The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  “I didn’t know you wanted to.”

  I did then, God knows. I told him so. “I do now.”

  He came right back. He subsided beside me again with a sweeping half embrace and a stretched-out “A-n-y time.”

  I blew out my breath a little to myself.

  He told me of the second one, then. It wasn’t she, I could tell in a moment, and I hardly listened after that.

  It was briefer. He’d been older, and the skin around his heart had been thicker.

  “And——?”

  “And that’s all. The rest is just—my personal laundry. You wouldn’t want that.”

  “Only two?” She hadn’t shown up.

  “Only two.”

  “You’ve told me of those you loved. Now tell me of someone you’ve hated. A girl, of course, not a man; someone you’ve hated with that same side of your heart. That’s all that interests a girl about a man: the other girls he’s loved—or hated.”

  For a minute I thought it wasn’t coming, it took so long. But it wasn’t the fact of trying to remember that slowed it; it was the fact of remembering, itself. “There was one like that,” he said at last.

  “What was she like?”

  “She was rotten. Rotten all the way through. That word hardly does her justice.” There was still hate there, now that he was raking the ashes. “If she’d looked on the outside like she looked on the inside she would have been clapped into a ward for contagious diseases. But she didn’t. They never do——”

  And suddenly there it was, starting. I knew almost at the first word.

  “She worked here in a club——”

  I felt carefully for the plunger, with one hand crossed over behind my own back. It was hard to do that way.

  It nearly destroyed the gossamer skein he was weaving. He said, “What’s that?”

  It was more noticeable in the quiet of now than it had been in the daytime when Flood was there, I thought fearfully. We were so close to it too. “Just the frigidaire. It needs defrosting. Go on with what you were saying.”

  “She’s the only woman I ever——”

  “What?”

  He wasn’t going to for a minute.

  “What?” I said again on a suspended breath.

  “Well, the only woman, I think, that I ever wished dead.”

  I waited.

  Then he said in a curiously sepulchral voice that must have transmitted well, “Well—she is dead now.”

  “What was her name?”

  “What good does that do you?” he said ruefully.

  “Well, it’s something that has to do with you, and when you love someone and want to learn everything there is about them, then it does do you some good.” I looked up at him overhead. I put my hand lightly against the side of his face and left it there. “Tell me her name.”

  “She was a bum named Mercer.”

  “Was that her first name?”

  “Mia Mercer was her name. Her stage name, probably; I don’t know.” It was well under way now. If I just left it alone it would come by itself. It was like pulling the cover off a furled umbrella: the first part is the hard part; after that it just peels effortlessly.

  “It was just a night-life stand in the beginning. Everyone has them in their lives. Someone you meet in a place, a club, one night and then start seeing off and on from then on. It had nothing much to do with love, believe me, from start to finish. But at least I didn’t hate her at that stage yet. I thought she was a good enough scout. She was a little heavy on the—expense roll, you might say. They have no souls, so they must have things they can see and feel and touch; that’s their only heaven.

  “Then one night she found out something about me.”

  Again there was a snag in the unraveling skein.

  “What?” I said without joining lips together.

  “Oh, nothing to speak of—I was taken ill in her place one night and—she got a little frightened, wanted to send for a doctor—something like that.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant, but I thought I’d better not sidetrack him too much.

  “Unfortunately, she’d found out about Leila. Leila was engaged to someone at the time, someone who’d come over from England, and—well, it meant her very life to have had anything happen to it. And Leila was an innocent party to——She’d been in Europe for years going to school, and she didn’t know very much about me even as my own sister. That was what made it so damnable. I don’t think this mutt would have been willing to believe that, but whether she had or not, I doubt that it would have made any difference to her.”

  I still couldn’t understand at all. I could sense he was being purposely vague about it, and that was helping to fog me too.

  “Well, suddenly this woman, this devil—I think she had some doctor friend and he first put the idea in her head—I noticed a change coming over her. First she became too sweet to me, sweeter than I cared to have her be. I hadn’t minded it as a place to stop by and have a drink in at three in the morning, but she started to get too twiny and whiny to suit me. Above all, she became too interested in Leila and her approaching marriage. Finally I felt I had to tell her bluntly, ‘Good-by, you won’t be seeing me any more after this.’ She changed a second time right after that. Still sweet, but discarded the build-up. Started mentioning some fantastic amount, twenty-five or thirty-five thousand dollars; did I know where she could get that much?

  “I told her flatly no, I didn’t.

  “Well, did Leila know, perhaps? she wondered.

  “Leila neither, I let her know.

  “Well, then, did I think the Honorable So-and-so, the Earl of Such-and-such’s eldest son, the man Leila was engaged to, did I think perhaps he might know?

  “I started to smell a rat, and I forced a showdown. She was still very sweet and innocuous about it. He wouldn’t want to be told that Leila could be taken ill, as I had on that one particular occasion; it might worry him a lot.

  “‘You try that,’ I said, ‘and I’ll kill you!’”

  I could hardly breathe. I could feel my heart going so, it was a wonder he couldn’t feel it from the back, where he was pressed against me.

