The Bride Wore Black

I The Woman

“Julie, my Julie.” It followed the woman down the four flights of the stairwell. It was the softest whisper, the strongest claim, that human lips can utter. It did not make her falter, lose a step. Her face was white when she came out into the daylight, that was all.

The girl waiting by the valise at the street entrance turned and looked at her almost incredulously as she joined her, as though wondering where she had found the fortitude to go through with it. The woman seemed to read her thoughts; she answered the unspoken question, “it was just as hard for me to say goodbye as for them, only I was used to it, they weren’t. I had so many long nights in which to steel myself. They only went through it once; I’ve had to go through it a thousand times.” And without any change of tone, she went on, “I’d better take a taxi. There’s one down there.”

The girl looked at her questioningly as it drew up.

“Yes, you can see me off if you want. To the Grand Central Station, driver.”

She didn’t look back at the house, at the street they were leaving. She didn’t look out at the many other well-remembered streets that followed, that in their aggregate stood for her city, the place where she had always lived.

They had to wait a moment at the ticket window; there was somebody else before them. The girl stood helplessly by at her elbow. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know, even at this very moment. I haven’t thought about it until now.” She opened her handbag, separated the small roll of currency it contained into two unequal parts; retained the smaller in her hand. She moved up before the window, thrust it in.

“How far will this take me, at day-coach rates?”

“Chicago — with ninety cents change.”

“Then give me a one-way ticket.” She turned to the girl beside her. “Now you can go back and tell them that much, at least.”

“I won’t if you don’t want me to, Julie.”

“It doesn’t matter. What difference does the name of a place make when you’re gone beyond recall?”

They sat for a while in the waiting room. Then presently they went below to the lower track level, stood for a moment by the coach doorway.

“We’ll kiss, as former childhood friends should.” Their lips met briefly. “There.”

“Julie, what can I say to you?”

“Just good-by. What else is there to say to anyone ever — in this life?”

“Julie, I only hope I see you someday soon.”

“You never will again.”

The station platform fell behind. The train swept through the long tunnel. Then it emerged into daylight again, to ride an elevated trestle flush with the upper stories of tenements, while the crosswise streets ticked by like picket openings in a fence.

It started to slow again, almost before it had got fully under way. “ ’Twanny-fifth Street,” droned a conductor into the car. The woman who had gone away forever seized her valise, stood up and walked down the aisle as though this were the end of the trip instead of the beginning.

She was standing in the vestibule, in readiness, when it drew up. She got off, walked along the platform to the exit, down the stairs to street level. She bought a paper at the waiting-room newsstand, sat down on one of the benches, opened the paper toward the back, to the classified ads. She furled it to a convenient width, traced a finger down the column under the heading: FURNISHED ROOMS.

The finger stopped almost at random, without much regard for the details offered by what it rested on. She dug her nail into the spongy paper, marking it. She tucked the newspaper under one arm, picked up her valise once more, walked outside to a taxi. “Take me to this address, here,” she said, and showed him the paper.

The landlady at the furnished rooming house stood back, waiting for her verdict, by the open room door.

The woman turned around. “Yes, this will do very nicely. I’ll give you the amount for the first two weeks now.”

The landlady counted it, began to scribble a receipt. “What name, please?” she asked, looking up.

The woman’s eyes flicked past her own valise with the “J.B.” once initialed in gilt still dimly visible midway between the two latches. “Josephine Bailey.”

“Here’s your receipt. Miss Bailey. Now I hope you’re comfortable. The bathroom’s just two doors down the hall on your—”

“Thank you, thank you, I’ll find out.” She closed the door, locked it on the inside. She took off her hat and coat, opened her valise, so recently packed for a trip of fifty blocks — or a lifetime.

There was a small rust-flaked tin medicine cabinet tacked up above the washbowl. She went over to it and opened it, rising on her toes as though in search of something. On the topmost shelf, as she had half hoped, there was a rusted razor blade, left behind by some long-forgotten masculine roomer.

She went back to the valise with it, cut a little oblong around the initials on the lid, peeled off the top layer of the papier-mâché, thus removing them bodily. Then she prodded through the contents of the receptacle, gashing at the stitching of an undergarment, a night robe, a blouse; removing those same two letters that had once stood for her wherever they were to be found.

Her predecessor obliterated, she threw the razor blade into the wastebasket, fastidiously wiped the tips of her fingers.

She found the picture of a man in the flap under the lid of the valise. She took it out and held it before her eyes, gazing at it for a long time. Just a young man, nothing wonderful about him: Not so strikingly handsome; just eyes and mouth and nose as anyone has. She looked at it a long time.

Then she found a folder of matches in her handbag and took the picture over to the washbasin. She touched a lighted match to one comer of it and held it until there was nothing to hold any more.

“Good-by,” she breathed low.

