The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  I continued to work at being charming. “I want to put it in myself. It’s my ring.”

  I put my hand on the dial, stood waiting in an attitude of trustful helplessness. “Tell me what I have to do.”

  For a moment his innate caution held out against his heart. He cast a brief look of sober speculation at me, hesitated almost unnoticeably.

  I opened my eyes a little. “I thought it was an engagement ring.”

  He raised my hand and put his lips to it in amends. “It is,” he said. “Wait a minute till I close the door.”

  He came back again.

  “I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you. Steady it so that little arrowhead points straight up first of all. That’s it. Now go around this way until you come to eleven——”

  He came back from seeing the last of them out.

  “Well, how’d you like it? What sort of a party did I give you? I’m glad you stayed to the end like you did; I was afraid you’d——”

  “It was my party. I couldn’t leave before all of them did.” I hooked a finger to an inadvertent yawn.

  “Tired? Shall I take you back now?”

  “I’m almost too tired to go back,” I said languidly. I hooked a finger to a second yawn. “It seems so much trouble to go all the way over——”

  An idea hit him, born of his solicitude. Or perhaps my yawns. “Say, you wouldn’t want to——? I don’t suppose you’d feel right about staying over here on account of me being in the place? Because if it weren’t for that——”

  I looked around me as if in sudden attentiveness to the proposal. “You know, that’s not such a bad——I don’t think I’d mind doing that at all, if I could only be sure you wouldn’t misunderstand me.”

  “How could I ever misunderstand anything you did?” he protested with an almost luminous sincerity. “That stage ended long ago with you and me. You shouldn’t say things like that to me. You ought to know me by now. You’d be as safe here in my place as you would back at your own.”

  “Then I think I will stay,” I acceded impulsively. “After all, we are engaged, and I’m too tired to care about the looks of it.”

  His bustling, enthusiastic reaction showed how complimented he felt by this mark of confidence I was showing him. There was a brief undercurrent of ordering and telephoning, and one of these prepared toilet kits containing everything necessary for the night arrived—I don’t know where he’d been able to obtain it at that hour, possibly from one of the hotels—within fifteen minutes.

  I took leave of him at the door of the room I was to grace. The last thing I said to him was, “Now you won’t do anything to make me regret this, will you?”

  I knew he wouldn’t. I could tell just by looking at him. He would as soon have thought of desecrating a church.

  To be worshiped, though I didn’t realize it at the moment, is a far more dangerous situation to be in than simply to be desired.

  “Pleasant dreams,” he said with abashed tactfulness, refraining even from kissing me, lest that seem to be an attempt at tilting the delicate balance between us.

  I heard him go back to “the boys.” I could hear him say, from where I was, as he went in, “Now listen, cut out the drinking, you two. There’s a lady staying here in the place tonight, and I don’t want her disturbed by you guys getting loud.”

  There wasn’t a sound. They knew enough not to smirk or say anything out of turn. They must have known him well. They must have known when he wasn’t kidding, when a thing was just what he claimed it was.

  First you steadied it so that the little arrowhead pointed straight up. Then around this way until you came to eleven——

  It came open quite easily. Quite easily and quite silently in the slumbering, plushy silence of the apartment.

  I shifted the boxed ring out of the way first, over to one side. Then I eased out a metal strongbox that stood at the back, careful not to scrape it against anything. I took it over to the table, tipped up the foresection of the pleated lid. Bonds, whole packets of them. They weren’t his; they were registered in the name of Michael J. Dillon. Under them an assortment of legal papers, deeds, or liens, or something; I couldn’t make out. I riffed through them rapidly. I didn’t want any of them. I closed it up again. There was a smaller fitted-in box in the upper compartment of the safe. I took that out, brought it over in turn.

  Currency, tight-packed little bricks of it, taped in strips of manila paper with the amounts or denominations serialized on them, the way banks do. I disregarded them. Under them, sheaves of clipped-together checks, perforation-canceled. I rippled through them, scanning the payees.

