Rendezvous in Black

by Cornell Woolrich

  Ward came around from behind the desk, then stopped short.

  “There’s been an accident,” Cameron said. “Someone’s been hurt. We’re not sure what relationship she—” he deliberately emphasized the word, “bears to you.”

  He was holding the list in such a way that only he, not Ward, could read it.

  “Is it Louise? Is it Mrs. Ward?”

  Ward’s face was strained and pale, but steady. Cameron watched it closely. He murmured something hesitant, purposely indistinct.

  “It’s not my mother, is it? Not Mom—?”

  His face grew whiter still. It flickered tearfully while he strove to hold it still.

  Cameron watched it closely.

  There were only three more names on the list: two married sisters, both younger than himself, and his partner’s daughter, a girl of twelve or thirteen. Cameron shook his head to himself.

  “I don’t believe—” he said blurredly.

  Ward took a staggering step toward him, then another. He caught hold of his lapels in supplication. His eyelids drooped, half-covering his eyes.

  “Martine—” he whispered expiringly.

  “Who’s Martine?” Cameron answered.

  He didn’t answer that. “Oh, my God,” he shuddered convulsively, his knees dipped limply, and he would have at least slid downward, if not fallen, had not Cameron caught him under the arms and held him for a moment until he got his own powers of support back again.

  “What’s her other name? Her last name?” Cameron had to put his mouth close, aim the words directly into his ear, to get him to understand them at all, acknowledge them. His faculties were so clogged with shocked grief they would not, it seemed, have penetrated otherwise.

  “Jensen,” he moaned, in mechanically extracted answer.

  Cameron led him over to a chair, helped him down into it.

  “Take a drink, Mr. Ward,” he said.

  Ward nodded, pointed. Cameron got it out for him, poured it, handed it to him.

  “There has been no accident. No one has been hurt.” He wrote the name down on his list: “Martine Jensen.”

  He had to repeat the statement. “No one. Miss Jensen or anyone else.”

  Ward’s reaction was slower this time, but as thorough as it had been in the first case. When it had completed itself, he rose to his feet. He dashed the half-finished brandy in the paper cup full into Cameron’s face. Little straw-colored drops stood out on his white shirtcollar.

  “Get out of my office.” He shook with the effort of dislodging the words.

  He came closer, swung, and hit him in the side of the jaw.

  Cameron staggered, kept his balance by putting his hand out to something behind him.

  “I won’t hold that against you,” he said. “I would have done that to anyone too, who did what I did to you.”

  Ward kept his arm from delivering a second blow only by sheer muscular contraction which made it tremble as it held itself back.

  “What’d you do a thing like that for?”

  “I had to find out whom you loved most. There was no other way.” Ward didn’t ask him why. “Get out,” he said through his clenched teeth.

  Cameron opened the door. “I’m getting. I’ll be back—shortly.”

  Cameron went back and showed the chief his list. Three names had been crossed off. Three remained, one of which had not been on it originally, had been added during the interview itself. They read:

  3. His wife.

  2. His mother.

  1. Martine Jensen.

  The chief was annoyed. “Well, which is which? Why the double sequence of numbers, what do they mean?”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you. They mean: one is the sequence in which he mentioned them. In other words, the speed with which they came to his mind. The other is the degree of emotion he showed. Now, which is it? Is it the one that first came to his mind, his wife? Is it the one he showed the greatest emotion about, his Martine Jensen? (Whoever she is.) I’m not a psychologist.”

  “We agree,” the chief added parenthetically.

  “I thought it would be clear, it would be easy to tell. It isn’t clear, it isn’t easy to tell. That’s the trouble with these tests of behavior. When human nature is involved, it’s never predictable, it always—”

  The chief had been pondering. He stopped pondering now, nodded in arrival at a conviction. “The one he showed the greatest emotion about,” he said, speaking with great deliberation.