  “There was no threat mentioned, you understand, just what I’ve told you. On her part, I mean. She pretended to back down very prettily. Oh, I hadn’t understood her. She’d simply been wondering aloud whether either one of them, or myself for that matter, had known where she could get such an amount. She hadn’t meant anything by it, anything in the world. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions like that. We’d forget about it, should we? She took leave of me very amiably. She said, ‘I’ll see you again in two or three days. I’ll expect you then, shall I?’ That was the punch line right there. ‘I’ll expect you in two or three days.’

  “I told her I wasn’t coming near her again, to get that into her head. She just smiled at me very forgivingly and said, ‘Don’t drop me now, Ladd. I couldn’t bear that; I wouldn’t let you do such a thing.’ That ‘now’ got over what she wanted to say. She let me take the seed home with me, to give it time to sprout in the hothouse of my mind.

  “She put me through a night of hell. The next day I told Leila. I felt it was the only decent thing to do. They were two such beautiful kids. He was only a boy himself, one of those apple-cheeked English youngsters. I pleaded with her not to pay any attention, not to let it affect her. I said, ‘Don’t let it frighten either one of you. It’s nothing; it has nothing to do with you, believe me. Once or twice I haven’t been well; that’s all it amounts to. You’ve never been ill, have you? Well, that shows it has nothing to do with you. You’re going back to the other side, anyway; we probably won’t see one another again for years at a time. If you speak of this now you’ll only be creating something between you that doesn’t exist, that’s imaginary.’

  “It was hard work convincing her, God knows, but I finally got her to believe there was nothing to it, got her to promise me she wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t smash up her whole life for no
good reason. I didn’t tell her that I was going to pay for her immunity. I didn’t tell her of the woman. I only told her enough to make me feel I’d taken the woman’s weapon away from her, robbed her of any chance of ever using it again.

  “Then I broke my neck scraping together everything I could lay my hands on, and I went over there. That was about noon on the day she died. I had a hard time getting in, and when I did she acted frightened. Something seemed to have happened in the meantime that made her change her mind. I thought it was of me that she was frightened at the time, but now that I look back I’m not so sure that it wasn’t of something or of someone else. I told her that I’d brought a considerable part, if not all, of the money that she’d hinted she needed, and she backed away from it, wouldn’t touch it. She insisted I’d misunderstood her; she hadn’t meant anything like that; she’d only been talking at random. She was good and scared, whatever the reason. I tried to put it down there, and she forced it back on me, insisted I take it away with me again. The only explanation I could find was that she’d suddenly lost her courage, was afraid I was setting some trap for her, going to have her nabbed for blackmail if she accepted it.

  “I didn’t like the way she was acting, so I told her to think it over and I’d be back later. She couldn’t wait for me to go, and I could tell by her expression that she didn’t intend letting me in if I came back later, so when she wasn’t watching I did something to the door, put a little wedge in it, to make sure of getting in again if I came back.

  “When I got back to our own place Leila was standing there waiting for me. Just standing like a statue out in the middle of one of the rooms. One look at her face and I knew what had happened. She’d changed her mind and decided to tell him after all, but she’d waited too long; she’d been too late. He’d already heard it from some other source; he’d already been told.

  “I asked her if that was the kind he was, ready to shy away at the very first.

  “She smiled a little and said no, he wasn’t that kind. All he’d said to her from first to last was, ‘I would rather have heard it from you first, my dear.’ She said, ‘I released him. He didn’t want me to, but I had to. It was dead. It was gone already. He would’ve stuck, but I didn’t want him that way, just the outside of him. Mother and I will make the announcement, Ladd. Love is like an eggshell, isn’t it? It can never be put together again.’

  “I never saw Leila shed a tear, or mope, or wilt. She held her head up. Then in a little while, a month or two afterward, she went away on a long cruise down South America way. She’ll never love again, I know.

  “Two lives smashed up. He threw his away flying for the Chinese a few months later.

  “Anyway, that day, that day it happened, I went back there again. I didn’t have much trouble guessing what the ‘other source’ was he’d received his information from. There’d been some flaw in timing, some slip-up that she hadn’t intended. I thought I could understand now why she’d been so frightened the first time. I’d warned her what I’d do if she did that to me, and I went there to do it.”

  “You went there intending to kill her?”

  “I went there to see that she stopped living. I would have killed her if there’d been twenty witnesses in the room.”

  I couldn’t stand it; my chest was going up and down so. “And——?”

  He laughed a little, bitterly. “She was dead when I got in there. Somebody’d beat me to it. She was lying there on the floor with a pillow over her. I bent over her and pushed back my cuff, like when you touch something unclean, and put my hand on her heart to make sure. She was dead all right. The way I wanted her to be. So I straightened up again and I tipped my hat to whoever it was had done it, for saving me the trouble, and I went out and closed the door after me and left her there just the way she was. Her cat got out, I remember, along with me. Even her cat wouldn’t stay with her.”

  “So you didn’t kill her.”

  “I would have, but I didn’t have the chance.”

  A deep sigh drifted from me; I wasn’t aware of it myself until it was gone. So deep it never seemed to end.