She ran a spurt of water down through the basin and went back to the valise. All that was left now, in the flap under the lid, was a scrap of paper with a penciled name on it. It had taken a long time to get it. The woman looked further, took out four similar scraps.

She brought them all out. She didn’t burn them right away. She played around with them first, as if in idle disinterest. She put them all down on the dresser top, blank sides up. Then she milled them around under her rotating fingertips. Then she picked one up, glanced briefly at the underside of it. Then she gathered them all together once more, burned all five of them alike over the washbowl.

Then she moved over toward the window, stood there looking out, a hand poised at each extremity of the slablike sill, gripping it. She seemed to lean toward the city visible outside, like something imminent, about to happen to it.

II Bliss

The cab drew up short at the entrance of Bliss’ apartment house and threw him forward a little on the seat. The liquor in his stomach sloshed around with the jolt. Not because there was so much in him but because it was so recently absorbed.

He got out, and the top of the door frame knocked his hat askew. He straightened it, fumbled for change, dropped a dime to the sidewalk. He wasn’t helplessly drunk; he never got that way. He knew everything that was said to him and everything he was saying, and he felt just right. Not too little, not too much. And then there was always the thought of Marge — it looked like he was getting someplace there. You didn’t want to drown out a thought like that in liquor.

Charlie, on night door duty, came out behind him while he was paying the driver. Charlie was just a little behind time with his reception ritual, because he’d stayed behind on his bench in the foyer to finish the last paragraph of a sports write-up in a tabloid before coming out. But it was two-thirty in the morning, after all, and no one’s perfect.

Bliss turned and said, “ ’Lo, Charlie.”

Charlie answered, “Morning, Mr. Bliss.” He held the entrance door open for him, and Bliss went inside. Charlie followed, his duties more or less satisfactorily performed. He yawned, and then Bliss caught it from him, without having seen him do it, and yawned, too — a fact that would have interested a metaphysician.

There was a mirror panel on one side of the lobby, and Bliss stepped up, took one of his usual going-in looks at himself. There were two kinds. The “boy-I-feel-swell, I-wonder-what’s-up-tonight” look. That was the going-out look. Then there was the “God-I-feel-terrible, be-glad-to-get-to-bed” look. That was the coming-back look.

Bliss saw a man of twenty-seven with close-cropped sandy hair, looking back at him. So close-cropped it looked silvery at the sides. Brown eyes, spare figure, good height without being too tall about it. A man who knew all about him — Bliss. Not handsome, but then who wanted to be handsome? Even Marge Elliott didn’t care if he was handsome or not. “As long,” as she had put it, “as you’re just Ken.”

He sighed, snapped his thumbnail at the bedraggled white flower that still clung to his lapel button-hole, and it flew to pieces.

Bliss took out a crumpled package of cigarettes, helped himself to one, scanned the neat hole in the upper right-hand corner. He saw that there was one left, offered it to Charlie. “Greater love hath no man,” he remarked.

Charlie took it, perhaps figuring there wasn’t likely to be anyone else coming in after this.

Charlie was big and roundish at the middle. He wasn’t so good at polishing all the way down toward the bottom of the brass stanchions that supported the door canopy, but the middle and upper parts always shone like jewels, and he could handle twice his weight in disorderly drunks. He’d been night doorman in the building ever since Bliss had first moved into it. Bliss liked him. Charlie liked Bliss, too. Bliss gave him two bucks on Christmas and spread another two throughout the year in four-bit pieces. But that wasn’t the reason; Charlie just liked him.

Bliss lit the two of them up. Then he turned and started up the two shallow steps to the self-service elevator. Charlie said, “Oh, I nearly forgot, Mr. Bliss. There was a young lady around to see you tonight.”

“Yeah? What name’d she leave?” Bliss answered indifferently. It hadn’t been Marge, so it really didn’t matter much — any more. He stopped and turned his face only a quarter of the way toward the answer.

“None,” said Charlie. “I couldn’t get her to leave any. I asked her two or three times, but—” He shrugged. “She didn’t seem to want to.”

“All right,” said Bliss. And it was all right.

“She seemed to want to go upstairs and wait for you in the apartment,” Charlie added.

“Oh, no, don’t ever do that,” Bliss said briskly. “Those days are over.”

“I know. No, I wouldn’t, Mr. Bliss, don’t ever worry—” Charlie said with impressive sincerity. Then he added with a somewhat reticent shake of his head, “She sure wanted to bad, though.”

Something about the way he said it aroused Bliss’ curiosity. “Whaddye mean?” He dropped one foot down a step to the lower level again, turned head and shoulders more fully toward Charlie.

“Well, she was standing here with me, a little to one side, over there by the mirror, after I’d already rung your announcer without getting any answer, and she said, ‘Well, could I go up and wait?’

