The bride wore black

by Cornell Woolrich

  She took two bored steps forward into the place and let her eyes stray halfheartedly around, without any real interest. “Well, now what do we do here?” she asked abruptly.

  He shied his hat off someplace where there was nothing to catch it. “You don’t seem to get the hang of things very easily, do you?” he said, thin lipped with annoyance. “Do you have to have outline drawings?”

  She turned her face aside to her shoulder an instant. “Don’t. I hate that word.”

  She moved ahead toward a dark opening. “What’s in there?”

  “The other room,” he said disgruntledly. “Go ahead in and see it by yourself if you want to. I’m warning you,

  you’re rushing things. That doesn’t come for about another ten minutes yet.”

  It lighted up and she passed from sight. It darkened and she came in again to where he was. He was swirling a coil of rye around in the bottom of a glass. “Aren’t you terrified?” he sneered. “It was a bedroom!”

  A scornful catch sounded in her throat. “You’re the one seems to be terrified. What do you have to do, build up your courage with that stuff?”

  “Well take that up in a few minutes—if you’ve got breath enough left to ask it.”

  She went over to a kneehole desk, shot open a drawer or two. “Desk,” he said scathingly. “You know, four legs, something you write on.” He put his glass down. “Lemme get something straight, just for the record. What was your idea was going to happen when you okayed coming up here with me? You were willing enough when I first put it up to you.”

  “Because you were too willing to see me back to my place otherwise. My willingness beat yours to the punch, that was all.”

  “And what’s over at your place that you’re leery of?”

  She shot open a third drawer, shot it closed again. “You name it. My dear old mother. A six-month-old kid that I support by my modeling. Or maybe it’s just that the washbasin is cracked.”

  He loosened his collar so abruptly the button flew off. “Well, the hell with your background, I’m going to give you a future. This is the works—now.”

  She shot open a fourth drawer, looked down, smiled a little. “I knew there was one someplace around here. I saw a box of the cartridges in the bureau drawer inside.” She came up with an automatic.

  He kept coming on over, necktie cockeyed. “Put that down! D’ya want to have an accident?”

  “I dont have accidents,” she murmured placidly. She

  measured the weapon lengthwise in the flat of one hand, thumbed the trigger.

  “It’s loaded, you damn nitwit!”

  “Then don’t try jerking it away from me, that’s what always sets them off. The safety’s down now, too.” She laid it down on the desk before her, but without taking her finger out of the trigger scabbard. He was in a state of mind where an antiaircraft gun wouldn’t have been able to do much with him. He caught her from behind in a double-furled embrace and hid her face under his own. Her hand stayed motionless on the desk, hooked in the gun, the whole time.

  His face got out of the way finally—he had to breathe himself—and hers came into view again.

  She drew her free hand across it with a grimace that wasn’t calculated to do his ego any good. “Don’t kiss me, you fool. I’m not out for love.”

  “What are you out for then?”

  “Nothing—as far as you’re concerned. You have nothing that I want, you have nothing that—is coming to me.

  Her attitude shriveled him like a June bug in a match flame. He rammed his hands into his pockets with force enough to drive them in almost up to his elbows.

  The gun slid off” the desk top, and she sauntered casually over toward the outside door, with it dangling from her one hooked finger.

  “Come back here with that. Where do you think you’re going with it?”

  “Only as far as the front door. I don’t know anything about you. I want to be sure that I get out of here. I’ll leave it just inside the doorsill.”

  His voice shook with masculine outrage. “Go ahead if you want to go that badly. I’m not that hard up.”

  He heard the door open, and when he took a quick step out into the little entryway, the gun was lying there

  mockingly on the threshold. He could hear her going down the stairs—but with deliberation, not with hate. Even that concession to his injured self-esteem was lacking.

  “Ill get who you are yet!” he called down after her wrathfully.

  Her answer came back from a floor below. “Better be thankful that you haven’t.”