  “But maybe it was cumulative emotion, the result of increasing strain. Maybe the first in mind was the right one, but he still had enough self-control at that moment to keep from showing it fully. It was only later that his control finally wore out. In other words, the emotion was for his wife, but it was carried over, past that point, and only showed itself by the time we’d reached the third name, externally.”

  The chief didn’t bother arguing with him. “The one he showed the greatest emotion about,” he said doggedly.

  “But will he figure it out that way too? The Danger? If we, the police, can’t be sure, how can he, on the outside, be sure? We may protect the sweetheart and he may go after the wife.”

  “The one he showed the greatest emotion about. Look, try not to think, will you, you only get in trouble. Just be the machine you’re supposed to be. A little logic gives us the right answer and that’s all I’ve used. The mere fact he has a sweetheart in addition to a wife, shows he loves the sweetheart more. If he loved his wife more than his sweetheart, he wouldn’t have a sweetheart at all. He wouldn’t need one. She would be superfluous.”

  He took his pencil and he took Cameron’s list. He crossed out “wife” and “mother.”

  “Now go to work on this,” he said.

  There was left only: “Martine Jensen.”

  Cameron went back again next day.

  The receptionist was no longer icy. She was hot, she was flaming with resentment, even though it was vicarious.

  “Mr. Ward will not see you,” she said sultrily. “I will not take your name in to him. I have standing instructions from him. This is a law-abiding private office and it’s protected by civil rights. Whether you’re a member of the police department or not, you cannot force your way in to him, you cannot compel him to see you. If you try to, he’ll get in touch with his attorneys at once and bring a civil suit for damages against the police department itself. Now go ahead and try if you think you’d care to.”

  Cameron knew he couldn’t. He turned around and walked out. From the lobby of the building he telephoned the chief. The chief telephoned Ward. Then called Cameron back, in the lobby, where he was waiting.

  “Go on up,” he said. “He’ll see you now. I’ve thrown my weight behind you.”

  The receptionist was already au courant by the time he got up there again. She was still resentful, but it was a passive resentment now, no longer an active one. She didn’t say “Come in.” She merely held the gate for him. Then Ward’s office door, beyond it.

  Ward was still resentful too.

  “Sit down,” he said, frowning.

  Cameron sat. “May we have this talk without being disturbed?”

  “The order’s already been given,” Ward said curtly.

  “It’s essential that you believe every word I tell you.”

  “I’ll reserve judgment on that.”

  “You are on a death list. Not your name itself, but, by proxy for you, the name of Martine Jensen. If you give us your fullest co-operation, I think we can promise you that no harm will come to her. One advantage we have is: the exact date of the danger is known to us. The attack will come during the twenty-four hours beginning midnight, May thirty-first, and ending midnight, June first, or not at all.” Ward had said something under his breath. “What did you say just then?”

  “Fantastic.”

  “You don’t believe me, I see.”

  “I haven’t an enemy in the world.”

  “No man can safely say that until after
his death. You may not have an enemy you know of, but that’s not the same thing.”

  “What’s the motive? Blackmail?”

  “Money wouldn’t ward it off. Money only has power over the sane mind. Maniacs don’t have motives. I could call it revenge, but even that wouldn’t be correct; because where the injury has been unintentional or unknowing, revenge can be reasoned with, turned aside. About the closest I can get to it would be: a revenge-mania.”

  “Who is he?” asked Ward satirically.

  “You wouldn’t know him, because—” He hesitated, and then he added reluctantly, “We don’t either.”

  “You know what motivates him, or fails to. You know that money would not influence him. You know he’s a maniac. You know the date he’ll strike, down to the last twenty-four hours. Yet you don’t know who he is. Great police work. How do you go about it, in reverse?”

  “Sometimes it has to be done that way. Sometimes it happens that way. Not often, thank God. But this time it did.”

  He waited for Ward to say something. Ward didn’t say anything. There was a treacherous mobility, however, to the corners of his mouth, as though he were having difficulty restraining his risibilities.

