The Black Angel (2 page)

Then I went out and closed the door behind me, and for the first time in four years I didn't give a damn what there was going to be for supper.

2

VISITING ANGEL

T
HEY
'
D TOLD ME OVER AT THAT HERMITAGE PLACE THAT
this was where it was. It was one of those remodeled private residences that have been converted into apartments. But of the expensive, not the cheap, variety. It was the type of place that offers extreme privacy. No attendants in the lobby, an automatic elevator. The door was the self-locking kind. Yes, I thought bitterly, she'd want extreme privacy.

I went into the small forward vestibule and found her name beside one of the small door buttons, but before I could put my finger to it a delivery boy bearing an empty box came out. He politely held the door for me, so I got in without having to telegraph my punch and run the risk of being refused admittance from below.

A moment later I was standing before her inner door on the second floor. And now that I was there I wanted to be back home again; I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. By that time the false courage of the double jiggerful of gin had had time to wear off, and I saw this for the preposterous, unlikely to succeed thing it was again. The only reason I didn't turn around and scuttle off again before she had time to come out and confront me was that, now that I was right there outside the door, it seemed senseless not to wait long enough at least to find out if I had the right person or not. I was almost certain I did have by now. I didn't like a remark they'd let drop at that Hermitage place when I'd been there just now. Miss Mercer had turned in her notice only two or three days ago. She was going away on a short vacation, she'd said. Yeah? I thought bitterly. On whose time?

The hopelessness of the thing I was trying to do came over me again. I put my hand distractedly to my forehead and thought, “What do I expect to get from this? What good will it do?”

She was taking a long time to answer. My courage was oozing out of me by the minute. If I had to wait much longer for the showdown I wouldn't be able to open my mouth at all. This was one of those things you had to do at white heat. Once you stopped and let yourself cool off you couldn't go through with it any more. I rang again, longer, harder, louder.

She wasn't in.

I gave the knob a twist only as a symptom of frustration. The door wavered loosely inward an inch or two. It must have been off the latch the whole time. I widened the gap and put my face to it. I could see a strip of room about a foot wide, splashed with a lot of vivid turquoise-blue color.

I cleared my throat. I even spoke aloud. I said, “I beg your pardon?” No one answered.

Not finding her in at the moment emboldened me. I forgot about my recent inclination to retreat. I stepped inside, closed the door softly behind me, stood there for a moment like that, with my hand resting on the knob. Then I lingeringly took it off, and entry was complete.

Enemy territory, I thought.

I took it all in. I thought: “So this is how they live when they—live like this.” It was a decorator's job, that outside room. Almost like a stage setting. Swell to look at, from the door like this, but no good for living in. Too florid. It was flooded with this acutely vivid turquoise-blue color: upholstery, carpet, drapes, lamp shades. Either she or the decorator had a passion for it. Then all over, like flecks of blood, there were dabs of vermilion.

I shook my head, not so much in moral condemnation as in common, ordinary, everyday sense of value. It wasn't worth it; it was no bargain; she was being overcharged. My way was the better way of the two; worry about a bill now and then, but at least be able to usher your company out when you felt like it, lock the door after them for the night. Every room, I felt to myself, looking around, ought to have at least
one
ugly or dilapidated piece of furniture in it. That makes an honest room of it, not a bandbox like this.

I moved a little deeper inward. My own reflection glided unexpectedly across a mirror I hadn't noticed and gave me a guilty little shock, until I'd swerved and recognized myself. I looked out of place here, even in a mirror. The suburbs trespassing on the bright-light belt. Washington Heights taking a peek in on Sutton Place. “Angel Face,” he called me. Well, maybe, but a sort of insipid, timid angel right then. Those eyes couldn't have looked mysterious if they'd tried, only sort of—guileless, I suppose you'd call it.

An arched opening into the next room came slipping toward me as I slipped toward it. Through it I could see a section of boudoir, and if the note in here was turquoise blue, the note in there was a sort of lush coral pink. It was drenched with it, even the satin-quilted walls.

I could see the foot of a coral satin chaise longue sticking out, with a rumpled coverlet on it and a discarded bedroom slipper or mule lying under it toe-up. She must have dressed in a hurry.

I shifted back and forth outside there, without going any nearer at first, until I could scan both of the side walls from where I was. There was no one in there. This was just a reflex precaution; I knew I would have been heard and challenged long ago if anyone had been in there.

I lingered outside a moment or two longer. For some strange reason it seemed less reprehensible to be caught trespassing in her living room than to be caught trespassing in the sanctum sanctorum of her boudoir. I roamed aimlessly around, looking over at the door by which I had entered every other moment. I strayed here and there, touching this, tapping that, poising three fingers in tripod formation on something else as I passed by. That was the only outward sign of the tension I was under.

Everything was monogrammed. That seemed to be another fetish of hers. There must have been a time she hadn't had much of anything, and now that she had plenty of everything she had to show whom it belonged to; she couldn't let the observer take it for granted. She'd thought up a symbol of two Ms overlapping one another, so that they looked like a single capital with four downward stems. She must have stayed up all one night to arrive at
that
brilliant inspiration, I reflected. A sixth-grade school kid could have rigged up something more original in ten minutes flat.

It had been sprinkled around wholesale. My only surprise was it had been left off the steam radiators and windowpanes and such. It was on cigarette boxes and on the cigarettes inside them and on matchsafes and worked into the corners of cushions and——

Suddenly the telephone began to ring someplace right there in the room with me. They use the expression “jumping out of your shoes.” I didn't jump out of mine, but if they weren't actually clear of the plushy carpet for a moment they felt as though they were, with the frightened heave I gave.