  Her name suddenly flickered up at me as I went on too far past. I toiled back to it again, retrieved it. “Mia Mercer.” Two hundred and fifty dollars. Salary or something? There was nothing there at sight——

  Suddenly I went into reverse, crushed the lid flat on them, started the box hectically back into the safe. I misjudged the upper slot, couldn’t slip it in right the first time, had to withdraw it partly and aim it over again.

  I was too late.

  “Mr. McKee won’t like that,” he said in a sort of grieved remonstrance from the doorway.

  I’d drawn the door even to the frame, but I hadn’t fitted it in tight, to avoid a possible betraying latch click. Now it was wide again. It was the one called Kittens. In a dark flannel robe, fists to pockets.

  The bleached skin of my face felt like cardboard, it was so stiff.

  “My ring is in there; I wanted to see if it was all right. I had a bad dream just now and——”

  He was simple-minded. But dangerous and shrewd as only the simple-minded can be. “But there it is in front of you, and it’s those other things you were taking out. I watched you through the crack of the door first.”

  I died a little more than I had already.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. You know how curious women are. Don’t—don’t tell him about it.”

  Instantly I realized what a bad mistake that was.

  His face twisted into a grin. He came in and returned the door to where it had been before, flush with the frame. “Okay, it’ll jist be something between you and me.” And suddenly that high-pitched cackle that I’d heard the very first day of all on the telephone wrenched jarringly from him, stopped short again.

  He came over close. I pushed the safe lid back into true, trying to efface the marks of my own guilt.

  He was looking at me, not the safe.

  There was something wrong about him. I’d known that all along. I couldn’t tell just what it was. Something that went beyond just ordinary cruelty. I remembered now that I’d seen him one day. There was no time to review that now. Suddenly he’d caught me to him.

  “Don’t you know what McKee’ll do to you if I tell him you tried to kiss me? Don’t—please—ah, please, don’t! Don’t let’s have any trouble.”

  “I ain’t trying to kiss you. Look, am I trying to kiss you? I don’t like kissing myself.”

  “Then what’re you holding me like this for? Let me——”

  “Just let me twist your hand a little, like this. I’ll stop if it hurts you. Ever since I first saw you I’ve been dying to——”

  I threshed around a little. “Sh! Somebody’ll hear us. Don’t!”

  “Jist the skin on the back of your wrist, where it’s loose; the wrong way around, like this. Don’t do that now; don’t scream!”

  I screamed more in stark terror of the pain to come than at any pain he’d actually caused me yet. I knew now what was the matter with him. He was a pain worshiper. Something out of the nether world of twisted impulses. Cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Cruelty that was not punishment but love.

  He was becoming enraged. “I told you not to scream, di’n’t I? When anyone tries to stop me like that I can’t stop at all. Now I can’t stop, myself! Now you’re gonna get it!”

  I’d never seen anyone hit so hard before. He went into the table, took that with him until it had over
turned, and then toppled backward over it, legs bucking briefly in air, to lie there floundering on his back and with it partly over him.

  McKee didn’t go after him, continue the assault, as ordinary rage would have dictated; he held back, froze there where he’d first struck him. The hardness of cement. The implacable steam roller pulsing in leashed motion.

  He said to me in a breath-choked voice, “Get out of the room here; hurry up. I’m going to shoot him as soon as I come back with my gun, and I don’t want you to see it.”

  Then he turned to accomplish it in cold blood, as if he’d said: “I’m going out to get a handkerchief.”

  The palpitating huddled mass in the corner said, “She was going through your safe—I caught her——” Then ran out of further breath.

  The other one had come in belatedly.

  He said to him with a complete lack of emotion that was almost insane: “Get me my gun, Skeeter. You know where it is.”

  “You can shoot me, but it’s true, McKee; she was going through your safe.” Blood peered at the corner of his lip.

