Phantom lady

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Scott Henderson fell in love outside of his own home. He’s not up here for having done that. The girl he fell in love with is not on trial here. You’ve noticed that her name hasn’t been mentioned in this courtroom, she hasn’t been dragged forward, compelled to testify, involved in any way in this brutal, inexcusable murder. Why? Because she

  doesn’t deserve to be. She had nothing to do with it. It’s not our purpose to punish the innocent here in this courtroom, to subject her to the notoriety and humiliation that would follow. The crime was his—that man whom you see there— and his alone. Not hers. She’s blameless. She’s been investigated both by the police and by the prosecution, and absolved of any connection, or incitement, or even knowledge of what had happened, until it was all over. She’s suffering enough right now through no fault of her own. We’re in general agreement on that one point, all of us, defense as well as prosecution. Her name and identity is known to us, but we’ve called her The Girl’ throughout, and we’ll continue to do so.

  “Very well. He was already dangerously in love with The Girl by the time he remembered to tell her he was married. Yes, I say dangerously—from his wife’s viewpoint. The Girl wouldn’t have him on those terms. She was, and is, a decent person, a fine human being; every one of us who has spoken to her feels that way strongly about her. I do myself, ladies and gentlemen; she’s a lovely, unfortunate person who happened to meet the wrong man. So as I say, she wouldn’t have him on those terms. She didn’t want to hurt anyone else. He found he couldn’t have his cake and eat it too.

  “Very well, he went to his wife and he asked her to divorce him. Cold-bloodedly, just like that. She refused him a divorce. Why? Because, to her, marriage was a sacred institution. Not just a passing affair, to be broken off short at a whim. Strange wife, wasn’t she?

  “The Girl’s suggestion, when he told her this, was that they forget all about one another. He couldn’t see it that way. He found himself caught between the horns of a dilemma. His wife wouldn’t give him up, and he wouldn’t give The Girl up.

  “He bided his time and then he tried once more. And if you’d speak of the first method as cold-blooded, what would you say of the way he went about it the second time? He put himself out to entertain her the way a customer’s man entertains an out-of-town buyer with whom he is trying to transact a business deal. That should give you a good insight into his character, ladies and gentlemen; that should tell you what caliber man he is. That was all a scrapped marriage, a broken home, a discarded wife, were worth to him. An evening’s paltry entertainment.

  “He bought two tickets for the theater, he reserved a table at a restaurant. He came home and told her he was taking her out. She couldn’t understand this sudden attentiveness. She mistakenly thought, for a moment, that perhaps there was a reconciliation in the air. She sat down at her mirror and she began to get ready.

  “A few moments later he returned to the room and he found her still sitting there at her dressing table, without going any further in her preparations. She understood a little better what his purpose was now.

  “She told him that she wouldn’t give him up. She told him, in effect, that she valued her home higher than two orchestra seats and a full course dinner. In other words, without giving him time to ask her, she had refused him a divorce a second time. That was one time too many.

  “He was at the final stage of his own preparations. He had his necktie open in his hands, measured off, ready to insert it under his collar. Instead, in a blind ungovernable rage at being outguessed and outgeneraled, he dropped it over her head as she sat there at her mirror. He tightened it around her neck, he twined the ends together with unimaginable cruelty and strength and will to kill. The police officers have told you how it had to be cut off, practically pared off, it was so imbedded in her soft throat. Did you every try to tear one of these seven-fold rep silk ties between your hands, ladies and gentlemen? It can’t be done; the edges will slice your fingers like a knife, but you can’t sever them.

  “She died. She flung her arms out once or twice, just in the beginning, and then she died there, between her husband’s hands. The man who had sworn to cherish and protect her. Don’t forget that.

  “He held her like that, upright at her own mirror, letting her look on at her own death struggles, so to speak, for long minutes. Long, long minutes. So that she was dead long before he let her fall over from that upright position he’d held her in. Then when he was sure that she was dead, that she was good and dead, that she was dead beyond recall, that she was out of his way once and for all—what did he do then?

  “Did he try to bring her back, did he feel any remorse, did he show any regret? No, I’ll tell you what he did. He calmly went ahead and finished his own dressing, right there in the room with her. He picked up another necktie and put that on, to take the place of the one he’d garroted her with. He put on his hat and his coat, and just before he left he called The Girl up. Luckily for her, and it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to her in her life, she wasn’t there at the time to get that call. She never knew about it until hours afterward. And why did he call her up. with his hands still moist and reeking from taking his wife’s life? Not in remorse, not to confess what he’d just done and ask her to help him or advise him. No, no. To use her for a cat’s-paw. To make a living alibi out of her. without her knowledge. To ask her to go out with him instead, on those same tickets, on that same table reservation. He probably would have set his own watch back, just before meeting her. and commented on it. so that she would be sure to remember afterward, and come forward in good faith and shield him with her honestly given testimony.

  “Is that a murderer for you, ladies and gentlemen, or isn’t it?

