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Authors: Cornell Woolrich

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The Black Angel (6 page)

BOOK: The Black Angel
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And in my excitement of mind that day, following the shock of the discovery I had just made, these discrepancies hadn't made sense to me.

They did now. Somebody whose name began with an
M
had been to see her that day, had detected something he didn't like, had fixed the door so that he could return and catch her off guard, and when he had——

Oh, if I only knew all the people she knew whose names began with
M!
Wait, there had been a book. Hadn't there been a list of names, an alphabetical calling list, I'd snatched up and taken with me that day, at the last moment, in my flurry of panic-stricken departure? I hadn't thought of it since; I hadn't seen it since. But that latter fact alone argued that, if I had taken it, it was still around somewhere.

I got out my handbag and started plumbing its depths and crevices. The woman never yet breathed who could be absolutely certain, at any one given time, of all that her own handbag holds. There is always some overlooked thing, some mislaid thing that she has lost track of, to be found lurking in its myriad compartments and zippered slits.

There was in this one too. But not what I was looking for. And yet I was certain I had brought that thing away with me. I could remember its soft leather turquoise cover, its stepped page margins, as well as I could that single-lined
M
on the match cover. I had all but torn the lining out of the bag, and there was no use kneading it any further. I sat there with it dangling disheartenedly over my knee.

Then I remembered that I'd gotten myself together rather carefully that day, to try to create a certain desired impression on her. I must have carried the other, the special, the dressy one. I'd forgotten I owned it. I hadn't used it since. That had been the last time clothes, accessories, meant anything to me. I'd been down to elementals from then on.

So I got it out and looked in that. And at the first touch of my fingers, as I unsheathed the mirror, turquoise flashed up at me like a patch on the black lining.

I opened it at the
M
page. My fingers had stopped being steady any more. I thought:
“Someone
in this book killed her. The name is in this book. On this very page I'm holding open here. It's looking right at me, staring me in the face. And I'm looking at it. But I can't tell which one it is.”

Marty ………
Crescent 6–4824

Mordaunt ………
Atwater 8–7457

Mason ………
Butterfield 9–8019

McKee ………
Columbus 4–0011

“I'm looking at it,” my mind repeated, “and I can't tell which one it is.”

But I was going to find out.

I didn't even know his first name, or rating, or which precinct house he was attached to. So if there'd been more than one of them by that last name I might have got hold of the wrong one. In fact, I didn't know anything about him. Only that he'd been a little less brutal, a little more human, that night that they'd brought Kirk back to the apartment. And I had to have someone to turn to; I couldn't go the thing alone.

So I walked into the precinct house that was the nearest to where she had lived and I asked for him. “Is there a Flood here?”

“Wesley Flood, on Homicide, that who you want?”

“I—I guess so.”

“Name, please?”

“Just say a young lady.”

They showed me into some room at the back, and he saw me in there. It was he. He couldn't place me for a minute, I could tell. Then he remembered. “You're Murray's wife; that's it!”

I told him wanly, yes, that was it.

He looked me over surreptitiously, I guess to see how I was taking it, standing up under it. I caught a flicker of sympathy in his eyes, though I suppose he didn't realize it showed. I really didn't want that; I wanted advice and coaching.

I told him what I'd found at the Mercer apartment. I told him what I thought it meant and what I intended doing about it.

He heard me through. Just sat and listened attentively. There was no mistaking his expression, though. Finally I had to say, “You still don't think I was up there that day, do you?”

“Possibly you were——”

“Well, here's the book. Look, right here. Her book.”

He leafed it, tapped it a couple of times against his thumbnail, handed it back. His attitude was unmistakable: it was over; it was water under the bridge. Whether I had been up there or not didn't matter any longer. Hadn't in the first place. The case was closed.

