The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Now, what sort of evidence will I need for it to be any good? Documentary, or will it just be enough if there’s some slip made in the course of conversation, or what sort of requirement will there be from the police point of view?”

  “There wouldn’t be any documentary evidence in a case like this,” he let me know. “You don’t find murders written down in black and white, like bank statements. If you can get anything you come to me with it, even if it’s only a rumor, a piece of idle gossip. That’ll be enough from this policeman’s point of view. If there’s anything to it at all we’ll see that it gets turned into something documentary; you leave that to us.”

  He saw me to the door. “You go ahead, and luck to you. Keep in touch with me; you can always find me around here.” But then at the very last he couldn’t resist adding, out of sheer kindliness, I suppose: “Will you do one thing for me, though? Don’t get your heart too set on it. Don’t take it too hard if it doesn’t—work out the way you expect it to.”

  I knew he didn’t really believe Kirk hadn’t done it. He didn’t expect me to uncover anything, because he thought everything there was to be uncovered had already been uncovered. Pity was making him seem to abet me. He thought it would be easier on me if I had some will-o’-the-wisp to chase than just to sit still waiting for the switch to fall.

  I knew that as I left him; I could read it in him, on him.

  “I’ll show him too,” I vowed. “I’ll show them all.”

  “I stayed up all night rubbing soap on my finger,” I told the pawnbroker, “but I can only get it up as high as the joint, where it is now. It won’t go over it.”

  He tried it a couple of times with his bare hand. “You could have it filed off,” he said.

  “I know I could, but I don’t want that done to it. I thought maybe you have a pair of pliers or some sort of instrument handy you could get it off with. I don’t care how much it hurts; it’s got to come off.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. He came back and put a drop or two of oil on my finger just above it and then got a good firm grip on the ring with a pair of nippers. Then he braced my arm by holding it pressed tightly under his own and started to tug away at it.

  It made it; it came off and flew across the pawnshop and he had to go after it.

  It looked so funny and raw there where it had been until now. It had left a little circlet of pink behind at the base of my finger. It was the first time it had been off since I was seventeen.

  He polished it and examined it and said: “You want to sell it outright or just pawn it?”

  “I’d rather just pawn it. I—I’ll want it back someday.”

  “Five dollars,” he said.

  “But it’s pure gold; it’s——”

  “I know, but how much gold is in a wedding ring? Seven-fifty. And not because of the ring, because I’ve got a heart where I got no business to have one.”

  I held out my hand. “Just let me look at it once again before you take it.” I tilted it so that I could see the engraving on the inside.

  K. M.—A. F., 1937.

  My brother-in-law pretended not to know my voice at first. Well, maybe he really didn’t recognize it at that. I hadn’t seen them for over three years, since they’d moved out to Trenton.

  I said, “This is Alberta. I’m speaking from the city.”

  His voice dropped still further, became wary. “Oh—uh—yes,” he said. “Alberta, how are you? We got your note and—uh—been meaning to answer it. You see, how we’re fixed here is—well, the house is rather small, and on account of the kids, I don’t see——”

  “But you don’t understand. I didn’t ask to be taken in. I thought I made that plain in my note. I don’t want anything done for me; I’ll look after myself. All I’m asking you to do is lend me a sum of money. I’ll pay you the usual rate of interest on it, and you’ll get it back, every penny of it——”

  “Is it for——? Are you still trying to help him?” The way he said that, you had to hear it to know what I mean.

  “Is Rose there? Let me speak to her a minute.” I’d never liked him much anyway.

  “She—uh—just stepped out to the store.” The timing was faulty; there was too much slack in the answer. As when you turn your head to confer in pantomime. I could see the signs going on, as though I were right in the room with them. Signs of interrogation and signs of refusal.

  My own sister. No, because I was the wife of a condemned man now. I might bring notoriety into their home. They had their children’s welfare to consider, their friends, their standing in the community.

  I said with a sort of passive, low-wattage dignity, “All right, Harvey. Never mind. I’d better get off now.”

  “You can reverse the charges,” he said patronizingly.

  I needed that money bitterly, even the little the call was going to cost. I knew it was a foolish thing to do. And yet it wasn’t pride or sulkiness. It was a compulsion of the very blood itself. I could no more have accepted that small sop from him now——

  “No,” I said with calm firmness. “It’s been worth it to me. The experience alone——”

  I hung up. I never saw either of them, or spoke, or heard from, or thought of them again.

  6

  Crescent 6–4824 ……… Marty

  IT HAD A LINE DRAWN THROUGH IT, AND I WONDERED why. It was the only one on that whole page to have a line drawn through it. I’d noticed a name here and there, on other pages, with a line drawn through the number and a new number superimposed—and that was understandable, a change of location. But never a line drawn through both name and number alike, as with this one. Wherever they went, though they changed numbers, they carried the same names with them; those remained unchanged.

  Then what was this?

