The Bride Wore Black

I The Woman

Miriam — last name long forgotten within the confines of the Helena Hotel — was a short pugnacious person the color of old leather. She had three things she clung to tenaciously; her British citizenship — which had been passively acquired through the accident of birth on the island of Jamaica; a pair of gold-coin earrings; and her “system” of doing rooms. No one had ever made the slightest attempt to interfere with the first two, and the few abortive efforts at tampering with the latter had met with resounding failure.

Numerical progression of the rooms had nothing to do with it. Nor had their location along the dim, creaky, varileveled corridors. In fact, it was a sort of mystic algebra known only to the innermost workings of her mind. No one could disturb it — not with impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long malevolent tirade, down endless reaches of labyrinthine corridor, that went on — or seemed to — for hours afterward, long after the original cause of it had slunk away, frustrated.

“The fo’teen come after the seventeen. It got to wait tell I finish the seventeen. I ain’t never yet do fo’teen first.”

Nor did this precedence have anything to do with gratuities, which were in any case an almost nonexistent factor at the Helena. Habit, perhaps, would be the closest guess to what after all was a purely emotional state of mind on Miriam’s part.

The wheel of the “system” having finally, at the appointed hour and fraction thereof of the day, swung around to “the nineteen,” Miriam advanced down a particularly moldering length of corridor far toward the back, tin bucket in one hand, long pole in the other, at the working end of which could still be detected stray wisps of fibrous fuzz.

She halted before “the nineteen,” reversed her key and sounded it twice against the woodwork. This was a mere formality, since she would have been as highly outraged at finding “the nineteen” in as at having her “system” interfered with. “The nineteen” had never been in at this hour yet. “The nineteen” had no right to be in at this hour.

Nor was the formality of the key tap due to scrupulous observance of hotel regulations, either. It was reflex action. She could no longer enter a door without doing it. Inevitably, on returning home to her own furnished room at the end of the day, she gave that same triphammer tap on the panel before inserting her own private key into the lock.

She threw open the door challengingly and advanced into a small and singularly unprepossessing room. The pattern of the carpet had been ground into oblivion. A sort of gray green fungus was all that now covered the floorboards. A whitewashed-brick wall blocked the eye a few feet outside the window. Through this a shaft of sunlight struggled downward at an angle that was enough to break its back. The room would have been better off without it, if only to preserve an illusion of cleanliness, for it was fuming like a Seidlitz powder with masses of dust particles.

On the wall above the bed was ranged an array of girls’ photographs of varying sizes, all mounted, framed and glassed over. Miriam did not even deign to raise her eyes to these. Most of them had been up for years. The one “nineteen” was going with now would never get up there, she opined, because she couldn’t afford to have a picture taken and he couldn’t afford to have it mounted, framed and glassed over. And there wasn’t any more room left on that side, anyway. He was too old now to begin a new side. And if he wasn’t, he ought to be. Which disposed of that matter.

The bed made, with frenziedly swirling effects on the dust motes in the sunbeam, Miriam narrowed the room door considerably but without closing it altogether. There was nothing furtive about the way she did this; there was rather an injured defiance. She even put this into words, aloud, it was felt so keenly. “Hidin’ it all the time. Always hidin’ it. Who he think going to take it anyway? Who he think want it?”

She gave her mouth a preparatory drying — or perhaps it was a whetting — along the back of her hand. She opened the closet door, stooped, disrupted a cairn of soiled shirts on the floor in one corner of it, brought up a bottle of gin like someone lifting a rabbit out of a hole.

She displayed no satisfaction at the sight of it, only moral indignation. “Who he think come in here, anyway, but me? He know ain’t nobody come in here but me! Suspicionin’ people that way!”

She tilted the bottle, lowered it again. Then she came out with it, advanced to the washbasin, turned on the cold-water tap. With a dexterity that bespoke long practice she switched the open bottle mouth under it and out again, just enough to restore the contents to their former level, no more. This was not so difficult as it appeared. There were mistrustful pencil gauge marks plainly visible on two of the four corners of the frosted glass to guide her. She corrected a slight discrepancy she had been guilty of in favor of the bottle, by means of her mouth. She was heaving with a sense almost of persecution by now. “Ole miser! Stingy ole thing!” she glowered with Antillean passion and a slight accompanying tinkle from the gold-coin earrings. “One thing I don’t like is people mistrustin’ me!”

She returned the bottle to its bourn, closed the closet, restored the room door to its former width and entered upon the second stage of her duties, which consisted in thrusting the staff with the errant fuzz at random places along the base of the walls, like someone spearing salmon from a rock in midstream.

