The Black Angel (28 page)

Twice a day, for several days past, he'd been calling me up about this party, reminding me I'd promised him to be there, urging me not to fail to keep my promise; I didn't quite understand why. That it was to be more or less in my honor, I gathered, but his insistence almost seemed to go beyond that, as though I were actually sponsoring it along with him.

“I want you here good and early. I'll send the car for you, say about six; how will that be?”

“You don't have to do that. I can get over there all right——”

“I should say not. I wouldn't think of it. You're coming in the car.”

Then he went on: “Will you do something for me? Wear the angel dress again. Have you still got it? I want them to see you just like I do.”

I said to myself, even while I was still on the line, talking to him, “The safe is built in above the fireplace in that little study or whatever it is; I saw it in there.”

“All right,” I said.

He was like a kid; I'd never heard anything like it. “I can hardly wait until tonight. Gee, it's still so long away until tonight; what am I going to do until then?”

“It will come,” I said evenly. I thought: “It always does.”

He was in a dinner jacket when I arrived, and the place was swarming with florists and caterers. He was standing there supervising a great long table they were arranging in the dining gallery for about twenty or thirty people.

He was still like a kid. Skeeter had been standing unobtrusively by, looking on with him, and as McKee came forward to greet me Skeeter crept a stealthy foot nearer the table. McKee immediately whirled on him in a sort of righteous fury. “You touch another one of them salted almonds after I told you not to, and I'll bust your jaw so you won't be able to use it at the meal!”

Skeeter retreated guiltily to where he had been before.

I had to tell myself: “These men have killed people.”

“What is it, your birthday?” I asked him.

“Better than that, much better. I'm not going to tell you ahead; you'll find out when the time comes.”

The other one, Kittens, came in harassed. “Hey, I can't get this tie on right. I must be nervous or something. We never gave a formal party like this before, just brawls.”

“Here, I'll do it for you,” I offered, so McKee would find me charming.

He stepped up close to me. His face smelled a little of tangy shaving lotion. “How strange,” I discovered to myself with a sort of wonderment; “they're no different from other men, except that the moral sense is gone, and you can't see that from the outside.”

When I finished McKee was crowding at my elbow. His face had a slightly sulky look to it, and his own tie, which I could have sworn had been intact a moment before, was drooping invitingly down. He was jealous of his own henchman!

Within the next half-hour his past came to life before me, came in the door in twos and threes. No, not the past. Who knew where that actually was at this moment as he stood beside me greeting arrivals? A lumpy torso huddled ankles to throat in a rotting sack in a lime pit somewhere. A wavering, undiscovered thing down under the waters of the harbor, feet in a cement cast. A skeleton under a cement garage floor that would be dug up some far-off day when this lawless age was a forgotten moment in a distant past.

His present, then, came to life before me, came in the door in twos and threes. In a sort of strained demureness that was their new-found respectability still sitting uneasily upon them. The men were too meek and brittlely polite; you couldn't move but what they moved a chair to accommodate you. The women were too subdued and kept porcelainly smiling at nothing, just to keep smiling for the sake of smiling. Dolls that the men had brought with them. That slightly heightened excitement of voice and vivacity of movement that women ordinarily bring to a party that
is
a party were entirely lacking in them. A faux pas would have warmed the rarefied air, but they were all alike in dread of one.

He had me at his right.

I kept thinking, “The safe is in the study, over that way, to my right. Tonight is the time, with all of them here. Far safer for it than if I were alone.”

His voice broke in upon me: “I didn't get you one because—you're more than just a guest. And I have something else for you later on.”

I looked around, and they were all exclaiming over little gold powder compacts. I hadn't even missed not having one.

The conversations were ludicrous, but I wasn't there to be amused, to take social notes. Who was I, after all? I asked myself. Just a desperate, stealthy creature sitting in their midst, less secure than they were even.

Then from one of the wives, in tactful arbitration, stemming perhaps from some long-haunting memory of a small dispute that had once grown beyond bounds and ended in a tragedy: “Oh, don't let's talk politics. It's not nice at the dinner table. After all, we're all good Americans here, I'm sure. Don't you agree with me, Miss French?”

“You're right. Of course we are.” I smiled cordially.

They had so many taboos, their new state of grandeur must be hell for half of them.

He had risen.

Kittens went “Sh!” to the person next to him. Skeeter went “Sh! The boss is going to say something” to the man across the way from him.

He looked at me privately, then at them. “I'd like to make a little speech to you. I suppose you wonder why you've all been brought together here on this particular night. Well, it's like this. Everyone finds someone. But most men, they just find women. I'm a man in a million. I've found an angel.”

They all looked at me and applauded delicately.

“Give me your hand, Angel.”

I stretched it out mechanically, already beginning to be a little afraid even before I knew what was coming next.

It hadn't been there a minute before. I don't know whether somebody had just passed it to him from behind his chair or it had been concealed underneath something on the table itself. Suddenly there was this plush box. There was a snap and the box split open. There was a flash from the satin lining for just a second, and then the box was empty.

Something cold, cold as death, that struck a shudder into the very deeps of my heart slipped down my finger.

The flash came from there now. Kept coming from there. Came from there permanently. I'd never seen a diamond that size before.

It went up to his lips and down again, and the kiss now struck the same cold shudder into me that the ring had.

“I want to announce my engagement to Miss Alberta French. Our engagement to be married.”

The pupils of my eyes felt like taut exclamation marks stretched from lid to lid. Under cover of the hand clapping and din of congratulatory ejaculation that churned around the table he leaned over toward me. “Say something to them. What's matter; did I startle you? Look at her, how white her face is. Was it too sudden for you? Don't be frightened——”

I kept saying to myself, “This isn't real. This isn't so.”

