The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich Page B

he’d given at one time. Why, that had been almost a replica of the death grimace I’d seen on her own face that day in the apartment. Was that the brand of murder, the symbol of it, transferred to his own countenance from hers? No, that was metaphysical nonsense.
    He was her husband. He’d been mad about her in the colloquial sense first. And now he was mad about her in the literal sense. Set out a chair, a drink, for her each time he sat down himself. They called him Heartbreak down there in the nether world. There’d been a line drawn through his name in her book, and he’d waited outside in the rain, in the snow, watching her windows, to claim her back again each time somebody left. Until one day, that day—hadn’t it occurred to him there was a better way of claiming her forever, with never another vigil necessary, with never another dispute about his title to her?
    It must have been that way. It was as plain as this hand that I held out before my face in the blue pallor of the early dawn.
    â€œMarty, I know what you did to Mia.” Suddenly, like that, in the middle of something else. No, that was no good. He’d deny it; that was only to be expected, even from someone in his condition. But what was the best I could hope to get, even if it were true and I’d hit the nail on the head? A frightened, furtive flash across his face. Why, for that matter, even if it weren’t true I might produce the same thing simply by the mere fact of making the accusation at all. No, I had to have more than that to go to Flood with.
    I already had for him a splendid motive, an exquisite motive. I already had for him an incriminating vigil outside her windows that the police had never brought to light or even suspected so far. Now all I needed, I felt, was a guilt reaction of one sort or another from the suspect himself, but a substantial one, one that would hold water, something more than just a frightened look or a stammered denial; given that, and I had enough to go to them with, they could go on from there.
    Suddenly, in that clarity which sometimes precedes sleep, I thought of another way of eliciting this reaction I was after, a way preferable and more reliable than a mere verbal trap. The accusation or denial must come from him, naturally, but it must be unforced, unsuggested; he must not realize that he was presenting it. Then it would be valid; then it would be substantial enough to hand over to Flood.
    I would accuse somebody else and watch and see what he did.
    And on that note my eyes finally dropped closed, their linings carmine against the rising sun.
    I carried the wrapped shoes up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, and for a moment I got frightened and thought I’d lost him all over again. But I remembered there was no fire escape outside the window, they’d told me. I opened the door and looked in.
    He was there. He was dressed. He was sitting on the bed with an inert sort of resignation, his hands dangling down between his legs. I closed the door after me and put the shoes down next to him on the floor and then stood there looking at him a moment. He looked at me in turn.
    â€œThen there was someone like you sitting talking to me last night,” he said finally.
    â€œYes, there was. How’d you sleep?”
    He looked back at the mattress, as though to inquire of it rather than of himself. “I don’t know,” he said lukewarmly. “I’m sort of used to angles, like benches give you. I kept missing them.”
    â€œYou better put those on.”
    He didn’t ask me what I’d wanted of them; he didn’t seem interested. “I wondered what become of them,” he said indifferently.
    I looked at him closely. I was seeing him for the first time in the daylight now. And although I was there to kill him myself, the full impact of what she’d done to him only came to me now as I got this better look at him. She’d