The Black Angel (9 page)

“When was the last time you saw her?” I kept looking down. I traced an imaginary line along the soiled table with the tip of my finger. Then I traced another one over the other way.

“I see her every night. The smoke clears away and there she is. She sits next to me, and I buy her a drink. She comes with me into every one of these places——”

“Yes, but when was the last time you
really
saw her?” I urged with gentle persuasiveness. I smiled a little, trying to show him that I didn't refuse to accept her on his plane; it was just that I wanted to know a little more about her on the other plane.

I waited, but he didn't answer.

“You used to go up and see her sometimes, too, didn't you, as well as having her come down here to see you?” And to make it stick I added: “She told me you did.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I used to. I used to lots. It hurt too much, though. So mostly I didn't go in; she didn't know about it. I just watched her windows from across the street in the shadows, in the rain and in the snow——”

I kept drawing that imaginary line over and over. His eyes were on my finger now, hypnotized.

“And then when they went away I'd go away—kind of happy—because she was by herself again.”

“They?” I breathed, scarcely stirring my lips.

“Whoever it was. I couldn't see him; I was never near enough. But you could tell by the way the lights would go out, and then a little while later somebody would come out of the doorway.”

“And then you'd go away happy.”

“I had her back again.”

He stopped. I kept tracing that line, as though I were slowly drawing something invisible out of him. “Only mostly,” he resumed abruptly, “they didn't come out again. I had to go away first. The cops would make me. And that hurt.” He pushed in the side of his stomach. “The smoke would take care of that, though.”

“And murder?” I thought.

I couldn't talk to him any more there. The stuff was too fresh in him. I'd made a good beginning. But I had to get him back on my plane again, where I could gauge his reactions better.

I said, “Marty, I want to do something for you. Would you like to sleep in a bed tonight and not just in a doorway or on a bench?”

He looked at me and said, with a pathos that was wholly without artifice, “Some people do, don't they?”

“You can, too, tonight. Would you like to, Marty? If I buy you a bed in a room all to yourself, will you promise me not to drink until—until I come down and see you tomorrow?”

He was able to walk without any noticeable convolutions. He'd learned how to; he'd had so much practice at it. By keeping his feet close to the ground, scarcely lifting them at all, he was able to make his way along, both straight and fairly steadily, at a sort of hangdog shuffle, head and shoulders bowed somewhat forward; that was all.

I took his arm. We must have made a strange-looking couple, leaving that place. A woman and a dead man.

I appealed to the barman on the way out. “I want to take him someplace to sleep where—where he'll stay put until tomorrow morning.”

He didn't make the mistake of misinterpreting, at least; but then, sizing the two of us up side by side, how could anyone have very well?

“Try the Commerce, over on Broome Street,” he said. He let a little spurt of beer into a glass, added something to it I wasn't quick enough to identify, and swished it around surreptitiously. “Here, give him this to drink a minute first.”

In the place on Broome Street I paid a dollar for a room for him and then went upstairs with him, at least as far as the door. I told him to take off his things and get some sleep and waited outside in the hall for a few minutes. Then I sent the boy in, quietly, and had him bring out his shoes to me. They were almost unidentifiable: shapeless slate crusts. I had him take them down below with us and wrap them in a bit of paper and told him to hold them there. Not to give them back to him under any circumstances, even if he should try to claim them before I could get down there.

“I must find him here when I come back tomorrow, and without any liquor in him.”

“I don't know,” the man behind the desk said doubtfully. “I've seen some of them that wouldn't let a little thing like bare feet stop them.”

“Then if he tries to get out tell him that the room hasn't been paid for and he'll have to wait for me to come down and bail him out. Whatever you do, keep him here.”

I went uptown again, back to the other world. I lay there all night long without sleeping, thinking about it, thinking it out, thinking it over.

Had he done it? Hadn't he? That fanged, hideous grin he'd given at one time. Why, that had been almost a replica of the death grimace I'd seen on her own face that day in the apartment. Was that the brand of murder, the symbol of it, transferred to his own countenance from hers? No, that was metaphysical nonsense.

He was her husband. He'd been mad about her in the colloquial sense first. And now he was mad about her in the literal sense. Set out a chair, a drink, for her each time he sat down himself. They called him Heartbreak down there in the nether world. There'd been a line drawn through his name in her book, and he'd waited outside in the rain, in the snow, watching her windows, to claim her back again each time somebody left. Until one day,
that
day—hadn't it occurred to him there was a better way of claiming her forever, with never another vigil necessary, with never another dispute about his title to her?

It must have been that way. It was as plain as this hand that I held out before my face in the blue pallor of the early dawn.

“Marty, I know what you did to Mia.” Suddenly, like that, in the middle of something else. No, that was no good. He'd deny it; that was only to be expected, even from someone in his condition. But what was the best I could hope to get, even if it were true and I'd hit the nail on the head? A frightened, furtive flash across his face. Why, for that matter, even if it weren't true I might produce the same thing simply by the mere fact of making the accusation at all. No, I had to have more than that to go to Flood with.

I already had for him a splendid motive, an exquisite motive. I already had for him an incriminating vigil outside her windows that the police had never brought to light or even suspected so far. Now all I needed, I felt, was a guilt reaction of one sort or another from the suspect himself, but a substantial one, one that would hold water, something more than just a frightened look or a stammered denial; given that, and I had enough to go to them with, they could go on from there.

Suddenly, in that clarity which sometimes precedes sleep, I thought of another way of eliciting this reaction I was after, a way preferable and more reliable than a mere verbal trap. The accusation or denial must come from him, naturally, but it must be unforced, unsuggested; he must not realize that he was presenting it. Then it would be valid; then it would be substantial enough to hand over to Flood.

