RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (10 page)

"Why do you persist in amending it as I first gave it?" she countered quite charmingly.

"We are going to ask you now if you care to correct or alter that statement."

"I do not," she said simply.

"You're fencing with us," Cameron told her politely. "I'm afraid your intellect is far superior to ours. I see what you just did there. Because I used the words 'do you care to,' you were answering me literally. 'No, you do not care to.'"

"I can only answer what you ask me," she said winningly. "If I am not literal, then how shall I be?"

"This is a serious matter, Mrs. Strickland."

She looked up into his eyes ruefully. "Extremely serious."

"We are not on the same basis we were when I first asked you the question. That is why I have brought you in to repeat it.to you once more. A taxi-driver Julius Glazer has identified your husband as being in his cab that night." He took out an envelope. "I have here one thousand dollars that he turned over to me, which he accuses your husband of having given to him as a bribe, in order not to make just such an identification. Your loyalty is understandable, Mrs. Strickland, but it can serve no further purpose. Now, once more: did or did not your husband leave this house during the early morning hours following that party?"

"Can I be compelled to give evidence against my husband?"

"No, you cannot."

She sighed deeply. She lowered her head. She made no further answer.

But she had given it, nonetheless!

He saw them all glance at one another triumphantly. Panic seized him suddenly. It was time to play his trump card. Nothing else could now save him.

"Florence, show them the note!" he burst out. "The note, Florence! The one I turned over to you!"

She looked at him, as if baffled.

"Florence, the note!" He was almost screaming it by now.

She shook her head bewilderedly. She gave him the poignant look of one who longs to help someone, who will do anything within her power toward that end, but who doesn't quite grasp what it is that is expected of her.

"What note, Hugh?" she pleaded gently.

"Florence--Florence--" They had to hold him down in his chair.

She was touching her handkerchief to her eyes now, weeping in sheer frustration at being unable to understand what it was he wanted of her. "The only thing you gave me--"

"Yes? Yes?" they all said in one voice.

She glanced inadvertently at her handbag, betraying the item's location in the very act of attempting not to do so.

Cameron held out his hand for it. She didn't offer to give it to him, but she didn't struggle to keep it from him either. She was too much the great lady to offer physical resistance. He took it from her lap, and opened it, and examined its contents.

In a moment he had produced a strip of paper.

"A check for five hundred dollars," he read from it. "Made out to bearer. Dated one day previous to the murder. . . ."

She'd burned the wrong thing. She'd made some ghastly mistake. She'd burned the note that could have saved him, instead of the check as he had told her to. But the damage wasn't irremediable; the check was made out to "Bearer," at least. It could have originated anywhere, not just at the scene of the murder. There was nothing about it to link it to--.

Cameron had turned it over, was reading it laterally.

"Endorsed," he said, "by Esther Holliday."

There was a knell-like silence. Then Strickland's berserk voice shattered it.

"No! No! It wasn't endorsed when I brought it ba-- That's not her signature! It couldn't be! She was already dead when I picked it-- That's a forgery! Somebody else must have--"

Suddenly he met Florence's eye. There was something about it. . . . Cool, tearless. There was a smile deep in it somewhere, that others could not see. He stopped speaking; his voice went off as at the throw of a switch. Not another word issued from him.

Cameron tilted his hand in exposition, let it fall again. "'When I brought it back,' you just said. 'She was already dead when I picked it up.' Sure she was. You had to kill her first, to get at the check."

He looked around at the others. "There's our case, gentlemen. Sealed, signed, and delivered." He pointed to Strickland's hands. "Signed by the lady's nails, right here. We'll take a photograph or two, because that kind of handwriting soon fades."

He opened the door to the hail, called out to someone, "Bring Mr. Strickland's car around. He's got someplace to go with us."

They stood Strickland up on his feet. He was incapable, for that moment at any rate, of standing unaided. She had remained sitting as she was, however. He saw, or thought he saw, a horrible thing, that must have escaped the others, who hadn't eyes that knew her so well.

For she was sitting as if her head were bowed with grief; as if crushed by an affliction that did not cry out or make a scene. Her elbow was upon the table beside her, and her hand was to her face, concealing her eyes, in fact sheltering from view all the upper part of her face. But he could see the corner of her mouth, from where he stood; it peered out. And though the constricting furrow that pulled the edge of her mouth ever so slightly awry, might have seemed to them a grimace of grief, he knew better than that what it was, for he'd seen it before this. It was a fixed, unholy smirk of ultimate vindication. The stencil of a triumph that is bitter, but is savory just the same. The ghost smile of an exquisite revenge.

More horrible than the death grimace on Esther Holliday, and yet fully as cold.

He turned and looked pleadingly into Cameron's compassionate (by comparison), humane face. "Let me speak to my wife a minute. Alone a minute. Just for a minute, before I go."

"We can't allow you out of our sight, Mr. Strickland. You're in custody from this moment on."

"Right here in the same room with you, just over to one side a little--"

"Your handbag, madam." They took that away from her first, as a precaution, lest she slip him some self-destructive agency. They needn't have worried, it occurred to him dismally. She was that agency in herself, in her entirety.

She rose and stood there, a little apart from them, over toward the wall, and waited acquiescently for him to come to her. She was so cool, so smiling, so charming. In all her, what she had once spoken to him of as her, drawing-room glaze.

"Why have you done this to me, Florence? I didn't kill that woman."

She modulated her voice carefully, so that it could not possibly have reached anyone but him. Her lips barely stirred, yet he could distinguish every word with a terribly clarity. (She had always had such beautiful diction.)

