The bride wore black Read online

  The Bride Wore Black

  Cornell Woolrich

  Copyright © 1940 by Cornell Woolrich

  Copyright renewed 1968 by the Estate of Cornell Woolrich

  To Chula

  And Remington Portable No. NC69411

  In unequal parts.

  For to kill is the great law set by nature in

  the heart of existence! There is nothing more

  beautiful and honorable than killing!

  — de Maupassant

  Part One

  BLISS

  Blue moon, you saw me standing alone,

  Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.

  Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for…

  — Rodgers and Hart

  THE WOMAN

  “JULIE, MY JULIE.” IT followed the woman down the four flights of the stairwell. It was the softest whisper, the strongest claim, that human lips can utter. It did not make her falter, lose a step. Her face was white when she came out into the daylight, that was all.

  The girl waiting by the valise at the street entrance turned and looked at her almost incredulously as she joined her, as though wondering where she had found the fortitude to go through with it. The woman seemed to read her thoughts; she answered the unspoken question, “it was just as hard for me to say goodbye as for them, only I was used to it, they weren’t. I had so many long nights in which to steel myself. They only went through it once; I’ve had to go through it a thousand times.” And without any change of tone, she went on, “I’d better take a taxi. There’s one down there.”

  The girl looked at her questioningly as it drew up.

  “Yes, you can see me off if you want. To the Grand Central Station, driver.”

  She didn’t look back at the house, at the street they were leaving. She didn’t look out at the many other well-remembered streets that followed, that in their aggregate stood for her city, the place where she had always lived.

  They had to wait a moment at the ticket window; there

  was somebody else before them. The girl stood helplessly by at her elbow. “Where are you going?”

  “I don^t even know, even at this very moment. I haven’t thought about it until now.” She opened her handbag, separated the small roll of currency it contained into two unequal parts; retained the smaller in her hand. She moved up before the window, thrust it in.

  “How far will this take me, at day-coach rates?”

  “Chicago—with ninety cents change.”

  “Then give me a one-way ticket.” She turned to the girl beside her. “Now you can go back and tell them that much, at least.”

  “I won’t if you don’t want me to, Julie.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What difference does the name of a place make when you’re gone beyond recall?”

  They sat for a while in the waiting room. Then presently they went below to the lower track level, stood for a moment by the coach doorway.

  “Well kiss, as former childhood friends should.” Their lips met briefly. “There.”

  “Julie, what can I say to you?”

  “Just ‘goodbye.’ What else is there to say to anyone ever—in this life?”

  “Julie, I only hope I see you someday soon.”

  “You never will again.”

  The station platform fell behind. The train swept through the long tunnel. Then it emerged into daylight again, to ride an elevated trestle flush with the upper stories of tenements, while the crosswise streets ticked by like picket openings in a fence.

  It started to slow again, almost before it had got fully under way. “Twanny-fith Street,” droned a conductor into the car. The woman who had gone away forever seized her valise, stood up and walked down the aisle as though this were the end of the trip instead of the beginning.

  She was standing in the vestibule, in readiness, when it drew up. She got off, walked along the platform to the exit, down the stairs to street level. She bought a paper at the waiting-room newsstand, sat down on one of the benches, opened the paper toward the back, to the classified ads. She furled it to a convenient width, traced a finger down the column under the heading Furnished Rooms.

  The finger stopped almost at random, without much regard for the details offered by what it rested on. She dug her nail into the spongy paper, marking it. She tucked the newspaper under one arm, picked up her valise once more, walked outside to a taxi. “Take me to this address, here,” she said, and showed him the paper.

  The landlady at the furnished rooming house stood back, waiting for her verdict, by the open room door.

  The woman turned around. “Yes, this will do very nicely. Hi give you the amount for the first two weeks now.”

  The landlady counted it, began to scribble a receipt. “What name, please?” she asked, looking up.

