Phantom lady

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Well, now it’s an hour before daybreak and his job’s done, he’s caused her to disappear from view, as far as it’s humanly possible. The only one who remained to be taken care of was she herself. He went back there where he’d left her, to attend to that part of it. And he admits, his mind was already made up. He wasn’t going to buy her silence, he was going to make sure of it in a more lasting way—by death. Then the rest of his structure wouldn’t be in any danger. Any of the others could welsh, but there wouldn’t be any proof left.

  “He let himself back into the room he’d taken next to hers, and sat there in the dark for a moment or two, thinking it out. He realized that he ran a far greater risk of being detected as the murderer in this case than in the case of your wife, but only as an unknown man who had signed the register downstairs under an assumed name, not as John Lombard. He intended overtaking his ship, he would never be seen around here again, so what chance was there of identifying him later? It would be suspected that ‘he’ had killed her, but it wouldn’t be known who ‘he’ was. See what I mean?

  “He went outside and listened at her door. The room was quiet, she was asleep by now. He tried it very carefully, but as he’d half expected, the door was locked, he couldn’t get in that way. There remained that drain pipe stepping-stone outside their two windows, which had been in the back of his mind all along anyhow.

  “The shade was still down to within a foot of the sill, as it had been before, when he looked out. He climbed quietly and agilely out the window, rested his foot on the necessary drain pipe support, and was able without very much difficulty to swing himself onto her sill and lower himself into the room under the shade. He didn’t take anything with him, he intended using just his bare hands and the bedclothes.

  “In the dark he edged his way to the bed, and he poised his arms, and he gripped the tortured mass of the bedclothes tight to prevent any outcry. They collapsed under him; they were empty. She wasn’t there. She’d gone. As erratically as she’d come into this place, she’d gone again, in the hour before dawn, after lying in the bed awhile. Two cigarette butts, a few grains of powder on the dressing stand, and the rumpled bedclothes, were all that was left of her.

  “When the worst part of the shock had worn off and he went downstairs again and asked about it more or less openly, they told him she’d come down not long before his return, handed in her key, and calmly walked out to the street once more. They didn’t know which way she’d gone, nor where she’d gone, nor why she’d gone; only that she’d gone—as strangely as she’d come.

  “His own game had boomeranged on him. The woman whom he had spent all night and hundreds of dollars in trying to turn into a ghost as far as you, Henderson, were concerned, had turned into a ghost—but as far as he himself was concerned now. Which wasn’t what he’d wanted at all. It left things too dangerously indefinite. She might pop back into the picture at any moment.

  “He went through hell in those few short hours that were all he could spare before he had to plane out, if he was still to overtake his ship. He knew how hopeless it was. He knew, as you and I know, what a place New York is to find someone in, on short order.

  “He hunted for her high and low, with the remorselessness of a maniac, and he couldn’t find her again. The day went, and the second night went, and his time was up, he couldn’t stay behind any longer. So he had to let it go under the heading of unfinished business. An ax hanging over him from then on, threatening to fall at any moment.

  “He planed out of New York the second day after the murder, made the short overwater hop from Miami to Havana that same day, and was just in time to board his own ship when it touched there on the third day out. His excuse to the shipboard officials was that he’d got drunk the night of sailing and missed it.

  “That was why he was so ripe for that come-on message i I sent in your name; that was all he needed to drop everything and come back. He’d been panicky all along, and that gave him the finishing touch. They talk about murderers being drawn back to the scene of their crime. This pulled him back like a magnet. Your asking for help gave him just the excuse he needed. He could come back openly now and help you ‘look’ for her. Finish the death hunt he hadn’t had time to complete the first time. Make sure that if she was ever found, she’d be found dead.”

  “Then you already suspected him when you came to my cell that day and drafted that cable in my name. When did you first begin to suspect him?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it and give you the exact day or hour. It was a very gradual thing, that came on in the wake of my change of mind about your own guilt. There was no conclusive evidence against him from first to last, that’s why I had to go at it in the roundabout way I did. He left no fingerprints at the apartment; must have wiped the few surfaces he touched off clean. I remember we found several doorknobs without any marks on them at all.

  “To start with, he was just a name you’d dropped, in the course of being questioned yourself. An old-time friend, whose invitation to join him in a farewell tour of the town you’d conscientiously passed up, much to your regret, on her account. I had a routine inquiry made for him, more to have him help us fill in a little of your background for our record than anything else. I learned he’d sailed, as you’d mentioned he intended to. But I also found out, quite unintentionally, from the steamship line, that he’d missed the sailing here and caught up with his ship at Havana three days later. And one other thing. That he’d originally booked passage for two, himself and a wife, but that when he’d overtaken the ship he was alone, and had finished out the rest of the trip unaccompanied. Incidentally, there was no record of his ever having been married or having had a wife up here, when I checked a little further.

  “Now there was not necessarily an>thing glaringly suspicious in all that, you understand. People do miss ships, especially when they celebrate too copiously just before sailing time. And people’s brides-to-be do change their minds at the last minute, back out, or the contemplated marriage is postponed by mutual consent.

