shrugged it off, like if she hadn’t gotten in that time, it didn’t matter because she was going to sooner or later. She smiled and said, ‘Some other time, then,‘and started off down the street, just the way she came walking. It was funny, too, dressed up the way she was. I watched her as ‘ far as the corner, and I didn’t see her call no cab Dr nothing, just walked along like it was ten in the morning. Then she turned the comer and disappeared. O’Connor, the cop, he passed her coming up this way, and I even seen him turn and look after her. She sure was a looker.”
“Just a ship that passes in the night,” remarked Bliss. “Well, one sure thing, it was some kind of stall. If I didn’t know her—and I don’t, from your description—and she didn’t know me, what was it all about? What the hell was she after? Maybe she had me mixed up with somebody else.”
“No, she had your name right, even your first name.
‘Mr. Ken BUss,’ she asked for when she first come in.”
“And she didn’t drive up, either, you say?”
“No, just came walking along from nowhere, then went walking away again just like she came. Funniest thing I ever seen.”
They talked it over a few moments longer, man to man, with the typical freemasonry of two-thirty in the morning. “Aw, you run into a lot of funny things like that from time to time, livin’ in a big city like this. You’re bound to. I know, Mr. Bliss, I seen enough of them myself, in my Une of work. Nuts that think they know you, and nuts that think they love you, and nuts that think you done something to them. You’d be surprised what bugs and mental cases there are walking around loose—”
“So now maybe I’ve got one of ‘em fastened on me. That’s a cheerful thought to take up to bed,” Bliss grimaced.
He turned away, readied the elevator panel. He flashed Charlie a mock-apprehensive backward grin just before it closed on him. “It’s getting so a young guy ain’t safe anymore living by himself. I think Til get myself married off and get hold of some protection!”
But the thought that he took up with him was of Marjorie—not of anyone else.
Corey showed up at his door at eight-thirty, long before he’d even begun to get ready, the night of Marjorie’s engagement party. “What the hell,” Bliss said with the pretended disgruntlement one shows only a close friend, “I only just got back from eating; I haven’t even shaved yet.”
“I called y’at the office at four-thirty. Where the hell were you?” Corey barked back at him with equally familiar brusqueness.
He came in and appropriated the best chair, swung one leg up over its arm. He got rid of his hat by aiming it at the windowsill. It missed but stayed on a low book rack underneath.
Corey wasn’t a bad-looking sort of fellow, without being decorative about it. Taller than Bliss, a little leaner—or maybe just seeming so because he was taller—and with dark brown hair and heavy brows. He tried to be man-about-townish in an Esquire sort of way, but it was just a veneer; you could tell he was a primitive underneath that. Every once in a while a crack would show, and you’d get a startHng gUmpse of jungle through it. Veneer or not, he worked hard at it. Any party you ever went to he was there, holding up a door frame, hand-warming a glass. Any girl you ever mentioned him to, she knew him, too—or had a friend who did. His technique was a head-on attack, a blitzkrieg, and it had succeeded in the unlikeliest quarters. Some of the haughtiest, most unbending shoulders in town had been pinned to the mat, if the truth had only been known.
He started rubbing his hands with a fine show of malicious glee. “Well, tonight you get hooked! Tonight you get branded! Feel like running out yet? You bet you do! You’re all white around the gills—”
“Think I’m like you?”
Corey trip-hammered a thumb against his own chest. “You should be like me. This is one guy they don’t pin down to a formal promise!”
“If you’d bathed oftener, maybe you’d get more offers,” Bliss grunted disparagingly.
“And make them have a hard time finding me when the lights go out? That wouldn’t be fair. So where were you this afternoon? I wanted to eat with you.”
“I was out getting the headlight. Where d’you suppose?” He opened a dresser drawer, took out a little cubed box, snapped the lid. “What d’you think of it?”
Corey took it out of the plush, breathed on it admiringly. “Say, is that a rock!”
“It ought to be. It threw me pul-lenty.” Bliss pitched it back in the drawer with an air of indifference that was admirably assumed, started unhitching his suspenders. “I’m going in and take a shower. You know where the Scotch is.”
He came in again in something under twenty minutes, complete down to bat-wing tie. “Who was the dame?” Corey asked idly, looking up from a newspaper.
“What dame?”
“The phone rang just now while you were in there, and some girl asked for you. I could tell it wasn’t one of your old pals by the way she spoke. ‘Does Mr. Kenneth Bliss live there?’ I told her you were busy and asked if there was anything I could do. Not another word, just hung up.”
“Strange.”
Corey swivelled his drink. “Maybe it was one of these
women society reporters looking for stuff on your engagement.”
“No, they usually tackle the girl end of it. Marjorie’s people have already given out all the dope there is, anyway. I wonder if it was her?” he said after a moment’s thought
“Who’s her?”
Bliss grinned. “I haven’t told you, but I think I’ve got a secret admirer. Funny thing happened not long ago. One night when I was out a beautiful girl tried her level best to get into the apartment here. The doorman told me about it afterward. She wouldn’t give her name or anything. He knows most of the crowd I used to hang out with—you know how doormen get after a while—and he was pretty sure he’d never seen her before. She was all togged out in evening clothes, looked like real carriage trade to his practiced eye. But she didn’t drive up to the door, that was the strangest part of it; just came strolling along the street from nowhere, dressed to kill like that.
