Читать книгу Phantom Lady - Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich - Страница 13

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The car was standing waiting there by the corner when the unseen belfry somewhere close at hand began tolling the hour. “Here it comes,” Burgess said. They’d been waiting about ten minutes for this, motor running.

Henderson, neither free nor indicted yet, sat on the rear seat between him and one of the other two Headquarters men who had taken part in the questioning up at his apartment the previous night and morning.

A third man whom they referred to as “Dutch” stood outside the car, on the sidewalk, in a sort of fatuous idleness. He had been kneeling crouched in mid-sidewalk tightening up his shoelaces just before the first stroke sounded. He straightened now.

It was the same kind of a night like the one before. The get-together hour, the sky with its make-up on in the west, everyone going someplace all at one time. Henderson gave no sign, sitting there between two of his captors. It must have occurred to him, though, what a difference a few hours can make.

His own address was just a few doors behind them, at the next corner to the rear. Only he didn’t live there any more; he lived in a detention-cell in the prison attached to police Headquarters now.

He spoke dully. “No, a store-length further back,” he said to Burgess. “I’d just come up to that lingerie-store window when the first stroke hit. I can remember that, now that I’m looking at it—and hearing the same sound—over again.”

Burgess relayed it to the man on the sidewalk. “Back up one store-length and take it from there, Dutch. That’s it. All right, start walking!” The second stroke of six had sounded. He did something to the stop-watch he was holding in his hand.

The tall, rangy, redheaded man on the sidewalk struck out. The car at the same time eased into gliding motion, keeping abreast of him out beyond the curb.

“Dutch” looked self-conscious for a moment or two, his legs worked a little stiffly; then it wore off gradually.

“How is he for pace?” Burgess asked presently.

“I think I was a little faster than that,” Henderson said. “When I’m sore I walk fast, I notice, and I was going at a pretty good clip last night.”

“Quicken it up a little, Dutch!” Burgess coached.

The rangy one accelerated slightly.

The fifth stroke sounded, then the last.

“How is it now?” Burgess asked.

“That’s about me,” Henderson concurred.

An intersection sidled past under them. A light held the car up. Not the walker. Henderson had disregarded them the night before. The car caught up with him midway down the next block.

They were on Fiftieth now. One block of it ticked off. Two.

“See it yet?”

“No. Or if I have, it doesn’t click. It was awfully red, redder than that one. The whole sidewalk was like red paint.”

The third block. The fourth.

“See it?”

“It doesn’t click.”

Burgess warned: “Watch what you’re doing, now. If you string it out very much longer, even your theoretical alibi won’t be any good. You should have been inside it already by now; it’s eight-and-a-half past.”

“If you don’t believe me anyway,” Henderson said drily, “what’s the difference?”

“It don’t hurt to figure out the exact walking-time between the two points,” the man on the other side of him put in. “We might just happen to find out when you actually got there, and then all we do is subtract.”

“Nine minutes past!” Burgess intoned.

Henderson was holding his head low, scanning the slowly-moving belt of sidewalk-fronts from under the car-ceiling.

A name drifted by, colorless glass tubes unlighted. He turned quickly after it. “That’s it! I think that’s it, but it’s out. Anselmo’s, it was something like that, I’m almost sure of it. Something foreign—”

“In, Dutch!” Burgess hollered. He drove the plunger down, killed his stop-watch. “Nine minutes, ten and a half seconds,” he announced. “We’ll give you the ten and a half seconds to allow for variations, such as the density of the crowd you had to buck and the cross-traffic at intersections, which is never the same twice. Nine minutes flat, walking-time, from the corner below your apartment to this bar. And we’ll give you another minute from the apartment itself down to that first corner, where the first chime-stroke caught you. We’ve already tested that lap out. In other words—” He turned and looked at him, “you find some way of proving that you got into this bar as late as six-seventeen—but no later—and you’ll still clear yourself automatically, even now.”

Henderson said: “I can prove I got in here as early as six-ten, if I can only find that woman.”

Burgess swung open the car-door. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

“Ever see this man before?” Burgess asked.

The barman held his chin in a vise. “Looks kind of familiar,” he admitted. “But then, my whole job is just faces, faces, faces.”

