The Black Angel (29 page)

The bleached skin of my face felt like cardboard, it was so stiff.

“My ring is in there; I wanted to see if it was all right. I had a bad dream just now and——”

He was simple-minded. But dangerous and shrewd as only the simple-minded can be. “But there it is in front of you, and it's those other things you were taking out. I watched you through the crack of the door first.”

I died a little more than I had already.

“I didn't mean anything by it. You know how curious women are. Don't—don't tell him about it.”

Instantly I realized what a bad mistake that was.

His face twisted into a grin. He came in and returned the door to where it had been before, flush with the frame. “Okay, it'll jist be something between you and me.” And suddenly that high-pitched cackle that I'd heard the very first day of all on the telephone wrenched jarringly from him, stopped short again.

He came over close. I pushed the safe lid back into true, trying to efface the marks of my own guilt.

He was looking at me, not the safe.

There was something wrong about him. I'd known that all along. I couldn't tell just what it was. Something that went beyond just ordinary cruelty. I remembered now that I'd seen him one day. There was no time to review that now. Suddenly he'd caught me to him.

“Don't you know what McKee'll do to you if I tell him you tried to kiss me? Don't—
please
—ah, please, don't! Don't let's have any trouble.”

“I ain't trying to kiss you. Look, am I trying to kiss you? I don't like kissing myself.”

“Then what're you holding me like this for? Let me——”

“Just let me twist your hand a little, like this. I'll stop if it hurts you. Ever since I first saw you I've been dying to——”

I threshed around a little. “Sh! Somebody'll hear us. Don't!”

“Jist the skin on the back of your wrist, where it's loose; the wrong way around, like this. Don't do that now; don't scream!”

I screamed more in stark terror of the pain to come than at any pain he'd actually caused me yet. I knew now what was the matter with him. He was a pain worshiper. Something out of the nether world of twisted impulses. Cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Cruelty that was not punishment but love.

He was becoming enraged. “I told you not to scream, di'n't I? When anyone tries to stop me like that I can't stop at all. Now I can't stop, myself! Now you're gonna get it!”

I'd never seen anyone hit so hard before. He went into the table, took that with him until it had overturned, and then toppled backward over it, legs bucking briefly in air, to lie there floundering on his back and with it partly over him.

McKee didn't go after him, continue the assault, as ordinary rage would have dictated; he held back, froze there where he'd first struck him. The hardness of cement. The implacable steam roller pulsing in leashed motion.

He said to me in a breath-choked voice, “Get out of the room here; hurry up. I'm going to shoot him as soon as I come back with my gun, and I don't want you to see it.”

Then he turned to accomplish it in cold blood, as if he'd said: “I'm going out to get a handkerchief.”

The palpitating huddled mass in the corner said, “She was going through your safe—I caught her——” Then ran out of further breath.

The other one had come in belatedly.

He said to him with a complete lack of emotion that was almost insane: “Get me my gun, Skeeter. You know where it is.”

“You can shoot me, but it's true, McKee; she was going through your safe.” Blood peered at the corner of his lip.

“Did he see anything like that?” He was waiting for me to say no. That was all I had to do, and it wouldn't have gone any farther.

Something locked in me. I knew he'd kill that man within the next thirty seconds if I said no. That was all I had to say. I couldn't, couldn't bring myself to. One's better instincts can show up at the damnedest times, to one's undoing.

He repeated it, phrased even more prejudicially. “He didn't see anything like that, did he?”

Then suddenly it was no longer necessary to say anything. The wind had subtly changed direction. I'd lost my chance.

“Look, boss,” Skeeter purred almost inaudibly. His hand was on the safe front; he'd tilted it out from the frame, showing it to be unlocked.

Then after a while he closed it again.

“He doesn't know the combination,” McKee murmured. “Neither of them do.” He didn't say it to me. You couldn't tell whom he was saying it to. To himself, maybe, in a sort of sad confirmation.