  The walloping slam he gave his door stunned the house like a shrapnel explosion. He picked up his empty whiskey glass and smashed it all the way across the room. He picked up a pottery ashtray and smashed that, too.

  He called her every name under the sun but murderer; he didn’t happen to think of that one.

  He called her every name but the right one.

  * * *

  THE LIGHT FLASHED ON in the pitch-black bedroom with explosive suddenness, like a flashlight photograph, revealing Corey in blazer-striped pajamas, lying in a trough of tortured bed coverings, hand outstretched to the switch of the bedside lamp. He squinted protectively, unable to bear the brightness after the long hours of lying there in the dark. His hair was a briery mass that bespoke repeated digital massaging. A pyramid of cigarette butts topped the tray next to him, and he added one last one to the accumulation with a triumphant downward stab that showed it had finally brought results. “Damn it, I knew I’d seen her someplace be—” he muttered disjointedly.

  The clock said 3:20.

  Then, as the implications of the discovery hit him fully, his eyes opened to their full extent and he swung his legs to the floor. “The girl that was with Bliss that night! She’s already killed a man! I’m going to warn him right now to look out!”

  He pounded outside in bare feet, came back again

  bringing the telephone directory from the hall, sat down on the bed with it, ran his finger down the column of Ps, stopped at Ferguson.

  Then he looked at the clock again: 3:23. “Hell think I’m nuts,” he murmured undecidedly. “The first thing in the morning’ll be time enough. I wonder if it really is the same girl; the other one was yellow as a buttercup, this one’s dark as a raven.”

  Then, with a renewed stiffening of resolution, “1 was never yet wrong in my life about a thing like this. He’s got to be told, I don’t care what time of night it is!” He flung the directory aside, barefooted it back to the hall and began dialing the number of Ferguson’s studio.

  The call signal at the other end went on interminably; no one came to the phone to answer. He hung up finally, massaged his hair a couple more times. The party must be over by this time. Maybe Ferguson didn’t sleep there in the studio at nights. Sure he did, he must; Corey remembered seeing a bed in one of the rooms.

  Well, he’d gone on someplace else then with the rest of them. It would have to wait until morning. He got back in bed, snapped out the light.

  Two minutes later it had flashed on again, and he was struggling into his trousers. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he tried to reason with himself, “but I can’t sleep until I get in touch with that guy.” He shrugged on his coat, spliced the two ends of his necktie in a sketchy knot, closed the door after him. He went downstairs, drummed up a cab, gave Ferguson’s address.

  Rationally, there was no basis whatever for his behavior, he had to admit. He was going to be made the laughingstock of everyone who knew him; their kindest explanation would be that he was drunk and suffering a mild case of the D.T.‘s. Chasing down in the middle of the night to tell a guy, “Look out, your model’s going to kill you!” But he was in the grip of something irrational;

  he couldn’t explain what it was himself. A hunch, a premonition, a sense of impending danger. If Ferguson was out, he’d leave a note under the door: “She’s the girl who was with Bliss the night he died, I remember now. Keep your eye on her.” At l
east give the guy a chance to defend himself.

  A knock at the studio door, when he stood before it presently, brought no more results than the phone call had. He noticed something that confirmed his hunch: Ferguson not only worked here but lived here, as well. A small thing, a slight thing—an empty milk bottle standing to one side of the door.

  That finished it. Milk bottles are not put out before you go, but after you come back. He was in there, he was almost certainly in there. Corey had a premonition of doom now that wouldn’t be dispelled.

  He went downstairs and roused the building superintendent, unconcerned at the wrathful reception that greeted him.

  “Yeah, he sleeps up there in the studio. But he might be out. Them artist fellows are up all night sometimes. What’s all the excitement for?”

  “You open that door for me,” Corey panted in a voice that brooked no argument. “Ill take the responsibility if I’m wrong. But I’m not getting out of here until you come up and open that door for me, understand?”