They were subsiding now. They were waiting. He was waiting. I had to do
some
thing. What did you do when you were suddenly told you were engaged? Jump up and run from the table? Say “No, I decline the honor with thanks”?

“Say something to them. Come on, say something to them.” He had me by the elbow now.

If Kirk's face would only get out of the way——

I found myself standing suddenly, so I must have risen. I didn't look at him, nor at them. I raised the champagne high until I could see the ceiling lights turn gold through it. I didn't point it at him. I pointed it upward, through the lights, through the ceiling, toward—whatever it was up there.

“To my husband,” I said in a steady voice.

“Keep it on,” he coaxed in the study. “Are you supposed to take it off like that? I think I once heard somewhere it brings bad luck.”

“That's the wedding band,” I improvised, “once the ceremony's been performed. Not this. I'm worried about it. There are so many people here—and you never know. Look, it's a little loose, and I don't want anything to happen. Let me put it in your safe while I'm here. I'll put it on again when I'm ready to go.”

He found me charming. If I'd stood on my head he'd have found me charming. “So that's why you wanted to get me alone in here. You're a sentimental little lady, aren't you? I didn't know you thought that much about it. All right, give it to me; I'll put it in for you.”

I continued to work at being charming. “I want to put it in myself. It's my ring.”

I put my hand on the dial, stood waiting in an attitude of trustful helplessness. “Tell me what I have to do.”

For a moment his innate caution held out against his heart. He cast a brief look of sober speculation at me, hesitated almost unnoticeably.

I opened my eyes a little. “I thought it was an
engagement
ring.”

He raised my hand and put his lips to it in amends. “It is,” he said. “Wait a minute till I close the door.”

He came back again.

“I wouldn't do this for anyone but you. Steady it so that little arrowhead points straight up first of all. That's it. Now go around this way until you come to eleven——”

He came back from seeing the last of them out.

“Well, how'd you like it? What sort of a party did I give you? I'm glad you stayed to the end like you did; I was afraid you'd——”

“It was my party. I couldn't leave before all of them did.” I hooked a finger to an inadvertent yawn.

“Tired? Shall I take you back now?”

“I'm almost too tired to
go
back,” I said languidly. I hooked a finger to a second yawn. “It seems so much trouble to go all the way over——”

An idea hit him, born
of
his solicitude. Or perhaps my yawns. “Say, you wouldn't want to——? I don't suppose you'd feel right about staying over here on account of me being in the place? Because if it weren't for that——”

I looked around me as if in sudden attentiveness to the proposal. “You know, that's not such a bad——I don't think I'd mind doing that at all, if I could only be sure you wouldn't misunderstand me.”

“How could I ever misunderstand anything you did?” he protested with an almost luminous sincerity. “That stage ended long ago with you and me. You shouldn't say things like that to me. You ought to know me by now. You'd be as safe here in my place as you would back at your own.”

“Then I think I
will
stay,” I acceded impulsively. “After all, we are engaged, and I'm too tired to care about the looks of it.”

His bustling, enthusiastic reaction showed how complimented he felt by this mark of confidence I was showing him. There was a brief undercurrent of ordering and telephoning, and one of these prepared toilet kits containing everything necessary for the night arrived—I don't know where he'd been able to obtain it at that hour, possibly from one of the hotels—within fifteen minutes.

I took leave of him at the door of the room I was to grace. The last thing I said to him was, “Now you won't do anything to make me regret this, will you?”

I knew he wouldn't. I could tell just by looking at him. He would as soon have thought of desecrating a church.

To be worshiped, though I didn't realize it at the moment, is a far more dangerous situation to be in than simply to be desired.

“Pleasant dreams,” he said with abashed tactfulness, refraining even from kissing me, lest that seem to be an attempt at tilting the delicate balance between us.

I heard him go back to “the boys.” I could hear him say, from where I was, as he went in, “Now listen, cut out the drinking, you two. There's a lady staying here in the place tonight, and I don't want her disturbed by you guys getting loud.”

There wasn't a sound. They knew enough not to smirk or say anything out of turn. They must have known him well. They must have known when he wasn't kidding, when a thing was just what he claimed it was.

First you steadied it so that the little arrowhead pointed straight up. Then around
this
way until you came to eleven——

It came open quite easily. Quite easily and quite silently in the slumbering, plushy silence of the apartment.

I shifted the boxed ring out of the way first, over to one side. Then I eased out a metal strongbox that stood at the back, careful not to scrape it against anything. I took it over to the table, tipped up the foresection of the pleated lid. Bonds, whole packets of them. They weren't his; they were registered in the name of Michael J. Dillon. Under them an assortment of legal papers, deeds, or liens, or something; I couldn't make out. I riffed through them rapidly. I didn't want any of them. I closed it up again. There was a smaller fitted-in box in the upper compartment of the safe. I took that out, brought it over in turn.

Currency, tight-packed little bricks of it, taped in strips of manila paper with the amounts or denominations serialized on them, the way banks do. I disregarded them. Under them, sheaves of clipped-together checks, perforation-canceled. I rippled through them, scanning the payees.

Her name suddenly flickered up at me as I went on too far past. I toiled back to it again, retrieved it. “Mia Mercer.” Two hundred and fifty dollars. Salary or something? There was nothing there at sight——

Suddenly I went into reverse, crushed the lid flat on them, started the box hectically back into the safe. I misjudged the upper slot, couldn't slip it in right the first time, had to withdraw it partly and aim it over again.

I was too late.

“Mr. McKee won't like that,” he said in a sort of grieved remonstrance from the doorway.

I'd drawn the door even to the frame, but I hadn't fitted it in tight, to avoid a possible betraying latch click. Now it was wide again. It was the one called Kittens. In a dark flannel robe, fists to pockets.