  The woman’s eyes flicked past her own valise with the “J.B.” once initialed in gilt still dimly visible midway between the two latches. “Josephine Bailey.”

  “Here’s your receipt. Miss Bailey. Now I hope you’re comfortable. The bathroom’s just two doors down the hall on your—”

  “Thank you, thank you, I’ll find out.” She closed the door, locked it on the inside. She took off her hat and coat, opened her valise, so recently packed for a trip of fifty blocks—or a lifetime.

  There was a small rust-flaked tin medicine cabinet tacked up above the washbowl. She went over to it and opened it, rising on her toes as though in search of something. On the topmost shelf, as she had half hoped, there was a rusted razor blade, left behind by some long-forgotten masculine roomer.

  She went back to the valise with it, cut a little oblong around the initials on the lid, peeled off the top layer of the papier-mache, thus removing them bodily. Then she prodded through the contents of the receptacle, gashing at the stitching of an undergarment, a night robe, a blouse; removing those same two letters that had once stood for her wherever they were to be found.

  Her predecessor obliterated, she threw the razor blade into the wastebasket, fastidiously wiped the tips of her fingers.

  She found the picture of a man in the flap under the lid of the valise. She took it out and held it before her eyes, gazing at it for a long time. Just a young man, nothing wonderful about him: Not so strikingly handsome; just eyes and mouth and nose as anyone has. She looked at it a long time.

  Then she found a folder of matches in her handbag and took the picture over to the washbasin. She touched a lighted match to one comer of it and held it until there was nothing to hold anymore.

  “Goodbye,” she breathed low.

  She ran a spurt of water down through the basin and went back to the valise. All that was left now, in the flap under the lid, was a scrap of paper with a penciled name on it. It had taken a long time to get it. The woman looked further, took out four similar scraps.

  She brought them all out. She didn’t bum them right away. She played around with them first, as if in idle disinterest. She put them all down on the dresser top, blank sides up. Then she milled them around under her rotating fingertips. Then she picked one up, glanced briefly at the underside of it. Then she gathered them all together once more, burned all five of them alike over the washbowl.

  Then she moved over toward the window, stood there looking out, a hand poised at each extremity of the slablike sill, gripping it. She seemed to lean toward the city visible outside, like something imminent, about to happen to it.

  BLISS

  THE CAB DREW UP short at the entrance of Bliss’s apartment house and threw him forward a little on the seat. The liquor in his stomach sloshed around with the jolt. Not because there was so much in him but because it was so recently absorbed.

  He got out, and the top of the
door frame knocked his hat askew. He straightened it, fumbled for change, dropped a dime to the sidewalk. He wasn’t helplessly drunk; he never got that way. He knew everything that was said to him and everything he was saying, and he felt just right. Not too little, not too much. And then there was always the thought of Marge—it looked like he was getting someplace there. You didn’t want to drown out a thought like that in liquor.

  Charlie, on night door duty, came out behind him while he was paying the driver. Charlie was just a little behind time with his reception ritual, because he’d stayed behind on his bench in the foyer to finish the last paragraph of a sports writeup in a tabloid before coming out. But it was two-thirty in the morning, after all, and no one’s perfect.

  Bliss turned and said, “‘Lo, Charlie.”

  Charlie answered, “Morning, Mr. Bliss.” He held the entrance door open for him, and Bliss went inside. Charlie followed, his duties more or less satisfactorily per-

  formed. He yawned, and then Bliss caught it from him, without having seen him do it, and yawned, too—a fact that would have interested a metaphysician.

  There was a mirror panel on one side of the lobby, and Bliss stepped up, took one of his usual going-in looks at himself. There were two kinds. The “boy-I-feel-swell, I-wonder-what’s-up-tonight” look. That was the going-out look. Then there was the “God-I-feel-terrible, be-glad-to-get-to-bed” look. That was the coming-back look.