He didn't say anything more than that; he let it go at that. But I could sense a slow change taking place in him; he was drifting away from me; I was losing him, like someone standing on a shore loses a boat carried out on the tide, and I couldn't do anything to stop him.

“I'll take you back to your room,” he said to me. His voice was still intimate, considerate; there was still that special quality left in it he'd used for me alone.

I slipped my arm through his and I turned and walked out beside him. I saw his lower lip trembling a little and I was afraid to look any more after that.

Halfway there I suddenly stopped, planted both hands against him in appeal. “McKee, you've got to believe me. I didn't see anything I shouldn't have.”

“Not even about the Sabbatino affair?” he said dryly.

“No.”

“Or the stuff about Conway?”

“No. No. Nothing but some bonds belonging to a Michael J. Dillon, and I hardly gave them a second——”

He'd trapped me. And I knew that was the name he'd wanted; he'd only made the others up as he went along.

“Even the middle initial,” he mused wryly. “You know I could be sent up for that, don't you, if it ever came out? You know that Michael J. Dillon, ‘Crooked Judge Dillon,' the ‘Corkscrew Judge,' as they called him, disappeared eleven years ago, and I could be accused of something even worse just as well as not?”

I'd heard of him. Everyone in the country had. The “Michael J.” had thrown me off.

He'd spoken quite gently, in a tone of indulgent remonstrance, but somehow I knew, in unshakable premonition, I'd signed my own death warrant.

“I'd never tell anyone on you.”

“I know you wouldn't.” He took my hands, which had been fastened on him all this while, and stripped them off like empty gloves. He wasn't obvious about it; there was simply an inattentiveness there, as if to say, “What are these things doing on me?”

He held the door open for me, to show me as a silent order where to go in.

“Good night, Angel,” he said caustically. “Angel in Black.”

I was badly frightened as he closed the door on me. I crouched there listening. I couldn't hear anything. I hadn't expected to. They must have been talking it over quietly among themselves, if they were talking at all. Or maybe they weren't; maybe he was just doing the talking within himself and they were waiting silently to be told what the outcome was to be.

Then suddenly I heard a morsel of consolation from one of them. He had perhaps come into a position, just then, from which I could hear that and no more, opposite the room opening or something.

“Don't take it that way, boss.”

From him no answer.

I could feel the blood leaving my face there in the blue dark. The verdict must have gone against me or he would not be mourning. I wanted to rush out then and there, throw myself at him in one desperate final appeal, before judgment had been inalterably passed. I knew it was too late for that. It wouldn't do any good. The idol had toppled; it couldn't be put back on its pedestal again. A remark Ladd had once made came back to me. “Love is like an eggshell; it can never be put together again.”

A further long, breathless wait. Then suddenly another bowdlerized remark reached me. “The place on Long Island.” It was as though somebody were making a suggestion to him.

The suggestion must have been taken up. There were a number of blurred, diverging treads off at a distance, as though they were in the act of dispersal. From nearer at hand, but in a guarded undertone, I heard a voice ask: “Are you coming with us?” Again I failed to detect the answer; perhaps he had just shaken his head.

Finally there was the snap of a light switch somewhere immediately adjacent to the room I was in, and then the elliptic remark: “—just get my things on a minute.”

An alarm bell was ringing in me wildly, hurting my chest with its brazen clamor. “I've got to get out of here!” the voice of inner panic shrieked above it. “Oh, how am I going to get out of here?”

The bell stilled suddenly; its clapper hung breathless. He had just knuckled the door.

I spread-eagled myself against the door in a violent convulsive movement, arms out at their widest. “Don't come in; I'm—I haven't got much on!”

“I won't come in. I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.”

I opened it on a crack, kept back behind it, as if afraid to look at him.

“I'm sending you home with the boys.”

“Home,” I thought; “home into the ground.”

“I thought you said I could——”

“I know, but I have to leave; I just got word, and you wouldn't want to stay here alone. I think it's better if you go back now, don't you?”

