Читать книгу Phantom Lady - Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich - Страница 9

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Ten minutes later and only eight blocks away in a straight line—two straight lines: seven blocks up one way and then one over to the left—he got out of the cab in front of an apartment-house on the corner.

He put the change left over from the fare into his pocket, opened the vestibule-door with his own key, and went inside.

There was a man hanging around in the lobby waiting for somebody. He was on his feet, drifting aimlessly around, from here to there, from there to the next place, the way a man waiting in a lobby does. He didn’t live in the building; Henderson had never seen him before. He wasn’t waiting for the car to take him up, because the indicator was unlighted; it was motionless somewhere up above.

Henderson passed him without a second glance, and pushed the button for himself, to bring it down.

The other had found a picture on the wall now, and was staring at it far beyond its merits. He stood with his back to Henderson. In fact he made it a point to seem unaware there was anyone else in the lobby with him at all, which was overdoing it a little.

He must have a guilty conscience, Henderson decided. That picture wasn’t worth all that close attention. He must be waiting for someone to join him down here, someone whom he had no right to escort out.

Henderson thought: What the hell did he care, what was it to him anyway?

The car arrived and he stepped in. The heavy bronze door swung closed by itself after him. He thumbed the six-button, the top of the rack. The lobby started to drop from sight, seen through the little diamond-shaped glass insert let into the shaft-door. Just before it did so he saw the picture-gazer, evidently impatient at being kept waiting this long by his prospective date, finally detach himself and take a preliminary step over toward the switchboard. Just a vignette, that was no possible concern of his.

He got out on the sixth floor and fumbled for his latchkey. The hall was quiet; there wasn’t a sound around him but the slight tinkle of the loose change in his own pocket as he sought for the key.

He fitted it into his own door, the one to the right as you came off the car, and opened it. The lights were out, it was pitch-dark on the other side of it. At this, for some reason or other, he gave a sound of scornful disbelief, deep in his throat.

He snapped a light-switch, and a small neat foyer came into existence. But the light only took care of just this one cubicle. Beyond the arched opening facing him across it, it was still as dark, as impenetrable, as ever.

He closed the door behind him, flung down his hat and coat on a chair out there. The silence, the continuing darkness, seemed to irritate him. The sullenness was starting to come back into his face again, the sullenness that had been so conspicuously there at six, out on the street.

He called out a name, called it through into the darkness lying beyond the inscrutable arched opening. “Marcella!” He called it imperatively, and not particularly friendlily.

The darkness didn’t answer.

He strode into it, speaking in that same harsh, demanding tone as he went. “Come on, cut it out! You’re awake, who do you think you’re kidding? I saw the light in your bedroom-window, from the street just now. Grow up, this isn’t going to get us anywhere!”

The silence didn’t answer.

He cut diagonally through the dark, toward some particular point on the wall, known to him by heart. He was grumbling in a less strident voice now. “Until I come back, you’re wide awake! The minute you hear me, you’re sound asleep! That’s just dodging the issue!”

His arm was reaching out before him. The click came before it had touched anything. The sudden bath of light made him jump slightly; it had come too soon, before he was expecting it.

He looked along his own arm, and the switch was still inches out past it; they hadn’t come together yet. There was a hand just leaving it, sidling away from it along the wall. His eyes raced up the sleeve the hand protruded from and found a man’s face.

He gave a startled half-turn, and there was another one looking at him from that direction. He gave an additional turn, still further rearward, having nearly reversed himself now, and there was a third, directly behind him. The three stood impassive, motionless as statues, in a half-circle around him.

He was so stunned for a minute by the triple, deathly-silent apparition that he stared questioningly around the room in search of recognition, of orientation, to see if he was in the right place at all, if it was his own apartment he’d entered.

His eyes came to rest on a cobalt-blue lamp-base on a table over by the wall. That was his. On a low-slung chair cocked out from a corner. That was his. On a photograph-folder standing on a cabinet. One panel held the face of a beautiful, pouting, doe-eyed girl with masses of curly hair. The other held his own face.

The two faces were looking in opposite directions, aloofly, away from one another.

