“And then you’d go away happy.”
“I had her back again.”
He stopped. I kept tracing that line, as though I were slowly drawing something invisible out of him. “Only mostly,” he resumed abruptly, “they didn’t come out again. I had to go away first. The cops would make me. And that hurt.” He pushed in the side of his stomach. “The smoke would take care of that, though.”
“And murder?” I thought.
I couldn’t talk to him any more there. The stuff was too fresh in him. I’d made a good beginning. But I had to get him back on my plane again, where I could gauge his reactions better.
I said, “Marty, I want to do something for you. Would you like to sleep in a bed tonight and not just in a doorway or on a bench?”
He looked at me and said, with a pathos that was wholly without artifice, “Some people do, don’t they?”
“You can, too, tonight. Would you like to, Marty? If I buy you a bed in a room all to yourself, will you promise me not to drink until—until I come down and see you tomorrow?”
He was able to walk without any noticeable convolutions. He’d learned how to; he’d had so much practice at it. By keeping his feet close to the ground, scarcely lifting them at all, he was able to make his way along, both straight and fairly steadily, at a sort of hangdog shuffle, head and shoulders bowed somewhat forward; that was all.
I took his arm. We must have made a strange-looking couple, leaving that place. A woman and a dead man.
I appealed to the barman on the way out. “I want to take him someplace to sleep where—where he’ll stay put until tomorrow morning.”
He didn’t make the mistake of misinterpreting, at least; but then, sizing the two of us up side by side, how could anyone have very well?
“Try the Commerce, over on Broome Street,” he said. He let a little spurt of beer into a glass, added something to it I wasn’t quick enough to identify, and swished it around surreptitiously. “Here, give him this to drink a minute first.”
In the place on Broome Street I paid a dollar for a room for him and then went upstairs with him, at least as far as the door. I told him to take off his things and get some sleep and waited outside in the hall for a few minutes. Then I sent the boy in, quietly, and had him bring out his shoes to me. They were almost unidentifiable: shapeless slate crusts. I had him take them down below with us and wrap them in a bit of paper and told him to hold them there. Not to give them back to him under any circumstances, even if he should try to claim them before I could get down there.
“I must find him here when I come back tomorrow, and without any liquor in him.”
“I don’t know,” the man behind the desk said doubtfully. “I’ve seen some of them that wouldn’t let a little thing like bare feet stop them.”
“Then if he tries to get out tell him that the room hasn’t been paid for and he’ll have to wait for me to come down and bail him out. Whatever you do, keep him here.”
I went uptown again, back to the other world. I lay there all night long without sleeping, thinking about it, thinking it out, thinking it over.
Had he done it? Hadn’t he? That fanged, hideous grin he’d given at one time. Why, that had been almost a replica of the death grimace I’d seen on her own face that day in the apartment. Was that the brand of murder, the symbol of it, transferred to his own countenance from hers? No, that was metaphysical nonsense.
He was her husband. He’d been mad about her in the colloquial sense first. And now he was mad about her in the literal sense. Set out a chair, a drink, for her each time he sat down himself. They called him Heartbreak down there in the nether world. There’d been a line drawn through his name in her book, and he’d waited outside in the rain, in the snow, watching her windows, to claim her back again each time somebody left. Until one day, that day—hadn’t it occurred to him there was a better way of claiming her forever, with never another vigil necessary, with never another dispute about his title to her?
It must have been that way. It was as plain as this hand that I held out before my face in the blue pallor of the early dawn.
“Marty, I know what you did to Mia.” Suddenly, like that, in the middle of something else. No, that was no good. He’d deny it; that was only to be expected, even from someone in his condition. But what was the best I could hope to get, even if it were true and I’d hit the nail on the head? A frightened, furtive flash across his face. Why, for that matter, even if it weren’t true I might produce the same thing simply by the mere fact of making the accusation at all. No, I had to have more than that to go to Flood with.
I already had for him a splendid motive, an exquisite motive. I already had for him an incriminating vigil outside her windows that the police had never brought to light or even suspected so far. Now all I needed, I felt, was a guilt reaction of one sort or another from the suspect himself, but a substantial one, one that would hold water, something more than just a frightened look or a stammered denial; given that, and I had enough to go to them with, they could go on from there.
Suddenly, in that clarity which sometimes precedes sleep, I thought of another way of eliciting this reaction I was after, a way preferable and more reliable than a mere verbal trap. The accusation or denial must come from him, naturally, but it must be unforced, unsuggested; he must not realize that he was presenting it. Then it would be valid; then it would be substantial enough to hand over to Flood.
I would accuse somebody else and watch and see what he did.
And on that note my eyes finally dropped closed, their linings carmine against the rising sun.
I carried the wrapped shoes up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, and for a moment I got frightened and thought I’d lost him all over again. But I remembered there was no fire escape outside the window, they’d told me. I opened the door and looked in.
He was there. He was dressed. He was sitting on the bed with an inert sort of resignation, his hands dangling down between his legs. I closed the door after me and put the shoes down next to him on the floor and then stood there looking at him a moment. He looked at me in turn.