  “You’ve got to help us,” Cameron said.

  “I’m a little old for games.”

  “You’ve got to give me all the information you can, on Martine Jensen—”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, we don’t even know where she lives.”

  Ward’s face darkened. “So that you can go to her, question her, and pester her, and frighten her? I’ll do no such thing. Come to me with all these cock-and-bull stories you want, but keep away from her, leave her out of it! Do you understand that?”

  “She can’t be left out of it,” Cameron said patiently, “because she’s the center of it, she’s the object, she’s the target. It’s not you, it’s she.” He groped to find the right words. “We’ll be tactful about it. We policemen understand many things, we come across all sorts of things. We know there are sometimes certain—certain relationships in a man’s life, that he doesn’t want— We’ll try not to tread on your toes, Mr. Ward. . . .”

  Ward sat bolt upright, as though some point of honor had been touched just then. He was deadly serious now, intense.

  “You don’t understand. You don’t understand at all. You think I’m carrying on a cheap affair behind my wife’s back?” He cleared his throat disgustedly. Then he sank back again, as if in futility. “A man doesn’t tell another man his personal history.”

  “But to a police official, trying to protect the life of someone very close to him?” Cameron prompted tactfully.

  Ward nodded at last, dully, after some moments of thought. “Yes, I guess you do,” he admitted. “Although I never had to before.”

  “It’s just the general background we want,” put in Cameron persuasively, and held his breath for fear the other wasn’t going to talk.

  He did at last, in that almost trance-like state of contemplation in which one reviews factors in one’s life, forgetting before long even the auditor, in one’s absorption.

  “I knew Martine first, long before there was a Mrs. Ward. She was my first love, she was my last; she was my only love.” He kept balancing a pencil on its point on the desk top, and watching it as he did so. Then he broke off to ask, “Is this a matter of life and death?”

  “Of life and death,” Cameron assented, keeping his own eyes down out of consideration.

  “I’ve never loved Louise. It was a marriage of second choice. No choice at all. I don’t know what to call it. Before then, it had always been Martine, with me. All my life, Martine. But we waited, like fools. We were so sure that it would never be anybody else but she for me and me for her, that we waited. Next year; it was always going to be next year. That ‘next year’ that never comes. Then all of a sudden, it was too late. She wouldn’t have me. Something happened that—came between us. She thought it did, anyway. She said, ‘I can’t let you, now.’ She wouldn’t have me. I waited around and waited around, and she wouldn’t have me. The ‘next years’ kept coming along thick and fast, and there we were, each alone. She told me to marry someone else. That was her wish for me. She said she didn’t want me to be alone any more. She said it would make her a little happy if one of us, at least, wasn’t alone. And I had always done what ever I thought would make her happy. So I did it this time too; this last time of all. I married Louise, who’d come along later.”

  “Does she—?”

  “She doesn’t know about Martine. She knows there was a Martine. She doesn’t know there still is one. Martine is no rival to her, on one plane. I’ve been faithful to my wife since my marriage. But she’s no rival to Martine, either. Martine is my love and no one else ever can be.”

  He stopped balancing the pencil and put it away in his pocket.

  Cameron didn’t look up at him, and he didn’t look over at Cameron. They were both thinking about it, their eyes at cross-trajectories of contemplation.

  “Now I’ve talked about it,” Ward sighed at last. “And I feel cheap about it. It was like a beery bar-room confession.”

  “No,” Cameron said. “It’s a matter of life and death. There are two times when you tell things. When your peace of mind is threatened, you tell them to a priest. When your safety is threatened, you tell them to a police officer. And you just did.”

  Cameron took out a notebook, prepared to jot things down. “Now, if you’ll just give me some of the necessary details—where she lives—”

  “No,” Ward said. “I don’t want her disturbed. I don’t want her intruded on and frightened. I won’t have it.”

