Rendezvous in Black

by Cornell Woolrich

  And on election night they’d both put their money there, on top of the radio console. He’d bet the Democrats were coming in, and she’d had to take the Republicans, by default; there wasn’t anyone else. But maybe she hadn’t been so dumb after all. He’d tried her out, just to see how she’d take it, and she’d been a good sport; hadn’t sulked or whimpered, insisted he pocket the whole bet, forced it on him. And the next day she’d gotten the stone-marten cape, and her whole original stake back along with it. How could she have known it would work out that way? It was like lending someone five hundred dollars (which was originally his, anyway) just overnight, and then the next day being paid a fur coat for interest. Good business.

  And on the piano rack, as he passed it, there was a sheet of music open. He glanced at it, and his lip curled as he read the lyric. “Sooner or later you’re gonna be coming around—”

  Wrong this time; not any more. He clawed at it with one hand, bunched it up into a crumpled ball, and gave it a venomous fling across the room.

  The mirrored bedroom door stood half open. He drew it back the rest of the way, and stood there looking in at her. Enough light came through from the blazing living room to reveal everything with utter distinctness, just a tracing of azure shadow to tone it down here and there.

  She was asleep there in the bed, resting on her side, her back toward him. The sight of her, so oblivious, so unconcerned by what she’d done, began to pump up his rancor again.

  The stone-marten cape had been dumped over a chair; it made a tent over it, with the chair back for a tentpole. The white dress had been put onto a hanger, but then instead of being restored to the inside of the closet, the hanger had simply been hooked over the top of the door, and the dress hung there, slipshod, against it.

  Her perfume was heavy in the air. She’d once told him the name of it. Styx. (And he’d added an “n” to it, and they’d both laughed.) She hadn’t had to tell him the price, he’d seen it on too many a charge account. Those charge accounts that had all been stopped some time ago, before the real pressure and the real blackmail had begun.

  He stood looking at her for a while, nursing his rage.

  Then with quiet, cold deliberation he unbuttoned his double-breasted jacket, heavy with gun. He took the jacket off completely, and folded it over lengthwise from the collar down, and placed it that way over a chair back.

  Then he went over and latched down the windows tight, so little or no sound—sound to come—should escape from them. Then he came back again to where he’d been, rearward of her undulant back, and unfastened his belt buckle. He drew the belt out in its entirety, and took hold of it by the buckle end, using that for a grip.

  He reached down and flipped the lightweight covers off her, with a single billowing wave. Rustling taffeta spread and hissing silk sheets. She lay there now in all her sculptured shapeliness, filmy black open to the waist shadowing her.

  He grimaced vengefully and flung the belt up overhead, like a writhing snake caught by the head. This was the way you treated women like her! This was what they deserved! This was what they got! This was the only treatment they understood!

  The sound it made coming down was like slow, spaced hand-clapping. Again, and again, and again; faster, and faster, and faster. Now across her rippling shoulder blades and now across her hips and now across the undersides of her thighs. White rents appeared in the black shadowing, as though it were no more than dust that was being removed here and there with the blows. It billowed out, and rippled, and settled again, with each impact.

  But that was the only movement. . . .

  Suddenly the steaming hate that had misted his eyes cleared enough to let him see that she hadn’t screamed, she hadn’t jumped, she hadn’t rolled away in an attempt to escape. And she should have, long moments ago.

  He dropped the belt in a looping little puddle. He reached down over the bed and pulled her head around his way, by the hair. It came around too easily, it came around too loose. It came around, and nothing else did. Her neck had been broken.

  He had, for the past several moments, been whipping a corpse.

  All the way up those deliberately curving stairs now, that shadow pursued him along the wall panels, and he fled away from it. But as the stairs curved, it relentlessly overtook him, then swept around before him, to confront him accusingly as he reached their top. He creased his eyes protectively and warded it off with the flat of one hand; plunged through its blue impalpability and gained the bedroom door and the bedroom beyond. It didn’t come in there after him. But it was waiting outside.

  He drew a shuddering bowel-deep breath, and turned the key in the bedroom door.

  She was, or seemed to be, asleep. The aureole of rosy light was out. Her head though, was little, if any, lower on the pillows than when he’d left her. Her eyes were indisputably closed. The daylight came through the spaces of the Venetian blinds like bars of lead bullion.

  He put the gun away, giving careful back-shoulder glances at her. Her eyelids never stirred.

  He went into the bathroom, and shook a little, even wept a little, with sheer reflex nervousness. Then he wiped his eyes on a towel, and sat on the edge of the tub for some moments, in a dismayed apathy. At last, still sitting there, he partially undressed; took off his coat, his tie, opened his shirt as far as his belt, but went no further.

  Sleep, sleep, he had to get sleep; that was the only way to get away from this, to elude it: sleep. He struck his own head a few times with the heel of his hand, pounded it lightly, as if to settle it for sleep. But sleep couldn’t be injected into it in that way. Within was a turmoil of nightmare-wakefulness.

