The bride wore black (16 page)

He followed her even in there after a decent interval of ten minutes or so. There was no impropriety in it, the room was open to the party now.

She began busily tapping at her nose with a puff" before the mirror the instant that she saw him nearing the outside of the doorway. Until then

He came up behind her. She saw him in the glass but didn't seem to. Standing at her shoulder he placed his hands one at each side of her face, as if trying to obliterate the dark luxuriant masses of hair that framed it.

She stood motionless under the ministration, without breathing. "WhatYe you doing that for?" She didn't pretend to misunderstand it as a caress.

He sighed and his hands fell away. He hadn't been able to cover her entire head with them after all.

She turned partly aside from him, folded her arms, chafed their upper parts uncomfortably, bent her head downward. It was a pose strangely suggestive of peni-

tence. She wasn't thinking in terms of penitence. She was seeing in her mind's eye a sharp Httle paint-scraping knife of Ferguson's that was somewhere about the place. She was seeing in her mind's eye the masses of people there were in the adjoining room. Perhaps, too, the diagonal line of escape that led from this dressing room to the outside studio door.

He'd finished lighting a cigarette. He spoke through smoke. "It wouldn't bother me like this if it weren't so."

"It isn't so," she said dully. With dangerous dullness, still looking down.

"HI get it eventually. It 11 suddenly come to me when I least expect it. Maybe five minutes from now. Maybe later on tonight, before the party's over. Maybe not for days. What's the matter? You're looking a little pale."

"It's so stuffy in here. And that red wine, I'm not used to it especially on an empty stomach, you know."

"You haven't eaten?" he said with extravagant concern.

"No, I was posing, you know, when they broke in on us, and I haven't been able to get away since. Doesn't seem to feel it, but I haven't had anything since ten this morning."

"Well, er, how about coming out and having something with me now? Even though I don't exactly seem to have made a hit "

"Why shouldn't I go with you? I have nothing against you. All contributions gratefully accepted."

"Don't say anything to the rest of them or they'll gang up on us."

"No," she agreed, "it would be better if we're not seen leaving "

"Have you got everything? I had a hat out there somewhere in that pile. I'll see if I can dredge it up on the Q.T. Meet me over by the door; we'll make a break and run for it."

Their crafty preparations for impending departure did

not go as unnoticed as they had hoped. Sonya chugged past at random, trailing clouds of cigarette smoke after her like a straining locomotive on an upgrade.

"Watch yourself with him," she said curtly over her shoulder.

The overshadowed figure behind her murmured with a gleam of eyes, "HI make sure he doesn't get very far past just telling me where it is he thinks he saw me before."

"And just in case your hands slip off the throttle, here take down my address. You can come around and have a nice long cry at my place tomorrow. There's nothing like a good stiff cry for washing down a seduction. And ril make you some of my own special borscht."

"Ill watch out,"

Sonya wasn't being flippant, far from it. "No, the reason I warn you is he's got such a direct approach that no one ever takes it seriously until it's over. A girl I used to go around with she laughed her head off at him all night long at a party one night. She only let him take her as far as her door. Then the next day she came around and ate borscht."

She went chugging off again billowing plumes of smoke. You almost expected to hear a train whistle blow.

They'd got as far as the foot of the outside stairs when they were stopped again. There was a thundering stampede behind them that sounded like six people in pursuit. It was only Ferguson.

"Say, will you do your foraging someplace else? I need her for a picture."

"Do you own her soul?"

"Yes!"

"Fine. Well, then, it's just the body I'm taking with me. Youll find her soul up there on the canvas."

Ferguson straightened his tie determinedly. "Well, then, we're both going with the body."

They weren't openly truculent about it, but both were in that mercurial state of mind where there is no longer much of a borderline between horseplay and hostility.

The girl surreptitiously sliced her hand against the side of Corey's arm, as if asking him to leave this to her, drew Ferguson a few steps away, out of earshot.