So it was his own home he’d come back to.

He was the first one to speak. It seemed as if they were never going to. It seemed as if they were going to stand staring at him all night. “What’re you men doing in my apartment?” he rapped out.

They didn’t answer.

“Who are you?”

They didn’t answer.

“What do you want here? How’d you get in?” He called her name again. This time parenthetically, as though demanding of her an explanation of their presence here. The door toward which he’d turned his head as he did so, the only other door that broke the walls besides the arched opening through which he’d just come, remained obliviously closed. Secretively, inscrutably closed.

They’d spoken. His head snapped back to them. “Are you Scott Henderson?” They had narrowed the semicircle about him a little now.

“Yes, that’s my name.” He kept looking around toward that door that didn’t open. “What is it? What’s up?”

They continued, with maddening deliberation, to ask their own questions instead of answering his. “And you live here, is that right?”

“Certainly I live here!”

“And you’re the husband of Marcella Henderson, is that right?”

“Yes! Now listen, I want to know what this is about.”

One of them did something with his palm, made some sort of a gesture with it that he failed to get in time. It only struck him after it was already over.

He tried to get over to that door and found that one of them, somehow, was in his way. “Where is she? Is she out?”

“She’s not out, Mr. Henderson,” one of them said quietly.

“Well if she’s in there, why doesn’t she come out?” His voice rose exasperatedly. “Talk, will you? Say something!”

“She can’t come out, Mr. Henderson.”

“Wait a minute, what was that you showed me just now, a police badge?”

“Now, take it easy, Mr. Henderson.” They were executing a clumsy sort of a group dance, the four of them. He’d shift a little one way, and they’d shift with him. Then he’d shift back again the other way, and again they’d shift with him.

“Take it easy? But I want to know what’s happened! Have we been robbed? Has there been an accident? Was she run over? Take your hands off me. Let me go in there, will you?”

But they had three pairs of hands to his one. Each time he’d get rid of one pair, two more would hold him back somewhere else. He was rapidly working himself up into a state of unmanageable excitement. The next step would have been blows. The rapid breathing of the four of them filled the quiet room.

“I live here, this is my home! You can’t do this to me! What right’ve you got to keep me out of my wife’s bedroom—”

Suddenly they’d quit. The one in the middle made a little sign to the one nearest the door, said with a sort of reluctant indulgence: “All right, let him go in, Joe.”

The obstructive arm he had been pressing against dropped so suddenly, he opened the door and went through almost off-balance, careening the first step or two of the way.

Into a pretty place, a fragile place, a place of love. All blue and silver, and with a sachet clinging to the air that he knew well. A doll with wide-spread blue satin panniers, sitting plumped on a vanity-table, seemed to look over at him with helpless wide-eyed horror. One of the two crystal sticks supporting blue silken shades had fallen athwart her lap. On the two beds, blue satin coverlets. One flat and smooth as ice, the other rounded over someone’s hidden form. Someone sleeping, or someone ill. Covered up completely from head to foot, with just a stray wisp or two of curly hair escaping up at the top, like bronze foam.

He’d stopped short. A look of white consternation crossed his face. “She’s—she’s done something to herself! Oh, the little fool—!” He glanced fearfully at the night-stand between the two beds, but there was nothing on it, no drinking-glass or small bottle or prescription-box.

He took sagging steps over to the bedside. He leaned down, touched her through the coverlet, found her rounded shoulder, shook it questioningly. “Marcella, are you all right—?”

They’d come in past the doorway after him. Vaguely he had an impression everything he did was being watched, being studied. But he had no time for anyone, anything but her.

Three pairs of eyes in a doorway, watching. Watching him fumble with a blue satin coverlet. His hand whipped down a narrow triangular corner of it.

There was a hideous, unbelievable moment, enough to scar his heart for life, while she grinned up at him. Grinned with a cadaverous humor that had become static. Her hair was rippling about her on the pillows in the shape of an open fan.

Hands interfered. He went backwards, draggingly, a step at a time. A flicker of blue satin and she was gone again. For good, forever.

