Phantom lady

by Cornell Woolrich

He brought his attention back to her. “Certain ones, yes.”

  She fumbled in a knitted market bag hanging over her arm. “I have only a few here, sir. From when I used to be in the chorus myself. I kept them all, they mean a lot to me. The Midnight Rambles, and the Frolics of 1911—” She was trembling with apprehension, as she put them down. She turned one of the yellowed leaves, as though to add to the veracity of her story. “See, this is me here, sir. Dolly Golden, that used to be my name. I played the Spirit of Youth in the final tableau—”

  Time, he thought, is a greater murderer than any man or woman. Time is the murderer that never gets punished. He looked at her raw, toilworn hands, not the programs at all. “A dollar apiece,” he said gruffly, feehng for his billfold.

  She was nearly overcome with joy. “Oh. bless you, mister! It will come in so handy!” She had swept up his hand before he could stop her and put her lips to it. The rouge started to elongate into pink tears. “I didn’t dream they were worth that much!”

  They weren’t. They weren’t worth a plugged nickel. “Here you are, mother,” he said compassionately.

  “Oh, now I’m going to eat—I’m going to eat a big dinner—!” She staggered out almost drunk with the unexpected windfall. A younger woman was standing there quietly waiting, as she gave place before him. She must have come in unnoticed behind her just now, he hadn’t seen her enter. It was the same one who had passed the doorway twice already, once in each direction. He was almost sure of it, although the previous optical snapshots he had had of her had been too brief to focus properly.

  She had looked younger out there, in the middle distance, than she did now, directly before him at close range. That was because she had retained a slimness of figure, after almost everything else was gone. She was ravaged, almost as ravaged as the charwoman who had just preceded her, if in a different way.

  A prickling sensation lightly stirred the fuzz below the hairhne on his neck. He tried not to stare at her too blatantly, looked down again after one all-comprehensive sweep of the eyes, so she wouldn’t detect anything on his face.

  His composite impression was this: she must have been pretty until just recently. It was rapidly leaving her now. There was an air of sub-surface refinement, perhaps even culture, still emanating from her, but there was a hard crust, a shell of coarseness and cheapening, forming on the outside that would soon smother it, extinguish it for good. Probably it was already too late to save her from the process. It was being accelerated, as far as he could tell at sight, either by alcohol in destructive day-long floods, or by acute and unaccustomed destitution; or perhaps by an attempt to dull the one with the other. There were traces of a third factor still discernible, and this perhaps had been the predecessor, the causative, of the other two. but it seemed to be no longer the determining one, had been superseded by the other two: unbearable distress of mind, mental misery, fear admixed with some sort of guilt, and prolonged endlessly over a period of months. It had left its mark but it was dying out now; the strictly physical dissipations were the current ones. She was jaunty, now, she was rubbery and unbreakable with the resiliency of the gutters and the bars, and of those who can go no lower, and that would suffice to see her through to the end. Probably a gas-tube in some rooming house.

  She looked as though she hadn’t been eating regularly. There was a shadowed hollow in each cheek, and the whole bone structure of the face showed through the thin covering. She was entirely in black, but not the black of widowhood nor yet the black of fashion; the rusty black of slovenliness, adhered to because it doesn’t show soil. Even her stockings were black, with a white crescent of hole showing above the back of each shoe.

  She spoke. Her voice was ruined, raucous with cheap whisky gulped inordinately all day and night. Yet even here there was a ghost of cultivation left. If she used slang now, h was from choice, from contact with those she associated with, and not because she didn’t know any better. “You got any jack left to pay out on programs, or am I too late?”

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he said guardedly.

  There was a snap of her shoddy, oversized handbag, and a pair of them were planked down. Companion pieces, from i the same night. A musical show at the Regina, season before ! last. I wonder who she was with that night, he thought. She i probably was secure yet and comely, she didn’t dream— ! He pretended to consult a reference list giving his needs, the gaps that remained to be filled in his “sets.”

