RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (9 page)

She tapped out the fourth one, stoppered the bottle. "I'll bring you some water," she said.

He swallowed it and flushed them down his throat, when she returned. He'd already had them in his mouth.

"Now lie back," she said. "And don't fight against them. Would you like me to hold my hand on your head?"

He smiled sheepishly. "No, thanks," he said. Then he shot her a quick, shamefaced look. "You're being very kind to me, Florence."

"What did you expect me to do?" she asked with an affectionate twinkle.

"After all, she was --"

"That's all over and done with," she said. "I'm sorry it had to end in such a grim way. But that's all water under the bridge, as far as you and I are concerned."

She arranged his pillows for him. She even drew the sheet up over his shoulder. She put out the remaining light.

"Thank you, Florence," he said with a half sob.

"Shhh," she answered softly in the dark. "Sleep. Just sleep."

It took a while to work.

Several times he was on the point of succumbing, and his hypertensile nerves, like springs, would ricochet him back again through the surface of consciousness. Then at last he sank down into the murky waters of oblivion and didn't come up any more.

Once a dream, like a patch of light oil on the surface, floated over him, illumined him with its hazy half light for awhile, then floated on past.

In the morning his sudden cry of astonishment brought her to the bathroom door in inquiry.

He was holding his hands perpendicular, backs toward his eyes.

"Look. All over me. What did I do to myself? Where did I get these? I only saw them this minute, as I was reaching for the water faucet."

She hurried to his side, took one of his now-trembling hands in hers, examined it. Red tracks across its back, in serried lines; some short, some long; some palepink with surface shallowness, some red-black with depth.

"Don't be frightened," she urged. "You must have done it to yourself, in your sleep." She took the other one, and looked at that in turn. She clicked her tongue, in mild commiseration. "Maybe you're allergic to that barbiturate you took. It may have irritated your blood or skin in some way, made you itch uncontrollably. Is it anywhere else?"

He drew back his sleeve. "No, not past the wrist bone. There are some on there, but that's as high as they go." He looked at her almost with superstitious dread. "I remember now, I had a dream. She was in it. The thing came back to me after all, but in a different way. Oh, it was horrible--" He shuddered violently, and planted one hand against the cabinet mirror, to support himself. "She wanted me to--she kept trying to get me to do what was really done to her. ( You know.) She had both my hands in hers, and kept trying to lead them to her own neck. And the more she tried, the harder I kept trying to pull them away. In the dream it was I who was screaming, not she. She had a grip of steel, she dug her nails into my hands, and I couldn't free them. Finally I tore them away, and her face sort of faded out, like an electric bulb that dies down slowly." He mopped at his newlyperspired forehead. "And she--she had on your dressing gown! It was she, but she had on your dressing--"

"Shh," she said. She put her finger briefly to his lips to silence them. "Don't bring it back. Look what it's doing to you. Wait a moment, let me fix you up."

She took a tuft of cotton, moistened it with witch hazel, and dabbed gently at the coagulated lacerations.

"It still smarts," he marveled. "This long after."

"They'll go away," she promised. "Within a week you won't be able to find them."

After he'd been summoned, as he was coming down the stairs, he met Florence. They exchanged a look--hers of concern, his of foreboding.

They didn't speak, but he silently raised two fingers to her, to show her this was the second time.

She nodded, gnawed her lip, as though she didn't like that any too well herself.

At last, she gripped his upper arm, in unspoken encouragement. Then, as she did so, suddenly her eyes went to his hand, with those mysterious nocturnal scratches still perceptible upon its back, even though now they had turned brown and encrusted with healing.

She motioned him agitatedly to wait where he was, not to go down any further. Hastily she ran down the few remaining steps herself, ran back along the hall to where his street garments were habitually kept. He could see her fumbling within the pockets of his topcoat.

Then she came back and in her hand she held a pair of his gloves.

"Put these on you," she breathed.

"But won't they think it strange? In the house?"

"But those marks. . . . They may believe they came from . . . It's better if they don't see them."

He drew in his breath sharply, in excruciation. "I never thought of that, until this very minute!" he gasped, appalled. "My God, they may think--"

"They won't think anything, if they don't see them. Try to keep them from seeing them."

"But indoors! How can I?"

"Well, then you've just come in. Here, like this." She ran down again. This time she brought him hat and topcoat. Put the hat into his hand, draped the topcoat over his arm as though he'd just doffed it.

"But they know I was in when they got here. He told them."

"Then you're just going out, you're on your way out. Whatever you do, see that those gloves stay on your hands ."

The library door suddenly opened, and Cameron's face appeared, looking out inquiringly to see what was detaining him.

Their stricken, conspiratorial tableau dissolved into motion. But there was a guilty aftereffect to it. They separated; he resumed his descent, she resumed her ascent. But they had been caught motionless; they were just a few seconds too late. It wasn't very well done. Particularly on her part; she'd given a noticeable start back from him.

He went down, reopened the door, which Cameron had closed again after that one brief glimpse, went inside and closed it after him.

"Gentlemen?" he said suavely.

There were three of them in there, two newcomers and the one from the other day. He didn't like that.

They took in the hat and topcoat.

"Were you on your way out, Mr. Strickland?"

"I just was going, yes."

"I'm sorry. This will have to take priority." It might have been veiled, but it was a distinct order.

"Very well," he said tractably. "Just as you say." And threw the topcoat down on a chair, and the hat on top of it.