  He opened the cabinet and took out the bottle of sleeping pills. He poured two into his hand, then three. Raised his hand halfway, scoop-shaped. Then suddenly flung them from him with a whimpering grimace. That would only lock it up inside his own head, that kind of sleep.

  He couldn’t go through it alone. Couldn’t keep it to himself. He had to talk to someone. He had to talk to her.

  They’d come here anyway. And she had to help him.

  He went into the bedroom again. The bars of lead bullion had become bars of silver bullion now. Before long they would become gold, but not yet.

  Then, before he got to the bed, he saw that she was awake after all. Must have awakened just now.

  “Florence—” he said breathlessly. “Florence—”

  “There is something you want to tell me?” The intonation of a question mark was so faint it was almost nonexistent. It wasn’t a question, it was a declarative statement, but he had no time for nuances of speech.

  “I do, I do. Listen carefully.”

  He sat down beside her on the bed. He got up again. He moved around to its other side. He sat down there. That was the side her heart was on.

  “Are you awake enough to understand?”

  “Quite enough.” There was something clipped about it.

  “That woman—” He stopped again, and wondered how to go on. “There was a woman here tonight. I don’t know if you noticed her or not—”

  She smiled with the faintest shadow of irony. “Let me see. A Hattie Carnegie dress, white, in the hundred-and-fifty-dollar bracket. But I think it was bought at a discount, after the season was over, and then charged at full price—to someone. Perugia originals on her feet. Probably 5-A’s. No more than that. Everything in very good taste, excellent taste, but—” she shook her head and crinkled her nose. “The foundation is cheap, she can’t do anything about that, it shows through. Thirty-five in actuality, but could pass for twenty-eight.”

  “She is twenty-eight,” he wanted to blurt out protestingly, but checked himself. Maybe she had been thirty-five at that, without his knowing it.

  “Her perfume would be something like Styx, sticky and syrupy.”

  His eyes were round and he was speechless.

  “Yes, Hugh. Yes, I believe I know whom you mean.”

  She lit a cigarette, as if giving him time to reco
ver. She even offered him one. He refused.

  “I—er, I don’t know how to say this, Florence. There was an involvement that you never knew of—”

  Again the ironical smile. “Shall I help you out there too, Hugh?”

  She flicked first-ash from her cigarette into the little cloisonné platter on the stand, savored the smoke, rolled her eyes thoughtfully ceilingward, as if marshaling her facts in order to be of the greatest possible assistance to him.

  “Her name is Esther Holliday. She lives at Sixteen-o-four Farragut Drive, Apartment D-seven. She pays a hundred and five a month for it. Telephone, Warfield seven one seven six. She’s been in your life—or shall I say in your hair—oh, roughly, about four years now, a little bit over. I’m not a clairvoyant, Hugh. I can’t give you the exact day you met her, nor the exact month. These things come on slowly. I can give you the exact season and year, spring, 1943. ‘In the spring an older man’s fancy—’ I shouldn’t have gotten so involved in my war work.” She said this quite parenthetically, with a charming and not very fierce admonishing upthrust of her index finger. “You loved her for three years. For the past year and a half, you’ve no longer loved her, but you’ve been too lacking in backbone to do anything about it.”

  He seemed ready to come apart, as if he was strung on loose wires; like a puppet with the puppetmaster’s fingers off the strings. “You know. You know about it.”

  “I’ve known for years,” she said offhandedly. She decided she’d had enough of her cigarette, put it out; it had only been used as an aid to the conversation, anyway. For his sake.

  “And now, what is it? What brings you to—unburden yourself at this particular time? Not that I don’t appreciate it. Small favors, you know, are better than none at all.”

  “Florence, I went there to—to—”

  This time she let him flounder his own way out.

  “To kill her.”

  “I know you did.”

  “Oh, Florence,” he said at last, and slumped back, as if wearied of trying to tell her anything she didn’t know already. She left him no virtue in his confession.

  “It was so obvious,” she said disclaimingly. “A business jacket over your dinner trousers. A lump under your coat. The revolver gone from the drawer. You weren’t very subtle about it, you know.” Then she added, quite neutrally, “And did you?”

  He stared his horror at her.

  “I’m only going by the indications you gave. You showed every intention, and yet you look at me so appalled when I—”

  “But do you have to be so brittle about it?” he pleaded almost poignantly.

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I’m sorry.” And she sounded quite penitent about it. “I’m not used to living with violence, you know. I’ll have to learn to drop my drawing-room glaze.”

  His head was drooping far downward, showing her the part in his hair. He was holding his hands cupped to his face, and speaking between them. His voice was stifled.

  “She was already dead. I found her lying there already dead. Someone—I don’t know who—I only know I didn’t.”

  She reached for his hand and held it. She patted the back of it, almost maternally.

  “Of course you didn’t. Of course.”

  He raised his head, became a little more alert, as a sudden recollection struck him. “I can prove it. I can show I didn’t. Wait a minute, where is that—!” He grew frightened for a moment, at finding he no longer had his coat on. He jumped up, went into the bathroom, came back with the coat. “Here. Here it is. I found this lying there in the room.” He handed her the note.

