The bride wore black (21 page)

There was a sudden caterwauUng of hysterical brakes; a large black shape, blurred for a moment by its very unexpectedness, careened around the corner of the church. It skimmed over the curb, nearly threatened to mount the steps themselves for a moment. Then by some miracle of maniac steering it veered off, straightened out, revealed itself for a split second as a black sedan, then shot forward into blurred velocity again. A series of ear-splitting detonations had punctuated the whole incredible apparition, and reflected flashes traced it from window-pane to windowpane along the lower floors of the row houses opposite. In its wake a noxious cloud of black smoke blanketed the church steps and those on them, as though an evil spirit had passed that way, and only began to thin out long after the malignant red taillight had twisted from sight at the far upper end of the street.

The laughter and playful shouts had changed to strangled coughs and sputterings. Then there was a sud-

den silence, as of premonition. In it, a voice spoke a name. The bride spoke her husband's name. "Nick!" Just once, in a hushed, terrified voice. An instant longer they stood down there motionless at the bottom of the steps, side by side, just as they had left the church. Then ail at once she stood alone, and he lay at her feet.

The others broke, came milling down off the steps, fluttering around her. In the middle of them all his face peered up at her, Hke a white pebble lying at the bottom of a deep pool. There was a tiny fleck of red, a comma, so to speak, down near the bottom of her snowy veil. She kept staring at it as if hypnotized. His face didn't move. Not a comma, no; a period.

Minutes went by that had no meaning anymore. She was a statue in white, the one motionless, the one fixed thing, in all the eddying and swirling about. Voices shouting suggestions reached her as from another world, holding no meaning. "Open his shirt! Get these girls out of here, put them in the cars and send them home!"

Hands were extended toward her, trying to lead her away. "My place is here," she murmured tonelessly.

"Stunned," someone said. "Don't let her stand there like that; see if you can get her to go with you."

She motioned briefly, mechanically, and they let her be.

In the welter of sounds a dismal, clanging bell approached in the distance, rushing through the streets. Then it stopped short. A black bag stood open at her feet. "Gone," a low voice said. A girl screamed somewhere close at hand. It wasn't she.

The black bag was held partly toward her. "Here, let me give you "

She motioned them aside with one hand, the one with the new gold wedding band on it. "Just let me hold my husband in my arms a moment. Just let me say goodbye." She knelt over him, with a great welling up of

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white tulle around her like a snowdrift stirred by the wind. The two heads joined, as they had been meant to join, but only one gave the caress. Those hovering closest heard a soft whisper. "I won't forget." ,

Then she was erect again, the straightest one among \ all of them; like ice, like white fire. A whimpering bridesmaid plucked helplessly at her sleeve. "Please come away now, please, Julie."

She didn't seem to hear. "How many were in that car, Andrea?"

"I saw five, I think."

"That is what I saw, too, and I have such very good eyes. What was the license number of that car, Andrea?"

"I don't know, I didn't have time "

"I did. D3827. And I have such a very good memory."

"Julie, don't, you're frightening me. Why aren't you crying?"

"1 am, where you can't see it. Come with me, Andrea. I'm going back inside the church."

"To pray?"

"No, to make a vow. Another vow to Nick."

POSTMORTEM ON NICK KILLEEN

S

O THAT WAS IT, and you've repaid your debt," Wanger said musingly, "and nothing we can do to you now can take away the satisfaction of your accomplishment, is that it? No punishment that you receive from us can touch you inside, where it really matters, is that right?"

She didn't answer.

"Yes, I had you figured that way all along, and now I see that I had you figured right. Sure, imprisonment won't be any punishment to you, no, nor even the chair itself, if they should happen to give you that. There isn't a flicker of remorse in your eyes, there isn't a shadow of fear in your heart."

"There isn't. You read me right."

"The state can't punish you, can it? But I can. Listen, Julie Killeen.