“I said, ‘Well, I dunno. Miss. I’m not supposed to...’ You know, trying to let her down easy. And then she opened this bag, this evening pockybook she was holding on to, and sort of hunted around down in it like she was looking for a lipstick. And right there on top of all her things there was this hundred-dollar bill staring me in the face. Now y’may not want to believe me, Mr. Bliss, but I saw it with my own eyes—”

Bliss chuckled with good-natured derision. “And you think she was trying to offer you that to let her up, is that it? Gawan, Charlie.” He kicked up one elbow scoffingly.

Nothing could lessen Charlie’s pained, round-eyed earnestness. “I know she was for a fact, Mr. Bliss, y’couldn’t miss it, the way she done it. She left the top of the bag wide open and went around under it with her fingers, so’s to be sure not to disturb it. It was spread out flat, see, on top of everything else. Then she looked from it to me, looked me square in the eye — even holding the bag a little ways out from her. Not right at me, y’understand, but just a little ways out, so I’d catch on what she meant. Listen, I been in this business long enough. I know all the signs. I could tell.”

Bliss scratched the corner of his mouth reflectively with the cutting edge of one thumbnail, as if feeling to see if it was still there. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a ten spot, Charlie?”

Charlie’s voice became almost falsetto in its aggrieved insistence. “Mr. Bliss, I seen the two ‘O’s’ in both upper comers of it!”

Bliss worried his lip between the edge of his teeth, pinching it in. “Well, I’ll be damned!” He turned full body toward Charlie at last, as though intending to talk until this thing had been thrashed out to his satisfaction.

Charlie seemed to understand the need for further colloquy between the two of them. He said, “Be right with you, Mr. Bliss,” as the sound of another cab arriving outside reached them. He went out, did his devoir with the doors, returned in the wake of a man and woman in evening garb who must have been very spruce at eight-thirty. All the starch was out of them now.

They nodded slightly to Bliss in passing, and he nodded slightly back to them, with all the awful frigidity of metropolitan neighbors. They stepped into the car and went up.

As soon as the glass porthole in the elevator panel had blacked out, Charlie and he resumed where they had left off. “Well, what’d she look like? Was she anyone you ever saw before? You know most of the crowd I used to have around to see me pretty well.”

“Yes, I do,” Charlie admitted. “And I can’t place her. I’m sure I never seen her before, Mr. Bliss, all I can tell you is she was some looker. Was she some looker!”

“All right, she was some looker,” agreed Bliss, “but like what?”

“Well, she was blond.” Charlie brought his hands into play as the artist in him came to the fore. He outlined — presumably — masses of luxuriant hair. “But this real blond, y’know this real yella-blonde? Not this phony, washed-out, silvery kind they make it. This real blond.”

“This real blond,” Bliss confirmed patiently.

“And... and blue eyes; y’know, the kind that are always laughing, even when they’re not? And about this high — her chin came up to this second chevron here, on me sleeve, see? And... er... not too fat, but y’wouldn’t call her skinny, either; just a right armful—”

Bliss was eying the far side of the foyer ceiling as the description unfolded. “No,” he kept saying, “no,” as if going over the records to himself. “The closest I can come to it is Helen Raymond, but—”

“No, I, ’member Miss Raymond,” Charlie said firmly. “It wasn’t her; I got a cab for her many a time.” Then he said, “Anyway, y’know how I’m pretty sure you don’t know her? Because she didn’t know you herself.”

“What?” said Bliss, “Then what the hell did she want coming around asking for me, trying to get into my place?”

Charlie was still a lap behind him in the circles they seemed to be making. “She didn’t know you worth a damn,” he repeated with heavy emphasis. “I tried her out, on the way up—”

“Oh, so then you were going to let her up. That must have been a hundred, after all.”

Charlie cleared his throat deprecatingly, realizing he had made a faux pas. “No, Mr. Bliss, no,” he protested soulfully. “Now, you know me better than that; I wasn’t. But I did start up on the car with her, acting like I was going to. I thought maybe that’d be the quickest way of getting rid of her, pretend like I was going to and then at the last minute—”

“Yeah, I know,” said Bliss dryly.

“Well, we started up in the car together, to the fourth. And on the way I remembered that robbery we had here in the building last year, y’know, and I figured I better not take any chances. So I started to reel her out a fake description of you, just the opposite of your real one, to try her out. I said, ‘He’s red-headed, ain’t he, and pretty tall, just a little bit under six feet? I’m kind of new on the job here. I wanna make sure I got him placed right, there are so many tenants in the building.’ She fell for it like a ton of bricks. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, ‘that’s him.’ Kind of quickly, to keep me from catching on that was the first time she heard what you looked like herself.”

“Well, I’ll be a—” Bliss said. He went ahead and said what it was he would be.