  Bliss saw a man of twenty-seven with close-cropped sandy hair, looking back at him. So close-cropped it looked silvery at the sides. Brown eyes, spare figure, good height without being too tall about it. A man who knew all about him—Bliss. Not handsome, but then who wanted to be handsome? Even Marge Elliott didn’t care if he was handsome or not. “As long,” as she had put it, “as you’re just Ken.”

  He sighed, snapped his thumbnail at the bedraggled white flower that still clung to his lapel button-hole, and it flew to pieces.

  Bliss took out a crumpled package of cigarettes, helped himself to one, scanned the neat hole in the upper right-hand corner. He saw that there was one left, offered it to Charlie. “Greater love hath no man,” he remarked.

  Charlie took it, perhaps figuring there wasn’t likely to be anyone else coming in after this.

  Charlie was big and roundish at the middle. He wasn’t so good at polishing all the way down toward the bottom of the brass stanchions that supported the door canopy, but the middle and upper parts always shone like jewels, and he could handle twice his weight in disorderly drunks. He’d been night doorman in the building ever since Bliss had first moved into it. Bliss liked him. Charlie liked Bliss, too. Bliss gave him two bucks on Christmas and spread another two throughout the year in four-bit pieces. But that wasn’t the reason; Charlie just liked him.

  Bliss lit the two of them up. Then he turned and started up the two shallow steps to the self-service elevator. Charlie said, “Oh, I nearly forgot, Mr. Bliss. There was a young lady around to see you tonight.”

  “Yeah? What name’d she leave?” Bliss answered indifferently. It hadn’t been Marge, so it really didn’t matter much—anymore. He stopped and turned his face only a quarter of the way toward the answer.

  “None,” said Charlie. “I couldn’t get her to leave any. I asked her two or three times, but—” he shrugged “—she didn’t seem to want to.”

  “All right,” said Bliss. And it was all right.

  “She seemed to want to go upstairs and wait for you in the apartment,” Charlie added.

  “Oh, no, don’t ever do that,” Bliss said briskly. “Those days are over.”

  “I know. No, I wouldn’t, Mr. Bliss, don’t ever worry …” Charlie said with impressive sincerity. Then he added with a somewhat reticent shake of his head, “She sure wanted to bad, though.”

  Something about the way he said it aroused Bliss’s curiosity. “Whaddya mean?” He dropped one foot down a step to the lower level again, turned head and shoulders more fully toward Charlie.

  “Well, she was standing here with me, a little to one side, over there by the mirror, after I’d already rung your announcer without getting any answer, and she said, ‘Well, could I go up and wait?’ I said, ‘Well, I dunno. Miss. I’m not supposed to…’ You know, trying to let her down easy. And then she opened this bag, this evening pockybook she was holding on to, and sort of hunted around down in it like she was looking for a lipstick. And right there on top of all her things there was this

  hundred-dollar bill staring me in the face. Now y’may not want to believe me, Mr. Bliss, but I saw it with my own eyes—”

  Bliss chuckled with good-natured derision. “And you think she was trying to offer you that to let her up, is that it? G’wan, Charlie.” He kicked up one elbow scoffingly.

  Nothing could lessen Charlie’s pained, round-eyed earnestness. “I know she was for a fact, Mr. Bliss, y’couldn’t miss it, the way she done it. She left the top of the bag wide open and went around under it with her fingers, so’s to be sure not to disturb it. It was spread out flat, see, on top of everything else. Then she looked from it to me, looked me square in the eye—even holding the bag a little ways out from her. Not right at me, y’under-stand, but just a little ways out, so I’d catch on what she meant. Listen, I been in this business long enough. I know all the signs. I could tell.”

  Bliss scratched the corner of his mouth reflectively with the cutting edge of one thumbnail, as if feeling to see if it was still there. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a ten spot, Charlie?”

  Charlie’s voice became almost falsetto in its aggrieved insistence. “Mr. Bliss, I seen the two O’s in both upper comers of it!”