It was while she was engaged in this slightly puzzling maneuver that she became aware of being observed. She turned her head and there was a lady standing out there in the hallway, looking through the open doorway. Miriam knew at a single glance that she did not live in the hotel, and she rose accordingly in Miriam’s esteem. Her low regard for and truculence toward those who did was matched only by her high regard for and willingness to be affable to those who didn’t. A blanket order, both ways.

“Yes, ma’am?” she said with cordial interest. “You lookin’ for Mist’ Mitchell?”

The lady was so friendly and so soft-spoken. “No,” she smiled. “I just happened to drop in to see a friend of mine, and she’s not in. I was on my way back to the elevator, and I’m afraid I became a little confused—”

Miriam rested on her mop handle like a Venetian gondolier at ease and hoped the lady wouldn’t go right away.

She didn’t. She advanced an unnoticeable step nearer the threshold but still remained well outside the confines of the room proper. She gave the impression of an overpowering interest in Miriam and her conversation.

Miriam visibly preened herself standing there in the sulfurous sun shaft, wriggled almost ecstatically around the mop pole.

“You know,” the lady confided with an enchanting woman-to-woman intimacy of manner, “I always think you can tell so much about a person just by looking at the room they live in.”

“Yes, indeed, you sho’ right about that,” Miriam agreed heartily.

“Just take this one here — as long as you happen to be in it tidying it up and I happen to be on my way past the door. Now, I don’t know a thing about the person living in it—”

“Mist’ Mitchell?” prompted Miriam, almost mesmerically engrossed by now. Her chin had come to rest on the rounded point of the mop handle.

The lady made a careless gesture of one hand. “Mitchell or whatever the name may be — I don’t know him and I’ve never seen him. But just let me tell you what his room shows me — and you correct me if I’m wrong.”

Miriam squirmed her shoulders with anticipatory delight. “Go ‘head,” she encouraged breathlessly. This was nearly as exciting as having your palm read by a fortuneteller, free of charge.

“He’s not very tidy. That necktie twisted around the light fixture—”

“He’s a slob,” confirmed Miriam pugnaciously.

“He’s not very well off. But of course the hotel itself would tell me that; it’s not very expensive—”

“He’s been a month and a half behind in his rent fo’ eight years straight!” divulged Miriam darkly.

The lady paused — not like one who is trying to put one over on you, but like one who wants to weigh her words carefully before committing herself. “He doesn’t work,” she said finally. “There’s an early edition of today’s paper standing on end in the wastebasket. I can see it from here. He evidently gets up around noon, reads for a while before going out for the rest of the day—”

Miriam nodded enthralled, unable to take her eyes off this apparition of wit, wisdom and graciousness. The mop handle could have been snatched away from under her and she probably would have retained her half-inclined position unaltered, without noticing it. “He shiftless, all right. He live on some kind of a sojer pension come in each month, I dunno what it is.” She shook her head reverently. “Gee, you sho good.”

“He’s lonely, hasn’t many friends.” Her eyes went up to the wall. “All those pictures up there, they’re a sign of loneliness, not popularity. If he had many friends, he wouldn’t have to bother with pictures.”

Miriam had never thought of it in this light before. In fact, if the pictures had meant anything at all to her — which they hadn’t for years past now — they had stood for a certain nastiness of mind on their owner’s part, a gloating over his misdeeds. In the beginning she had even expressed this aloud once or twice, at sight of them. To wit: “Dirty ole thing!”

“Even,” the lady went on, “if he actually knew all those girls well — which he probably didn’t — he knew them only one at a time, not all in a group. There are the ear puffs of right after the war and the Japanese-doll bob of the early twenties and the flat, shoulder-length hair of a few years ago—”

Miriam had swiveled her head, was looking around and up at the wall behind her; the rounded point of the mop handle now rested just above one ear. She even scratched her head by moving it slightly back and forth in this position.

“He’s never actually found the girl he’s looking for; there wouldn’t be so many of them up there if he had. There wouldn’t be any of them up there if he had. But they—” She tapped the rim of one of her lower teeth reflectively. “Blend them all together, into one composite picture, and they try to tell you what he has been looking for.”

“Blame!” marveled Miriam, who apparently hadn’t even known he had been looking for anything. Or at least, not something that you discussed in polite company.

“He’s been looking for mystery. An illusion. A type of girl who is not to be found anywhere in this world. Who does not exist outside his own imagination. A rootless creature floating detachedly above the everyday world, with no points of contact. An odalisque. A Mata Hari.”

“Who?” queried Miriam alertly, swinging her head around.