“So, of course, that was enough for me,” Charlie assured him virtuously. “That finished it. When I heard that I said to myself, ‘Nothing doing. Not on my shift, y’don’t!’ But I didn’t say anything to her, because — well, she was dressed pretty swell and all that, not the kind it pays to get tough with. So I let her down easy, tried the wrong key to your door and when it wouldn’t work pretended I didn’t have no other and couldn’t let her in. We went downstairs again, and she just kind of shrugged it off, like if she hadn’t gotten in that time, it didn’t matter because she was going to sooner or later. She smiled and said, ‘Some other time, then,’ and started off down the street, just the way she came walking. It was funny, too, dressed up the way she was. I watched her as far as the corner, and I didn’t see her call no cab or nothing, just walked along like it was ten in the morning. Then she turned the comer and disappeared. O’Connor, the cop, he passed her coming up this way, and I even seen him turn and look after her. She sure was a looker.”

“Just a ship that passes in the night,” remarked Bliss. “Well, one sure thing, it was some kind of stall. If I didn’t know her — and I don’t, from your description — and she didn’t know me, what was it all about? What the hell was she after? Maybe she had me mixed up with somebody else.”

“No, she had your name right, even your first name. ‘Mr. Ken Bliss,’ she asked for when she first come in.”

“And she didn’t drive up, either, you say?”

“No, just came walking along from nowhere, then went walking away again just like she came. Funniest thing I ever seen.”

They talked it over a few moments longer, man to man, with the typical freemasonry of two-thirty in the morning. “Aw, you run into a lot of funny things like that from time to time, livin’ in a big city like this. You’re bound to. I know, Mr. Bliss, I seen enough of them myself, in my line of work. Nuts that think they know you, and nuts that think they love you, and nuts that think you done something to them. You’d be surprised what bugs and mental cases there are walking around loose—”

“So now maybe I’ve got one of ’em fastened on me. That’s a cheerful thought to take up to bed,” Bliss grimaced.

He turned away, readied the elevator panel. He flashed Charlie a mock-apprehensive backward grin just before it closed on him. “It’s getting so a young guy ain’t safe any more living by himself. I think I’ll get myself married off and get hold of some protection!”

But the thought that he took up with him was of Marjorie — not of anyone else.

Corey showed up at his door at eight-thirty, long before he’d even begun to get ready, the night of Marjorie’s engagement party. “What the hell,” Bliss said with the pretended disgruntlement one shows only a close friend, “I only just got back from eating; I haven’t even shaved yet.”

“I called y’at the office at four-thirty. Where the hell were you?” Corey barked back at him with equally familiar brusqueness.

He came in and appropriated the best chair, swung one leg up over its arm. He got rid of his hat by aiming it at the windowsill. It missed but stayed on a low book rack underneath.

Corey wasn’t a bad-looking sort of fellow, without being decorative about it. Taller than Bliss, a little leaner — or maybe just seeming so because he was taller — and with dark brown hair and heavy brows. He tried to be man-about-townish in an Esquire sort of way, but it was just a veneer; you could tell he was a primitive underneath that. Every once in a while a crack would show, and you’d get a startling glimpse of jungle through it. Veneer or not, he worked hard at it. Any party you ever went to he was there, holding up a door frame, hand-warming a glass. Any girl you ever mentioned him to, she knew him, too — or had a friend who did. His technique was a head-on attack, a Blitzkrieg, and it had succeeded in the unlikeliest quarters. Some of the haughtiest, most unbending shoulders in town had been pinned to the mat, if the truth had only been known.

He started rubbing his hands with a fine show of malicious glee. “Well, tonight you get hooked! Tonight you get branded! Feel like running out yet? You bet you do! You’re all white around the gills—”

“Think I’m like you?”

Corey trip-hammered a thumb against his own chest. “You should be like me. This is one guy they don’t pin down to a formal promise!”

“If you’d bathed oftener, maybe you’d get more offers,” Bliss grunted disparagingly.

“And make them have a hard time finding me when the lights go out? That wouldn’t be fair. So where were you this afternoon? I wanted to eat with you.”

“I was out getting the headlight. Where d’you suppose—” He opened a dresser drawer, took out a little cubed box, snapped the lid. “What d’you think of it?”

Corey took it out of the plush, breathed on it admiringly. “Say, is that a rock!”

“It ought to be. It threw me pul-lenty.” Bliss pitched it back in the drawer with an air of indifference that was admirably assumed, started unhitching his suspenders. “I’m going in and take a shower. You know where the Scotch is.”

He came in again in something under twenty minutes, complete down to bat-wing tie. “Who was the dame?” Corey asked idly, looking up from a newspaper.

“What dame?”

“The phone rang just now while you were in there, and some girl asked for you. I could tell it wasn’t one of your old pals by the way she spoke. ‘Does Mr. Kenneth Bliss live there?’ I told her you were busy and asked if there was anything I could do. Not another word, just hung up.”

