John D. MacDonald

Her Black Wings

I stood with the rest of them down in the chattering damp of the 34th Street stop waiting for the express to roll in. I was on my way up to Columbia to find out if they had found room to wedge me into the graduate school. The twin lights showed in the distance and the crowd shifted a little, trying to outguess the subway system and pick a spot where the door would stop.

He didn’t yell. I saw him go over the edge, half turning, his mouth wide open and silent, his fingers working fast on the empty air. His shoulders looked square and solid under the brown gabardine. They weren’t solid enough. He hit the rails a split second before the steel wheels of the express ground him to blood and paste.

The crowd made exactly the same noise you hear when a touchdown play is called back for offside. A mingled groan and scream, with elements of nausea. A round little woman beside me grabbed herself by the throat and made strangled noises.

The express jammed brakes so hard that I saw the customers inside making impromptu staggering runs toward the front end. It was a waste of brakes. The boy in the gabardine had hit with his head overlapping the far rail.

They gathered around as if it was a prime dogfight. I backed out of the press, folded my paper and shoved it into my pocket. You know how it is when something happens like that. You want to make some stuffy and superfluous comment to your fellow citizen.

There was a girl standing next to me. She was tall, dressed in a sleek gray suit. Her pocketbook was a wardrobe trunk for the Singer midgets. Her black hair came down lush and thick on one shoulder. She had that city anemic look — cheekbones pushing against the pale flesh; a thin, patrician nose. Not the lips. Full of life and vitality. Her eyes were gray with a strange unfocused look.

“On the nasty side,” I said to her.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at me. I glanced down at her and saw that she held left wrist with the fingers of her right hand. She had sunk her long dark fingernails into the flesh of her left wrist. Blood ran around the curve of her white wrist and up her arm.

“Hey!” I said. “You’re hurting yourself!”

She fastened those blank gray eyes on me and murmured, “I told him he would die. I told him.”

Obviously she knew the citizen who’d taken the dry dive. I glanced around. Nobody was looking at us. The cops would be along soon. The tabloids would make a tasty dish out of the situation — a dish that people riding other trains would lick their chops over. She didn’t even know that I existed. I took my clean handkerchief, lifted her fingernails out of her flesh, tied the handkerchief around the four little bleeding holes. I took her arm turned her around, headed her toward the turnstiles and gave her a little push. She walked ahead of me quietly enough. We came up the stairs out into the sun just as a white squad car came screaming up.

She stopped when she hit the sidewalk and I steered her down the street toward the Stanlet Hotel. She stood quietly in the drugstore off the lobby while I put a dab of iodine on each hole and taped the bandage across her wrist. The gray eyes were still looking at something far in the distance.

In the bar she sat across the small table from me and looked blankly down at the straight whiskey I had bought for her. “Drink it down,” I ordered.

She lifted it calmly and drank it. The harsh fingers of the liquor tightened on her throat. She gasped and the tears ran down her cheeks. The glaze went out of her gray eyes. She looked at me for the first time and came apart at the seams. Fortunately we were in a dark corner of the bar. I moved over onto the bench beside her and held her fingers tightly, murmuring a lot of nothing to her until the hysteria went out of her quiet sobbing and the real tears came.

I moved back to my chair and sipped my drink, grinned at her. “Okay now?”

“I... I guess so. How did I get here?”

“You came with me. You were with the man who fell in front of the train. I thought the reporters would figure you as good material for a lush spread. I didn’t think you’d like that. That bandage on your wrist is from where you gouged yourself with your fingernails.”

“Who are you?” she asked, trying to smile.

“Joe Brayton. And you?”

“Judith Dikes.”

“Hi, Judy.”

“Hello, Joe.”

“Who was the guy? Husband?”

She shuddered. “No. A friend. This was — the third time I’ve been out with him. His name was Ralph Lortz.”

“Does anybody know you were with him?”

