The bride wore black (4 page)

"That finished it, of course; he was afraid to take a chance after that. He pretended he didn't have the key or something and eased her out as tactfully as he could. She was too well dressed for him to get snotty with. When she saw it was no go, she just smiled, shrugged and went sauntering down the street again."

Corey was leaning interestedly forward by this time. "And are you sure you don't recognize her from his description?"

"Dead sure. And as I just told you, she didn't recognize me, either."

"I wonder what she was after?"

"She wasn't out to clean the apartment, that's a cinch, because she was willing to pay a hundred dollars just for the privilege of getting in here, and anyone who can get a hundred dollars' worth out of this place is a magician."

Corey nodded judicious agreement on that point.

Bliss stood up. "Let's go." He smiled nervously. "I like everything about marriage except the functions leading up to it such as tonight's."

"The part I like best," said Corey, "is not having it happen in the first place."

TTiey were out in the public hall waiting for the self-service car when a thin, querulous ringing piped up behind a closed door somewhere nearby.

Bliss cocked an experienced ear. "Key of G flat. That's mine. I'd better hop in and take it a minute; it may be Marge."

He went back to the door, fumbled in his pocket for his key, dropped it, had to stoop to get it. Corey stuck his foot out to hold the car up for them. "Hurry up

before somebody gets it away from us," he urged.

Bliss pitched the door open. The thin wail rose to a full-toned peal, then perversely stopped short and didn't resume. He backed out again, pulled the door shut after him. "Too late, they've quit trying."

Riding down in the elevator, Corey suggested, "Maybe it was that same mystery dame again."

"If it was," Bliss grunted, "whatever it is she wants, she sure wants bad."

Alone there with Marge, in a little alcove away from the rest of the party, he scratched the back of his neck in pretended perplexity. "Let's see now, how does this go? Tve seen enough movies, I ought to have the hang of it. Well, let's give it the old shut-eye treatment, that's the safest. Shut your eyes and stick out your finger."

She promptly hooked her thumb toward him.

He slapped it out of the way. "Not that one. Help a fellow out. I'm so nervous I could "

"Oh, wrong finger? You should be more specific. How'd I know but what you wanted to bite it or something?"

And then the ring. Their heads drew together, looking down at it; they made a love knot of their four hands. They made nonsensical purrings and cooings and other noises that to them were probably language. Suddenly both became aware of eyes regarding them steadfastly, and they turned their heads in unison toward the doorway. A girl was outlined in it, as motionless as though she had taken root in the floor.

She was in tiered, wide-spreading black, the creamy whiteness of her shoulders rising out of it without any interrupting straps. A gossamer black wimple twinkling with jet was drawn over hair so incredibly yellow it seemed to have been powdered with cornmeal.

A dimple of sympathy or possibly derision at the

comer of her mouth had disappeared before they could confirm it. "Pardon me," she said quietly, and moved on.

"What a striking girl!" Marjorie exclaimed involuntarily, continuing to stare at the empty doorway as though hypnotized.

"Who is she?"

"I don't know. I think I remember her coming in along with Fred Sterling and his party, but if I was introduced, it didn't take."

They looked down at the ring once more. But the spell had been broken, their mood was gone, they couldn't seem to get it back. The room didn't feel quite as warm as it had. As though that look from the doorway had chilled it.

She shivered, said, "Come on, let's get back to the others."

The party was in the homestretch now, and they were dancing, he and she. Those little sketchy turns and fake half steps that are just an excuse to cover up a private conversation.

He said, "Well, let's take the apartment on Eighty-fourth Street, then. After all, if he'll give it to us for five dollars less a month like he said. . . . And with the furniture they're going to give us, we can fix it up to look like something "

She said, "That girl in black can't take her eyes off you. Every time I look over there she's staring at you for all she's worth. If it was any night but tonight, I might begin to get worried."

He turned his head. "She isn't looking at me."

"She was until I called your attention to it."

"Who is she, anyway?"

She shrugged. "I thought all along she came with Fred Sterling and his bunch. You know how he always shows up anywhere with a whole posse. But he left quite some

time ago and now I see she's still here. Maybe she decided to stay on alone. Whoever she is, I like the way she handles herself. None of this cheap dazzle stuff. I've been watching, she's had her troubles all evening long, poor thing. Every time she tries to sneak out on the terrace alone, three or four of the men mistake it for a come-on and make a beeline after her. Then a minute later she'll come in again, usually by the side door, still alone. What she does to get rid of them that fast I don't know, but she must have it down to a science. They they'll come slinking in again themselves right afterward, one by one, with that foolish look men have when they've been stymied. It's a regular sideshow."