“Just look at them up there. Not one of them as she really is — or was, rather. Soft-focused in tulle, haloed in photographic mist, peering through a lace fan, ogling the camera in reverse through a mirror, biting a rose—” She smiled a little, not altogether unkindly. “A man and his dreams.”

“I ’spect he never goin’ get one like he really wants her,” suggested Miriam.

“You never can tell,” the lady in the doorway smiled. “You never can tell.”

Then she deferred to Miriam with an enchanting, quizzical little quirk of her head. “Tell the truth now, haven’t I been right more than I’ve been wrong?”

“You been right all the way!” Miriam championed her stoutly.

“You see? That’s what I mean. It just goes to show you what an empty room can tell you.”

“Don’ it though! It sho do.”

“Well, I mustn’t keep you from your work any longer.” She gave a chummy little flurry of her fingers, an extra-warm smile of parting, and moved on her way.

Miriam sighed regretfully as the doorway showed blank. She let the mop staff stagger against the wall, went over to the entry and stood in it, watching her down the hall and around the turn. Then that showed blank, too.

She sighed again, more disconsolately than ever. What an enjoyable conversation! What an instructive, entertaining one! What a shame it had to be over so soon, couldn’t have kept on a little longer! Just until she finished one more room, for instance.

The elevator door clashed faintly, out of sight around the turn there, and she was gone for good now. Miriam moved unwillingly back into the room to her uncompleted task.

“She sho was nice,” she murmured wistfully. “I bet she don’ ever come back again, either.”

II Mitchell

Mitchell came into the shabby lobby of his hotel at his usual time, folded paper under his arm. He stopped at the desk to see if there was any mail. He got that special look from the clerk, reserved for those who are chronically a month and a half behind in their room rent. He got three letters.

The first was a note from Maybelle, his blond friend from the restaurant. The second was a mistake, belonged in the pigeonhole above. The third one was either a circular or a bill, he could tell right away by looking at it. The address was typed, and the envelope bore no return address. He didn’t open it right away, for that reason. He could scent bills and advertisements a mile away.

He went upstairs, closed the door and looked around the room. He’d been living here twelve years. The room had acquired facets of his personality in that time. There were framed photographs of girls galore all over the walls. A regular gallery. It wasn’t that he was a roué; he was a romanticist. He’d kept looking for his ideal. He’d wanted her to be glamorous, mysterious. Masks and fans and secret rendezvouses and that sort of stuff. And all he’d ever got was waitresses from Childs and salesgirls from Hearn’s. Pretty soon it would be too late to find. Her any more; pretty soon it wouldn’t matter.

He hung up his coat, with the third letter making a white scar above its side pocket. He got out the gin bottle from underneath his dirty shirts on the floor at the back of the closet, where the maid couldn’t get at it. He allowed himself only two fingers every evening, parceled out each bottle so that it lasted two weeks. He shot the pickup bodily into the back of his mouth, without putting lips to the jigger glass at all.

Here it was night again, and nothing wonderful, nothing glamorous was ever going to happen to him. Just cheapness. A cheap hotel room, a chap man in his shirt sleeves, cheap gin, cheap regrets. He supposed he might as well call up Maybelle now as later and get it over with. He knew he was going to in the end, anyway. It was a case of Maybelle or nothing. But he knew just what she’d say, just what she’d wear, just what she’d think. Beer and liverwurst.

He picked up the phone and gave the number of her rooming house. Then he always had to wait while her landlady yelled all the way up the stairwell to the fourth floor for her to come down. He’d done it so often he knew just how long to allow for it. He left the phone and went over to his coat to get out a cigarette. He saw that third, unopened envelope in his side pocket. He pulled it out, tore it open.

A crimson ticket fell out. There was nothing else in the envelope. “Elgin Theater. Loge A-1. Good only Tuesday evening.” That was tonight. “$3.30” it said in the corner. It couldn’t be good; it must be some kind of dummy. He turned it over and over and over, but there was no catch on it anywhere, no additional payment to be made. It was authentic. Who had sent him such a thing?

The phone was making rasping metallic noises. He went back to it. “She’ll be right down,” Maybelle’s landlady was saying, against background noises of clump, clump, clump. She always came down with her shoes left open and flapping.

“Sorry,” he said firmly, “I got the wrong number,” and hung up.

He started to get ready. It rang back when he was at the hair-smoothing stage. It was Maybelle. “Mitch, was that you just called me here?”

“No,” he lied remorselessly.

“Well, am I gonna see you tonight?”

“Gee, no,” he whined falsely. “I’m laid up in bed with a touch of grippe.”

“Well, should I stop over and keep you company?”

“No, don’t do that,” he said hastily. “You might catch it from me and lose a week’s wages.” He hung up before she could bedevil him with any further unwanted kindnesses.

