RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (7 page)

She laughed indulgently. "The party, dear." Noth-- ing could seem to ruffle her tonight.

Oh, God, that party! He shuddered inwardly.

"You weren't very cordial at the end."

"My head," he said. "It's ready to burst."

"Why don't you take an aspirin?" she said.

"An aspirin wouldn't--" he started to say.

She finished it for him before he could. "No, an aspirin wouldn't help, would it?"

He looked at her askance. What did she mean by that? What did she know?

Apparently she didn't mean anything by it, she didn't know anything; it was just his own self-consciousness. She was out of her party gown now and into a silk negligee, placid, untroubled.

Suddenly, he became aware she'd been at the bureau a moment ago, at that same drawer; she'd already quitted it, was coming away, by the time the fact registered on him.

"What'd you want there just now?" he asked her sharply.

"Why, I was putting away something," she said vaguely. She chuckled, as you would at a cross child.

"Can't I even go to my own bureau drawer."

She couldn't have seen the gun was gone. She would have said something about it, and she didn't, not a word.

She didn't even notice the contrasting stripe on his evening trousers, beneath the business-jacket. She was all taken up in herself, in a world of her own; probably reliving and resavoring the party. Women had a habit of doing that, he knew.

He put his hand out to the bedroom doorknob. "I have to get some air," he said. "That's the only thing'll cool off my head."

She didn't oppose him.

"Be sure you take your key, dear," was all she said. "The servants are all dead to the world, poor souls."

"I won't disturb you," he promised sombrely.

She came over to him, quite innocuously. "I'll say good night to you now," she said, and gave him one of their perfunctory cheek-kisses.

He stiffened, too late.

Her fingertips had just lightly strayed past the place where the gun was. So deft were they, he only realized it once it was done and they had gone on by. No pressure, just a surface stroke.

She gave no sign. She must have mistaken it for that bulky cigar case he carried in there sometimes. He looked slyly past her, and saw it lying there as big as life across the room. But she didn't glance over that way.

She went over to her bed and lightly whisked the covers aside. She was smiling, she was charming, she was cool to the last. You would have thought their guests were still present.

She airily touched two fingertips to her own lips, then fluttered them toward him, sending him a final little good-night salutation.

His last glimpse of her, as he closed the door, showed her to him sitting propped against the pillows, about to take up a book and read herself to sheep; a rosy halo from the bedside lamp pinking her face and shoulders; her snowy hair, soft as a young girl's, falling in thick curls below her shoulders.

She looked like an eighteenth-century marquise ready to hold court at a levee in her bedroom.

He went rapidly down their slowly curving stairs (he'd always hated those stairs; they took so long getting you down). A grotesque shadow of himself rippled along beside him over the ivory-pale wall panels, cast from the night lamp left burning in the broad hail below. Like a ghostly adviser spurring him on to evil deeds.

In the hail as he passed, he noted a strange thing, a trifling yet somehow bizarre memento, overlooked from that party, that now seemed to have taken place a thousand years ago. A goblet of flat champagne left standing forgotten on the edge of a table beside the wall, an empty chair drawn up alongside it. It must have been hers, it now occurred to him. That was where she'd been sitting waiting those few moments, in that very chair. And though he could no longer remember seeing her hold or sip a glass of champagne, she must have asked for one or the butler must have offered her one unasked.

Suddenly, in a flash of anger, he went over to it, pitched it shoulder-high in venomous oblation, and downed it, flat as it was. He had just toasted her death with her own drink.

A flicker of chill night air needled the hall, the door clumped shut, and he'd left the house.

He didn't ring, he didn't knock. He didn't have to. He took the key she'd given him, once long ago, and anlocked the door with very little sound.

He took tile key out, went in, and closed the door. With not much more sound than its opening had made.

He knew right where the switch was, knew where to put his hand without even having to look. He snapped it, and thegarish peach ceiling lights she affected went on in a little ringed cluster.

He knew the place so well. Knew everything about it. It had once been like a second home to him. No, once it had been his first home, and the place he had just come from, that had been his second. Funny how you changed.

Every piece of furniture, every object, every chair, had some part in his history. There--that one over there--he'd sat there that night when he'd been a little drunk, back in their early days, and vowed he was never going home to Florence again; he was going to break off clean with her, that very night, that very hour. She'd had to sit beside him on the chair arm, and cajole and talk him out of it, and finally gently disengage the telephone from him, which he'd been holding in his hand then. She'd smoothed his ruffled fur, and winked at him knowingly, and said, "We're doing all right; why go out of our way looking for trouble? Here, have another drink and pretend you're single; it works just as good."

And on election night they'd both put their money there, on top of the radio console. He'd bet the Democrats were coming in, and she'd had to take the Republicans, by default; there wasn't anyone else. But maybe she hadn't been so dumb after all. He'd tried her out, just to see how she'd take it, and she'd been a good sport; hadn't sulked or whimpered, insisted he pocket the whole bet, forced it on him. And tile next day she'd gotten the stone-marten cape, and her whole original stake back along with it. How could she have known it would work out that way? It was like lending someone five hundred dollars (which was originally his, anyway) just overnight, and then the next day being paid a fur coat for interest. Good business.

And on the piano rack, as he passed it, there was a sheet of music open. He glanced at it, and his lip curled as he read the lyric. "Sooner or later you're gonna be coming around--"

Wrong this time; not any more. He clawed at it with one hand, bunched it up into a crumpled ball, and gave it a venomous fling across the room.

The mirrored bedroom door stood half open. He drew it back the rest of the way, and stood there looking in at her. Enough light came through from the blazing livingroom to reveal everything with utter distinctness, just a tracing of azure shadow to tone it down here and there.

