The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  And then, when she had, suddenly it seemed to come by itself; it was my heart speaking out in its fright to the only one it remembered.

  10

  Butterfield 9–8019 Again (and hurry, operator, hurry!)

  A SLEEPY VOICE GOT ON, ONE OF THE SERVANTS.

  He couldn’t hear me, I was so strangled with caution. Oh, the fool, he was killing me! I had to do it all over again.

  “Quick—Ladd! Only Ladd, not you! Only Ladd will do! Don’t stand there——”

  “I know, miss, but it’s after three o’clock. If you’ll only give me an idea of who you are I’ll see whether——”

  “Tell him Alberta. This is an emergency. Tell him to come quickly to the phone if he loves me. If he ever loved me.”

  I didn’t know what I was saying any more. Already some of my life had gone by, and nobody could bring it back.

  If he loved me; if he’d ever loved me. Oh, he must have, all right, to come so fast. I could hear the floundering rush of unshod feet and something go over, like a chair that had been in the way. I could hear the fright in his voice, needling sleep to pieces.

  “What is it? Where are you? What’s happened?”

  And like the squeaking of a trapped little mouse in her hole, “Sh! Listen carefully. I have only a minute. I’m in an apartment on Central Park West. They’re going to do something to me. Some men. They’re taking me out of here in just a minute. Ladd, find some way of helping me. I have only you to turn to——”

  “The police. I’ll get them there right away. I’ll come over with them my——”

  “That’ll be too late. They won’t get here in time. I won’t be here any more. They’ll deny I ever was. No one’ll ever find out where——”

  It’s hard to think fast when your heart has just received an uppercut. Fast and clear. He did it. He had to. “Where are they taking you, got any idea at all?”

  “I heard one of them mention Long Island, but I can’t be sure.”

  “That means the Queensborough Bridge, nine chances out of ten. Where is the place you’re in right now, Park West and where?”

  “In the upper Sixties.”

  “They’ll take you through the crosstown cut in the park at Sixty-seventh, then. That’s quicker than going down to Fifty-ninth and over, no lights. Maybe I can cut in on them——”

  “Oh, Ladd, don’t miss me, whatever you do. They may hold me out there for days, or I may never get there Ladd, his car—the license plate is 072-027. Try and remember that.”

  I heaved, elongated as if I were trying to climb up the bare wall.

  “Ladd, he’s knocking at the door, inside in the other room. They’re ready for me——”

  Even having him just on the phone, all the way across the city from me, was better than nothing at all.

  “Ladd, Ladd, are you still there? Oh, don’t leave me——”

  He was already gone. He hadn’t waited to hang up.

  I got back to the bath outlet on the far side just as McKee re-entered the room from the other door. His face was dangerous for a minute, as if threatening something imminent, here and now, because of the delay. Then it smoothed somewhat. “Are you ready?”

  I moved across the threshold ahead of him. “Why are you sending me home in disgrace like this?”

  He didn’t seem to hear me.

  I tried once more, between my room and the one where the two men were waiting for us. “McKee, you wouldn’t let them do anything to me, would you?”

  This time he gave me the oddest smile. I could translate its message so clearly: “There was a soft spot there, in that place, until a little while ago. You’re just too late; it’s sealed up now. But how well you remember its location, don’t you?”

  We came into the room and he said to them, “She’s a little frightened, boys; don’t drive too fast.”

  If I hadn’t known already, it was a dead giveaway the way the two of them flanked me. They didn’t exactly stand one on each side of me like sentries, but somehow they were there, closer than they’d ever walked beside me yet.

  Suddenly his voice caught up with us, pulled us back like a lariat. “Wait a minute. I want to say good night to her. Wait outside there.”

  I went calmly back toward him; they went on. It was the strangest thing I’d ever witnessed. And though I was a participant, I still could witness it, for I wasn’t involved. How could I have been?

  His arms went around me; he strained me to him. I turned my head aside, and he missed my mouth.