“I didn’t want this to happen,” he said brokenly. “This wasn’t what I was looking for—”

Three pairs of eyes exchanged glances, jotted that down in the notebooks of their minds.

They took him out into the other room and led him over to a sofa. He sat down on it. Then one of them went back and closed the door.

He sat there quietly, shading his eyes with one hand as though the light in the room was too strong. They didn’t seem to be watching him. One stood at the window, staring out at nothing. The other was standing beside a small table, leafing through a magazine. The third one was sitting down across the room from him, but not looking at him. He was prodding at one of his fingernails with something, to clean it. The way he pored over it, it seemed the most important thing in the world to him at the moment.

Henderson took his shielding hand away presently. He found himself looking at her wing of the photograph-portfolio. It slanted his way. He reached over and closed it.

Three pairs of eyes completed a circuit of telepathic communication.

The ceiling of leaden silence began to come down closer, to weigh oppressively. Finally the one sitting across from him said, “We’re going to have to talk to you.”

“Will you give me just a minute more, please?” he said wanly. “I’m sort of shaken up—”

The one in the chair nodded with considerate understanding. The one by the window kept looking out. The one by the table kept turning the pages of a woman’s magazine.

Finally Henderson pinched the corners of his eyes together as if to clear them. He said, quite simply: “It’s all right now. You can begin.”

It began so conversationally, so off-handedly, it was hard to tell it had even begun at all. Or that it was anything but just a tactful chat, to help them fill in a few general facts. “Your age, Mr. Henderson?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Her age?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“How long were you married?”

“Five years.”

“Your occupation?”

“I’m in the brokerage business.”

“About what time did you leave here tonight, Mr. Henderson?”

“Between five-thirty and six.”

“Can you come a little closer than that?”

“I can narrow it for you, yes. I can’t give you the exact minute the door closed after me. Say, somewhere between quarter of and five of six. I remember I heard six o’clock striking, when I’d gotten down as far as the corner; from the little chapel over in the next block.”

“I see. You’d already had your dinner?”

“No.” A split second went by. “No—I hadn’t.”

“You had your dinner out, in that case.”

“I had my dinner out.”

“Did you have your dinner alone?”

“I had my dinner out, without my wife.”

The one by the table had come to the end of the magazine. The one by the window had come to the end of the interest the view held for him. The one in the chair said with tactful over-emphasis, as if afraid of giving offense: “Well, er, it wasn’t your usual custom, though, to dine out without your wife, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Well, as long as you say that, how is it you did tonight?” The detective didn’t look at him, looked at the cone of ash he was knocking off his cigarette into a receptacle beside him.

“We’d arranged to take dinner out together tonight. Then at the last minute she complained of not feeling well, of having a headache, and—I went alone.”

“Have words, anything like that?” This time the question was inaudible, it was so minor-keyed.

Henderson said, in an equally minor key, “We had a word or two, yes. You know how it is.”

“Sure.” The detective seemed to understand perfectly how little domestic misunderstandings like that went. “But nothing serious, that right?”

“Nothing that would make her do anything like this, if that’s what you’re driving at.” He stopped, asked a question in turn, with a momentary stepping-up of alertness. “What was it, anyway? You men haven’t even told me yet. What caused—?”

The outside door had opened and he broke off short. He watched with a sort of hypnotic fascination, until the bedroom door had closed. Then he made a half-start to his feet. “What do they want? Who are they? What are they going to do in there?”

The one in the chair had come over and put his hand to his shoulder so that he sat down again; without, however, any undue pressure being exerted. It was more like a gesture of condolence.

The one who had been by the window, looked over, mentioned: “A little nervous, aren’t you, Mr. Henderson?”

A sort of instinctive, natural dignity, to be found in all human beings, came to Henderson’s aid. “How should I be—at ease, self-possessed?” he answered with rebuking bitterness. “I’ve just come home and found my wife dead in the house.”

He’d made that point. The interlocutor by the window noticeably had nothing further to say on that score.

The bedroom door had opened again. There was awkward, commingled motion in it. Henderson’s eyes dilated, they slowly coursed the short distance from door to arched opening, leading out into the foyer. This time he gained his feet fully, in a spasmodic jolt. “No, not like that! Look what they’re doing! Like a sack of potatoes— And all her lovely hair along the floor—she was so careful of it—!”

