The bride wore black Read online

  She eyed it as he set it down again half-drained. “This isn’t our first meeting,” she remarked thoughtfully.

  “No, last night at the theater—”

  “Not there, either. You saw me once before. On the steps of a church. Do you remember?”

  “On the steps of a church?” His head lolled idiotically; he straightened it with an effort. “What were you doing there?”

  “Getting married. Now do you remember?”

  Absently, absorbed in what she was saying, he finished what was in his glass. “Was I at the wedding?”

  “Ah, yes, you were at the wedding—very much so.” She got up abruptly, snapped the switch of the midget radio. “We’ll have a little music at this point.”

  A gutteral, malevolent trombone seemed to snarl into the air about them. She began to pivot about him, turning faster and faster, skirt expanding about her knees.

  Nobody’s sweetheart now.

  And it all seems wrong somehow —

  He backed his hand to his forehead. “I can’t see you so clearly—what’s happening—are the lights flickering?”

  Faster and faster went the solo dance, the dance of triumph and obsequy. “The lights are still, it’s you that is flickering.”

  His glass fell, crashed on the floor. He started to writhe, clutch at himself. “My chest—it’s being torn apart^ Get help, a doctor—”

  “No doctor could reach here in time.” She was like a spinning top now, seeming to recede down the long vista of the walls. His dimming eyes could see her as a blur of brightness; then, like white metal cooling, little by little she seemed to go out forever in the dark.

  He was on the floor now at her feet, moaning out along the carpet in a foaming expiration: “… only wanted to make you happy…”

  From far away a voice whispered mockingly, “You have … you have…” Then trailed off into silence.

  * * *

  She BACKED THE ROOM DOOR after her, about to close it inextricably into the frame, then froze to statuesque stillness, holding it ajar that fraction of an inch that meant reentry could be gained at her volition.

  They looked at each other, a foot apart. Maybelle was blond and buxom and blowsy, and holding a cylinder of some sort done up untidily in brown paper. The woman

  in the velvet cape, flung around her in a sort of jaunty defiance that somehow suggested a toreador, eyed her calculatingly, watchfully.

  The other spoke first, pouting with overreddened, fullblown lips. “I brought this over to Mitch. If he doesn’t want to see me, he doesn’t have to; I understand now. But tell him—”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell him I said he should drink it while it’s still hot.”

  The woman in the cape glanced over her shoulder at the hairbreadth crack of door, too narrow to permit vision. “They saw you come in just now, downstairs?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “They saw you carrying that soup?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  How easy to have inveigled her into the room. She had moved the screen out and around his body, concealing it, when the first warning knock at the door had come. How easy, in the moment or two before this stupid heifer discovered him, to have silenced her forever, with the same glass he had just drunk from. Or to have left her there, involved, too stupid ever to clear herself.

  She turned back to her. The door clicked definitely shut behind her. “Get down there where you come from, get away from here fast.” It wasn’t said in menace, but in whispered warning.

  Maybelle just opened China-blue eyes and stared at her stupidly.

  “Quick! Every minute that you spend up here alone will count against you. Be sure you take that container down with you again, unopened. Let them know you couldn’t get in—gather people around you, protect yourself!” She gave the slow-thinking lummox a push that started her involuntarily down the corridor toward the front of the building. From the turn at the end of it the

  blonde looked back dazedly. “But wha-what’s wrong? What happened?”

  “Your friend is dead in there and I killed him. I’m only trying to save you from becoming involved yourself, you fool. I have nothing against—other women.”

  But Maybelle hadn’t waited to hear the last. She emitted a series of noises like a nail scratching glass, fled from view with a great surging wallow.

  The woman in the velvet cape moved swiftly, but with a neat economy of movement that robbed her going of all semblance of flight, to the hinged service door at the other end of the corridor, giving onto the unguarded back stairs.

  POSTMORTEM ON MITCHELL

  WANGER’S superior DIDN’T put him on it until nearly a week after it had happened. A man named Cleary had been working on it in the meantime and getting exactly nowhere.

  “Say, listen, Wanger, there’s a peculiar case over at the Helena Hotel. I’ve just been reading the reports sent in on it, and it occurred to me it has certain features in common with that Bliss incident—remember that, six months or so ago? At first glance they’re not at all alike. There’s no doubt about this one, it’s an out-and-out murder. But what gave me the notion was they both feature a woman who seems to have gone up in smoke immediately afterward, for all the trace we’ve ever been able to find of her. Also a complete lack of discoverable motive. Neither of which is exactly usual in our line. That’s why I thought it’d be a good idea to have Cleary run through it for you, give you his findings; you talk to some of the people he’s lined up. You see, you’re familiar with that Bliss affair, he’s not; you’re in a better position to judge. If you think you detect any connection, no matter how slight, let me know, I’ll assign you to it full-time.”

