RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (8 page)

"Her perfume would be something like Styx, sticky and syrupy."

His eyes were round and he was speechless.

"Yes, Hugh. Yes, I believe I know whom you mean."

She lit a cigarette, as if giving him time to recover. She even offered him one. He refused.

"I--er, I don't know how to say this, Florence. There was an involvement that you never knew of--"

Again the ironical smile. "Shall I help you out there too, Hugh?"

She flicked first-ash from her cigarette into the little cloisonné platter on the stand, savored the smoke, rolled her eyes thoughtfully ceilingward, as if marshalling her facts in order to be of the greatest possible assistance to him.

"Her name is Esther Holliday. She lives at Sixteen-o-four Farragut Drive, Apartment D-seven. She pays a hundred and five a month for it. Telephone, Warfield seven one seven six. She's been in your life--or shall I say in your hair--oh, roughly, about four years now, a little bit over. I'm not a clairvoyant, Hugh. I can't give you the exact day you met her, nor the exact month. These things come on slowly. I can give you the exact season and year, spring, 1943. 'In the spring an older man's fancy--' I shouldn't have gotten so involved in my war work." She said this quite parenthetically, with a charming and not very fierce admonishing upthrust of her index finger. "You loved her for three years. For the past year and a half, you've no longer loved her, but you've been too lacking in backbone to do anything about it."

He seemed ready to come apart, as if he was strung on loose wires; like a puppet with the puppetmaster's fingers off the strings. "You know. You know about it."

"I've known for years," she said offhandedly. She decided she'd had enough of her cigarette, put it out; it had only been used as an aid to the conversation, anyway. For his sake.

"And now, what is it? What brings you to--unburden yourself at this particular time? Not that I don't appreciate it. Small favors, you know, are better than none at all."

"Florence, I went there to--to--"

This time she let him flounder his own way out.

"To kill her."

"I know you did."

"Oh, Florence," he said at last, and slumped back, as if wearied of trying to tell her anything she didn't know already. She left him no virtue in his confession.

"It was so obvious," she said disclaimingly. "A business jacket over your dinner trousers. A lump under your coat. The revolver gone from the drawer. You weren't very subtle about it, you know." Then she added, quite neutrally, "And did you?"

He stared his horror at her.

"I'm only going by the indications you gave. You showed every intention, and yet you look at me so appalled when I--"

"But do you have to be so brittle about it?" he pleaded almost poignantly.

"Forgive me," she said. "I'm sorry." And she sounded quite penitent about it. "I'm not used to living with violence, you know. I'll have to learn to drop my drawing-room glaze."

His head was drooping far downward, showing her the part in his hair. He was holding his hands cupped to his face, and speaking between them. His voice was stifled.

"She was already dead. I found her lying there already dead. Someone--I don't know who--I only know I didn't."

She reached for his hand and held it. She patted the back of it, almost maternally.

"Of course you didn't. Of course."

He raised his head, became a little more alert, as a sudden recollection struck him. "I can prove it. I can show I didn't. Wait a minute, where is that--!" He grew frightened for a moment, at finding he no longer had his coat on. He jumped up, went into the bathroom, came back with the coat. "Here. Here it is. I found this lying there in the room." He handed her the note.

She read it aloud. "'Now how do you like it, Mr. Strickland?'"

Her thinking was always so much quicker than his. "You should have left it there," she said instantly. "There's where it should have stayed, where he put it. Not here, where they can't see it."

"But I didn't want to be linked--"

She changed her mind, abruptly. "Maybe it's better. Yes, maybe you were right. But keep it, whatever you do. Make sure you hang onto it. If you have to, you can show it to them. But you see, you've already destroyed the greater part of its value. You can't prove you found it there in the room, now that you've removed it. You can prove, or they can, that it wasn't written by you; but you could have found it anywhere. It could have come from anywhere else. It's too late now." Then seeing the dismay this had brought into his eyes, she added: "But even without the note, you're safe enough. They can't saddle it on you, when you really didn't do it. There would have to be a complete miscarriage of justice. Those things don't happen."

"But they'll come here. They're bound to. They'll ask questions. . . ."

She nodded regretfully. "They'll go back into her past. And the association was--a rather long one."

"Florence, you've got to help me! No matter what they find out about the past, that won't count so much; at least, if we can keep them from finding out about tonight. Don't you see? This big party you gave tonight. What a marvelous thing. Dozens of people; they all saw me here all evening, to the very end. Florence, I didn't go out of the house after our guests left tonight! I never left it, do you understand? Florence, you won't go back on me, will you? You'll stick by me? You're my only hope."

"I'm your wife, Hugh," was all she said. "Are you forgetting? I'm your wife." There was only tender devotion in her eyes as they met his.

His head fell forward against her breast, with a deep choking gasp of relief that was almost a sob.

Softly, reassuringly, her hand stroked his hair. Forgivingly, understandingly, with all the wifely solicitude there was in the whole world.

She'd died the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. Nothing happened Wednesday. Nothing happened Thursday. It was just flat, impersonal; it was just cold print, black on white. He held his breath. Then on Friday it finally leaped out of the papers, came to life, and took the form of a man standing on his threshhold.

"Show him in," he said to Harris.

Then he checked the order. "No, wait a minute." He tried a pose at the desk, scanning some papers. No, that didn't look right, this wasn't an office. He tried a large leather-covered chair, sank back in it, crossed his legs. He got up again, selected a book from the shelf and a cigar from his humidor, returned to the chair.