  “I seem to be short that one. Seven-fifty,” he said.

  He saw her eyes glitter. He’d hoped that would get her.

  “Got any more?” he suggested craftily. “This is your last chance, you know. I’m closing up this place tonight.”

  She hesitated. He saw her eyes go to her bag. “Well, do you bother buying just one at a time?”

  “Any number.”

  “As long as I’m in here—” She opened the bag once more, tilted the flap over against her so that he couldn’t look down into it, pulled an additional program out. She snapped the bag shut again, first of all, before she did anelse. He noted that. Then she spaded the folder at him. He took it, reversed it his way.

  Casino Theatre

  It was the first one that had showed up in the full three days. He leafed through it with pretended casualness, past the preliminary filler columns to where the play-matter itself

  began. It was dated by the week, as all theatrical programs are. “Week beginning May 17th.” His breath log-jammed. That was the week. The right week. It had been on the night of the twentieth. He kept his eyes down so they wouldn’t give him away. Only—the upper right-hand corners of the pages were untouched. It wasn’t that they’d been smoothed out, that would have left a tell-tale diagonal seam; they’d never been folded over in the first place.

  It was hard to keep his voice casual. “Got the mate to it? Most of them come in twos, you know, and I could make you a better offer.”

  She gave him a searching look. He even caught the little uncompleted start her hand made toward the snap of her pocketbook. Then she forced it down again. “What d’you think I do, print them?”

  “I prefer to buy duplicates, doubles, whenever possible. Didn’t anyone go with you to this particular show? What became of the other pro—?”

  There was something about it she didn’t like. Her eyes darted suspiciously around the store, as if in search of a trap. She edged warily backward a step or two from the table. “Come on, one is all I got. Do you wanna buy or don’t you?”

  “I can’t give you as much as I could have given you for a pair—”

  She was obviously in a hurry to get outside into the open again. “All right, anything you say—” She even arched over to reach for the money from where she was standing, he couldn’t get her to close in toward the purchasing table again.

  He let her get as far as the door with it. Then he called after her, but in a quietly modulated voice, unwarranted to cause alarm, “Just a moment. Could I ask you to come back here a moment, there’s something I forgot.”

  She stopped short for a single instant, cast a look of sharp distrust back over her shoulder at him. It was more than just the look of automatic response one gives to a suramons; it was a look of wariness. Then as he rose, crooking his finger at her, she gave a stifled cry, broke into a scampering run, rounded the store entrance, and fled from sight.

  He flung the impediment of the table bodily over to one side to get quick clearance, dashed out after her. Behind him several of the topheavy stacks of programs reared by the boy wavered from the vibration of his violent exit, crumbled, and spilled all over the floor in snowdrifts.

  She was chopsticking it down toward the next corner when he got out on the sidewalk, but her high heels were against her. When she glanced back and saw him coming full tilt behind her, she gave another cry, louder this time, and was stung into an added spurt of velocity that carried her around into the next street before he had quite halved the distance.

  But he got h
er there, only a few yards past where his own car had been standing waiting all day, in hopes of just such an eventuality as this. He overlapped her, blocked her off, gripped her by the shoulders, and then swung her in with him against the building front, pinning her there in a sort of enclave of his arms.

  “All right now, stand still—it’s no use,” he breathed heavily.

  She was less able to speak than he was; alcohol had killed her wind. He almost thought she was going to choke for a minute. “Lemme—‘lone. What—uf I done?”

  “Then what did you run for?”

  “I didn’t like,” her head hung over his arms, trying to get air, “the way you looked.”

  “Lemme see that bag. Open that pocketbook! Come on, open up that pocketbook or I’ll do it for you!”

  “Take your hands off me! Leave me alone!”