  It could be death, I knew. And I dreaded the thought of tracking down a dead man. Or it could be a severance of relations. I hoped, of the two, to find it was that. One thing was sure: that line meant something, was there for a reason, had not just been drawn through it idly.

  It came due at its appointed time, and its appointed time was now, five-thirty of a porcelain-blue evening. Hours had gone by in the preparations leading up to it, preparations that could not be seen by the eye, gave no outward sign, could have been mistaken for silent pondering or absent-minded reverie, but were active within me nevertheless.

  At the very end, as the moment for it drew nigh, I drew nearer to it by degrees. The telephone, I mean. I walked back and forth before it, murmuring to myself, memorizing a lesson under my breath. Sometimes looking up at the ceiling, sometimes down at the floor, as I did so. Turning every few paces and retracing my steps. Back and forth, back and forth, whispering under my breath.

  “If the voice is young, sort of vital, resonant, the opening wedge is: ‘You don’t know me, but I feel as though I know you; I’ve heard so much about you.’ Then go on from there. The key is flirtatious, coquettish.

  “If the voice is dry, lifeless, worn out, the opening wedge is: ‘I have some information which I feel may interest you.’ The key is a suggestion of pecuniary or personal advantage.

  “If the voice is brisk, businesslike, impersonal, then the best approach is likewise direct, impersonal, without shadings or overtones. ‘My name is so-and-so; I would like to speak to you personally for a few moments.’

  “If the voice is indeterminate, cannot be analyzed, fits into none of these categories, then the third approach, the direct, businesslike one, is still the best.”

  I had stopped parading now. I had it memorized.

  I sat down before the instrument and braced myself, one hand stiffly to each end of the small table it sat on.

  I thought of him, as I did each time. “Wish me luck, darling; maybe this will be it.” I took a deep preparatory breath. The dial wheel oscillated beneath my finger, and my thoughts oscillated with it. “If the voice is young, vibrant——If the voice is dry, reserved——If the voice is businesslike——”


  “Hello?” There wasn’t enough to tell by.

  “Is Marty there?”

  “Marty who?”

  “Just Marty.”

  “You’ll have to give me the last name.”

  I’d known I would; I’d been afraid of that, but I didn’t have it to give.

  I parried evenly with the question I’d prepared myself. “Who is this I’m speaking to, please?”

  “This is the desk of the St. Albans Hotel.”

  “Oh——” So all the rehearsal had been wasted. “Well, I have no second name. I’m trying to reach someone whom I know only as Marty. Couldn’t you help me just from that? Couldn’t you tell me if you have anyone registered with you whose first name is Marty?”

  “I don’t see how,” he said rather ungraciously.

  In this, from beginning to end, there was to be no acceptance of defeat. I knew already it must be that way. My mind was made up. There would be no such thing as a refusal, a slight, a rebuff. Or rather, they would have no power to hinder me.

  “I don’t see how I can help you. I’m rather busy at the moment.”

  I made my voice pleasantly reasonable. “This is important to me. It’s not a frivolous matter. It’s a serious matter. If I come down there myself, instead of taking up your time on the phone, won’t you please try to help me trace this person?”

  His own voice relented. “If you drop in I can have someone look over the registers for you.”

  It was a pleasantly prosperous-looking place, a residential-type hotel. Just under the upper brackets of ultra-smartness, perhaps, but spelling a sort of solid, substantial, middle-class affluence. That was likely to prove a point in my favor, I realized immediately as I stepped in. This type hotel attracted a very small percentage of transients. It would have a far slower and less continuous turnover than an ordinary commercial hotel, and the guests individually would be far more likely to be known personally to the management and to be recalled by name even after they had gone.

  They were courteous to me. Sight at firsthand evidently improved my status. The assistant manager himself came out to me.

  “I’m sorry, Miss——?”

  “Miss French.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss French. As the desk already told you, there is no one registered with us at the moment whose given name is ‘Marty’ or Martin. I’ve had someone go over the register. Are you sure that’s all the information you can give us?”

  “I’m afraid that’s all.”

  “Could you give me an idea of what the person looks like?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I had to admit. “You see, the person is not known to me. But it’s very important that I get in touch with him. And this first name and the address here are the only clues I have.” At least I was able to impress him with my earnestness, if nothing else; I could see that.

  “I’m sorry, I’d be only too glad to help you.” He stroked his immaculately shaven jowls. “But I don’t see how I can.”

  I did, and I didn’t hesitate to make the suggestion. “I don’t like to impose, but if I wait out here, couldn’t you have someone go back through your back registers—just for a short distance—and see if such a person was here formerly?”

  “Well——” he said. “Well——” And then, “Just a moment.”

  He left me sitting out there while he went in to give the order to someone. So I knew I’d won that point, at least.

  It took quite some time, and while I was sitting there I tried to form a composite impression of this mysterious “Marty” by piecing him together from the other habitués of the place. Not, I knew, that there was any guarantee he need necessarily resemble the others just because he had formerly dwelt here; he could have been a different type altogether who simply had happened to live in the same building for a while. But there is a degree of truth after all in the old saying about birds of a feather, and I felt he would not have lodged here at any time if he had not had a certain something in common with those I now glimpsed about me here and there passing through from the elevators to the street and vice versa, stopping for a moment at the desk or to chat with an acquaintance in the lobby.

