Уильям Айриш - Phantom lady

“Sure of her now, he came out of the place again. This was a little before two o’clock in the morning.

“He hurried straight back to Anselmo’s in a cab. The place was going into the death-watch now, and there was plenty of opportunity to become confidential with the bartender and find out what, if anything, he knew. In due course he let drop some casual remark about her, you know the sort of thing. ‘Who was that lonely looking number I saw sitting up at the end there all by herself a little while ago?’ or something on that order. Just as an opening wedge.

“They’re a talkative race anyway, and that was all the barman needed to go the rest of the way under his own speed. That she’d been in there once before, around six, gone out with someone, he’d brought her back, and then he’d left her.

“An adroit further question or two brought out the point he was mainly interested in. That you had accosted her without any time lag, immediately upon coming in, and that it had been only a very few minutes past six. In other words, his worst fears were exceeded. She was not only a potential protection to you, she was your absolute, unqualified salvation. It would have to be taken care of. And without delay.” He broke off to ask, “Am I boring you by rehashing it at this length?”

“It was my life,” Henderson observed dryly.

“He didn’t let any grass grow under his feet. He made the first deal then and there, under the very eyes of the few remaining customers still lingering in the place. The barman was the type that bribes easy, anyway, as the saying goes; he was ripe and ready to fall into his hand. A few guarded words, a palming of hands across the bar, and it was done. ‘How much would you take to forget you saw that woman meet that fellow in here? You don’t need to forget he was in here, just forget she was.’ The barman allowed he’d take a modest enough sum. ‘Even if it turned out to be a police matter?’ The barman wasn’t quite so sure after he’d heard that. Lombard made up his mind for him with a sum of fifty times larger than he’d expected to get out of it. He gave a thousand dollars in cold cash . He had a considerable wad of it on him, ready at hand, the stake he’d been intending to use to set the two of them up in South America. That cinched it as far as the barman was concerned, of course. Not only that, Lombard cemented it with a few quiet-spoken but blood-chilling threats. And he was evidently a good threatener. Maybe because his threats weren’t idle, they were the McCoy, and his listener could sense that.

“That barman stayed fixed from then on, long after he knew all the facts in the case, and nothing we nor anyone else could do could get a word out of him. And it wasn’t entirely due to the thousand dollars by any means. He was good and frightened, and so were all the rest of them. You saw the effect it finally had on Cliff Milburn. There was something grim about this Lombard. He was a man with absolutely no sense of humor. He’d stayed too close to nature all his life.

“The barman taken care of, he went on from there, backtracking over the route you had taken not very many hours before. There’s no need of giving you all the details at this late date. The restaurant and the theater were closed, of course, by that time of night, but he managed to learn the whereabouts of the individuals he was after and seek them out. In one case he even made a quick trip all the way out to Forest Hills and back, to get one of them out of bed. By four o’clock that morning the job was complete; he’d contacted three more of the key figures whose collusion it was necessary for him to have: the taxi driver Alp, the head-waiter from the Maison Blanche, and the box-office man from the Casino. He gave them varying amounts. The taxi driver simply to deny having seen her. The headwaiter to give a split to the table waiter, whose job depended on him after all, and make sure that he stayed in line. The box-office man he fixed so liberally he practically made him an ally. It was through him that Lombard learned one of the house musicians had been heard shooting his mouth off, bragging what a hit he’d made with this particular woman — as he saw it — and added a suggestion that perhaps he’d better be taken care of too. Lombard wasn’t able to get around to that until the second night after the murder, but luckily for him, we had overlooked the man entirely, so there was no harm done by the delay.

“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.