  He didn’t waste any more time arguing. He yanked it so violently from under her arm that the frayed loop strap she had it suspended by tore off bodily. He opened it, plunged his hand in, crowding her back with his body so that she couldn’t escape from the position he had her backed into. It came up again with a program identical to the one she had just sold him in the store. He let the pocketbook drop to free his hands. He tried to flutter the leaves to open it, and they adhered. He had to pry them away from one another. All the inner ones, from cover to cover, were notched, were neatly folded over at their upper right-hand tips. He peered in the uncertain street light, and the date line was the same as the other.

  Scott Henderson’s program. Poor Scott Henderson’s program, returning at the eleventh hour, like bread cast upon the waters—

  22 The Hour of the Execution

  10.55 P.M. The last of anything, ah the last of anything, is always so bitter. He was cold all over, though the weather was warm, and he was shivering, though he was sweating, and he kept saying to himself over and over, “I’m not afraid,” more than he was listening to the chaplain. But he was and he knew he was, and who could blame him? Nature had put the instinct to live in his heart.

  He was stretched out face downward on his bunk, and his head, with a square patch shaved on the top, was hanging down over the edge of it toward the floor. The chaplain was sitting by him, one hand pressed consolingly against his shoulder as if to keep the fear in, and every time the shoulder shook, the hand would shake in sympathy with it, although the chaplain was going to live many more years yet. The shoulder shook at regularly spaced intervals. It’s an awful thing to know the time of your own death.

  The chaplain was intoning the 23rd Psalm in a low voice. “Green pastures, refresh my soul—” Instead of consoling him, it made him feel worse. He didn’t want the next world, he wanted this one.

  The fried chicken and the waffles and the peach shortcake that he’d had hours ago felt like they were all gummed up somewhere behind his chest, wouldn’t go down any further. But that didn’t matter, it wouldn’t give him indigestion, there wouldn’t be time enough for it to.

  He wondered if he’d have time to smoke another cigarette. They’d brought in two packs with his dinner, that had been only a few hours ago, and one was already crumpled and empty, the second half gone. It was a foolish thing to worry about, he knew, because what was the difference if he smoked one all the way down or had to throw it away after a single puff? But he’d always been thrifty about things like that, and the habits of a lifetime die hard.

  He asked the chaplain, interrupting his low-voiced chant, and instead of answering directly the chaplain simply said, “Smoke another, my boy,” and struck the match and held it for him. Which meant there really wasn’t time.

  His head flopped down again and smoke came out of the hidden gray gash of his lips. The chaplain’s hand pressed down on his shoulder once more, steadying the fear, damming it. Footsteps could be heard coming quietly and with horrible slowness along the stone-floored passage outside, and a sudden hush fell over Death Row. Instead of coming up, Scott Henderson’s head went down even further. The cigarette fell and rolled away. The chaplain’s hand pressed down harder, almost riveting him there to the bunk.

  The footsteps had stopped. He could sense they were standing out there looking in at him, and though he tried not to look, he couldn’t hold out, his head came up against his will and turned slowly. He said, “Is this it now?”

  The cell door started to ease back along its grooves, and the warden said, “This is it now, Scott.”

  Scott Henderson’s program. Poor Scott Henderson’s program, returning like bread cast upon the waters. He stared at it. The handbag he had wrenched from her lay unnoticed at his feet.

  The girl, meanwhile, was writhing there beside him, trying to break the soldered grip of his hand on her shoulder.

  He put it carefully away in his inside pocket first of all. Then he took two hands to her, trundled her roughly along the sidewalk and over to where his car stood waiting. “Get in there, you heartless apology for a human being! You’re coming with me! You know what you’ve nearly done, don’t you?”

  She threshed around for a moment before he got the door open and pushed her in. She went sprawling knees first, turned and scrambled upward against the seat. “Let me go, I tell you!” Her voice went keening up and down the street. “You can’t do this to me! Somebody come here! Aren’t there any cops in this town to stop a guy like him—!”

  “Cops? You’re getting cops! All the cops you want! You’ll be sick of the sight of them before I get through with you!” Before she could squirm out at the opposite side, he had come in after her, yanked her violently back so that she floundered against him, and crashed the door shut after him.

