The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich Page A

she didn’t know about it. I just watched her windows from across the street in the shadows, in the rain and in the snow——”
    I kept drawing that imaginary line over and over. His eyes were on my finger now, hypnotized.
    â€œAnd then when they went away I’d go away—kind of happy—because she was by herself again.”
    â€œThey?” I breathed, scarcely stirring my lips.
    â€œWhoever it was. I couldn’t see him; I was never near enough. But you could tell by the way the lights would go out, and then a little while later somebody would come out of the doorway.”
    â€œAnd then you’d go away happy.”
    â€œI had her back again.”
    He stopped. I kept tracing that line, as though I were slowly drawing something invisible out of him. “Only mostly,” he resumed abruptly, “they didn’t come out again. I had to go away first. The cops would make me. And that hurt.” He pushed in the side of his stomach. “The smoke would take care of that, though.”
    â€œAnd murder?” I thought.
    I couldn’t talk to him any more there. The stuff was too fresh in him. I’d made a good beginning. But I had to get him back on my plane again, where I could gauge his reactions better.
    I said, “Marty, I want to do something for you. Would you like to sleep in a bed tonight and not just in a doorway or on a bench?”
    He looked at me and said, with a pathos that was wholly without artifice, “Some people do, don’t they?”
    â€œYou can, too, tonight. Would you like to, Marty? If I buy you a bed in a room all to yourself, will you promise me not to drink until—until I come down and see you tomorrow?”
    He was able to walk without any noticeable convolutions. He’d learned how to; he’d had so much practice at it. By keeping his feet close to the ground, scarcely lifting them at all, he was able to make his way along, both straight and fairly steadily, at a sort of hangdog shuffle, head and shoulders bowed somewhat forward; that was all.
    I took his arm. We must have made a strange-looking couple, leaving that place. A woman and a dead man.
    I appealed to the barman on the way out. “I want to take him someplace to sleep where—where he’ll stay put until tomorrow morning.”
    He didn’t make the mistake of misinterpreting, at least; but then, sizing the two of us up side by side, how could anyone have very well?
    â€œTry the Commerce, over on Broome Street,” he said. He let a little spurt of beer into a glass, added something to it I wasn’t quick enough to identify, and swished it around surreptitiously. “Here, give him this to drink a minute first.”
    In the place on Broome Street I paid a dollar for a room for him and then went upstairs with him, at least as far as the door. I told him to take off his things and get some sleep and waited outside in the hall for a few minutes. Then I sent the boy in, quietly, and had him bring out his shoes to me. They were almost unidentifiable: shapeless slate crusts. I had him take them down below with us and wrap them in a bit of paper and told him to hold them there. Not to give them back to him under any circumstances, even if he should try to claim them before I could get down there.
    â€œI must find him here when I come back tomorrow, and without any liquor in him.”
    â€œI don’t know,” the man behind the desk said doubtfully. “I’ve seen some of them that wouldn’t let a little thing like bare feet stop them.”
    â€œThen if he tries to get out tell him that the room hasn’t been paid for and he’ll have to wait for me to come down and bail him out. Whatever you do, keep him here.”
    I went uptown again, back to the other world. I lay there all night long without sleeping, thinking about it, thinking it out, thinking it over.
    Had he done it? Hadn’t he? That fanged, hideous grin