The bride wore black (7 page)

"The really clever woman is all things to all men. Like the chameleon, she takes her coloring from his ideal of her. It is her job to find out what that is. Those pictures on the wall, they told so plainly what you had looked for in women "

He nearly dropped the glass he was holding, stared at her wide-eyed. "How did you know there were pictures on the wall? Have you ever been in this room before?"

She drank a sip of liquor, coughed very slightly. "No," she said. "But it is easy to see from the stains that there were pictures there. And anyone who does that is a romantic and romanticizes women."

"Oh," he said, and took up his glass again. His perceptions were already a little dulled. He was too happy to be captious. "It's funny. ..."

"What is?"

"Just by being here, you change this mangy room into something warm and glamorous. You take away twenty years and make me feel like I useta feel walking down the bullyvards on leave under a tin hat, and around every comer I was sure I'd find. ..."

"What?"

"I don't know, something wonderful. I never did, but it didn't matter, because there was always another corner. It was the feeling that mattered. It made your footsteps sing. I've always wanted it back again, but I was never able to get it anymore after that. You must be magic."

"Black or white?"

He smiled vacantly. He evidently didn't get the allusion.

"HI have to go now." She stood up, crossed over to the dresser. "One more drink before I do. I think there's enough in it for one more." She held up the bottle, eyed it against the light. They had been using the bureau top for a serving table. She filled the two glasses, then interrupted herself, letting them stand there on it a moment, a considerable distance apart. "I must make myself beautiful for your last look at me," she smiled across her shoulder.

A little metal powder holder flashed open in her hand. She leaned across the bureau top toward the mirror. She made little flurried motions that bespoke the will rather than the deed, for the vast majority of them failed to come anywhere near the surface of her nose. She was really powdering the air between it and the mirror.

He sat there, smiling over at her in hazy benevolence.

Her nose didn't grow any noticeably whiter but then

maybe that was the whole art of powdering it, so that it wouldn't show. A grain or two of white had fallen on the dark-wood surface of the dresser. She bent down toward them, the epitome of neatness. Her breath stirred them off into oblivion.

She picked up the glasses and went back to him.

He looked up at her with an almost doglike devotion. "I can't believe all this is really happening to me. That you're really here. That you're bending over me like this, handing me a glass. That your breath is stirring my hair. That there's just a little sweetness, like one carnation in a whole room, in the air around me. ..."

He'd put his glass down meanwhile, and so had she, as if in some kind of obligatory accompaniment.

"When you go outside the door, I'll know it wasn't true. I'll dream about you tonight, and in the morning I won't know which was the dream and which was the real part. I don't already."

"Drink." And then as he reached for the wrong one, "No, that one's yours, over there. And you forgetting?" she said with unexpected sharpness.

"To what?"

"To the coming dream. May it be a long and pleasant one.

He hitched his glass. "To the coming dream."

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 DIDNT 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 youll 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.