She was asleep there in the bed, resting on her side, her back toward him. The sight of her, so oblivious, so unconcerned by what she'd done, began to pump up his rancor again.

The stone-marten cape had been dumped over a chair; it made a tent over it, with the chair back for a tentpole. The white dress had been put onto a hanger, but then instead of being restored to the inside of the closet, the hanger had simply been hooked over the top of the door, and the dress hung there, slipshod, against it.

Her perfume was heavy in the air. She'd once told him the name of it. Styx. (And he'd added an "n" to it, and they'd both laughed.) She hadn't had to tell him the price, he'd seen it on too many a charge account. Those charge accounts that had all been stopped some time ago, before the real pressure and the real blackmail had begun.

He stood looking at her for awhile, nursing his rage.

Then with quiet, cold deliberation he unbuttoned his double-breasted jacket, heavy with gun. He took the jacket off completely, and folded it over lengthwise from the collar down, and placed it that way over a chair back.

Then he went over and latched down the windows tight, so little or no sound--sound to come--should escape from them. Then he came back again to where he'd been, rearward of her undulant back, and unfastened his belt buckle. He drew the belt out in its entirety, and took hold of it by the buckle end, using that for a grip.

He reached down and flipped the lightweight covers off her, with a single billowing wave. Rustling taffeta spread and hissing silk sheet. She lay there now in all her sculptured shapeliness, filmy black open to the waist shadowing her.

He grimaced vengefully and flung the belt up overhead, like a writhing snake caught by the head. This was the way you treated women like her! This was what they deserved! This was what they got! This was the only treatment they understood!

The sound it made coming down was like slow, spaced handclapping. Again, and again, and again; faster, and faster, and faster. Now across her rippling shoulder blades and now across her hips and now across the undersides of her thighs. White rents appeared in the black shadowing, as though it were no more than dust that was being removed here and there with the blows. It billowed out, and rippled, and settled again, with each impact. But that was the only movement. . . .

Suddenly the steaming hate that had misted his eyes cleared enough to let him see that she hadn't screamed, she hadn't jumped, she hadn't rolled away in attempt to escape. And she should have, long moments ago.

He dropped the belt in a looping little puddle. He reached down over the bed and pulled her head around his way, by the hair. It came around too easily, it came around too loose. It came around, and nothing else did. Her neck had been broken.

He had, for the past several moments, been whipping a corpse.

All the way up those deliberately curving stairs now, that shadow pursued him along the wall panels, and he fled away from it. But as the stairs curved, it relentlessly overtook him, then swept around before him, to confront him accusingly as he reached their top. He creased his eyes protectively and warded it off with the flat of one hand; plunged through its blue impalpability and gained the bedroom door and the bedroom beyond. It didn't come in there after him. But it was waiting outside.

He drew a shuddering bowel-deep breath, and turned the key in the bedroom door.

She was, or seemed to be, asleep. The aureole of rosy light was out. Her head though, was little, if any, lower on the pillows than when he'd left her. Her eyes were indisputably closed. The daylight came through the spaces of the Venetian blinds like bars of lead bullion.

He put the gun away, giving careful back-shoulder glances at her. Her eyelids never stirred.

He went into the bathroom, and shook a little, even wept a little, with sheer reflex nervousness. Then he wiped his eyes on a towel, and sat on the edge of the tub for some moments, in a dismayed apathy. At last, still sitting there, he partially undressed; took off his coat, his tie, opened his shirt as far as his belt, but went no further.

Sleep, sleep, he had to get sleep; that was the only way to get away from this, to elude it: sleep. He struck his own head a few times with the heel of his hand, pounded it lightly, as if to settle it for sleep. But sleep couldn't be injected into it in that way. Within was a turmoil of nightmare-wakefulness.

He opened the cabinet and took out the bottle of sleeping pills. He poured two into his hand, then three. Raised his hand halfway, scoop-shaped. Then suddenly flung them from him with a whimpering grimace. That would only lock it up inside his own head, that kind of sleep.

He couldn't go through it alone. Couldn't keep it to himself. He had to talk to someone. He had to talk to her .

They'd come here anyway. And she had to help him.

He went into the bedroom again. The bars of lead bullion had become bars of silver bullion now. Before long they would become gold, but not yet.

Then, before he got to the bed, he saw that she was awake after all. Must have awakened just now.

"Florence--" he said breathlessly. "Florence--"

"There is something you want to tell me?" The intonation of a question mark was so faint it was almost nonexistent. It wasn't a question, it was a declarative statement, but he had no time for nuances of speech.

"I do, I do. Listen carefully."

He sat down beside her on the bed. He got up again. He moved around to its other side. He sat down there. That was the side her heart was on.

"Are you awake enough to understand?"

"Quite enough." There was something clipped about it.

"That woman--" He stopped again, and wondered how to go on. "There was a woman here tonight. I don't know if you noticed her or not--"

She smiled with the faintest shadow of irony. "Let me see. A Hattie Carnegie dress, white, in the hundredand-fifty dollar bracket. But I think it was bought at a discount, after the season was over, and then charged at full price--to someone. Perugia originals on her feet. Probably 5-A's. No more than that. Everything in very good taste, excellent taste, but--" She shook her head and crinkled her nose, "the foundation is cheap, she can't do anything about that, it shows through. Thirty-five in actuality, but could pass for twenty-eight."

"She is twenty-eight," he wanted to blurt out protestingly, but checked himself. Maybe she had been thirtyfive at that, without his knowing it.