  “Good night,” he said huskily, “good night.”

  I’d been yellow until now, all the way through, from the moment he’d first trapped me at the safe, whining and whimpering. Now I could feel a cold, low-burning flame of contempt licking through me, fusing a little courage into me, stiffening my back against him. I was glad. I’d have that much to look back on afterward, at least, no matter what happened after I left here.

  I smiled as his arms fell away, releasing me. “Who gets the ring now?”

  “Oh—wait, take it with you. I want you to have it on you.”

  He got it out and put it on my finger.

  I let him.

  I turned and went back toward where they were waiting, just past the doorway.

  It had been a little loose from the beginning. I gave my fingers a disdainful downward fling, as though ridding them of some clot of mud or dirt that had adhered. It flew off downward, like a raindrop, and lay there winking in the plushy carpet nap.

  Our eyes met for the last time in this life, his and mine.

  I stepped on it, ground it under my foot with supreme contempt, as I moved on.

  “Come on, gentlemen,” I said, “take the lady home.”

  Skeeter had me in the back beside him, Kittens at the wheel. We skimmed through the Sixty-seventh Street transverse, the park a rippling black desolation on either side of us. They were going fast even for that unobstructed and unfrequented thoroughfare at three-thirty in the morning; they wanted to get me over the bridge quickly, I guess.

  I was holding the cigarette they’d given me—as executioners are wont to do—fast in my mouth without benefit of hands. It shed sparks backward on the buffeting wind of our progress.

  We hadn’t spoken, any of us. What was there to say?

  As we neared the Fifth Avenue exit on a long, slow curve that hid the roadway ahead from us, a stalled cab came into sight, hugging the westbound lane, vis-à-vis to us, motionless there where it had no right to be. This was just clear of the last overpass; that is, before we reached it. These overpasses, carrying lengthwise park-roadways overhead, form tunnels for all practical purposes, wherever they occur. Every New Yorker is familiar with them.

  The cab’s headlights, whether accidentally or intentionally, flared up as we came within range of them, drenched us in a momentary spray of light, like a mist of calcium. While it splashed over us it must have been vivid enough to catch our license number on the wing, if that was the purpose, though in another instant we had torn through it and plunged into the tunnel. Three long, spaced blasts of the cab horn, I noticed, chased us into the tunnel and beat us through to the other end, as sound does even the fastest-winging car.

  There was no time to analyze all this; before one could it was already all a terminated fact. I had thought, for a moment, that it might be he in the cab, but there was no one to be seen in the rear of it, only the driver up forward.

  The tunnel ended and we came out into the light, the last lap of the defile continuing to unwind semicircularly before us. Suddenly the black shape of a lightless car impinged itself into mid-thoroughfare dead ahead of us, gliding out in low, slantwise to the right of way, narrowing it to a bottleneck that every moment grew slimmer.

  I heard Skeeter scream something: “Look out, he’s cutting us off down there!” Kittens slewed us over, trying to get through between the curbing and the impediment while there was still time, before the space had closed entirely.

  The offender immediat
ely and effortlessly ebbed back again, as though it had been but teetering on open brakes, but it was too late to do us any good; all it could ensure now was to avoid a catastrophic fender-to-side collision between the two machines. We were already off course. The two inside wheels had struck up onto the pedestrian lane with a sickening pitch. A moment later there was a series of dragging concussions as we skimmed the retaining wall.

  He stopped us short of overturning by a miracle of adroit brake graduation, and we lurched motionless, now on the far side of the erratic jaywalking car that had caused all the trouble.

  The three of us sat there dazed for a moment from the cushioned buffeting we had received. Kittens was leaning his face down upon the wheel, cushioned by both arms, his senses evidently doubly dislocated by this shaking up coming so soon after McKee’s frightful blow.

  “Son of a——! Did you see what he tried to do?” Skeeter muttered numbly.

