Phantom lady (9 page)

"In other words, he deliberately injected a myth into the proceedings, knowing she did not exist, knowing she could never be found, and perfectly content to have her not found, for only while she remains not found is his fractional alibi of any service to him.

"In conclusion, let me ask you, ladies and gentlemen, just one simple question. Is it natural, is it likely, when a man's very life depends on his ability to remember certain details in the appearance of another, for him to be unable to recall a single, solitary one of them? Not one, mind you! He is unable to recall the color of her eyes, or the color of her hair, or the contour of her face, or her height, or her girth, or anything else about her. Put yourselves in his place. Would you be likely to forget so completely, so devastatingly, if

your lives depended on it? Self-preservation can be a wonderful spur to the memory, you know. Is it at all plausible that he would forget her so totally, if he really wished her to be found? If she exists, or ever did, to be found? I leave you with that thought.

"I don't think there's much more I have to say to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. It's a simple case. The issue is clear, without anything to confuse it."

Pointing with dramatic prolongation. "The State accuses that man whom you see there, Scott Henderson, of murdering his wife.

"The State demands his life in return.

"The State rests its case."

The Ninetieth Day Before the Execution

"Will the accused please rise and face the jury?

"Will the foreman of the jury please stand?

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?"

"We have. Your Honor."

"Do you find this defendant guilty or not guilty of the charge made against him?"

"Guilty, Your Honor."

Strangled voice from the direction of the prisoner's dock, "Oh, my God—no—!"

"Prisoner at the bar, have you anything to say before this court passes sentence upon you?"

"What is there to say, when they tell you you have committed a crime, and you and you alone know you haven't? Who is there to hear you, and who is there to beheve you?

"You're about to tell me that I must die, and if you tell me I must, I must. I'm no more afraid of dying than any other man. But I'm just as afraid of dying as any other man. It isn't easy to die at all, but it's even harder to die for a mistake. I'm not dying for something I've done, but for a mistake. And that's the hardest way to die of all. When the time comes, I'll meet it the best I can; that's all I can do anyway.

"But I say to you now, all of you, who won't listen and don't believe: I didn't do that. I didn't do it. Not all the findings of all the juries, not all the trials in all the courts, not all the executions in all the electric chairs—in the whole world—can make what isn't so, so.

"I'm ready to hear it now. Your Honor. Quite ready."

Voice from the bench, in a sympathetic aside, "I'm sorry, Mr. Henderson. I don't think I've ever heard a more compelling, dignified, manly plea from anyone who has stood before me for sentence. But the verdict of the jury in this case gives me no alternative."

Same voice, slightly louder, "Scott Henderson, having been tried and found guilty of murder in the first degree, I hereby sentence you to die in the electric chair, in the State

Prison at , during the week beginning October 20th,

said sentence to be carried out by the warden of the prison, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Low voice, just outside the cell in the Death House corridor, "Here he is, in this one."

Louder, above a jangle of keys, "Somebody here to see you, Henderson."

Henderson doesn't speak or move. Gate is opened, then closed again. Long, awkward pause, while they look at one another.

"Guess you don't remember me."

"You remember the people that kill you."

"I don't kill people, Henderson. I turn people who commit crimes over to those whose job it is to try them."

"Then you come around afterward to make sure they haven't gotten away, to satisfy yourself they're still there where you put them, getting it rubbed into them, day by day and minute by minute. It must worry you. Well, take a look. I'm here. I'm safe on ice. Now you can go away happy."

"You're bitter, Henderson."

"It doesn't sweeten you any to die at thirty-two."

Burgess didn't answer that. No one could have, adequately. He shuttered his eyes rapidly a couple of times to show that it had hit. He went over to the skinny canal of an opening and looked out.

"Small, isn't it?" Henderson said, without turning his head to look.

Burgess promptly turned and came away from it, at that, as though it had closed up on him. He took something out of his pocket, stopped before the bunk the other was sitting crouched on. "Cigarette?"

