The bride wore black (17 page)

The super grumblingly preceded him up the stairs, jangled keys, knocked uselessly before fitting one to the door. Corey knew where the switch was, reached around him backhand and plugged it on. The two of them stood there looking down the long vista of light to the far end where the black skylight panes slanted down and the outside night began.

All Corey said, in a strangely anticlimactic, almost subdued voice, was, "I knew it."

Ferguson was lying facedown before the easel. The

wicked steel sliver of the arrowhead protruded from his back, over the heart, forced through by the fall itself to that additional penetration. In front, when they turned him over, the feathered end of it had been splintered by the fall, was at right angles to the rest of the shaft. He must have turned full face toward the stand at the instant it winged at him to receive it dead center to the heart like that.

Above him brooded Diana the huntress, Diana the killer faceless now. The features that had tormented Corey were gone. An oval hole in the canvas, cut by a paint-scraping knife, occupied their place. The bow, cord slack now, balanced mockingly across one corner of the modeling stand.

Corey brooded, "I didn't tumble in time, she beat me to it. He must have posed her late at night, to finish it up."

"What d'ya suppose it was?" the super breathed, awestruck, after they'd put in the call and stood there in the open doorway, waiting for the police. "Her grip on the bowstring accidentally slipped and the arrow flew out?"

"No," Corey murmured. "No. Diana the huntress came to life."

THEN SHE MOVED over here like this." Corey was warming up to his reenactment as he went along, as any good actor does when he has a sympathetic audience and is enjoying his role. A cigarette hanging from the comer of his mouth vibrated with animation whenever he spoke. He was in his shirt sleeves, vest unbuttoned. A string of hair had come down over his forehead with the ardor of his movements.

"Go on," Wanger nodded.

"Then she starts casing the drawers one by one like this, slap slap slap. Hell, I didn't get it. I figured she was just stalling, giving herself something to do with her hands, you know; killing time like they do until the clinch caught up with her. So then she hits the one it's in and comes up with it "

"Wait a minute, wait a minute " Wanger started from his chair, made a hasty gesture of dissuasion. "Don't touch it. We may still be able to get her prints off it. Have you handled it much yourself since she picked it up?"

Corey's arrested hand hung like a claw over it. "No, only to put it back in. But I haven't finished telling you what she did with it afterward "

"All right, but first let me wrap it up. I want to have it checked with your permission."

"Help yourself." He stood aside while Wanger took out a handkerchief, dipped into the drawer with it and transferred it to his pocket.

"Ill see that you get it back," Wanger promised.

"No hurry. Only too glad to be of some help." The performance resumed. "So then, she doodles around with it. I go over and give her the old branding iron and " he looked genuinely outraged all over again, even though this was only a recapitulation " and it didn't take."

Wanger nodded with masculine understanding."She wasn't having any."

"She wasn't having any. She says, 'I don't want love, I don't want kisses,' and she goes over to the door, gun and all. I follow her, and she's left it lying there inside the sill, and she's already halfway down the stairs. So I called down after her that I'd figure out who she was if it took me all the rest of the night, and she calls up to me, 'Better be thankful you haven't.'"

He got white around the mouth with virtuous indignation. "The little so-and-so, I'd like to give her a biff across the snout! I don't mind a jane standing you off as long as she's scared about it. But one thing gripes me is a jane standing you off and being fresh about it at the same time!"

Wanger could see his point perfectly. He'd been led on for some reason best known to herself by the murderous little trickster and then dished out of what he had a right to expect was coming to him. As far as Wanger's personal feelings entered into it and they didn't at all he liked this guy.

He drummed nails on the chair arm. "As I see it, there are three possible explanations for her coming up here with you like she did, before going back and killing the guy she had in mind to all along. One, she intended

getting rid of you first, before you had a chance to warn Ferguson and throw a monkey wrench into the main business at hand. After she got here with you, you still hadn't remembered who she was, so she changed her mind; She'd got you away from the party, and that was the most important thing. She figured she'd have time enough to get back there and finish up before it finally dawned on you where you'd seen her before. Two, she came up only to get the weapon and use it on him. No, that won't hold up. My brain's hitting on two cylinders. She left it behind her, inside the door. Well, three is you were pestering her at the party and she was afraid you would stay on after the others and gum the works up, so she took the easiest way of eliminating you. Gave you a tease treatment and then left you flat."

