The bride wore black
Page 18
“Corey. Does the name mean anything to you?”
She said with painful slowness, “Yes, I remember this Corey. Twice he crossed my path, for a moment only. Once, on a terrace at a party, he brought me a drink. It would have been so easy to… But I sent him away, to clear the decks for…”
“The murder of Bliss, isn’t that right?”
“According to you, someone who had never harmed me, never even seen me before that night.” She held her forehead briefly, resumed: “And the second and last time, I was up in his very room with him, for a few minutes. 1 went back to his apartment with him as the simplest way of getting rid of him. I remember I even held him at the point of a gun to make sure of getting out again unhindered. His gun.”
“The gun that killed your husband. The gun that fired the bullet into Nick Killeen. Through a slip up on the part of a rookie it was checked by ballistics instead of by the fingerprint department for your prints, which was what he had brazenly turned it over to us for.
“I remember 1 was sitting there raising cain with the fingerprint bureau for not sending me a report on a weapon that had never reached them, when someone at ballistics telephoned me and said. That gun you sent us to be tested matches the markings on the slug taken out of
Nick Killeen; we suppose that’s what you wanted, you weren’t very definite about it.’ I had to see it with my own eyes before I’d beheve them. Then just to make the irony all of a piece, Corey comes walking in to find out if we were through with the gun and he could have it back again. He never got out again!
“He’d come forward to help us of his own accord. He had a license for the gun; he was only too willing to let us have it, to see if we could get your prints off it. I suppose by then so many years had passed since the Killeen killing, his sense of immunity had become almost a fetish. He thought nothing could…
“It took a little while, but we finally broke him down. In the meantime I had been working independently on what we all thought was an entirely different matter and came across an obscure item in old newspapers at the library, datelined on one of those Fridays that the Friday-Night Fiends had been on the loose. Just a little human-interest thing, tragic to those immediately involved but not particularly important. A bridegroom had been struck dead by a stray shot, presumably fired from some roof nearby, as he was leaving the very church he’d just been married in.
“To me that story offered the only possible reason for the murders of the Friday-Night Fiends, who had already lost three charter members and the bartender they carried around with them on those tears of theirs. I put two and two together. No mention was made of who the bereaved bride was, but after all there must have been one; a man doesn’t marry himself.
“So we soft-pedaled Corey’s arrest, held him practically incommunicado, to be sure you’wouldn’t get wind of it and pull your next and last punch. It was easy to figure out where it would land, so I simply got into position under it.
“But what I can’t figure out is what you did with yourself between visitations, so to speak. How you were able to vanish so completely each time, effect all these quick changes of coiifure and personality. I knew you were coming but to the last minute didn’t know from where or how. It was like trying to come to grips with a wraith.”
The woman answered abstractedly, “There was nothing very supernatural about it. 1 suppose you looked for me in out-of-the-way hiding places, rooming houses, cheap hotels. I came into contact with dozens of people daily who never gave me a second look. I lived in a hospital. I’ll give you the name if you want, one of the biggest in the city. I worked there and lived right there, didn’t have to go out. My hair was kept covered, so no one knew—or cared—what color it was, from first to last. When I was off duty I stayed in my room, didn’t encourage friendship from the staff. When it came time to—strike again, I would get a short leave of absence, go away, return again a few days later.
“All for what? All for nothing.”
She was breathing again with difficulty, as she had in the chair before. As though something inside her were breaking up, clogging her windpipe.
“So I held the very gun he killed Nick with, in my own hands! Had him helpless at the point of it; lowered it and walked out, to go and kill an innocent man.” She began to shiver uncontrollably, as though she had a chill. “Now I can hear that awful cry of Bliss’s as he went over the terrace. I didn’t hear it then. Now I can hear Mitchell’s groan. I can hear them all!”
She bowed her head as abruptly as though her neck had snapped. Her sobbing was low pitched but intense, even paced as the pulsing of a dynamo.
A long time after, when it had ended, she looked up again. “What did he do it for—Corey, I mean?” she asked. “I must know that.”
Paper rattled under his coat. He took out a copy of the confession, unfolded it, offered it to her.
She glanced only at the beginning and at the signature at the end of the last page. Then she returned it. “You tell me,” she said. “I believe you now. You are an honest man.”