I stood perfectly still for a minute, waiting for it to quit. It didn't. It kept on and kept on, until finally I couldn't stand it any more. What made it worse was I couldn't locate where it was at first, even by the sound. It was someplace near by, right in the same room with me, but there was no sign of it.

I went looking around high and low for it, with furtive, trembling haste. It seemed to grow clearer over in a certain corner where there was a turquoise-lacquered object that might have been a chest of drawers. I clawed at the mid-section of it, and a little slab came down in desk formation. There it was behind that, lacquered turquoise to match everything else, and bleating like something smothering to death. Beside it was a little address book, with its pliable leather cover dyed the same inevitable color and stamped with the same inevitable monogram.

I lifted the receiver finally, to try to silence it in that way. Then, because I already held it in my hand, I put it to my ear, stood quiet with it like that.

A man's voice said instantly, and with a sort of hurried intimacy, “Hello, Mia?” And then over again, because there was no answer from my end, “Hello, Mia?”

That voice. I would have known his voice anywhere. I put my free hand down on the desk slab and braked myself against it while I curved over weakly above it, like when you have a pain in your stomach.

“Hello?” he kept saying. “Hello, Mia?”

The colors in the room ran a little; a drop or two of turquoise seemed to swim around in my eyes. In this damn place you even shed turquoise teardrops.

I didn't have the heart for any cheap surprises, for any punishing triumphs. I didn't want to be cruel to him. He was being cruel enough for the two of us. I put it down again quietly, almost tenderly.

I didn't have to worry about whether I had the right person or not now any more.

Crazy thoughts without logic took turns slashing at me. “Why do they get you to learn to love them, if this is how they're going to treat you after you do? Why do they come around you when you're seventeen and aren't doing anything to them, are just minding your own business, getting along all right without them, if this is how they're going to act when you're twenty-two? Why don't they leave you
alone?”
I sobbed deep inside where it couldn't be heard. “Why don't they leave you
alone
if they don't mean it?”

I walked haphazardly back toward the arched opening leading to the next room again. I think I thought it was the outside door. Then when I noticed what it was I stopped, to turn and go the other way.

But in there, on the vanity table in a crystal frame, I could see her picture smiling mockingly out at me, as if to say: “You see? Aren't you sorry you came around here now? If you hadn't you still wouldn't have been sure.” And hate came on, and bitterness came on, and I strode forward, to go to it and pick it up. I suppose to smash it, or some other equally childish thing.

I didn't watch where I was going and I stumbled over something as I made my way around the foot of the impeding chaise longue.

A foot, a leg, projecting from the other side of it. What I had taken to be a discarded boudoir slipper until now. Even from where I was standing at the moment, but for the hideous clarity of that one unmistakable silk-clad limb, it still looked like a tumbled mass of boudoir pillows, perhaps a discarded negligee and a chaise coverlet, all intermingled and allowed to fall in a neglected heap to the floor, there in that one place.

I suppose I gave a smothered scream. I don't remember. I got down waveringly and edged aside one of the pillows. Coral sateen it was, and so soft, so harmless. But someone had smothered her to death with it.

Though no man was the breath of her life, one of them had taken the breath of her life away, and she was dead.

I was sorry I'd tampered with that concealing pillow. For that grimacing, suffused mask with the protruding tongue didn't look at all like the photograph in the crystal frame over there any longer.

I got up again, cold and sick and frightened. I'd never seen a dead human being before. I couldn't seem to turn my eyes away. I retreated stealthily backward, a step at a time, as if afraid that if I dared to turn my back on her she'd rise up and come after me.

When I had regained the archway between the rooms and had at least a head start, then panic came on briefly. The panic of any young, unversed, not very bright thing. I made several confused half turns, this way and that; then I located the door and sped for it, my frightened mind screaming: “Let me out of here! I want to get out of here! I don't want to stay in this place—with
her!”

Then at the last moment, just as I'd reached the door, the thought of Kirk came to me, and some sort of protective instinct—I don't know what it was—brought me up short, held me there a moment.

They mustn't connect him with her. They mustn't know he'd known her or——I turned and saw the phone standing there across the room with the slab let down before it the way I'd left it. And next to it that little private address book of hers. I went running over and picked it up and leafed through it. There it was, on the
M
page, big as life. His name and office number.

First I was just going to tear the page out bodily and leave the rest behind. Then I realized that maybe they would notice that; it would look too incriminating. So I thrust the whole booklet into my handbag intact and snapped it closed on it. They weren't going to find
his
name around here, not if I could help it.

I looked around questioningly. There wasn't anything else out here that I could see that might involve him, and not even for his sake could I have gone back into that—that other room a second time.

I told myself I'd better get out of here fast myself. Somebody was liable to come along at any moment and——

Even so, I knew enough not to bolt out without reconnoitering first and thereby running a risk of blundering head-on into someone on the outside. It's uncanny how quickly your instincts, if left to their own guidance, will adapt themselves even to the most bizarre, unlooked-for situations, as though you were used to meeting those situations every day in your life. Accordingly, instead of throwing the door open forthwith, I stood there listening intently beside it for several moments before making any further move.

It was because I stood there motionless like that, and with my head tilted at just a certain angle, that I had a chance to become aware of this fleck of color against the creamy expanse of the door. It was in the seam, the opposite one where the hinges were located, and it was just over the lower one of these, as though it had sidled downward until the hinge had blocked its further descent.

Even after it had caught my eye it meant nothing; there was not enough of it to convey any meaning in my present state of tension and anxiety to get out. Only, as I turned the knob and slowly drew the door inward from its frame, motion, the motion of a dab of color, caught my eye back to where it had been again, and I saw that it had fallen out with the reverse widening of the seam at that end and now lay on the floor, a postage-stamp-sized square from where I stood. I reached down and picked it up, and it was only then that I could make out what it actually was.