“Strange.”

Corey swiveled his drink. “Maybe it was one of these women society reporters looking for stuff on your engagement.”

“No, they usually tackle the girl end of it. Marjorie’s people have already given out all the dope there is, anyway. I wonder if it was her?” he said after a moment’s thought.

“Who’s her?”

Bliss grinned. “I haven’t told you, but I think I’ve got a secret admirer. Funny thing happened not long ago. One night when I was out a beautiful girl tried her level best to get into the apartment here. The doorman told me about it afterward. She wouldn’t give her name or anything. He knows most of the crowd I used to hang out with — you know how doormen get after a while — and he was pretty sure he’d never seen her before. She was all togged out in evening clothes, looked like real carriage trade to his practiced eye. But she didn’t drive up to the door, that was the strangest part of it; just came strolling along the street from nowhere, dressed to kill like that.

“He told me she opened her bag, pretending to hunt for a lipstick or something, and let him get a good look at a hundred-dollar bill floating around on top of everything else. And the way she acted gave him a pretty good idea it would have been his for the asking if he’d just opened my door with his passkey and let her in.”

Corey looked skeptical. “You mean a doorman is going to turn down a chance to make a hundred dollars that easy? He’s bulling you.”

“I don’t know about that. The amount is so fantastic in itself that, to me at any rate, it bears the earmark of truth. If he was just making the thing up, he would have been more likely to make it ten or twenty dollars.”

“Well, what’d he do — let her in?”

“I could tell by the way he spoke that the hundred darned near got him; he was just on the point of bringing her up and letting her in. Only he thought he’d better try her out first, see if she really knew me, before he went ahead and admitted her. So he strung her along with a fake description that was just the opposite of mine in every respect, and she fell for it, said yes, that was the man — proving she’d never seen me before in her life.

“That finished it, of course; he was afraid to take a chance after that. He pretended he didn’t have the key or something and eased her out as tactfully as he could. She was too well dressed for him to get snotty with. When she saw it was no go, she just smiled, shrugged and went sauntering down the street again.”

Corey was leaning interestedly forward by this time. “And are you sure you don’t recognize her from his description?”

“Dead sure. And as I just told you, she didn’t recognize me, either.”

“I wonder what she was after?”

“She wasn’t out to clean the apartment, that’s a cinch, because she was willing to pay a hundred dollars just for the privilege of getting in here, and anyone who can get a hundred dollars’ worth out of this place is a magician.”

Corey nodded judicious agreement on that point.

Bliss stood up. “Let’s go.” He smiled nervously. “I like everything about marriage except the functions leading up to it — such as tonight’s.”

“The part I like best,” said Corey, “is not having it happen in the first place.”

They were out in the public hall waiting for the self-service car when a thin, querulous ringing piped up behind a closed door somewhere near by.

Bliss cocked an experienced ear. “Key of G flat. That’s mine. I’d better hop in and take it a minute; it may be Marge.”

He went back to the door, fumbled in his pocket for his key, dropped it, had to stoop to get it. Corey stuck his foot out to hold the car up for them. “Hurry up before somebody gets it away from us,” he urged.

Bliss pitched the door open. The thin wail rose to a full-toned peal, then perversely stopped short and didn’t resume. He backed out again, pulled the door shut after him. “Too late, they’ve quit trying.”

Riding down in the elevator, Corey suggested, “Maybe it was that same mystery dame again.”

“If it was,” Bliss grunted, “whatever it is she wants, she sure wants bad.”

Alone there with Marge, in a little alcove away from the rest of the party, he scratched the back of his neck in pretended perplexity. “Let’s see now, how does this go? I’ve seen enough movies, I ought to have the hang of it. Well, let’s give it the old shut-eye treatment, that’s the safest. Shut your eyes and stick out your finger.”

She promptly hooked her thumb toward him.

He slapped it out of the way. “Not that one. Help a fellow out. I’m so nervous I could—”

“Oh, wrong finger? You should be more specific. How’d I know but what you wanted to bite it or something?”

And then the ring. Their heads drew together, looking down at it; they made a love knot of their four hands. They made nonsensical purrings and cooings and other noises that to them were probably language. Suddenly both became aware of eyes regarding them steadfastly, and they turned their heads in unison toward the doorway. A girl was outlined in it, as motionless as though she had taken root in the floor.

She was in tiered, wide-spreading black, the creamy whiteness of her shoulders rising out of it without any interrupting straps. A gossamer black wimple twinkling with jet was drawn over hair so incredibly yellow it seemed to have been powdered with cornmeal.

A dimple of sympathy — or possibly derision — at the comer of her mouth had disappeared before they could confirm it. “Pardon me,” she said quietly, and moved on.