  Bliss worried his lip between the edge of his teeth, pinching it in. “Well, I’ll be damned!” He turned full body toward Charlie at last, as though intending to talk until this thing had been thrashed out to his satisfaction.

  Charlie seemed to understand the need for further colloquy between the two of them. He said, “Be right with you, Mr. Bliss,” as the sound of another cab arriving outside reached them. He went out, did his devoir with the doors, returned in the wake of a man and woman in evening garb who must have been very spruce at eight-thirty. All the starch was out of them now.

  They nodded slightly to Bliss in passing, and he

  nodded slightly back to them, with all the awful frigidity of metropolitan neighbors. They stepped into the car and went up.

  As soon as the glass porthole in the elevator panel had blacked out, Charlie and he resumed where they had left off. “Well, what’d she look like? Was she anyone you ever saw before? You know most of the crowd I used to have around to see me pretty well.”

  “Yes, I do,” Charlie admitted. “And I can’t place her. I’m sure I never seen her before, Mr. Bliss, all I can tell you is she was some looker. Was she some looker!”

  “All right, she was some looker,” agreed Bliss, “but like what?”

  “Well, she was blond.” Charlie brought his hands into play as the artist in him came to the fore. He outhned— presumably—masses of luxuriant hair. “But this real blond, y’know this real yella blond? Not this phony, washed-out, silvery kind they make it. This real blond.”

  “This real blond,” Bliss confirmed patiently.

  “y—and blue eyes; y’know, the kind that are always laughing, even when they’re not? And about this high—her chin came up to this second chevron here, on me sleeve, see? And, er, not too fat, but y’wouldn’t call her skinny, either; just a right armful—”

  Bliss was eying the far side of the foyer ceiling as the description unfolded. “No,” he kept saying, “no,” as if going over the records to himself. “The closest I can come to it is Helen Raymond, but—”

  “No, I, ‘member Miss Raymond,” Charlie said firmly. “It wasn’t her; I got a cab for her many a time.” Then he said, “Anyway, y’know how I’m pretty sure you don’t know her? Because she didn’t know you herself.”

  “What?” said Bliss, “Then what the hell did sh
e want coming around asking for me, trying to get into my place?”

  Charlie was still a lap behind him in the circles they

  seemed to be making. “She didn’t know you worth a damn,” he repeated with heavy emphasis. “I tried her out, on the way up—”

  “Oh, so then you were going to let her up. That must have been a hundred, after all.”

  Charlie cleared his throat deprecatingly, realizing he had made a faux pas. “No, Mr. Bliss, no,” he protested soulfully. “Now, you know me better than that; I wasn’t. But 1 did start up on the car with her, acting like I was going to. I thought maybe that’d be the quickest way of getting rid of her, pretend like I was going to and then at the last minute—”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Bliss dryly.

  “Well, we started up in the car together, to the fourth. And on the way I remembered that robbery we had here in the building last year, y’know, and I figured I better not take any chances. So I started to reel her out a fake description of you, just the opposite of your real one, to try her out. I said, ‘He’s red-headed, ain’t he, and pretty tall, just a little bit under six feet? I’m kind of new on the job here. I wanna make sure I got him placed right, there are so many tenants in the building.’ She fell for it like a ton of bricks. ‘Yes, of course, ‘she said, ‘that’s him.’ Kind of quickly, to keep me from catching on that was the first time she heard what you looked like herself.”

  “Well, I’ll be a—” Bliss said. He went ahead and said what it was he would be.

  “So, of course, that was enough for me,” Charlie assured him virtuously. “That finished it. When I heard that I said to myself, ‘Nothing doing. Not on my shift, y’don’t!’ But I didn’t say anything to her, because—well, she was dressed pretty swell and all that, not the kind it pays to get tough with. So I let her down easy, tried the wrong key to your door and when it wouldn’t work pretended I didn’t have no other and couldn’t let her in. We went downstairs again, and she just kind of