  “But we’re only trying to protect her. We have to take certain precautions—”

  “You haven’t made out a very convincing case to me. You don’t know who it is, or where he is, or what he is, or even what he looks like. It’s the funniest thing I ever heard of. On the thirtieth of May, she’s safe all day, but on the thirty-first of May, she has to watch out all day. Then on the first of June, she’s safe again. It sounds more like a weather forecast than a—”

  Something about it struck his risibilities. He began to laugh, and he couldn’t stop. He threw his head back and brayed. He slapped the top of his desk.

  Cameron didn’t try to curb him. “It’ll take a little while, I see,” he said. He stood up to go. “That’s all right, there’s still time.”

  He came back the next day.

  Ward grinned again when he saw him. “Are you going to start that boogie-man stuff all over again?”

  “I just wanted to show you these,” Cameron said quietly.

  He took out some clippings, newspaper photographs, a couple of “stills” from the morgue, spread them on his desk.

  Ward looked them over, still chuckling slyly.

  “You knew him, didn’t you?” Cameron pointed.

  Ward nodded.

  “His daughter died.”

  Ward gazed up at him calmly. “I’d already known that. Heard it in a vague, roundabout way. Too bad; but it does happen, you know. What connection has that got with me? I have no daughter. And Martine is not an adolescent who has had the misfortune to lose her head over a degenerate. That’s all it was.”

  Ward pointed again. “You knew him, didn’t you?” he said accusingly.

  “Very slightly. And I’ve also heard that one. Combat fatigue. He took his wife’s life and then his own. If you’re trying to protect me from a suicide pact—” He swept the clipping aside. “That was years ago, during the war.”

  Cameron brought it back center again. “Notice the date line on it.”

  He wasn’t impressed. “I see. That’s where you got that idea from. Just a coincidence. These two things are two years apart.”

  “And in between, there was this,” Cameron said patiently.

  Ward shrugged. “He murdered his mistress. He was electrocuted. Well, that’s what the law says shall be done to you when you do such a thing.
Why make hocus-pocus out of it?”

  “The date line.”

  “This time is completely out of kilter. You’ve slipped up.”

  “Of the crime, not the execution.”

  “Now, please . . .” He was good-natured but firm. He wouldn’t hear any more.

  Cameron got up to go. “All right, there’s still a little time.”

  “Here, take these with you.”

  “You don’t want them?”

  Ward shook his head. “You’re wasting your time.”

  “No, I’m not. There’s no such thing in my line.”

  Ward was still grinning when he left the room.

  And the next day again he came back.

  This time Ward only smiled a little when he saw him; not very surely.

  “Look, you’re beginning to get on my nerves, Inspector. I’m a businessman, I have a job to do here. I can’t be thinking about things like—”

  “Are you sure it’s me that’s getting on your nerves, or is it— something else?” Cameron asked softly.

  “Well, after all, you come stalking in here each day with the regularity of a radio time signal, and turn my place into a chamber of horrors.”

  “I just want you to look at this report.”

  Ward read a line or two.

  “This is a death certificate,” he said impatiently. “And moreover, it has to do with a woman whom I never knew, whom I never set eyes on while she was still—”

  “But you knew her husband. Notice the name.”

  “So I did. But according to this, she died of— How many people die of that every year, Inspector?”

  “They contract it accidentally. She was infected with intent to kill.”

  “Were you able to prove that?”

  “The case would have ended then and there if I had been able to,” Cameron admitted.

  “If,” Ward said dryly. He handed the certificate back. “Will that be all for today?”

  “You’ll have to answer that.”

  “Very well. Then I’m afraid it will.”

  He wasn’t smiling any more when Cameron closed the door after himself and left.

  The elevator didn’t immediately stop by to pick Cameron up on his way down. While he was standing there waiting, the ground-glass door at the end of the corridor suddenly flared open and the receptionist came running out after him.