“What a striking girl!” Marjorie exclaimed involuntarily, continuing to stare at the empty doorway as though hypnotized.

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know. I think I remember her coming in along with Fred Sterling and his party, but if I was introduced, it didn’t take.”

They looked down at the ring once more. But the spell had been broken, their mood was gone, they couldn’t seem to get it back. The room didn’t feel quite as warm as it had. As though that look from the doorway had chilled it.

She shivered, said, “Come on, let’s get back to the others.”

The party was in the homestretch now, and they were dancing, he and she. Those little sketchy turns and fake half steps that are just an excuse to cover up a private conversation.

He said, “Well, let’s take the apartment on Eighty-fourth Street, then. After all, if he’ll give it to us for five dollars less a month like he said... And with the furniture they’re going to give us, we can fix it up to look like something—”

She said: “That girl in black can’t take her eyes off you. Every time I look over there she’s staring at you for all she’s worth. If it was any night but tonight, I might begin to get worried.”

He turned his head. “She isn’t looking at me.”

“She was until I called your attention to it.”

“Who is she, anyway?”

She shrugged. “I thought all along she came with Fred Sterling and his bunch. You know how he always shows up anywhere with a whole posse. But he left quite some time ago and now I see she’s still here. Maybe she decided to stay on alone. Whoever she is, I like the way she handles herself. None of this cheap dazzle stuff. I’ve been watching, she’s had her troubles all evening long, poor thing. Every time she tries to sneak out on the terrace alone, three or four of the men mistake it for a come-on and make a beeline after her. Then a minute later she’ll come in again, usually by the side door, still alone. What she does to get rid of them that fast I don’t know, but she must have it down to a science. They they’ll come slinking in again themselves right afterward, one by one, with that foolish look men have when they’ve been stymied. It’s a regular sideshow.”

She touched her hand lightly to his lapel as a signal; they stopped on the half turn.

“Some more people are leaving. I’ll have to see them off. Be right back, darling. Miss me while I’m gone.”

He watched her go, standing there like a flagpole on which the flag has suddenly been run down. When the light blue gown had whisked from sight at one end of the room, he turned and went out the other way, onto the terrace for a breath of air. He felt a little sticky under the collar; dancing always made him warm, anyway.

The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. He lit the after-the-dance, whiie-waiting-for-her-to-come-back cigarette. He felt good, looking down at the town that had nearly had him licked once. “I’m all set now,” he thought. “I’m young. I’ve got love, I’ve got a clear track. The rest is a cinch.”

The terrace ran along the entire front of the apartment. At one end it made a turn around to the side of the penthouse superstructure, and the moon couldn’t follow it. It was dark there. There were no floor-length windows, either, just an infrequently used side door whose solid composition blacked out light.

He drifted around the turn, because there was another couple on the other way and he didn’t want to crowd them. He stood in the exact right angle formed by the two directions of the ledge, and now he had two views instead of one.

And then suddenly — she must have slipped unnoticed out through the side door and come along from that direction toward him — that ubiquitous girl in black was standing there a foot or two away from him, looking out into the distance, the same way he was. She was weirdly like a white marble bust floating in the air without any pedestal, for the black of her dress was swallowed up in the blackness of the trough they both stood in.

“Swell, isn’t it?” he suggested. After all, they were at the same party together.

She didn’t seem to want to talk about that, so maybe it wasn’t so swell to her.

At that instant Corey came along, conquest bound. He’d evidently had his eye on her for some time past, but the wheel of opportunity had only now spun his way. Bliss’ presence didn’t deter him in the least. “You go inside,” he ordered arbitrarily. “Don’t be a hog, you’re engaged.”

The girl said in quick interruption: “Do you want to be a dear?”

“Sure I want to be a dear.”

“Then get me a big tinkly highball.”

He thumbed Bliss. “He does that better than I do.”

“It would taste better coming from you.” It was primitive, but it worked.

Corey came back with it. She accepted it from him, held it out above the coping, slowly tilted it until the glass was bottom up and empty. Then she gravely handed it back. “Now go in and get me another.”

Corey got the point. It would have been hard to miss it. The suave man-about-town glaze shattered momentarily and one of those aforementioned glimpses of jungle showed through the rent. Not travelogue jungle, either. A flash of white coursed over his face, lingering longest around his mouth in a sort of bloodless pucker. He stepped in and went for her neck with both hands, in businesslike silence.

“Whoa — easy,” Bliss moved quickly, blocked them off before they could get to her, deflected them up into the air. By the time they came down again, Corey already had them under control. He bunched them in his pockets, perhaps to make sure of keeping them that way. Vocal resentment came belatedly, after the physical had already been reined in.

“Any twist that thinks she can make a monkey outta me...!” He turned around and strode back from where he’d come.

Bliss turned to follow. After all, what was she to him?