"You haven't avenged Nick Killeen. You only think you have, but you haven't. On the night that Bliss, Mitchell, Ferguson, Holmes and Moran tore past those church steps, howling drunk in their car, a man crouched at the first-floor window of a rooming house opposite, watching for the two of you, a gun in his hand, waiting for you to come out. He'd missed Killeen going in for some reason; maybe the cab Killeen arrived in formed an impediment in his line of fire, maybe there were too many people around him, maybe he reached his death

post too late. And so he stayed there; he wasn't going to miss him coming out.

"He didnt.

"He raised his gun as you and your husband came down the steps. He sighted at Nick, and he pulled the trigger. The car streaked by in between at that instant, with its exhaust tube exploding a mile a minute. But his bullet found its mark, over the car's low top. It was a freak of timing that wouldn't have happened again in a hundred years, that couldn't have happened if he had tried to arrange it that way. The very reflections of the backfiring along the row of unlighted windowpanes helped to cover up his flash.

"There's your punishment, Julie Killeen. You've sent four innocent men to their deaths, who had nothing to do with killing your husband."

He hadn't reached her with that, he could tell; there was still the same glaze of icy imperviousness all over her. There was disbelief in her eyes. "Yes, I remember," she said contemptuously, "the papers tried to hint at some flimsy possibility like that at the time, no doubt deliberately encouraged by you people to cover up your own incompetence. There have been cases before that were never solved Elwell, Dorothy King, Rothstein and there's always the same reason; rottenness in the wrong places, bribery in the right places, pull. But there never was a case in the whole history of the police force that was allowed to pass so unnoticed as this. Not even a suspect questioned in it from first to last. As though a dog had been shot down in the streets!"

"As far as our encouraging the papers at the time goes, it was the other way around. We did everything we could to keep them from mentioning the man-across-the-way angle, deliberately misled them with stories of a stray shot from some rooftop, hoping if we kept quiet about it,

if this unknown gunman thought he wasn't suspected, it would be easier to get our hands on him."

"I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now! 1 saw with my own eyes."

"What you saw was an optical illusion, then. If you had come to us at the time, asked us how we were progressing, we could have proved it to your satisfaction once and for all. But no, you hugged your vengeance to yourself, nursed your bitterness, wouldn't interview the police. You deliberately withheld the information that was in your own possession inaccurate though it was and used it for murder."

She flashed him a look that was a complacent admission.

"There were powder bums found on the window curtains in that room opposite the church. There were people in it, on the floor above, who distinctly heard a shot beneath their feet, over and above all the backfiring outside. They were in a better position to judge, after all, than you. We even found a discharged shell, of the same caliber as that taken out of your husband's body, wedged between a crack in the floorboards. We knew from the start where the death shot had been fired from; that was why we didn't have to go tracing wild cars all over the city. We knew everything but who the killer was. We only found that out now, recently. Don't you want to know who he is? Don't you at least want to hear his name?"

"Why should I be interested in what rabbits you pull from a trick hat to try to mislead me?"

"The proof is in our files right now. It came in too late to save Bliss, Mitchell, Moran or Ferguson. But it's there today. Scientific proof; proof that cannot be gotten around. Documentary proof; a signed confession I have a copy with me in my own pocket at this very

minute. He's been in custody down in the city for the past three weeks."

For the first time, she had no challenging answer to make.

"You'll meet him face to face when you go back there with me shortly. 1 think that you'll remember meeting him before."

The first superficial crack had appeared on the glaze that protected her. A flicker of doubt, of dread, peered from her eyes. A question forced its way out. "Who?"

"Corey. Does the name mean anything to you?"

She said with painful slowness, "Yes, I remember this Corey. Twice he crossed my path, for a moment only. Once, on a terrace at a party, he brought me a drink. It would have been so easy to. . . . But I sent him away, to clear the decks for. ..."

"The murder of Bliss, isn't that right?"

