The bride wore black Read online

  “There it is, right there! It’s caught on that little round white thing…” She plunged one arm down, probing into space. A moment later she had straightened again with a frustrated smile. “It’s just an inch away from my fingers. Maybe you’d have better luck; you probably have a longer reach.”

  He got up on the coping, squatting on both heels. He cupped one hand to its inner edge, as a brake to keep from going over too far. His head turned away from her, searching for it.

  She stepped forward behind him, palms out-turned as if in sanctimonious negation, then recoiled again as quickly. The slight impact forced a hissing breath from her, a sound that was explanation, malediction and expiation all in one.

  “Mrs. Nick Killeen!”

  He must have heard it. It must have been a spark in his darkening mind for a moment that went out as he went out.

  The ledge was empty. She and the night had it to

  themselves. Through the terrace windows, around the turn, the radio was pulsing to a rumba and voices were laughing. One, louder than the others, exclaimed, “Keep it up, you’ve got it now!”

  Marjorie accosted her on her way in a moment later. “I’m looking for my fiance.” She used the word with proud possessiveness, touching her ring with unconscious ostentation as she did so. ‘Is he out there, do you know?”

  The girl in black smiled courteously. “He was, the last time I saw him.” She moved on down the long room, briskly yet not too hurriedly, drawing more than one pair of admiring masculine eyes after her as she went.

  The maid and butler were no longer on duty in the cloakroom adjoining the front door, came back only as they were summoned. Just as the front door was closing unobtrusively, without their having been disturbed, the house telephone connected with the downstairs entrance began to ring. It went on unanswered for a few moments.

  Marjorie came inside again from the terrace, remarking to those nearest her, “That’s strange. He doesn’t seem to be out there.”

  Her mother, who had finally been compelled to attend to the neglected telephone in person, screamed harrowingly from somewhere out near the entrance, just once. The party had come to an end.

  POSTMORTEM ON BLISS

  LEW WANGER LEFT THE cab with its door teetering open and elbowed his way through the small knot of muted onlookers who had collected about it. “What is it?” he asked the cop, showing him something from a vest pocket.

  “Cash in.” The patrolman pointed almost vertically. “From up there to down here.”

  Somebody’s midnight edition of tomorrow morning’s paper had been requisitioned, expanded with its component leaves spread end to end and formed into a mound along the ground. One foot, in a patent-leather evening oxford, stuck out at one corner.

  “I understand they’re having a blowout up there. Probably had a drink too many, leaned too far over and lost his balance.” He tipped a section of the news sheet back, for Wanger’s benefit.

  One of the spectators, who hadn’t been expecting this and was standing too close, turned his head aside, cupped a precautionary hand to his mouth and backed out in a hurry.

  “Well, what’d y’expect, violets?” the cop called after him antagonistically.

  Wanger squatted down on his heels and began to knead at a rigidly contracted fist that was showing at the upper right-hand corner of the mound. He finally extracted what looked like a swirl of frozen black smoke.

  “Dame’s handkerchief,” supplied the cop.

  “Scarf,” corrected Wanger. “Too big for a handkerchief.”

  He looked down again at the shrouded body.

  “I know him by sight,” the night doorman of the building supplied. “I think they were announcing his engagement to their daughter tonight, up at the Elliotts’. That’s the penthouse.”

  “Well, I’d better get up there and get it over with,” Wanger sighed. “Just routine; probably won’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes at the most.”

  At daybreak he was still hammering at the disheveled, exhausted guests ranged before him. “And do you mean to say there’s not one of you here even knew this girl’s name or had never seen her before tonight?” All heads kept shaking dully.

  “Didn’t anyone ask her name? What kind of people are you, anyway?”

  “We all did at one time or another,” a dejected man said. “She wouldn’t give it. Passed it off each time with some crack like ‘What’s in a name?”

  “Okay, then she was a gate-crasher, pure and simple. Now what I want to find out is why, what her motive was.” Marjorie’s mother came back into the room at this point, and he turned to her. “How about it, any valuables missing, anything stolen from the apartment?”

  “No,” she sobbed, “not a thing’s been touched. I just got through checking up.”

  “Then robbery wasn’t the motive for the intrusion. She seems to have avoided and discouraged all the rest of you young fellows all evening long, according to what you say; singled Bliss out as soon as there was a chance of getting him alone. Yet according to what you say—” he turned to Corey “—he didn’t seem to recognize her from the description passed on to him by the doorman at his own flat. And when he arrived here and finally saw her, he acted as though she was a perfect stranger to him. That is, assuming it was the same girl.

  “That’s about all there is to be done up here for the present. Has anyone anything to add to this description you’ve given me of her?”

