Уильям Айриш: Phantom lady

“Apart from that one bad flaw, he did a fairly competent job. Let the elevator boy overhear him talking to an empty room, even gave the door a delayed action swing behind him so that she seemed to be closing it after he’d already left it.

“I suppose I could have pinned him down with it.” Then he concluded, “But that still wouldn’t have meant getting him for the killing of your wife, necessarily. So I played dumb again. It was just a matter of getting him to repeat himself — but on someone that we sicked onto him, and held the strings to, instead of on someone that he’d picked for himself, without our full knowledge.”

“Was that your idea, to use Carol like that?” Henderson queried. “It’s a good thing I didn’t know about it ahead of time. If I had, you wouldn’t have gotten me to—”

“That was her idea, not mine. I’d arranged to hire some outside girl to play the part of decoy. She muscled in on it. She came storming in to where we were posted, watching him in the magazine shop, that last night, just before the deadline, and told me flatly she was going to be the one to go in there and tackle him, or else! She said she was going ahead whether she had my okay or whether she didn’t. Hell, I couldn’t stop her, and I couldn’t afford to have two of them walking in there one behind the other, so I had to let her have her way. We called in a make-up expert from one of the theaters and had him give her a good going-over, and we sent her on in.”

“Imagine,” she said rebelliously to the room at large, “I should sit back on my hands, and take a chance on some two-dollar extra gumming the whole thing up with her hamminess! There was no more time left by then to go wrong any more, we’d used it all up.”

“She never did show up, did she?” Henderson mused. “I mean the real one. Strangest thing. Whoever she is, wherever she is, she sure played out her little game of hide-and-seek to the end.”

“She wasn’t trying to, she wasn’t even playing one,” Burgess said. “That’s what’s stranger about it still.”

Henderson and the girl both jolted slightly, leaned forward alertly. “How do you know? You mean you finally got wind of her? You’ve found out who she is?”

“Yes, I got wind of her,” Burgess said simply. “Quite some time ago. I’ve known it for weeks, months now — who she was.”

“Was?” breathed Henderson. “Is she dead?” “Not in the way you mean. But she’s as good as, for all practical purposes. Her body’s still alive. She’s in an asylum for the hopelessly insane.”

He reached slowly into his pocket, began to sift through envelopes and papers, while the two of them stared, transfixed.

“I’ve been up there myself, not once but several times. I’ve talked to her. You can hardly tell it in her manner. Just a little vague, dreamy. But she can’t remember yesterday, the past is blurred, all fogged out. She would have been no good to us, no good at all; she couldn’t have testified. That’s why I had to keep it to myself, play the thing out the way we did. It was our only chance, to get him to convict himself out of his own mouth, by substituting someone for her.”

“How long—?”

“She was committed within three weeks after that night with you. It had been intermittent up to then, then the curtain dropped for good.”

“How did you—?”

“In a roundabout way, that doesn’t really matter now any more. The hat showed up by itself, in one of these bundle shops. You know, thrift shops where they sell things for a few cents. One of my men spotted it. We traced it back link by link, just as he did later, working in the opposite direction. Some old hag had picked it up out of an ashcan, peddled it to the thrift shop. We canvassed all the houses in the vicinity after she’d pointed out the general site of the ashcan to us. It took weeks. Finally we found a maid who had thrown it out. Her employer had been committed to an asylum not long before. I questioned her husband, the members of her family. Nobody knew of the exact incident with you but herself, but they told me enough to show it was she, all right. She’d been behaving erratically like that for some time past, staying out alone all night, going to hotels by herself. Once they found her sitting on a park bench at daybreak.

“I got this from them.”

He handed Henderson a snapshot. A snapshot of a woman.

Henderson looked at it long and hard. He nodded finally, but more to himself than to them. “Yes,” he said softly, “yes — I guess so.”

Carol took it away from him suddenly. “Don’t look at her any more. She’s done enough to you for one lifetime. Stay as you are, keep her unremembered. Here, here’s your snapshot back.”

“It helped, of course,” Burgess said, putting it away again, “when we were getting Carol ready that night to go in and pinch-hit for her. The make-up man was able to give her a superficial resemblance to this person. Enough to fool him, anyway. He’d only seen her at a distance and in uncertain light that night.”

“What was her name?” Henderson asked.

Carol made a quick pass with her hand. “No, don’t tell him. I don’t want her with us. We’re starting out new — no ghosts.”

“She’s right,” Burgess said. “It’s over. Bury it.”

Even so, they fell silent for a few moments, the three of them, thinking about her, as they would probably continue to think about her every so often for the rest of their lives. It was one of those things that stays with you.

At the door when they were leaving, Carol’s arm linked to his, Henderson turned back to Burgess for a minute, his forehead querulously creased. “But there should be some lesson in the whole thing, some reason . You mean she and I went through all we did — for nothing? There must be some moral in it somewhere.”

Burgess gave him an encouraging slap on the back to speed him on his way. “If you’ve got to have a moral, I give you this: don’t ever take strangers to the theater unless you’ve got a good memory for faces.”