The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  “I have nothing to wear.”

  “You’ve been going around with me pretty steadily, and you’ve never been arrested yet for indecent exposure.”

  Then when the dress had come and I’d sent it back, the next time I saw him I said: “Don’t ever do that again, young man, or when the night of the party does come you’ll show up carrying your arm in a sling!”

  He only laughed. “I could have sworn it wouldn’t work. I told them so at Carnegie’s when I picked it out.”

  “I hope you laid side bets on it,” I said maliciously.

  And even when she called me herself on the phone, just before the affair, I still said to myself knowingly: “He put her up to it.”

  “This is Leila Mason. Now, you’re not going to be mean to me, are you? I’ve been trying so hard to get Ladd to bring you. And—well, there’s no telling with Ladd; he can be very selfish about his friends. Come. As a special favor to me, won’t you?”

  After I’d hung up I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t seem to me that any amount of browbeating could have extorted that much from a sister if she were congenitally unwilling. She must want me herself. And I wondered why.

  I went.

  It was about what I’d expected it to be. But for the number of rooms that you kept encountering if you were foolish enough to keep progressing, and an occasional crystal chandelier like an inverted wedding cake, it was any party in anyone’s home above the twenty-five-thousand-a-year bracket.

  There was a mother, but counter to all my expectations, which had run toward a domineering, bejeweled dowager, she was a shadowy, wispy little nonentity, fragile-looking as Dresden china, who weighed about ninety pounds, talked with fluttering wrists à la Zasu Pitts, and seemed to have the status of a pet Persian kitten in the household. Even the guests, I noticed, would give her a sort of pat in passing, so to speak, and then go on to somebody of more consequence.

  It was the sister who counted. She was a tall, lovely girl. She was Ladd all over. She had all his charm of the individual and then some additional little facets of her own as the due of her sex. She greeted me with her two hands clasped to my one.

  “Well, you did! You never can get together with anyone you really want to at this sort of thing, but at least it helps to break the ice. Now remember, no matter what happens, if the very building burns down around us, we’re going to get in at least one heart-to-heart talk before it’s over, even if we’ve got to wait all night. Ladd, make her stay.”

  “I’ll make her.”

  She rushed off again, pointing her finger at me commandingly. “Remember, we have a date.”

  “She’s charming,” I said to him.

  “She’ll do,” he answered with typical brotherly luke-warmness.

  It was Ladd, Ladd, Ladd all evening. He was almost grotesque about it, the way he kept me to himself. We danced a little in one oversized gallery where they had four or five players working at instruments, sipped an occasional champagne cup, roamed around a little. He showed me some of the rooms.

  “How many are there, anyway?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said half contemptuously. “I just sleep in one of those nearest the door and go in and out a lot.”

  I laughed.

  And as I say, none of it amounted to anything. I had no hopes of or for anything; I was just killing time there, so I let the evening drift by.

  Around half-past twelve they started to thin out, and in another half-hour the backgrounds were once more clearly visible in all the rooms. I’d quite forgotten about her; I thought it had just been lip courtesy. He looked at his watch, said we’d done our duty, and he suggested that I get myself together and we’d go for a drive in the open air before he took me home.

  He only released me from his protective custody now, at the very end, because I was going into a room where other men were hardly likely to follow me, I adduced. And at any rate, I sat there for a few moments in a preserve still piled fairly high with mink and brocade wraps and fooled around with my face a little.

  I don’t know whether she’d had her weather eye out and had seen me go in or had happened to look around after I was gone and had missed me; anyway, within a moment or two she came dashing in after me.

  She swooped past without stopping, caught me by the hand as she did so. “Come on,” she said. “This won’t do. I have a special place for us.” She took me into some little private sitting room of her own—it hadn’t been open to the party—and rang for someone.

  “We’ll have a glass of champagne in here by ourselves,” she said. “All right with you? I haven’t had a chance to get down to the bottom of one all evening.”

  I said it was all right with me and meant it.

  She was, now that I looked at her more closely, fully as lovely as she had seemed to be outside in the crowd, and that wasn’t a test that I’d been at all sure she would pass. It was a loveliness of mind as well as appearance. She was cultured, but not in a cold, bookish way. Switzerland, Paris, the usual background, I suppose. But it wasn’t just a veneer, as with so many of her kind. She had absorbed it. Young as she was, she was mellow with it. She was well baked, golden brown with civilization.

  She poured for us when they’d left the champagne and then brought out the cigarettes. Then she sat down and loosed the bands of her backless sandals. I made some complimentary remark about a diamond bowknot she was wearing, just to do my share at starting us off together, and she said it was Ladd’s gift.

  And then it happened. And this is how it happened.

  We were looking around for a light, and neither one of us had one.

  “I should have asked him just now——” she said and went over and opened a drawer.

  I sat waiting.

  “There’s usually a lighter on this table of mine, but somebody seems to have removed it,” she said. She closed the first drawer and opened a second. “I’ll go out and get some,” she said. Then suddenly she said, “Oh, never mind, here’s an old book of them left over in here.”

