“She said, ‘But don’t waste the tickets. Why throw out good money? Take her instead. She can have the show. She can have the dinner. She can have you altogether. But she can’t have you in the only way she wants you.’
“That was her answer. That was always going to be her answer from then on, I knew it then. Forever, for the rest of our lives. And that’s an awful long time.
“Then here’s what happened next. I clenched my teeth and drew my arm back, in a line with the side of her jaw. I don’t remember what happened to the necktie I’d been holding. It must have dropped to the floor. I only know it didn’t go around her neck.
“I never let fly. I couldn’t. I’m not that way. She even tried to get me to. I don’t know why. Or maybe because she knew she was safe, I was incapable of doing it. She’d seen me in the glass, of course, she didn’t have to turn her head. She jeered, ‘Go ahead, hit me. Casey at the bat. That won’t get it for you either. Nothing will get it for you; whether you’re sweet or whether you’re sour, whether you’re gentle or whether you’re rough.’
“Then we both said things we shouldn’t have, like people
do. But it was just mouth fireworks, that was all. I never laid a hand on her. I said, ‘You don’t want me; then what the hell are you hanging on to me for?’
“She said, ‘You might come in handy, in case of burglars.’ “I said, ‘You bet that’s all there’ll be to it from now on!’ “She said, ‘I wonder if I’ll be able to tell the difference?’ “I said, ‘That reminds me. You’ve got something coming to you,’ I took two dollars out of my wallet and I threw them on the floor behind her. I said, ‘That’s for being married to you! And I’ll pay the piano player on my way downstairs.’
“Sure, it was low, it was rotten. I grabbed my hat and coat and I got out of there fast. She was still laughing there at the glass when I left. She was laughing. Jack. She wasn’t dead. I didn’t touch her. Her laughter followed me through the door, even after I’d closed it. It drove me down the stairs on foot, without waiting for the car to come up. It drove me nuts, I couldn’t get away from it fast enough. It even followed me all the way down to the next landing, and then finally it faded away.”
He stopped for a long time, while the scene he had rekindled slowly cooled and died again, before he could go ahead. There were traces of sweat in the creases running across his contracted forehead.
“Then when I came back,” he said quietly, “she was dead and they said I did it. They said it happened at eight minutes and fifteen seconds after six. Her watch told them. It must have happened within ten minutes after I’d slammed the door behind me. That part of it still gives me the creeps, even now, when I think of it. He must have been lurking right there inside the building already, whoever he was—” “But you say you went down the stairs yourself?” “He might have been hidden up on the last stretch, between our floor and the roof. I don’t know. Maybe he heard the whole thing. Maybe he even watched me go. Maybe I slammed the door so hard it rebounded instead of catching, and he got in that way. He must have been in on her before
she knew it. Maybe the very sound of her own laughter helped to cover him up, kept her from hearing anything until it was late.”
“That makes it sound like some sort of a prowler, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but what for? The cops were never able to figure out what for, that’s why they wouldn’t give it any serious consideration. It wasn’t robbery; nothing was taken. There was sixty dollars in cash right in the drawer in front of her, not even covered over. It wasn’t attack, either. She was killed right where she’d been sitting, and left right where she’d been killed.”
Lombard said, “One or the other could have been intended, and he got frightened off before he carried out the object of the intrusion. Either by some outside sound or by the very act he had just committed itself. That’s happened a thousand and one times.”
“Even that won’t do,” Henderson said dully. “Her diamond solitaire was lying there loose on the dressing table the whole time. It wasn’t even on her finger. All he had to do was scoop it up as he ran out. Frightened or not, how long would that take? It stayed behind.” He shook his head. “The necktie damned me. It came out from underneath all the others on the rack. And the rack was fairly deep within the closet. And that particular tie went with every stitch I had on. Sure, because I took it out myself. But I didn’t twist it around her. I lost track of it in the heat of the quarrel. It must have fallen unnoticed to the floor. Then I grabbed up the one I’d come home with, and whipped that around my collar, and stormed out. Then he came creeping in, and it caught his eye as he advanced unsuspectedly on her, and he picked it up— God knows who he was, and God only knows why he did it!”
Lombard said, “It may have been some impulse without rhyme or reason, just an urge to kill for the sake of killing, unleashed in some stray mental case hanging around outside. It may have been whipped up by the very scene of violence between you, especially after he had detected that the door wasn’t securely closed. He realized he could commit it almost with impunity, and you’d be blamed for it. There have been things like that, you know.”
“If it was anything along those lines, then they’ll never get him. That kind of killers are the hardest to track down. Only some freak or fluke will ever open it up. Some day they may get him for something else entirely, and then he’ll confess this one along with it, and that’s the first inkling they’ll have. Long after it’ll do me any good.”
“What about this key witness you mentioned in your message?”
“I’m coming to that now. It’s the one slim ray of hope in the whole thing. Even if they never get on to who really did it, there’s a way for me to be cleared of it. The two findings aren’t necessarily one and the same in this case; they can be separate and distinct, and yet equally valid each in its own right.”