  He said, “I wouldn’t ask anyone else but you to believe that, but it’s the truth.”

  I believed it. Yes, to the ones we love, in a room alone like this, we tell the truth.

  I felt my thumb go down on the plunger, almost as if of its own volition. The slight hum we had become used to faded away. There was a long silence. I felt like a spent swimmer who has reached the shore, is incapable of further movement, lies there amid the debris of his recent struggle.

  I raised my eyes and cast them around me, in strange first-time glimpses, as at a new scene that I hadn’t seen until now. I wondered what made the lights seem brighter than before all at once. Why, look, they shone; they sparkled. My heart was like a cork bobbing around in champagne, it was so light. The silly thing, it was trying to fly up through my throat with a pop. And where was that music coming from? Ghost trumpets all at once sounding allegrettos. Maybe it wasn’t there, but just the same Harry James would have been jealous.

  He didn’t do it; he didn’t do it; he didn’t do it!

  He’d been very quiet for a long time. His hand felt very heavy on me. I moved it a little, and it started to drop of its own weight. I caught it in time and eased it down gently the rest of the way. Then I disengaged myself and stood up.

  I stood looking down at him for a minute. Then I moved slowly away. I put my hand on the lid of the cabinet, let it linger there a moment. Then I drew it away.

  “You’re getting out of here,” I ordered myself sullenly. “You’re getting out of here, hear it?”

  He shifted a little to a more comfortable position now that he was freed of me.

  “Do you want another drink?” I said softly.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he looked at me in transient awareness. “Sweetheart, I’m so sleepy. May I take a little nap here? Just for a little while? I’ll go later. Put something over me, sweetheart, and I won’t be in your way.”

  His eyes dropped closed again.

  I walked quietly about. I picked up the thing or two I had, from here, from there, unhurriedly, and dropped them in the cheap, lightweight little case I’d originally had with me in the hotel room for scenic effect. I stood it by the door and went back toward him again.

  I hate writing notes. But I didn’t want him to wait too long. He might think I was coming back. And I never was. Just—

  Good-by, my dear.

  You never knew me.

  I never knew you.

  I left the light on so he wouldn’t be too lonely when he woke up. He’d be lonely enough, but at least he wouldn’t be in the dark.

  His face was the last thing the light fell on as I eased the door closed, squeezing the light in there to a slit. I took that away with me. I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t seem to get rid of it, shake it loose. It stuck to my heart like flypaper.

  I came out into the night with my lightweight case in one hand, and I started walking down the street. I didn’t know where to. Just in one direction—away from there. Good and away. All the way away. Away from where there might have been love if I’d stayed any longer.

  9

  Columbus 4–0011 ……… McKee

  “MCKEE’S GONE OVER TO HIS CLUB. WON’T I DO JIST AS well instead?”

  I made myself sound cordial. “Well, almost. But not quite. By the way, I’ve forgotten. Won’t you tell me where it is?”

  “If you don’t know where it is, then you don’t know McKee, sister.”

  So the voice wasn’t a butler’s or he wouldn’t have dared call me that. My momentary vision of a pompous figure sitting puffing a cigar and drowsing over a newspaper in a bay window overlooking Fifth Avenue thinned away. A night club. Or, more likely still, some sort of social-political club where they played cards, that sort of thing.

  “Oh, I know McKee all right. He told me to ring him at the club. And I’ve lost the number. That’s why I r
ang him up here instead.”

  The voice said, “How’je get this number? He never gives this number to no one.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a way,” I said lightly.

  A change of voices took place. The new one was deeper in pitch, breezily ribald. “Whadd’ye looking for, a dancing job? Come over here and we’ll audition you.”

  So it was a night club. He’d said “his club.” He owned it, then.

  They were still having a good time with me, both voices. They were taking turns, displacing one another. “Yeah, c’mon over; until you’ve been auditioned by us you’ve never been auditioned at all.”

  The other voice cut in, “And bring your practice trunks.”

  I became a little dancer about town, hail fellow well met. It seemed to be about the best ground to meet them on. “Ah, please, boys, have a heart. You know how it is. A girl has to work. And there are so many of those darned places.”

  One voice asked the other in a confidential aside that still reached me, “Sh’I give it to her?”

  I couldn’t get the answer—that was still further aside—but I got the result. “Okay, it’s the Ninety Club.” Then a curious cackling chuckle that was somehow terrifying, almost simple-minded. “Now don’t say we never guv you nothing.” He actually said that in all seriousness: “guv”; I’d thought until now they only used it to parody illiteracy in comic strips and on the stage.

  Its actual street number was eighty-eight; I think the reason for this curious flaw in designation was that ninety took up less room, saved light tubing over the entrance.

  You went in the side way. A beetling-browed individual hanging around at the entrance, as though he had just emerged for a breath of air, pointed this out. “Looking for a job? Then you go round the alley and in through the second fire exit.”

  I went around the alley and in through the second fire exit. I knocked, and a disembodied hand pushed open the heavy metal slab without any accompanying face being interested enough to look out and see who it was. I went inside into semidarkness. A white gash stayed open behind me a moment or two; then the heavy metal slab went whongg! and closed it up.