  She came back and settled herself beside me once more and lit the cigarettes for us.

  I lost track of the opening part of the conversation. I suppose it was girly-girly stuff, anyway. I kept looking at it where she was holding it absently in her hand.

  It was blue and it had that single M on it. It was a duplicate to the one I’d taken from behind the door seam at Mia Mercer’s apartment.

  I pretended my cigarette had gone out. I said, “May I?” and took them from her. I struck one, but what I was really doing was looking at it hard at closer range.

  It was the same, the same folder I’d sat comparing on the bed in the furnished room that night they’d brought me back Kirk’s clothes.

  I said offhandedly, “Are these yours?”

  “Ladd’s, really. I made him a gift of a tremendous bale of them one Christmas. Silly sort of gift, wasn’t it? But if I remember correctly, I think I did it because I’d used up all my own Christmas funds by the time I got around to him, so I simply put in the order with Father’s tobacconist and charged it to his tobacco account. He never did really use them much, and since then they’ve been sprouting up all over the house. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the end of them.”

  I kept them in my own hand from this point on. Absently, as she had. They were going out of here with me when I left tonight.

  Success had a curious pewter lackluster to it; it wasn’t bright at all.

  She’d become serious suddenly. About Ladd and me, evidently, though I’d missed the original point of transposition. “You don’t know what you mean to him,” she was saying. “Oh, my dear, I don’t know how you feel about him, and it’s not my place to ask you——” She stopped a minute, then went on: “He can’t tell you this. I’ll have to. Don’t let him become too set on you. You mustn’t. For your own sake. There are reasons why—why things with Ladd should never go beyond a certain point.”

  It took a moment for it to sink in. It wasn’t the usua
l stuff. Are you good enough for him? Will you do? She was trying to warn me against him. I could sense it. It radiated from her. There was no mistaking it.

  Suddenly he stood there looking in the doorway at us. He didn’t look pleased. “What’ve you been saying to Alberta?” He sounded a little crisp about it, I thought. Even taut. “Anything I shouldn’t hear? You wouldn’t go deep on me now, would you, Leila?”

  She tried to laugh it off. “Ladd, you shouldn’t stick your head in here like that! We might have been comparing stocking tops or something.”

  He said to me, “Are we going?”

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re going.” It wouldn’t have done any good to stay; there wouldn’t have been anything to stay for now any more.

  I wondered what she’d been trying to say to me.

  I said hardly a word to him all the way home.

  “Why are you so glum?”

  I smiled wanly. “No reason,” I said, “no reason.”

  I thought, “So I’ve found you, have I?”

  I went to see Flood right after that, the very next day. He heard me for a while. “Well, have you any evidence yet?”

  I showed him the matches.

  He looked them over, shook his head finally. “They’re valueless by themselves, not sufficient. For one thing, you didn’t hang onto the original match cover that you found wedged behind the door up there, discarded it. It’s therefore only your word that the two are similar. In the second place, although they strongly indicate that the party in question was up there and left them there, they’re not positive proof in themselves; they could have been carried there by someone else just as readily. What you’ve got to have is direct——”

  “I know,” I said. “And it may come at any minute now. That’s why I came to see you. I want to be ready for it. I don’t know how to trap it, to catch it on the fly. To just come here afterward and repeat it to you—I want something stronger than that.”

  “You’ll have to have.”

  “What do you advise me to do?”

  He thought about it. “Are you by yourself in this place?”

  “Entirely.”

  “And you feel fairly sure that something’s coming?”

  “After these matches—yes, I do.”

  “I’ll have something made up for you by our carpenters. Make sure there’s no one there with you when they bring it around.”

  It was installed before the week was out. He came over with them himself to supervise.

  I said, “What is it? It looks like an old victrola cabinet.”

  “That’s what it is,” he told me. “It’s built into one. It’s the same principle as these machines they dictate into in offices sometimes.”

  I said, “Oh, I understand; right here in front of it, is that the idea?” I felt a little crawly; I don’t know why.

  “Anywhere around here in front of it. I’ll give you the range approximately. You won’t be hollering, so anything farther out than here, say, is liable to blur.” He traced an imaginary line with his foot along the floor. “Keep him inside that.”

  He rearranged things. “This divan ought to go over closer, right up against it. I imagine it’ll come in handy to you.”

  I could feel a little red stop light burning on each cheek; I don’t know why.

  “Now, so you won’t have to go over to it each time, I’ve had this cable starter rigged up for you. See, there’s a plunger on the end. Flatten it with your thumb when you want to take. I’ll pay it out along here, behind the divan, and bring it up here between these two cushions, the green and the orange. Remember where it is now. That ought to be easy; just work your hand in.”

  “Quite easy,” I thought; “just like driving nails into a cross.”

  He had that masculine instinct for mechanical perfection. “Now let’s try it out,” he said. “We already tested it over at the workshop, but I want to see how it takes here in the room.”

  He did something to it. Not at the end of the concealed cable but right in under the lid itself. “Say something into it. Quietly, just as though you were talking to him.”

  I crushed my own fingers together. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “That’ll do as well as anything else.”

