The Black Angel (20 page)

I gave one more wrench, and there was enough space to bolt through. The minute was compressed to thirty seconds now, to less. It was dark in there. I couldn't see my way, but I tried to remember. You went over to the left, and there was a door into the hall. If you got out through that, then the front door to the house lay straight ahead to your right.

I did something wrong. Turned toward it on too wide a sweep. He got over to it first and slammed it, and I was trapped. The minute was up now; the minute was gone. Our forms even brushed together lightly there at the door, then separated again for the last brief time. He would have caught me even sooner, I think, except that he spared his one arm, was only grasping for me with the other.

Something caught at the back of my leg as I twisted and turned to get away from him, and I fell floundering back on the sofa. He came down partly across me a minute later, pinning me there.

I didn't know how to defend myself. There was no defense. You can hope to deflect a knife; you can even manage to ward a gun aside. But this was like fending off a snake, a one-fanged snake. One strike and there was no use in further struggle.

Dimly, in the back of my own mind, I thought I heard a whistle blow. As I had that night, walking along the street, doing his errand. This one was swifter, sharper, shorter, directly outside the house somewhere. I knew it wasn't so; it wasn't real, just some trick of returning memory churned up in the midst of this death struggle. There was a sudden lisping surge of leather scuffing on stone, as if feet were trooping up the stoop outside. Then blows against wood.

He desisted just long enough to listen. “Well, I'll still get you first. They can't prove anything on me without you. They never have been able to. They never will.”

I had my hands locked in the side fringes of his hair, one on each side of the semibald crown, as if trying to tear his skull apart by main force, but it did no good.

He wanted to make sure of where he——He deliberately pulled down the shoulder of my dress, clawed at it until he'd forced a bare spot for his purpose, the turn of my shoulder.

I heard the door go in. The outside one, beyond in the hall. It thudded like a wooden drum.

“They still can't——”

I could sense his arm go back in the dark. I didn't know where it was coming from, up, or down, or straight. Nor how soon, a second, two seconds, three.

I twisted my shoulder, flung it over, narrowed it toward its opposite, as in a last convulsive shudder.

His hand slapped up against it in a sort of raking blow. I heard something puncture the taut stuffing of the sofa with a little
pock!
Something wet seeped out of it, traced a stray tickling line or two over the unbroken skin of my shoulder where it met the sofa back.

A light glowered fiercely in at us, very hard-cored and round and silver-backed, poised down at full arm's length. It cast a pale aura all over the room. I lay there in it, and he lay prone athwart me, slowly starting to turn his head and face it with a sort of crafty, evasive delay in timing.

My eyelids began to blink more and more rapidly, and the light blurred, swirled smaller, went out.

I'd never fainted before. I never did again.

In a moment I'd come back again. Not to any rescue, not to any salvation, but to an unreality as bad or worse than the nightmare that had just preceded oblivion.

So little time had passed that it was as though a tiny segment of a progressing film had been snipped off and the continuing action had taken a short jump forward from where it had left off. Mordaunt was leaving the room, head dangling over as though his neck had been broken, though it was his own feet that supported him. There was a glint of steel from his wrist as his arm was held back for a moment by the projection of the doorframe and stayed behind him. Then it was drawn around after him and followed him out, drawing after itself in turn the arm of the man behind him that it was fastened to.

The room was lighted up now, and I could hardly place it. It was as though I had awakened in a strange place I had never been in before. The tulip horn of the gramophone was there in the background; the same mallards were under glass on the wall. Some vintage magazine or other, of a number that had been in here for his patients to read, had fallen to the floor and fluttered open. And as someone's foot trod unknowingly on it in passage it kicked free one of the leaves, carried it before it a short distance along the floor.

There were men in the room, on their various faces no sign of any compunction or solicitude for me. They were all stony-faced, truculent. One stood looking at me, waiting for my eyes to find him.

“Get up,” he said gruffly when they had.

I forced my back away from the vise of the sofa joint. I righted my dismantled dress there where he'd wrenched it down.

“Your name's Alberta French,” he said curtly. He was looking at a loose-leaf memorandum pad he held in his hand that opened horizontally.

“Yes,” I breathed low.

“And you live at—West Sixty-eighth.”

I said yes again.

“Get on your feet,” he jerked at me.

I staggered upright, thrust myself out from the sofa on one stiff arm.

He took hold of the other in two places, at the break of the elbow and at the wrist. He held it that way, like a lever. His grip wasn't gentle. I had to go in whichever way he went to avoid wrenching it at the arm socket.

“Now walk straight ahead. Out through that door in front of you.”

I said, planting unwilling feet before me staccato, at his pace, not my own, “Why are you doing this to me? Where are you taking me? He——Didn't you see what he tried to do to me?”

His voice was harsher by far than Mordaunt's had been at any time from first to last. It was the impersonal harshness of official retribution, not personal animosity. “You're under Federal arrest for the transportation and selling of narcotics.”

I went out with my own head dangling over, as though
my
neck were broken, just as he had. The fox and the chicken had been caught in the same trap.

Immediately following the last of the many times I'd been brought up before them for exhaustive questioning—or I should say the latest, for I hadn't known then that it was going to be the last—instead of being returned to the detaining cell, I was transported from there over to the police-headquarters building by car.

I was brought into an office, and when I saw Flood there I knew he'd had something to do with this change in the previous days' routine.

They turned me over to him, left me in there in his hands.

He was rather grim about it, like a man who has performed a thankless task at no little trouble to himself and is still not entirely convinced of his own wisdom in doing so.

“You're being freed; did they tell you?”