  Suddenly the door on my side, which was the only one of the two still usable, wrenched open, and Ladd was standing out there beside it afoot. I recognized him even in the dark.

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I made an abortive movement to lurch out through the opening and join him, then swayed back into place again, like something dangling on a loose string.

  “I can’t, Ladd; he’s holding a gun against me!” I croaked hoarsely.

  “Stay where you are, you out there; don’t come any nearer!” Skeeter warned him over my shoulder.

  The cigarette was in my hand. I don’t know how I came to do it; I don’t think I would have found the nerve if I’d thought about it consciously. I didn’t; I just acted on instinct alone. His hand was against my side, just over the hip. I simply swept my outside hand around, under the arm on that side, and burrowed the live cigarette deep into the veined back of his hand.

  He barked like a seal and snatched it back, and the gun fell loose onto the seat. I sprang down and was already on the ground beside Ladd. I think my abrupt movement dislodged it even farther, and it fell from there down to the floor, but there wasn’t time to see exactly what happened.

  Ladd closed in and sent his fist crashing through into the open side of the car. It caught Skeeter off balance, bending down to retrieve the gun, his face thrust forward to meet the blow almost gratuitously.

  I saw the face there one moment, then the fist, then just empty space under the car ceiling. The shank of Kittens’ leg was coming out through the front-door opening, without the rest of him showing yet. I turned and ran back along the walled-in chute, back along the way we’d just come. “Up this way, quick! I’ve got a taxi waiting at the other end of the tunnel,” I’d dimly heard him say.

  “Look out, Ladd, they’re going to shoot before we can get in there!”

  “Keep in front of me,” he said tersely. He could have outdistanced me; he didn’t, of course—hung back, propelling me forward with an arm about my waist. We were like that statuette group of shepherd and shepherdess fleeing before the storm. Angel in a high wind.

  A moment later the shot came. There was something unreal about it even after I’d heard it. A shot right in the middle of a New York traffic by-pass. It wasn’t very loud. I’d thought they were louder than that.

  The first car, his, provided us with a measure of shelter, once we’d rounded it and streaked for the tunnel entrance up ahead. But I could hear their feet beating up fast on the other side of it.

  “They’re coming after us. We’ll never get in——”

  A truck had slowed on the eastbound lane, blocked in turn by the snarl we had wrought between the lot of us. I screamed out toward it at random as we raced by: “Stop those men; they’re trying to hold us up!”

  A deep masculine voice blared accommodatingly from the towering driver’s seat: “Police! Holdup! Poli-i-ice!” A moment later I heard what sounded like an empty pop bottle on the wing strike something with a bell-like bounce and shatter on the ground. There was the sound of a long, dragging fall. One pair of footfalls kept pounding relentlessly on after us.

  We were nearly at the tunnel mouth now. “There he is; he backed up like I told him!” Ladd gasped. A red taillight glowed out in welcome to us. He flung me inside just as the second shot came, and I landed sprawled on hands and knees. There was a dull, whacking sound from some part of the cab structure, as though somebody had hit it with a stick. He clung to the outside of the door handle as it swept off with us into the gloom, then finally floundered in after me. “Get us out of here!” I heard him grunt to the driver. “Just keep going and never mind looking around!”

  A police whistle was starting to blow, faint and querulous, somewhere out on Fifth Avenue, now that it was all over.

  I crawled up onto the seat by means of my hands. Then I just lolled against him while he panted down into my hair from overhead.

  I don’t think we said anything as far west as Amsterdam Avenue, two blocks beyond the park.

  Then I said, “Did that really happen to us? I’ll never doubt anything like that I read in the papers again——”

  He said, “Where do you want me to take you? Back to my place?”

  I said, “No, they’ll find your car and they’re liable to come after me there. Take me back to my old place; I’ll be all right there. They don’t know about it. That is, if it’s still available.”

  “It’s still there waiting for you,” he said. “I made sure that it would be. I wouldn’t let them dismantle it. I’ve been going around there nearly every day, hoping that sooner or later you’d——”

  “And now I am,” I sighed with inexpressible content.