They gave him a little more time. He took an angle-shot at Henderson. Then he went around the opposite side and took it from there. “I don’t know.” He still hesitated.

Burgess said, “Sometimes the frame counts as much as the picture. Let’s try it differently. Go on back behind the bar, barman.”

They all went over to it. “Which stool were you on, Henderson?”

“Somewhere along about here. The clock was straight over, and the pretzel-bowl was about two up from me.”

“All right, get on it. Now try it, barman. Forget about us, take a good look at him.”

Henderson inclined his head morosely, stared down at the surface of the bar, the way he had the other time.

It worked. The barman snapped his fingers. “That did it! Gloomy Gus. I remember him now. Only last night, wasn’t it? Must have been just a one-drink customer, didn’t stick around long enough to sink in.”

“Now we want the time.”

“Sometime during my first hour on duty. They hadn’t thickened up yet around me. We had a late start last night; sometimes happens.”

“What is your first hour on duty?”

“Six to seven.”

“Yeah, but about how long after six, that’s what we want to know.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, gents. I only watch the clock toward the end of my shift, never around the beginning. It might have been six, it might have been six-thirty, it might have been six-forty-five. It just wouldn’t be worth a damn for me to try to say.”

Burgess looked at Henderson, raised his eyebrows slightly. Then he turned to the barman again. “Tell us about this woman that was in here at that time.”

The barman said with catastrophic simplicity, “What woman?”

Henderson’s complexion went slowly down the color-scale, from natural to pale to dead white.

A flick of Burgess’ hand held him mute.

“You didn’t see him get up and go over and speak to a woman?”

The barman said, “No sir, I didn’t see him get up and go over and speak to anyone. I can’t swear to it, but my impression was there was no one else at the bar at that time for him to speak to.”

“Did you see a woman sitting here by herself, without seeing him get up and go over to her?”

Henderson pointed helplessly two bar-stools over. “An orange hat,” he said, before Burgess could stop him.

“Don’t do that,” the detective warned him.

The barman was suddenly becoming irritable, for some reason or other. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been in this business thirty-seven years. I’m sick of their damn faces, night after night, just opening and closing, opening and closing, throwing the booze in. Don’t come in and ask me what color hats they had on, or if they picked each other up or not. To me they’re just orders. To me they’re just drinks, see, to me they’re just drinks! Tell me what she had and I’ll tell you if she was in here or not! We keep all the tabs. I’ll get ’em from the boss’s office.”

They were all looking at Henderson now. He said, “I had Scotch and water. I always have that, never anything else. Give me just a minute now, to see if I can get hers. It was all the way down near the bottom—”

The barman came back with a large tin box.

Henderson said, rubbing his forehead, “There was a cherry left in the bottom of the glass and—”

“That could be any one of six drinks. I’ll get it for you. Was the bottom stemmed or flat? And what color was the dregs? If it was a Manhattan the glass was stemmed and dregs, brown.”

Henderson said, “It was a stem-glass, she was fiddling with it. But the dregs weren’t brown, no, they were pink, like.”

“Jack Rose,” said the barman briskly. “I can get it for you easy, now.” He started shuffling through the tabs. It took a few moments; he had to sift his way through them in reverse, the earlier ones were at the bottom. “See, they come off the pads in order, numbered at the top,” he mentioned.

Henderson gave a start, leaned forward. “Wait a minute!” he said breathlessly. “That brought something back to me, just then. I can remember the number printed at the top of my particular pad. Thirteen. The jinx-number. I remember staring at it for a minute when he handed it to me, like you would with that number.”

The barman put down two tabs in front of all of them. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Here you are. But not both on the same tab. Thirteen—one Scotch and water. And here are the Jack Roses, three of them, on number seventy-four. That’s one of Tommy’s tabs, from the shift before, in the late afternoon; I know his writing. Not only that, but there was some other guy with her. Three Jack Roses and a rum, this one says, and no one in their right mind is going to mix those two drinks.”

“So—?” Burgess suggested softly.