He was almost sure, when he got down to the Elgin and presented it at the door, that the ticket chopper was going to turn him down. Instead, he accepted it, even passed him in with an extra touch of deference because it was a loge seat.

Then it was good, there could be no further doubt of it. But who had sent it to him? Would the person be up there in the loge when he got there? Suppose there was more than one; how would he know which one it was?

There wasn’t anybody in the loge at all, he discovered to his secret disappointment when the usher had led him to it. Each loge was fitted with four chairs, walled off from its neighbors on either side and from the balcony behind it. There was more privacy to be obtained in them than in any other part of the house, even the boxes.

He felt funny sitting there alone with the three vacant chairs around him, kept looking around to see if anyone was coming. Even kept half expecting to be tapped on the shoulder by the usher and told a mistake had been made and he’d have to leave, there was someone else downstairs at the box office claiming his ticket. But nothing like that happened. All the other loges gradually filled up, but no one came near this center one, which was the choicest of the lot. At overture time, when the house lights went down and plunged the audience into blue twilight, its three remaining chairs were still unspoken for, almost as though they had been bought up ahead of time to make sure they would remain unoccupied.

The play began, and as its glamour and make-believe unfolded before him, little by little he began to forget the strange circumstances that had brought him here, to lose himself in its spell. Then suddenly — at exactly what point during the first act she’d arrived he did not know — there was someone already sitting there next to him. There hadn’t even been a flick of the usher’s flashlight or a rustle of garments to warn him. Or if there had, he’d missed them.

No one ever came to claim those two other chairs just in back of them. He never saw any more of the show than just that first half of the first act. He couldn’t take his eyes off her from then on. She was beautiful; gee, she was beautiful! She was red haired and had a face like a cameo. She had a dark velvet wrap around her, lighter on the inside, and she seemed to rise out of its folds like a — like a nymph out of a seashell.

He would never have dared to speak to her, but suddenly she had turned to him, was holding a cigarette to her lips, waiting for a light. “Would you mind?” she said, with just a trace of foreign accent. “One is allowed to smoke in these loges, I believe.”

And that was the start of the acquaintanceship.

He had everything in readiness long before she could be expected to come. He still couldn’t believe she’d meant it, that she was really coming here to see him. It had been her own suggestion, he would never have dreamed of— He had told her how to reach the room without having to pass through the inquisitive lobby downstairs, by the service stairs at the back of the house that only old-timers like him knew about. And yet, with all that, she had managed to convey, tactfully and deftly, that this wasn’t to be an affair. Certainly it wasn’t; you don’t have an affair with your ideal. You worship her.

He stood back, looking the place over for the tenth time. All those girls’ pictures that he’d taken down from the walls had left yellowed stains behind them from being up so long. What did he want those counterfeits for, now that he’d found the real thing at last? He’d got hold of a screen and put it around the bed. He couldn’t do much else for the room; it still remained a shabby $8-a-week cubbyhole.

He rubbed his hands nervously. He looked in the mirror again to see how the new necktie looked on him.

The phone rang, and he almost tripped all over himself trying to get to it fast enough. Wasn’t she coming? Had she changed her mind? Then he slumped disappointedly, with a wearied grimace. It was only Maybelle.

“How’s your grippe? I been worried about you all day, Mitch. Look, I snitched some of the rest’runt’s chicken broth that goes with our special dolla’ dinna’, I’m gonna bring it over in a container, it’s the best thing for you when you’re laid up like that—”

He writhed agonizedly. God, tonight of all nights! “I thought you had the night shift Wednesday nights,” he snarled ungraciously.

“I changed places with one of the other girls so I could come over and take care of you.”

“No, some other time, I can’t see you tonight—”

She was starting to snivel at the other end of the line. “All right for you! You’ll be sorry!”

He hung up heartlessly just as the delicate tap he’d been waiting to hear sounded on the room door.

He opened the door and Romance came in, just as he’d always daydreamed it would, someday, somewhere. She was muffled in that same velvet cape she’d worn at the theater.

He didn’t know what to say or how to act; he’d never been with an Ideal before. “Did you find those stairs all right? I... maybe I should have gone down and met you at the comer.”

He turned on the radio, but it was a sports commentary, so he turned it right off again.

She brought a bottle of something out from under the folds of her cape. Yet she could even make that act, which would have seemed unspeakably shoddy if committed by anyone like Maybelle, appear gracious and intriguing. “This is for us,” she said. “Arak. I brought it as my contribution to our evening.” It hadn’t been opened yet, foil still sealed its neck, and he had to pull up the cork with a screw.

