The Black Angel (24 page)

She tried to laugh it off. “Ladd, you shouldn't stick your head in here like that! We might have been comparing stocking tops or something.”

He said to me, “Are we going?”

“Yes,” I said, “we're going.” It wouldn't have done any good to stay; there wouldn't have been anything to stay for now any more.

I wondered what she'd been trying to say to me.

I said hardly a word to him all the way home.

“Why are you so glum?”

I smiled wanly. “No reason,” I said, “no reason.”

I thought, “So I've found you, have I?”

I went to see Flood right after that, the very next day. He heard me for a while. “Well, have you any evidence yet?”

I showed him the matches.

He looked them over, shook his head finally. “They're valueless by themselves, not sufficient. For one thing, you didn't hang onto the original match cover that you found wedged behind the door up there, discarded it. It's therefore only your
word
that the two are similar. In the second place, although they strongly indicate that the party in question was up there and left them there, they're not positive proof in themselves; they could have been carried there by someone else just as readily. What you've got to have is direct——”

“I know,” I said. “And it may come at any minute now. That's why I came to see you. I want to be ready for it. I don't know how to trap it, to catch it on the fly. To just come here afterward and repeat it to you—I want something stronger than that.”

“You'll have to have.”

“What do you advise me to do?”

He thought about it. “Are you by yourself in this place?”

“Entirely.”

“And you feel fairly sure that something's coming?”

“After these matches—yes, I do.”

“I'll have something made up for you by our carpenters. Make sure there's no one there with you when they bring it around.”

It was installed before the week was out. He came over with them himself to supervise.

I said, “What is it? It looks like an old victrola cabinet.”

“That's what it is,” he told me. “It's built into one. It's the same principle as these machines they dictate into in offices sometimes.”

I said, “Oh, I understand; right here in front of it, is that the idea?” I felt a little crawly; I don't know why.

“Anywhere around here in front of it. I'll give you the range approximately. You won't be hollering, so anything farther out than here, say, is liable to blur.” He traced an imaginary line with his foot along the floor. “Keep him inside that.”

He rearranged things. “This divan ought to go over closer, right up against it. I imagine it'll come in handy to you.”

I could feel a little red stop light burning on each cheek; I don't know why.

“Now, so you won't have to go over to it each time, I've had this cable starter rigged up for you. See, there's a plunger on the end. Flatten it with your thumb when you want to take. I'll pay it out along here, behind the divan, and bring it up here between these two cushions, the green and the orange. Remember where it is now. That ought to be easy; just work your hand in.”

“Quite easy,” I thought; “just like driving nails into a cross.”

He had that masculine instinct for mechanical perfection. “Now let's try it out,” he said. “We already tested it over at the workshop, but I want to see how it takes here in the room.”

He did something to it. Not at the end of the concealed cable but right in under the lid itself. “Say something into it. Quietly, just as though you were talking to him.”

I crushed my own fingers together. “I don't know what to say.”

“That'll do as well as anything else.”

There was a faint hum.

“Suppose he notices that?”

“Tell him it's the water pipes in the wall, or something.” He turned it off. “We can't get that out of it entirely.” He did something to it again. “Now listen. The playback.” He held up his hand.

It was uncanny. “Say something into it. Quietly, just as though you were talking to him.”

A cottony feminine voice answered, “I don't know what to say. … Suppose he notices that?”

“Tell him it's the water pipes in the wall, or something.”

I couldn't recognize my own voice. They say you never can; you so seldom hear it.

He cut it off.

“Are you going to leave that on there?”

“He won't hear it. It'll go on from there.”

“Suppose I run over. How will I know?”

“You won't run over. You've got plenty of room. Just don't waste it. I mean, don't have it on by the hour. Just turn it on when you're getting hot.” Then he said, “Call me if you think you've got anything.” He went over to the door. Then just as he was about to leave he said, almost by way of afterthought, “By the way, who is he?”

I said, “I'd rather not give you the name beforehand. I think it's he, but if it isn't, then giving you the name is no good. If it is I'll give it to you then. Or it'll probably be down on here anyway.”

“That was a typically feminine reaction just then.” He closed the door.

I stood looking over at the green and orange cushions. I wondered why I felt so low.

I took the tickets and threw them aside.

“I was scalped for them,” he protested cheerfully. “That show's sold out solid until next Fourth of July.”

“Not tonight, I've changed my mind.”

“I see you in a new light. So suddenly cuddly and stay-homish and domestic. Look at this, the lights low. Highballs cooking over there waiting for us. Great guns, even sandwiches for later! Say, you can do something to a place, can't you? You make me feel like I've been married ten years. Only the nice part of that, though.”

“Don't make fun of me,” I pleaded forlornly. That set the mood, gave the key we were to play in. Bittersweet, not wisecracking.

“Here, stretch out here. Put your feet up. No, the other way, I want to sit on that side of you.” Orange and green. “Tonight's our night for getting to know one another better. Tonight's our night for reminiscence.”

I felt as though I were preparing something for the slaughtering block.

We sipped awhile and talked awhile, until the mood I wanted had grown on us, fastened on us. Our voices were low; the lights were low; slanting shadows of treachery were stroked upon the walls.

“It's bromidic but it's true,” I went on, “that a woman doesn't
want
to be the very first love in a man's life. He'd be too raw yet. So don't fail me, Ladd. Don't let me down. Don't make me think you're lacking in the completeness I want you to have. I give you two, three—how many will I need to give you?—before me.”