She frowned. “I didn’t mention it to anyone. Maybe he did. He left his office to meet me. He decided that in the rush it would be easier to get uptown by subway.”

“What did he do?”

“Something in investments. His number was Capital forty-six thousand five hundred sixty-nine.”

“Hold it while I phone up and check.”

The girl on the other end of the line said, “Mr. Lortz has left for the day. Can I take a message? No, I don’t know where he would be. He didn’t say. No, I don’t know who he might be with. You’re welcome, sir.”

I went back to the table. “You’re clear, Judy.”

She was nice to be with and easy to talk to. Every time she remembered Lortz the little gray ghosts came back into her eyes and that rich mouth of hers trembled. I was a boy scout on a mission. I was taking her mind off the tragedy. I was being gay. The laughing young man. Full of jokes and light patter. We drank at the bar, dinnered in the Village, eveninged on 56th.

She drank steadily and too much and I couldn’t tell if it was a regular habit or the result of what had happened to her down in the cool darkness of the subway cavern. But she didn’t show it. At two in the morning we were at a small uptown bar. I had run out of patter she had begun to look like the nicest thing that had ever happened to me. I put all my hopes in my eyes and looked across at her.

“You’re nice, Joe,” she said. “Pick up your marbles and run, Joe. Run like hell.”

“What do you mean, Judy?”

“I mean run — while there’s time.”

“I don’t get it.”

Her eyes narrowed and suddenly she wasn’t pretty at all. “Joe, Ralph Lortz was the third one in two months. The third. Bill Graff fell in front of a taxi. Stanley McQuade fell out of his apartment window. Get away from me, Joe. I like you. You don’t want to be the next one, Joe. Do you?” She laughed and the sound of it was like small, sharp white teeth nibbling at my spinal cord.

She flew into a hundred little bits. I got her into a taxi and managed to understand the address she gave. Her teeth were chattering and she shuddered all over.

It was a walk-up apartment on 97th, a block and a half from the river. She leaned against the wall with her face in her hands while I dug in her purse for the key. I got the door open and found the lights. She took five running steps into the room and pitched herself out on her face. I shut the door, picked her up, put her on the couch, got a towel and cold water from the kitchen and swabbed her face until her eyelids fluttered and she looked up at me.

“Go away, Joe,” she said faintly. “Go far away. Don’t ever come back, Joe.”

In a matter of minutes she was asleep. I pulled her shoes off and her suitcoat. I got blankets out of her bedroom and covered her up, tucking her in. When I’d dimmed the lights, I walked to the window, looking down at the empty expanse of 97th Street.

She had told me to go away. That was the last thing I would do. I put her key on a table and left. The door locked behind me. I walked toward the stairs. Light came from under a door near the head of the stairs.

It swung open and a man was silhouetted against the light. He said, “I was giving you five minutes more, friend. If you weren’t out of there then, I was coming in after you.”

“That would have been interesting,” I said.

I caught a whiff of his breath as he threw a big fist at me. I stepped inside the clumsy swing and brought one up through the middle. It was harder than I wanted it to be and it hurt the hell out of my hand. But it made me look good. He went back into the room and smashed a cheap chair as he fell on it. I followed him closely and when he staggered up, I put a hand on his thick chest and shoved him back toward the bed. He sat down.

As he tried to get up I stood over him with the right hand cocked. “Better keep sitting, laddie,” I said. He relaxed. He had a florid face, unkempt hair, a soiled blue shirt open at the neck and puffy eyes. I moved back and kicked his door shut.

He took the cigarette I offered him and held still for the match. His one room apartment was as neat and sweet as the inside of a hobo’s shoe.

I pulled a chair around and straddled it, my forearms resting on the back of it. “Now, laddie, suppose you tell me what you expected to gain by bashing me one out there in the hall.”

He mumbled, “I don’t like wise guys.”

“Nobody does. I didn’t know I qualified. Are you a self-appointed guard for the little lady?”