“They were working a racket together, your husband and Corey. A nice, profitable, juicy little racket. The details are here in his confession.” He broke off short. “Did Killeen ever tell you that?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes, he told me. I knew. He told me—all but the names. He told me what would happen to him if he quit. I didn’t believe him. I wasn’t as familiar with violence then. I told him it was either that or me. I didn’t think it was as serious as all that, I didn’t believe it could be. You see, I loved him. He took a week or two to make up his mind, and then he made his choice. Me.”
For the first time Julie Killeen looked directly at Wanger. She spoke quietly, as though telling him some other woman’s story. “He changed his quarters. Our meetings became furtive. I suggested that we go to the police for protection, but he told me he was in it as deep as whoever it was he feared. He said we’d go away. We’d go away, right from the church door straight to the ship. That was another thing I insisted on, a church wedding.” She smiled grimly. “You see, I killed him, in a way. That made my obligation even greater afterward.” She hesitated a moment, weary, then went on.
“He said we wouldn’t come back right away. Maybe we wouldn’t come back for a long time after. He was right. We went away all right—but not together. And we neither of us ever came back again.
“I knew I had to take him on those terms or not at all. There was never much question of a choice in it for me. I wanted him. Lord, how I wanted him. I used to lie awake
at nights breaking down the time there still was to go without him into minutes and seconds. It made it seem shorter that way. His business…” She shrugged. “He promised he’d give it up. That was all my conscience was strong enough to demand.”
“The mistake you both made,” Wanger mused almost to himself, “was in thinking that there’s ever any quitting the game he was in. They’d chalked up several killings behind them in the course of ^business.’ And then there was the question of the final division of the profits, which is always the main rub. Corey couldn’t let him go. They had each other deadlocked.”
The woman interrupted. There was fury in her quiet voice.
“He quit. He not only quit but made himself over. Mr. Corey, the dashing man-about-town. That’s what he’s become! Why couldn’t he have let Nick go? Why did he have to kill him?”
For the first time in his career Wanger was answering questions instead of asking them. There was a quality of despair in Julie Killeen that carried them both outside the rules of captive and captor.
“Yes, Corey quit. But by the time he tried it there was no one left to reckon with but himself, don’t forget. When Killeen tried it, there was still Corey. And the way he did it wasn’t any too reassuring. Just broke the connection off short, put himself out of reach—probably listening to your well-meant advice—but with enough on Corey to send him to the chair in three or four round trips. Not to mention several thousand dollar
s that Corey thought was coming to him. Corey had his reasons, all right. He wouldn’t have known a moment’s peace from then on. There would have been an ax hanging over him every minute of his life. He went out to get Nick while the getting was good, before Killeen got him first. The church was the only place Corey would be sure to find him. Before that, Nick evidently didn’t show himself.”
“He laid low, very low,” she said quietly, almost indifferently.
“Nick had moved. Corey didn’t know who the girl was, where she lived.”
“We met in the dark in the movies, always two seats in the last row.”
“But he finally thought of a way. He went around to all the churches asking questions. Somebody slipped up, and he found out where and when the wedding was going to take place. Then he rented a room that commanded the side entrance. He knew Killeen would use the side entrance. He took a gun in there with him, and a package of food, and he didn’t go away from that window for forty-eight hours straight. He figured the time of the ceremony might be moved up at the last minute as a precaution.”
There was silence in the room. Wanger thought of the bullet that had killed Nick Killeen, the bullet that had gone over the heads of five other men and yet had inevitably caused the death of four of them. He sighed and looked at Julie Killeen.
“You—he never knew who you were from first to last. You were just that unimportant little white doll-like figure next to his target. And he—you never knew who he was either, did you—the man who took you to his room one night, the man who had killed your husband?”
The woman didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear.
“Afterward, he sent a wreath to the funeral, in care of the warden of the church.”
The woman shivered, put up a hand as though Wanger had struck her.
He saw that he had convinced her at last.
He got up, put the manacle around her wrist, closing it almost gently, as if trying not to disturb her bitter reverie. She seemed not to notice it.
“Let’s go,” he said gruffly. She stood up, suddenly became conscious of the steel that linked their wrists. She looked at Wanger and nodded gravely.
“Yes,” said Julie Killeen, “it’s time for me to go.”
The End