The bride wore black

by Cornell Woolrich

  “That’s a funny implement for a typist to be carrying around with her; do you use that in your work?”

  She was struggling almost maniacally against him now; something seemed to be driving her to a frenzy. He was exerting his strength passively, holding her a prisoner in the chair with one hand riveted at the base of her throat. He was standing affside to her, however, not directly before her. She alone was in a straight line with the fireplace.

  “Let me up—let me up!”

  “Not until you speak,” he grunted.

  She crumpled suddenly, seemed to collapse inwardly, was suddenly a limp bundle there in the chair. “There’s a gun in there, above the zinc partition—trained on this chair! Any minute the heat will—A sawed-off shotgun filled with—”

  “Who put it there?” he probed relentlessly.

  “I did! Quick, let me up!”

  “Why? Answer me, why?”

  “Because I’m Nick Killeen’s widow—and I came here to kill you. Holmes!”

  “That’s all,” he said briefly, and stepped back.

  He took his hand away too late. As it broke contact, there was a blinding flash behind her that lit up his face, a roar, and a dense puff of smoke swirled out around her, as though blown out of the fireplace by a bellows worked in reverse.

  She heaved convulsively one more time, as though still attempting to escape by reflex alone, then deflated again, staring at him through the smoke haze that veiled her.

  “You’re all right,” he assured her quietly. “1 emptied it out before I started the fire up a second time, only left the powder charge in it. The dictation machine saved me; you must have accidentally brushed against the lever, turned it on, when you came in here last night. It recorded the whole proceeding, from the first warning creak of the floor to the replacing of the zinc sheet that roofs the fireplace. Only I couldn’t tell which one of you it was; that’s why I had to give you the chair test.”

  The door flashed open and the Cameron girl’s frightened white face peered in at them. “What was that?”

  He was, strangely enough, twice as rough spoken and curt to her as he had been to the woman in the chair, the way one is to a puppy or a child that can’t be held

  responsible for its actions. “Stay out of here,” he bellowed, “you damned nuisance of an autograph-hunting, hero-worshiping school brat, or Til come out there, turn you over my knee and give you a spanking that’ll make you need cotton wool someplace else besides your ankle!”

  The door closed again twice as quickly as it had opened, with a gasp of shocked incredulity.

  He turned back to the limp, deflated figure still cowering there in the chair. She seemed to hang suspended in a void; she had lost one personality without regaining another. His voice dropped again to ordinary conversational pitch, as with an adult. “What were you going to do to her —in case it had worked?” he asked curiously.

  She was still suffering from shock, but she managed a weak smile. “Exactly nothing at all. She wasn’t even on my list. She couldn’t have endangered me. I might have tied her up in order to get away, that’s all.”

  “At least you’re fair-minded in your death dealing,” he conceded grudgingly. He watched her for a moment, then went over and poured her a drink without turning his back on her. “Here. You seem to be all in shreds. Knit yourself up again.”

  She tottered waveringly erect at last, one hand out to the chair back. Then little by little a change came over her. She seemed to fill out before his very eyes, gain color, body, like those outline drawings they had once given to a child named Cookie Moran. The life-force, that inextinguishable thing, flowed back into her. Not the cold, spinsterish tide that had been Miss Kitchener; something warmer, brighter. Though her hair was still artfully streaked with gray and drawn tightly back, the last vestiges of the prissy Miss Kitchener seemed to peel away, roll off her like a transparent cellophane wrapping. She was somehow a young, more vibrant woman. A woman who knew no fear, a woman who knew how to

  admit defeat gracefully. But a vengeful sort of grace it was, even now.

  “Well, I got them all but you. Holmes. Nick will overlook that. I’m only a woman, after all. Go ahead, call the police, I’m ready.”

  “I am the police. Holmes was hijacked into safety weeks ago; he’s lying low in Bermuda. I’ve been living his life for him ever since, tearing the covers off his old books and reading them over again into the machine, waiting for you to show up. I was afraid the dog would give me away; it showed so plainly I wasn’t its master.”