  No one had; she had been seen by so many people, it was exhaustive in itself. As the guests filed mournfully out one by one, giving their names and addresses in case they should be wanted for further questioning, Corey edged up to Wanger. He was full of drink and cold sober at the same time. “I was his best friend,” he said huskily, “How do you see it? What do you figure it for?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Wanger answered as he prepared to leave, “not that you’re entitled to be taken into my confidence any more than anyone else. There isn’t anything to show that it wasn’t an accident—but one thing. The fact that she cleared out of here so fast right after it happened, instead of staying to face the music like all the rest of you. Another very incriminating piece of behavior is that when she met Miss Elliott in the doorway and the latter asked her if she’d seen him, she calmly answered that he was out there, instead of screaming blue murder that he’d just gone over, which was the normal thing to do. There’s always a possibility, of course, that he didn’t go over until after she’d already left him and gone inside. But what argues against that is that he took that black scarf of hers down with him. That makes it look very much as though she was still with him at the actual instant it happened. Yet she could have dropped it or even given it to him to hold for her, then gone in.

  “You see, the thing is fifty-fifty so far; everything you can bring to bear on one side balances nicely with something you can bring to bear on the other. What’ll finally tip the scales one way or the other, as far as I’m concerned, is her ultimate behavior. If she comes forward within a day or two to identify or clear herself, as soon as

  she hears we’re looking for her, the chances are itni Uim out to have been an accident and she ran out simply to escape the notoriety, knowing she had no right up here. If she remains hidden and we have to go out hunting for her, I think we can say murder and not be very far from right.”

  He pocketed the description and other data he’d taken down. “We’ll get her, either way, don’t worry.”

  But they didn’t.

  Evening accessories department, Bonwit Teller department store, fifteen days later:

  “Yes, this is our twelve-dollar wimple. The only place it could have been purchased is here; it’s a special with us.”

  “All right, now call your sales staff in here. I want to find out if any of them remembers selling one to a woman whose description follows…”

  And when they’d assembled and he’d repeated it three times over, a mousy little person with glasses stepped forward. “I—I rememb
er selling one of these numbers in black, to a beautiful girl answering that description, a little over two weeks ago.”

  “Good! Dig up the sales slip. I want the address it was sent to.”

  Fifteen minutes later: “The customer paid cash and took it with her; no name or address was given.”

  “Is that the customary way you make these sales?”

  “No, they’re a luxury item; they’re usually delivered. In this case it was at the customer’s special request that she took it right along with her, I remember that.”

  Wanger (under his breath): “To cover her tracks.”

  Wanger’s report to his superior, three weeks later:

  “… And not a trace of her since. Not a sign to show who she was, where she came from, where she went. Nor why she did it—if she did it. I’ve investigated Bliss’s past exhaustively, checked back almost to the first girl he ever kissed, and she doesn’t appear anywhere in it. The testimony of the doorman at his flat, and of his friend Corey, seems to show that he did not know this girl, whoever she was. Yet she deliberately discouraged and shunned everyone else at this party, until she had maneuvered to get him alone out on that terrace. So mistaken identity won’t jibe, either.

  “In short, the only indication it was not an accident is the strange behavior of this mystery woman and her subsequent disappearance and refusal to come forward and clear up the matter. On the other hand, other than the above, there is no positive indication it was murder, either.”

  Wanger’s record on Ken Bliss:

  Met death in fall from seventeenth-floor terrace, 4:30 A.M., May 20. Last seen with woman, about twenty-six, fair skin, yellow hair, blue eyes, five feet five inches. Identity unknown. Wanted for questioning.

  Motive: Uncertain if crime was committed, but, if so, probably passional or jealousy. No record of former relationship.

  Witnesses: None.

  Evidence: Black evening scarf, purchased Bonwit Teller’s, May 19.

  Case Unsolved.

  Part Two

  MITCHELL

  He starts as one who, hearing a deer’s tread,

  Beholds a panther stealing forth instead.

  — de Maupassant

  THE WOMAN

  MIRIAM—LAST NAME LONG forgotten within the confines of the Helena Hotel—was a short pugnacious person the color of old leather. She had three things she clung to tenaciously; her British citizenship— which had been passively acquired through the accident of birth on the island of Jamaica; a pair of gold-coin earrings; and her “system” of doing rooms. No one had ever made the slightest attempt to interfere with the first two, and the few abortive efforts at tampering with the latter had met with resounding failure.

  Numerical progression of the rooms had nothing to do with it. Nor had their location along the dim, creaky, varileveled corridors. In fact, it was a sort of mystic algebra known only to the innermost workings of her mind. No one could disturb it—not with impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long malevolent tirade, down endless reaches of labyrinthine corridor, that went on—or seemed to—for hours afterward, long after the original cause of it had slunk away, frustrated.

  “The fo’teen come after the seventeen. It got to wait tell I finish the seventeen. I ain’t never yet do fo’teen first.”

  Nor did this precedence have anything to do with gratuities, which were in any case an almost nonexistent factor at the Helena. Habit, perhaps, would be the closest guess to what after all was a purely emotional state of mind on Miriam’s part.

  The wheel of the “system” having finally, at the appointed hour and fraction thereof of the day, swung around to “the nineteen,” Miriam advanced down a particularly moldering length of corridor far toward the back, tin bucket in one hand, long pole in the other, at the working end of which could still be detected stray wisps of fibrous fuzz.