  “So I didn’t think any more about it. And yet on the other hand I did. That little detail of his missing the ship and then overtaking it alone, lodged in the back of my mind and stayed with me from then on. He had, a little bit unluckily for himself, managed to attract my attention. Which seldom turns out to be beneficial, with cops. Then later, when my belief in your own guilt began to evaporate, there was a vacuum left behind. And a vacuum is something that has to be filled, or it will fill by itself. These facts about him began to trickle out, and before I knew it, the empty space had begun to fill up again.”

  “You sure kept me in the dark,” Henderson admitted.

  “I had to. There wasn’t anything definite enough, until just recently. In fact until that night he drove Miss Richman into the woods with him. Confiding in you would have been a bad risk. Most likely you wouldn’t have shared my feelings about him, and for all I knew might have warned him off” in some burst of misguided loyalty. Or even if you had strung along with me, had shared my belief, knowledge of what was up might have made you a poor actor. He might have detected something in your manner toward him, and our hands would have been tipped. You were under a terrific strain, you know. I felt the safest thing to do was to work through you, using you as a sort of unconscious medium, without letting you realize the purpose of what you were doing yourself. And it wasn’t easy. Take that stunt with the theater programs, for instance—”

  “1 thought you were crazy—or I would have if I was normal myself—the way you rehearsed me and rehearsed me and rehearsed me, every little act, every little word, that was to lead up to it. You know what I thought you were doing it for? As a pain-killer, to keep my mind off the approaching deadline. So I fell in with it, and did as you told me, but with my tongue in my cheek.”

  “Your tongue in your cheek, and my heart in my mouth,” Burgess chuckled grimly.

  “Did he have anything to do with those peculiar accidents that kept dogging you all a
long the way, as far as you were able to find out?”

  “Everything. The strange part of that is, the one that seemed most like a murder, the Cliff Millburn affair, proved to be a bona fide suicide when we got through investigating it; and of course the barman was killed accidentally. But the two that seemed most like accidents turned out to be murders. Murders that he committed. I’m speaking of the deaths of the blind man and Pierrette Douglas. Both were murders without weapons, in the usual sense. The death of the blind man was a particularly horrible piece of business.

  “He left him there in the room for a moment or two, ostensibly to chase down to the street and call me. He knew the man had an aversion to the police, typical of his kind of fraudulent panhandling. He knew the first thing he’d do would be to tn.’ to escape from there. He counted on his doing that. As soon as he was on the other side of the door he attached a strong black thread, the kind tailors use. across the top step, at about ankle height. Knotted it around the banister leg on one side, a projecting nail head on the other. Then he turned out the light, knowing now the blind man

  had the use of his eyes, made a receding drum-beat of his footsteps, you know that old stunt, and crouched there waiting on the lower flight, just out of sight below the landing.

  “The blind man came out fast and incautiously, in a hurry to put himself out of reach before Lombard returned with his police friend, and the thing worked just as he’d intended it to. The thread caught him short and sent him toppling down the whole flight, and into the foreshortened landing wall head-first. The thread had snapped, of course, but that didn’t save him. The fall didn’t kill him, he simply got a nasty crack on the skull and lay there stunned. And so Lombard hurriedly came back up to the landing again, stepped over him, went on to the head of the stairs, removed the telltale ends of loose thread from both sides.

  “Then he went back to the senseless man, explored with his hands, found he was still breathing. His head was forced back at an unnatural angle by the wall against which it rested, and there was a strain on his neck. It was like a suspension bridge, you understand, between his shoulders flat on the floor and his head semi-upright against the wall. He located the position of the neck, and then he straightened up, raised one leg so that his heavy shoe was poised just over it, and—”

  Carol turned her head sharply aside.

  “I’m sorry,” Burgess murmured.

  She turned back again. “It’s part of the story. We should know it.”

  “Then and only then he went out and called me. And when he came back he stayed down at the street door, and was careful to engage the cop on the beat in conversation the whole time he was waiting for me, to establish that he’d remained down there in full sight, if it became necessary.”

  “Did you get what it was right away?” Henderson asked.

  “I examined the body down at the Morgue later that night, after I’d sent him home, and I saw the little red nick across each shin the thread had made. I saw the traces of dust on the back of his neck too. I figured what it was then.

  It was just a matter of building it up from those two points. It would have been hard to get him on it, though. It might have been done. I preferred to wait and get him for the main thing. I couldn’t have got him for the main thing on the strength of that blind man incident, that was a cinch. And 1 didn’t want to grab him prematurely only to see him get away again. Once I had him, I wanted to hang onto him. So I kept my mouth closed and went on paying out rope.”

  “And the thing about that reefer smoker you say he had nothing to do with?”

  “In spite of the discrepancy of razors, that was only what it seemed. Cliff Milburn slashed his own throat in a fit of drug-induced depression and fear. The safety blade must have been a discard berthed under the shelf paper either by a former tenant or by some friend of his who came in and used his bathroom to shave in. A behaviorist would be interested. Even when it came to suicide, he instinctively avoided using his own implement for anything other than what it was intended for. That’s a trait common to all of us; that’s why we get sore when our wives sharpen pencils with them.”