  There was a faint hum.

  “Suppose he notices that?”

  “Tell him it’s the water pipes in the wall, or something.” He turned it off. “We can’t get that out of it entirely.” He did something to it again. “Now listen. The playback.” He held up his hand.

  It was uncanny. “Say something into it. Quietly, just as though you were talking to him.”

  A cottony feminine voice answered, “I don’t know what to say. … Suppose he notices that?”

  “Tell him it’s the water pipes in the wall, or something.”

  I couldn’t recognize my own voice. They say you never can; you so seldom hear it.

  He cut it off.

  “Are you going to leave that on there?”

  “He won’t hear it. It’ll go on from there.”

  “Suppose I run over. How will I know?”

  “You won’t run over. You’ve got plenty of room. Just don’t waste it. I mean, don’t have it on by the hour. Just turn it on when you’re getting hot.” Then he said, “Call me if you think you’ve got anything.” He went over to the door. Then just as he was about to leave he said, almost by way of afterthought, “By the way, who is he?”

  I said, “I’d rather not give you the name beforehand. I think it’s he, but if it isn’t, then giving you the name is no good. If it is I’ll give it to you then. Or it’ll probably be down on here anyway.”

  “That was a typically feminine reaction just then.” He closed the door.

  I stood looking over at the green and orange cushions. I wondered why I felt so low.

  I took the tickets and threw them aside.

  “I was scalped for them,” he protested cheerfully. “That show’s sold out solid until next Fourth of July.”

  “Not tonight, I’ve changed my mind.”

  “I see you in a new light. So suddenly cuddly and stay-homish and domestic. Look at this, the lights low. Highballs cooking over there waiting for us. Great guns, even sandwiches for later! Say, you can do something to a place, can’t you? You make me feel like I’ve been married ten years. Only the nice part of that, though.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” I pleaded forlornly. That set the mood, gave the key we were to play in. Bittersweet, not wisecracking.

  “Here, stretch out here. Put your feet up. No, the other way, I want to sit on that side of you.” Orange and green. “Tonight’s our night for getting to know one another better. Tonight’s our night for reminiscence.”

  I felt as though I were preparing something for the slaughtering block.

  We sipped awhile and talked awhile, until the mood I wanted had grown on us, fastened on us. Our voices were low; the lights were low; slanting shadows of treachery were stroked upon the walls.

  “It’s bromidic but it’s true,” I went on, “that a woman doesn’t want to be the very first love in a man’s life. He’d be too raw yet. So don’t fail me, Ladd. Don’t let me down. Don’t make me think you’re lacking in the completeness I want you to have. I give you two, three—how many will I need to give you?—before me.”

  He quit evading me. “Two will do,” he murmured, “if you must make mountains out of molehills.” His voice was drowsy with the return to forgotten things. “Her name was Patsy and I was twenty, and it was one of those first things. She lived on Columbus Avenue; that was when they still had the el there, and it ran past her flat right at the level of her living-room windows. No, excuse me, they called it the front room. I remember you had to finish up what you were saying before a train came, or else it would be broken up into two parts with a long wait in between.”

  He groped uncertainly. “You can’t tell these things very well, can you?”

  “But you loved her.”

 
; “Yes, I guess I must have, or I wouldn’t still remember it. It lasted about a year, I think, and it really was pretty shiny. Maybe that was because I was twenty and she was eighteen. You can’t be any younger than that, either one of you. I used to go over to the Columbus Avenue flat for Sunday dinners. I don’t think I missed a Sunday dinner in months.

  “Then I made the mistake of taking her to a party. Cinderella shouldn’t go to a party, the story in the storybooks to the contrary. I was proud of her; I had a good time showing her off. I remember she cried a little on the way home. I hadn’t noticed anything, but she claimed they’d snickered at her. Just the girls, not the boys. She wouldn’t go out with me at all for a while after that, wouldn’t even see me at first.

  “Then suddenly she asked me of her own accord if I’d take her to another party. Another party like the first one again, where pretty much the same crowd would be. I located one and I called for her. I remember how she came out of the downstairs doorway all bundled in a beautiful fur wrap. Cinderella to the bitter end. She said her aunts and her cousins and I don’t know who else besides had all chipped in and made a first payment on it for her.

  “All through the party that night she kept it on. She’d open the windows when no one was looking and make the room good and draughty, as an excuse to keep on wearing it. And this time no one laughed at her. They were all pretty young there, I guess.

  “She was very happy riding home with me that night, strangely happy. She kept kissing me almost fiercely, as though we’d never see one another again.

  “We never did. A couple of detectives came around to her home the next day, and she was sentenced to the State Prison for Women for stealing it.”

  He got up abruptly and moved away. I knew. Who doesn’t want to be twenty again? Suddenly he’d stopped. He was standing right by it. My heart got quiet.

  “Let’s have something,” he said.

  “It doesn’t work; it’s a D.C.”

  My voice went up too high. But I had to stop him quickly; his hand was already out to the lid. “No, Ladd, come over here. Come here by me. Don’t roam around when I’m talking to you.”