Rendezvous in Black

by Cornell Woolrich

  His frantic pounding with both fists stopped short. The door had opened. A girl came out, slowly. She pulled it closed after her, and then she stood there and looked at him, with her back slumped against the door.

  She’d had a drink or two and looked like she’d had them alone. She had a lighted cigarette between her lips and talked without removing it. A spare was stuck behind her ear like a pencil.

  “You’re too late,” she blurted out without introduction. “She left just a quarter of an hour ago. You missed her by fifteen minutes.”

  “How’d you know who I—?”

  “Your heart’s all up in your eyes,” she said gruffly. “I’d know you in the dark by the shine it gives off. Why didn’t you get here sooner? Or better still, why did you ever meet her in the first place?”

  “She was my wife. She swore that all our lives— Where’d they go? Which way?”

  She slumped lower against the door, as if she were tired. Tired of the whole world. “Just call it ‘away’ and let it go at that. ‘Away from you.’ You’re licked. They may still be in the town somewhere. Or at some motor court on the road out—”

  He backed his hand to his skull and screwed up his face into a weazened grimace.

  “Tell me something,” she said with a curious sort of objective curiosity. “Is it that bad? Does it hurt as much on the inside as it looks like it does on the outside of you?”

  She never got the answer.

  She was still standing there, shoulders slumped low against the door, tired, tired of the whole world, long after his figure had plunged back into the darkness, the car door had cracked closed, and the red taillight had whirled off.

  Suddenly she gave her cigarette a violent downward fling that splintered it into sparks against the ground.

  “Jesus!” she exclaimed bitterly. “I hate love!” She turned on her heel and the door slammed.

  She was alone in there. She had grown tired waiting for him, had dozed off. The tableau spoke for itself. The brightly lighted room in the motor court bungalow, probably reserved ahead of time in her name alone, so he could join her there. And he hadn’t come, and she’d slept while she waited.

  The shades down on both windows, for she’d undressed before. Her bag open and balanced astride two chair arms, partially emptied. The covers of the bed turned neatly back on a diagonal line.

  She was asleep seated at the dressing table, her face resting on her forearm. She was in night attire, a pale-blue negligee over her gown. The hairbrush she had used before sleep overcame her lay there within reach of her hand. Near it stood the little traveling alarm clock she had taken out of her bag. Its ticking was the only sound in there with her. It seemed to point up the scene. Its hands were crossing at five to eleven now, and though no one but she could have told when he was originally supposed to have come, the inclination of her drowsing head showed that time was far past—far past and gone.

  And then the knob on the door by which you came in twisted slowly, in subtle noiselessness, as though pressure were being exerted from the outside, secretive pressure. The pressure relaxed, the knob turned back the other way to where it had started from.

  No tread, no sound. No withdrawal any more than there had been any approach. But then a window went up softly behind one of the overlapping, fully-drawn shades. The shade billowed out. A man’s leg came down to the floor behind it. A second one followed.

  She didn’t hear him. Her sleep was too deep and the sounds he had made too hushed.

  A hand, the bent fingers of a hand, clasped the edge of the shade, held it taut for a minute, then bent it back in a sharp momentary indentation.

  Bucky came out from in back of it, his gun readied in his hand. His eyes were only eyes when they rested on her. When they left her to roam searchingly elsewhere about the room, they became stones, cold and hard, imbedded in his face.

  He trod softly. With the terrible softness of oncoming death. He looked into the bath first, fanning his gun in a half turn. He looked into the closet. She’d hung her clothes there, the clothes she’d taken off on arriving here.

  There was no other place to look. He put his gun back in his pocket. Those hard stones turned to glance over at her, softened into eyes again. Forgiving eyes. He took down her things from the closet hooks, and carried them over to the open bag, and put them back into it. Even with them, even with her inanimate belongings, because they were hers, he was gentle. He folded them over first, so they’d fit in, wouldn’t be crushed, wouldn’t be harmed.