  “I should have noticed that,” she admitted. “Overcon-fidence must have made me careless. Everything went like clockwork with all the others—Bliss and Mitchell and Moran and Ferguson.”

  “Look out,” he warned her dryly, “I’m getting it all on there.” He thumbed the dictation machine, making its faint whirring sound again.

  “Do you take me for the usual petty-larceny criminal for gain, trying to cover up what he’s done, trying to welsh out of it?” There was unutterable contempt in the look she gave him. “You have a lot to learn about me! I glory in it! I want to shout it from the housetops, I want the world to know!” She took a quick step over beside the recording apparatus; her voice rose triumphantly into the speaking tube. “I pushed Bliss to his death! I gave cyanide to Mitchell! I smothered Moran alive in a closet! I shot Ferguson through the heart with an arrow! This is Julie Killeen speaking. Do you hear me, Nick, do you hear me? Your debt is paid—all but one. There, Detective, there’s your case. Now bring on your revenge. To me it’s a citation!”

  “Sit down a minute,” he said. “There’s no hurry. It’s taken me two and a half years to catch up with you; a few minutes more won’t matter. I want to talk to you.”

  And when she had sat down, he said, “So you help-

  fully put it all on the record for me. All but one thing. You neglected to add why; what this outstanding debt was. I happen to know—now, I didn’t for years. It was what held me up. I found out just in the nick of time— for Holmes’s sake, anyway. If I hadn’t he—the real Holmes—would have been where the rest are by now.”

  “You happen to know why!” Sparks seemed to dart from her eyes. “You couldn’t, no, nor anyone else. Did you live through it? Did you see it with your own eyes? A dry Hne or two on some forgotten, dust-covered police report! But it still stings in my heart.

  “It’s a long time ago now, as time goes, and yet all I have to do is shut my eyes and he’s beside me again, Nick, my husband. And the pain wells up around me again, the hate, the rage, the sick, cold loss. All I have to do is shut my eyes and it’s yesterday again, that long-past, unforgotten yesterday.”

  FLASHBACK: THE LITTLE

  CASKET AROUND THE

  CORNER

  “FOR BETTER OR FOR worse, in sickness or in health, until death do ye part?”

  “I do.”

  “I now pronounce you man and wife. Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. You may kiss the bride.”

  They turned toward each other shyly. She drew the filmy veil clear of her face. Her eyes drooped closed as his lips met hers in the sacramental kiss. She was Mrs. Nick Killeen now, not Julie Bennett anymore.

  The members of their wedding party came crowding around; they were engulfed in a surging surf of bobbing heads, backslapping hands, congratulatory voices. The bridesmaids’ tinted chiffon hats swept over her face one by one like colored gelatin slides, dyeing it without obscuring it, while each gave her a little peck of benediction. Through all the commotion, his eyes and hers kept seeking each other, as if to say, ““You’re all that really matters to me, you, over there.”

  Then they were side by side again, Mr. and Mrs. Nick Killeen, her hand tucked submissively under his arm, as a wife’s should be, her step matched to his, her heart beating his music. Down the long, vaulted church aisle they moved, toward where the doors stood open wide and the future, their future, waited. And behind them.

  two by two, came
the bridesmaids like a bed of mobile flowers, yellow, azure, lilac, pink.

  The apsed doorway receded overhead, gave way to a night sky soft as velvet, pricked with a single star, the evening star. Promising things, long life and happiness and laughter; promising things—but with a wink.

  Their attendants hung back, as if bonded in some mischievous conspiracy, as the two principals unsuspectingly started down the short, spreading flight of church steps. The foremost of a short line of cars that had been held in readiness a few doors up the street meshed gears and started slowly forward to receive them. A gust of surreptitious giggling swept over those crowded in the doorway behind them. Hands sought paper bags, and the first few swirls of rice began to mist the steps. The bride threw up her arm to ward off” the bombardment, huddled closer to the room. Squeals of glee were emitted, the air whitened with the falling grains.