“Then there was someone like you sitting talking to me last night,” he said finally.
“Yes, there was. How’d you sleep?”
He looked back at the mattress, as though to inquire of it rather than of himself. “I don’t know,” he said lukewarmly. “I’m sort of used to angles, like benches give you. I kept missing them.”
“You better put those on.”
He didn’t ask me what I’d wanted of them; he didn’t seem interested. “I wondered what become of them,” he said indifferently.
I looked at him closely. I was seeing him for the first time in the daylight now. And although I was there to kill him myself, the full impact of what she’d done to him only came to me now as I got this better look at him. She’d killed him a thousand times to my one. He’d been a fine-looking man once; you could still make out the traces of it here and there in the shape of his head, particularly the back of it, the proportion of his features, a turn his head gave now and then. He’d been intelligent too; his eyes told that. No longer by what was in them, but by their lingering outward characteristics of color, size, and width.
She’d done her work well, all right. She’d gutted him. I couldn’t help crying out to myself as I beheld what she’d left of him: “Out of all the thousands and thousands of fine constructive women in this world, what evil star made him pick her out? What got him about her? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he tell——?”
And the answer, of course, was self-evident. What gets any of us about any of them; what gets any of them about any of us? The image in our minds. Not the reality that others see; the image in the mind. Therefore, how could he see, how could he tell, how could he free himself, when the image in his mind all along, and even now, was that of a lovely creature, all sunshine, roses, and honey, a beatific haloed being, a jewel of womankind? Who would even strive to free himself from s
uch a one? Watch out for the image in your mind.
He straightened from the lacing of his shoes at last; it was a difficult job, because the punctures the laces were to go through were warped and askew and all but obliterated, and he had to coax the lace tip through each one by moistening it and drawing it to a point; he straightened, and then he got to his feet.
I said, “They’re sending us up two cups of coffee and some rolls. I told them to.”
He drew his finger uncertainly across under his nose and mumbled: “Gee, you’re being pretty nice to me.”
I let him be for a while out of common, everyday humanity, until at least he had some coffee in him. I didn’t know why I should give quarter like this, unless I may have felt that I was aiding my own purpose by waiting until his system had become stabilized at least.
The coffee came, and we busied ourselves with it for a while: he sitting slumped on the edge of the bed, holding the mug clasped between both hands and down low almost over the floor; I standing taking mine from the top of the derelict object that passed for a bureau.
It came to me how strange the picture must be that we made, had anyone been there to see it. The huntress and the hunted, for that was what it amounted to, eying one another watchfully across this dusty, shabby, sun-blinded room, while we silently sipped at the nauseous contents of the thick mugs. The ravaged man he was; the strange, inscrutable woman I was. The silence in the room. The distance maintained between us. The eyes that watched their opposites gravely, even over the top of the thick crockery. It made what should have been an act of amenity into a sort of wary deadlock, where neither moved, waiting for the other to move first. By that I don’t mean physical movement, of course.
He put his mug down to the floor empty. I thrust mine aside, three quarters full. I passed him cigarettes that I had brought with me.
Then I returned to where I’d been, put my elbow to the bureau top. I said, “Would you like a newspaper? Do you ever read the newspapers?”
He shook his head. I wasn’t sure whether the answer was meant for both questions, so I repeated the one I was actually interested in having answered. “Do you ever read them much?”
“No, I never bother. There’s nothing in them that has to do with me.” He looked at me some more. Then he asked in a passive, detached sort of way, “What do you want with me?”
“I knew Mia, you know.”
A hunted look came over his face; he turned it aside for a second. Or maybe it was a haunted look; I didn’t know.
He wasn’t going to go on, so I had to.
“She meant a lot to me. I thought maybe there was something I could do for you.”
“What?” he asked. It wasn’t said challengingly. Just inertly.
I shifted unobtrusively around until I could watch his face in the dingy mirror, and yet, in looking at me, he wouldn’t guess at once that my eyes were on him.
“When I last saw her—oh, about three or four weeks ago—she asked me to——”
His face hardened, took on a sort of brutal aspect, especially about the mouth. “She’s dead,” he said.
I went on in the same quiet voice, as though he hadn’t spoken. “I know that. But how do you know it? I thought you didn’t read the newspapers.”
No guilt appeared, though. Only a shuttering of the eyes, an expression of blank groping, as though he were trying to remember himself how he’d come to know about it without reading it in the papers.
I gave him time. “I thought you didn’t read the newspapers? Then how did you know?”
He looked at the wall opposite him, and it wasn’t to be found there. He looked at the ceiling, and it wasn’t there. He looked at his empty hands, and it wasn’t there.
I gave him time. “You said you didn’t read the newspapers. How did you know, then? How did you know?”
He felt his forehead with the back curve of one hand, and it wasn’t there. Wasn’t in there.
“How did you know, then? How did you know?”
“Don’t,” he moaned in a helpless sort of way. “Each time you say that it drives it away again. I’m just going to get it and it drives it away again.”