Her hand flashed out, pinned him at her side. “Don’t go. I want to talk to you.” It dropped away again as soon as she saw that she had gained her point.

He waited, listening.

“You don’t know me, do you?”

“I’ve been trying to find out who you are all evening.” He hadn’t; he’d paid her less attention than any man there. It was the gallant thing to say, that was all.

“You saw me once before, but you don’t remember. But I do. You were in a car with four others—”

“I’ve been in a car with four others lots of times, so many times I really can’t—”

“Its license number was D3827.”

“I’ve got a rotten head for figures.”

“It was kept in a garage up on Exterior Avenue in the Bronx. And it was never called for afterward. Isn’t that strange? It must still be there, rusted away—”

“I don’t remember any of that,” he said, baffled. “But say, who are you, anyway? There’s something electrifying about you—”

“Too much can cause a short circuit.” She moved a step or two away as though she had lost interest in him as unaccountably as she had developed it. She lifted the jet-spangled scarf from her head, held it spun out in a straight line before, her hands far apart, let the breeze flutter it forward.

Suddenly she gave a little exclamation. It was gone. Her hands still measured off its length. An aerial wire, invisible against the night, came down diagonally right there where she was, riveted to the facade below the ledge by a little porcelain insulation knob. She flashed him a look of half-comic surprise, then bent over, peering down.

“There it is, right there! It’s caught on that little round white thing—” She plunged one arm down, probing into space. A moment later she had straightened again with a frustrated smile. “It’s just an inch away from my fingers. Maybe you’d have better luck; you probably have a longer reach.”

He got up on the coping, squatting on both heels. He cupped one hand to its inner edge, as a brake to keep from going over too far. His head turned away from her, searching for it.

She stepped forward behind him, palms out-turned as if in sanctimonious negation, then recoiled again as quickly. The slight impact forced a hissing breath from her, a sound that was explanation, malediction and expiation all in one.

“Mrs. Nick Killeen!”

He must have heard it. It must have been a spark in his darkening mind for a moment that went out as he went out.

The ledge was empty. She and the night had it to themselves. Through the terrace windows, around the turn, the radio was pulsing to a rumba and voices were laughing. One, louder than the others, exclaimed, “Keep it up, you’ve got it now!”

Marjorie accosted her on her way in a moment later. “I’m looking for my fiancé—” She used the word with proud possessiveness, touching her ring with unconscious ostentation as she did so. “Is he out there, do you know?”

The girl in black smiled courteously. “He was, the last time I saw him.” She moved on down the long room, briskly yet not too hurriedly, drawing more than one pair of admiring masculine eyes after her as she went.

The maid and butler were no longer on duty in the cloakroom adjoining the front door, came back only as they were summoned. Just as the front door was closing unobtrusively, without their having been disturbed, the house telephone connected with the downstairs entrance began to ring. It went on unanswered for a few moments.

Marjorie came inside again from the terrace, remarking to those nearest her, “That’s strange. He doesn’t seem to be out there.”

Her mother, who had finally been compelled to attend to the neglected telephone in person, screamed harrowingly from somewhere out near the entrance, just once. The party had come to an end.

III Post-Mortem on Bliss

Lew Wanger left the cab with its door teetering open and elbowed his way through the small knot of muted onlookers who had collected about it. “What is it?” he asked the cop, showing him something from a vest pocket.

“Cash in.” The patrolman pointed almost vertically. “From up there to down here.”

Somebody’s midnight edition of tomorrow morning’s paper had been requisitioned, expanded with its component leaves spread end to end and formed into a mound along the ground. One foot, in a patent-leather evening oxford, stuck out at one corner.

“I understand they’re having a blowout up there. Probably had a drink too many, leaned too far over and lost his balance.” He tipped a section of the news sheet back, for Wanger’s benefit.

One of the spectators, who hadn’t been expecting this and was standing too close, turned his head aside, cupped a precautionary hand to his mouth and backed out in a hurry.

“Well, what’d y’expect, violets?” the cop called after him antagonistically.

Wanger squatted down on his heels and began to knead at a rigidly contracted fist that was showing at the upper right-hand corner of the mound. He finally extracted what looked like a swirl of frozen black smoke.

“Dame’s handkerchief,” supplied the cop.

“Scarf,” corrected Wanger. “Too big for a handkerchief.”

He looked down again at the shrouded body.

“I know him by sight,” the night doorman of the building supplied. “I think they were announcing his engagement to their daughter tonight, up at the Elliotts’. That’s the penthouse—”

“Well, I’d better get up there and get it over with,” Wanger sighed. “Just routine; probably won’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes at the most.”

At daybreak he was still hammering at the disheveled, exhausted guests ranged before him. “And do you mean to say there’s not one of you here even knew this girl’s name or had never seen her before tonight?” All heads kept shaking dully.

