Phantom lady

by Cornell Woolrich

  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.”

  He quirked his head at the detective. “For a fellow in your line of work, you seem to have quite a few illusions left intact, haven’t you? That would be asking something, wouldn’t it? Expect someone to come back three thousand miles and can his whole immediate future, to go to bat for a

  friend at the drop of a hat. And not a current friend either, mind you. Remember, you get thicker skinned as you get older. Some of the idealism peels off. The man of thirty-two isn’t the same pal to you the lad of twenty-five was, and you’re not to him.”

  Burgess cut across his objections. “Just answer one thing. Would he have once done it?”

  “He would have once done it.”

  “Then if he would have once done it, he’ll still do it. I tell you again there’s no age limit on that kind of loyalty. If he had it, then he has it. If he hasn’t it, then that only proves he never did have it.”

  “But that’s an unfair test, that’s putting the hurdle too high.”

  “If he’s the sort of a guy that would weigh a five-year contract against your life,” Burgess argued, “then he’s no good to you anyway. If he isn’t, then he’s the guy you need. Why not give him a chance to come through first, before you start to talk as though he won’t?”

  He took a memorandum book out of his pocket, tore off a blank leaf, poised his knee for a writing rest, foot to the edge of the bunk.

  NN29 22 CABLE VIA NBN = —,

  SEPT 20 NLT JOHN LOMBARD =

  Compania Petrolera Sudamericana Head Office, Caracas, Venezuela

  Have been sentenced for Marcella’s death since you left a certain key witness can clear me if found my lawyer here has reached the end of his resources this is to ask you to come up and help me have no one else to turn to and no other chance of pulling through sentence set for third week in October and appeal has been turned down give me a hand will you

  SCOTT HENDERSON

  9 The Eighteenth Day Before the Execution

  HE still had some of the tan on him from warmer latitudes. He’d come up so quick he’d brought it with him, like people do when they travel nowadays; a cold in the head flies with them from the West Coast to the East; a three-day boil on the neck lasts from Rio to La Guardia Field before it pops.

  He looked about the age Scott Henderson had once been; the former Scott Henderson of five or six months ago, not the pinched death-mask lingering on in a cell, who counted years by hours.

  He was still wearing the clothes he’d put on in South America. A snowy panama that was out of season up here right now, and a gray flannel suit that was too light, both in shade and weight, for an American autumn. It needed the blazing Venezuelan sunshine to make it seem less conspicuous.

  He was moderately tall, and easy moving with it; no effort at all to get around. You could think of him as always chasing after a street car, even when it was already a block away, because it was so easy for him to catch up with it. He was anything but a natty dresser, in spite of his vernal clothes. His small mustache could have stood a touch of the scissors, and his necktie needed steaming, it kept curling around on itself all the way down, like a spiral of spun-sugar candy. The impression he gave, in short, was that he’d be a lot better at bossing a crew of men or poring over a draughting board than dancing on a ballroom floor with the ladies. There was a certain gravity about him that indicated that, if outward indications are ever any good. What used to be called, in the days of simpler cataloguing, a man’s man.

  “How’s he taking it?” he asked the guard in an under-

  tone as he followed him along the tier.

  “Just about.” Meaning, what can you expect?

  “Just about, eh?” He shook his head, muttered under his breath, “Poor cuss.”

  The guard had reached it, was opening it up.

  He held back a moment, swallowed hard as if to get his throat working smoothly, t
hen turned the corner of the cell grate into view. He went into the cell with a wry grin on his face and an outstretched hand leading the way. As though he were running in to him in the lounge of the Savoy-Plaza.

  “Well, lookit old Hendy,” he drawled. “What’re you doing, trying to be funny?”

  There was none of the bitterness present in Henderson’s reaction there had been the day the detective had visited him. You could tell this man was an old friend. His drawn face lighted up. He answered him in kind. “I live here now. How d’ye like that?”

  They pumped hands as if they’d never get through. They were still working away at it after the guard had locked up and gone off again.