I was too numb to react much at first. I'd been in custody four days by now. “No, they didn't. I noticed their line of questioning took a different turn the last time or so; that was all. It was more about Kirk's trouble and what I'd been trying to do for him than this—this other thing.”

“Well, that's why you were brought up here. I interceded. I had a hard time convincing them. I'm no one, you know. I have no particular influence. It was just that I happened to be acquainted with certain factors in the background, in your particular case, and I put them before them. Put them before them for all I was worth, I might add. You're not freed technically, but you've been released into my custody, and you won't have to face Federal charges. Which is a good deal to be grateful for. It will be necessary for you to give evidence against this man Mordaunt, along with three other men and a colored woman, eventually, but that won't come up for several months yet.”

He was waspishly unsympathetic. “Don't cry about it. You brought it on yourself.”

I uncurled my enfolded arm and lifted my face from his desk blotter. “Can I go now?” I faltered helplessly.

“Yes, you can go now,” he said ungraciously. “Take my advice and go home and rest up and stay out of trouble from now on. You see, this whole thing wouldn't have happened if you'd listened to me in the first place. I
told
you when you were in here that day——”

I'd risen and gone toward the door while he went on talking.

I was still far from admirable to him. “You've been a very dumb person, little Mrs. Murray. I'm willing to take your innocence in this mess at its face value on faith alone, but——”

I whirled on him from the door, almost aghast. If it did nothing else, it drove all self-pitying weakness out of me forthwith. “You don't think I
voluntarily
co-operated in such a——!”

“I happen to be inclined to believe you. But I have no actual proof, you know. You could have.”

He opened a drawer, took out a folder or dossier of some kind. He moistened his thumb and leafed over several loose papers contained in the seam of it. “Before you go it might interest you to know that the whole undertaking was a waste of time, anyway. His name is Mordaunt, right? And what was the date of the Mercer woman's murder? Never mind, I have it right here. May the twelfth. I took pains to look up this man's record—he has one that goes back to when I was in knee pants myself—and here are some interesting facts that I culled from our files. The most recent of his arrests took place on the fifteenth of March. He was evidently arrested on suspicion of some more serious charge, but with the help of a little adroit juggling he seems to have managed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and served time for that instead. Anyway, he served sixty days on Welfare Island for disorderly conduct and a few other little odds and ends, and the date of his release is down on the records as May the fifteenth,
three days after her death.”
He closed the folder with a snap. “In case you still have any doubts, I've checked on the fingerprints and it's the same man.”

My chin only went down for a minute; it didn't stay down. It came right up again, higher than before.

“That's what mistakes are for,” I murmured quietly, “so you'll keep on going and not quit too easily.”

He looked at me curiously. I don't know, for some strange reason he seemed to like me a little better when he saw me square off like that than he had only a moment ago.

“I like your spirit,” he admitted, “but your line of reasoning is all flooey.”

“You can keep me from going ahead with it, I suppose, as long as I'm sort of paroled to you, as you say.”

“Do I have to?”

“There's only one way you can. By having me put back in jail again.”

“Don't you see it's no use? Believe me, Mrs. Murray, it's no use. Give up this harebrained idea, quit trying——”

“No, I won't give up trying. I couldn't, even if I wanted to. I
believe
, and that's all I've got. Don't take it away from me; I won't let you.” I opened the door to go. “Why should I quit trying? Because I was wrong this time? The next time I may be right. You're always wrong until the last time. And then when you're right, at the end, that wipes out all the times before when you were wrong. I'm going ahead, Mr. Flood; I'm going ahead. Whether with your sanction or without it. This very next time may be the right time, the last time of all. I may be just an hour away, a block away, from
him. He
may be waiting just around the corner. The next time I pick up the phone
he
may answer; it may be his voice I hear saying ‘Hello. Who is this?'”

8

Butterfield 9–8019
………Mason

“H
ELLO
.
WHO IS THIS
?”

The voice was vivid, tingling; it rushed at you. It was in a hurry. Not in the sense of “I'm busy; what do you want? Don't bother me,” but eager, zestful, anxious to be on its way from the last interesting thing that had happened to it to the next interesting thing that was to happen to it. The sort of voice that only interesting things happened to. And if they weren't already, it made them that way just by taking part. That kind of voice.

The first sip of a cocktail in it. The wind up at the prow of a motorboat in it. A walloping good dance tune in it, the kind that takes your feet and lifts them. The spanking bliss of the first gushing cascade when you turn on an ice-cold shower on a melting August day. The turn on a breakneck toboggan run in it. All those things in it. Everything that makes life swell in it. Everything that is life. What a voice.

I said, “I'm a friend of someone you know. I just got into town, and I'm giving you a ring, the way I promised I'd do.”

The voice was open, friendly, trustful; it took me at my word. It didn't know how to be suspicious, that voice. “Who's the somebody?”

That was it; who
was
the somebody?

“Somebody you haven't seen in quite some time. Now, think.”

The voice fell in with me, helping to work its own undoing, so to speak. “Let's see, whom haven't I seen in quite some time?” There was a quickly mumbled name or two, discarded before I could quite make them out. Then, “It wouldn't be Ed Lowrie, would it?”

I gave a little rill of laughter down the scale, meant to convey admission, capitulation. I let that stand by itself. I hadn't said it was; if something went wrong I could still get out of it.

He said, “Well, what d'ye know?” as if marveling at this mark of attention on the part of a long-unseen friend. Then he said, “Where is he, still out there?”

I said, “He was the last I saw him. I came sort of a roundabout way myself.” But I laughed a little with it again. Not too much, just enough so I could still leave the way open, back out and say, “It wasn't he, it was somebody else,” if I had to. This mustn't go wrong. These opening stages were always the most important part of the whole thing until I could make contact and fasten myself onto them.