It was heady stuff, but it made you see the world through rose-colored glasses. It took away his tongue-tiedness, made him speak without difficulty and say the things that came to his mind. “You’re just like I always dreamed of someone being, almost as though you came out of my own head.”

“The really clever woman is all things to all men. Like the chameleon, she takes her coloring from his ideal of her. It is her job to find out what that is. Those pictures on the wall, they told so plainly what you had looked for in women—”

He nearly dropped the glass he was holding, stared at her wide-eyed. “How did you know there were pictures on the wall? Have you ever been in this room before?”

She drank a sip of liquor, coughed very slightly. “No,” she said. “But it is easy to see from the stains that there were pictures there. And anyone who does that is a romantic and romanticizes women.”

“Oh,” he said, and took up his glass again. His perceptions were already a little dulled. He was too happy to be captious. “It’s funny—”

“What is?”

“Just by being here, you change this mangy room into something warm and glamorous. You take away twenty years and make me feel — like I useta feel walking down the bullyvards on leave under a tin hat, and around every corner I was sure I’d find...”

“What?”

“I don’t know, something wonderful. I never did, but it didn’t matter, because there was always another corner. It was the feeling that mattered. It made your footsteps sing. I’ve always wanted it back again, but I was never able to get it any more after that. You must be magic.”

“Black or white?”

He smiled vacantly. He evidently didn’t get the allusion.

“I’ll have to go now.” She stood up, crossed over to the dresser. “One more drink before I do. I think there’s enough in it for one more.” She held up the bottle, eyed it against the light. They had been using the bureau top for a serving table. She filled the two glasses, then interrupted herself, letting them stand there on it a moment, a considerable distance apart. “I must make myself beautiful — for your last look at me,” she smiled across her shoulder.

A little metal powder holder flashed open in her hand. She leaned across the bureau top toward the mirror. She made little flurried motions that bespoke the will rather than the deed, for the vast majority of them failed to come anywhere near the surface of her nose. She was really powdering the air between it and the mirror.

He sat there, smiling over at her in hazy benevolence.

Her nose didn’t grow any noticeably whiter — but then maybe that was the whole art of powdering it, so that it wouldn’t show. A grain or two of white had fallen on the dark-wood surface of the dresser. She bent down toward them, the epitome of neatness. Her breath stirred them off into oblivion.

She picked up the glasses and went back to him.

He looked up at her with an almost doglike devotion. “I can’t believe all this is really happening to me. That you’re really here. That you’re bending over me like this, handing me a glass. That your breath is stirring my hair. That there’s just a little sweetness, like one carnation in a whole room, in the air around me—”

He’d put his glass down meanwhile, and so had she, as if in some kind of obligatory accompaniment.

“When you go outside the door, I’ll know it wasn’t true. I’ll dream about you tonight, and in the morning I won’t know which was the dream and which was the real part. I don’t already.”

“Drink.” And then as he reached for the wrong one, “No, that one’s yours, over there. And you forgetting?” she said with unexpected sharpness.

“To what—?”

“To the coming dream. May it be a long and pleasant one.”

He hitched his glass. “To the coming dream.”

She eyed it as he set it down again half-drained. “This isn’t our first meeting,” she remarked thoughtfully.

“No, last night at the theater—”

“Not there, either. You saw me once before. On the steps of a church. Do you remember?”

“On the steps of a church?” His head lolled idiotically; he straightened it with an effort. “What were you doing there?”

“Getting married. Now do you remember?”

Absently, absorbed in what she was saying, he finished what was in his glass. “Was I at the wedding?”

“Ah, yes, you were at the wedding — very much so.” She got up abruptly, snapped the switch of the midget radio. “We’ll have a little music at this point.”

A gutteral, malevolent trombone seemed to snarl into the air about them. She began to pivot about him, turning faster and faster, skirt expanding about her knees.

He backed his hand to his forehead. “I can’t see you so clearly — what’s happening — are the lights flickering?”

Faster and faster went the solo dance, the dance of triumph and obsequy. “The lights are still, it’s you that is flickering.”

His glass fell, crashed on the floor. He started to writhe, clutch at himself. “My chest — it’s being torn apart^ Get help, a doctor—”

“No doctor could reach here in time.” She was like a spinning top now, seeming to recede down the long vista of the walls. His dimming eyes could see her as a blur of brightness; then, like white metal cooling, little by little she seemed to go out forever in the dark.

He was on the floor now at her feet, moaning out along the carpet in a foaming expiration: “...only wanted to make you happy...”

From far away a voice whispered mockingly, “You have... you have...” Then trailed off into silence.