  Carol murmured softly, “I’ll never be able to go near one again, after that night.”

  “But the death of Mrs. Douglas was his doing?” Henderson questioned interestedly.

  “That was even more adroit than the other one. A long strip or runner of carpeting ran across the highly polished floor surface, in her place, from the foyer step-down, at one end. to directly under the French windows, at the other. What first put the idea into his head was that he skidded slightly himself, on the quite dangerous flooring, a little earlier in the proceedings, and she had laughed at him. Eye-measurement did the rest, while he was talking to her. The straight line sweep of the rug, of course, was almost an invitation. He marked an invisible X on it to show where she must stand in order to have the greater part of her length go outside the window when she was overbalanced, and carefully retained its exact location in his mind from then on. Which is not the easy feat it sounds, when you are engaged in moving about yourself and talking with someone, and can only give it part of your attention.

  “This isn’t a hypothetical reconstruction on my part, I have all this from him at first hand, in black and white. From that point on, there was a sort of minuet of death danced by the two of them, during which he delicately maneuvered her into just the right position. When he had completed writing out the check he stood up with it and returned toward the window, as if to have the fresh air hasten its drying. Then he shifted until he was precisely to one side of the position he wanted her to take, but off the rug. Then he drew her on from where she had remained by seeming to offer her the check. Passively extending it toward her, but without moving his own feet, so that she had to come forward for it. It’s the same principle they use in bull fighting. The bull follows the cape away from the fighter’s body. She followed the check up to one side of his body. When she had fallen into the exact spot he wanted her to, he relaxed his fingers and let the check pass to her.

  “Her attention was taken up in scanning it, and for a moment or two, she stood motionless. He quickly moved away from her, strode the whole length of the room, as if taking an abrupt departure then and there. Then when he’d reached the far end of it, and was on the step clear of it, he turned to look back at her and called ‘Good-by!’ That brought her head up from the check, that caused her to turn toward him —and at the same time present her full back to the window. She was now in the exact position it was necessary for her to be. For if she’d gone out frontwards or sidewards she might have been able to cling to the window frame and arrest herself. Backwards it was an impossibility, the human arm-socket doesn’t work that way.

  “He dipped down, flung up the rug at full arm’s length overhead, let it drop again; that was all he had to do. She went out like a puff of wind. She didn’t even have time to scream, he says. He must have caught her on the out-breath.

  She was already gone by the time her flown-off shoe ticked back again to the floor.”

  Carol crinkled up the corners of her eyes, “Those things are worse than the ones with knife or gun, there’s so much more treachery involved in them!”

  “Yes, but much harder to prove to a jury. He didn’t lay a hand on her, he killed her from twenty or twenty-two feet away. The clue was still in the rug itself, of course. I saw it the minute I got in there. The ripples were at his end. Where she had stood it was smooth, only just shifted further back along the floor. If it had been an honest skid or misstep, it would have been the other way around. The pleats would have been at her end, where her feet kicked the rug back on itself. His end would have been flat and undisturbed, the agitation couldn’t possibly have transferred itself that far over.

  “There was a cigarette left burning there, as if by her. That was to make it seem that the fall had occurred just previous to our arrival, whereas he had telephoned me some fifteen minutes before. Or if I wanted to disregard that, he had been
continuously in my company for fully eight to ten minutes before, counting from the time I met him in front of the fire station.

  “It didn’t fool me for a moment, but the mechanics of how he’d done it gave me three full days’ work before I could figure it out satisfactorily. The ash stand had an orifice in its center through which ashes were meant to drop, all the way down through the long stem into the hollow base which was meant for that purpose. There was supposed to be a trap, but he jammed that so it would stay open. He simply took three ordinary size cigarettes, removed a little tobacco from the mouth end of the two foremost ones, and telescoped them together to form one triple the usual length but retaining the trademark of a small size cigarette at the far end, in case there should be enough left to investigate. Then he lit it, left it spearing the top of the stand in a long inclined plane, one end down into the open stem and resting against it. A cigarette left burning like that in a slanted position, and over an opening, will seldom go out, even when it’s not fanned by the breath as in smoking. The slow ember simply worked its way back from cigarette to cigarette without a break. As the first two were consumed, they dropped off down the stem without leaving a trace. The third, which was resting wholly on the tilted perimeter of the smoke stand, remained in place to the end, forming just what he wanted it to, a perfect one-cigarette butt by the time we got there.

  “This alibi, however, handicapped him in another way. It would have been better if he’d skipped it. It limited how far away he could go on the fool’s errand she was supposed to have sent him; he had to be sure of getting back soon enough for it to be of any use to him. He had to pick some place in the immediate vicinity, and he had to pick some place that would at sight be identifiable as a complete hoax, so there would be no excuse for the two of us to linger around investigating or asking questions. Hence the fire-house gag. One look was enough, and we beat it back again to her place.