The Black Angel
Page 3
He’d been in a fight. As if I cared! He could have been in ten, so long as he’d come back to me now. His lip was split, and there was a cut over one eye, and a strand of his hair hung down in a dank fishhook over his forehead. The only thing that was strangely missing was the whiff of alcohol to go with it.
I reached up and fondly pushed the fishhook back in place, but it came right down again. I put both my arms around his neck, tight, and hid my face against him and took a great big deep sigh.
I kept waiting to feel his arms close around behind me, but they didn’t. “He’s still off me a little,” I thought ruefully.
But I didn’t care; he could be sore at me all he wanted, if he’d only stay with me while he was being sore.
He shoved me unexpectedly back before him, and when I looked up in surprise I saw it wasn’t he but the two men who were with him, one on each side, who had shoved him.
I hadn’t seen them until now; the doorway wasn’t terribly wide—and then there’d been him to look at. There was a glistening little chain from his hand to one of theirs, even though he was holding it in his pocket, trying to hide it from me. And his other one—well, the second man was holding that down at his side, with the cuff all twisted around like a wringer.
But it was that chain; I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It hurt; it was wound so tight around—my heart.
He said to me quite gently, “Don’t be frightened, Alberta. It’s all right.”
One of the strangers close beside the two of us said, “It’s all right, is good.”
But we only had eyes for one another, even after they were inside with him and the door was closed. We stood there, the two of us, in a frightened little world of our own, with nobody else around.
He said, “They think I——” He stopped and started over again. “Well, look, there was a——”
“I know, I know about it. It wasn’t you. Tell them. Kirk, not you. Tell them.”
“Yeah, tell us, Kirk,” one said.
We didn’t hear them; we didn’t even know they were there. One had wandered off, anyway, to look around the place.
“How did you know? The radio——?”
“I was there,” I said. “I was right there when you——”
I saw the start of surprise he gave. He reached out with his free hand and touched the extreme corner of my mouth in a sort of caress. But one finger lay across both lips at once, the upper and the lower, so I knew what the caress was for.
A voice from somewhere outside the two of us said, “What’d you just say, lady?”
Kirk said quietly, “She didn’t say anything.”
His foot slid out a little along the rug, unnoticeably, and touched mine warningly. I had sense enough not to look down.
“She said she heard it on the radio,” Kirk said.
“Tell them, Kirk,” I kept repeating futilely. It was the only thing I could think of to say.
He smiled at me a little. “I have been, for hours past. It doesn’t seem to help.” The point was he was coming back to me, more and more every minute; I could feel it. Not from this police business, from her, I mean.
“You don’t think so, do you?” And when my swimming eyes had told him the best they could, he said: “Well, I have that much at least.”
I had him back again.
I turned to the one who had stayed right beside us. He’d had to, because of that little steel chain. “He couldn’t have, don’t you see?” I even plucked at the chain, childishly trying to get rid of it, but that only brought both their hands up at once in a double gesture that was somehow horrible. “He couldn’t have,” I kept on saying. “He was at his office. He was at his office until after six. I phoned him there; he’d just left; the girl’ll tell you——”
It was like talking to stone. Even his eyes were stone. They were fixed on me, but they gave no sign of mobility.
The other one came in from the hall. He was carrying Kirk’s packed valise with him. “Yeah, here it is,” he announced quietly.
The one with us said, “We better let him go, Flood. She says he couldn’t have done it.” He didn’t even crack a smile. He had refined cruelty down to a science. Or maybe he didn’t even know he was being cruel at all.
Flood said, with a touch of lazy compassion, a sort of passive tolerance at best, “Aw, don’t rib her, Brennan. I’ve got one of my own home. I know how they are.”
“Yeah,” Brennan marveled, as though I wasn’t within hearing of them at all. “Ain’t it wonderful the way they’ll go to bat for these guys? They don’t even know what it is, where it is, or anything else about it, but right away it couldn’t have been him because they say so.” He sucked something and it made a pop inside his cheek. “All right, ready? Let’s go.”
I flung my arm convulsively around Kirk’s neck, as if to hold him there with me. Across his shoulder I pleaded to the one called Flood, in whom I thought I’d detected a soft spot: “But he was still at his office after six, don’t you see? I was over there myself at her place; I was there, I tell you, around five, and she was already——”
Kirk’s cuff mate gave me a withering look; he was plainly disgusted by such a transparent prevarication; that was an insult to their intelligences. “Sure,” he said dryly, “you were over there. You had tea with her, I suppose. They were going away together tonight, and you dropped in for a sociable farewell visit. Or maybe to help her pack.”
And even the one called Flood—I could see by the way he looked at me he didn’t take it seriously either—just felt sorry for me. He tried to let me down as gently as he could. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Murray,” he said, “that wouldn’t help much even if it were so. You see, she—it happened between one and two in the afternoon. We have experts who can give us the time on these things. And Murray here”—you could tell by the tightening up when he pronounced the name and glanced aside at him his feeling sorry ended with me, didn’t extend to Kirk—“Murray here may have been back at his office by the time you phoned around six, but he admits that he was over there at the Mercer place just around that very time. In fact, he was seen leaving the building at a quarter of two, so there’s no virtue in his either admitting or denying it.”