  All but one coat and dress. He left them out for her to wear home with him. Home? Yes, home. Even though they had no house waiting for them, no roof to go over them, home was wherever they were, together.

  Then he latched the bag closed and stood it down on the floor, ready to carry it out for her.

  Even that she didn’t hear, the click of the latches.

  Then he went toward her, to wake her.

  He stopped just behind her and stood there looking down at her for a minute. If she could have seen his face just then, she would have known she never need fear she’d ever hear a word of recrimination about this afterward. No questions asked, no blame allotted. Just to have her back, that would be enough.

  He bent over at last and kissed her gently on the top of the head, to wake her.

  “Sharon,” he whispered tenderly in her ear. “Sharon, wake up. I’m taking you back with me.”

  Her head rolled over slightly, along her arm, as a person does who slowly comes back to wakefulness. And she was grinning up at him, sidewise (he could see her profile now). In a sly, elfin sort of way.

  But her eyes were still blurry with slee—

  His hand stabbed suddenly downward toward the hairbrush, there before her. Snatching, not the brush but what lay under it, held in place by it.

  Penciled lines on a square of paper.

  You can have her back now, soldier.

  Don’t say I never gave you anything.

  He fell down, first upon one knee, then both, there beside her. He tried to take her in his arms, but every which way he held her, she dangled another way, at cross-purposes to his embrace. Until at last she lay there stretched out on the floor. Still smiling up at him, slyly, elfinly.

  With the desperate helplessness of a man beside himself, his hands went slapping down his own sides, seeking to bring something, anything, out of his pockets to help her with. What, he didn’t know.

  And then they stopped, as one of them felt the gun.

  Hoarse with his pain, he crooned to her brokenly, “I don’t want it either, Sharon. I don’t want it either. If this is what it does to you, they can have it.”

  He hovered low above her, until he’d reached her tortured, twisted mouth. He kissed it, as a husband does, a husband should.

  “Thank you, Sharon. It was nice loving you.”

  The shot jarred the two of them alike, her dead body and his still living one.

  Their kiss only repeated itself as his lips fell athwart hers once more, stayed there. It became permanent.

  Chance remark during the course of a shop-talk conversation between Detective A and Detective B:

  . . . reminds me of a case we had out our way not so long ago. Found a note saying, “Now you know what it feels like.” We couldn’t make it out, because they were both dead. Who wrote it to who . . .?

  Chance remark during the course of a conversation between Detective B and Detective C (three weeks later):

  . . . like in that case A. was telling me about a while back. They found a note saying, “Now you know what it feels like.” Something like that, I don’t remember exactly. . . .

  Chance remark during the course of a conversation between Detective C and Lieutenant D (Cameron’s chief ), six weeks later:

  ...B told me he heard of a case like that. The note was worded the same way, that’s what made me think of it just now. They didn’t set too much store by it, just figured it was the work of a crank. . . .

  Letter fr
om Lieutenant D to his opposite number at headquarters A (two and a half hours later):

  . . . that MacLain Cameron, at his own request, be attached to your office on a temporary basis, to work along with your men on the deaths of Pfc. Buck Paige and his wife Sharon . . .

  Answering telegram from Lieutenant A to Lieutenant D (twenty minutes later):

  ONLY TOO HAPPY ACCEDE YOUR REQUEST. SEND HIM ON.

  They turned back to the witness again, Cameron and his chief. “Just one more question, Celeste . . .”

  The girl on the chair swung her trousered leg off its opposite knee, dropped her foot to the floor with a short-tempered stamp. She took a hitch in her belt. She snapped the ash off her cigarette with a proficient fingernail.

  “There you go again! How do you expect me to know who you’re talking to? I keep thinking it’s somebody else, behind me! Rusty’s the name. What do you think I am, a big sissy?”

  Cameron and his chief exchanged a look. “Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” the chief apologized dryly. “It takes us old-timers a little while to get used to the idea you’re never, never supposed to call a girl by a girl’s name nowadays. Okay, Rusty.”

  “That’s more like it,” she relented generously. “Now what can I do for you this time?”