He tried to talk me out of it at first. “Look, even taking your point of view, even granting that Murray—that your husband—isn't guilty and that there's someone else still at large who is, don't you see you may be starting from a wrong premise altogether in basing something on this book and on that match cover you say you saw? There's no hard-and-fast rule that the name of everyone she knew
had
to go into that book. It could work the other way around, couldn't it? Those she knew well, those she knew best, mightn't be in it at all. She'd be so familiar with their numbers she'd know them by heart, wouldn't have had to write them down. Only those she knew less well would be in the book.”

I thought of Kirk's name. She'd known him well enough to try to vamp him into going away with her, and his name was in the book. I didn't tell him that; there was still an ache in that old wound.

“There have been murders committed before, you know,” he went on, “by people having no telephone numbers to their name at all. What I'm trying to tell you is this: there's no certainty——”

“But nothing's ever certain, is it? Only that you people have the wrong man.”

He lidded his eyes deprecatingly. “Ah, you'd only get all muddied up. You're too nice a person, Mrs. Murray. Don't try it. You're not her type; you won't know how to handle half of these people.”

“I'll have to learn.”

Maybe it showed on my face. Maybe he saw what he'd be doing to me by dampening, taking away this one incentive I had left. Maybe he thought it would be kinder after all to let me start out on a hopeless, foredoomed quest than on no quest at all, to just sit counting the days as they went by, crossing them off one by one on the calendar of my mind until that red-letter date, sometime during the week of May sixteenth, was reached.

All I know is he suddenly changed. For no apparent reason, because of nothing that I had been able to say to convince him. “Try it, anyway,” he consented abruptly. “Go ahead and try it.”

I'd intended to anyway, whether with his benediction or not. But I did need someone to angel me, even if against his own convictions.

“Will they—do you think I'm running any risk of being recognized from the trial?”

“Well, I didn't know you at first, and I'm supposed to have a mind trained to remember faces. You didn't take the stand, and you were kept pretty much in the background. I'd say if you change yourself around a little you'd have a pretty good chance of not being recognized.”

“Now, what sort of evidence will I need for it to be any good? Documentary, or will it just be enough if there's some slip made in the course of conversation, or what sort of requirement will there be from the police point of view?”

“There wouldn't be any documentary evidence in a case like this,” he let me know. “You don't find murders written down in black and white, like bank statements. If you can get anything you come to me with it, even if it's only a rumor, a piece of idle gossip. That'll be enough from this policeman's point of view. If there's anything to it at all we'll see that it gets turned into something documentary; you leave that to us.”

He saw me to the door. “You go ahead, and luck to you. Keep in touch with me; you can always find me around here.” But then at the very last he couldn't resist adding, out of sheer kindliness, I suppose: “Will you do one thing for me, though? Don't get your heart too set on it. Don't take it too hard if it doesn't—work out the way you expect it to.”

I knew he didn't really believe Kirk hadn't done it. He didn't expect me to uncover anything, because he thought everything there was to be uncovered had already been uncovered. Pity was making him seem to abet me. He thought it would be easier on me if I had some will-o'-the-wisp to chase than just to sit still waiting for the switch to fall.

I knew that as I left him; I could read it in him, on him.

“I'll show him too,” I vowed. “I'll show them all.”

“I stayed up all night rubbing soap on my finger,” I told the pawnbroker, “but I can only get it up as high as the joint, where it is now. It won't go over it.”

He tried it a couple of times with his bare hand. “You could have it filed off,” he said.

“I know I could, but I don't want that done to it. I thought maybe you have a pair of pliers or some sort of instrument handy you could get it off with. I don't care how much it hurts; it's got to come off.”

“I'll see what I can do,” he said. He came back and put a drop or two of oil on my finger just above it and then got a good firm grip on the ring with a pair of nippers. Then he braced my arm by holding it pressed tightly under his own and started to tug away at it.

It made it; it came off and flew across the pawnshop and he had to go after it.