“He told me she opened her bag, pretending to hunt for a lipstick or something, and let him get a good look at a hundred-dollar bill floating around on top of everything else. And the way she acted gave him a pretty good idea it would have been his for the asking if he’d just opened my door with his passkey and let her in.”
Corey looked skeptical. “You mean a doorman is going to turn down a chance to make a hundred dollars that easy? He’s bulling you.”
“I don’t know about that. The amount is so fantastic in itself that, to me at any rate, it bears the earmark of truth. If he was just making the thing up, he would have been more likely to make it ten or twenty dollars.”
“Well, what’d he do—let her in?”
“I could tell by the way he spoke that the hundred darned near got him; he was just on the point of bringing her up and letting her in. Only he thought he’d better try
her out first, see if she really knew me, before he went ahead and admitted her. So he strung her along with a fake description that was just the opposite of mine in every respect, and she fell for it, said yes, that was the man—proving she’d never seen me before in her life.
“That finished it, of course; he was afraid to take a chance after that. He pretended he didn’t have the key or something and eased her out as tactfully as he could. She was too well dressed for him to get snotty with. When she saw it was no go, she just smiled, shrugged and went sauntering down the street again.”
Corey was leaning interestedly forward by this time. “And are you sure you don’t recognize her from his description?”
“Dead sure. And as I just told you, she didn’t recognize me, either.”
“I wonder what she was after?”
“She wasn’t out to clean the apartment, that’s a cinch, because she was willing to pay a hundred dollars just for the privilege of getting in here, and anyone who can get a hundred dollars’ worth
out of this place is a magician.”
Corey nodded judicious agreement on that point.
Bliss stood up. “Let’s go.” He smiled nervously. “I like everything about marriage except the functions leading up to it—such as tonight’s.”
“The part I like best,” said Corey, “is not having it happen in the first place.”
They were out in the public hall waiting for the self-service car when a thin, querulous ringing piped up behind a closed door somewhere nearby.
Bliss cocked an experienced ear. “Key of G flat. That’s mine. I’d better hop in and take it a minute; it may be Marge.”
He went back to the door, fumbled in his pocket for his key, dropped it, had to stoop to get it. Corey stuck his foot out to hold the car up for them. “Hurry up
before somebody gets it away from us,” he urged.
Bliss pitched the door open. The thin wail rose to a full-toned peal, then perversely stopped short and didn’t resume. He backed out again, pulled the door shut after him. “Too late, they’ve quit trying.”
Riding down in the elevator, Corey suggested, “Maybe it was that same mystery dame again.”
“If it was,” Bliss grunted, “whatever it is she wants, she sure wants bad.”
Alone there with Marge, in a little alcove away from the rest of the party, he scratched the back of his neck in pretended perplexity. “Let’s see now, how does this go? I’ve seen enough movies, I ought to have the hang of it. Well, let’s give it the old shut-eye treatment, that’s the safest. Shut your eyes and stick out your finger.”
She promptly hooked her thumb toward him.
He slapped it out of the way. “Not that one. Help a fellow out. I’m so nervous I could—”
“Oh, wrong finger? You should be more specific. How’d I know but what you wanted to bite it or something?”
And then the ring. Their heads drew together, looking down at it; they made a love knot of their four hands. They made nonsensical purrings and cooings and other noises that to them were probably language. Suddenly both became aware of eyes regarding them steadfastly, and they turned their heads in unison toward the doorway. A girl was outlined in it, as motionless as though she had taken root in the floor.
She was in tiered, wide-spreading black, the creamy whiteness of her shoulders rising out of it without any interrupting straps. A gossamer black wimple twinkling with jet was drawn over hair so incredibly yellow it seemed to have been powdered with cornmeal.
A dimple of sympathy—or possibly derision—at the
comer of her mouth had disappeared before they could confirm it. “Pardon me,” she said quietly, and moved on.
“What a striking girl!” Marjorie exclaimed involuntarily, continuing to stare at the empty doorway as though hypnotized.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. I think I remember her coming in along with Fred Sterling and his party, but if I was introduced, it didn’t take.”
They looked down at the ring once more. But the spell had been broken, their mood was gone, they couldn’t seem to get it back. The room didn’t feel quite as warm as it had. As though that look from the doorway had chilled it.
She shivered, said, “Come on, let’s get back to the others.”
The party was in the homestretch now, and they were dancing, he and she. Those little sketchy turns and fake half steps that are just an excuse to cover up a private conversation.
He said, “Well, let’s take the apartment on Eighty-fourth Street, then. After all, if he’ll give it to us for five dollars less a month like he said… And with the furniture they’re going to give us, we can fix it up to look like something—”
She said, “That girl in black can’t take her eyes off you. Every time I look over there she’s staring at you for all she’s worth. If it was any night but tonight, I might begin to get worried.”
He turned his head. “She isn’t looking at me.”