He began punching one hand into the flat of the other, over and over while he spoke. “There’s a certain woman, somewhere or other, right at this moment, as we sit here in this cell talking it over, who can clear me—simply by telling them at what time I met her at a certain bar eight blocks from where I lived. That time was ten minutes after six. And she knows it just as I know it; wherever and whoever she is, she knows it. They proved, by re-enacting it, that I couldn’t have reached that bar at that time and still have committed the murder back at my house. Jack, if you hope to do anything for me, if you want to pull me through this, you’ve got to find that woman. She and she alone is the answer.”
Lombard took a long time. Finally he said, “What’s been done about finding her, so far?”
“Everything,” was the devastating answer, “everything under the sun.”
Lombard came over and slumped down limply on the edge of the bunk beside him. “Whew!” he said, blowing through his clasped hands. “And if the police failed, your lawyer failed, everyone and everything failed, right at the time it happened and with all the time they needed—what a chance I have, months after it’s cold and with eighteen days to do it in!”
The guard had showed up. Lombard stood up, let his hand trail off Henderson’s slumped shoulder as he turned away to be let out.
Henderson raised his hand. “Don’t you want to shake hands?” he said falteringly.
“What for? I’ll be back again tomorrow.”
“You mean you’re going to take a fling at it, anyway?”
Lombard turned and gave him a look that was almost scathing, as if irked by the obtuseness of such a question. “What the hell gave you the idea I wasn’t?” he growled surlily.
10 The Seventeenth, the Sixteenth Days Before the Execution
LOMBARD shuffled around the cell, hands in pockets, looking down at his own feet as though he’d never noticed how they worked before. Finally he stopped and said, “Hendy, you’ve got to do better than that. I’m not a magician, I can’t just pull her out of a hat from nothing.”
“Listen,” Henderson said weariedly, “I’ve gone
over the thing in my own mind until I’m sick of it, until I dream about it at nights. I can’t squeeze a drop more detail out of it.”
“Didn’t you look at her face at all?”
“It must have gotten in the way plenty of times, but it didn’t take.”
“Let’s start in again at the beginning and run through it once more. Don’t look at me like that, it’s the only thing we can do. She was already sitting on a stool at the bar when you walked in. Suppose you give me your first impression of her if you can. Try to recapture it. Sometimes there’s a clearer visualization to be gained from a fleeting first impression than from all the more deliberate studies you can make later on. Well then, your first impression?”
“A hand reaching for pretzels.”
Lombard eyed him scathingly. “How can you leave your own bar stool, walk over to another, and accost somebody, without seeing them? Show me that trick sometime. You knew it was a girl, didn’t you? You didn’t think it was a mirror you were addressing? Well how did you know it was a girl?”
“She had on a skirt, so she was a girl, and she wasn’t using crutches, so she was able-bodied. Those were the only two things I cared about. I was looking through her, seeing My Girl in my mind’s eye the whole time I was with her; what do you expect me to be able to tell you?” Henderson flared in turn.
Lombard took a minute off to let the two of them calm down. Then. “What was her voice like. Did that tell you anything? Where she came from? What her background was?”
“That she’d been to high school. That she was city-bred. She talked like we all do here. Pure metropolitan. About as colorless as boiled water.”
“Then this was her home town, if you couldn’t notice any variation in accent. Whatever good that does us. In the taxi, what?”
“Nothing; the wheels went around.”
“In the restaurant, what?”
Henderson arched his neck rebelliously. “Nothing. It’s no use. Jack. Nothing. It won’t come. I can’t. I can’t. She ate and she talked, that was all.”
“Yes, but about what?”
“I can’t remember. I can’t remember a word of it. It wasn’t meant to be remembered. It was just meant to pass the time, keep silence at a distance. The fish was excellent. Wasn’t the war terrible? No, she didn’t care for another cigarette, thank you.”
“You’re driving me crazy. You sure must have loved Your Girl.”
“I did. I do. Shut up about it.”
“In the theater, what?”
“Only that she stood up in her seat: I’ve already told you that three times. And you said yourself, that doesn’t tell you what she was like, that only tells you what she did at one point.”
Lombard came in closer. “Yes, but why did she stand up?
That keeps eluding you. The curtain was still up, you say. People don’t stand like that for no reason.”
“I don’t know why she stood up. I wasn’t inside her mind.”
“You weren’t even inside your own, from what I can gather. Never mind, we can come back to that later. Once you’ve got the effect, the cause is bound to follow eventually.” He moiled around for a while, letting a brief pause rest them up.
“When she stood up like that, you looked at her then at least?”
“Looking is a physical act, with the pupils of the eyes; seeing is a mental one, with the cells of the brain. I looked at her all night long; I didn’t see her once.”
“This is torture,” Lombard grimaced, squeezing the bridge of his nose up close beneath the brows. “I can’t seem to get it from you. There must be somebody I can get it from, somebody who saw you with her that night. Two people can’t go around town for six hours together without somebody at least seeing them.”