  She read it aloud. “ ‘Now how do you like it, Mr. Strickland?’ ”

  Her thinking was always so much quicker than his. “You should have left it there,” she said instantly. “There’s where it should have stayed, where he put it. Not here, where they can’t see it.”

  “But I didn’t want to be linked—”

  She changed her mind, abruptly. “Maybe it’s better. Yes, maybe you were right. But keep it, whatever you do. Make sure you hang on to it. If you have to, you can show it to them. But you see, you’ve already destroyed the greater part of its value. You can’t prove you found it there in the room, now that you’ve removed it. You can prove, or they can, that it wasn’t written by you; but you could have found it anywhere. It could have come from anywhere else. It’s too late now.” Then seeing the dismay this had brought into his eyes, she added: “But even without the note, you’re safe enough. They can’t saddle it on you, when you really didn’t do it. There would have to be a complete miscarriage of justice. Those things don’t happen.”

  “But they’ll come here. They’re bound to. They’ll ask questions. . . .”

  She nodded regretfully. “They’ll go back into her past. And the association was—a rather long one.”

  “Florence, you’ve got to help me! No matter what they find out about the past, that won’t count so much; at least, if we can keep them from finding out about tonight. Don’t you see? This big party you gave tonight. What a marvelous thing. Dozens of people; they all saw me here all evening, to the very end. Florence, I didn’t go out of the house after our guests left tonight! I never left it, do you understand? Florence, you won’t go back on me, will you? You’ll stick by me? You’re my only hope.”

  “I’m your wife, Hugh,” was all she said. “Are you forgetting? I’m your wife.” There was only tender devotion in her eyes as they met his.

  His head fell forward against her breast, with a deep choking gasp of relief that was almost a sob.

  Softly, reassuringly, her hand stroked his hair. Forgivingly, understandingly, with all the wifely solicitude there was in the whole world.

  She’d died the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. Nothing happened Wednesday. Nothing happened Thursday. It was just flat, impersonal; it was just cold print, black on white. He held his breath. Then on Friday it finally leaped out of the papers, came to life, and took the form of a man standing on his threshold.

  “Show him in,” he said to Harris.

  Then he checked the order. “No, wait a minute.” He tried a pose at the desk, scanning some papers. No, that didn’t look right, this wasn’t an office. He tried a large leather-covered chair, sank back in it, crossed his legs. He got up again, selected a book from the shelf and a cigar from his humidor, returned to the chair.

  “All right. Now show him in.”

  The man wasn’t very impressive. He was a tall, scrawny fellow, hollow-cheeked. He acted uncertain, a tyro. He hadn’t changed his shirt in days; there was a regular ruff of frayed threads peering out at his wrist.

  He said, “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Strickland. I’m from the police. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  Strickland said, “Sit down. No, I don’t mind.”

  The man sat down, inclined too far forward; there was too much wrist left over. He looked around at the room in awe. He looked at Strickland in awe. As if he hadn’t known people lived in places like this.

  “Have a cigarette,” Strickland said, to put him at his ease. “That’s your light, there.”

  He took up the inkwell first, by mistake.

  “No, right there beside you.”

  Even after he had it, he couldn’t get it to work.

  “You just push down. Prod a little.”

  But by that time he’d given up, and used a match of his own.

  Then he didn’t know what to do with the match; had to keep it pinched between his fingers.

  Good Lord, what have I been afraid of? thought Strickland.

  “What are the questions?” he prompted.

  The man gave a start, as though he’d forgotten what he’d just said, himself. “Oh—ah. Yes. Er—did you know a woman—a lady—named Esther Holliday?”

  “Yes I did,” Strickland said immediately.

  “Well?”

  “About as well as a man can.” He let him get that first. Then he said, “I’m frank about these things, you see.” Then
he said, “But that was at one time. That ended a year and a half ago.”

  The man fidgeted with his cigarette. It was painful to watch him. He was the questioned and Strickland the questioner, you would have thought.

  “You know, she’s dead.”

  “Murdered,” Strickland corrected. “I read about it in the paper. All about it.”

  “You haven’t seen her lately, have you, Mr. Strickland?”

  “No.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “I should say over six months ago.”

  “Oh.” Then he said, “Well—” It was about as flat as last week’s ginger ale. “In that case—” Then he didn’t seem to know what more to say. He got up.

  Strickland rose too. He happened to put his book down on the table beside them.

  The man fidgeted with it, in that way typical of an awkward person who doesn’t know how to conclude an interview gracefully, extricate himself properly from someone’s presence, and so fiddles around with this and that.

  “New?”

  “On the contrary,” said Strickland patronizingly, “it’s quite old.”

  “Oh. I only thought, because some of the pages haven’t been cut yet...”

  “I hadn’t got that far yet.” The thing to do in cases of this kind was to shoot the answers at them fast, not take time enough to draw breath between question and answer.

  Cameron abstractedly ran his thumbnail down the edge of one. It was the opening page. The following three or four adhered to it.

  Then he closed the book and forgot about it and went away.