The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  His voice stopped. I waited without using my own, afraid if I did he would become too aware of me, wouldn’t go on again. He was talking to himself more than to me. I was just the sounding board against which his voice projected itself. Presently he’d gone on again.

  “In a little blue dress that sort of swung out wide from here down. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and I just stood there looking at her.”

  Like me, I thought, like me. I’d first met Kirk at a dance like that too.

  “And I can even remember the piece they happened to be playing just then too. ‘Always.’ Every time I’ve ever heard it since, it meant her in a little blue dress, the first time I ever saw her. It was our song, hers and mine, while we were together, and now that we’re not, it’s just mine, I guess.

  “I guess I would have stood there all night like that, just looking. That would have been enough for me. But then the fellow that had taken me there, he came back to me and said: ‘What’s the matter? What’re you going to do, just stand there? Don’t you want to dance or nothing?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but only with one girl. That one over there.’ And I showed her to him. He was one of these fellows don’t stand back about anything; he laughed and said, ‘That can be arranged easy enough,’ and grabbed my arm and hauled me over to her then and there, without paying any attention to who she was with. And I went on from there under my own——” He couldn’t find the word.

  “Evil destiny,” I supplied silently to myself.

  “So that’s how you first met her,” I said. “That’s how she was when you first met her.”

  The room was getting cloudier all the time. He was sprawled diagonally on the bed, back on his elbow, picking at the covering as he spoke. I was seated there on a chair drawn up close beside him. Its back was toward the bed, and I was straddling it in reverse, my arms folded along the top of it and my chin resting on them.

  He and the bed were between me and the door. It would have been impossible for me to get out of the room in time, in case anything——

  I’d been downstairs just now, a few minutes ago, and I’d told them to send somebody up and have them knock on the door in ten minutes’ time. No sooner, no later. Seven minutes of the ten were up now.

  The two pillows on the bed, pillows such as she’d been smothered with, were lying there undisturbed. They were within easy reach of him, the way he lay. The window looked out on a blind surface of shaft wall, and we were alone in the room, cut off, isolated. He didn’t know someone was coming up to knock on the door outside in three more minutes. For all he knew, no one was coming near here for the rest of the night.

  I dropped my wrist a little on the inside of the chair back, glanced at it. Two and a half minutes.

  “I know who did it, Marty,” I said quietly.

  His eyeballs rolled upward at me like marbles, stayed that way, peering from under his upper lids. Finally he said uncertainly, “Yeah, that guy they’ve got up there now; everybody knows.”

  “No, no, I don’t mean him. I know who really did it.” I kept my lashes inscrutably down. “I’m the only one who does. Here’s something that no one knows, no one but me, and now I’m telling you. I was there at the time it happened. I was in the place. I saw him, and he didn’t know it; he didn’t see me.”

  A pulse in his cheek started to throb. I saw it begin, and then I kept my eyes off it from then on. A cord running down the side of his neck stood out more distinctly than it had a minute ago, I thought, but I wasn’t quite sure.

  I knew what he was going to ask next, but I had to wait for him to ask it before I could answer it. He took quite a while, as though he had a hard time getting the words to come.

  “Why didn’t you—tell someone sooner?” He swallowed in the middle of it. I saw the obstruction go down his throat.

  “Maybe I didn’t want to get mixed up in it.”

  “Are you—sure you really saw him doing it?”

  “I saw him crouching over her, right in the act.”

  “Why didn’t you scream or holler, try to save her?”

  “I was afraid he’d do it to me too, if I did; I was afraid of my own life. I stuffed the corner of a towel in my mouth to make sure he wouldn’t hear me.”

  “How’d you happen to be up there? How come he didn’t see you, if you were right in the place when it happened?”

  Tension was suddenly in the room with us, crowding the air in it, like a slowly expanding gas, making it resist when we tried to breathe it in. And yet we were both so quiet, almost motionless. He plucking at the counterpane. My face brooding over the chair top.

  “I’d dropped in on her. That was nothing; I’d often done that before. For no particular reason, just to kill time. We were pretty chummy, you know. We were fiddling around there, doing nothing, like two women will at that hour of the day. She wasn’t even dressed yet.”

  I remembered that much from firsthand observation.

  “It suddenly occurred to me I wanted to take a shower. I don’t know why; I just felt like it. She said go ahead, help myself. I went in there and left the bathroom door open just about an inch; I took off my things and got behind that thick green glass door. I left that open about an inch too. But I never got to turn the faucets on the wall. I was standing there strapping on one of these rubber caps that we women use, without making any noise, I guess. I had a little trouble adjusting it—it was hers—and that took several minutes. All of a sudden I thought I heard a man’s voice out there where she was. I tiptoed out of the closet to close the bathroom door, so he wouldn’t be able to look in. Before I even got over to it, it was already happening. I heard her fall to the floor in the room outside. I grabbed a towel and put it around me, and I stuck my eye to the crack of the door and looked out. It was only wide enough for one eye. I saw him pressing down hard at something on the floor there, and I knew what he was doing. I hid way back in the shower closet, where it was dark, for a long time afterward, until I was sure he’d gone.”