  The super grumblingly preceded him up the stairs, jangled keys, knocked uselessly before fitting one to the door. Corey knew where the switch was, reached around him backhand and plugged it on. The two of them stood there looking down the long vista of light to the far end where the black skylight panes slanted down and the outside night began.

  All Corey said, in a strangely anticlimactic, almost subdued voice, was, “I knew it.”

  Ferguson was lying facedown before the easel. The

  wicked steel sliver of the arrowhead protruded from his back, over the heart, forced through by the fall itself to that additional penetration. In front, when they turned him over, the feathered end of it had been splintered by the fall, was at right angles to the rest of the shaft. He must have turned full face toward the stand at the instant it winged at him to receive it dead center to the heart like that.

  Above him brooded Diana the huntress, Diana the killer—faceless now. The features that had tormented Corey were gone. An oval hole in the canvas, cut by a paint-scraping knife, occupied their place. The bow, cord slack now, balanced mockingly across one corner of the modeling stand.

  Corey brooded, “I didn’t tumble in time, she beat me to it. He must have posed her late at night, to finish it up.”

  “What d’ya suppose it was?” the super breathed, awestruck, after they’d put in the call and stood there in the open doorway, waiting for the police. “Her grip on the bowstring accidentally slipped and the arrow flew out?”

  “No,” Corey murmured. “No. Diana the huntress came to life.”

  POSTMORTEM ON FERGUSON

  “THEN SHE MOVED over here like this.” Corey was warming up to his reenactment as he went along, as any good actor does when he has a sympathetic audience and is enjoying his role. A cigarette hanging from the comer of his mouth vibrated with animation whenever he spoke. He was in his shirt sleeves, vest unbuttoned. A string of hair had come down over his forehead with the ardor of his movements.

  “Go on,” Wanger nodded.

  “Then she starts casing the drawers one by one like this, slap—slap—slap. Hell, I didn’t get it. I figured she was just stalling, giving herself something to do with her hands, you know; killing time like they do until the clinch caught up with her. So then she hits the one it’s in and comes up with it—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute—” Wanger started from his chair, made a hasty gesture of dissuasion. “Don’t touch it. We may still be able to get her prints off it. Have you handled it much yourself since she picked it up?”

  Corey’s arrested hand hung like a claw over it. “No, only to put it back in. But I haven’t finished telling you what she did with it afterward—”

  “All right, but first let me wrap it up. I want to have it checked—with your permission.”

  “Help yourself.” He stood aside while Wanger took out a handkerchief, dipped into the drawer with it and transferred it to his pocket.

  “Ill see that you get it back,” Wanger promised.

  “No hurry. Only too glad to be of some help.” The performance resumed. “So then, she doodles around with it. I go over and give her the old branding iron and—” he looked genuinely outraged all over again, even though this was only a recapitulation “—and it didn’t take.”

  Wanger nodded with masculine understanding. “She wasn’t having any.”

  “She wasn’t having any. She says, ‘I don’t want love, I don’t want kisses,’ and she goes over to the door, gun and all. I follow her, and she’s left it lying there inside the sill, and she’s already halfway down the stairs. So I called down after her that I’d figure out who she was if it took me all the rest of the night, and she calls up to me, ‘Better be thankful you haven’t.’”

  He got white around the mouth with virtuous indignation. “The little so-and-so, I’d like to give her a biff across the snout! I don’t mind a jane standing you off as long as she’s scared about it. But one thing gripes me is a jane standing you off and being fresh about it at the same time!”

  Wanger could see his point perfectly. He’d been led on for some reason best known to herself by the murderous little trickster and then dished out of what he had a right to expect was coming to him. As far as Wanger’s personal feelings entered into it—and they didn’t at all—he liked this guy.