Kirk’s breath said, soft beside my ear in rueful tenderness, “Don’t say that any more, about you going there. Please, for me, won’t you? Thanks just the same.” I saw that he didn’t believe me himself, now that he’d thought twice about it, any more than the other two did. Masculine minds seem to run in the same groove in certain situations.
“I couldn’t get in; she didn’t answer the bell,” he went on. “So I waited a minute or two, and then I went away again.” But this was to them, over the top of my head, not to me. He was ashamed to address me directly about it because of the implication.
Brennan suddenly raised his own hand. To show me Kirk’s hand, by bringing it up automatically like that along with his. There were a number of varying red streaks on the back of it.
“Her cat did that,” Kirk said, continuing to address them. “I’ve told you where those came from over and over.”
Brennan said to Flood: “She wouldn’t let him in, but her cat raked his hand.”
“It was outside in the hall; it had gotten out in some way. When I tried to grab it, it slashed at me and ran away. It acted like something had frightened it. But it was always running out like that, beating it up to the roof and places, so I let it go——”
“Good alibi, that cat,” Brennan said. He let their hands drop again. “But not good enough. Come on.” He gave his wrist a directional jerk that tautened the links. Kirk had to turn in answer to it. It did something to me, to see him turn in involuntary obedience like that. The way a dog does on a leash.
I tried to draw his face down to mine, press it to me, but his cheek slipped away and was gone; I couldn’t hold it.
They were taking him out the door. “Ah, wait,” I pleaded. “Won’t he need something? Let me give him something to take with him.”
I know, I know; it was a silly thing to do, but I’d never had my husband taken away from me for murder before; I hadn’t learned the proper decorum.
I ran back with them, and when I got there the door was standing open and the hallway beyond was empty. They hadn’t waited; they were gone.
I stood there in the open doorway, and the rolled-up pajamas dropped disconsolately to the floor at my feet and lay there.
3
ANNOUNCEMENT OF WIDOWHOOD
I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT WAS ALL OVER AND DONE WITH already as I sat there in Benedict’s office waiting for him to come back. The long dragging months seemed to have flashed by like minutes. I had a childish notion that they’d left something out, that they’d rushed things through more than they had a right to, more than they did with others. Benedict said no, and the calendar said no, but it couldn’t be that this was the last of it, that there was nothing more after this. Why, it was only yesterday that he was still sitting there across the table from me, grumbling: “Gee, what d’ye do to this coffee? You could plant geraniums in it!” Why, it was only last night, wasn’t it, that they’d taken him away from me, and I’d come running to the door a minute too late, and a pair of his rolled-up pajamas had fallen to the floor and remained there at my feet?
And now it was over already. It had been since that hideous day last week. This, today, was just anticlimax, the finishing touch. That was why Benedict had been able to persuade me to wait here in his office instead of going down there and being present in the chambers. He’d wanted me to stay home altogether, but I couldn’t have endured that. At least here, at this halfway stop, I could hear it a little sooner—what I knew already.
Benedict’s office girl was a sympathetic young thing. She sat there beside me on a hard little wall bench in his reception room with her arm around me, offering me a drink of water from time to time. I guess she didn’t know what else to do for me. She kept talking away a blue streak, trying to be encouraging.
“It’s just a technicality. I know it frightens people so, but it isn’t final; it isn’t irrevocable. It’s just a legal phrase that’s automatically spoken in all these cases. Honey, I’ve seen Mr. Benedict get more people off on appeals and reversals. Haven’t you, Mort? How about it, Mort?”
Mort was a young law clerk who worked in the office. He was sympathetic too. He’d go away and then come back again at intervals. He wasn’t talking quite so much and so sanguinely, I noticed. Maybe he knew more law than she.
“He wouldn’t even let me take the stand. Don’t you think maybe that would have helped?”
“But, honey, what could you have done? What could you have said? Don’t you suppose he would have been the first to call you if it would have helped any? He never overlooks a witness that he thinks will help a case. And he never uses one that he thinks will weaken it. Does he, Mort? Mort, does he? Nobody saw you come or go there that day; that was the unfortunate part of it. The jury wouldn’t have believed you any more than the arresting detectives did. They would have thought you were just making it up to try to shield your husband, and the sympathy that you aroused for yourself would have worked in reverse; it would have alienated them against him even more than they were already. That’s why he tried to keep you away from the proceedings as much as possible and made you wear a veil and sit far back in the courtroom where you wouldn’t be noticed. You see, you’re too appealing, too attractive, honey; and you have to admit he was mixed up with this other woman, was going away with her, even if it was only for a spell. You were a bad risk; you would have hurt our side more than you helped it, just by being who you are, looking like you do. You were the injured party, but the—forgive me for saying this, honey—the injury was done you by the very man my boss was trying to defend.”