  Cleary said, “Here’s what I’ve gotten so far, after seven days on it. It all stacks up very nicely, but it has no meaning. It’s as irrational as the act of a feminine homicidal maniac, but I have definite proof that she is nothing of the sort, as you’ll be able to judge for yourself later, when you hear it. Now, he died from a pinch or two of cyanide potassium introduced into a glass of arak—”

  “Yes, I read that in the examiner’s report.” “Here are transcriptions of the witnesses’ statements. You can read them over later; I’ll give you the gist of them now, as I go along. First of all, I found a red theater-ticket stub—you know, the remainder that’s returned to the customer to hold after it’s chopped at the door—in the lining of one of his pockets. I traced it back and here’s the story: two nights before his death a very beautiful red-haired woman stepped up to the box office at the Elgin Theater and said she wanted to buy an entire loge outright. The ticket seller asked her what night she wanted it for, and she said that didn’t matter, any night. What did matter was that she wanted to be sure of getting the entire loge. That was unusual for two reasons: with most customers the date is the important thing; they take the best they can get on the particular date they want. Secondly, the number of seats didn’t seem to concern her, either; she didn’t ask whether she was getting three, four or five. All she wanted was the entire loge for her own. He gave her the four seats for the first night they were available, which happened to be the very next night. Naturally the incident impressed him.

  “Two of them were never used. Mitchell was seen by the theater staff to show up alone on that particular night and turn in one ticket. The same woman who had originally bought them also showed up alone, but a considerable time later, long after the curtain had gone up.”

  “Only one person is in a position to state for a fact that she was the same woman who bought them,” Wanger warned him.

  “The ticket seller; and that’s his affidavit you have under your thumb there. He’d shuttered his box office ^ for the night and happened to be standing watching the ” show from the mezzanine stairs; she passed him on her way up—alone—and he recognized her beyond any possibility of doubt.

  “Now we come to the important part of the whole thing. I’ve questioned the usher on loge duty. What he tells me convinces me they were utter
strangers to each other. He paid particular attention to the act of seating her for several reasons. He has fewer people to seat than the orchestra or balcony ushers. She came in unusually late and so stood out. She was strikingly beautiful and came alone, which seemed to him to be unusual.

  “He watched closely, if not altogether intentionally, for the above reasons, as she settled herself in her seat. Neither one turned to greet the other. Neither one spoke or even nodded. He remained within earshot long enough to be sure of that. He’s positive; by everything he’s ever learned in all his years of theater ushering, that they were complete strangers.

  “And that cinches it, to my mind. If they hadn’t been, Mitchell would have waited for her down in the lobby instead of going up ahead. Any man would have, even the crudest.

  “It was only during the intermission that the usher noticed they’d begun to talk to each other. And then it was in that diffident way of two people who are just becoming acquainted.

  “In other words; it was a pickup.”

  “If they were strangers, how’d she get his ticket to him? She bought them, he showed up with one of them.”

  “Anonymously, through the mail. I found the envelope, also, in one of the pockets. The ticket was a vivid crimson. There’s a faint pinkish discoloration visible on the inside of the envelope; somebody with sweaty hands, either at the post office or downstairs at the hotel desk— or, maybe Mitchell himself—handled it, dampened the dye a little. This is it here.

  “She was only seen one more time after that. Then she vanished completely. I haven’t been able to get a line on her since then. The night of the murder she wasn’t seen entering or leaving the hotel. However, that isn’t quite as confounding as it sounds, because there’s a service stairs at the back that leads directly out into an alley without passing the lobby. The alley door works on a spring lock, can’t be opened from the outside, but it could very easily have been left ajar to admit her. These precautions must have been her own suggestion, since she evidently came prepared to kill Mitchell.

  “Then who was it saw her that one more time you just mentioned, after the theater episode?”

  “The girl he was keeping steady company with, a waitress named Maybelle Hodges. She called at the room within a few moments after the time established for his death by the medical examination. When she knocked on the door, this woman came out. She’d been in there.”

  “What did the woman say to her?”

  “She admitted she’d killed him, and advised the girl to go downstairs again, get away before she became involved herself.”

  Wanger felt his chin dubiously. “Do you think that statement’s trustworthy?”

  “Yes, because the girl’s description of the woman, both as to appearance and the clothes she was wearing, talhes completely with that given me by the theater staff, so you see she couldn’t very well have made the story up.

  And this brings up a point I mentioned before. She’s not a homicidal maniac by any means; she had a beautiful opportunity to kill the Hodges girl then and there. All she had to do was admit her to the room—there was a screen around his body. She had plenty of time. Instead she warned the girl off, for the girl’s own sake.

  “There’s the whole thing. More material than we need, in one way. But the keystone that would give it a meaning is missing; no motive.”

  “No conceivable motive, and they didn’t know each other, and she vanishes as completely as a streak of lightning after it’s struck once,” Wanger summed up, baffled. “Well, he sent me over here to see if I could make anything out of it. I’m only sure of one thing: this case strings along with the Bliss one; it’s an accurate copy.”