  He drummed nails on the chair arm. “As I see it, there are three possible explanations for her coming up here with you like she did, before going back and killing the guy she had in mind to all along. One, she intended

  getting rid of you first, before you had a chance to warn Ferguson and throw a monkey wrench into the main business at hand. After she got here with you, you still hadn’t remembered who she was, so she changed her mind; She’d got you away from the party, and that was the most important thing. She figured she’d have time enough to get back there and finish up before it finally dawned on you where you’d seen her before. Two, she came up only to get the weapon and use it on him. No, that won’t hold up. My brain’s hitting on two cylinders. She left it behind her, inside the door. Well, three is you were pestering her at the party and she was afraid you would stay on after the others and gum the works up, so she took the easiest way of eliminating you. Gave you a tease treatment and then left you flat.”

  Corey looked as though this last suggestion didn’t do his self-esteem any too much good, but he swallowed it.

  “I think a combination of one and three is as close as we can get to it at the first sitting,” Wanger went on, getting ready to leave. “She came up here with you because you were getting in her hair. She intended giving you the gun if you came through with who she was, but if you didn’t, she was going to let you go. You didn’t, and she let you go. Come in tomorrow, will you? I want to go over the whole thing with you again. Just ask for me, Wanger’s the name.”

  Day was breaking when he got back to headquarters, and daybreak wasn’t lovely around headquarters, inside or out. He was tired, and it was the hour when human vitality is at its lowest. He went into his superior’s untenanted office, slumped into a chair at the desk and let his head plop into his pronged fingers.

  “Why the hell did that woman have to be bom?” he groaned softly.

  After a while he raised his head, took out the gun she’d

  handled at Corey’s place, put it in a manila folder, sealed the flap, scrawled across it almost illegibly; “See if you can get anything on this for me. Wanger” with his precinct number.

  He picked up the phone. “Send me in a messenger, will you?”

  “There’s no one around out here right now,” the desk sergeant answered.

  “Try to find someone, anyone’ll do.”

  The rookie that showed up about ten minutes later was green enough to have fooled a grazing cow.

  Wanger remarked, “Where’d they dig you up from?” But he said it well under his breath. After all, everyone has feelings.

  “What took you so long?”

  “I got in
a couple of the wrong rooms. This building’s kind of tricky.”

  Wanger looked at him through blurred eyes. “Take this over and give it in for me. It’s a gun. They’ll know what to do.” Then, with a touch of misgiving, “Will you be able to get there, d’you think?”

  The rookie beamed proudly. “Oh, sure, 1 been sent over there twice already since I been detailed around here.”

  He turned, came up against the wrong side of the door, where there was no knob, only hinges, looked up and down the seam as though it had played a dirty trick on him. Then he got what the trouble was, shifted over to where the knob was, grabbed it and still couldn’t get out right.

  “Get your feet out of the way,” Wanger coached him with angelic patience. “They’re holding it up.”

  He was too tired even to get sore about it.

  “You’re still sure of what you told me the other night?” Wanger began, on his second and more detailed questioning of Corey, at headquarters forty-eight hours later.

  “Positive. She had the same eyes, mouth, everything, in fact, but the hair, of that girl in black who was at Marjorie Elliott’s engagement party the night Bliss met his death two years ago. I could swear it was the same one!”

  “Your testimony’s doubly welcome to me; it’s not only important in itself but it bears out what my own private theory has been in these cases all along: that the woman is one and the same. A theory that, I might add, isn’t shared by anyone else.”

  Corey clenched his fist, bounced it on the tabletop. “If I’d only gotten it sooner, figured out who it was the portrait reminded me of! But I didn’t get it in time.”

  “Undoubtedly you could have saved his life if you’d only made the discovery even an hour earlier that same night. But the breaks fell her way. As it was, you only succeeded in hurrying the thing up, bringing it on all the faster, by insisting you’d seen her somewhere before. She identified you and recognized the danger, realized she had a deadline to work against. And made it—maybe only minutes ahead of your first warning phone call! He died at twenty-one past three in the morning; his wrist-watch stopped with the fall.”