She backed the room door after her, about to close it inextricably into the frame, then froze to statuesque stillness, holding it ajar that fraction of an inch that meant reentry could be gained at her volition.

They looked at each other, a foot apart. Maybelle was blond and buxom and blowsy, and holding a cylinder of some sort done up untidily in brown paper. The woman in the velvet cape, flung around her in a sort of jaunty defiance that somehow suggested a toreador, eyed her calculatingly, watchfully.

The other spoke first, pouting with overreddened, full-blown lips. “I brought this over to Mitch. If he doesn’t want to see me, he doesn’t have to; I understand now. But tell him—”

“Yes?”

“Tell him I said he should drink it while it’s still hot.”

The woman in the cape glanced over her shoulder at the hairbreadth crack of door, too narrow to permit vision. “They saw you come in just now, downstairs?”

“Yes, sure.”

“They saw you carrying that soup?”

“Yes, sure.”

How easy to have inveigled her into the room. She had moved the screen out and around his body, concealing it, when the first warning knock at the door had come. How easy, in the moment or two before this stupid heifer discovered him, to have silenced her forever, with the same glass he had just drunk from. Or to have left her there, involved, too stupid ever to clear herself.

She turned back to her. The door clicked definitely shut behind her. “Get down there where you come from, get away from here fast.” It wasn’t said in menace, but in whispered warning.

Maybelle just opened China-blue eyes and stared at her stupidly.

“Quick! Every minute that you spend up here alone will count against you. Be sure you take that container down with you again, unopened. Let them know you couldn’t get in — gather people around you, protect yourself!” She gave the slow-thinking lummox a push that started her involuntarily down the corridor toward the front of the building. From the turn at the end of it the blonde looked back dazedly. “But wha-what’s wrong? What happened?”

“Your friend is dead in there and I killed him. I’m only trying to save you from becoming involved yourself, you fool. I have nothing against — other women.”

But Maybelle hadn’t waited to hear the last. She emitted a series of noises like a nail scratching glass, fled from view with a great surging wallow.

The woman in the velvet cape moved swiftly, but with a neat economy of movement that robbed her going of all semblance of flight, to the hinged service door at the other end of the corridor, giving onto the unguarded back stairs.

III Post-Mortem on Mitchell

Wanger’s superior didn’t put him on it until nearly a week after it had happened. A man named Cleary had been working on it in the meantime and getting exactly nowhere.

“Say, listen, Wanger, there’s a peculiar case over at the Helena Hotel. I’ve just been reading the reports sent in on it, and it occurred to me it has certain features in common with that Bliss incident — remember that, six months or so ago? At first glance they’re not at all alike. There’s no doubt about this one, it’s an out-and-out murder. But what gave me the notion was they both feature a woman who seems to have gone up in smoke immediately afterward, for all the trace we’ve ever been able to find of her. Also a complete lack of discoverable motive. Neither of which is exactly usual in our line. That’s why I thought it’d be a good idea to have Cleary run through it for you, give you his findings; you talk to some of the people he’s lined up. You see, you’re familiar with that Bliss affair, he’s not; you’re in a better position to judge. If you think you detect any connection, no matter how slight, let me know, I’ll assign you to it full-time.”

Cleary said, “Here’s what I’ve gotten so far, after seven days on it. It all stacks up very nicely, but it has no meaning. It’s as irrational as the act of a feminine homicidal maniac, but I have definite proof that she is nothing of the sort, as you’ll be able to judge for yourself later, when you hear it. Now, he died from a pinch or two of cyanide potassium introduced into a glass of arak—”

“Yes, I read that in the examiner’s report.”

“Here are transcriptions of the witnesses’ statements. You can read them over later, I’ll give you the gist of them now, as I go along. First of all, I found a red theater-ticket stub — you know, the remainder that’s returned to the customer to hold after it’s chopped at the door — in the lining of one of his pockets. I traced it back and here’s the story: two nights before his death a very beautiful red-haired woman stepped up to the box office at the Elgin Theater and said she wanted to buy an entire loge outright. The ticket seller asked her what night she wanted it for, and she said that didn’t matter, any night. What did matter was that she wanted to be sure of getting the entire loge. That was unusual for two reasons: with most customers the date is the important thing; they take the best they can get on the particular date they want. Secondly, the number of seats didn’t seem to concern her, either; she didn’t ask whether she was getting three, four or five. All she wanted was the entire loge for her own. He gave her the four seats for the first night they were available, which happened to be the very next night. Naturally the incident impressed him.

“Two of them were never used. Mitchell was seen by the theater staff to show up alone on that particular night and turn in one ticket. The same woman who had originally bought them also showed up alone, but a considerable time later, long after the curtain had gone up.”