“Let him injure me some more,” I thought dismally; “I only want him back. Let him injure me to his heart’s content.”
“And then even if Mr. Benedict hadn’t felt that way about it himself,” she went on, “Mr. Murray particularly asked him not to call you unless he had to; that was his wish. He didn’t want you to get all smeared up in it if it could be avoided.”
That was true. Kirk had told me the same thing himself.
I kept watching the door, watching the door, waiting for it to open. “Shouldn’t he be back by now? Does it always take this long?”
“He’ll be here any minute now, honey. Just be patient.”
Finally it did open, and there he was, carrying a brief.
I tried to read his face from all the way across the reception room. My eyes fastened on him in mute appeal and followed him as he came on toward me, and then past, and swung out the little gate in the partition railing and passed through. He avoided my gaze with an air of studious preoccupation. He didn’t seem to see me until I had risen and he couldn’t pretend not to any more. That alone should have been answer enough.
Then he said, “Come inside; come into my office.” And to the girl, “Why did you let her sit out here, Ruthie? Why didn’t you have her wait inside?”
The girl said, “She didn’t want to be alone in there, Mr. Benedict. She asked if she could sit with me, and I had to be out here to answer the switchboard.”
He held the private-office door for me and I went in. I felt a little bit as though I were going to my own execution here and now. There wasn’t very much doubt of what he was going to tell me. It was just the word itself that was so awful. And the attaching of a date to it.
He couldn’t look at me at first. He fussed around with the papers he’d brought back with him as long as he could. I just waited, with my eyes burning at him.
He sighed finally and said: “Now don’t take it hard. The other day was the real test, and you stood it like a major; you were wonderfully brave.”
He wouldn’t have said that if he could have seen me afterward, at home by myself, with the corner of the pillow stuffed into my mouth, I thought.
Wasn’t he going to say it ever? Was he just going to stand there like that all afternoon? “Is it——?”
“I’m appealing it, of course.”
“He didn’t give him—the other?”
“He couldn’t; there was no recommendation of mercy.”
“Say it. I can stand it. Only say it quick and get it over with.”
But he still wouldn’t name the word; I had to myself.
“The chair? The electric chair?”
He looked down at his desk in assent.
It exploded in my mind. My husband has been sentenced to death. That thing we all obey, all live under, the law of the state, has decreed he shall be taken from me in full health, and his body attached to——
I closed my eyes briefly, opened them again. Because what there was to be seen on the outside was less fearful than what there was to be seen on the inside.
He was worried about me. I was sitting down, so he must have thrust forward a chair. He tried to take out a bottle of liquor he kept for such emergencies in one of the desk drawers. I motioned to him not to. “Don’t be afraid,” I murmured half audibly.
“It isn’t over yet. You’re taking the typical layman’s point of view,” he tried to say. Or something like that.
I motioned that aside too. Of course it was over. The damage was already largely done. The sentence had already been partially carried out on both of us. In our hearts, if nowhere else. How could we both be ever quite the same again? What good would his appeal be by the time it was finally submitted? They’d never give me back quite the same man that had gone up there to that place where they kept them. They’d never give him back the same wife that he had left behind.
After a while, in a carefully controlled voice that wasn’t like my own at all, I asked: “How did he take it?”
“With his head up, looking him straight in the eye.�
��
“I should have been there, somewhere close by, at such a time. He was all alone in that room, poor boy.”
“He said he was glad you weren’t there to hear it. He thanked me as they took him out for not letting you come.”
A moment or two went sluggishly by. “I guess I’ll go home now,” I said forlornly. “There’s nothing to wait here for any more.”
He got up and came outside with me. He said, “I’ll take you downstairs and put you in a taxi. Do you want Mort or the girl to ride home with you to your place?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll be all right. I’ll have to get used to going around alone from now on, I guess.”
After he’d closed the cab door on me and given the driver my address, and just as he was about to turn away I reached out quickly through the open window and clutched him by the sleeve. “When? Tell me the date.”
“Now, why do you want to——?” he protested.
I wouldn’t let go his arm. “I’ve got to know. Please tell me.”
“The week of May sixteenth.”
I sank back against the seat. And all the way home the thought that rode with me was: “I’m only twenty-two, and yet they’re going to make me a widow in less than three months.”
4
FAREWELL SCENE
IT’S HARD TO SAY GOOD-BY FOR GOOD AT ANY TIME OR ANY place. It’s harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss. And nothing should come between the kisses of a man and his wife.
He said things that went right through me. “Everyone’s entitled to be forgiven at least once. Even a dog; they give a dog three bites——”
“You are, you were, you have been, long ago, oh, long ago.”
“That was just—well, it must have been one last wild oat left over. I would have been such a good husband from—then on. If they would’ve only let me. I would have been the best-behaved guy anyone ever had around her. I would have brought you candy or flowers every night when I came home and I would’ve never kicked about the coffee any more.”