“What the hell is it to you?”

“I’d be happy to hit again, laddie.”

“It’s none of your business — but she lives off me, friend.”

I felt sick in the middle. She’d seemed so right, somehow. “You ought to keep her home nights then,” I said.

He scowled. “It isn’t what you think. I’ve got no claim on her like that. We’re both from the same town. I’m keeping her going until she gets a job. I want to marry her.”

I looked at the cluttered room. “You mean you work! And still find time to keep your place so clean?”

He said sullenly, “I make good money, I’m an industrial designer.”

“So you just live next to her and keep her going and expect her to drop into your lap when the debt gets high enough.”

“Put it anyway you want to.”

I stared at him for a few minutes. I checked back through my memory of the faces of the people on the subway platform. I couldn’t build laddie into the picture, but there had been more people there than I’d had time to look at. It might just fit. If laddie had taken care of Lortz, he might have practiced on Graff and McQuade.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Michael Burns. What’s it to you?”

“Where were you today at four-fifteen?”

“I was right here. I had my day off.”

He had powerful hands. Hands that could have shoved Lortz off the edge of the platform. He sat too still. I didn’t like the look of him. There was nothing to go on. If Judy had suspected him, she would have mentioned it when she told me to leave her.

“I’m Ralph Lortz,” I said quietly.

He looked at me steadily. “You pack a hell of a good punch for a ghost, Lortz.”

“How do you know Lortz is dead?” I asked quickly.

He waved a big hand at the radio. “Seven o’clock news.” He smiled. “She has a rough time with her boys friends, doesn’t she?” It wasn’t a pretty smile.

I fell asleep two minutes after I climbed into bed, but awakened a half hour later. Michael Burns, three times life size, was straddling the front car on a subway train, bearing down on me. I was tied hand and foot and stretched across the tracks. Burns was smiling. We weren’t down in the underground, but out on a flat expanse of Daliesque desert. Judy was on her face in the sand ten feet away. I was screaming at her to untie me, but the train was making too much noise...

Clicking on the light, I sat on the edge of the bed and sucked a cigarette like a little kid with a straw in somebody else’s soda. My hands shook and the breeze from my open window chilled the perspiration on my back.

Right then and there I decided that I’d better arrange to be number four in Burns’ hit parade. That was the way out for Judy. It would either prove that all the others had been accident, or that Burns was little boy grue.

The next afternoon was warm and Judy and I walked in the park. In the side pocket of my jacket was the comfortable weight of the little Spanish automatic I had won in a crap game in Paris. I had decided that if I told her my suspicions about Burns, she might spoil my play. It had to work right. The only way it could work properly was by being on my toes all the time.

It was tough work to take my eyes off Judy every few minutes and take a look around. There was color in her cheeks and her lips were made for laughing. Once when we got behind a stack of shrubbery, I pulled her close and kissed her. She was laughing at the time, but after the kiss she stood close to me and I looked down into her eyes and everything was very solemn between us — like a chord of organ music you overhear as you walk by a church.

“You better not see me again, Joe,” she said. “I’m bad luck.”

“It’s too late, now. Isn’t it?” I said softly.

She didn’t answer. She nodded her head quickly and lifted her face to be kissed again. It would always and forever be too late to ever leave her.

May in the month to be in love in Manhattan. You can be in love almost any month anywhere else, but it’s good to save it until May when you’re in the big town. We went everyplace that people go and did everything that people do and there was nobody in Manhattan except the two of us.

All except Burns. Burns was the quick look I gave behind us whenever we approached a curb. Burns was a light shining under a door after I took her home. Burns was the fear that kept me from taking a subway.

He was always around the corner from us. When I glanced behind us and saw the empty sidewalk, I knew that he had just stepped into a doorway. Always I remembered his smile.