"According to you, someone who had never harmed me, never even seen me before that night." She held her forehead briefly, resumed: "And the second and last time, I was up in his very room with him, for a few minutes. 1 went back to his apartment with him as the simplest way of getting rid of him. I remember I even held him at the point of a gun to make sure of getting out again unhindered. His gun."

"The gun that killed your husband. The gun that fired the bullet into Nick Killeen. Through a slip up on the part of a rookie it was checked by ballistics instead of by the fingerprint department for your prints, which was what he had brazenly turned it over to us for.

"I remember 1 was sitting there raising cain with the fingerprint bureau for not sending me a report on a weapon that had never reached them, when someone at ballistics telephoned me and said. That gun you sent us to be tested matches the markings on the slug taken out of

Nick Killeen; we suppose that's what you wanted, you weren't very definite about it.' I had to see it with my own eyes before I'd beheve them. Then just to make the irony all of a piece, Corey comes walking in to find out if we were through with the gun and he could have it back again. He never got out again!

"He'd come forward to help us of his own accord. He had a license for the gun; he was only too willing to let us have it, to see if we could get your prints off it. I suppose by then so many years had passed since the Killeen killing, his sense of immunity had become almost a fetish. He thought nothing could. . . .

"It took a little while, but we finally broke him down. In the meantime I had been working independently on what we all thought was an entirely different matter and came across an obscure item in old newspapers at the library, datelined on one of those Fridays that the Friday-Night Fiends had been on the loose. Just a little human-interest thing, tragic to those immediately involved but not particularly important. A bridegroom had been struck dead by a stray shot, presumably fired from some roof nearby, as he was leaving the very church he'd just been married in.

"To me that story offered the only possible reason for the murders of the Friday-Night Fiends, who had already lost three charter members and the bartender they carried around with them on those tears of theirs. I put two and two together. No mention was made of who the bereaved bride was, but after all there must have been one; a man doesn't marry himself.

"So we soft-pedaled Corey's arrest, held him practically incommunicado, to be sure you'wouldn't get wind of it and pull your next and last punch. It was easy to figure out where it would land, so I simply got into position under it.

"But what I can't figure out is what you did with yourself between visitations, so to speak. How you were able to vanish so completely each time, effect all these quick changes of coiifure and personality. I knew you were coming but to the last minute didn't know from where or how. It was hke trying to come to grips with a wraith."

The woman answered abstractedly, "There was nothing very supernatural about it. 1 suppose you looked for me in out-of-the-way hiding places, rooming houses, cheap hotels. I came into contact with dozens of people daily who never gave me a second look. I lived in a hospital. I'll give you the name if you want, one of the biggest in the city. I worked there and lived right there, didn't have to go out. My hair was kept covered, so no one knew or cared what color it was, from first to last. When I was off duty I stayed in my room, didn't encourage friendship from the staff. When it came time to strike again, I would get a short leave of absence, go away, return again a few days later.

"All for what? All for nothing."

She was breathing again with difficulty, as she had in the chair before. As though something inside her were breaking up, clogging her windpipe.

"So I held the very gun he killed Nick with, in my own hands! Had him helpless at the point of it; lowered it and walked out, to go and kill an innocent man." She began to shiver uncontrollably, as though she had a chill. "Now I can hear that awful cry of Bliss's as he went over the terrace. I didn't hear it then. Now I can hear Mitchell's groan. I can hear them all!"

She bowed her head as abruptly as though her neck had snapped. Her sobbing was low pitched but intense, even paced as the pulsing of a dynamo.

A long time after, when it had ended, she looked up again. "What did he do it for Corey, I mean?" she asked. "I must know that."

Paper rattled under his coat. He took out a copy of the confession, unfolded it, offered it to her.

She glanced only at the beginning and at the signature at the end of the last page. Then she returned it. "You tell me," she said. "I believe you now. You are an honest man."

"They were working a racket together, your husband and Corey. A nice, profitable, juicy little racket. The details are here in his confession." He broke off short. "Did Killeen ever tell you that?" he asked.