  “And you saw him?”

  He said it very low. As close to him as I was, I could hardly hear it. His lips just moved a little. About a minute was gone now; about one and a half were left.

  “I certainly did. I saw him right in the act. I saw him from head to foot.”

  “And you’ve never told anybody?” This time even his lips didn’t move; the air in front of them just vibrated, that was all.

  “I’ve never told a living soul. I’m the only one who knows it.”

  The hand that had been plucking the counterpane flattened on it in a directional pat. “Come here,” he said. “Come a little closer, over here by me.” His eyes stayed down, didn’t look up at me. “Get on the bed here next to me.”

  My heart hurt as though a surgeon were taking stitches in it. Those two harmless-looking pillows there, side by side——His hand gave the bed another persuasive pat, and then another.

  I forced myself up from the chair by pushing my arms against the top of it, and then I moved around it toward him until my knees brought up against the edge of the bed.

  His eyes stayed down. He repeated that flat-handed pat atop the bed. Meaning “Down; down here beside me.” I glanced at the pillows and then back to him. I put my knee to the bed and sank down on my side.

  Our heads were very close together now, though our bodies lay extended in opposite directions, his form overlapping one side of it, mine the other.

  His hand reached upward toward the head of the bed and drew one of the pillows out of position by its corner, and he started shifting it down toward me like that, flat along the surface of the bed.

  I looked steadily up at the ceiling. I thought: “In another minute a great white mass will drop down over me, obliterating everything.”

  “And you’re sure you saw him?” his voice murmured close to my ear.

  “I saw all there was to see of him. What do you want? Why did you ask me to come closer to you like this?”

  And now the pillow would leap up and then
come hurtling down.

  Instead he inserted it under the back of my head and took his hand off it; left it there, as a partial support for my head, a resting place. Perhaps it was a form of bribery; I don’t know. “Tell me who he was,” he said in a husky whisper. “I want to know. I’ve got to know.”

  And if it had been he, he wouldn’t have to know; he would know already.

  The tension slowly siphoned from the air and left a sort of vacuum behind it. I felt all limp and starchless. My forehead was damp. I closed my eyes in momentary exhaustion.

  The knock on the door came while they were shut like that. The test period was over. Marty just turned his head, not understanding. This was to have saved my life. “Yes,” I called out weakly. A hotel boy looked in, and I told him to get some cigarettes or something; I don’t remember.

  I tried to analyze my own feelings. He stood acquitted now. What further, what greater certainty could there ever be than this? And yet to my surprise, along with the sense of disappointment, of frustration, that was rightly there, there was a sneaking, almost shamefaced sense of relief. I thought to myself with wonderment: “My God, I must actually have developed a liking for this poor devil to feel the way I do about it.” Or maybe it was just a sense of sportsmanship, a repugnance at the idea of delivering the final blow to someone who was down already.

  I got up presently and went over toward the tarnished glass framed over the bureau. My legs were still a little rocky under me from my recent crisis. “I may as well go now,” I reflected; there was nothing for me here any more. I had as much proof as I could hope for.

  I was forgetting him. I was forgetting I’d left him in mid-conversation, so to speak. I was forgetting that what to me was a topic over and done with to him was a topic broken off short. He got off the bed in turn, came up behind me. I felt his hand on my arm, but I didn’t turn; I continued adjusting my hat.

  “Tell me who he is; tell me.”

  “Why? What satisfaction is it to you to know? There’s a man in jail for it already, and they’re going to execute him for it soon——”

  “That isn’t enough; that’s no good to me. I’m not the state. Whaddo I care who the state kills for it? I’m the one who loved her. I want to know who really did it, whose hands really did it! You can’t transfer a thing like that from one guy to another. The one who really did it stays the one who really did it, no matter who the state takes it out on!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said you did. You said you saw him.”

  “I just said that.”

  “You’re trying to back out now. You think I’m just a Bowery bum, not worth telling it to. I want that one thing from you, d’you hear me? That one thing. I want to know who that guy was that you saw kill her.”

  I went toward the door. He came around the outside of me and got there first, got between it and me.

  “I’m not going to let you out of here. You know, and you’re not getting out of here until I know too.”

  I tried to paw him aside. He didn’t actively raise hands to me, menace me; he just bore my hands down, stayed there. I’d conjured up this tatterdemalion jinni myself out of a bottle of alky, so to speak, and now I couldn’t exorcise him again.

  “I wasn’t up there, I tell you!”

  “You said you were, and I believe you the first time. You knew her place too well, even that green glass shower door she had up there! Now who was it you saw? You’re going to tell me.”

  He reached around behind me and caught my arm at the wrist. He started bending it up toward the shoulder, the wrong way. It’s painful. It’s a method little boys are fond of. It’s effective, nonetheless.

  We were struggling full-tilt now, even if still only passively. He’d retained a good deal more vigor than I’d suspected, and it occurred to me even in the midst of my present preoccupation that if he’d reacted positively to that other previous test a while ago I would have stood very little chance, knock on the door or no knock.

