Phantom lady (27 page)

"Sometime within the next hour and a half. We'll make it."

They'd hit full wooded country now; trees with whitewashed waistbands to give the road a boundary in the dark. No more terrain lights, only an occasional inbound car blurring into incandescence as it approached, then dousing its lights in that wayside salute so reminiscent of an ambulant tipping his hat.

"But suppose something happens to delay us? A tire goes out or something? Wouldn't it be better to telephone?"

"I know what I'm doing. You sound quite anxious all at once."

"Yes, oh yes, I am," she breathed. "I've been blind. Blind. I see which was the dream, now, and which the reality."

"Quite a reformation," he said grudgingly. "For five months you didn't lift a finger to help him. And now all at once, within fifteen minutes, you're all hot and bothered."

"Yes," she said submissively. "It doesn't seem to matter, all at once. About my husband, or the threat of being put into an institution, or any of the rest of it. You've made me see the whole thing in a different light." She drew the back of one hand weariedly across her brow, said with infinite disgust, "I want to do at least one brave thing, I'm so sick of being a coward all my life!"

They rode in silence after that. Until presently she asked, almost with anxiety, "Will just my sworn testimony be enough to save him?"

"It'll be enough to postpone—what they have scheduled

for tonight. Once that's been accomplished, we can turn it over to the lawyers, they'll see it through the rest of the way."

Suddenly she noticed they had swung off left, at a fork, onto a desolate, poorly surfaced cross-country "feeder." It had already occurred several moments before, by the time she became aware of it. The motion of the car had become less even. The occasional passing road-mate had diminished to none. There was no sign of life on it,

"But why this? I thought the north and south highway we were on was the one that takes you up to the State Prison. Isn't he at—?"

"This is a shortcut," he answered briefly. "A sort of shuttle that'll save time."

The humming of the wind seemed to rise a little, take on an apprehensive moaning quality, as they rushed through, displacing it.

He spoke again, chin almost to wheel, eyes motionless and emotionless over it. "I'll get you where we're going in plenty of time."

There were no longer just two of them in the car. At some indeterminate point in the previous silence, a third presence had entered it, was in it now, sitting between them. The icy, shrouded shape of fear, its unseen arms enfolding the woman in cold embrace, its frigid fingertips seeking out her windpipe.

There hadn't been any lights but their own for ten minutes past now. There hadn't been any word between them. The trees were a smoky, billowing mass on each side of them. The wind was a warning message, unheeded until too late. Their two faces were ghosts reflected side by side on the windshield before them.

He slowed, backed, turned aside once more, this time onto an unpaved dirt lane, little better than a defile through the trees. They jounced along over its unevenness of surface, dried leaves hissing in their wake, stirred by the ex-

haust tube; the wheels climbing over half-submerged roots, the fenders grazing trunks impinging on the right of way. The headlights played over a grottolike profundity of trees, bleaching the nearer ones into dazzling stalagmites, leaving the inner ones black and enshrouded. It was like some evil, bewitched glade in a fairy tale for children; woods of supernatural import where bad things were about to happen.

She said in a smothered voice, "No, what're you doing?" Fear locked its embrace about her tighter, breathed glacially down her neck. "I don't like the way you're acting. What're you doing this for?"

Suddenly they'd stopped, and it was over. The sound of the brakes only reached her senses after the fact had been accomplished. He killed the engine, and there was stillness all around. Inside the car and out. They were motionless, all of them; the car, and he and she, and her fear.

Not quite; there was one thing moving. The three fingers of his hand, that had remained upon the wheel rim, kept fluttering restlessly, rising and falling in rotation, like somebody striking successive keys on the piano over and over.

She turned and began to pummel at him. in impotent fright. "What is it? Say something! Say something to me! Don't just sit there like that! What did we stop here for? What are you thinking, why are you looking like that?"

"Get out." He gave the order with a hitch of his chin.

"No. What are you going to do? No." She sat there staring at him in ever widening fright.