What could I say? He could have come in and dragged me out bodily if I tried to resist. “Just—just give me a few minutes. I'm all undressed. I'll have to——”

He flung them in at me with a sort of contempt. The night was so long; death was so sure, I suppose. “Don't take too long, baby. The boys are waiting, and I need them for something else—afterward.”

What a horrid word that was, “afterward”; it seemed to give off vibrations, like a knell, long after he'd turned and gone away again.

I ran across the room to the triple casement. Frustration eddied through me like a form of nausea as I stopped short by them. We were so high up that perspective became a crazy quilt, lost all coherence. That string of beaded lights trailing across the dark was not Manhattan any more but the Long Island shore across the East River. The East River Drive, on the near side of the channel, seemed closer at hand than the concealed crevice hidden somewhere deep underfoot that was Central Park West. To scream out was to launch my voice futilely across the night at Astoria, not toward the base of this monstrous monolith.

I tore myself away. There was a bath to my room, and I went in there. Then there was another door that led out on the other side of it again. It had been locked on my side when I was still a goddess. I unlocked it now, listened, drew in daring through raptly parted lips, cautioned it open, and looked out.

The room beyond was dark and unoccupied. For a moment hope shot up again. There was only one further door other than my mode of entrance. Only one way out of it. It must be through there or not at all. But as I reached it and softly pared it away, knob crushed to silence, a crevice of light ignited along it, like a noiseless but livid fuse suddenly set off.

Hope went down again with the sickening suction of a whirlpool draining through me. A figure in shorts and undershirt was revealed, foot to chair, attaching a garter to his leg. Even before I could withdraw the vignette had altered, he was moving so fast. The leg went down, and there was the flurry of an outspread shirt, sleeves without hands sticking up in air like an X-shaped scarecrow. A muffled voice said to someone, presumably in a room beyond, “Bring a little chloroform along, in case we have trouble with her in the car.”

I smoothed the door closed again, stealthily as I had dislodged it. Its silent docility of hinge and latch had been my only salvation.

“Like a rat in a trap,” kept beating through my brain; “like a rat in a trap.”

There was a telephone in the room I was in. As I widened the bath door to re-enter, light fanned out, caught it for me, pinned it against the wall like a beetle, licorice-black, glistening black.

How could I hope to use it undetected, with just a flimsy door between me and him? The first word out of my mouth would resound in the magnifying silence in here.

I crushed myself against the wall, as if trying to smother it with my entire body. Such a loud clatter the release of the hook gave. Sh-h! The police? I didn't know; I wasn't sure of whom I was calling until I already held it cupped to my lips, like a sort of chalice of salvation. I only knew I needed help, wanted it fast, in the worst way.

I thought she'd never get on, answer the signal, and I daren't touch that hook again.

And then, when she had, suddenly it seemed to come by itself; it was my heart speaking out in its fright to the only one it remembered.

10

Butterfield 9–8019
Again (and hurry, operator, hurry!)

A
SLEEPY VOICE GOT ON
,
ONE OF THE SERVANTS
.

He couldn't hear me, I was so strangled with caution. Oh, the fool, he was killing me! I had to do it all over again.

“Quick—Ladd! Only Ladd, not you! Only Ladd will do! Don't stand there——”

“I know, miss, but it's after three o'clock. If you'll only give me an idea of who you are I'll see whether——”

“Tell him Alberta. This is an emergency. Tell him to come quickly to the phone if he loves me. If he ever loved me.”

I didn't know what I was saying any more. Already some of my life had gone by, and nobody could bring it back.

If he loved me; if he'd ever loved me. Oh, he must have, all right, to come so fast. I could hear the floundering rush of unshod feet and something go over, like a chair that had been in the way. I could hear the fright in his voice, needling sleep to pieces.

“What is it? Where are you? What's happened?”

And like the squeaking of a trapped little mouse in her hole, “Sh! Listen carefully. I have only a minute. I'm in an apartment on Central Park West. They're going to do something to me. Some men. They're taking me out of here in just a minute. Ladd, find some way of helping me. I have only you to turn to——”