The bride wore black (3 page)

Bliss lit the two of them up. Then he turned and started up the two shallow steps to the self-service elevator. Charlie said, "Oh, I nearly forgot, Mr. Bliss. There was a young lady around to see you tonight."

"Yeah? What name'd she leave?" Bliss answered indifferently. It hadn't been Marge, so it really didn't matter much anymore. He stopped and turned his face only a quarter of the way toward the answer.

"None," said Charlie. "I couldn't get her to leave any. I asked her two or three times, but " he shrugged " she didn't seem to want to."

"All right," said Bliss. And it was all right.

"She seemed to want to go upstairs and wait for you in the apartment," Charlie added.

"Oh, no, don't ever do that," Bliss said briskly. "Those days are over."

"I know. No, I wouldn't, Mr. Bliss, don't ever worry ..." Charlie said with impressive sincerity. Then he added with a somewhat reticent shake of his head, "She sure wanted to bad, though."

Something about the way he said it aroused Bliss's curiosity. "Whaddya mean?" He dropped one foot down a step to the lower level again, turned head and shoulders more fully toward Charlie.

"Well, she was standing here with me, a little to one side, over there by the mirror, after I'd already rung your announcer without getting any answer, and she said, 'Well, could I go up and wait?' I said, 'Well, I dunno. Miss. I'm not supposed to. . . .' You know, trying to let her down easy. And then she opened this bag, this evening pockybook she was holding on to, and sort of hunted around down in it like she was looking for a lipstick. And right there on top of all her things there was this

hundred-dollar bill staring me in the face. Now y'may not want to believe me, Mr. Bliss, but I saw it with my own eyes "

Bliss chuckled with good-natured derision. "And you think she was trying to offer you that to let her up, is that it? G'wan, Charlie." He kicked up one elbow scoffingly.

Nothing could lessen Charlie's pained, round-eyed earnestness. "I know she was for a fact, Mr. Bliss, y'couldn't miss it, the way she done it. She left the top of the bag wide open and went around under it with her fingers, so's to be sure not to disturb it. It was spread out flat, see, on top of everything else. Then she looked from it to me, looked me square in the eye even holding the bag a little ways out from her. Not right at me, y'under-stand, but just a little ways out, so Td catch on what she meant. Listen, I been in this business long enough. I know all the signs. I could telW

Bliss scratched the corner of his mouth reflectively with the cutting edge of one thumbnail, as if feeling to see if it was still there. "Are you sure it wasn't just a ten spot, Charlie?"

Charlie's voice became almost falsetto in its aggrieved insistence. "Mr. Bliss, I seen the two O's in both upper comers of it!"

Bliss worried his lip between the edge of his teeth, pinching it in. "Well, I'll be damned!" He turned full body toward Charlie at last, as though intending to talk until this thing had been thrashed out to his satisfaction.

Charlie seemed to understand the need for further colloquy between the two of them. He said, "Be right with you, Mr. Bliss," as the sound of another cab arriving outside reached them. He went out, did his devoir with the doors, returned in the wake of a man and woman in evening garb who must have been very spruce at eight-thirty. All the starch was out of them now.

They nodded slightly to Bliss in passing, and he

nodded slightly back to them, with all the awful frigidity of metropolitan neighbors. They stepped into the car and went up.

As soon as the glass porthole in the elevator panel had blacked out, Charlie and he resumed where they had left off. "Well, what'd she look like? Was she anyone you ever saw before? You know most of the crowd I used to have around to see me pretty well."

"Yes, I do," Charlie admitted. "And I can't place her. I'm sure I never seen her before, Mr. Bliss, all I can tell you is she was some looker. Was she some looker!"

"All right, she was some looker," agreed Bliss, "but like what?"

"Well, she was blond." Charlie brought his hands into play as the artist in him came to the fore. He outhned presumably masses of luxuriant hair. "But this real blond, y'know this real yella blond? Not this phony, washed-out, silvery kind they make it. This real blond."

"This real blond," Bliss confirmed patiently.