“Did you go up there, maybe, and see her lying there right after it happened? Don’t be afraid; there’s no harm in that.” I shoveled my hands toward him in ingenuous protest. “Isn’t that it, Marty? You happened to go up there and found her lying there just the way she was, with one of her own silk stockings twisted around her neck, choked to death; isn’t that it?”
“No, she was—smothered to death with a pillow.”
I said, without making the tactical error of altering the unexcited, casual tenor of my voice: “You see, you did go up there; that’s how you knew. That’s all right; there’s nothing to be nervous about in that. You opened the door and you saw her lying there the first thing, right from where you were, on the floor in that front room of hers, so you quickly closed it and went away again. Nobody’s blaming you for——”
He said with a sort of childish querulousness, “She wasn’t in the front room; she was in the room behind, the one she slept in.”
“You see, you know the whole thing,” I said quietly. I began treacherously touching up my hair via the mirror. “You say you don’t read the newspapers, so you must have gone up there and seen it for yourself. By the way, how’d you get in?” I tried to make my voice sound admiring, flattering to his dexterity.
He began to shake his head, imperceptibly at first, then more and more confirmedly, but with a puzzled expression continuing on his face. “I didn’t go up there,” he murmured. “I didn’t do that, because she wouldn’t-a wanted me to. The last time I did she threw me out; she told me never to come around again. She was ashamed, I guess, on account of I looked so dirty and—well, you know. She said she’d call the cops if I ever came near her again. She said, ‘Go to the Salvation Army, you bum!’ I just watched from across the street after that.” He sighed, but he kept on shaking his head.
The denials and retractions were starting in now, I said to myself. But he’d said enough already, more than enough.
I looked in my bag, at the cigarettes that were still there, and pretended not to see them. I closed it with a definitive snap. “We need some more cigarettes,” I said. “I’ll go down and get them in a minute.” I was going to phone Flood. I had enough for him now. It was a job for him from here on. He’d warned me not to look for any documentary evidence. Well, what more could there be than this? He’d said he never read the newspapers, yet he’d known she was dead, and he’d known more than that: he’d known the exact method and even the very room she was lying in. He admitted he’d maintained an endless vigil across the street and been tortured by a cancerous love. What stronger motive could a man have ever had than what she’d done to him?
Flood would know how to get the rest of it out of him in short order, where I didn’t. By this time tomorrow, maybe by tonight even, it would all be over.
“You want me to wait here for you?” he asked in that chronically helpless way of his.
“Just stay here where you are; I’ll be right back.” I opened the door.
The blat of a cheap, defective little radio in one of the adjacent little cubbyholes came welling in from outside.
He quirked his head almost idiotically and blinked. He started to shake his head again imperceptibly as before. This time up and down and not across. “That’s how,” he murmured cryptically.
“What?” I said from half over the threshold.
“That’s how I heard. I remember now. I didn’t read it in the papers and I didn’t go up there. It came in over the radio at the Silver Dollar place. They got a radio there by the cash register, and there was some kind of a fight that night they wanted to get, so they had it turned on, waiting for it. I just about got there, and I didn’t have any soup in me yet, so I understood the words that was coming out of it. I can still remember ’em by heart too. I only heard ’em once, but I can say them right through to the end, jus
t like they came out. Sometimes they say themselves over, without me doing it myself at all. They’re coming now, and I can’t stop ’em. ‘An attractive young woman was found murdered in her apartment by the police late this afternoon. The victim was Mia Mercer, a brunette about twenty-eight years old, who had recently worked as an entertainer at the Hermitage——’”
His face puckered into a white cicatrice and went slowly over and downward out of sight, but the words continued to well from it unchecked. That voice. You had to hear it to know what grief can really do. No sobs, no huskiness, nothing so warm and alive as that. The monotonous singsong of Chinese children reciting their lessons, meaningless, arid, a parrotlike duplication.
“‘—She was last seen alive Thursday night, when she returned rather late, but it has been established that the murder did not take place until one or two o’clock today. The police are already holding a suspect, whose name is being withheld for the present, and they expect to——’”
I closed the door and came in again. I went over to him and placed my hand across his mouth and sealed it up, silencing that terrible, unbearable, mechanical flow of misery that was pouring from it like from a machine, a machine without intelligence or awareness of its own. I said to him what he’d said to me before: “Don’t.” I was a woman after all.
Acting can reach great heights of persuasiveness. But sincerity, when there is no acting at all, can reach even greater.
He’d got himself a stay, but not yet an acquittal.
Many hours had gone by. We were still there in the room together. It darkened early, that room, earlier even than the grubby world outside. It was dim already with imminence of dusk, while the afternoon sun still rode high elsewhere.
His voice was a lazy thread stitching through the silence.
“She was in a little blue dress that night; I can see it yet. It’s funny how you go someplace and never think you’re going to meet someone there who will change your whole life around from then on. You go to some dance or party, just because you’ve got nothing better to do, and you think by the next night after you won’t even remember about it any more. And here ten years later you can still remember everything about it as clear as if it was just the night before. You can’t remember any of the other nights around then, or even the months or years, but just that one night; you’ve saved it whole, the way it was.”
The Black Angel Page 7