  “For good,” he added, low.

  It would be light in a little while. New York was a night older. I couldn’t hate the town. I forgave it. It was easy to, with him there with me. Tender there with me.

  “Over it now? Better?”

  “Over it now. Better,” I answered with heavy-lidded eyes.

  “How’d you happen to get mixed in with such a bunch in the first place?”

  “I was trying to find evidence that might help Kirk.”

  “Kirk? Who’s Kirk?”

  “My husband.” I wasn’t watching what I was saying.

  Then I thought, “Oh, he may as well know now as any other time; he’s got to sooner or later.” I was too tired.

  “I’m Kirk Murray’s wife. He’s under sentence, you know, and I’ve been trying to help him; that’s all it is. I found his name—McKee’s—I found all your names in a little book of hers, and I’ve been going down the list——”

  I saw I’d hurt him, so I stopped.

  “Then it was sort of a police assignment—on your own?”

  “Yes, but——Don’t look at me that way; don’t feel that way about it,” I said contritely.

  “Then that was all you wanted with me too. I was just a name on your list. I was just a suspect and you were just an informer. Then I didn’t really meet you, know you, live you——”

  We both fell silent. What could I say to that? We both stopped talking, and I thought perhaps it was better so. I saw I’d hurt him very badly, more irreparably than I knew.

  He’d been holding a small glass in his hand for some time before. That was the first sign of anything, that glass. His face hadn’t changed; his body hadn’t moved yet. There was a crunching sound, like someone crushing nuts with his teeth. A little white stuff like coarse sugar trickled out of the hollowed curve of the hand he’d been holding it in. Then the brown liquor dripped out. It slowed, attenuated, changed slowly to red. Became drops instead of a continuous line.

  I said, “Oh, you’ve——”

  He was looking at it now himself, without seeming to understand what it was. Then he looked up at me, as if to ask me what it was. His eyes looked funny; they weren’t right.

  First a trembling started. Then retching. That went down deeper than the throat. Deeper than the chest. The stomach. Down through the very legs. Until—it was all of him.

  He bolted to
his feet, as if his first impulse was to get out of here. Then he checked himself. He leaned against something, as if he couldn’t make it. Then he straightened again. Leaned again and straightened again.

  I was on my own feet now. “What is it? What’s happening to you?”

  He kept doubling and straightening again; it was hideous.

  “You brought this on,” he heaved. “You should have loved me. Should have loved me, as I did—you. The shock. You brought this on. You brought it on——”

  I tried to help him. “Lean on me. Let me get you over here to——”

  “And I said she was low! Even she left me some guard against herself at least; you crawled into my blood, into my brain. Now I can’t get you out and I can’t have you either. Well, I can get you out, if I have to. There’s one sure way that never fails.”

  Before I realized what was happening he was trying to get at my throat. But something was the matter with his reflexes; they were faulty. Fluctuations, like a sort of alternating current passing through him, would interrupt the clutch of his arms each time; yet they kept coming back, coming back, as I retreated before him, at first only fighting him off passively, then, as necessity slowly mounted in me, struggling more and more strenuously against him.

  “Don’t——Not you, Ladd! No, not you! Ladd, you’re ill; you don’t know what you’re doing——”

  Foam was suddenly flecking his lips.

  “I’m ill,” he said in a terrible, hacking voice, “but I know what I’m doing. I’m going to”—and then he lunged for my throat again—”if I die a minute later myself.”

  He had me pressed back against some sharp outline—I think it was that cabinet Flood had brought into the place—and the whole thing rocked in company with our combined weights.

  I tried to reason with him, even at this pass. I don’t know; terror wasn’t absolute, as it had been with Mordaunt or even McKee. It could never be with him. “Don’t—haven’t I been through enough for one night?” The thing gave behind me, shunted aside, and we were wedged in there, in a little space. A little space, but big enough for dying in.