  “Did he see anything like that?” He was waiting for me to say no. That was all I had to do, and it wouldn’t have gone any farther.

  Something locked in me. I knew he’d kill that man within the next thirty seconds if I said no. That was all I had to say. I couldn’t, couldn’t bring myself to. One’s better instincts can show up at the damnedest times, to one’s undoing.

  He repeated it, phrased even more prejudicially. “He didn’t see anything like that, did he?”

  Then suddenly it was no longer necessary to say anything. The wind had subtly changed direction. I’d lost my chance.

  “Look, boss,” Skeeter purred almost inaudibly. His hand was on the safe front; he’d tilted it out from the frame, showing it to be unlocked.

  Then after a while he closed it again.

  “He doesn’t know the combination,” McKee murmured. “Neither of them do.” He didn’t say it to me. You couldn’t tell whom he was saying it to. To himself, maybe, in a sort of sad confirmation.

  He didn’t say anything more than that; he let it go at that. But I could sense a slow change taking place in him; he was drifting away from me; I was losing him, like someone standing on a shore loses a boat carried out on the tide, and I couldn’t do anything to stop him.

  “I’ll take you back to your room,” he said to me. His voice was still intimate, considerate; there was still that special quality left in it he’d used for me alone.

  I slipped my arm through his and I turned and walked out beside him. I saw his lower lip trembling a little and I was afraid to look any more after that.

  Halfway there I suddenly stopped, planted both hands against him in appeal. “McKee, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t see anything I shouldn’t have.”

  “Not even about the Sabbatino affair?” he said dryly.

  “No.”

  “Or the stuff about Conway?”

  “No. No. Nothing but some bonds belonging to a Michael J. Dillon, and I hardly gave them a second——”

  He’d trapped me. And I knew that was the name he’d wanted; he’d only made the others up as he went along.

  “Even the middle initial,” he mused wryly. “You know I could be sent up for that, don’t you, if it ever came out? You know that Michael J. Dillon, ‘Crooked Judge Dillon,’ the ‘Corkscrew Judge,’ as they called him, disappeared eleven years ago, and I could be accused of something even worse just as well as not?”

  I’d heard of him. Everyone in the country had. The “Michael J.” had thrown me off.

  He’d spoken quite gently, in a tone of indulgent remonstrance, but somehow I knew, in unshakable premonition, I’d signed my own death warrant.

  “I’d never tell anyone on you.”

  “I know you wouldn’t.” He took my hands, which had been fastened on him all this while, and stripped them off like empty gloves. He wasn’t obvious about it; there was simply an inattentiveness there, as if to say, “What are these things doing on me?”

  He held the door open for me, to show me as a silent order where to go in.

  “Good night, Angel,” he said caustically. “Angel in Black.”

  I was badly frightened as he closed the door on me. I crouched there listening. I couldn’t hear anything. I hadn’t expected to. They must have been talking it over quietly among themselves, if they were talking at all. Or maybe they weren’t; maybe he was just doing the talking within himself and they were waiting silently to be told what the outcome was to be.

  Then suddenly I heard a morsel of consolation from one of them. He had perhaps come into a position, just then, from which I could hear that and no more, opposite the room opening or something.

  “Don’t take it that way, boss.”

  From him no answer.

  I could feel the blood leaving my face there in the blue dark. The verdict must have gone against me or he would not be mourning. I wanted to rush out then and there, throw myself at him in one desperate final appeal, before judgment had been inalterably passed. I knew it was too late for that. It wouldn’t do any good. The idol had toppled; it couldn’t be put back on its pedestal again. A remark Ladd had once made came back to me. “Love is like an eggshell; it can never be put together again.”

  A further long, breathless wait. Then suddenly another bowdlerized remark reached me. “The place on Long Island.” It was as though somebody were making a suggestion to him.