  “Sharon Paige had a locket, a thingamabob on a chain around her neck. We want to ask you about that locket.”

  “Okay, go ahead and ask me.”

  “She wore it pretty much, that right?”

  “All the time. It only came off when she washed her neck. Then it went right back on again.”

  “Now here’s the part we want to ask you about. How did she wear it? Can you tell us? Can you show us?”

  “Well, this is the neck of her dress.” She yanked out the neck of her own sweatshirt to show them. She pointed, her finger disappeared down the aperture. “Like this see? Down underneath it. All the way down in there.”

  “Never on the outside?”

  “Never once. See, it wasn’t for show. It was a personal memento, like, I only knew it was there because I saw her before her dress went on over it.”

  “But nobody passing her on the street, or even standing talking to her after her dress went on, could tell it was there?”

  “Only an x-ray machine.”

  “Thanks. That’ll be all, Ce—er, Rusty.”

  She got up to go. She traced her hand along the wall and a match head flared out.

  “Listen—Please—” the chief stammered somewhat helplessly. “Not on our walls.”

  “What’s the matter with your walls?” she said charitably. “They strike matches good.”

  The door closed after her.

  “Don’t you see the point I want to bring out? That the poison letters to the husband were written by nobody else but the very guy himself, the one who killed her! Right while he was in the act of seducing her away from Paige, he kept tipping him off as to the progress of the seduction. Giving him a play-by-play account, right as he went along. He used that locket, in one of the letters, as a means of identifying the girl he was seducing as Paige’s wife, so there could be no mistake in Paige’s mind. Nobody on the street could see it, nobody could see it when she was fully dressed. He’s the only one could have sent those letters.”

  “Why should he snitch on himself? That’s crazy.”

  “It’s crazy cruel, which isn’t the same thing. It’s ferocious sadism. He wanted to make him suffer, and he did make him suffer. You heard Rubin on that point.”

  “All right, but what do we have now? Proving what?”

  “That he wasn’t interested in the wife; either in loving her, or in killing her. He didn’t kill her because he had anything against her, he killed her because he had something against Paige. The husband was the target, the wife was just the weapon used to strike him down.”

  The chief tried to shake his head, fighting off belief.

  “Just answer me two questions,” Cameron said. “How long did she suffer?”

  “Ten seconds. Maybe twenty. Just at the end.”

  “How long did he suffer?”

  “Weeks, I guess. Rubin said so. Weeks of slow torture.”

  Cameron spread his hands. “Which one of them was he really punishing?”

  “This,” said the chief dismally, “is something new.”

  Cameron had to go all the way out to Tulsa. In Tulsa he had to go all the way out to Dixon Avenue. Along Dixon Avenue he had to go all the way out to its extreme end. Even so, weeks of patient inquiry and research had had to precede this, before he could even find out just where it was he had to go.

  He used a variety of methods to get there; train, and then bus, and finally a Tulsa taxi.

  Then he walked up a flagstone path and rang the predetermined doorbell. An attractive little housewife of sunny aspect and friendly demeanor came bustling out after a moment or two.

  “Graham Garrison lives here, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said readily. “He’s my husband.”

  “Ask him if he remembers Cameron,” he said tactfully. He didn’t want to frighten her, he didn’t want to tell her he was a detective. There was something so cloudless, so trusting about her.

  She repeated it to herself first, the way a little girl does a message entrusted to her, to make sure of getting it right. “Ask him if he remembers Cameron.” Then nodding to show she had it, went to deliver it.

  Then came back to report, with a candor that was altogether fetching, “He said he doesn’t. But he said to come in anyway.”

  Cameron, thanking her, decided he didn’t blame Garrison one bit for remarrying. Or rather, for marrying this particular little person. The wonder would have been had he failed to, once he’d known her. Every man, he supposed, was entitled to his happiness. And the very first look at Garrison’s face showed Cameron he had his now, all right, if he’d never had it before.

  He’d been listening to a baseball game. It was Sunday afternoon. He politely turned the radio off, successfully concealing the regret that Cameron knew darned well it must give him to do so.