  That link of hands carried messages for them, unspoken but plainly understood. Henderson’s was a warmly grateful, “You came. You showed up. So that stuff about a real friend isn’t the bunk.”

  And Lombard’s was a fervent, encouraging, “I’m with you. I’m damned if they’re going to do it.”

  After that, they steered clear of the subject the first few minutes. They said everything but what they really wanted to. A sort of skittishness, a diffidence, that a particular topic when it is too vital, bleeding, and raw, will sometimes bring about.

  Thus Lombard said, “Gee, that was a dusty ride on the train, getting up here.”

  And Henderson, “You look good. Jack. Must agree with you down there.”

  “Agree, hell! Don’t talk about it, will you? Of all the lousy, God-forsaken holes! And the food! And the mosquitoes! I was a sucker ever to sign up for five years like I did.”

  “But there was good money in it, I suppose, wasn’t there?”

  “Sure. But what am I going to do with it down there, anyway? Nowhere to spend it. Even the beer has a kerosene flavor.”

  Henderson mumbled, “I feel low, spiking it for you, though.”

  “You did me a favor,” Lombard protested gallantly. “The contract’s still on, anyway. This is just time off I wangled.”

  He waited a moment or two more. Then finally he edged up to it; the it that was on both their minds. He quit looking at his friend, looked somewhere else instead. “What about this thing anyway, Hendy?”

  Henderson tried to smile. “Well, there’s a member of our class who’s going to take part in an electrical experiment two and a half weeks from today. What was it they gave me in the year book? ‘Most likely to get his name in the papers.’ Good prophecy. I’ll probably make every edition that day.”

  Lombard’s eyes turned to stare at him truculently. “No, you won’t. Let’s quite horsing around. We’ve known each other half our lives; may as well kick off our shoes and drop the company manners.”

  “Sure,” Henderson agreed forlornly. “What the hell, life’s so short.” He belatedly realized the unintentional appropriateness of that, grinned sheepishly.

  Lombard slung one hip across the rim of the washbowl in the corner and relieved the leg that supported it of floor duty. He took it by the ankle with both hands and held it up. “I only met her once,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Twice,” Henderson corrected. “There was that time we ran into you on the street, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember. She kept pulling you by the arm, from behind, to break it up.”

  “She was on her way to buy some clothes, and you know how they are when that’s in the wind. Neither time nor

  tide—” Then he apologized still further, in behalf of someone who was dead and gone, apparently without realizing how perfectly unimportant it was now. “We were always going to have you up for dinner, but I dunno—somehow— you know how those things are.”

  “I know how it is,” Lombard agreed with diplomatic understanding. “No wife ever yet liked her husband’s premarriage friends.” He took out the pow-wow cigarettes, threw them across the narrow cell. “Don’t mind if they make your tongue swell up and your lips blister. They’re from down there; part gunpowder and part insecticide. I haven’t had time to change back to ours yet.”

  He took a thoughtful drag. “Well, I guess you better give me the dope.”

  Henderson pulled up a sigh from way in. “Yeah, I guess I better. I’ve been over it so many times already, I think I could reel it off backward, or in my sleep.”

  “To me it’s like a blackboard without anything written on it yet. So don’t skip anything if you can help it.”

  “That marriage of mine and Marcella’s was just a prelim, not the main event it should have been at all. A guy don’t usually go around admitting that, even to his friends, but this is the death house and it seems foolish to have reticences here. A little over a year ago, the main bout suddenly came up. And too late for me to take part in. You never met her, don’t know her, so there’s no reason for me to mention her name. They were decent enough to do that for me at the trial, too. All through it they just called her The Girl. I’ll do that here, I’ll call her My Girl to you.”

  “Your Girl,” Lombard assented. He had his arms folded, cigarette sticking out from behind his elbow, and was staring down broodingly at the floor, listening hard.

  “My Girl, poor girl. It was It, the real thing, the McCoy. If you’re not married, and It comes along—you’re safe. Or if your marriage itself happens to be It, that’s better still, you’re on pure velvet. Or if you’re married, and It never comes along—you’re still safe, even if you’re only half

  alive and don’t know it. It’s when you’re married, and It shows up only after it’s too late—that you want to look out.”