"All right. Now show him in."

The man wasn't very impressive. He was a tall, scrawny fellow, hollow-cheeked. He acted uncertain, a tyro. He hadn't changed his shirt in days; there was a regular ruff of frayed threads peering out at his wrist.

He said, "Sorry to bother you, Mr. Strickland. I'm from the police. Mind if I ask you a few questions?"

Strickland said, "Sit down. No, I don't mind."

The man sat down, inclined too far forward; there was too much wrist left over. He looked around at the room in awe. He looked at Strickland in awe. As if he hadn't known people lived in places like this.

"Have a cigarette," Strickland said, to put him at his ease. "That's your light, there."

He took up the inkwell first, by mistake.

"No, right there beside you."

Even after he had it, he couldn't get it to work.

"You just push down. Prod a little."

But by that time he'd given up, and used a match of his own.

Then he didn't know what to do with the match; had to keep it pinched between his fingers.

Good Lord, what have I been afraid of? thought Strickland.

"What are the questions?" he prompted.

The man gave a start, as though he'd forgotten what he'd just said, himself. "Oh-- Ah. Yes. Er--did you know a woman--a lady--named Esther Holliday?"

"Yes I did," Strickland said immediately.

"Well?"

"About as well as a man can." He let him get that first. Then he said, "I'm frank about these things, you see." Then he said, "But that was at one time. That ended a year and a half ago."

The man fidgeted with his cigarette. It was painful to watch him. He was the questioned and Strickland the questioner, you would have thought.

"You know, she's dead."

"Murdered," Strickland corrected. "I read about it in the paper. All about it."

"You haven't seen her lately, have you, Mr. Strickland?"

"No."

"When was the last time?"

"I should say over six months ago."

"Oh." Then he said, "Well--." It was about as flat as last week's ginger ale. "In that case--" Then he didn't seem to know what more to say. He got up.

Strickland rose too. He happened to put his book down on the table beside them.

The man fidgeted with it, in that way typical of an awkward person who doesn't know how to conclude an interview gracefully, extricate himself properly from someone's presence, and so fiddles around with this and that.

"New?"

"On the contrary," said Strickland patronizingly, "it's quite old."

"Oh I only thought, because some of the pages haven't been cut yet. . . ."

"I hadn't got that far yet." The thing to do in cases of this kind was to shoot the answers at them fast, not take time enough to draw breath between question and answer.

Cameron abstractedly ran his thumbnail down the edge of one. It was the opening page. The following three or four adhered to it.

Then he closed the book and forgot about it and went away.

They were preparing for bed, that same night. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, already in his pajamas, but unwilling, or unable, to lie down and rest. Back arched, shoulders slumped, hands loosely clasped, staring disconsolately down at the floor.

She, on the contrary, was sitting before her dressing table. Head also lowered somewhat, but intent on what occupied her at the moment, and not lost in abstraction as in his case. She was shaping her nails with a file, tapering them.

She spoke at last.

"How were her hands? Hers , you know."

He knew. He grimaced, and wiped the edge of his hand across his mouth, as though to remove a bad taste.

"Does it disturb you if I remind you?" she asked tactfully.

"No," he said with a sigh. "I was thinking of it anyway. I have been, the whole time. They were--oh, I suppose like any woman's: soft and whiter than a man's--"

"No, I mean where were they? How were they? You said, you said, it was the neck."

"Oh." He understood her this time. "They were up like this." He showed her. "Trying to protect her neck, trying to free it. Frozen into claws, you know. Anyone's would be."

She mimicked the gesture, with her own. Studied it in the mirror.

"Then she must have clawed and scratched at his. Left marks on them."

"I suppose so. That was the only thing she could do."

Presently, since she said nothing further, he raised his head and said, "What made you ask me that?"

"Association of ideas, I suppose. I was looking at my own hands just now, and I thought of hers. I'm sorry if it--"

"It's all right," he said. His head went down again. She tweaked the two silk-shaded lamps on her dressing table, and they both went out. She got up and came over to the second bed. The silk of her dressing gown whispered soothingly as she agitated it in removal. Then she stopped, held it arrested at elbow height. She turned and glanced at him concernedly.

"Will you be able to sleep?"

"I'll try."

"Yes, but will you succeed? That's the important thing."

"Don't worry about me. You can put the light out."

"Yes, but you can't just sit there on the edge of your bed all night."

"I'm afraid if I go on my back, it will come back again. I had it all last night. Every time I'd come out of a doze, I was covered with perspiration. After all, it was a terrible thing to see. It's the first time I've ever seen anything like that. And then to stumble in on it like that, unexpectedly . . ." But the crux of the matter he still hadn't told her: the way he'd used his belt.

She scratched slightly, ever so slightly, at the extreme corner of her mouth, with the nail of her index finger.

"You can't have that happen again tonight," she said. "You'll need a doctor if you keep up like that. I think I know what we'll do."

She readjusted her wrapper, went into the bathroom for a moment. She came out with the bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.

"Try these," she said. "Until the shock wears off. Hold out your hand."

He extended it docilely, like a child.

She tapped the bottle slightly, until two of them had rolled onto his palm. Then she righted it, read the label. "Two is the ordinary dose, it says. I think you could stand three, in your condition." She tapped out a third one. Then she held the bottle poised, asked him, "Would you be afraid to try four?"

"No," he said. "Anything's better than--"