The Black Angel (11 page)

And now the pillow would leap up and then come hurtling down.

Instead he inserted it under the back of my head and took his hand off it; left it there, as a partial support for my head, a resting place. Perhaps it was a form of bribery; I don't know. “Tell me who he was,” he said in a husky whisper. “I want to know. I've got to know.”

And if it had been he, he wouldn't have to know; he
would
know already.

The tension slowly siphoned from the air and left a sort of vacuum behind it. I felt all limp and starchless. My forehead was damp. I closed my eyes in momentary exhaustion.

The knock on the door came while they were shut like that. The test period was over. Marty just turned his head, not understanding. This was to have saved my life. “Yes,” I called out weakly. A hotel boy looked in, and I told him to get some cigarettes or something; I don't remember.

I tried to analyze my own feelings. He stood acquitted now. What further, what greater certainty could there ever be than this? And yet to my surprise, along with the sense of disappointment, of frustration, that was rightly there, there was a sneaking, almost shamefaced sense of relief. I thought to myself with wonderment: “My God, I must actually have developed a liking for this poor devil to feel the way I do about it.” Or maybe it was just a sense of sportsmanship, a repugnance at the idea of delivering the final blow to someone who was down already.

I got up presently and went over toward the tarnished glass framed over the bureau. My legs were still a little rocky under me from my recent crisis. “I may as well go now,” I reflected; there was nothing for me here any more. I had as much proof as I could hope for.

I was forgetting him. I was forgetting I'd left him in mid-conversation, so to speak. I was forgetting that what to me was a topic over and done with to him was a topic broken off short. He got off the bed in turn, came up behind me. I felt his hand on my arm, but I didn't turn; I continued adjusting my hat.

“Tell me who he is; tell me.”

“Why? What satisfaction is it to you to know? There's a man in jail for it already, and they're going to execute him for it soon——”

“That isn't enough; that's no good to me. I'm not the state. Whaddo I care who the state kills for it? I'm the one who loved her. I want to know who really did it, whose hands
really
did it! You can't transfer a thing like that from one guy to another. The one who really did it stays the one who really did it, no matter who the state takes it out on!”

“I don't know.”

“You said you did. You said you saw him.”

“I just said that.”

“You're trying to back out now. You think I'm just a Bowery bum, not worth telling it to. I want that one thing from you, d'you hear me? That one thing. I want to know who that guy was that you saw kill her.”

I went toward the door. He came around the outside of me and got there first, got between it and me.

“I'm not going to let you out of here. You know, and you're not getting out of here until I know too.”

I tried to paw him aside. He didn't actively raise hands to me, menace me; he just bore my hands down, stayed there. I'd conjured up this tatterdemalion jinni myself out of a bottle of alky, so to speak, and now I couldn't exorcise him again.

“I wasn't up there, I tell you!”

“You said you were, and I believe you the first time. You knew her place too well, even that green glass shower door she had up there! Now who was it you saw? You're going to tell me.”

He reached around behind me and caught my arm at the wrist. He started bending it up toward the shoulder, the wrong way. It's painful. It's a method little boys are fond of. It's effective, nonetheless.

We were struggling full-tilt now, even if still only passively. He'd retained a good deal more vigor than I'd suspected, and it occurred to me even in the midst of my present preoccupation that if he'd reacted positively to that other previous test a while ago I would have stood very little chance, knock on the door or no knock.

“Don't! Let go, you're hurting me!” I winced. “You fool!” I could have screamed, but I had more to lose than he by raising a great clamor, attracting attention to the two of us.

I couldn't stand it any more, and just saying I didn't know was no good; he wouldn't take that for an answer.

“You going to tell me? You going to tell me?” he kept breathing into my averted face.

I couldn't think of a name; I couldn't think of an address.

“All right, I'll tell you where you can find him; I'll tell you where he is. It's on the third floor at——” I gave him a name and address at random. “Now let me out of here!” There was water in my eyes from sheer physical pain.

He stood aside, and I clawed the door open and ran out into the hall. As I hurried along it, rubbing my numbed arm to bring the circulation back and glancing resentfully back a couple of times, it occurred to me that it was just as well that the name and address I'd given him just now, under stress of improvisation, were my own. Under the circumstances there was no telling what he might take it into his head to do.

It's hard to sit waiting in the dark, waiting for a doorknob to turn stealthily, waiting for a blurred form to come creeping in on a death-dealing errand. The night outside was very quiet, and the room within was quieter still, and the only sign that I was there at all was the red bead of my cigarette, brightening and dimming, brightening and dimming, while a clock close by me ticked away.

This, in a way, was the third and final test he was being subjected to, though I hadn't intentionally planned it. The first had been his familiarity with the details of the crime; a firsthand familiarity. He'd neutralized that by his claim of having absorbed them over the radio. But that was just a verbal statement, and there was no way of checking on its truthfulness. So the burden of that test still lay more against than for him. The second had been his failure to make any attempt to silence me, when presumably I alone held knowledge damaging to him. Ergo, the knowledge I presumably held had therefore
not
been damaging to him, had nothing to do with him. So he had passed that one with flying colors. But the score was still one for, one against. Now, quite fortuitously, a third and final test had come up, and this would cinch it. Two out of three. Now he had the definite knowledge of who had killed the thing he valued most. Someone named “French”—he would see that name downstairs in the entryway—who lived in this same house I did, who lived on this same floor, who lived in this same room I was in now. He'd wanted that knowledge badly, badly enough to brutalize me in order to elicit it. The thing was, what had he wanted it for? What did he intend doing with it?