  This, then, was how he would be if he ran true to form: a man already past the financial hazards of the twenties and entered now upon the prosperous calm of early middle age, when money, if it is to be made at all, has already been made. That is to say, not that the process of making it is discontinued, but the system of making it is set, runs more or less under its own momentum, releasing the individual from a great many of the earlier strains and stresses. He would be jovial, complacent, a little self-assertive (and entitled to be). Beginning to round a little at the waistline, but not enough as yet to worry about it overmuch. Hair beginning to thin a little, but that would still be a secret between him and his barber. He would stroll about, preceded by an expensive Havana cigar, and he would have an appreciative eye for the female stranger that would grow stronger as time went on. Not one of them failed to look me over, though not in a blatant, disconcerting manner.

  Well, that would be about him. A little of all that would enter into his personality, and then there would be other elements, of course, particular to him as an individual.

  The assistant manager had come out to me again. He had something jotted on a card that someone had evidently transcribed from the register at his behest.

  “I wonder if you could mean either one of these?” he said. “I had them go back three full seasons. Unfortunately—or perhaps I should say fortunately—we seem to have had a scarcity of guests with the given name of Martin during recent years. Now there’s a Martin Ebling who was with us some time ago. He left as his forwarding address Cleveland; that was at that time. Whether it’s still valid, of course, I don’t know. Then the other is Martin Blair. He left as his forwarding address another hotel here in the city.” His lip curled in a sort of professional disdain. “The Senator. I think you’ll find that farther downtown.” He sounded as though it were some sort of blemish that was liable to erasure from one day to the next.

  I took them both down and I thanked him and left.

  It was only when I’d reached there and gone in that I fully understood that lift of his lip.

  “I wonder what happened to him?” I thought. “From the St. Albans to the Senator.” It was more than a step down; it was a vertical drop.

  They didn’t look you over here; they practically disrobed you optically. With them the process of not making money was all that had carried over from the twenties, continuing all the earlier stresses and hazards. In partial compensation they had retained youth’s slimness of waist and, on the average, their hair was thicker. Why this last should be, I don’t know, unless it was because they couldn’t afford to have it cut and singed and treated preventively as often, and therefore lost less of it. Or perhaps only with peace and perfect security comes the beginning of decay. They stalked around sucking cheap cigarettes, and there was something lean, avid, wolflike about their movements.

  Not that they were all carbon copies of one another, you understand; it’s just that that was the general atmosphere of the place. They were even more self-assertive than the other group, but with this difference: no one listened.

  The clerk had a badly decayed front tooth and eyes that had looked on everything vicious there was under the electric lights.

  “Marty Blair,” he said. “Yeah, I remember him.” The memory was unwelcome. His eyes creased at the corners, and his mouth did too.

  “Is he still here?” I asked.

  “He was put out a long time ago. We got tired of carrying him.” He chuckled scornfully. “Once wasn’t enough. We had to keep putting him out over and over. He kept trying to sneak back in again each time, even after the door was locked. Finally we wore him out.” He gestured with his hand in dismissal. No pity there, no mercy.

  I wondered what he’d been trying to hang onto so desperately, to keep coming back like that each time. Respectability, I guess; even the tattered shr
eds of it that were still to be found in this place.

  “Then you don’t know where he went?”

  He eyed me bleakly. “Wherever they go,” he said, “when they’re down and out for the tenth count. The Bowery, I guess.”

  “The Bowery?” I said helplessly. “How do you look for them along the Bowery?”

  “Once they hit that,” he said, “they’re usually not worth trying to look for any more. Nobody bothers. That’s a living graveyard.”

  It was just the words of a song to me; I had so much to learn about everything. “I’ll never go there any more,” something like that.

  “But suppose he still was worth trying to look for, then what would I do?”

  “Just go in one smokehouse after the other until you see him in one of them—if you can recognize him any more.”

  I didn’t even know what he’d looked like to begin with.

  “Lady, you’ve got yourself a job,” he said when I’d told him this. He was too world-wise and weary to even ask me what I wanted him for, what I was trying to find him about. It was bound to be just a variation of some tale he’d heard before. For him there was nothing new under the electric lights. And I wondered if I’d ever be that way myself someday.

  “He was just an ordinary guy, a dime-a-dozen guy,” he said. “Gee, this is going to be hard. But I helped put him out myself two or three times, so I think I can——Thin and tall, kind of. Light hair, light brown hair. That’s about all I remember.”

  Thin and tall. Light brown hair. He was right; I had a job.

  They were looking at the backs of my legs from all over the place; I could feel them, and I wanted to get out. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Lots of luck, lady,” he said mournfully.

  Nothing new under the electric lights. It must be terrible, I thought to myself, to know as much as he did about the less appealing aspects of human nature.