"y\nd and blue eyes; y'know, the kind that are always laughing, even when they're not? And about this high her chin came up to this second chevron here, on me sleeve, see? And, er, not too fat, but y'wouldn't call her skinny, either; just a right armful "

Bliss was eying the far side of the foyer ceiling as the description unfolded. "No," he kept saying, "no," as if going over the records to himself. "The closest I can come to it is Helen Raymond, but "

"No, I, 'member Miss Raymond," Charlie said firmly. "It wasn't her; I got a cab for her many a time." Then he said, "Anyway, y'know how I'm pretty sure you don't know her? Because she didn't know you herself."

"What?" said Bliss, "Then what the hell did she want coming around asking for me, trying to get into my place?"

Charlie was still a lap behind him in the circles they

seemed to be making. "She didn't know you worth a damn," he repeated with heavy emphasis. "I tried her out, on the way up "

"Oh, so then you were going to let her up. That must have been a hundred, after all."

Charlie cleared his throat deprecatingly, realizing he had made a faux pas. "No, Mr. Bliss, no," he protested soulfully. "Now, you know me better than that; I wasn't. But 1 did start up on the car with her, acting like I was going to. I thought maybe that'd be the quickest way of getting rid of her, pretend like I was going to and then at the last minute "

"Yeah, I know," said Bliss dryly.

"Well, we started up in the car together, to the fourth. And on the way I remembered that robbery we had here in the building last year, y'know, and I figured I better not take any chances. So I started to reel her out a fake description of you, just the opposite of your real one, to try her out. I said, 'He's red-headed, ain't he, and pretty tall, just a little bit under six feet? I'm kind of new on the job here. I wanna make sure I got him placed right, there are so many tenants in the building.' She fell for it like a ton of bricks. 'Yes, of course, 'she said, 'that's him.' Kind of quickly, to keep me from catching on that was the first time she heard what you looked like herself."

"Well, 111 be a " Bliss said. He went ahead and said what it was he would be.

"So, of course, that was enough for me," Charlie assured him virtuously. "That finished it. When I heard that I said to myself, 'Nothing doing. Not on my shift, y'don't!' But I didn't say anything to her, because well, she was dressed pretty swell and all that, not the kind it pays to get tough with. So I let her down easy, tried the wrong key to your door and when it wouldn't work pretended I didn't have no other and couldn't let her in. We went downstairs again, and she just kind of

shrugged it off, like if she hadn't gotten in that time, it didn't matter because she was going to sooner or later. She smiled and said, 'Some other time, then,'and started off down the street, just the way she came walking. It was funny, too, dressed up the way she was. I watched her as ' far as the corner, and I didn't see her call no cab Dr nothing, just walked along like it was ten in the morning. Then she turned the comer and disappeared. O'Connor, the cop, he passed her coming up this way, and I even seen him turn and look after her. She sure was a looker."

"Just a ship that passes in the night," remarked Bliss. "Well, one sure thing, it was some kind of stall. If I didn't know her and I don't, from your description and she didn't know me, what was it all about? What the hell was she after? Maybe she had me mixed up with somebody else."

"No, she had your name right, even your first name.

'Mr. Ken BUss,' she asked for when she first come in."

"And she didn't drive up, either, you say?"

"No, just came walking along from nowhere, then

went walking away again just like she came. Funniest

thing I ever seen."

They talked it over a few moments longer, man to man, with the typical freemasonry of two-thirty in the morning. "Aw, you run into a lot of funny things like that from time to time, livin' in a big city like this. You're bound to. I know, Mr. Bliss, I seen enough of them myself, in my Une of work. Nuts that think they know you, and nuts that think they love you, and nuts that think you done something to them. You'd be surprised what bugs and mental cases there are walking around loose "

"So now maybe I've got one of 'em fastened on me. That's a cheerful thought to take up to bed," Bliss grimaced.

He turned away, readied the elevator panel. He flashed Charlie a mock-apprehensive backward grin just before it closed on him. "It's getting so a young guy ain't safe anymore living by himself. I think Til get myself married off and get hold of some protection!"

But the thought that he took up with him was of Marjorie not of anyone else.

Corey showed up at his door at eight-thirty, long before he'd even begun to get ready, the night of Marjorie's engagement party. "What the hell," Bliss said with the pretended disgruntlement one shows only a close friend, "I only just got back from eating; I haven't even shaved yet."