Henderson looked up derisively. "What's the matter with them?"

"Ah, don't be like that," the detective protested throatily. He continued to hold them out.

Henderson took one grudgingly at last, more as if by doing so to get him to move away from him than because he really wanted one. His eyes were still bitter. He wiped the small cylinder insultingly on his sleeve before putting it to his mouth.

Burgess gave him a light for it. Henderson looked his scorn at him even for that, holding his eyes steady, above the small flame, on the other's face. "What's this, the day of the execution already?"

"I know how you feel—" Burgess began in mild remonstrance.

Henderson reared up suddenly on the slab. "You know how I feel!" he flared. He snapped ashes down toward the detective's feet, by way of indicating them. "They can go anywhere they feel like!" He jabbed his thumb toward his own. "But they can't!" His mouth looped downward at one corner. "Get out of here. Get out. Go back and kill somebody else. Get fresh material. I'm second-hand, I've been worked over once already."

He lay back again, blew a tracer of smoke out along the wall. It mushroomed when it hit the top of the bunk, came down toward him again.

They had quit looking at one another. But Burgess was standing still, hadn't gone. He said finally, "I understand your appeal's been turned down."

"Yes, my appeal's been turned down. Now there are no more hitches, no more impediments, nothing further to interfere with the ceremonial bonfire. Now I can skid straight down the chute without anything more to stop me. Now the cannibals won't have to go hungry. Now they can make a nice, swift, clean-cut job of it. Stream-lined." He turned and looked at his listener. "What're you looking so mournful about? Sorry because the agony can't be prolonged? Sorry because I can't die twice over?"

Burgess made a wry face as though his cigarette tasted

rotten. He stepped on it. "Don't hit below the belt, Henderson. My dukes aren't even up."

Henderson looked at him intently for a while, as though noticing something in his manner for the first time through the red haze of anger that had hovered over his perceptions until now. "What's on your mind?" he asked. "What brings you around here like this, anyway, months afterward?"

Burgess felt the back of his neck. "I don't know how to put it myself. It's a funny thing for a dick to do," he admitted. "I know my job with you ended when you were indicted by the Grand Jury and bound over for trial— It's sort of hard to bring out," he ended lamely.

"Why? It shouldn't be. I'm just a condemned guy in a cell."

"That's just why it is. I came up to—well, what I'm here to say is—" He stopped a minute, then blurted out, "I believe you're innocent. Well, there it is, for what it's worth, and it's not worth anything—to you or me either. I don't think you did it, Henderson."

Long wait.

"Well, say something. Don't just sit there looking at me."

"I don't know what to say when a guy digs up the corpse he helped to bury and says, 'Sorry, old man, I guess I've made a mistake.' You better tell me what to say."

"I guess you're right. I guess there's nothing to say. But I still claim I did my part of the job right, on the evidence there was to go by. I'll go further than that. I'd do the same thing over again tomorrow, if it had to be done a second time. My personal feelings don't count; my job is to work with concrete things."

"And what brought on this profound change of conviction?" Henderson asked, with a dull sort of irony.

"That's as hard to explain, to make clear, as any of the rest of it. It's been a slow thing, it's taken weeks and months to soak through me. About as slow as water soaking through a stack of blotters. It started in at the trial, I guess. It worked by a sort of reverse process. All the things that they

made to count against you so heavily, they seemed to point the other way around, to me, later on when I ran over them in my own mind.

"I don't know if you can quite get what I mean. Framed alibis are always so clever, so smooth, so chock full of plausible details. Yours was so lame, so blank. You couldn't remember a single thing about this woman. A ten-year-old child would have been able to do a better job of description. As I sat in the back of the courtroom listening, it slowly dawned on me: hey, that must be the truth he's telling! Any lie, any lie at all, would have more meat on its bones than that. Only a man who was not guilty could frustrate his own chances as thoroughly as you did. The guilty are smarter than that. Your life was at stake, and all you could muster to protect yourself was two nouns and an adjective. 'Woman,' 'hat,' and 'funny." I thought to myself, 'How true to life that is.' A guy is all riled up inside from a row at home, he picks up someone he's not interested in in the first place. Then right on top of that comes the mental cloudburst of finding out there's been a murder in his house and hearing himself accused of it—" He gestured expressively. "Which is more likely: that he'd remember such a stranger in exhaustive detail, or that what little impression remained of her in the first place would be completely washed away, leaving the slate blank?