She touched her hand lightly to his lapel as a signal; they stopped on the half turn.

"Some more people are leaving; I'll have to see them off. Be right back, darling. Miss me while I'm gone."

He watched her go, standing there like a flagpole on which the flag has suddenly been run down. When the light blue gown had whisked from sight at one end of the room, he turned and went out the other way, onto the terrace for a breath of air. He felt a little sticky under the collar; dancing always made him warm, anyway.

The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. He lit the after-the-dance, whiie-waiting-for-her-to-come-back cigarette. He felt good, looking down at the town that had nearly had him licked once. "I'm all set now," he thought. "I'm young. I've got love, I've got a clear track. The rest is a cinch."

The terrace ran along the entire front of the apartment. At one end it made a turn around to the side of the penthouse superstructure, and the moon couldn't follow it. It was dark there. There were no floor-length win-

dows, either, just an infrequently used side door whose solid composition blacked out light.

He drifted around the turn, because there was another

couple on the other way and he didn't want to crowd

them. He stood in the exact right angle formed by the

two directions of the ledge, and now he had two views

instead of one.

And then suddenly she must have slipped unnoticed out through the side door and come along from that direction toward him that ubiquitous girl in black was standing there a foot or two away from him, looking out into the distance, the same way he was. She was weirdly like a white marble bust floating in the air without any pedestal, for the black of her dress was swallowed up in the blackness of the trough they both stood in.

"Swell, isn't it?" he suggested. After all, they were at the same party together.

She didn't seem to want to talk about that, so maybe it wasn't so swell to her.

At that instant Corey came along, conquest bound. He'd evidently had his eye on her for some time past, but the wheel of opportunity had only now spun his way. Bliss's presence didn't deter him in the least. "You go inside," he ordered arbitrarily. "Don't be a hog, you're engaged."

The girl said in quick interruption, "Do you want to be a dear?"

"Sure I want to be a dear."

"Then get me a big tinkly highball."

He thumbed Bliss. "He does that better than I do."

"It would taste better coming from you." It was primitive, but it worked.

Corey came back with it. She accepted it from him, held it out above the coping, slowly tilted it until the glass was bottom up and empty. Then she gravely handed it back. "Now go in and get me another."

Corey got the point. It would have been hard to miss it. The suave man-about-town glaze shattered momentarily and one of those aforementioned glimpses of jungle showed through the rent. Not travelogue jungle, either. A flash of white coursed over his face, lingering longest around his mouth in a sort of bloodless pucker. He stepped in and went for her neck with both hands, in businesslike silence.

"Whoa easy," Bliss moved quickly, blocked them off before they could get to her, deflected them up into the air. By the time they came down again, Corey already had them under control. He bunched them in his pockets, perhaps to make sure of keeping them that way. Vocal resentment came belatedly, after the physical had already been reined in.

"Any twist that thinks she can make a monkey outta me . . .!" He turned around and strode back from where he'd come.

Bliss turned to follow. After all, what was she to him?

Her hand flashed out, pinned him at her side. "Don't go. I want to talk to you." It dropped away again as soon as she saw that she had gained her point.

He waited, listening.

"You don't know me, do you?"

"I've been trying to find out who you are all evening." He hadn't; he'd paid her less attention than any man there. It was the gallant thing to say, that was all.

"You saw me once before, but you don't remember. But I do. You were in a car with four others "

"I've been in a car with four others lots of times, so many times I really can't "

"Its license number was D3827."

"I've got a rotten head for figures."

"It was kept in a garage up on Exterior Avenue in the Bronx. And it was never called for afterward. Isn't that strange? It must still be there, rusted away. ..."

"I don't remember any of that," he said, baffled. "But say, who are you, anyway? There's something electrifying about you "

"Too much can cause a short circuit." She moved a step or two away as though she had lost interest in him as unaccountably as she had developed it. She lifted the jet-spangled scarf from her head, held it spun out in a straight line before, her hands far apart, let the breeze flutter it forward.

Suddenly she gave a little exclamation. It was gone. Her hands still measured off its length. An aerial wire, invisible against the night, came down diagonally right there where she was, riveted to the facade below the ledge by a little porcelain insulation knob. She flashed him a look of half-comic surprise, then bent over, peering down.

"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 harrow-ingly from somewhere out near the entrance, just once. The party had come to an end.

L

"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.