He reached across her and unlatched the door on that side. "I said get out."

"No! You're going to do something. I can see it on your face—"

He flung her before him with one stiffly locked arm. A moment later they were both standing there beside the car, toe deep in sandpaper, tan and yellow leaves. He cracked the car door shut again after him. It was damp and penetrating under the trees, pitch-black around them in all directions but one: the ghostly tunnel ahead made by the

projecting headlight beams.

'"Come this way," he said quietly. He started walking down it. He held her by the elbow, to make sure that she accompanied him. The leaves sloshed and spit under them in the unnatural quiet. The car fender fell behind them, they were clear of it now, walking ahead. She went, turned unnaturally sidewise, staring into his unanswering face. She could hear her own breath, echoing under the canopy of the trees. His was quieter.

They walked like that in silent, unexplained pantomime until they'd reached a point where the projected headlight shine thinned out, was about to disappear. On this boundary line between light and shadows he stopped, took his hand off her. She went down convulsively a few inches, he caught her, straightened her, took his hand off her a second time.

He took out a cigarette and offered it to her. She tried to refuse. "Here," he insisted roughly, thrusting it at her mouth. "Better take one!" He lit it for her, holding his hands cupped over the match flame. There was something ritualistic about the little attention that only struck redoubled fear into her, instead of reassuring her. She took one puff, then the cigarette dropped from her unmanageable lips, she wasn't able to retain it. He made a precautionary pass at it with his foot, ground it out because of the leaves.

"All right," he said. "Now go back to the car. Walk up that pathway of light from here, and get back in the car, and wait for me in it. And don't look around, just keep walking straight ahead."

She didn't seem to understand, or else was too undone by terror to be able to move of her own volition. He had to give her a slight push away from him to start her off. She tottered a few uncertain steps through the shuffling leaves.

"Go ahead, keep walking straight back along those lights like I told you," his voice came after her. "And don't look back!"

She was a woman and a frightened one. The admonition

had an opposite effect to that intended; it brought her head around, uncontrollably.

He already had the gun out in his hand, although he hadn't quite brought it all the way up yet, it was still at half position. It must have come out silently behind her back as she was moving away.

Her scream was like a bird, clawed and dying, that manages to spiral up through the trees for one last flutter before it drops down dead. She tried to close in toward him again, as though nearness was a guarantee of immunity and the danger lay in being detached from him.

"Stay there!" he warned flintily. "I tried to make it as easy for you as I could, I told you not to look back."

"Don't! What for?" she wailed. "I told you I'd tell them everything you want me to! I told you I would! I will, I will—!"

"No," he contradicted with horrifying calm, "you won't, and I'll make sure you don't. Tell it to him instead, when he catches up to you in the next world, about half an hour from now." His arm stretched out at firing position with the gun.

She made a perfect silhouette against the fuzzy headlight glare. Trapped, unable even to flee aside into the protective darkness beyond the beams in time, for they were so wide, she floundered around where she stood in a complete, befuddled circle, that brought her around facing him once more as she had been before.

That was all there was time for.

Then the shot echoed thunderously under the ceiling of trees overhead. Her scream was its counterpoint.

He must have missed, as fairly close to one another as they were. There was no smoke at his end, as there should have been, though her mind had no time to reason about that. She felt nothing; she still stayed up, too dazed to run or do anything but waver there, like a ribbon streamer before an electric fan. He was the one stumbled sideways against a near-by tree trunk, leaned there inertly for a min-

ute, face pressed against the bark, as though in remorse for what he had just attempted. Then she saw that he was holding his shoulder with the other hand. The gun winked harmlessly from the bed of leaves where he had dropped it, like a lump of coal in the light flare.

A man's figure glided swiftly past her from the rear, went down the path of light toward him. He was holding a gun of his own, she saw, centered on the crumbling figure against the tree. He dipped for a minute, and the wink was gone from the leaves underfoot. Then he stepped in close, there was a flash of reflected light down by their wrists, and something made the sound of a twig snapping. Lombard's sagging figure came away from the tree, leaned soddenly against him, then straightened itself.