“So I still don’t remember seeing any such woman, even if she stayed over into my shift, because she was Tommy’s order, not mine. But if she did stay over, my thirty-seven years’ experience tending bar tells me he didn’t get up and go over and speak to her, because there was already a guy with her. And my thirty-seven years’ experience also tells me he was with her to the end, because nobody buys three Jack Roses at eighty cents a throw and then walks out and leaves his investment behind for somebody else to cash in on.” And he took a definitive swipe to the counter with his bar-rag.

Henderson’s voice was shaking. “But you remembered me being here! If you can remember me, why can’t you remember her? She was even better to look at.”

The barman said with vicious logic: “Sure I remembered you. Because I’m seeing you now over again, right before my eyes. Bring her back in front of me the same way, and I’ll probably remember her too. I can’t without that.”

He was hanging onto the rim of the bar with both hands, like a drunk with unmanageable legs. Burgess detached one of his arms, grunted, “Come on, Henderson.”

He still clung to it with the other, straining toward the barman. “Don’t do this to me!” he protested in a choked voice. “Don’t you know what the charges are? Murder!”

Burgess quickly sealed a hand to his mouth. “Shut up, Henderson,” he ordered curtly.

They led him out backward. He kept straining away from them toward that bar.

“You sure did draw the thirteen-tab,” one of them grunted in a wry undertone, as they emerged to the street with him, pressed closely around him in a sort of perambulatory vise.

“Even if she shows up from now on, at any later point in the evening, it’s already too late to do you any good,” Burgess warned him as they sat waiting for the taxi-driver to be traced and brought in. “It had to be in that bar by six-seventeen. But I’m curious to see whether she will show up at some later point, and if so, just how long after. That’s why we’re going to retrace your movements, step by step, throughout the entire evening, from beginning to end.”

“She will, she’s got to!” Henderson insisted. “Somebody’ll remember her, in one of the other places we went that night. And then, once you get hold of her in that way, she herself will be able to tell you just where and at what time she first met me.”

The man Burgess had sent out on the assignment came in, reported: “The Sunrise Company has two drivers on the line outside Anselmo’s. I brought them both down. Their names are Budd Hickey and Al Alp.”

“Alp,” Henderson said. “That’s the funny name I’ve been trying to think of. That’s the name I told you we both laughed at.”

“Send Alp in. Tell the other guy never mind.”

He was as funny-looking in real life as on his license-picture; even funnier, for he was in full color in real life.

Burgess said, “Did you have a haul last night from your stand to the Maison Blanche Restaurant?”

“Mason Blantch, Mason Blantch—” He was going to be a little doubtful at first. “I pick ’em up and put ’em down so many times a night—” Then a memory-quickening method of his own seemed to come to his aid. “Mason Blantch; about sixty-five cents on a dry night,” he mumbled. He went back into full-voice again. “Yeah, I did! I had a sixty-five cent haul last night, in between two thirty-cent pulls.”

“Look around you. See anyone here you gave it to?”

His eyes slid past Henderson’s face. Then they came back again. “It was him, wasn’t it?”

“We’re asking you, don’t ask us.”

He took the question-mark off. “It was him.”

“Alone or with somebody else?”

He took a minute with that. Then he shook his head slowly. “I don’t remember noticing nobody else with him. Alone, I guess.”

Henderson gave a lurch forward, like somebody who suddenly turns an ankle. “You must have seen her! She got in ahead of me and she got out ahead of me, like a woman does—”

“Sh, quiet,” Burgess tuned him out.

“Woman?” the driver said aggrievedly. “I remember you. I remember you perfect, because I got a dented fender picking you up—”

“Yes, yes,” Henderson agreed eagerly, “and maybe that’s why you didn’t see her step in, because your head was turned the other way. But surely when we got there—”

“When we got there,” the driver said sturdily, “my head wasn’t turned the other way, no cabman’s ever is when it comes time to collect a fare. And I didn’t see her get out either. Now how about it?”

“We had the light on, all the way over,” Henderson pleaded. “How could you help seeing her, sitting there in back of you? She must have shown in your rear-sight mirror or even against your windshield—”

“Now I am sure,” the driver said. “Now I’m positive—even if I wasn’t before. I been hacking eight years. If you had the top-light on, you were by yourself. I never knew a guy riding with a woman to leave the top-light on yet. Any time the top-light’s on, you can bet the guy behind you is a single.”

