“She had on a skirt, so she was a girl, and she wasn’t using crutches, so she was able-bodied. Those were the only two things I cared about. I was looking through her, seeing My Girl in my mind’s eye the whole time I was with her; what do you expect me to be able to tell you?” Henderson flared in turn.
Lombard took a minute off to let the two of them calm down. Then. “What was her voice like. Did that tell you anything? Where she came from? What her background was?”
“That she’d been to high school. That she was city-bred. She talked like we all do here. Pure metropolitan. About as colorless as boiled water.”
“Then this was her home town, if you couldn’t notice any variation in accent. Whatever good that does us. In the taxi, what?”
“Nothing; the wheels went around.”
“In the restaurant, what?”
Henderson arched his neck rebelliously. “Nothing. It’s no use. Jack. Nothing. It won’t come. I can’t. I can’t. She ate and she talked, that was all.”
“Yes, but about what?”
“I can’t remember. I can’t remember a word of it. It wasn’t meant to be remembered. It was just meant to pass the time, keep silence at a distance. The fish was excellent. Wasn’t the war terrible? No, she didn’t care for another cigarette, thank you.”
“You’re driving me crazy. You sure must have loved Your Girl.”
“I did. I do. Shut up about it.”
“In the theater, what?”
“Only that she stood up in her seat: I’ve already told you that three times. And you said yourself, that doesn’t tell you what she was like, that only tells you what she did at one point.”
Lombard came in closer. “Yes, but why did she stand up? That keeps eluding you. The curtain was still up, you say. People don’t stand like that for no reason.”
“I don’t know why she stood up. I wasn’t inside her mind.”
“You weren’t even inside your own, from what I can gather. Never mind, we can come back to that later. Once you’ve got the effect, the cause is bound to follow eventually.” He moiled around for a while, letting a brief pause rest them up.
“When she stood up like that, you looked at her then at least?”
“Looking is a physical act, with the pupils of the eyes; seeing is a mental one, with the cells of the brain. I looked at her all night long; I didn’t see her once.”
“This is torture,” Lombard grimaced, squeezing the bridge of his nose up close beneath the brows. “I can’t seem to get it from you. There must be somebody I can get it from, somebody who saw you with her that night. Two people can’t go around town for six hours together without somebody at least seeing them.”
Henderson smiled wryly. “That’s what I thought, too. I found out I was wrong. There must have been a case of mass astigmatism all over town that night. Sometimes they’ve got me wondering myself if there really was such a person, or if she wasn’t just a hallucination on my part, a vagary of my own feverish imagination.”
“You can cut that out right now,” Lombard ordered curtly.
“Time’s up,” a voice said from outside.
Henderson got up, picked up a charred match stick from the floor, and carried it over to the wall, where there were rows of little charred dabs, in parallel rows. The top lines had all been intercrossed into x’s; the last few on the end were still single downward strokes. He added a cross line to one, and made that into an x.
“And cut that out too!” Lombard added. He spit forcefully into his own hand, took a quick step over, gave the wall a violent sweep, and the whole bunch of them, crossed and uncrossed, were gone at once.
“All right, move over,” he said, taking out pencil and paper.
“I’ll stand for a change,” Henderson said. “There’s only room for one on the edge of that thing.”
“Now you know what I want, don’t you? Raw material, that hasn’t already been worked over. Second-string witnesses, people who weren’t subpoenaed to appear at the trial, people who were overlooked both by the cops and Gregory, your lawyer.”
“You don’t want much. Ghosts, once-removed. Second-degree ghosts to help us get a line on a first-degree ghost. We better get a medium in on this with us.”
“I don’t care if they only brushed elbows with you, walked past on one side of the street while you two walked past on the other. The point is, I want to be the first to get to them, if possible. I don’t want anyone else’s left-overs. There must be some place we can drive a wedge in, split this thing open. I don’t care how diaphanous it is, I want to rig up some kind of a list between us. All right, here we go again. The bar.”
“The inevitable bar,” Henderson sighed.
“The barman’s been used up already. Anyone else at it but the two of you?”
“No.”
“Take your time. Don’t try to force it. It won’t come that way, when you try to force it. It drives it back.”
(Four or five minutes)
“Wait. A girl in a booth turned her head to look around after her. I noticed that as we were leaving. Want that?”
Lombard’s pencil moved. “Give me that sort of thing. That’s exactly the sort of thing I want. Can you tell me anything else about this girl?”
“No. Even less than the woman I was with. Just the turn of a head.”
“Come on, now.”
“The taxi. That’s been used up. He was the big comic relief at the trial.”
“The restaurant comes next. Was there a hat-check girl at this Maison Blanche?”
“She’s one of the few with a legitimate excuse for not remembering her. I was alone when I went up to her alcove; the phantom had separated from me to go into the powder room.”
Lombard’s pencil moved again. “There may have been an attendant in there. Still, if she wasn’t noticed with you, there’s even less chance she was noticed without you. Now how about the restaurant, any heads turn there?”
“She joined me separately.”
“That brings us to the theater.”
“There was a doorman with funny fish-hook mustaches, I remember that much. He did a double take on her hat.”
“Good. He’s in.”
He jotted something. “How about the usher?”
“We got there late. Just a pocket light in the dark.”
“No good. How about the stage itself?”
“You mean the performers? I’m afraid the show ran off too fast.”
“When she stood up like that it might have been seen. Were any of them questioned by the police?”
“No.”
“It won’t hurt for me to check. We’re not passing up anything in this, understand, anything? If a blind man was anywhere near you that night, I’d want— What’s matter?”
“Hey,” Henderson had said sharply.
“What is it?”
“You just brought something back to me then. One was. A blind pan-handler tagged us as we were leaving—” Then as he saw Lombard’s pencil briefly scrawl something, “You’re kidding,” he protested incredulously.
“Think so?” Lombard said levelly. “Wait and see.” He cocked his pencil once more.
“That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.”
Lombard put the list away in his pocket, stood up. “I’ll make a dent in that somewhere along the line!” he promised grimly. He went over and whacked at the grate, to be let out. “And keep your eyes off that wall!” he added, catching the direction of Henderson’s inadvertent glance, over to where the erased box-score had once been kept. “They’re not going to get you in there.” He thumbed the opposite direction along the corridor from the one he was about to take.
“They say they are,” was Henderson’s ironically murmured answer.