  There was a sudden caterwauUng of hysterical brakes; a large black shape, blurred for a moment by its very unexpectedness, careened around the corner of the church. It skimmed over the curb, nearly threatened to mount the steps themselves for a moment. Then by some miracle of maniac steering it veered off, straightened out, revealed itself for a split second as a black sedan, then shot forward into blurred velocity again. A series of ear-splitting detonations had punctuated the whole incredible apparition, and reflected flashes traced it from window-pane to windowpane along the lower floors of the row houses opposite. In its wake a noxious cloud of black smoke blanketed the church steps and those on them, as though an evil spirit had passed that way, and only began to thin out long after the malignant red taillight had twisted from sight at the far upper end of the street.

  The laughter and playful shouts had changed to strangled coughs and sputterings. Then there was a sud-

  den silence, as of premonition. In it, a voice spoke a name. The bride spoke her husband’s name. “Nick!” Just once, in a hushed, terrified voice. An instant longer they stood down there motionless at the bottom of the steps, side by side, just as they had left the church. Then ail at once she stood alone, and he lay at her feet.

  The others broke, came milling down off the steps, fluttering around her. In the middle of them all his face peered up at her, like a white pebble lying at the bottom of a deep pool. There was a tiny fleck of red, a comma, so to speak, down near the bottom of her snowy veil. She kept staring at it as if hypnotized. His face didn’t move. Not a comma, no; a period.

  Minutes went by that had no meaning anymore. She was a statue in white, the one motionless, the one fixed thing, in all the eddying and swirling about. Voices shouting suggestions reached her as from another world, holding no meaning. “Open his shirt! Get these girls out of here, put them in the cars and send them home!”

  Hands were extended toward her, trying to lead her away. “My place is here,” she murmured tonelessly.

  “Stunned,” someone said. “Don’t let her stand there like that; see if you can get her to go with you.”

  She motioned briefly, mechanically, and they let her be.

  In the welter of sounds a dismal, clanging bell approached in the distance, rushing through the streets. Then it stopped short. A black bag stood open at her feet. “Gone,” a low voice said. A girl screamed somewhere close at hand. It wasn’t she.

  The black bag was held partly toward her. “Here, let me give you—”

  She motioned them aside with one hand, the one with the new gold wedding band on it. “Just let me hold my husband in my arms a moment. Just let me say goodbye.” She knelt over him, with a great welling up of white tulle around her like a snowdrift stirred by the wind. The two heads joined, as they had been meant to join, but only one gave the caress. Those hovering closest heard a soft whisper. “I won’t forget.” ,

  Then she was erect again, the straightest one among all of them; like ice, like white fire. A whimpering bridesmaid plucked helplessly at her sleeve. “Please come away now, please, Julie.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. “How many were in that car, Andrea?”

  “I saw five, I think.”

  “That is what I saw, too, and I have such very good eyes. What was the license number of that car, Andrea?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t have time—”

  “I did. D3827. And I have such a very good memory.”

  “Julie, don’t, you’re frightening me. Why aren’t you crying?”

  “1 am, where you can’t see it. Come with me, Andrea. I’m going back inside the church.”

  “To pray?”

  “No, to make a vow. Another vow to Nick.”

  POSTMORTEM ON NICK KILLEEN

  “SO THAT WAS IT, and you’ve repaid your debt,” Wanger said musingly, “and nothing we can do to you now can take away the satisfaction of your accomplishment, is that it? No punishment that you receive from us can touch you—inside, where it really matters, is that right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Yes, I had you figured that way all along, and now I see that I had you figured right. Sure, imprisonment won’t be any punishment to you, no, nor even the chair itself, if they should happen to give you that. There isn’t a flicker of remorse in your eyes, there isn’t a shadow of fear in your heart.”