Henderson could hardly talk. He was feeling at his throat as though it bothered him. “How could you remember my face, and not remember hers?”

Burgess stepped all over that, before the man could even answer. “You didn’t remember her face yourself. You were with her six solid hours—you say. He had his back to her for twenty minutes.” He ended the interview. “All right, Alp. Then that’s your statement.”

“That’s my statement. There was nobody with this man when I had him in my cab last night.”

They hit the Maison Blanche at the dismantlement stage. The cloths were off the tables, the last long-lingering gourmets had departed. The help was eating in the kitchen, judging by the unbridled sounds of crockery and silverware in work that emanated from there.

They sat down at one of the denuded tables, drawing up chairs like a peculiar ghost-party of diners about to fall to without any visible utensils or comestibles.

The headwaiter was so used to bowing to people that he bowed now as he came out to them, even though he was off duty. The bow didn’t look so good because he’d removed his collar and tie, and had a lump of food in one cheek.

Burgess said, “Have you seen this man before?”

His black-pitted eyes took in Henderson. The answer came like a finger-snap. “Yes, surely.”

“When was the last time?”

“Last night.”

“Where did he sit?”

He picked out the niche-table unerringly. “Over there.”

“Well?” Burgess said. “Go on.”

“Go on with what?”

“Who was with him?”

“Nobody was with him.”

There was a line of little moist needle-pricks starting out along Henderson’s forehead. “You saw her come in a moment or two after me, and join me. You saw her sitting there during the whole meal. You must have. Once you even passed close by and bowed and said, ‘Everything satisfactory, m’sieu?’ ”

“Yes. That is part of my duties. I do it to each table at least once. I distinctly recall doing it to you, because your face was, how shall I say, a little discontented. I also distinctly recall the two vacant chairs, one on each side of you. I believe I straightened one a little. You have quoted me yourself. And if I said ‘monsieur,’ as I did, that is the surest indication there was no one with you. The correct inquiry for a lady and gentleman together is ‘m’sieu-et-dame.’ It is never altered.”

The black centers of his eyes were as steady as buckshot fired deep into his face and lodged there. He turned to Burgess. “Well, if there is any doubt, I can show you my reservation-list for last night. You can see for yourselves.”

Burgess said with an exaggeratedly slow drawl that meant he liked the idea very much, “I don’t think that would hurt.”

The headwaiter went across the dining-room, opened a drawer in a buffet, brought back a ledger. He didn’t go out of the room, he didn’t go out of their sight. He handed it to them unopened, just as he had found it; let them open it for themselves. All he said was, “You can refer to the date at the top.”

They all formed a cluster of heads over it but himself. He remained detached. It was kept in impromptu pencil, but it was sufficient for its purpose. The page was headed “5-20, Tues.” Then there was a large corner-to-corner X drawn across the page, to show that it was over and done with. It cancelled without impairing legibility.

There was a list of some nine or ten names. They went like this, columnarly:

Table 18	—Roger Ashley, for four. (Lined out)
Table 5	—Mrs. Rayburn, for six. (Lined out)
Table 24	—Scott Henderson, for two. (Not lined out)

Beside the third name was this parenthetic symbol: (1).

The headwaiter explained, “That tells its own story. When a line is drawn through, that means the reservation has been completed, filled up. When there is no line drawn through, that means they never showed up. When there is no line drawn through, and a number is added, that means only part of them showed up, the rest are still expected. Those things in the little brackets are for my own guidance, so I will know where they go when they do show up, where to put them, without having to ask a lot of questions. No matter if they come only at the dessert, so long as they come at all, the line goes through. What you see here means, therefore: m’sieu had a reservation for two, m’sieu showed up by himself, and the other half of his party never reached here.”

Burgess traced hypersensitive finger-pads over that particular section of the page, feeling for erasures. “Texture unmarred,” he said.

Henderson pronged his hand, elbow to tabletop; let it catch his head as it toppled forward.

The headwaiter shovelled with his hands. “My book is all I have to go by. My book says—to me—Mr. Henderson was alone in this dining-room last night.”