  “Are you from the company’s eastern office?” he said. “Is that where we met?” Then seeing that Cameron was not quite sure what he meant, amplified, “The Standard Oil Company.”

  “No,” said Cameron. “You didn’t meet me in business. I don’t know if you recall or not, but—” He glanced around, but they were alone anyway; she’d gone back to some domestic enterprise that held more attraction for her than her husband’s concerns.

  Garrison’s memory suddenly beat him to the punch. He straightened in his chair, snapped his fingers, then pointed one at Cameron. “Oh, now I do! Sure. You’re the police fellow that came out several times and talked to me, around the time Jeanette died.” And then with evidences of extreme satisfaction, though it was probably due far more to his own successful feat of recollection than to Cameron’s presence, he urged, “Sit down,” offered him a cigarette and wanted to know if he wanted to have a drink.

  Cameron got up and closed the door with a precautionary “I wonder if we could talk this over by ourselves?”

  “Is it bad?” asked Garrison.

  “We don’t want your wife to hear it,” said Cameron, already her staunch protector after exactly forty-five seconds’ acquaintanceship. “The implications aren’t too pleasant.”

  “Nothing’ll get her out of the back for hours,” confided Garrison with an affectionate pride that shone out all over him. “She’s cooking her first Sunday meal all by herself. There’s a chalk mark across the back of the hall beyond which I daren’t step.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Garrison,” Cameron couldn’t resist blurting out.

  “I had my loneliness,” Garrison let him know.

  Cameron reseated himself. “Look, I had to come to you,” he explained. “I don’t enjoy doing it, any more than you probably will enjoy having me do it. I hate to have to rake up the past. You’re out of it now; it’s over far as you’r
e concerned. But you can help me. You’re the only one who can. You’re the only remaining link.” Then he added, “ Living link.”

  “That sounds pretty grim.”

  “Well, it has been. It is.” He took things out of his pocket, things he’d brought along to show him. “Did you know a man named Hugh Strickland?”

  “That bum?” was Garrison’s way of answering yes. “They gave him the chair, I understand. He ended up fine, didn’t he? I knew he was heading that way.”

  “You knew him fairly well, in other words.”

  “Too well to suit me, I dropped him even before Jeanette died. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him any more, toward the end. After all, Florence Strickland was one of her best friends. I’m not a puritan or anything like that, but when a man’s that open about such things . . .”

  Cameron deftly sidestepped the moral aspect of the thing as being no concern of his. “There are two things I’m afraid we disagree on,” he said. “But even though we do disagree, you can still help me nevertheless. That doesn’t alter things one bit. One is about the death of the first Mrs. Garrison—”

  “Oh, you still think Jeanette’s death was—not altogether in the course of nature.”

  “I still do and I always will.”

  “I don’t,” said Garrison.

  “That needn’t hinder us at all. And secondly, it may surprise you, but I don’t think Strickland was guilty of the murder of Miss Holliday, for which he went to the chair.”

  Garrison looked not only surprised, but even rather rebukingly at him for this.

  “I interviewed him, unofficially of course, in his death cell some weeks before the execution. He repeated what I’d already heard him say when we first took him into custody—that there was a note lying there beside her body, of a vindictive, gloating nature. He couldn’t produce it, of course, so he had no way of saving himself.” He leaned forward intently, and indicated his own chest with his thumb. “I happen to believe there was such a note. Why? Because it was such an odd, unlikely, you might say pitiful, little detail to cling to, to be the lie of a man trying to save his own life. He never claimed to have seen any shadowy figure of a man slipping out as he got there, nothing like that. Only, and always, he insisted he’d found that note there by her body. He swore to me he had. He quoted from it and his quotation never varied from first to last. And I happened to know, which he never did from beginning to end, that you yourself had received pretty much the same type of note a whole year earlier when your wife died. And—one solid year after he was in his grave—a third such note turned up, in a third instance, somewhere else. Now do you understand why I’ve come out here to you?”