  He took the back of his hand to her twice to silence her; once in threat, the second time in fulfilment. Then he bent to the dashboard. “I never did that to a woman before,” he gritted. “But you’re no woman. You’re just a bum in feminine form. A no-good bum.” They swerved out from the curb, straightened and shot off. “Now you’re going to ride whether you want to or not, and you better see that you ride quiet. Every time you howl or try anything while I’m bucking this traffic I’ll give you another one of those if I have to. It’s up to you.”

  She quit wildcatting, deflating sullenly against the seat leather, glowered there, while they cut around corners, bypassed car after car going the same way they were. Once, when a light held them up for a minute, she said defeatedly, without renewing her previous attempts to escape, “Where’re you heading with me?”

  “You don’t know, do you?” he said cuttingly. “It’s all news to you, isn’t it?”

  “Him, hunh?” she said with quiet resignation.

  “Yeah, him, hunh?! Some specimen of humanity you are!” He crushed the accelerator flat once more, and both their heads went back in unison. “You ought to be beaten raw, for being willing to let an innocent man go to his death, when you could have stopped it at any time from first to last, just by coming forward and telling them what you know!”

  “I figured it was that,” she said dully. She looked down at her hands. After a while she said, “When is it—tonight?”

  “Yes, tonight!”

  He saw her eyes widen slightly, in the reflected dashboard light, as though she hadn’t realized until now it was that imminent. “I didn’t know it was—going to be that soon,” she gulped.

  “Well, it isn’t now!” he promised harshly. “Not as long as I’ve got you with me at last!”

  Another light stopped them. He cursed it, sat there wiping his face with a large handkerchief. Then both their heads flung back together again.

  She sat there staring steadily before her. Not at anything before or beyond the car. Yet not at anything below the windshield either, although it was there her eyes were fixed. He could see her in the mirror on her side. She was staring inwardly at something. The past, perhaps. Summing up her life. There was no bar whisky at hand now to provide her with an escape. She had to sit and face it, while the car raced on.

  “You must be something made of saw
dust, without any insides at all!” he told her once.

  She answered, unexpectedly and at length. “Look what it did to me. You haven’t thought of that, have you? Haven’t I suffered enough for it already? Why should I care what happens to him, or to anyone else! What is he to me, anyway? They’re killing him tonight. But I’ve been killed for it already! I’m dead, I tell you, dead! You’ve got someone dead sitting in the car next to you.”

  Her voice was the low growl of tragedy striking in the vitals; no shrill woman’s whine or plaint; a sexless groan of suffering. “Sometimes in dreams I see someone who had a beautiful home, a husband who loved her, money, beautiful things, the esteem of her friends, security; above all, security, safety. That was supposed to go on until she died. That was supposed to last. I can’t believe it was me. I know it wasn’t me. And yet the whisky-dreams, sometimes, tell me that it was. You know how dreams are—”

  He sat eyeing the darkness that came streaming toward them, to part in the middle over the silver prow of the headlights and come together again behind them, like a mystic undulating tide. His eyes were gray pebbles, that didn’t move, didn’t hear, didn’t give a rap about her trouble.

  “Do you know what it means to be thrown out into the street? Yes, literally thrown out, at two in the morning, with just the clothes you have on your back, and to have the doors locked behind you and your own servants warned not to admit you again on pain of dismissal! I sat on a park bench all night the first night. I had to borrow five dollars from my own former maid the next day, so that I could get a room, find shelter at least.”

  “Why didn’t you come forward then, at least? If you’d already lost everything, what more did you have to lose?”

  “His power over me didn’t end there. He warned me that if I opened my mouth, did anything to bring notoriety or disgrace on his good name, he’d sign me over into an institution for alcoholics. He could easily do it too, he has the influence, the money. I’d never get out again. Straitjackets and cold-water treatments.”