“Then your book says that to us too. Take his name and address, usual stuff, case wanted further questioning. All right, next. Mitri Maloff, table-waiter.”

A change of figures before Henderson’s eyes, that was all. The dream, the practical joke, the whatever it was, went on and on.

This was going to be comedy-stuff. To the rest of them, anyway, if not to him. He caught sight of one of them writing something down. He hooked his finger around to his thumb, like in that old hair-tonic ad. “No, no. Beg pardon, shentlemen. There is a D in it. It is silent, you don’t speak it.”

“Then what’s the good of having it?” one of them wondered to the man next to him.

“I don’t care what there is in it,” Burgess said. “All I want to know is, do you have Table Twenty-four?”

“From ten, over there, all the way around to twenty-eight, that is me.”

“You waited on this man at twenty-four last night?”

He was going to make a social introduction of it. “Ah, sure, certainly!” He lighted up. “Good evening! How are you? You coming back again soon, I hope!” He evidently didn’t recognize them as detectives.

“No he isn’t,” said Burgess brutally. He flattened his hand, to kill the flow of amenities. “How many were there at the table when you waited on him?”

The waiter looked puzzled, like a man who is willing to do his best but can’t get the hang of what is expected of him. “Him,” he said. “No more. Shust him.”

“No lady?”

“No, no lady. What lady?” And then he added, in perfect innocence, “Why? He lose one?”

It brought on a howl. Henderson parted his lips and took a deep breath, like when something hurts you unbearably.

“Yeah, he lost one all right,” one of them clowned.

The waiter saw he had made a hit, batted his eyes at them coyly, but still, apparently, without any very clear idea of how he had chalked up his success.

Henderson spoke, in a desolate, beaten-down sort of voice. “You drew out her chair for her. You opened the menu-card, offered it to her.” He tapped his own skull a couple of times. “I saw you do those things. But no, you didn’t see her.”

The waiter began to expostulate with Eastern European warmth and lavishness of gesture, but without any rancor: “I draw out a chair, yes, when there is a lady there for it. But when there is no lady there, how can I draw out a chair? For the air to sit down on it, you think I’m going to draw out a chair? When is no face there, you think I’m going to open bill-of-fare and push it in front of?”

Burgess said, “Talk to us, not him. He’s in custody.”

He did, as volubly as ever, simply switching the direction of his head. “He leave me tip for one-and-a-half. How could there be lady with him? You think I’m going to be nice to him today, if is two there last night and he leave me tip for only one-and-a-half?” His eyes lit with Slavonic fire. Even the supposition seemed to inflame him. “You think I forget it in a horry? I remember it for next two weeks! Hah! You think I ask him to come back like I do? Hah!” he snorted belligerently.

“What’s a tip for one-and-a-half?” Burgess asked with jocular curiosity.

“For one is thirty cents. For two is sixty cents. He give me forty-five cents, is tip for one-and-a-half.”

“Couldn’t you get forty-five cents for a party of two?”

“Never!” he panted resentfully. “If I do, I do like this.” He removed an imaginary salver from the table, fingers disdainfully lifted as if it were contaminated. He fixed a baleful eye on the imaginary customer, in this case Henderson. Sustained it long enough to shrivel him. His thick underlip curled in what was meant for a lopsided leer of derision. “I say, ‘Thank you, sor. Thank you very motch, sor. Thank you very very motch, sor. You sure you able to do this?’ And if is lady with him, he feel like two cents, he stick in some more.”

“I kind of would myself,” Burgess admitted. He turned his head. “How much do you say you left, Henderson?”

Henderson’s answer was forlornly soft-spoken. “What he says I did; forty-five cents.”

“One thing more,” Burgess said, “just to round the whole thing out. I’d like to see the check for that particular dinner. You keep them, don’t you?’

“Manager got them. You have to ask him.” The waiter’s face took on an expression of conscious virtue, as though now he felt sure his veracity would be sustained.

Henderson was suddenly leaning alertly forward, his licked listlessness was gone again.