  “There isn’t. You read me right.”

  “The state can’t punish you, can it? But I can. Listen, Julie Killeen.

  “You haven’t avenged Nick Killeen. You only think you have, but you haven’t. On the night that Bliss, Mitchell, Ferguson, Holmes and Moran tore past those church steps, howling drunk in their car, a man crouched at the first-floor window of a rooming house opposite, watching for the two of you, a gun in his hand, waiting for you to come out. He’d missed Killeen going in for some reason; maybe the cab Killeen arrived in formed an impediment in his line of fire, maybe there were too many people around him, maybe he reached his death post too late. And so he stayed there; he wasn’t going to miss him coming out.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “He raised his gun as you and your husband came down the steps. He sighted at Nick, and he pulled the trigger. The car streaked by in between at that instant, with its exhaust tube exploding a mile a minute. But his bullet found its mark, over the car’s low top. It was a freak of timing that wouldn’t have happened again in a hundred years, that couldn’t have happened if he had tried to arrange it that way. The very reflections of the backfiring along the row of unlighted windowpanes helped to cover up his flash.

  “There’s your punishment, Julie Killeen. You’ve sent four innocent men to their deaths, who had nothing to do with killing your husband.”

  He hadn’t reached her with that, he could tell; there was still the same glaze of icy imperviousness all over her. There was disbelief in her eyes. “Yes, I remember,” she said contemptuously, “the papers tried to hint at some flimsy possibility like that at the time, no doubt deliberately encouraged by you people to cover up your own incompetence. There have been cases before that were never solved—Elwell, Dorothy King, Rothstein— and there’s always the same reason; rottenness in the wrong places, bribery in the right places, pull. But there never was a case in the whole history of the police force that was allowed to pass so unnoticed as this. Not even a suspect questioned in it from first to last. As though a dog had been shot down in the streets!”

  “As far as our encouraging the papers at the time goes, it was the other way around. We did everything we could to keep them from mentioning the man-across-the-way angle, deliberately misled them with stories of a stray shot from some rooftop, hoping if we kept quiet about it, if this unknown gunman thought he wasn’t suspected, it would be easier to get our hands on him.”

  “I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now! 1 saw with my own eyes—”

  “What you saw was an optical illusion, then. If you had come to us at the time, asked us how we were progressing, we could have proved it to your satisfaction once and for all. But no, you hugged your vengeance to yourself, nursed your bitterness, wou
ldn’t interview the police. You deliberately withheld the information that was in your own possession—inaccurate though it was— and used it for murder.”

  She flashed him a look that was a complacent admission.

  “There were powder bums found on the window curtains in that room opposite the church. There were people in it, on the floor above, who distinctly heard a shot beneath their feet, over and above all the backfiring outside. They were in a better position to judge, after all, than you. We even found a discharged shell, of the same caliber as that taken out of your husband’s body, wedged between a crack in the floorboards. We knew from the start where the death shot had been fired from; that was why we didn’t have to go tracing wild cars all over the city. We knew everything but who the killer was. We only found that out now, recently. Don’t you want to know who he is? Don’t you at least want to hear his name?”

  “Why should I be interested in what rabbits you pull from a trick hat to try to mislead me?”

  “The proof is in our files right now. It came in too late to save Bliss, Mitchell, Moran or Ferguson. But it’s there today. Scientific proof; proof that cannot be gotten around. Documentary proof; a signed confession—I have a copy with me in my own pocket at this very minute. He’s been in custody down in the city for the past three weeks.”

  For the first time, she had no challenging answer to make.

  “You’ll meet him face to face when you go back there with me shortly. 1 think that you’ll remember meeting him before.”

  The first superficial crack had appeared on the glaze that protected her. A flicker of doubt, of dread, peered from her eyes. A question forced its way out. “Who?”