I would accuse
somebody else
and watch and see what he did.

And on that note my eyes finally dropped closed, their linings carmine against the rising sun.

I carried the wrapped shoes up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, and for a moment I got frightened and thought I'd lost him all over again. But I remembered there was no fire escape outside the window, they'd told me. I opened the door and looked in.

He was there. He was dressed. He was sitting on the bed with an inert sort of resignation, his hands dangling down between his legs. I closed the door after me and put the shoes down next to him on the floor and then stood there looking at him a moment. He looked at me in turn.

“Then there
was
someone like you sitting talking to me last night,” he said finally.

“Yes, there was. How'd you sleep?”

He looked back at the mattress, as though to inquire of it rather than of himself. “I don't know,” he said lukewarmly. “I'm sort of used to angles, like benches give you. I kept missing them.”

“You better put those on.”

He didn't ask me what I'd wanted of them; he didn't seem interested. “I wondered what become of them,” he said indifferently.

I looked at him closely. I was seeing him for the first time in the daylight now. And although I was there to kill him myself, the full impact of what
she'd
done to him only came to me now as I got this better look at him. She'd killed him a thousand times to my one. He'd been a fine-looking man once; you could still make out the traces of it here and there in the shape of his head, particularly the back of it, the proportion of his features, a turn his head gave now and then. He'd been intelligent too; his eyes told that. No longer by what was in them, but by their lingering outward characteristics of color, size, and width.

She'd done her work well, all right. She'd gutted him. I couldn't help crying out to myself as I beheld what she'd left of him: “Out of all the thousands and thousands of fine constructive women in this world, what evil star made him pick her out? What
got
him about her? Couldn't he see, couldn't he tell——?”

And the answer, of course, was self-evident. What gets any of us about any of them; what gets any of them about any of us? The image in our minds. Not the reality that others see; the image in the mind. Therefore, how could he see, how could he tell, how could he free himself, when the image in his mind all along, and even now, was that of a lovely creature, all sunshine, roses, and honey, a beatific haloed being, a jewel of womankind? Who would even strive to free himself from such a one? Watch out for the image in your mind.

He straightened from the lacing of his shoes at last; it was a difficult job, because the punctures the laces were to go through were warped and askew and all but obliterated, and he had to coax the lace tip through each one by moistening it and drawing it to a point; he straightened, and then he got to his feet.

I said, “They're sending us up two cups of coffee and some rolls. I told them to.”

He drew his finger uncertainly across under his nose and mumbled: “Gee, you're being pretty nice to me.”

I let him be for a while out of common, everyday humanity, until at least he had some coffee in him. I didn't know why I should give quarter like this, unless I may have felt that I was aiding my own purpose by waiting until his system had become stabilized at least.

The coffee came, and we busied ourselves with it for a while: he sitting slumped on the edge of the bed, holding the mug clasped between both hands and down low almost over the floor; I standing taking mine from the top of the derelict object that passed for a bureau.

It came to me how strange the picture must be that we made, had anyone been there to see it. The huntress and the hunted, for that was what it amounted to, eying one another watchfully across this dusty, shabby, sun-blinded room, while we silently sipped at the nauseous contents of the thick mugs. The ravaged man he was; the strange, inscrutable woman I was. The silence in the room. The distance maintained between us. The eyes that watched their opposites gravely, even over the top of the thick crockery. It made what should have been an act of amenity into a sort of wary deadlock, where neither moved, waiting for the other to move first. By that I don't mean physical movement, of course.

He put his mug down to the floor empty. I thrust mine aside, three quarters full. I passed him cigarettes that I had brought with me.

Then I returned to where I'd been, put my elbow to the bureau top. I said, “Would you like a newspaper? Do you ever read the newspapers?”

He shook his head. I wasn't sure whether the answer was meant for both questions, so I repeated the one I was actually interested in having answered. “Do you ever read them much?”

“No, I never bother. There's nothing in them that has to do with me.” He looked at me some more. Then he asked in a passive, detached sort of way, “What do you want with me?”

“I knew Mia, you know.”

A hunted look came over his face; he turned it aside for a second. Or maybe it was a haunted look; I didn't know.

He wasn't going to go on, so I had to.

“She meant a lot to me. I thought maybe there was something I could do for you.”

“What?” he asked. It wasn't said challengingly. Just inertly.

I shifted unobtrusively around until I could watch his face in the dingy mirror, and yet, in looking at me, he wouldn't guess at once that my eyes were on him.

“When I last saw her—oh, about three or four weeks ago—she asked me to——”

His face hardened, took on a sort of brutal aspect, especially about the mouth. “She's dead,” he said.

I went on in the same quiet voice, as though he hadn't spoken. “I know that. But how do you know it? I thought you didn't read the newspapers.”

No guilt appeared, though. Only a shuttering of the eyes, an expression of blank groping, as though he were trying to remember himself how he'd come to know about it without reading it in the papers.

I gave him time. “I thought you didn't read the newspapers? Then how did you know?”

He looked at the wall opposite him, and it wasn't to be found there. He looked at the ceiling, and it wasn't there. He looked at his empty hands, and it wasn't there.

I gave him time. “You said you didn't read the newspapers. How did you know, then? How did you know?”

He felt his forehead with the back curve of one hand, and it wasn't there. Wasn't in there.

“How did you know, then? How did you know?”

“Don't,” he moaned in a helpless sort of way. “Each time you say that it drives it away again. I'm just going to get it and it drives it away again.”

“Did you go up there, maybe, and see her lying there right after it happened? Don't be afraid; there's no harm in that.” I shoveled my hands toward him in ingenuous protest. “Isn't that it, Marty? You happened to go up there and found her lying there just the way she was, with one of her own silk stockings twisted around her neck, choked to death; isn't that it?”