  Chambermaid, fourth floor, Helena Hotel:

  “I never seen her before, so I knew for a fact she didn’t live in the hotel. I thought maybe she was visitin’ somebody. She was just passin’ by the hall that day. This was about, um, two weeks before it happened. Maybe mo’. She stopped and looked in the open door while I’m cleanin’ his room, I said, ‘Yes’m, you lookin’ for Mr. Mitchell?’ She said, ‘No, but I always think you can learn so much about a pusson’s character and habits just by lookin’ at their rooms.’ She talk so polite and refine’ it’s a pleasure to hear her. She look at the girls’ pictures he have all over the wall and she say, ‘He likes women to be mysterious, I can tell by them. Not one is an honest everyday pitcher of how those girls really look. They all tryin’ to look like somethin’ else, for his sake. Bitin’ roses and starin’ through lace fans. If one if ‘em gave him her pitcher like she really was, he most likely wouldn’t put it up.”

  “That’s all. And then before I knowed it, she gone away again, and I never seen her no mo’ after that.”

  Clerk at Globe Liquor Store:

  “Yes, I remember selling this. A thing as unusual as arak we don’t sell more than a bottle a year. No, it was not her suggestion. I happened to come across it on the shelf and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get it off our hands, as long as she’d asked for something unusual and at the same time potent. She said she was making a present of it to a friend, and the more exotic it was the better pleased he would be. I’d already shown her vodka and aquavit. She decided on arak. She admitted she’d never sampled any of it herself. One funny thing: on her way out she gave me a peculiar smile and said, ‘I find myself doing so many things these days that I’ve never done before.’

  “No, not at all nervous. As a matter of fact she deliberately stood aside and told me to go ahead and wait on a man who wanted a bottle of rye in a hurry, while she was making up her mind. She said she wanted to take her time making a selection.”

  * * *

  Wanger’s SUPERIOR SAID a week later, “So you think the two cases are related in some way, do you?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, in just what way?”

  “Only in this way: the same unknown woman is involved in both.”

  “Oh, no, there’s where you’re wrong, it couldn’t possibly be,” his chief overrode him, semaphoring with both hands. “Ill admit I had some vague notion along those lines myself when I spoke to you last week. But that won’t stand up, man, it won’t wash at all! Since then I’ve

  had time to look over the composite description Cleary obtained of her and sent in. That knocks it completely on the head. Take the Bliss one out of the files a minute, bring it in here… Now just look at the two of them. Put them side by side a minute.

  Bliss file — Mitchell file

  yellow blond hair — red hair

  five feet five — five feet seven

  fresh complexion — sallow complexion

  blue eyes — gray blue eyes

  about twenty-six — about thirty-two

  speech shows education and refinement — talks with slight foreign accent

  There’s not even a similar modus operandi involved, or anything like it! One pushed a young broker’s clerk off a terrace. The other dropped cyanide into the drink of a seedy ne’er-do-well in a mangy hotel. As far as we know, the two men not only did not know the women who brought about their deaths but had never heard of each other. No, Wanger, I think it’s two entirely different cases—”

  “Linked by the same murderess,” Wanger insisted, unconvinced. “With these two diametrically opposite descriptions staring me in the face, I’ll grant you it’s like flying in the face of Providence to dispute. Just the same, all those physical differences don’t mean much. Just break them down a minute, and look how easy it is to get the smallest common denominator.

  “Blonde and redhead: any little chorus girl will tell you how transitory that distinction can be.

  “Five feet five and five seven: if one wore a pair of extra-high heels and one wore flat heels, that could still be the same girl.

  “Fresh and sallow complexions: a dusting of powder takes care of that.

  “The difference in eye coloring can be an optical illusion created by the application of eye shadow.

  “The seemi
ng difference in age is another variable, likewise dependent on externals such as costume and manner.

  “And what else is left? An accent? / can talk with an accent myself, if I feel like it.

  “A point to remember is that no single person who saw one of these women saw the other. We have a complete set of witnesses on each of them separately. We have no single witness on the two of them at one time. There’s no chance of getting a comparison. You say there’s no similarity in modus operandi, but there is in every way. It’s just the method of commission that was different; you’re letting that mislead you. Notice these ‘two’ unknown women involved. Both have a brilliant, almost uncanny faculty for disappearing immediately afterward. It amounts almost to genius. Both stalk their victims ahead of time, evidently trying to get a line on their background and habits. One appeared at Bliss’s flat while he was out, the other cased Mitchell’s room—also while he was out. If that isn’t modus operandi, what is? I tell you it’s the same woman in both cases.”

  “What’s her motive then?” his superior argued. “Not robbery. Mitchell was a month and a half behind ia his room rent. She bought out an entire loge at $3.30 a seat and threw two of the seats away just to be sure of getting to meet him under favorable circumstances. Revenge would be perfect, but—he didn’t know her and she didn’t know him. We not only can’t fit a motive to it, but we can’t even apply the explanation that usually goes with lack of motive. She’s not a homicidal maniac, either. She had a beautiful opportunity to kill the Hodges girl—and

  the Hodges girl is the juicy, beefy, lamebrain type that’s almost irresistible to a congenital murderer. Instead she passed it up, warned the girl off for the girl’s own sake.”

  “The motive lies back in the past, way back in the past,” Wanger insisted obdurately,