"It's been on my mind a long time now. It's kept coming back to me with more and more pressure each time. Once before I already started to come up here, but then I turned around and backed out again. Then I talked to Miss Rich-man once or twice—"

Henderson elongated his neck. "I begin to see light."

The detective said, sharply and at once, "No, you don't, at all! You probably think she came to see me and finally influenced me— It was the other way around. I first looked her up, and went to have a talk with her—to tell her pretty much what I've told you today. Since then, I admit, she's been to see me several times—not at Headquarters but at my

own place—and we've had several more talks about it. But that's neither here nor there. Miss Richman nor nobody else can put anything in my mind if it wasn't in there already. If there's any changing with me, it's got to be done on the inside, and not from the outside in. If I'm up here to see you today, it's on my own hook. I'm not here at her suggestion. She didn't know I was coming up here. I didn't myself —until I did."

He started to walk back and forth. "Well, I've got it off my chest now. I still won't retract. I did my part of the job the only way it could have been done, the way the evidence called for it to be done. And you can't ask any more of a man than that."

Henderson didn't answer. He sat staring moodily at the floor. It was a sort of quiescent brooding. He seemed less actively bitter than in the beginning. The shadow made by Burgess's pacing kept passing and repassing him. He didn't bother to look up at its source.

Then the shadow stood still, and he could hear the sound of coins jangling thoughtfully inside a pocket lining.

Burgess's voice said, "You've got to get hold of someone that can help you. That can work at it full time for you."

He jingled some more. "I can't, I've got work of my own. Oh, I know in movies and such there are these glorified detectives that chuck everything just to go off on some sideline of their own. I've got a wife and kids. I need my job. And you and me are strangers, after all."

Henderson didn't move his head. "I didn't ask you to," he murmured quietly.

Burgess quit jingling finally, came part of the way back to him. "Get someone that's close to you, that's all for you" —he tightened his fist and hoisted it in promise, "—and I'll back him up all I can."

Henderson looked up for the first time, then down again. He said one word, dispiritedly, "Who?"

"It needs someone that'll put a passion into it, a belief, a fervor. Someone who isn't doing it for money, nor for his

own advancement. Someone who's doing it for you, because you're Scott Henderson, and no other reason. Because he likes you, yes even loves you, because he'd almost rather die himself than have you die. Someone that won't be licked, even when he is. Someone that won't know it's too late, even when it is. That's the kind of flame it needs, that's the kind of juice. That and only that'll swing it."

His hand had come to rest on Henderson's shoulder while he spoke, in an accolade of insistence.

"You've got a girl that feels that way about you, I know. But she's just a girl. She's got the flame, but not the experience. She's doing what she can, but it isn't enough."

For the first time Henderson's bleak expression softened a little. He shot a brief look of gratitude, meant for her, by proxy at the detective. "I might have known—" he murmured.

"It needs a man. Someone that knows his way around. And yet has that feeling for you she has. You must have someone like that. Everyone has someone like that in his life."

"Yes, when they first start out. I used to, I guess, like everyone else. They seem to drop off along the way, as you get older. Especially after you get married."

"They don't drop off, if they're what I'm talking about." Burgess insisted. "Whether you keep in touch with them or not has nothing to do with it. If it's once there, it's there."

"There was a guy once, he and I, we were as close as brothers," Henderson admitted. "But that was in the past—"

"There's no time limit on friendship."

"He isn't here right now, anyway. The last time I met him he told me he was leaving the next day for South America. He had a five-year contract with some oil company."