“Good luck to you,” he couldn’t resist calling back to her from the outer door of the house.
It had taken him three hours to ride out. It only took thirty minutes to ride back. Or so it felt. The wheels racketed around under him, talking out loud the way train wheels do. “Now I’ve got her! Now I’ve got her! Now I’ve got her!”
A conductor stopped beside him, one time. “Tickets, please.”
He looked up, grinning blankly. “It’s okay,” he said. “Now I’ve got her.”
Now I’ve got her. Now I’ve got her. Now I’ve got her...
19
The Fifth Day Before the Execution
There was no sound of arrival. There was a sound of departure, the faint hum of a car drawing away outside past the glass doors. He looked up and there was someone already standing there in the inner entrance, like a wraith against the glass doors. She’d partly opened them to step through, was standing there half in, half out, head turned to look behind her at the receding vehicle that had brought her.
He had a feeling that it was she, with nothing further than that to substantiate it for a moment. The fact that she was coming in alone, like the lady free-lance he’d gathered she was. She was stunningly beautiful, so beautiful that all delight was taken from her beauty by its excess amount, as anything overdone is apt to. Just as the profile of a cameo or the head of a statue fail to move the emotions, except as an artistic abstraction, so did she. One had the feeling that, the law of compensation being what it is, she had few inner merits, must be full of flaws, to be that peerless on the outside. She was a brunette, and tall; her figure was perfection. Almost it must have made life barren, to be without so many of the problems, the strivings, that plagued other women. She looked that way, as though life was barren, a burst soap bubble leaving the unpleasant taste of soap upon her lips.
Her gown was like a ripple of fluid silver running down the slender gap between the wings of the door, as she stood there between them. Then, the car having gone, she turned her head forward again and finished entering.
She had no look for Lombard, a wan “Good evening” without spirit for the hallman.
“This gentleman has been—” the latter began.
Lombard had reached her before he could finish it.
“Pierrette Douglas.” He stated it as a fact.
“I am.”
“I’ve been waiting to speak to you. I must talk to you immediately. It’s urgent—”
She had stopped before the waiting elevator, with no intention, he could see, of allowing him to accompany her any further than that. “It’s a little late, don’t you think?”
“Not for this. This can’t wait. I’m John Lombard, and I’m here on behalf of Scott Henderson—”
“I don’t know him, and I’m afraid I don’t know you either — do I?” The “do I?” was simply a sop of urbanity thrown in.
“He’s in the death house of the State Penitentiary, awaiting execution.” He looked across her shoulder at the waiting attendant. “Don’t make me discuss it down here. Out of common ordinary decency—”
“I’m sorry, I live here; it’s one-fifteen in the morning, and there are certain proprieties— Well, over here then.” She started diagonally across the lobby toward a small inset furnished with a settee and smoking stands. She turned to him there, remained standing; they conferred erect.
“You bought a hat from a certain employee of the Kettisha establishment, a girl named Madge Peyton. You paid her fifty dollars for it.”
“I may have.” She noticed that the hallman, his interest whetted, was doing his best to overhear from the outside of the alcove. “George,” she reprimanded curtly. He withdrew reluctantly across the lobby.
“In this hat you accompanied a man to the theater, one night.”
Again she conceded warily, “I may have. I have been to theaters. I have been escorted by gentlemen to them. Will you come to the point, please?”
“I am. This was a man you’d only met that same evening. You went with him without knowing his name, nor he yours.”
“Ah no.” She was not indignant, only coldly positive. “Now you can be sure you are mistaken. My standards of conduct are as liberal as anyone else’s, you will find. But they do not include accompanying anyone anywhere, at any time, without the formality of an introduction first. You have been misdirected, you want some other person.” She thrust her foot out from underneath the silver hem, to move away.
“Please, don’t let’s split hairs about social conduct. This man is under sentence of death, he’s to be executed this week! You’ve got to do something for him—!”
“Let’s understand one another a little better. Would it help him if I falsely testify I was with him, on one certain night?”
“No, no, no,” he breathed, exhausted, “only if you rightly testify you were with him, as you were.”
“Then I can’t do it, because I wasn’t.”
She continued to gaze at him steadily. “Let’s go back to the hat,” he said finally. “You did buy a hat, a special model that had been made for somebody else—”
“But we’re still at cross-purposes, aren’t we? My admitting that has no bearing on my admitting that I accompanied this man to a theater. The two facts are entirely unrelated, have nothing to do with one another.”
That, he had to admit to himself, could very well be. A dismal chasm seemed to be on the point of opening at his feet, where he had seemed to be on solid ground until now.
“Give me some more details of this theater excursion,” she had gone on. “What evidence have you that the person accompanying him was myself?”
“Mainly the hat,” he admitted. “The twin to it was being worn on the stage, that very night, by the actress Mendoza. It was an original made for her. You admit that you secured a duplication of it. The woman with Scott Henderson was wearing that duplication.”
“It still does not follow that I was that woman: your logic is not as flawless as you seem to believe.” But that was simply by way of an aside; her thoughts, he could see, were busy elsewhere.
Something had happened to her. Something was having a surprisingly favorable effect on her. Either something that he had said, or something that had occurred to her in her own mind. She had suddenly become strangely alert, interested, almost one might say feverishly absorbed. Her eyes were sparkling watchfully.
“Tell me. One or two more things. It was the Mendoza show, is that right? Can you give me the approximate date?”
“I can give you the exact date. They were in the theater together on the night of May twentieth last, from nine until shortly after eleven.”
“May,” she said to herself, aloud. “You interest me strangely,” she let him know. She motioned, even touched him briefly on the sleeve. “You were right. You’d better come upstairs with me a minute, after all.”
During the ride up in the car she only said one thing. “I’m very glad you came to me with this.”
They got out at the twelfth floor or so, he wasn’t sure just which one it was. She keyed a door and put on lights, and he followed her in. The red fox scarf that had been dangling over her arm, she dropped carelessly over a chair. Then she moved away from him over a polished floor that reflected her upside down like a funnel of fuming silver being spilled out across it.
“May the twentieth, is that right?” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll be right back. Sit down.”
Light came from an open doorway, and she remained in there awhile, while he sat and waited. When she returned she was holding a handful of papers, bills they looked like, sorting them from hand to hand. Before she had even reached him, she had apparently found one that suited her purpose more than any of the rest. She tossed all but one aside, retained that, came over to him with it.