“Only one person is in a position to state for a fact that she was the same woman who bought them,” Wanger warned him.

“The ticket seller; and that’s his affidavit you have under your thumb there. He’d shuttered his box office for the night and happened to be standing watching the show from the mezzanine stairs; she passed him on her way up — alone — and he recognized her beyond any possibility of doubt.

“Now we come to the important part of the whole thing. I’ve questioned the usher on loge duty. What he tells me convinces me they were utter strangers to each other. He paid particular attention to the act of seating her for several reasons. He has fewer people to seat than the orchestra or balcony ushers. She came in unusually late and so stood out. She was strikingly beautiful and came alone, which seemed to him to be unusual.

“He watched closely, if not altogether intentionally, for the above reasons, as she settled herself in her seat. Neither one turned to greet the other. Neither one spoke or even nodded. He remained within earshot long enough to be sure of that. He’s positive; by everything he’s ever learned in all his years of theater ushering, that they were complete strangers.

“And that cinches it, to my mind. If they hadn’t been, Mitchell would have waited for her down in the lobby instead of going up ahead. Any man would have, even the crudest.

“It was only during the intermission that the usher noticed they’d begun to talk to each other. And then it was in that diffident way of two people who are just becoming acquainted.”

“In other words, it was a pickup.”

“If they were strangers, how’d she get his ticket to him? She bought them, he showed up with one of them.”

“Anonymously, through the mail. I found the envelope, also, in one of the pockets. The ticket was a vivid crimson. There’s a faint pinkish discoloration visible on the inside of the envelope; somebody with sweaty hands, either at the post office or downstairs at the hotel desk — or, maybe Mitchell himself — handled it, dampened the dye a little. This is it here.

“She was only seen one more time after that. Then she vanished completely. I haven’t been able to get a line on her since then. The night of the murder she wasn’t seen entering or leaving the hotel. However, that isn’t quite as confounding as it sounds, because there’s a service stairs at the back that leads directly out into an alley without passing the lobby. The alley door works on a spring lock, can’t be opened from the outside, but it could very easily have been left ajar to admit her. These precautions must have been her own suggestion, since she evidently came prepared to kill Mitchell.”

“Then who was it saw her that one more time you just mentioned, after the theater episode?”

“The girl he was keeping steady company with, a waitress named Maybelle Hodges. She called at the room within a few moments after the time established for his death by the medical examination. When she knocked on the door, this woman came out. She’d been in there.”

“What did the woman say to her?”

“She admitted she’d killed him, and advised the girl to go downstairs again, get away before she became involved herself.”

Wanger felt his chin dubiously. “Do you think that statement’s trustworthy?”

“Yes, because the girl’s description of the woman, both as to appearance and the clothes she was wearing, tallies completely with that given me by the theater staff, so you see she couldn’t very well have made the story up. And that brings up a point I mentioned before. She’s not a homicidal maniac by any means; she had a beautiful opportunity to kill the Hodges girl then and there. All she had to do was admit her to the room — there was a screen around his body. She had plenty of time. Instead she warned the girl off, for the girl’s own sake.

“There’s the whole thing. More material than we need, in one way. But the keystone that would give it a meaning is missing; no motive.”

“No conceivable motive, and they didn’t know each other, and she vanishes as completely as a streak of lightning after it’s struck once,” Wanger summed up, baffled. “Well, he sent me over here to see if I could make anything out of it. I’m only sure of one thing: this case strings along with the Bliss one; it’s an accurate copy.”

Colored chambermaid, fourth floor, Helena Hotel:

“I never seen her before, so I knew for a fact she didn’t live in the hotel. I thought maybe she was visitin’ somebody. She was just passin’ by the hall that day. This was about, um, two weeks before it happened. Maybe mo’. She stopped and looked in the open door while I’m cleanin’ his room, I said, ‘Yes’m, you lookin’ for Mr. Mitchell?’ She said, ‘No, but I always think you can learn so much about a pusson’s character and habits just by lookin’ at their rooms.’ She talk so polite and refine’ it’s a pleasure to hear her. She look at the girls’ pictures he have all over the wall and she say, ‘He likes women to be mysterious, I can tell by them. Not one is an honest everyday pitcher of how those girls really look. They all tryin’ to look like somethin’ else, for his sake. Bitin’ roses and starin’ through lace fans. If one if ’em gave him her pitcher like she really was, he most likely wouldn’t put it up.”

“That’s all. And then before I knowed it, she gone away again, and I never seen her no mo’ after that.”

