readjusted the silver peninsula that clothed it. She looked him straight in the eye, in withering disparagement. A blundering, easily dealt with male. "Shall I call down and have you removed?"

"If you want to see a good brawl up here, try it."

"You can't compel me to tell you. The choice rests with me."

That was true up to a point, and he knew it.

"I'm a free agent in the matter. What're you going to do about it?"

"This."

Her face changed for a minute at sight of the gun, but it was just the flicker of shock that would have crossed anyone's. It changed right back again to normal. She even sat down slowly, but not in the crumpled way of the vanquished; in a way that expressed patient assurance: as though this would take some time and she intended sitting it out.

He'd never seen anyone like her before. After that first momentary contraction of the facial muscles, she was still the one remaining in control of the situation, not he, gun or no gun.

He stood over her with it, trying to bear down on her mentally if nothing else. "Aren't you afraid to die?"

She looked up into his face. "Very much," she said with perfect composure. "As much as anyone, at any time. But I'm not in any danger right now. You can't afford to kill me. People are killed to keep them from telling something they know. They are never killed to force them to tell something they know. For then, how can they tell it afterward? That gun still leaves the decision with me, not with you. I could do many things. I could call the police. But I won't. I'll sit and wait until you put it away again."

She had him.

He put it away, scrubbed a hand across his eyebrows. "All right," he said thickly.

She uttered a note of laughter. "Which one of us got most of the effects of that? My face is dry, yours is shining. My color is unchanged, yours is pale."

About all he could find to say, once more, was, "All right, you win."

She continued to hammer the point home. Or rather, tap it delicately, hammering being a heavy handed procedure at best; and she was deft, she was chic. "You see, you can't threaten me." She paused, to permit him to hear between the lines. "You can interest me."

He nodded. Not to her, in inward confirmation to himself. He said, "Can I sit here a minute?" and motioned to a small table desk. He took something out of his pocket and snapped it open. He carefully tore out something along a punctured line. Then he snapped the folder closed again and returned it to his pocket. A blank oblong remained before him. He uncapped a fountain pen and began to write across it.

He looked up once to ask, "Am I boring you?"

She gave him the wholly natural, unforced smile that comes when two people understand one another perfectly. "You're being very good company. Quiet, but entertaining.
"

This time he was the one smiled, to himself. "How do you

spell your name?"

"B-e-a-r-e-r."

He gave her a look, then bent to his task once more. "Not quite phonetic, is it?" he murmured deprecatingly.

He had written the numeral 100. She had come closer, was looking down on the bias. "I'm rather sleepy," she remarked, and yawned artificially and tapped her hand over her mouth once or twice.

"Why don't you open the windows. It may be a little close in here."

"I'm sure it isn't that." She crossed over to them, however, and did so. Then came back to him again.

He had added another cipher. "How do you feel now, better?" he questioned with ironic solicitude.

She glanced briefly downward. "Considerably refreshed. You might almost say revivified."

"It takes so little, doesn't it?" he agreed acidly.

"Surprisingly little. Next to nothing at all." She was enjoying her own pun.

He didn't go ahead writing. He allowed the pen to flatten against the desk without taking his hand from it. "This is preposterous, you know."

"I haven't gone to you for anything. You've come to me for something." She nodded. "Good night."

The pen upended again in his hand.

He was standing in the open doorway, facing inward in the act of taking leave of her, when the car arrived and the elevator door opened in answer to his ring. He was holding a small tab of paper, a leaf torn from a memo pad, folded once and held within the pronged fingers of one hand.

"I hope I haven't been rude," he was saying to her. A rueful smile etched into his profile for a minute. "At least I know I haven't bored you. And please overlook the exceptional hour of the night. After all, it was rather an exceptional matter." Then in answer to something that she said, "You don't have to worry about that. I wouldn't bother writing a check if I were going to stop payment on it after-

ward. That's a pretty small dodge, any way you look it"

"Down, sir?" the attendant reminded him, to attract his attention.

He glanced over. "Here's the car." Then back to her again. "Well, good night." He tipped his hat to her decorously and came away, leaving the door ajar behind him. She closed it lingeringly in his wake, without looking out after him.

In the car he raised the tab of paper and glanced at it.

"Hey, wait a minute," he blurted out, with a stab of the hand toward the carman. "She only gave me one name here—"

The operator slowed the car, prepared to reverse it. "Did you want to go back again, sir?"

For a moment he seemed about to assent. Then he scanned his watch. "No, never mind. I guess it'll be all right. Go ahead down."

The car picked up speed again and resumed its descent.

In the lobby below he stopped long enough to consult the hallman, flashing the paper at him for a moment. "Which way is this from here, up or down, any idea?"

On it were two names and a number. "Flora," the number, and "Amsterdam."

"It's finally over," he was telling Burgess breathlessly on the phone a minute or two later, from an all-night drugstore on Broadway. "I thought I had it, and there was one last link, but this time it's the last. No time to tell you now. Here's where it is. I'm on my way there now. How soon can you be there?"

Burgess, overreaching himself in the headlong sweep of the patrol car that had brought him over, recognized Lombard's car standing out by itself in front of one of the buildings, at first sight empty; jumped hazardously off in full flight and came back. It was only when he'd gained the sidewalk and approached from that direction that he made him

out sitting there on the running board, screened from the roadway by the car body at his back.

He thought he was ill at first, the way he was sitting there in a huddle on the car step; bowed over his own lap, head lowered toward the sidewalk underfoot. His posture suggested someone in the penultimate stages of being sick to his stomach; everything but the final climax.