  She halted before “the nineteen,” reversed her key and sounded it twice against the woodwork. This was a mere formality, since she would have been as highly outraged at finding “the nineteen” in as at having her “system” interfered with. “The nineteen” had never been in at this hour yet. “The nineteen” had no right to be in at this hour.

  Nor was the formality of the key tap due to scrupulous observance of hotel regulations, either. It was reflex action. She could no longer enter a door without doing it. Inevitably, on returning home to her own furnished room at the end of the day, she gave that same triphammer tap on the panel before inserting her own private key into the lock.

  She threw open the door challengingly and advanced into a small and singularly unprepossessing room. The pattern of the carpet had been ground into oblivion. A sort of gray green fungus was all that now covered the floorboards. A whitewashed-brick wall blocked the eye a few feet outside the window. Through this a shaft of sunlight struggled downward at an angle that was enough to break its back. The room would have been better off without it, if only to preserve an illusion of cleanliness, for it was fuming like a Seidlitz powder with masses of dust particles. .

  On the wall above the bed was ranged an array of girls’ photographs of varying sizes, all mounted, framed and glassed over. Miriam did not even deign to raise her eyes to these. Most of them had been up for years. The one “nineteen” was going with now would never get up there, she opined, because she couldn’t afford to have a picture taken and he couldn’t afford to have it mounted, framed and glassed over. And there wasn’t any more room left on that side, anyway. He was too old now to begin a new side. And if he wasn’t, he ought to be. Which disposed of that matter.

  The bed made, with frenziedly swirling effects on the dust motes in the sunbeam, Miriam narrowed the room door considerably but without closing it altogether. There was nothing furtive about the way she did this; there was rather an injured defiance. She even put this into words, aloud, it was felt so keenly. “Hidin’ it all the time. Always hidin’ it. Who he think going to take it anyway? Who he think want it?”

  She gave her mouth a preparatory drying—or perhaps it was a whetting—along the back of her hand. She opened the closet door, stooped, disrupted a cairn of soiled shirts on the floor in one corner of it, brought up a bottle of gin like someone lifting a rabbit out of a hole.

  She displayed no satisfaction at the sight of it, only moral indignation. “Who he think come in here, anyway, but me? He know ain’t nobody come in here but me! Suspicionin’ people that way!”

  She tilted the bottle, lowered it again. Then she came out with it, advanced to the washbasin, turned on the cold-water tap. With a dexterity that bespoke long practice she switched the open bottle mouth under it and out again, just enough to restore the contents to their former level, no more. This was not so difficult as it appeared. There were mistrustful pencil gauge marks plainly visible on two of the four corners of the frosted glass to guide her. She corrected a slight discrepancy she had been guilty of in favor of the bottle, by means of her mouth.

  She was heaving with a sense almost of persecution by now. “Or miser! Stingy qV thing!” she glowered with Antillean passion and a slight accompanying tinkle from the gold-coin earrings. “One thing I don’t like is people mistrustin’ me!”

  She returned the bottle to its bourn, closed the closet, restored the room door to its former width and entered upon the second stage of her duties, which consisted in thrusting the staff with the errant fuzz at random places along the base of the walls, like someone spearing salmon from a rock in midstream.

  It was while she was engaged in this slightly puzzling maneuver that she became aware of being observed. She turned her head and there was a lady standing out there in the hallway, looking through the open doorway. Miriam knew at a single glance that she did not live in the hotel, and she rose accordingly in Miriam’s esteem. Her low regard for and truculence toward those who did was matched only by her high regard for and willingness to be affable to those who didn’t. A blanket order, both way.

  “Yes, ma’am?” she said with cordial intere
st. “You lookin’ for Mist’ Mitchell?”

  The lady was so friendly and so soft-spoken. “No,” she smiled. “I just happened to drop in to see a friend of mine, and she’s not in. I was on my way back to the elevator, and I’m afraid I became a little confused…”

  Miriam rested on her mop handle like a Venetian gondolier at ease and hoped the lady wouldn’t go right away.

  She didn’t. She advanced an unnoticeable step nearer the threshold but still remained well outside the confines of the room proper. She gave the impression of an overpowering interest in Miriam and her conversation.

  Miriam visibly preened herself standing there in the sulfurous sun shaft, wriggled almost ecstatically around the mop pole.

  “You know,” the lady confided with an enchanting woman-to-woman intimacy of manner, “I always think you can tell so much about a person just by looking at the room they live in.”

  “Yes, indeed, you sho’ right about that,” Miriam agreed heartily.

  “Just take this one here—as long as you happen to be in it tidying it up and I happen to be on my way past the door. Now, I don’t know a thing about the person living in it—”

  “Mist’ Mitchell?” prompted Miriam, almost mesmerically engrossed by now. Her chin had come to rest on the rounded point of the mop handle.

  The lady made a careless gesture of one hand. “Mitchell or whatever the name may be—I don’t know him and I’ve never seen him. But just let me tell you what his room shows me—and you correct me if I’m wrong.”