The Black Angel (10 page)

“No, she was—smothered to death with a pillow.”

I said, without making the tactical error of altering the unexcited, casual tenor of my voice: “You see, you did go up there; that's how you knew. That's all right; there's nothing to be nervous about in that. You opened the door and you saw her lying there the first thing, right from where you were, on the floor in that front room of hers, so you quickly closed it and went away again. Nobody's blaming you for——”

He said with a sort of childish querulousness, “She wasn't in the front room; she was in the room behind, the one she slept in.”

“You see, you know the whole thing,” I said quietly. I began treacherously touching up my hair via the mirror. “You say you don't read the newspapers, so you must have gone up there and seen it for yourself. By the way, how'd you get in?” I tried to make my voice sound admiring, flattering to his dexterity.

He began to shake his head, imperceptibly at first, then more and more confirmedly, but with a puzzled expression continuing on his face. “I didn't go up there,” he murmured. “I didn't do that, because she wouldn't-a wanted me to. The last time I did she threw me out; she told me never to come around again. She was ashamed, I guess, on account of I looked so dirty and—well, you know. She said she'd call the cops if I ever came near her again. She said, ‘Go to the Salvation Army, you bum!' I just watched from across the street after that.” He sighed, but he kept on shaking his head.

The denials and retractions were starting in now, I said to myself. But he'd said enough already, more than enough.

I looked in my bag, at the cigarettes that were still there, and pretended not to see them. I closed it with a definitive snap. “We need some more cigarettes,” I said. “I'll go down and get them in a minute.” I was going to phone Flood. I had enough for him now. It was a job for him from here on. He'd warned me not to look for any documentary evidence. Well, what more could there be than this? He'd said he never read the newspapers, yet he'd known she was dead, and he'd known more than that: he'd known the exact method and even the very room she was lying in. He admitted he'd maintained an endless vigil across the street and been tortured by a cancerous love. What stronger motive could a man have ever had than what she'd done to him?

Flood would know how to get the rest of it out of him in short order, where I didn't. By this time tomorrow, maybe by tonight even, it would all be over.

“You want me to wait here for you?” he asked in that chronically helpless way of his.

“Just stay here where you are; I'll be right back.” I opened the door.

The blat of a cheap, defective little radio in one of the adjacent little cubbyholes came welling in from outside.

He quirked his head almost idiotically and blinked. He started to shake his head again imperceptibly as before. This time up and down and not across. “That's how,” he murmured cryptically.

“What?” I said from half over the threshold.

“That's how I heard. I remember now. I didn't read it in the papers and I didn't go up there. It came in over the radio at the Silver Dollar place. They got a radio there by the cash register, and there was some kind of a fight that night they wanted to get, so they had it turned on, waiting for it. I just about got there, and I didn't have any soup in me yet, so I understood the words that was coming out of it. I can still remember 'em by heart too. I only heard 'em once, but I can say them right through to the end, just like they came out. Sometimes they say
themselves
over, without me doing it myself at all. They're coming now, and I can't stop 'em. ‘An attractive young woman was found murdered in her apartment by the police late this afternoon. The victim was Mia Mercer, a brunette about twenty-eight years old, who had recently worked as an entertainer at the Hermitage——'”

His face puckered into a white cicatrice and went slowly over and downward out of sight, but the words continued to well from it unchecked. That voice. You had to hear it to know what grief can really do. No sobs, no huskiness, nothing so warm and alive as that. The monotonous singsong of Chinese children reciting their lessons, meaningless, arid, a parrotlike duplication.

“‘—She was last seen alive Thursday night, when she returned rather late, but it has been established that the murder did not take place until one or two o'clock today. The police are already holding a suspect, whose name is being withheld for the present, and they expect to——'”

I closed the door and came in again. I went over to him and placed my hand across his mouth and sealed it up, silencing that terrible, unbearable, mechanical flow of misery that was pouring from it like from a machine, a machine without intelligence or awareness of its own. I said to him what he'd said to me before: “Don't.” I was a woman after all.

Acting can reach great heights of persuasiveness. But sincerity, when there is no acting at all, can reach even greater.

He'd got himself a stay, but not yet an acquittal.

Many hours had gone by. We were still there in the room together. It darkened early, that room, earlier even than the grubby world outside. It was dim already with imminence of dusk, while the afternoon sun still rode high elsewhere.

His voice was a lazy thread stitching through the silence.

“She was in a little blue dress that night; I can see it yet. It's funny how you go someplace and never think you're going to meet someone there who will change your whole life around from then on. You go to some dance or party, just because you've got nothing better to do, and you think by the next night after you won't even remember about it any more. And here ten years later you can still remember everything about it as clear as if it was just the night before. You can't remember any of the other nights around then, or even the months or years, but just that one night; you've saved it whole, the way it was.”

His voice stopped. I waited without using my own, afraid if I did he would become too aware of me, wouldn't go on again. He was talking to himself more than to me. I was just the sounding board against which his voice projected itself. Presently he'd gone on again.

“In a little blue dress that sort of swung out wide from here down. She couldn't have been more than eighteen, and I just stood there looking at her.”

Like me, I thought, like me. I'd first met Kirk at a dance like that too.

“And I can even remember the piece they happened to be playing just then too. ‘Always.' Every time I've ever heard it since, it meant her in a little blue dress, the first time I ever saw her. It was our song, hers and mine, while we were together, and now that we're not, it's just mine, I guess.

“I guess I would have stood there all night like that, just looking. That would have been enough for me. But then the fellow that had taken me there, he came back to me and said: ‘What's the matter? What're you going to do, just stand there? Don't you want to dance or nothing?' I said, ‘Yeah, but only with one girl. That one over there.' And I showed her to him. He was one of these fellows don't stand back about anything; he laughed and said, ‘That can be arranged easy enough,' and grabbed my arm and hauled me over to her then and there, without paying any attention to who she was with. And I went on from there under my own——” He couldn't find the word.

