The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich Read Free Book Online Page B

carried the other, the special, the dressy one. I’d forgotten I owned it. I hadn’t used it since. That had been the last time clothes, accessories, meant anything to me. I’d been down to elementals from then on.
    So I got it out and looked in that. And at the first touch of my fingers, as I unsheathed the mirror, turquoise flashed up at me like a patch on the black lining.
    I opened it at the M page. My fingers had stopped being steady any more. I thought: “Someone in this book killed her. The name is in this book. On this very page I’m holding open here. It’s looking right at me, staring me in the face. And I’m looking at it. But I can’t tell which one it is.”
    Marty ……… Crescent 6–4824
    Mordaunt ……… Atwater 8–7457
    Mason ……… Butterfield 9–8019
    McKee ……… Columbus 4–0011
    â€œI’m looking at it,” my mind repeated, “and I can’t tell which one it is.”
    But I was going to find out.
    I didn’t even know his first name, or rating, or which precinct house he was attached to. So if there’d been more than one of them by that last name I might have got hold of the wrong one. In fact, I didn’t know anything about him. Only that he’d been a little less brutal, a little more human, that night that they’d brought Kirk back to the apartment. And I had to have someone to turn to; I couldn’t go the thing alone.
    So I walked into the precinct house that was the nearest to where she had lived and I asked for him. “Is there a Flood here?”
    â€œWesley Flood, on Homicide, that who you want?”
    â€œI—I guess so.”
    â€œName, please?”
    â€œJust say a young lady.”
    They showed me into some room at the back, and he saw me in there. It was he. He couldn’t place me for a minute, I could tell. Then he remembered. “You’re Murray’s wife; that’s it!”
    I told him wanly, yes, that was it.
    He looked me over surreptitiously, I guess to see how I was taking it, standing up under it. I caught a flicker of sympathy in his eyes, though I suppose he didn’t realize it showed. I really didn’t want that; I wanted advice and coaching.
    I told him what I’d found at the Mercer apartment. I told him what I thought it meant and what I intended doing about it.
    He heard me through. Just sat and listened attentively. There was no mistaking his expression, though. Finally I had to say, “You still don’t think I was up there that day, do you?”
    â€œPossibly you were——”
    â€œWell, here’s the book. Look, right here. Her book.”
    He leafed it, tapped it a couple of times against his thumbnail, handed it back. His attitude was unmistakable: it was over; it was water under the bridge. Whether I had been up there or not didn’t matter any longer. Hadn’t in the first place. The case was closed.
    He tried to talk me out of it at first. “Look, even taking your point of view, even granting that Murray—that your husband—isn’t guilty and that there’s someone else still at large who is, don’t you see you may be starting from a wrong premise altogether in basing something on this book and on that match cover you say you saw? There’s no hard-and-fast rule that the name of everyone she knew had to go into that book. It could work the other way around, couldn’t it? Those she knew well, those she knew best, mightn’t be in it at all. She’d be so familiar with their numbers she’d know them by heart, wouldn’t have had to write them down. Only those she knew less well would be in the book.”
    I thought of Kirk’s name. She’d known him well enough to try to vamp him into going away with her, and his name was in the book. I didn’t tell him that; there was still an ache in that old wound.
    â€œThere have been