He quit evading me. “Two will do,” he murmured, “if you must make mountains out of molehills.” His voice was drowsy with the return to forgotten things. “Her name was Patsy and I was twenty, and it was one of those
first
things. She lived on Columbus Avenue; that was when they still had the el there, and it ran past her flat right at the level of her living-room windows. No, excuse me, they called it the front room. I remember you had to finish up what you were saying before a train came, or else it would be broken up into two parts with a long wait in between.”

He groped uncertainly. “You can't tell these things very well, can you?”

“But you loved her.”

“Yes, I guess I must have, or I wouldn't still remember it. It lasted about a year, I think, and it really was pretty shiny. Maybe that was because I was twenty and she was eighteen. You can't
be
any younger than that, either one of you. I used to go over to the Columbus Avenue flat for Sunday dinners. I don't think I missed a Sunday dinner in months.

“Then I made the mistake of taking her to a party. Cinderella shouldn't go to a party, the story in the storybooks to the contrary. I was proud of her; I had a good time showing her off. I remember she cried a little on the way home. I hadn't noticed anything, but she claimed they'd snickered at her. Just the girls, not the boys. She wouldn't go out with me at all for a while after that, wouldn't even see me at first.

“Then suddenly she asked me of her own accord if I'd take her to another party. Another party like the first one again, where pretty much the same crowd would be. I located one and I called for her. I remember how she came out of the downstairs doorway all bundled in a beautiful fur wrap. Cinderella to the bitter end. She said her aunts and her cousins and I don't know who else besides had all chipped in and made a first payment on it for her.

“All through the party that night she kept it on. She'd open the windows when no one was looking and make the room good and draughty, as an excuse to keep on wearing it. And this time no one laughed at her. They were all pretty young there, I guess.

“She was very happy riding home with me that night, strangely happy. She kept kissing me almost fiercely, as though we'd never see one another again.

“We never did. A couple of detectives came around to her home the next day, and she was sentenced to the State Prison for Women for stealing it.”

He got up abruptly and moved away. I knew. Who doesn't want to be twenty again? Suddenly he'd stopped. He was standing right by it. My heart got quiet.

“Let's have something,” he said.

“It doesn't work; it's a D.C.”

My voice went up too high. But I had to stop him quickly; his hand was already out to the lid. “No, Ladd, come over here. Come here by me. Don't roam around when I'm talking to you.”

“I didn't know you wanted to.”

I did then, God knows. I told him so. “I do now.”

He came right back. He subsided beside me again with a sweeping half embrace and a stretched-out “A-n-y time.”

I blew out my breath a little to myself.

He told me of the second one, then. It wasn't she, I could tell in a moment, and I hardly listened after that.

It was briefer. He'd been older, and the skin around his heart had been thicker.

“And——?”

“And that's all. The rest is just—my personal laundry. You wouldn't want that.”

“Only two?” She hadn't shown up.

“Only two.”

“You've told me of those you loved. Now tell me of someone you've hated. A girl, of course, not a man; someone you've hated with that same side of your heart. That's all that interests a girl about a man: the other girls he's loved—or hated.”

For a minute I thought it wasn't coming, it took so long. But it wasn't the fact of
trying
to remember that slowed it; it was the fact of remembering, itself. “There was one like that,” he said at last.

“What was she like?”

“She was rotten. Rotten all the way through. That word hardly does her justice.” There was still hate there, now that he was raking the ashes. “If she'd looked on the outside like she looked on the inside she would have been clapped into a ward for contagious diseases. But she didn't. They never do——”

And suddenly there it was, starting. I knew almost at the first word.

“She worked here in a club——”

I felt carefully for the plunger, with one hand crossed over behind my own back. It was hard to do that way.

It nearly destroyed the gossamer skein he was weaving. He said, “What's that?”

It was more noticeable in the quiet of now than it had been in the daytime when Flood was there, I thought fearfully. We were so close to it too. “Just the frigidaire. It needs defrosting. Go on with what you were saying.”

“She's the only woman I ever——”

“What?”

He wasn't going to for a minute.

“What?” I said again on a suspended breath.

“Well, the only woman, I think, that I ever wished dead.”

I waited.

Then he said in a curiously sepulchral voice that must have transmitted well, “Well—she
is
dead now.”

“What was her name?”

“What good does that do you?” he said ruefully.

“Well, it's something that has to do with you, and when you love someone and want to learn everything there is about them, then it does do you some good.” I looked up at him overhead. I put my hand lightly against the side of his face and left it there. “Tell me her name.”

“She was a bum named Mercer.”

“Was that her first name?”

“Mia Mercer was her name. Her stage name, probably; I don't know.” It was well under way now. If I just left it alone it would come by itself. It was like pulling the cover off a furled umbrella: the first part is the hard part; after that it just peels effortlessly.

“It was just a night-life stand in the beginning. Everyone has them in their lives. Someone you meet in a place, a club, one night and then start seeing off and on from then on. It had nothing much to do with love, believe me, from start to finish. But at least I didn't hate her at that stage yet. I thought she was a good enough scout. She was a little heavy on the—expense roll, you might say. They have no souls, so they must have things they can see and feel and touch; that's their only heaven.

“Then one night she found out something about me.”

Again there was a snag in the unraveling skein.

“What?” I said without joining lips together.

“Oh, nothing to speak of—I was taken ill in her place one night and—she got a little frightened, wanted to send for a doctor—something like that.”

I didn't understand what he meant, but I thought I'd better not sidetrack him too much.

“Unfortunately, she'd found out about Leila. Leila was engaged to someone at the time, someone who'd come over from England, and—well, it meant her very life to have had anything happen to it. And Leila was an innocent party to——She'd been in Europe for years going to school, and she didn't know very much about me even as my own sister. That was what made it so damnable. I don't think this mutt would have been willing to believe that, but whether she had or not, I doubt that it would have made any difference to her.”