  “But that didn’t work, he couldn’t get her. So he did the next best thing. He went out alone, cold-bloodedly went through the whole routine he had prepared for himself and his wife, without missing a single stop, from six to midnight. At the time it didn’t occur to him to do what he now says he did: pick up some stray along the way and use her for his alibi. He was too excited, too confused, just then. Or

  perhaps it did enter his mind, but he lacked the nerve; was afraid to trust a stranger, afraid his manner would betray him. Or then again maybe it was because he reasoned that it was already too late for that to do him any good; too much time had passed by now since he’d left his own house. His living alibi could have been made just as easily to count against him as for him, once the crime was more than just a few minutes old. A little adroit questioning would have been able to extract the exact time he had really met her, and not the time he wished it to be believed he had met her. He thought of all that.

  “So what was better than that, even? Why, an imaginary companion, of course. A phantom at his side, purposely left vague, left blurred, so that she could never be retrieved later on to damn his story of when they had met. In other words, which was preferable for his purposes: an unsupported alibi or a refuted one? I leave that up to you yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. An unsupported one could never be completely confirmed, but it would always seem to leave a reasonable doubt open. A refuted one would be automatically cast back in his face and leave him no further defense. That was the best he could do. that was the best he could get, and he made his decision accordingly.

  “In other words, he deliberately injected a myth into the proceedings, knowing she did not exist, knowing she could never be found, and perfectly content to have her not found, for only while she remains not found is his fractional alibi of any service to him.

  “In conclusion, let me ask you, ladies and gentlemen, just one simple question. Is it natural, is it likely, when a man’s very life depends on his ability to remember certain details in the appearance of another, for him to be unable to recall a single, solitary one of them? Not one, mind you! He is unable to recall the color of her eyes, or the color of her hair, or the contour of her face, or her height, or her girth, or anything else about her. Put yourselves in his place.
Would you be likely to forget so completely, so devastatingly, if your lives depended on it? Self-preservation can be a wonderful spur to the memory, you know. Is it at all plausible that he would forget her so totally, if he really wished her to be found? If she exists, or ever did, to be found? I leave you with that thought.”

  “I don’t think there’s much more I have to say to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. It’s a simple case. The issue is clear, without anything to confuse it.”

  Pointing with dramatic prolongation. “The State accuses that man whom you see there, Scott Henderson, of murdering his wife.

  “The State demands his life in return.”

  “The State rests its case.”

  6 The Ninetieth Day Before the Execution

  “WILL the accused please rise and face the jury?

  “Will the foreman of the jury please stand?

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

  “We have, Your Honor.”

  “Do you find this defendant guilty or not guilty of the charge made against him?”

  “Guilty, Your Honor.”

  Strangled voice from the direction of the prisoner’s dock, “Oh, my God—no—!”

  7 The Eighty-seventh Day Before the Execution

  “PRISONER at the bar, have you anything to say before this court passes sentence upon you?”

  “What is there to say, when they tell you you have committed a crime, and you and you alone know you haven’t? Who is there to hear you, and who is there to believe you?

  “You’re about to tell me that I must die, and if you tell me I must, I must. I’m no more afraid of dying than any other man. But I’m just as afraid of dying as any other man. It isn’t easy to die at all, but it’s even harder to die for a mistake. I’m not dying for something I’ve done, but for a mistake. And that’s the hardest way to die of all. When the time comes, I’ll meet it the best I can; that’s all I can do anyway.

  “But I say to you now, all of you, who won’t listen and don’t believe: I didn’t do that. I didn’t do it. Not all the findings of all the juries, not all the trials in all the courts, not all the executions in all the electric chairs—in the whole world—can make what isn’t so, so.

  “I’m ready to hear it now. Your Honor. Quite ready.”

  Voice from the bench, in a sympathetic aside, “I’m sorry, Mr. Henderson. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more compelling, dignified, manly plea from anyone who has stood before me for sentence. But the verdict of the jury in this case gives me no alternative.”

  Same voice, slightly louder, “Scott Henderson, having been tried and found guilty of murder in the first degree, I hereby sentence you to die in the electric chair, in the State

  Prison at , during the week beginning October 20th, said sentence to be carried out by the warden of the prison, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  8 The Twenty-first Day Before the Execution

  LOW voice, just outside the cell in the Death House corridor, “Here he is, in this one.”

  Louder, above a jangle of keys, “Somebody here to see you, Henderson.”

  Henderson doesn’t speak or move. Gate is opened, then closed again. Long, awkward pause, while they look at one another.

  “Guess you don’t remember me.”

  “You remember the people that kill you.”

  “I don’t kill people, Henderson. I turn people who commit crimes over to those whose job it is to try them.”

  “Then you come around afterward to make sure they haven’t gotten away, to satisfy yourself they’re still there where you put them, getting it rubbed into them, day by day and minute by minute. It must worry you. Well, take a look. I’m here. I’m safe on ice. Now you can go away happy.”

  “You’re bitter, Henderson.”

  “It doesn’t sweeten you any to die at thirty-two.”

  Burgess didn’t answer that. No one could have, adequately. He shuttered his eyes rapidly a couple of times to show that it had hit. He went over to the skinny canal of an opening and looked out.