I tried to make plans for us, but Judy always steered me away, saying, “Oh, Joe. Don’t be dull. We’ve got a million tomorrows with sunshine every day.”

It looked as though she was right.

During the first week of June she began to be jittery. She wouldn’t tell me why. Her cheeks were gaunt. On a warm night she said, “Joe, let’s go back to the park. Let’s go back to the place where you kissed me the first time. Please, Joe.”

In the cab she clung to my arm and her eyes were bright. There was a bench near the place where I had kissed her. It was near a sharp curve in the path. She pulled me over to the bench and we sat down, side by side. She was on my right side. A cool breeze came along and she shivered. She slipped her hand down into my jacket pocket, said, “What on earth have you got in that pocket, Joe?”

I took it out. A distant light glimmered on the blued steel. “It’s a gun, darling. I won it in a crap game during the war.”

“Do you always carry it?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I like to have it around, darling.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Sure. It’s got a shell in the chamber. This little thing here is the safety. All you have to do is push that down and pull the trigger.”

She shivered. “It frightens me. How do you hold it?”

“Like so. You’ve got to be careful not to get your hand too high on the grip.”

“Let me hold it, Joe.”

I handed it to her. She was awkward with it. I could just see her face in the dim light. She slid away from me, turned toward me and scowled with mock fury. “Grrr! I’m going to kill you, Joe.”

The look of the gun in her hand was an absurdity. I laughed. Then I heard the faint bitter sound of the safety. The scowl had faded. Her eyes were far away.

I slapped the gun with my right hand. The flare burned my wrist and a brilliant slash of pain creased my arm. She swung the gun back, and I grunted as I hit her in the face with my left fist. She crumpled and slid off the bench.

I stood up and walked blindly off into the darkness. You do silly things when the hinges come loose and your life slides down into a pile of rubble. I must have walked a hundred yards, my lips moving but making no sound. I turned and came back. She was gone...

Lieutenant Weber called me up yesterday and I hurried down to Headquarters.

I sat across from him and he tapped on the desk top with his yellow pencil for a few seconds. With a violence that startled me, he smacked his palm down on a heavy manila file folder on his desk. “I’m considering this case closed, Brayton.”

“How—?” I gasped.

“I admit that I took you at face value when you came in. I some of my best men on it. They reviewed the investigations of the deaths of Graff, McQuade and Lortz. There is no proof that this Judith Dikes even knew Graff and McQuade. You could have gotten that dope out of the papers, you know.”

“But the fact that Michael Burns and Miss Dikes moved out that same night I was shot—!”

Lieutenant Weber scratched gently over his right ear. More scurf fell on his dark coat. “I figure it this way, Brayton. You and Burns were both after the girl. Burns won. They were scared of you. You acted funny. They took off and you rigged up a story of shooting yourself in the arm and then tossed your gun in the drink. Your idea was revenge. You built your idea on the fact that one of her dates fell in front of a train. That’s all you’ve got for us.”

I stood up. “Look, Lieutenant. I didn’t dream this up, you know.”

He smiled tiredly. “You better relax, fella. Psycho, weren’t you?”

Suddenly I understood. I leaned on the desk. “No, I was not a psycho. I flew sixty-one missions and was shipped back to the states on account of combat fatigue. Then the war ended.”

“You better take it easy, Brayton.”

I turned and walked out...

But I know one thing. Burns hasn’t showed up at his since that night. And she had a gun when she left the bench. They lived a block and a half from the river. When the tide is right, a body will go on out to sea.

I feel as if I should do something to stop her. I don’t know where she is. I think she’s still in town. Once I thought I saw her, but I lost in the crowd. I spend a lot of my time where the crowds are thickest. That’s where she’ll be.

Keep your eyes open. She’s a lean-flanked lovely girl with vague gray eyes and thick black bair. Her face sometimes has a pinched, white look, but her lips are warm and heavy. She probably uses another name now. I think she knows I’m looking for her.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Her Black Wings