Henderson smiled wryly. “That’s what I thought, too. I found out I was wrong. There must have been a case of mass astigmatism all over town that night. Sometimes they’ve got me wondering myself if there really was such a person, or if she wasn’t just a hallucination on my part, a vagary of my own feverish imagination.”
“You can cut that out right now,” Lombard ordered curtly.
“Time’s up,” a voice said from outside.
Henderson got up. picked up a charred match stick from the floor, and carried it over to the wall, where there were rows of little charred dabs, in parallel rows. The top lines had all been intercrossed into .r’s; the last few on the end were still single downward strokes. He added a cross line to one, and made that into an x.
“And cut that out too!” Lombard added. He spit forcefully into his own hand, took a quick step over, gave the
wall a violent sweep, and the whole bunch of them, crossed and uncrossed, were gone at once.
“All right, move over,” he said, taking out pencil and paper.
“I’ll stand for a change,” Henderson said. “There’s only room for one on the edge of that thing.”
“Now you know what I want, don’t you? Raw material, that hasn’t already been worked over. Second-string witnesses, people who weren’t subpoenaed to appear at the trial, people who were overlooked both by the cops and Gregory, your lawyer.”
“You don’t want much. Ghosts, once-removed. Second-degree ghosts to help us get a line on a first-degree ghost. We better get a medium in on this with us.”
“I don’t care if they only brushed elbows with you, walked past on one side of the street while you two walked past on the other. The point is, I want to be the first to get to them, if possible. I don’t want anyone else’s left-overs. There must be some place we can drive a wedge in, split this thing open. I don’t care how diaphanous it is, I want to rig up some kind of a Ust between us. All right, here we go again. The bar.”
“The inevitable bar,” Henderson sighed.
“The barman’s been used up already. Anyone else at it but the two of you?”
“No.”
“Take your time. Don’t try to force it. It won’t come that way, when you try to force it. It drives it back.”
(Four or five minutes)
“Wait. A girl in a booth turned her head to look around after her. I noticed that as we were leaving. Want that?”
Lombard’s pencil moved. “Give me that sort of thing. That’s exactly the sort of thing I want. Can you tell me anything else about this girl?”
“No. Even less than the woman I was with. Just the turn of a head.”
“Come on, now.”
“The taxi. That’s been used up. He was the big comic relief at the trial.”
“The restaurant comes next. Was there a hat-check girl at this Maison Blanche?”
“She’s one of the few with a legitimate excuse for not remembering her. I was alone when I went up to her alcove; the phantom had separated from me to go into the powder room.”
Lombard’s pencil moved again. “There may have been an attendant in there. Still, if she wasn’t noticed with you, there’s even less chance she was noticed without you. Now how about the restaurant, any heads turn there?”
“She joined me separately.” ^ “That brings us to the theater.”
“There was a doorman with funny fish-hook mustaches, I remember that much. He did a double take on her hat.”
“Good. He’s in.”
He jotted something. “How about the usher?”
“We got there late. Just a pocket light in the dark.”
“No good. How about the stage itself?”
“You mean the performers? I’m afraid the show ran off too fast.”
“When she stood up like that it might have been seen. Were any of them questioned by the police?”
“No.”
“It won’t hurt for me to check. We’re not passing up anything in this, understand, anything? If a blind man was anywhere near you that night, I’d want— What’s matter?”
“Hey,” Henderson had said sharply.
“What is it?”
“You just brought something back to me then. One was. A blind pan-handler tagged us as
we were leaving—” Then as he saw Lombard’s pencil briefly scrawl something, “You’re kidding,” he protested incredulously.
“Think so?” Lombard said levelly. “Wait and see.” He cocked his pencil once more.
“That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.”
Lombard put the list away in his pocket, stood up. “I’ll make a dent in that somewhere along the line!” he promised grimly. He went over and whacked at the grate, to be let out. “And keep your eyes off that wall!” he added, catching the direction of Henderson’s inadvertent glance, over to where the erased box-score had once been kept. “They’re not going to get you in there.” He thumbed the opposite direction along the corridor from the one he was about to take.
“They say they are,” was Henderson’s ironically murmured answer.
Personal Columns, all newspapers: Will the young lady who was seated in a wall booth at Anselmo’s Bar with a companion, at or around 6.15 in the evening. May 20th last, and who may recall an orange hat that caused her to turn her head as its wearer was leaving, kindly get in touch with me. She was facing toward the back. If she remembers this it is vital that I hear from her without delay. A person’s happiness is involved. All replies held in strictest confidence. Communicate J. L., Box 654, care of this newspaper.
No replies.
11 The Fifteenth Day Before the Execution
LOMBARD
A BLOWZY woman, with her graying hair in her eyes and an aura of cabbage around her, opened the door. “O’Bannon? Michael O’Bannon?”
That was as far as he got. “Now listen. I’ve already been over to your office once today, and the man there said he’d give us until Wednesday. We’re not trying to gyp the poor penniless company that needs the money so bad. Sure it must be down to its last fifty thousand bucks, it must!”
“Madam. I’m not a collector. I simply wish to speak to the Michael O’Bannon who worked as doorman at the Casino last spring.”
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