"I'm going with him to get rid of him. This is the simplest way there is. See if you can clear the rest of them out up there; I'll come back later and we'll finish the picture. Or have you had too much to drink?"

"This red ink? This isn't drink."

"Well, don't drink any more then. I'll be back in an hour in an hour and a half at the latest. Be sure you have them out by then. Wait up there for me."

"Is that a promise?"

"That's more than a promise, it's a dedication."

He turned and, without another word, tramped stolidly up the stairs.

Corey prodded a wall switch, and a small apartment living room lit up. "After you," he said with mock gallantry.

She took two bored steps forward into the place and let her eyes stray halfheartedly around, without any real interest. "Well, now what do we do here?" she asked abruptly.

He shied his hat off someplace where there was nothing to catch it. "You don't seem to get the hang of things very easily, do you?" he said, thin lipped with annoyance. "Do you have to have outline drawings?"

She turned her face aside to her shoulder an instant. "Don't. I hate that word."

She moved ahead toward a dark opening. "What's in there?"

"The other room," he said disgruntledly. "Go ahead in and see it by yourself if you want to. I'm warning you,

you're rushing things. That doesn't come for about another ten minutes yet."

It lighted up and she passed from sight. It darkened and she came in again to where he was. He was swirling a coil of rye around in the bottom of a glass. "Aren't you terrified?" he sneered. "It was a bedroom!"

A scornful catch sounded in her throat. "You're the one seems to be terrified. What do you have to do, build up your courage with that stuff?"

"Well take that up in a few minutes if you've got breath enough left to ask it."

She went over to a kneehole desk, shot open a drawer or two. "Desk," he said scathingly. "You know, four legs, something you write on." He put his glass down. "Lemme get something straight, just for the record. What was your idea was going to happen when you okayed coming up here with me? You were willing enough when I first put it up to you."

"Because you were too willing to see me back to my place otherwise. My willingness beat yours to the punch, that was all."

"And what's over at your place that you're leery of?"

She shot open a third drawer, shot it closed again. "You name it. My dear old mother. A six-month-old kid that I support by my modeling. Or maybe it's just that the washbasin is cracked."

He loosened his collar so abruptly the button flew off. "Well, the hell with your background, Tm going to give you a future. This is the works now."

She shot open a fourth drawer, looked down, smiled a little. "I knew there was one someplace around here. I saw a box of the cartridges in the bureau drawer inside." She came up with an automatic.

He kept coming on over, necktie cockeyed. "Put that down! D'ya want to have an accident?"

"I dont have accidents," she murmured placidly. She

measured the weapon lengthwise in the flat of one hand, thumbed the trigger.

"It's loaded, you damn nitwit!"

"Then don't try jerking it away from me, that's what always sets them off. The safety's down now, too." She laid it down on the desk before her, but without taking her finger out of the trigger scabbard. He was in a state of mind where an antiaircraft gun wouldn't have been able to do much with him. He caught her from behind in a double-furled embrace and hid her face under his own. Her hand stayed motionless on the desk, hooked in the gun, the whole time.

His face got out of the way finally he had to breathe himself and hers came into view again.

She drew her free hand across it with a grimace that wasn't calculated to do his ego any good. "Don't kiss me, you fool. I'm not out for love."

"What are you out for then?"

"Nothing as far as you're concerned. You have nothing that I want, you have nothing that is coming to me.

Her attitude shriveled him like a June bug in a match flame. He rammed his hands into his pockets with force enough to drive them in almost up to his elbows.

The gun slid off" the desk top, and she sauntered casually over toward the outside door, with it dangling from her one hooked flnger.

"Come back here with that. Where do you think you're going with it?"

"Only as far as the front door. I don't know anything about you. I want to be sure that I get out of here. I'll leave it just inside the doorsill."

His voice shook with masculine outrage. "Go ahead if you want to go that badly. I'm not that hard up."

He heard the door open, and when he took a quick step out into the little entryway, the gun was lying there

mockingly on the threshold. He could hear her going down the stairs but with deliberation, not with hate. Even that concession to his injured self-esteem was lacking.