“She was until I called your attention to it.”
“Who is she, anyway?”
She shrugged. “I thought all along she came with Fred Sterling and his bunch. You know how he always shows up anywhere with a whole posse. But he left quite some
time ago and now I see she’s still here. Maybe she decided to stay on alone. Whoever she is, I like the way she handles herself. None of this cheap dazzle stuff. I’ve been watching, she’s had her troubles all evening long, poor thing. Every time she tries to sneak out on the terrace alone, three or four of the men mistake it for a come-on and make a beeline after her. Then a minute later she’ll come in again, usually by the side door, still alone. What she does to get rid of them that fast I don’t know, but she must have it down to a science. They they’ll come slinking in again themselves right afterward, one by one, with that foolish look men have when they’ve been stymied. It’s a regular sideshow.”
She touched her hand lightly to his lapel as a signal; they stopped on the half turn.
“Some more people are leaving; I’ll have to see them off. Be right back, darling. Miss me while I’m gone.”
He watched her go, standing there like a flagpole on which the flag has suddenly been run down. When the light blue gown had whisked from sight at one end of the room, he turned and went out the other way, onto the terrace for a breath of air. He felt a little sticky under the collar; dancing always made him warm, anyway.
The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. He lit the after-the-dance, whiie-waiting-for-her-to-come-back cigarette. He felt good, looking down at the town that had nearly had him licked once. “I’m all set now,” he thought. “I’m young. I’ve got love, I’ve got a clear track. The rest is a cinch.”
The terrace ran along the entire front of the apartment. At one end it made a turn around to the side of the penthouse superstructure, and the moon couldn’t follow it. It was dark there. There were no floor-length windows, either, just an infrequently used side door whose solid composition blacked out light.
He drifted around the turn, because there was another couple on the other way and he didn’t want to crowd them. He stood in the exact right angle formed by the two directions of the ledge, and now he had two views instead of one.
And then suddenly—she must have slipped unnoticed out through the side door and come along from that direction toward him—that ubiquitous girl in black was standing there a foot or two away from him, looking out into the distance, the same way he was. She was weirdly like a white marble bust floating in the air without any pedestal, for the black of her dress was swallowed up in the blackness of the trough they both stood in.
“Swell, isn’t it?” he suggested. After all, they were at the same party together.
She didn’t seem to want to talk about that, so maybe it wasn’t so swell to her.
At that instant Corey came along, conquest bound. He’d evidently had his eye on her for some time past, but the wheel of opportunity had only now spun his way. Bliss’s presence didn’t deter him in the least. “You go inside,” he ordered arbitrarily. “Don’t be a hog, you’re engaged.”
The girl said in quick interruption, “Do you want to be a dear?”
“Sure I want to be a dear.”
“Then get me a big tinkly highball.”
He thumbed Bliss. “He does that better than I do.”
“It would taste better coming from you.” It was primitive, but it worked.
Corey came back with it. She accepted it from him, held it out above the coping, slowly tilted it until the glass was bottom up and empty. Then she gravely handed it back. “Now go in and get me another.”
Corey got the point. It would have been hard to miss it. The suave man-about-town glaze shattered momentarily and one of those aforementioned glimpses of jungle showed through the rent. Not travelogue jungle, either. A flash of white c
oursed over his face, lingering longest around his mouth in a sort of bloodless pucker. He stepped in and went for her neck with both hands, in businesslike silence.
“Whoa—easy,” Bliss moved quickly, blocked them off before they could get to her, deflected them up into the air. By the time they came down again, Corey already had them under control. He bunched them in his pockets, perhaps to make sure of keeping them that way. Vocal resentment came belatedly, after the physical had already been reined in.
“Any twist that thinks she can make a monkey outta me …!” He turned around and strode back from where he’d come.
Bliss turned to follow. After all, what was she to him?
Her hand flashed out, pinned him at her side. “Don’t go. I want to talk to you.” It dropped away again as soon as she saw that she had gained her point.
He waited, listening.
“You don’t know me, do you?”
“I’ve been trying to find out who you are all evening.” He hadn’t; he’d paid her less attention than any man there. It was the gallant thing to say, that was all.
“You saw me once before, but you don’t remember. But I do. You were in a car with four others—”
“I’ve been in a car with four others lots of times, so many times I really can’t—”
“Its license number was D3827.”
“I’ve got a rotten head for figures.”
“It was kept in a garage up on Exterior Avenue in the Bronx. And it was never called for afterward. Isn’t that strange? It must still be there, rusted away…”
“I don’t remember any of that,” he said, baffled. “But say, who are you, anyway? There’s something electrifying about you—”
“Too much can cause a short circuit.” She moved a step or two away as though she had lost interest in him as unaccountably as she had developed it. She lifted the jet-spangled scarf from her head, held it spun out in a straight line before, her hands far apart, let the breeze flutter it forward.
Suddenly she gave a little exclamation. It was gone. Her hands still measured off its length. An aerial wire, invisible against the night, came down diagonally right there where she was, riveted to the facade below the ledge by a little porcelain insulation knob. She flashed him a look of half-comic surprise, then bent over, peering down.
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