It looked so funny and raw there where it had been until now. It had left a little circlet of pink behind at the base of my finger. It was the first time it had been off since I was seventeen.

He polished it and examined it and said: “You want to sell it outright or just pawn it?”

“I'd rather just pawn it. I—I'll want it back someday.”

“Five dollars,” he said.

“But it's pure gold; it's——”

“I know, but how much gold is in a wedding ring? Seven-fifty. And not because of the ring, because I've got a heart where I got no business to have one.”

I held out my hand. “Just let me look at it once again before you take it.” I tilted it so that I could see the engraving on the inside.

K. M.—A. F., 1937.

My brother-in-law pretended not to know my voice at first. Well, maybe he really didn't recognize it at that. I hadn't seen them for over three years, since they'd moved out to Trenton.

I said, “This is Alberta. I'm speaking from the city.”

His voice dropped still further, became wary. “Oh—uh—yes,” he said. “Alberta, how are you? We got your note and—uh—been meaning to answer it. You see, how we're fixed here is—well, the house is rather small, and on account of the kids, I don't see——”

“But you don't understand. I didn't ask to be taken in. I thought I made that plain in my note. I don't want anything done for me; I'll look after myself. All I'm asking you to do is lend me a sum of money. I'll pay you the usual rate of interest on it, and you'll get it back, every penny of it——”

“Is it for——? Are you still trying to help
him?”
The way he said that, you had to hear it to know what I mean.

“Is Rose there? Let me speak to her a minute.” I'd never liked him much anyway.

“She—uh—just stepped out to the store.” The timing was faulty; there was too much slack in the answer. As when you turn your head to confer in pantomime. I could see the signs going on, as though I were right in the room with them. Signs of interrogation and signs of refusal.

My own sister. No, because I was the wife of a condemned man now. I might bring notoriety into their home. They had their children's welfare to consider, their friends, their standing in the community.

I said with a sort of passive, low-wattage dignity, “All right, Harvey. Never mind. I'd better get off now.”

“You can reverse the charges,” he said patronizingly.

I needed that money bitterly, even the little the call was going to cost. I knew it was a foolish thing to do. And yet it wasn't pride or sulkiness. It was a compulsion of the very blood itself. I could no more have accepted that small sop from him now——

“No,” I said with calm firmness. “It's been worth it to me. The experience alone——”

I hung up. I never saw either of them, or spoke, or heard from, or thought of them again.

6

Crescent 6–4824
……… Marty

I
T HAD A LINE DRAWN THROUGH IT
,
AND I WONDERED
why. It was the only one on that whole page to have a line drawn through it. I'd noticed a name here and there, on other pages, with a line drawn through the number and a new number superimposed—and that was understandable, a change of location. But never a line drawn through both name and number alike, as with this one. Wherever they went, though they changed numbers, they carried the same names with them; those remained unchanged.

Then what was this?

It could be death, I knew. And I dreaded the thought of tracking down a dead man. Or it could be a severance of relations. I hoped, of the two, to find it was that. One thing was sure: that line meant something, was there for a reason, had not just been drawn through it idly.

It came due at its appointed time, and its appointed time was now, five-thirty of a porcelain-blue evening. Hours had gone by in the preparations leading up to it, preparations that could not be seen by the eye, gave no outward sign, could have been mistaken for silent pondering or absent-minded reverie, but were active within me nevertheless.

At the very end, as the moment for it drew nigh, I drew nearer to it by degrees. The telephone, I mean. I walked back and forth before it, murmuring to myself, memorizing a lesson under my breath. Sometimes looking up at the ceiling, sometimes down at the floor, as I did so. Turning every few paces and retracing my steps. Back and forth, back and forth, whispering under my breath.

“If the voice is young, sort of vital, resonant, the opening wedge is: ‘You don't know me, but I feel as though I know you; I've heard so much about you.' Then go on from there. The key is flirtatious, coquettish.

BOOK: The Black Angel
11.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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