I had my own ideas about that, and that was why I was sitting huddled in a chair now, at three in the morning, instead of occupying the bed where I rightfully belonged. A chair drawn into a corner as far from both bed and room door as I could manage to get it, and with its back turned outward to serve as a screen for my lumped, tucked-under body.

I'd already been undressed and in bed for the night, lying there in the darkness, over two hours ago, when a sense of disquiet, of impending danger—call it a premonition if you will—began to assail me more and more strongly. Why had he wanted the exact name and whereabouts of her killer so badly, once I had convinced him I knew them? It wasn't just for the morbid satisfaction of it alone; it wasn't just so he could lacerate himself still further as he sat the nights away in smokehouses with “her” by his side. He didn't have to have an actual name and address for that; the pronoun “somebody” would have done just as well.

I'd pulled the light chain beside me and sat up at this point. I'd thought: “I better get up out of here, not lie here in this bed; otherwise I'm liable never to wake up in it again in the morning.”

That was it, of course; that was what he'd wanted it for.

I put something over me and sat in a chair for a while with the light on. But then I realized that in that way I was only postponing it until some other night, some future night, when I would no longer be on guard. It was better to attract it at once, get it over with, while I was expecting it, was it not? And finally, it was the definitive test. If he came near here on a bloody errand he exonerated himself once and for all, beyond any lingering shadow of a doubt. Surely if he had done such a thing himself he would not attempt to wreak retribution on someone else for having done it. Even madmen didn't do that. Even they retained awareness of the parentage of their own crimes.

True, he couldn't get up here from the street. But that would only delay him a night or two; eventually he'd succeed somehow or other. And I didn't want this thing to be postponed. So I crept down the two flights of stairs and reversed the latch plunge on the outside door so that it could be opened from the outside. If he tried it now, tested it in any way, it would open for him just as any ordinary door.

I went up again to my own place and carefully closed the door without locking it. From a hook on the back of the bathroom door I unslung a laundry bag full of soiled articles of apparel. I carted it over to the bed and put it there where I had been lying myself a short while before. It was squat and lumpy in its natural contour, but I kneaded it and stretched it and its contents into a longer, more columnar outline that more closely approached a torso. Then I carefully arranged the coverings over it and put out the light, and in the dark it looked like someone lying there.

I knew there was still some risk attached to remaining in the place at all, no matter how well I secreted myself; yet I must be an eyewitness of whatever took place, for the test to be a valid one, and I couldn't sit crouched on the upper stairs all night peering down through the bannister rail. So I drew a chair over into the far corner and got down behind it and took up my vigil—waiting for the love that had turned to death.

He might be lurking down there in the shadows of the street right now, watching these windows as he had once watched hers. He'd seen the light go out behind them, and now in a little while he'd venture forth and creep up to the door and suddenly vanish within, like something whisked away.

It was very quiet inside and out. There was a half-moon, enough to dust the air with pollen without bleaching it. I had the shades drawn down to three-quarter length, and the oblong boxes of light that came in below them reproduced themselves just high enough on the door, slantwise to them, to take its knob. The knob was glass, and when it turned it would blur, create a momentary pinwheel of light. And then another way of knowing would be this: the third step from the top on the stairs outside was faulty; it would creak. I'd learned to skip it whenever I ascended them myself. But he wouldn't know.

It was four o'clock now, and I'd been sitting like this ever since shortly after one. I thought about them, the two of them. And, for that matter, the two of us: Kirk and myself. What a strange way for their love story to end up. A harmless, fluffy little girl of eighteen on a dance floor one night ten years ago, waltzing to the strains of “Always.” And a boy comes in and looks at her, takes just one look, and from then on he's in love. And another boy and another girl, somewhere else, a thousand miles away, maybe, who didn't know either of them at the time and didn't even know one another yet. The girl, as a matter of fact, still a child in a middy blouse and bangs, probably chewing her pencil nightly under a lamp while she pored over her algebra homework. And now, ten years later, the first girl is already dead; murdered and infamous and vile. And a derelict, a stumble bum, who was once the boy, is about to creep up the stairs of a strange house, to murder someone he has never seen before, in the depths of the night. And the second boy is a shaven-pated, hollow-cheeked inmate in a penitentiary, awaiting execution for something he didn't do. And the second girl, the “little” girl, is hiding behind a chair in the dark in that same strange room, waiting to watch, to look on at a murder that is to be no murder, that is to be the act without the deed.

How strange, it came to me then, are the patterns of human experience! The meaningless life lines that start out singly and so simply from here, from there, draw slowly toward one another over a period of time, until finally they come together, mesh, to form into a design that never could have been guessed at, foretold, by what had gone before. And the completed fabric is the sum of all the threads that have gone into it.

If another boy hadn't gone to a dance one night and seen a girl there, floating in a blue dress to the strains of “Always,” the boy I'd married would not now be in a cell under sentence of death, and I would not now be hiding here in the dark, my cheek pressed to the back of a chair, listening, waiting.

The clock went tick, tick, tick.

Outside there, past the door, the third step from the top snarled all at once, as when you nudge a sleeping cur lying in your path. That was the sound it habitually made, a canine simulation. Then its queerly warped surface relapsed into silence again as the pressure quitted it.

I flung out my hand quickly, struck out the red ember that had been held in it against something. Then I drew myself together, made myself smaller, cowered there, and watched the telltale knob from low down around the side of the chair back.

Nothing happened for a while. For a while that seemed much longer than it probably was. Tick, tick; tick, tick; tick, tick. Hundreds of them, it sounded like. If there was anyone out there at all, he must be standing with his ear close to the door seam, listening to hear if there was anyone astir in here. Or perhaps exploring the door, gauging its surface with stealthy finger tips. He would not think, at first, that it would open at trial, and yet the instinctive thing to do was test the knob; that would show him when he did.