“Evil destiny,” I supplied silently to myself.

“So that's how you first met her,” I said. “That's how she was when you first met her.”

The room was getting cloudier all the time. He was sprawled diagonally on the bed, back on his elbow, picking at the covering as he spoke. I was seated there on a chair drawn up close beside him. Its back was toward the bed, and I was straddling it in reverse, my arms folded along the top of it and my chin resting on them.

He and the bed were between me and the door. It would have been impossible for me to get out of the room in time, in case anything——

I'd been downstairs just now, a few minutes ago, and I'd told them to send somebody up and have them knock on the door in ten minutes' time. No sooner, no later. Seven minutes of the ten were up now.

The two pillows on the bed, pillows such as she'd been smothered with, were lying there undisturbed. They were within easy reach of him, the way he lay. The window looked out on a blind surface of shaft wall, and we were alone in the room, cut off, isolated. He didn't know someone was coming up to knock on the door outside in three more minutes. For all he knew, no one was coming near here for the rest of the night.

I dropped my wrist a little on the inside of the chair back, glanced at it. Two and a half minutes.

“I know who did it, Marty,” I said quietly.

His eyeballs rolled upward at me like marbles, stayed that way, peering from under his upper lids. Finally he said uncertainly, “Yeah, that guy they've got up there now; everybody knows.”

“No, no, I don't mean him. I know who
really
did it.” I kept my lashes inscrutably down. “I'm the only one who does. Here's something that no one knows, no one but me, and now I'm telling you.
I was there at the time it happened
. I was in the place. I saw him, and he didn't know it; he didn't see me.”

A pulse in his cheek started to throb. I saw it begin, and then I kept my eyes off it from then on. A cord running down the side of his neck stood out more distinctly than it had a minute ago, I thought, but I wasn't quite sure.

I knew what he was going to ask next, but I had to wait for him to ask it before I could answer it. He took quite a while, as though he had a hard time getting the words to come.

“Why didn't you—tell someone sooner?” He swallowed in the middle of it. I saw the obstruction go down his throat.

“Maybe I didn't want to get mixed up in it.”

“Are you—sure you really saw him doing it?”

“I saw him crouching
over her
, right in the act.”

“Why didn't you scream or holler, try to save her?”

“I was afraid he'd do it to me too, if I did; I was afraid of my own life. I stuffed the corner of a towel in my mouth to make sure he wouldn't hear me.”

“How'd you happen to be up there? How come he didn't see you, if you were right in the place when it happened?”

Tension was suddenly in the room with us, crowding the air in it, like a slowly expanding gas, making it resist when we tried to breathe it in. And yet we were both so quiet, almost motionless. He plucking at the counterpane. My face brooding over the chair top.

“I'd dropped in on her. That was nothing; I'd often done that before. For no particular reason, just to kill time. We were pretty chummy, you know. We were fiddling around there, doing nothing, like two women will at that hour of the day. She wasn't even dressed yet.”

I remembered that much from firsthand observation.

“It suddenly occurred to me I wanted to take a shower. I don't know why; I just felt like it. She said go ahead, help myself. I went in there and left the bathroom door open just about an inch; I took off my things and got behind that thick green glass door. I left that open about an inch too. But I never got to turn the faucets on the wall. I was standing there strapping on one of these rubber caps that we women use, without making any noise, I guess. I had a little trouble adjusting it—it was hers—and that took several minutes. All of a sudden I thought I heard a man's voice out there where she was. I tiptoed out of the closet to close the bathroom door, so he wouldn't be able to look in. Before I even got over to it, it was already happening. I heard her fall to the floor in the room outside. I grabbed a towel and put it around me, and I stuck my eye to the crack of the door and looked out. It was only wide enough for one eye. I saw him pressing down hard at something on the floor there, and I knew what he was doing. I hid way back in the shower closet, where it was dark, for a long time afterward, until I was sure he'd gone.”

“And you saw him?”

He said it very low. As close to him as I was, I could hardly hear it. His lips just moved a little. About a minute was gone now; about one and a half were left.

“I certainly did. I saw him right in the act. I saw him from head to foot.”

“And you've never told anybody?” This time even his lips didn't move; the air in front of them just vibrated, that was all.

“I've never told a living soul. I'm the only one who knows it.”

The hand that had been plucking the counterpane flattened on it in a directional pat. “Come here,” he said. “Come a little closer, over here by me.” His eyes stayed down, didn't look up at me. “Get on the bed here next to me.”

My heart hurt as though a surgeon were taking stitches in it. Those two harmless-looking pillows there, side by side——His hand gave the bed another persuasive pat, and then another.

I forced myself up from the chair by pushing my arms against the top of it, and then I moved around it toward him until my knees brought up against the edge of the bed.

His eyes stayed down. He repeated that flat-handed pat atop the bed. Meaning “Down; down here beside me.” I glanced at the pillows and then back to him. I put my knee to the bed and sank down on my side.

Our heads were very close together now, though our bodies lay extended in opposite directions, his form overlapping one side of it, mine the other.

His hand reached upward toward the head of the bed and drew one of the pillows out of position by its corner, and he started shifting it down toward me like that, flat along the surface of the bed.

I looked steadily up at the ceiling. I thought: “In another minute a great white mass will drop down over me, obliterating everything.”

“And you're sure you saw him?” his voice murmured close to my ear.

“I saw all there was to see of him. What do you want? Why did you ask me to come closer to you like this?”