  The suggestion must have been taken up. There were a number of blurred, diverging treads off at a distance, as though they were in the act of dispersal. From nearer at hand, but in a guarded undertone, I heard a voice ask: “Are you coming with us?” Again I failed to detect the answer; perhaps he had just shaken his head.

  Finally there was the snap of a light switch somewhere immediately adjacent to the room I was in, and then the elliptic remark: “—just get my things on a minute.”

  An alarm bell was ringing in me wildly, hurting my chest with its brazen clamor. “I’ve got to get out of here!” the voice of inner panic shrieked above it. “Oh, how am I going to get out of here?”

  The bell stilled suddenly; its clapper hung breathless. He had just knuckled the door.

  I spread-eagled myself against the door in a violent convulsive movement, arms out at their widest. “Don’t come in; I’m—I haven’t got much on!”

  “I won’t come in. I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.”

  I opened it on a crack, kept back behind it, as if afraid to look at him.

  “I’m sending you home with the boys.”

  “Home,” I thought; “home into the ground.”

  “I thought you said I could——”

  “I know, but I have to leave; I just got word, and you wouldn’t want to stay here alone. I think it’s better if you go back now, don’t you?”

  What could I say? He could have come in and dragged me out bodily if I tried to resist. “Just—just give me a few minutes. I’m all undressed. I’ll have to——”

  He flung them in at me with a sort of contempt. The night was so long; death was so sure, I suppose. “Don’t take too long, baby. The boys are waiting, and I need them for something else—afterward.”

  What a horrid word that was, “afterward”; it seemed to give off vibrations, like a knell, long after he’d turned and gone away again.

  I ran across the room to the triple casement. Frustration eddied through me like a form of nausea as I stopped short by them. We were so high up that perspective became a crazy quilt, lost all coherence. That string of beaded lights trailing across the dark was not Manhattan any more but the Long Island shore across the East River. The East River Drive, on the near side of the channel, seemed closer at hand than the concealed crevice hidden somewhere deep underfoot that was Central Park West. To scream out was to launch my voice futilely across the night at Astoria, not toward the base of this monstrous monolith.

  I tore myself away. There was a ba
th to my room, and I went in there. Then there was another door that led out on the other side of it again. It had been locked on my side when I was still a goddess. I unlocked it now, listened, drew in daring through raptly parted lips, cautioned it open, and looked out.

  The room beyond was dark and unoccupied. For a moment hope shot up again. There was only one further door other than my mode of entrance. Only one way out of it. It must be through there or not at all. But as I reached it and softly pared it away, knob crushed to silence, a crevice of light ignited along it, like a noiseless but livid fuse suddenly set off.

  Hope went down again with the sickening suction of a whirlpool draining through me. A figure in shorts and undershirt was revealed, foot to chair, attaching a garter to his leg. Even before I could withdraw the vignette had altered, he was moving so fast. The leg went down, and there was the flurry of an outspread shirt, sleeves without hands sticking up in air like an X-shaped scarecrow. A muffled voice said to someone, presumably in a room beyond, “Bring a little chloroform along, in case we have trouble with her in the car.”

  I smoothed the door closed again, stealthily as I had dislodged it. Its silent docility of hinge and latch had been my only salvation.

  “Like a rat in a trap,” kept beating through my brain; “like a rat in a trap.”

  There was a telephone in the room I was in. As I widened the bath door to re-enter, light fanned out, caught it for me, pinned it against the wall like a beetle, licorice-black, glistening black.

  How could I hope to use it undetected, with just a flimsy door between me and him? The first word out of my mouth would resound in the magnifying silence in here.

  I crushed myself against the wall, as if trying to smother it with my entire body. Such a loud clatter the release of the hook gave. Sh-h! The police? I didn’t know; I wasn’t sure of whom I was calling until I already held it cupped to my lips, like a sort of chalice of salvation. I only knew I needed help, wanted it fast, in the worst way.

  I thought she’d never get on, answer the signal, and I daren’t touch that hook again.