Clerk at Globe Liquor Store:

“Yes, I remember selling this. A thing as unusual as arak we don’t sell more than a bottle a year. No, it was not her suggestion. I happened to come across it on the shelf and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get it off our hands, as long as she’d asked for something unusual and at the same time potent. She said she was making a present of it to a friend, and the more exotic it was the better pleased he would be. I’d already shown her vodka and aquavit. She decided on arak. She admitted she’d never sampled any of it herself. One funny thing: on her way out she gave me a peculiar smile and said, ‘I find myself doing so many things these days that I’ve never done before.’

“No, not at all nervous. As a matter of fact she deliberately stood aside and told me to go ahead and wait on a man who wanted a bottle of rye in a hurry, while she was making up her mind. She said she wanted to take her time making a selection.”

Wanger’s superior said a week later: “So you think the two cases are related in some way, do you?”

“I do.”

“Well, in just what way?”

“Only in this way: the same unknown woman is involved in both.”

“Oh, no, there’s where you’re wrong, it couldn’t possibly be,” his chief overrode him, semaphoring with both hands. “I’ll admit I had some vague notion along those lines myself when I spoke to you last week. But that won’t stand up, man, it won’t wash at all! Since then I’ve had time to look over the composite description Cleary obtained of her and sent in. That knocks it completely on the head. Take the Bliss one out of the files a minute, bring it in here... Now just look at the two of them. Put them side by side a minute.

There’s not even a similar modus operandi involved, or anything like it! One pushed a young broker’s clerk off a terrace. The other dropped cyanide into the drink of a seedy ne’er-do-well in a mangy hotel. As far as we know, the two men not only did not know the women who brought about their deaths but had never heard of each other. No, Wanger, I think it’s two entirely different cases—”

“Linked by the same murderess,” Wanger insisted, unconvinced. “With these two diametrically opposite descriptions staring me in the face, I’ll grant you it’s like flying in the face of Providence to dispute. Just the same, all those physical differences don’t mean much. Just break them down a minute, and look how easy it is to get the smallest common denominator.

“Blonde and redhead: any little chorus girl will tell you how transitory that distinction can be.

“Five feet five and five seven: if one wore a pair of extra-high heels and one wore flat heels, that could still be the same girl.

“Fresh and sallow complexions: a dusting of powder takes care of that.

“The difference in eye coloring can be an optical illusion created by the application of eye shadow.

“The seeming difference in age is another variable, likewise dependent on externals such as costume and manner.

“And what else is left? An accent? I can talk with an accent myself, if I feel like it.

“A point to remember is that no single person who saw one of these women saw the other. We have a complete set of witnesses on each of them separately. We have no single witness on the two of them at one time. There’s no chance of getting a comparison. You say there’s no similarity in modus operandi, but there is in every way. It’s just the method of commission that was different; you’re letting that mislead you. Notice these ‘two’ unknown women involved. Both have a brilliant, almost uncanny faculty for disappearing immediately afterward. It amounts almost to genius. Both stalk their victims ahead of time, evidently trying to get a line on their background and habits. One appeared at Bliss’ flat while he was out, the other cased Mitchell’s room — also while he was out. If that isn’t modus operandi, what is? I tell you it’s the same woman in both cases.”

“What’s her motive then?” his superior argued. “Not robbery. Mitchell was a month and a half behind in his room rent. She bought out an entire loge at $3.30 a seat, and threw two of the seats away just to be sure of getting to meet him under favorable circumstances. Revenge would be perfect, but — he didn’t know her and she didn’t know him. We not only can’t fit a motive to it, but we can’t even apply the explanation that usually goes with lack of motive. She’s not a homicidal maniac, either. She had a beautiful opportunity to kill the Hodges girl — and the Hodges girl is the juicy, beefy, lamebrain type that’s almost irresistible to a congenital murderer. Instead she passed it up, warned the girl off for the girl’s own sake.”

“The motive lies back in the past, way back in the past,” Wanger insisted obdurately.

“You sifted through Bliss’ past — broke it down almost day by day — and couldn’t find one anywhere.”

“I must have missed it then. I’m to blame, not it. It was there, I didn’t see it.”

“We’re up against something here. D’you realize that even if these two men were still alive they themselves couldn’t throw any light on who she is, what she did it for — because they didn’t know her themselves, seem never to have seen her before?”

“That’s a thought to cheer one up,” said Wanger glumly. “I can’t promise you to solve this, even though you’ve turned it over to me. All I can promise is not to quit trying until I do.”

Wanger’s record on Mitchell (five months later):

Evidence: 1 envelope, typed on sample machine on display at typewriter salesroom, without knowledge of personnel.

1 arak bottle, purchased Globe Liquor Store.

1 ticket stub, Loge A-1, Elgin Theater.

Case Unsolved.