In the leaden quiet the second man's voice reached her clearly.

"I arrest you for the murder of Marcella Henderson!"

He put something to his lips, and a whistle sounded with doleful, long drawn out finality. Then the silence came down on the three of them again.

Burgess leaned down solicitously and raised her from the kneeling position she had collapsed into on the bed of leaves, hands pressed tightly over her sobbing face.

"I know," he said soothingly. "I know it was pretty bad. It's over now. It's over. You did the job. You've saved him. Lean on me, that's it. Have a good cry. Go to it. You've got it coming to you."

Womanlike, she stopped then and there. "I don't want to now. I'm all right, now. It's just that—I didn't think anyone would get here in time to—"

"They wouldn't have just by tailing the two of you. Not the way he drove." A second car had braked somewhere farther up the lane only moments before; its occupants hadn't even reached the spot yet. "I couldn't take any chances on that. I was riding right with you the whole way out, didn't you know that? I was right in the trunk compartment. I

heard the whole thing. I've been in it ever since you first walked inside the store."

He raised his voice, shouted back to where flashlights were winking fitfully under the trees as the second party descended. "Is that Gregory and the rest of you fellows? Go back—don't waste time getting out and coming over here. Get over to the highway fast and get on the nearest telephone. Get the District Attorney's office. We only have a few minutes. I'll follow you in the other car. Tell them I'm holding a guy named John Lombard, self-confessed killer of Mrs. Henderson, to get word to the warden—"

"You haven't got a bit of evidence against me," Lombard growled, wincing with pain.

"No? What more do I need than what you've just given me? I caught you in the very act of murdering in cold blood a girl whom you never even set eyes on until just an hour ago! What could you have possibly had against her, except that her evidence was the one thing that could have still saved Henderson, absolved him of the crime? And why were you determined not to let that happen? Because that would have meant reopening the whole case, and your own immunity would have been endangered. That's my evidence against you!"

A State Trooper came thudding up to them. "Need a hand here?"

"Carry the girl over to the car. She's just been through a pretty rocky experience and needs looking after. I'll take care of the guy."

The husky trooper picked her up bodily, cradled her in his arms. "Who is she?" he asked over his shoulder, as he led the way back along the glowing headlight carpet.

"A pretty valuable little person," Burgess answered from the rear, jarring his prisoner along beside him, "so walk gently with her, officer, walk slow. That's Henderson's girl, Carol Richman, you're holding in your arms. The best man of us all."

One Day, After the Execution —

They were together in the living room of Burgess's small flat in Jackson Heights. That was the scene of their first meeting, following the release. He'd arranged it that way for them. He'd had her there waiting for Henderson, when the latter came down on the train. As he expressed it to her, "Who wants to meet outside a prison gate? You two have had enough of that stuff already. Wait for him over at my place. It may be only instalment-plan furniture, but at least it's non-penal."

They were sitting close together on the sofa, in soft lamplight, in a state of profound—if still somewhat dazed— peace. Henderson had his arm around her, and her head was resting in the notch of his shoulder.

Something about the two of them gave Burgess a choking feeling in the throat, when he came in and saw them. How's it coming, you two?" he asked gruffly, in order not to show it.

"Gee, everything's so good-looking, isn't it?" Henderson marvelled. "I'd almost forgotten how good-looking everything is. Carpets on the floor. Soft light coming from a lampshade. A sofa cushion behind me. And look, the best-looking thing of all—" He nudged the top of her head with his chin. "It's all mine, I've got it all back again, and it's good for another forty years yet!"

Burgess and the girl exchanged a side glance of unspoken compassion.

"I just came from the District Attorney's office," Burgess said. "They finally got the full confession out of him down there. Sealed, signed, and delivered."

"I still can't get over it," Henderson said, shaking his head. "I still can hardly believe it. What was in back of it?