"I know you didn't, Hugh. And that perhaps was your greatest mistake. For if you had, that would have paid your debt to me. I would have stood by you then, through thick and thin, and fought for you and with you to the bitter end. But you didn't, it wasn't your hand that rid me of her. So that leaves your debt to me still outstanding. And I don't leave my accounts unclaimed. You'll have to pay the bill yourself, Hugh. And those three years of misery and humiliation come high, come very high."

In the background there was a metallic clash, as someone readied a pair of handcuffs.

She stood there smiling at him; so cool, so charming, so unmoved.

IT WAS STILL NIGHT, the tailings of night, and she was lying there very quiet, but very wide awake, praying desperately for it to last a little longer. She'd never thought she'd ever be praying for night to last a little longer. She'd always liked the day, not the night; she'd always liked the light, not the dark.

"Let it stay dark just a little overtime. Keep the day away just a little longer. You can do it. I know it has to come sooner or later. But Lord, make it come slow ."

Praying there flat on her back, eyes looking up at the dim ceiling, just beyond which Mars, the god of war, presumably was hovering low above her, about to tear her in two.

And while she prayed, she was holding a hand tightly in both of hers. The most valuable hand in the world. A hand she didn't want to let go of, ever.

Not a pretty hand. Shapeless and lumpy, sinewy and strong, rough-skinned on the inside and . . . But, oh, that hand!

She turned her head and touched her lips to it again, for about the fifteenth time.

The cleverly-constructed alarm, which had two tones, loud and soft, went brrrr , softly; and her prayer had been turned down. The mechanism vibrated more than it actually rang. When it was soft that way, it was for one. When it was loud, it was for two. She quickly clapped her hand to it and it stopped.

She transferred the hand back to its owner's breast, and reluctantly left it lying there. Like something you've borrowed and have to give back. She got out of the bed, picked up her dress and undergarments and stockings, and closed herself off in the tiny bathroom, to dress in there without disturbing him. The light was like a flash of calcium to her unaccustomed eyes, but she quickly closed the door to keep it in there with her, and out of the bedroom.

Then she started to cry. She cried good, because she knew this was the last chance she'd have, until after it was all over. The government said you had to be cheerful. The forty-eight states said you had to be sunny, even willing. The forty-eight states were just flat things on a map; they didn't have a heart and arteries.

She was busy for fifteen minutes, all over the little flat, in and out, without once waking him.

And now everything had been done and there was nothing left to do. Now the tough part came. Now the showdown. She took a good deep breath to see her through. Now the curtain was up. Now she was on the air.

She went over to the bed, and put her hand down softly.

"Darling," she said. "The whole war's waiting."

He opened his eyes and grinned, lazily.

"Oh," he recollected, "today's the day I go." And jumped fast.

"Your razor's ready on the edge of the washstand," she said. "I even got the blade in without cutting myself." She licked her thumb. "Well, without cutting myself much . And the cap's off that tube thing you use. A little of it popped out; I must have pinched it without noticing. That was about all I knew how to do in that department. No, not those. There's a clean set waiting for you on the chair over there."

"I'll be taking them right off again, anyway," he said.

"Oh, do you even have to do that?" She was slightly disapproving of them. After all, they didn't have to get that personal, did they?

"They give them to you," he said.

He shaved and dressed.

"Did I take very long?"

"Not long en--" she started to say. Then changed it to, "Not long at all."

"I never shaved so fast before. My skin's on fire."

"Why didn't you use your lotion?"

He laughed. "I don't think I better today. It smells kind of sweet."

They went in to breakfast.

"Are you frightened?" he said.

"No," she lied with a dazzling smile. "Are you?"

He shrugged. He was more truthful about it. "Not frightened exactly. A little scary though. And a whole lot excited. Like I used to feel in school, the day the finals were going to be announced, when I didn't know if I'd flunked or passed. And like I felt the day of our marriage. Before, I mean. Not after."

"I'm not going to sit on my own chair today. It's-- it's so far away. Would I crowd you if I-- Could we both sit on yours?"

"I'll hold my arm around you to keep you from falling off. I only need one arm to feed with, anyway."

"Hold it tighter," she whispered.

"Do you want the radio?" she faltered presently.

He looked at it dubiously. "What's on this early? We never heard it at this hour before." Then, "Let's just be by ourselves."

She sighed. That was what she'd wanted too.

He put back his napkin. "Guess I'd better . . ."

"Just one more cup of coffee," she interposed quickly.

"How about you?"

"Let me drink it from your cup." She pushed her own away.

She prayed again. She prayed over a cup of coffee. He couldn't hear her. "Make it last. Don't let it get down to the bottom. Keep filling it up in some way, from below. By magic, by miracle. You can do it."

She got turned down again.

"Bottoms up," he said with finality. And tilted the cup, and set it back on its saucer with a click of conclusion.

He wiped his mouth with his napkin. Then he wiped hers with it too.

He took his arm away from her, and she had to stand up, or she would have fallen off her half of the chair. He stood up after her.

Breakfast was over. Forever. Never again, never an-- She quickly shut her mind against that image.

He was all packed, from the night before. The little he was to take.

"Now, we went over everything last night," he reminded her, "so we don't have to go into it again. You have our two bank books. Don't lose them. The one with the green cover, they pay two per cent. The one with the blue cover, they only pay one and a half per cent. So whatever you have left out of what I send you, you put into the one with the green cover."