  “Small, isn’t it?” Henderson said, without turning his head to look.

  Burgess promptly turned and came away from it, at that, as though it had closed up on him. He took something out of his pocket, stopped before the bunk the other was sitting crouched on. “Cigarette?”

  Henderson looked up derisively. “What’s the matter with them?”

  “Ah, don’t be like that,” the detective protested throatily. He continued to hold them out.

  Henderson took one grudgingly at last, more as if by doing so to get him to move away from him than because he really wanted one. His eyes were still bitter. He wiped the small cylinder insultingly on his sleeve before putting it to his mouth.

  Burgess gave him a light for it. Henderson looked his scorn at him even for that, holding his eyes steady, above the small flame, on the other’s face. “What’s this, the day of the execution already?”

  “I know how you feel—” Burgess began in mild remonstrance.

  Henderson reared up suddenly on the slab. “You know how I feel!” he flared. He snapped ashes down toward the detective’s feet, by way of indicating them. “They can go anywhere they feel like!” He jabbed his thumb toward his own. “But they can’t!” His mouth looped downward at one corner. “Get out of here. Get out. Go back and kill somebody else. Get fresh material. I’m second-hand, I’ve been worked over once already.”

  He lay back again, blew a tracer of smoke out along the wall. It mushroomed when it hit the top of the bunk, came down toward him again.

  They had quit looking at one another. But Burgess was standing still, hadn’t gone. He said finally, “I understand your appeal’s been turned down.”

  “Yes, my appeal’s been turned down. Now there are no more hitches, no more impediments, nothing further to interfere with the ceremonial bonfire. Now I can skid straight down the chute without anything more to stop me. Now the cannibals won’t have to go hungry. Now they can make a nice, swift, clean-cut job of it. Stream-lined.” He turned and looked at his listener. “What’re you looking so mournful about? Sorry because the agony can’t be prolonged? Sorry because I can’t die twice over?”

  Burgess made a wry face as though his cigarette tasted rotten. He stepped on it. “Don’t hit below the belt, Henderson. My dukes aren’t even up.”

  Henderson looked at him intently for a while, as though noticing something in his manner for the first time through the red haze of anger that had hovered over his perceptions until now. “What’s on your mind?” he asked. “What brings you around here like this, anyway, months afterward?”

  Burgess felt the back of his neck. “I don’t know how to put it myself. It’s a funny thing for a dick to do,” he admitted. “I know my job with you ended when you were indicted by the Grand Jury and bound over for trial— It’s sort of hard to bring out,” he ended lamely.

  “Why? It shouldn’t be. I’m just a condemned guy in a cell.”

  “That’s just why it is. I came up to—well, what I’m here to say is—” He stopped a minute, then blurted out, “I believe you’re innocent. Well, there it is, for what it’s worth, and it’s not worth anything—to you or me either. I don’t think you did it, Henderson.”

  Long wait.

  “Well, say something. Don’t just sit there looking at me.”

  “I don’t know what to say when a guy digs up the corpse he helped to bury and says, ‘Sorry, old man, I guess I’ve made a mistake.’ You better tell me what to say.”

  “I guess you’re right. I guess there’s nothing to say. But I still claim I did my part of the job right, on the evidence there was to go by. I’ll go further than that. I’d do the same thing over again tomorrow, if it had to be done a second time. My personal feelings don’t count; my job is to work with concrete things.”

  “And what brought on this profound change of conviction?” Henderson asked, with a dull sort of irony.

 
“That’s as hard to explain, to make clear, as any of the rest of it. It’s been a slow thing, it’s taken weeks and months to soak through me. About as slow as water soaking through a stack of blotters. It started in at the trial, I guess. It worked by a sort of reverse process. All the things that they made to count against you so heavily, they seemed to point the other way around, to me, later on when I ran over them in my own mind.

  “I don’t know if you can quite get what I mean. Framed alibis are always so clever, so smooth, so chock full of plausible details. Yours was so lame, so blank. You couldn’t remember a single thing about this woman. A ten-year-old child would have been able to do a better job of description. As I sat in the back of the courtroom listening, it slowly dawned on me: hey, that must be the truth he’s telling! Any lie, any lie at all, would have more meat on its bones than that. Only a man who was not guilty could frustrate his own chances as thoroughly as you did. The guilty are smarter than that. Your life was at stake, and all you could muster to protect yourself was two nouns and an adjective. ‘Woman,’ ‘hat,’ and ‘funny.” I thought to myself, ‘How true to life that is.’ A guy is all riled up inside from a row at home, he picks up someone he’s not interested in in the first place. Then right on top of that comes the mental cloudburst of finding out there’s been a murder in his house and hearing himself accused of it—” He gestured expressively. “Which is more likely: that he’d remember such a stranger in exhaustive detail, or that what little impression remained of her in the first place would be completely washed away, leaving the slate blank?

  “It’s been on my mind a long time now. It’s kept coming back to me with more and more pressure each time. Once before I already started to come up here, but then I turned around and backed out again. Then I talked to Miss Rich-man once or twice—”