Corey looked as though this last suggestion didn't do his self-esteem any too much good, but he swallowed it.

"I think a combination of one and three is as close as we can get to it at the first sitting," Wanger went on, getting ready to leave. "She came up here with you because you were getting in her hair. She intended giving you the gun if you came through with who she was, but if you didn't, she was going to let you go. You didn't, and she let you go. Come in tomorrow, will you? I want to go over the whole thing with you again. Just ask for me, Wanger's the name."

Day was breaking when he got back to headquarters, and daybreak wasn't lovely around headquarters, inside or out. He was tired, and it was the hour when human vitality is at its lowest. He went into his superior's untenanted office, slumped into a chair at the desk and let his head plop into his pronged fingers.

"Why the hell did that woman have to be bom?" he groaned softly.

After a while he raised his head, took out the gun she'd

handled at Corey's place, put it in a manila folder, sealed the flap, scrawled across it almost illegibly; "See if you can get anything on this for me. Wanger" with his precinct number.

He picked up the phone. "Send me in a messenger, will you?"

"There's no one around out here right now," the desk sergeant answered.

"Try to find someone, anyonell do."

The rookie that showed up about ten minutes later was green enough to have fooled a grazing cow.

Wanger remarked, "Where'd they dig you up from?" But he said it well under his breath. After all, everyone has feelings.

"What took you so long?"

"I got in a couple of the wrong rooms. This building's kind of tricky."

Wanger looked at him through blurred eyes. "Take this over and give it in for me. It's a gun. They'll know what to do." Then, with a touch of misgiving, "Will you be able to get there, d'you think?"

The rookie beamed proudly. "Oh, sure, 1 been sent over there twice already since I been detailed around here."

He turned, came up against the wrong side of the door, where there was no knob, only hinges, looked up and down the seam as though it had played a dirty trick on him. Then he got what the trouble was, shifted over to where the knob was, grabbed it and still couldn't get out right.

"Get your feet out of the way," Wanger coached him with angelic patience. "They're holding it up."

He was too tired even to get sore about it.

"You're still sure of what you told me the other night?" Wanger began, on his second and more detailed

questioning of Corey, at headquarters forty-eight hours later.

"Positive. She had the same eyes, mouth, everything, in fact, but the hair, of that girl in black who was at Marjorie Elliott's engagement party the night Bliss met his death two years ago. 1 could swear it was the same one!''

"Your testimony's doubly welcome to me; it's not only important in itself but it bears out what my own private theory has been in these cases all along: that the woman is one and the same. A theory that, I might add, isn't shared by anyone else."

Corey clenched his fist, bounced it on the tabletop. "If I'd only gotten it sooner, figured out who it was the portrait reminded me of! But I didn't get it in time."

"Undoubtedly you could have saved his life if you'd only made the discovery even an hour earlier that same night. But the breaks fell her way. As it was, you only succeeded in hurrying the thing up, bringing it on all the faster, by insisting you'd seen her somewhere before. She identified you and recognized the danger, realized she had a deadline to work against. And made it maybe only minutes ahead of your first warning phone call! He died at twenty-one past three in the morning; his wrist-watch stopped with the fall."

"And I phoned him at 3:22 or 3:23; I saw the time there in my room!" Corey grimaced anguishedly. "The arrow must have been still vibrating through his heart, he hadn't even toppled to the floor yet!"

"Don't let it get you." The detective tried to brace him up. "It's over now and it's too late. What interests me is that you can be invaluable to me; you're what I've been crying for all along in this, and now I've got it. At last there's a link between two of these four men. You didn't know Mitchell, did you?"