  “Don’t! Let go, you’re hurting me!” I winced. “You fool!” I could have screamed, but I had more to lose than he by raising a great clamor, attracting attention to the two of us.

  I couldn’t stand it any more, and just saying I didn’t know was no good; he wouldn’t take that for an answer.

  “You going to tell me? You going to tell me?” he kept breathing into my averted face.

  I couldn’t think of a name; I couldn’t think of an address.

  “All right, I’ll tell you where you can find him; I’ll tell you where he is. It’s on the third floor at——” I gave him a name and address at random. “Now let me out of here!” There was water in my eyes from sheer physical pain.

  He stood aside, and I clawed the door open and ran out into the hall. As I hurried along it, rubbing my numbed arm to bring the circulation back and glancing resentfully back a couple of times, it occurred to me that it was just as well that the name and address I’d given him just now, under stress of improvisation, were my own. Under the circumstances there was no telling what he might take it into his head to do.

  It’s hard to sit waiting in the dark, waiting for a doorknob to turn stealthily, waiting for a blurred form to come creeping in on a death-dealing errand. The night outside was very quiet, and the room within was quieter still, and the only sign that I was there at all was the red bead of my cigarette, brightening and dimming, brightening and dimming, while a clock close by me ticked away.

  This, in a way, was the third and final test he was being subjected to, though I hadn’t intentionally planned it. The first had been his familiarity with the details of the crime; a firsthand familiarity. He’d neutralized that by his claim of having absorbed them over the radio. But that was just a verbal statement, and there was no way of checking on its truthfulness. So the burden of that test still lay more against than for him. The second had been his failure to make any attempt to silence me, when presumably I alone held knowledge damaging to him. Ergo, the knowledge I presumably held had therefore not been damaging to him, had nothing to do with him. So he had passed that one with flying colors. But the score was still one for, one against. Now, quite fortuitously, a third and final test had come up, and this would cinch it. Two out of three. Now he had the definite knowledge of who had killed the thing he valued most. Someone named “French”—he would see that name downstairs in the entryway—who lived in this same house I did, who lived on this same floor, who lived in this same room I was in now. He’d wanted that knowledge badly, badly enough to brutalize me in order to elicit it. The thing was, what had he wanted it for? What did he intend doing with it?

  I had my own ideas about that, and that was why I was sitting huddled in a chair now, at three in the morning, instead of occupying the bed where I rightfully belonged. A chair drawn into a corner as far from both bed and room door as I could manage to get it, and with its back turned outward to serve as a screen for my lumped, tucked-under body.

  I’d already been undressed and in bed for the night, lying there in the darkness, over two hours ago, when a sense of disquiet, of impending danger—call it a premonition if you will—began to assail me more and more strongly. Why had he wanted the exact name and whereabouts of her killer so badly, once I had convinced him I knew them? It wasn’t just for the morbid satisfaction of it alone; it wasn’t just so he could lacerate himself still further as he sat the nights away in smokehouses with “her” by his side. He didn’t have to have an actual name and address for that; the pronoun “somebody” would have done just as well.

  I’d pulled the light chain beside me and sat up at this point. I’d thought: “I better get up out of here, not lie here in this bed; otherwise I’m liable never to wake up in it again in the morning.”

  That was it, of course; that was what he’d wanted it for.

  I put something over me and sat in a chair for a while with the light on. But then I realized that in that way I was only postponing it until some other night, some future night, w
hen I would no longer be on guard. It was better to attract it at once, get it over with, while I was expecting it, was it not? And finally, it was the definitive test. If he came near here on a bloody errand he exonerated himself once and for all, beyond any lingering shadow of a doubt. Surely if he had done such a thing himself he would not attempt to wreak retribution on someone else for having done it. Even madmen didn’t do that. Even they retained awareness of the parentage of their own crimes.

  True, he couldn’t get up here from the street. But that would only delay him a night or two; eventually he’d succeed somehow or other. And I didn’t want this thing to be postponed. So I crept down the two flights of stairs and reversed the latch plunge on the outside door so that it could be opened from the outside. If he tried it now, tested it in any way, it would open for him just as any ordinary door.

  I went up again to my own place and carefully closed the door without locking it. From a hook on the back of the bathroom door I unslung a laundry bag full of soiled articles of apparel. I carted it over to the bed and put it there where I had been lying myself a short while before. It was squat and lumpy in its natural contour, but I kneaded it and stretched it and its contents into a longer, more columnar outline that more closely approached a torso. Then I carefully arranged the coverings over it and put out the light, and in the dark it looked like someone lying there.

  I knew there was still some risk attached to remaining in the place at all, no matter how well I secreted myself; yet I must be an eyewitness of whatever took place, for the test to be a valid one, and I couldn’t sit crouched on the upper stairs all night peering down through the bannister rail. So I drew a chair over into the far corner and got down behind it and took up my vigil—waiting for the love that had turned to death.