Hands riveted to him, holding him there. The outer door closed muffledly. A little sachet came drifting out of the empty bedroom, seeming to whisper: “Remember? Remember when I was your love? Remember?”

This time he sank down suddenly, buried his face within his two gouging, kneading hands. You could hear his breath. The tempo was all shot to pieces. He said to them in helpless surprise, after his hands had dropped again, “I thought guys didn’t cry—and now I just have.”

The one who had been in the chair before passed him a cigarette, and even lit it for him. His eyes looked bright, Henderson’s, in the shine of the match.

Whether it was that that had interrupted it, or it had died out of its own accord for lack of anything further to feed on, the questioning didn’t resume. When they resumed talking again, it was pointless, inane, almost as though they were talking just to kill time, for the sake of having something to say.

“You’re a very neat dresser, Mr. Henderson,” the one in the chair observed at random.

Henderson gave him a half-disgusted look, didn’t answer.

“It’s great the way everything you’ve got on goes together.”

“That’s an art in itself,” the former magazine-reader chimed in.

“Socks, and shirt, and pocket-handkerchief—”

“All but the tie,” the one by the window objected.

“Why do you have to discuss anything like that at a time like this?” Henderson protested wearily.

“It should be blue, shouldn’t it? Everything else is blue. It knocks your whole get-up silly. I’m not a fashion-plate, but y’know just looking at it does something to me—” And then he went on innocently, “How’d you happen to slip up on an item as important as the tie, when you went to all the trouble of matching everything else up? Haven’t you got a blue tie?”

Henderson protested almost pleadingly, “What’re you trying to do to me? Can’t you see I can’t talk about trifles like—”

He’d asked the question again, as tonelessly as before. “Haven’t you got a blue tie, Mr. Henderson?”

Henderson ran his hand up through his hair. “Are you trying to drive me out of my mind?” He said it very quietly, as though this small-talk was almost unendurable. “Yes, I have a blue tie. Inside, on my tie-rack, I think.”

“Then how’d you come to skip it when you were putting on an outfit like this? It cries out for it.” The detective gestured disarmingly. “Unless, of course, you did have it on to begin with, changed your mind at the last minute, whipped it off and put on the one you’re wearing instead.”

Henderson said, “What’s the difference? Why do you keep this up?” His voice went up a note. “My wife is dead. I’m all cracked-up inside. What’s the difference what color tie I did or didn’t put on?”

It went on, as relentlessly as drops of water falling one by one upon the head. “Are you sure you didn’t have it on originally, then change your mind—?”

His voice was smothered. “Yes, I’m sure. It’s hanging from my tie-rack in there.”

The detective said guilelessly, “No, it isn’t hanging from your tie-rack. That’s why I’m asking. You know those little vertical notches running down your tie-rack, like a fish’s backbone? We found the one it belongs on, the one you usually kept it strung through, because that was the only vacant one on the whole gadget. And that was the lowest one of all, in other words all the ties on the upper ones overlapped it as they hung down straight. So you see, it was removed from under all the other ties, which means you must have gone there and selected it originally, not just pulled it off at random from the top. Now what bothers me is why, if you went to all the trouble of lifting up all your other ties and selecting that one from underneath, and withdrawing it from the rack, you then changed your mind and went back to the one you’d already been wearing all day at business, and which didn’t go with your after-dark outfit.”

Henderson hit himself smartly at the ridge of the forehead with the heel of one hand. He sprang up. “I can’t stand this!” he muttered. “I can’t stand any more of it, I tell you! Come out with what you’re doing it for, or else stop it! If it’s not on the tie-rack, then where is it? I haven’t got it on! Where is it? You tell me, if you know! What’s the difference where it is, anyway?”

“A great deal of difference, Mr. Henderson.”

There was a long wait after that; so long that he started to get pale even before it had come to an end.

“It was knotted tight around your wife’s neck. So tight it killed her. So tight it will have to be cut loose with a knife to get it off.”