The manager brought them out himself. They were kept in sheaves, in little oblong clasp-folders, one to a date, apparently to help him tally his accounts at the end of each month. They found it without difficulty. It said “Table 24. Waiter 3. 1 Table d’hôte—2.25.” It was stamped in faint purple, “Paid—May 20th” in a sort of oval formation.

There were only two other checks for Table Twenty-four in that day’s batch. One was “1 tea—0.75,” from late afternoon, just before the dinner hour. The other was dinner for four, a party that had evidently come in late, just before closing.

They had to help him get back into the car. He walked in a kind of stupor. His legs were balky. Again there was the dream-like glide of unreal buildings and unreal streets moving backward past them, like shadows on glass.

He broke out suddenly, “They’re lying—they’re killing me, all of them! What did I ever do to any of them—?”

“Y’know what it reminds me of?” one of them said in an aside. “Them Topper pictures, where they fade off and on the screen right in front of your eyes. Did y’ever see one of them, Burge?”

Henderson shuddered involuntarily and let his head go over.

There was a show going on outside, and the music, and laughter, and sometimes handclapping, would trickle into the small, cluttered office, diluted.

The manager was sitting waiting by the phone. Business was good, and he tried to look pleasantly at all of them, savoring his cigar and leaning far back in his swivel-chair.

“There can be no question that the two seats were paid for,” the manager said urbanely. “All I can tell you is that nobody was seen going in with him—” He broke off with sudden anxiety. “He’s going to be ill. Please get him out of here as quickly as you can, I don’t want any commotion while there’s a performance going on.”

They opened the door and half-carried, half-walked Henderson toward it, his back inclined far over toward the floor. A gust of singing from out front surged in.

“Chica chica boom boom

Chica chica boom boom—”

“Ah, don’t,” he pleaded chokingly. “I can’t stand any more of it!” He toppled onto the back seat of the police sedan, made a knot of his two hands, gnawed at them as if seeking sustenance for his sanity.

“Why not break down and admit there was no dame with you?” Burgess tried to reason with him. “Don’t you see how much simpler it would be all around?”

Henderson tried to answer him in a rational, even voice, but he was a little shaky at it. “Do you know what the next step would be after that, if I did, if I could, make such an admission as you’re asking me to? My sanity would start to leave me. I’d never be sure of anything again in my life. You can’t take a fact that you know to be true, as true as—as that your name is Scott Henderson—” He clapped himself on the thigh; “—as true as that this is my own leg, and let yourself begin to doubt it, deny it, without your mental balance going overboard. She was beside me for six hours. I touched her arm. I felt it in the curve of my own.” He reached out and briefly tweaked Burgess’ muscular underarm. “The rustle of her dress. The words she spoke. The faint fragrance of her perfume. The clink of her spoon against her consommé-plate. The little stamp of her chair when she moved it back. The little quiver of the shaky taxi-chassis when she stepped down from it. Where did the liquor go to, that my eyes saw in her glass when she raised it? When it came down again, it was empty.” He pounded his fist against his knee, three, four, five times. “She was, she was, she was!” He was almost crying; at least his face was wreathed in those lines. “Now they’re trying to tell me she wasn’t!”

The car glided on through the never-never land it had been traversing all evening.

He said a thing that few if any suspects have ever said before. Said it and meant it with his whole heart and soul. “I’m frightened; take me back to the detention-pen, will you? Please, fellows, take me back. I want walls around me, that you can feel with your hands. Thick, solid, that you can’t budge!”

“He’s shivering,” one of them pointed out with a sort of detached curiosity.

“He needs a drink,” Burgess said. “Stop here a minute, one of you go in and bring him out a couple fingers of rye. I hate to see a guy suffer like that.”

Henderson gulped it avidly, as though he couldn’t get it down fast enough. Then he slopped back against the seat. “Let’s go back, take me back,” he pleaded.

“He’s haunted,” one of them chuckled.

“That’s what you get when you raise a ghost.”

Nothing further was said until they were out of the car again and filing up the steps at Headquarters in phalanx. Then Burgess steadied him with a hand to his arm, as he fumbled one of the steps. “You better get a good night’s sleep, Henderson,” he suggested. “And a good lawyer. You’re going to need both.”