“Didn’t anyone ask her name? What kind of people are you, anyway?”

“We all did at one time or another,” a dejected man said. “She wouldn’t give it. Passed it off each time with some crack like ‘What’s in a name?’ ”

“O.K., then she was a gate-crasher, pure and simple. Now what I want to find out is why, what her motive was.” Marjorie’s mother came back into the room at this point, and he turned to her. “How about it, any valuables missing, anything stolen from the apartment?”

“No,” she sobbed, “not a thing’s been touched. I just got through checking up.”

“Then robbery wasn’t the motive for the intrusion. She seems to have avoided and discouraged all the rest of you young fellows all evening long, according to what you say; singled Bliss out as soon as there was a chance of getting him alone. Yet according to what you say” — he turned to Corey — “he didn’t seem to recognize her from the description passed on to him by the doorman at his own flat. And when he arrived here and finally saw her, he acted as though she was a perfect stranger to him. That is, assuming it was the same girl.

“That’s about all there is to be done up here for the present. Has anyone anything to add to this description you’ve given me of her?”

No one had; she had been seen by so many people, it was exhaustive in itself. As the guests filed mournfully out one by one, giving their names and addresses in case they should be wanted for further questioning, Corey edged up to Wanger. He was full of drink and cold sober at the same time. “I was his best friend,” he said huskily, “How do you see it? What do you figure it for?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Wanger answered as he prepared to leave, “not that you’re entitled to be taken into my confidence any more than anyone else. There isn’t anything to show that it wasn’t an accident — but one thing. The fact that she cleared out of here so fast right after it happened, instead of staying to face the music like all the rest of you. Another very incriminating piece of behavior is that when she met Miss Elliott in the doorway and the latter asked her if she’d seen him, she calmly answered that he was out there, instead of screaming blue murder that he’d just gone over, which was the normal thing to do. There’s always a possibility, of course, that he didn’t go over until after she’d already left him and gone inside. But what argues against that is that he took that black scarf of hers down with him. That makes it look very much as though she was still with him at the actual instant it happened. Yet she could have dropped it or even given it to him to hold for her, then gone in.

“You see, the thing is fifty-fifty so far; everything you can bring to bear on one side balances nicely with something you can bring to bear on the other. What’ll finally tip the scales one way or the other, as far as I’m concerned, is her ultimate behavior. If she comes forward within a day or two to identify or clear herself, as soon as she hears we’re looking for her, the chances are it’ll turn out to have been an accident and she ran out simply to escape the notoriety, knowing she had no right up here. If she remains hidden and we have to go out hunting for her, I think we can say murder and not be very far from right.”

He pocketed the description and other data he’d taken down. “We’ll get her, either way, don’t worry.”

But they didn’t.

Evening Accessories Department, Bonwit Teller Department Store, fifteen days later:

“Yes, this is our twelve-dollar wimple. The only place it could have been purchased is here; it’s a special with us.”

“All right, now call your sales staff in here. I want to find out if any of them remembers selling one to a woman whose description follows—”

And when they’d assembled and he’d repeated it three times over, a mousy little person with glasses stepped forward. “I...I remember selling one of these numbers in black, to a beautiful girl answering that description, a little over two weeks ago.”

“Good! Dig up the sales slip. I want the address it was sent to.”

Fifteen minutes later: “The customer paid cash and took it with her; no name or address was given.”

“Is that the customary way you make these sales?”

“No, they’re a luxury item; they’re usually delivered. In this case it was at the customer’s special request that she took it right along with her, I remember that.”

Wanger (under his breath): “To cover her tracks.”

Wanger’s report to his superior, three weeks later:

“...And not a trace of her since. Not a sign to show who she was, where she came from, where she went. Nor why she did it — if she did it. I’ve investigated Bliss’ past exhaustively, checked back almost to the first girl he ever kissed, and she doesn’t appear anywhere in it. The testimony of the doorman at his flat, and of his friend Corey, seems to show that he did not know this girl, whoever she was. Yet she deliberately discouraged and shunned everyone else at this party, until she had maneuvered to get him alone out on that terrace. So mistaken identity won’t jibe, either.

“In short, the only indication it was not an accident is the strange behavior of this mystery woman and her subsequent disappearance and refusal to come forward and clear up the matter. On the other hand, other than the above, there is no positive indication it was murder, either.”

Wanger’s record on Ken Bliss:

Met death in fall from seventeenth-floor terrace, 4:30 A.M., May 20. Last seen with woman, about twenty-six, fair skin, yellow hair, blue eyes, five feet five inches. Identity unknown. Wanted for questioning.

Motive: uncertain if crime was committed, but, if so, probably passional or jealousy. No record of former relationship.

Witnesses: none.

Evidence: Black evening scarf, purchased Bonwit Teller’s, May 19.

Case Unsolved.