"I called y'at the office at four-thirty. Where the hell were you?" Corey barked back at him with equally familiar brusqueness.

He came in and appropriated the best chair, swung one leg up over its arm. He got rid of his hat by aiming it at the windowsill. It missed but stayed on a low book rack underneath.

Corey wasn't a bad-looking sort of fellow, without being decorative about it. Taller than Bliss, a little leaner or maybe just seeming so because he was taller and with dark brown hair and heavy brows. He tried to be man-about-townish in an Esquire sort of way, but it was just a veneer; you could tell he was a primitive underneath that. Every once in a while a crack would show, and you'd get a startHng gUmpse of jungle through it. Veneer or not, he worked hard at it. Any party you ever went to he was there, holding up a door frame, hand-warming a glass. Any girl you ever mentioned him to, she knew him, too or had a friend who did. His technique was a head-on attack, a blitzkrieg, and it had succeeded in the unlikeliest quarters. Some of the haughtiest, most unbending shoulders in town had been

pinned to the mat, if the truth had only been known.

He started rubbing his hands with a fine show of malicious glee. "Well, tonight you get hooked! Tonight you get branded! Feel like running out yet? You bet you do! You're all white around the gills "

"Think Tm like you?"

Corey trip-hammered a thumb against his own chest. "You should be like me. This is one guy they don't pin down to a formal promise!"

"If you'd bathed oftener, maybe you'd get more offers," Bliss grunted disparagingly.

"And make them have a hard time finding me when the lights go out? That wouldn't be fair. So where were you this afternoon? I wanted to eat with you."

"I was out getting the headlight. Where d'you suppose?" He opened a dresser drawer, took out a little cubed box, snapped the lid. "What d'you think of it?"

Corey took it out of the plush, breathed on it admiringly. "Say, is that a rock!"

"It ought to be. It threw me pul-lenty." Bliss pitched it back in the drawer with an air of indifference that was admirably assumed, started unhitching his suspenders. "I'm going in and take a shower. You know where the Scotch is."

He came in again in something under twenty minutes, complete down to bat-wing tie. "Who was the dame?" Corey asked idly, looking up from a newspaper.

"What dame?"

"The phone rang just now while you were in there, and some girl asked for you. I could tell it wasn't one of your old pals by the way she spoke. 'Does Mr. Kenneth Bliss live there?' I told her you were busy and asked if there was anything I could do. Not another word, just hung up."

"Strange."

Corey swiveled his drink. "Maybe it was one of these

women society reporters looking for stuff on your engagement."

"No, they usually tackle the girl end of it. Marjorie's people have already given out all the dope there is, anyway. I wonder if it was /ler?" he said after a moment's thought

"Who's her?"

Bliss grinned. "I haven't told you, but I think I've got a secret admirer. Funny thing happened not long ago. One night when I was out a beautiful girl tried her level best to get into the apartment here. The doorman told me about it afterward. She wouldn't give her name or anything. He knows most of the crowd I used to hang out with you know how doormen get after a while and he was pretty sure he'd never seen her before. She was all togged out in evening clothes, looked like real carriage trade to his practiced eye. But she didn't drive up to the door, that was the strangest part of it; just came strolling along the street from nowhere, dressed to kill like that.

"He told me she opened her bag, pretending to hunt for a lipstick or something, and let him get a good look at a hundred-dollar bill floating around on top of everything else. And the way she acted gave him a pretty good idea it would have been his for the asking if he'd just opened my door with his passkey and let her in."

Corey looked skeptical. "You mean a doorman is going to turn down a chance to make a hundred dollars that easy? He's bulling you."

"1 don't know about that. The amount is so fantastic in itself that, to me at any rate, it bears the earmark of truth. If he was just making the thing up, he would have been more likely to make it ten or twenty dollars."

"Well, what'd he do let her in?"

"I could tell by the way he spoke that the hundred darned near got him; he was just on the point of bringing her up and letting her in. Only he thought he'd better try

her out first, see if she really knew me, before he went ahead and admitted her. So he strung her along with a fake description that was just the opposite of mine in every respect, and she fell for it, said yes, that was the man proving she'd never seen me before in her life.