"Ill get who you are yet!" he called down after her wrathfuUy.

Her answer came back from a floor below. "Better be thankful that you haven't."

The walloping slam he gave his door stunned the house like a shrapnel explosion. He picked up his empty whiskey glass and smashed it all the way across the room. He picked up a pottery ashtray and smashed that, too.

He called her every name under the sun but murderer; he didnt happen to think of that one.

He called her every name but the right one.

THE LIGHT FLASHED ON in the pitch-black bedroom with explosive suddenness, like a flashlight photograph, revealing Corey in blazer-striped pajamas, lying in a trough of tortured bed coverings, hand outstretched to the switch of the bedside lamp. He squinted protectively, unable to bear the brightness after the long hours of lying there in the dark. His hair was a briery mass that bespoke repeated digital massaging. A pyramid of cigarette butts topped the tray next to him, and he added one last one to the accumulation with a triumphant downward stab that showed it had finally brought results. "Damn it, I knew I'd seen her someplace be " he muttered disjointedly.

The clock said 3:20.

Then, as the implications of the discovery hit him fully, his eyes opened to their full extent and he swung his legs to the floor. "The girl that was with Bliss that night! She's already killed a man! I'm going to warn him right now to look out!"

He pounded outside in bare feet, came back again

bringing the telephone directory from the hall, sat down on the bed with it, ran his finger down the column of Ps, stopped at Ferguson.

Then he looked at the clock again: 3:23. "Hell think Tm nuts," he murmured undecidedly. "The first thing in the morning'll be time enough. I wonder if it really is the same girl; the other one was yellow as a buttercup, this one's dark as a raven."

Then, with a renewed stiffening of resolution, "1 was never yet wrong in my life about a thing like this. He's got to be told, I don't care what time of night it is!" He flung the directory aside, barefooted it back to the hall and began dialing the number of Ferguson's studio.

The call signal at the other end went on interminably; no one came to the phone to answer. He hung up finally, massaged his hair a couple more times. The party must be over by this time. Maybe Ferguson didn't sleep there in the studio at nights. Sure he did, he must; Corey remembered seeing a bed in one of the rooms.

Well, he'd gone on someplace else then with the rest of them. It would have to wait until morning. He got back in bed, snapped out the light.

Two minutes later it had flashed on again, and he was struggling into his trousers. "I don't know why I'm doing this," he tried to reason with himself, "but I can't sleep until I get in touch with that guy." He shrugged on his coat, spliced the two ends of his necktie in a sketchy knot, closed the door after him. He went downstairs, drummed up a cab, gave Ferguson's address.

Rationally, there was no basis whatever for his behavior, he had to admit. He was going to be made the laughingstock of everyone who knew him; their kindest explanation would be that he was drunk and suffering a mild case of the D.T.'s. Chasing down in the middle of the night to tell a guy, "Look out, your model's going to kill you!" But he was in the grip of something irrational;

he couldn't explain what it was himself. A hunch, a premonition, a sense of impending danger. If Ferguson was out, he'd leave a note under the door: "She's the girl who was with Bliss the night he died, I remember now. Keep your eye on her." At least give the guy a chance to defend himself.

A knock at the studio door, when he stood before it presently, brought no more results than the phone call had. He noticed something that confirmed his hunch: Ferguson not only worked here but lived here, as well. A small thing, a slight thing an empty milk bottle standing to one side of the door.

That finished it. Milk bottles are not put out before you go, but after you come back. He was in there, he was almost certainly in there. Corey had a premonition of doom now that wouldn't be dispelled.

He went downstairs and roused the building superintendent, unconcerned at the wrathful reception that greeted him.

"Yeah, he sleeps up there in the studio. But he might be out. Them artist fellows are up all night sometimes. What's all the excitement for?"

"You open that door for me," Corey panted in a voice that brooked no argument. "Ill take the responsibility if I'm wrong. But I'm not getting out of here until you come up and open that door for me, understand?"