"Sit down, make yourself comfortable." This was Cameron. Still veiled, and still an order.

He sat down. And now he suddenly found that she--her advice, rather--had somehow emphasized the gloves, and the hands they covered, instead of detracting from them. Thrown a veritable spotlight on them. He was caught with them; he couldn't take them off without attracting attention to his hands, and he couldn't leave them on without doing the same thing.

"Just a few questions." Cameron again. Easy, almost engaging, you might say. Little of his usual gaucheness today.

He was sitting now. He'd had to. He tried to move his gloved hands subtly, get them as much out of the way as possible. He tried to sandwich one down inside, between his thigh and the chair arm. Then perhaps if he could slip the other one partly inside his jacket, between the two buttons. . . .

Cameron's eyes hadn't once seemed to go to his hands. They didn't even now, as the hands began to slide. He could tell, because his own eyes were watching Cameron's. He was going to get away with--.

Suddenly a little glossed-over white package appeared, came toward him. "Have a cigarette, Mr. Strickland."

His hand made a false start, then recoiled again. "No, thanks. Not--not right now."

"Oh, come on, join us. We'll all have one all around. Be sociable."

"Not just now. I don't care for one."

The little white package retreated, disappeared. It had failed; or yet, maybe it had succeeded.

"Is there any reason you should keep your gloves on in the house, Mr. Strickland?"

The blood in his face did a turnabout; backed from flow to ebb. "I--I was going out."

"But you took off your hat and coat."

He sighed curtly. He summoned arrogance. "Does it annoy you if I choose to keep my gloves on?"

"No," said Cameron courteously, "but I should think it would annoy you. You're wearing them insideout."

The seam that encircled each finger was thick and thready. She must have held them the wrong way when he shaved his hands in.

He ran out of arrogance. Also, facial coloring.

They were waiting. He had hands, now, four feet long and two feet wide. They were in close-up.

"Don't you think you'd like to take them off, Mr. Strickland?" If Cameron could ever have been called urbane, he was urbane then.

"You can't compel me to take off my gloves in my own house, if I don't want to," was the best he could get off.

"No. But then you must have some very strong reason for not wanting to."

"I haven't! None whatever!" He was perspiring liberally now.

"Then why don't you? You seem warm. Far warmer than the rest of us."

His hand went to his opposite fingers, tugged; the glove fell to the floor.

His breathing was audible in the silence. It sounded like footsteps going through sand.

"Is that what you didn't want us to see? Where did you get them?"

"I--I don't know. I woke up one morning, and they were there. In--in my sleep I must have. . . . I'd had a dream . . ."

They didn't say a word. Their scorn was louder for that, louder than any derisive playback could have made it. Their very eyelids seemed to curl up scornfully at him.

He'd got them in a dream.

Their questions, as a matter of fact, turned out to be only two.

"Do you deny that she was here? That she came here to your house, earlier that very evening, seeking admission to the party your wife was giving?"

"Yes, I do!" he said fiercely.

"Call in the butler," Cameron said dispassionately. "And get out that picture of her that we brought from her place. The one he's already identified for us. We'll have him do it over again, in front of you."

He just held up his hand, in a warding-off gesture; then let it drop down again, all bent and broken.

"She may have come to the door. I--I didn't see her."

"We can't prove that you did. Your eyesight is your own affair. We can prove that you said to somebody, at your door, 'You'll never live to do this to me again.' And we can prove that that somebody was she. Which gets us, indirectly, around to the same result."

They gave that time to get in its corrosive action. He was crumbling away now like sandcastles at high tide.

Then the second question came. The second and last.

"Now, how about this? Do you deny that you went over to her place, later that very same evening, sort of-- you might say, returning her visit to you? Returning it with interest."

"I do! I was in full view of dozens of people, here at the party. I went upstairs and went directly to bed!"

"We can't handle dozens of people. Just one will do. How about--" Cameron seemed to be improvising. He turned his head toward one of his cohorts. "--that taxi-driver, who's already identified him from his photograph; who took him right up to her door. Bring him in and we'll have him repeat the identification from real life."

Again Strickland's hand climbed falteringly to an arresting height, dropped back again exhausted. He'd paid him a thousand dollars to keep quiet! What was more than a thousand dollars? His mind answered it numbly, without taking in the real meaning. Why, fifteen hundred, or even two thousand dollars, paid him afterward not to keep quiet. By someone else.

"Where'd you get a photograph of mine?" he asked them vacantly.

They didn't answer that. They had, he thought, a curious look on their faces. Elusive. He couldn't put his finger on what it was.

Suddenly, they brought Florence into the room. Two of them came in with her between them. A reluctant, wincing, sympathetic-eyed Florence. So shrinking, so helpless, between these rough men.

He half started to his feet. "Gentlemen, I protest-- You can't do this--I demand you leave my wife out of this!"

They turned a deaf ear. They sat her down, with great show of courtesy and consideration. She was no random witness, to be shunted about in their midst, to be baited, tricked and trapped. She was a great lady, stepping down from her pedestal for a moment, of her own gracious complaisance, to mire her feet in the muddy affairs of a man's world.

"You have said, Mrs. Strickland, that your husband did not leave the house, in the early morning hours of the thirty-first of May, following the party that you gave here that night."

"Not precisely," she said. "I said that my husband did not leave this house to my knowledge, during the early morning hours et cetera."

"Why do you persist in qualifying it that way?" Cameron asked her.