  “That you want to look out,” murmured Lombard with a sort of musing compassion.

  “It was a clean little thing. I told My Girl about Marcella the second time I saw her. That was supposed to be the last time we saw each other. The twelfth time we saw each other we were still trying to make it the last time. We tried to steer clear of each other—like steel filings try to steer clear of a magnet.

  “Marcella knew about her within thirty days after it had started. I saw to it that she did. I went and told her. It wasn’t a case of any sudden shock, get that. She just smiled about it a little, and she waited. Like someone watching two flies under a tumbler turned upside down.

  “I went to her and asked for a divorce. This was at about mid-point. That slow, thoughtful smile came out on her again. She hadn’t seemed to set any particular store by me until then, that I could notice. Just that thing that dropped shoes in the next aisle over from her. She said she’d have to think it over. She thought it over. The weeks went by, the months. She took her time thinking it over, she kept me dangling like that. I’d get that slow, mocking smile every now and then. She was the only one of the three of us having a good time out of it.

  “It was pulling me inside out. I’m a grown man, and I wanted My Girl. I wasn’t going to let myself be gypped. I didn’t want any affair, I wanted my wife. And the woman in my house, she wasn’t my wife.”

  The hands before his face that he stared down through, they shook a little even at this late day.

  “My Girl said to me. There must be some way out. We’re in her hands and she knows it. This sullen silence on your part, that’s the wrong attitude. That brings out an equally sulky opposition on her part. Go to her as a man goes to a friend. Take her out some night, have a heart-to-heart talk with her. When two people once loved one another, as you

  and she did, there must be something left of it, if it’s only a memory in common. There must be some vestige of good will, of kindly feeling for you, you can reach in her. Make her see it’s the best thing for her own sake, as well as yours and mine.’

  “So I bought tickets for a show, and I reserved a table for us at our old place, where we used to go in the days before our marriage. And I went home and said, ‘Let’s go out together again, shall we? Let’s go out tonight like we used to.’

  “Came that slow smile again, and she said ‘Why not?’ As I stepped into the shower, she was sitting there at the glass beginning to get ready. All the old ways I knew by heart, the f
irst little touches here and there. I whistled in the shower. I liked her very much in the shower. I realized what the trouble was; I saw I’d always liked her, and I’d mistaken it for love.”

  He let the cigarette fall from his hand, flattened it. Then kept looking there. “Why didn’t she refuse at once? Why did she let me whistle in the shower? Watch me in the glass take pains with the part in my hair? Get satisfaction out of the way my handkerchief looked in the breast pocket of my coat? Be happy all over for the first time in six months? Why did she pretend she was going, when she knew from the first she didn’t intend to? Because that was her way. That was her. Because she loved to keep me dangling in suspense. Even about that smaller matter, as well as the larger one.

  “I caught on little by little. Her smile, reflected in the glass. The way she wasn’t really getting anywhere with those little touches of hers. I was holding my necktie out in my hands, ready to sling it on. And finally even the little touches had quit, she was sitting there not moving her hands any more, just sitting there doing nothing. Only the smile stayed on, the smile at a man in love. A man in love and at your mercy.

  “There are two stories, theirs and mine. And both are identical up to that point; not a hairsbreadth variation between the two. They didn’t bring out a single detail that

  wasn’t true. Every slightest motion I made, up to there, they had down pat. They did their research work well, perfect. And then, as I stood behind her looking into the same glass with my necktie stretched out between my hands, the two stories split as far apart as the hands of a clock at six. Mine goes all the way over this way, theirs goes all the way over that.

  “I’m telling you mine now. I’m telling you the true one.

  “She was just waiting for me to ask her. That’s all she was sitting there for like that. The smile, the still hands, demurely folded on the table edge. Finally I did, after I’d watched her for a moment. I said, ‘Aren’t you going?’

  “She laughed. Gee, how she laughed. How hard, how long and hearty. I’d never known until then what a terrible weapon laughter can be. I could see my face, over there above hers in the glass, getting white.