"No, I didn't."

"Moran?"

"Him, either."

"But at least you did know two of them, if not the others. YouYe the first witness of any sort we've turned up who is in that position, who overlaps two of these episodes, bridges them. Don't y'see what you can mean to us?"

Corey looked doubtful. "But I didn't know the two of them concurrently. I only met Ferguson about eight months ago, at a cocktail party. Bliss was already dead by that time."

Wanger's face dropped. "So that even through you, any connection between the two of them will have to come by hearsay, at secondhand."

"I'm afraid so. Even Bliss I only knew the last year or two of his life. He and Ferguson had sort of drifted apart, got out of each other's orbit, by then."

"Any trouble between them?" Wanger asked alertly.

"No. Different worlds, that was all. Divergent occupations and hence divergent interests; brokerage and art. No points of contact left after they once started to harden into their molds."

"Did either of them mention Mitchell?"

"No, never that I can recall."

"Moran?"

"No."

"Well, Mitchell and Moran are in it somewhere," Wanger said doggedly. "But well let them ride for the present, take the two we've got. Now, here's what I want you to do for me: I want you to burrow back in your memory, rake up every particular mention each of those two made of the other Bliss of Ferguson and Ferguson of Bliss and try to recall in just what connection the reference was made, just what subject or topic it had

to do with. Women, horses, money, whatever it was. Is that clear? My theory is there is some point at which these four lives cross maybe other lives, as well. But since I don't know who the others are, I'll have to confine myself to the four I do know of so far. Once I find that point, I may be able to trace the woman/or-ward, from there on, since I haven't been able to trace her or her motive backward, from the crimes themselves."

Wanger to superior:

"As a matter of fact, to clear the decks I'm going to do what will probably seem to you suicidal, fatal. I'm going to eliminate the woman from my calculations entirely, leave her out of it as completely as though she didn't exist. She only clouds the thing up, anyway. I'm going to concentrate on the four men. Once I can put my finger on the connecting link there is between them, shell reenter the thing automatically, probably dragging her motive into view."

His superior shook his head dubiously. "It's sort of an inverted technique, to say the least. She commits the murders, so instead of concentrating on her, you concentrate on the victims."

"In self-defense. Shell hold us up forever, Uke she's already held us up for nearly two solid years. When you can't get in one door, get in another. Even if they don't lead to the same rooms, at least you're in."

"Well, try to get in, even if it's by a chimney," his superior urged plaintively. "The only thing that keeps this from being a big stink is that no one inside or out of the department seems to share your conviction that the four cases have any relation to one another. Presumably to be outwitted by four separate criminals on four

different occasions is less of a reflection on us than to be outwitted by the same criminal four times running."

Wanger was coming down the steps at headquarters when he bumped into Corey on his way up them. Corey grabbed him by the arm. "Hold on, you're just the man I want to see."

"What brings you around here at this unearthly hour? I was just on my way home."

"I was playing cards until now, and listen, remember those 'mentions' you asked me to recall if I could Bliss of Ferguson, and vice versa? Well, one of them popped into my head, so I left the game flat then and there."

"Swell. Come on in and let's hear it." They turned and went up the steps together. Wanger led him into an unoccupied room at the back, snapped on a light. "I get the hell bawled out of me whether I get home late or early," he confessed ruefully, "so half an hour more won't matter."

"Now, I don't know if this is what you want or not, but at least I got something. I wanted to get it to you right away, before I lose it again. Association of ideas brought something back to me. We were playing stud tonight and somebody shoved a stack of chips across the table, said, 'Can't take 'em with you.' That brought Ferguson back to me. We were playing poker down at his studio one night, and I remember him shoving a stack across the table with the same remark. Then that in turn brought back a reference he made at the time to Ken Bliss and that was what you told me the other day you wanted.

"See how it works? Association of ideas, once removed. He said, 'I haven't had a hand like this since I used to belong to the Friday-Night Fiends.' I said, 'What were the Friday-Night Fiends?' He said.