“Sure, it was low, it was rotten. I grabbed my hat and coat and I got out of there fast. She was still laughing there at the glass when I left. She was laughing. Jack. She wasn’t dead. I didn’t touch her. Her laughter followed me through the door, even after I’d closed it. It drove me down the stairs on foot, without waiting for the car to come up. It drove me nuts, I couldn’t get away from it fast enough. It even followed me all the way down to the next landing, and then finally it faded away.”
He stopped for a long time, while the scene he had rekindled slowly cooled and died again, before he could go ahead. There were traces of sweat in the creases running across his contracted forehead.
“Then when I came back,” he said quietly, “she was dead and they said I did it. They said it happened at eight minutes and fifteen seconds after six. Her watch told them. It must have happened within ten minutes after I’d slammed the door behind me. That part of it still gives me the creeps, even now, when I think of it. He must have been lurking right there inside the building already, whoever he was—”
“But you say you went down the stairs yourself?”
“He might have been hidden up on the last stretch, between our floor and the roof. I don’t know. Maybe he heard the whole thing. Maybe he even watched me go. Maybe I slammed the door so hard it rebounded instead of catching, and he got in that way. He must have been in on her before she knew it. Maybe the very sound of her own laughter helped to cover him up, kept her from hearing anything until it was late.”
“That makes it sound like some sort of a prowler, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, but what for? The cops were never able to figure out what for, that’s why they wouldn’t give it any serious consideration. It wasn’t robbery; nothing was taken. There was sixty dollars in cash right in the drawer in front of her, not even covered over. It wasn’t attack, either. She was killed right where she’d been sitting, and left right where she’d been killed.”
Lombard said, “One or the other could have been intended, and he got frightened off before he carried out the object of the intrusion. Either by some outside sound or by the very act he had just committed itself. That’s happened a thousand and one times.”
“Even that won’t do,” Henderson said dully. “Her diamond solitaire was lying there loose on the dressing table the whole time. It wasn’t even on her finger. All he had to do was scoop it up as he ran out. Frightened or not, how long would that take? It stayed behind.” He shook his head. “The necktie damned me. It came out from underneath all the others on the rack. And the rack was fairly deep within the closet. And that particular tie went with every stitch I had on. Sure, because I took it out myself. But I didn’t twist it around her. I lost track of it in the heat of the quarrel. It must have fallen unnoticed to the floor. Then I grabbed up the one I’d come home with, and whipped that around my collar, and stormed out. Then he came creeping in, and it caught his eye as he advanced unsuspectedly on her, and he picked it up— God knows who he was, and God only knows why he did it!”
Lombard said, “It may have been some impulse without rhyme or reason, just an urge to kill for the sake of killing, unleashed in some stray mental case hanging around outside. It may have been whipped up by the very scene of violence between you, especially after he had detected that the door wasn’t securely closed. He realized he could commit it almost with impunity, and you’d be blamed for it. There have been things like that, you know.”
“If it was anything along those lines, then they’ll never get him. That kind of killers are the hardest to track down. Only some freak or fluke will ever open it up. Some day they may get him for something else entirely, and then he’ll confess this one along with it, and that’s the first inkling they’ll have. Long after it’ll do me any good.”
“What about this key witness you mentioned in your message?”
“I’m coming to that now. It’s the one slim ray of hope in the whole thing. Even if they never get on to who really did it, there’s a way for me to be cleared of it. The two findings aren’t necessarily one and the same in this case; they can be separate and distinct, and yet equally valid each in its own right.”
He began punching one hand into the flat of the other, over and over while he spoke. “There’s a certain woman, somewhere or other, right at this moment, as we sit here in this cell talking it over, who can clear me — simply by telling them at what time I met her at a certain bar eight blocks from where I lived. That time was ten minutes after six. And she knows it just as I know it; wherever and whoever she is, she knows it. They proved, by re-enacting it, that I couldn’t have reached that bar at that time and still have committed the murder back at my house. Jack, if you hope to do anything for me, if you want to pull me through this, you’ve got to find that woman. She and she alone is the answer.”
Lombard took a long time. Finally he said, “What’s been done about finding her, so far?”
“Everything,” was the devastating answer, “everything under the sun.”
Lombard came over and slumped down limply on the edge of the bunk beside him. “Whew!” he said, blowing through his clasped hands. “And if the police failed, your lawyer failed, everyone and everything failed, right at the time it happened and with all the time they needed — what a chance I have, months after it’s cold and with eighteen days to do it in!”
The guard had showed up. Lombard stood up, let his hand trail off Henderson’s slumped shoulder as he turned away to be let out.
Henderson raised his hand. “Don’t you want to shake hands?” he said falteringly.
“What for? I’ll be back again tomorrow.”
“You mean you’re going to take a fling at it, anyway?”
Lombard turned and gave him a look that was almost scathing, as if irked by the obtuseness of such a question. “What the hell gave you the idea I wasn’t?” he growled surlily.
10
The Seventeenth, the Sixteenth Days Before the Execution
Lombard shuffled around the cell, hands in pockets, looking down at his own feet as though he’d never noticed how they worked before. Finally he stopped and said, “Hendy, you’ve got to do better than that. I’m not a magician, I can’t just pull her out of a hat from nothing.”
“Listen,” Henderson said weariedly, “I’ve gone over the thing in my own mind until I’m sick of it, until I dream about it at nights. I can’t squeeze a drop more detail out of it.”
“Didn’t you look at her face at all?”
“It must have gotten in the way plenty of times, but it didn’t take.”
“Let’s start in again at the beginning and run through it once more. Don’t look at me like that, it’s the only thing we can do. She was already sitting on a stool at the bar when you walked in. Suppose you give me your first impression of her if you can. Try to recapture it. Sometimes there’s a clearer visualization to be gained from a fleeting first impression than from all the more deliberate studies you can make later on. Well then, your first impression?”
“A hand reaching for pretzels.”
Lombard eyed him scathingly. “How can you leave your own bar stool, walk over to another, and accost somebody, without seeing them? Show me that trick sometime. You knew it was a girl, didn’t you? You didn’t think it was a mirror you were addressing? Well how did you know it was a girl?”