Free The bride wore black by Cornell Woolrich Page B

then. I'm to blame, not it. It was there, I didn't see it."
    "We're up against something here. D'you realize that even if these two men were still alive they themselves couldn't throw any hght on who she is, what she did it for because they didn't know her themselves, seem never to have seen her before?"
    "That's a thought to cheer one up," said Wanger glumly. "I can't promise you to solve this, even though you've turned it over to me. All I can promise is not to quit trying until I do."
    Wanger's record on Mitchell (five months later):
    Evidence:
    1 envelope, typed on sample machine on display at typewriter salesroom, without knowledge of personnel.
    1 arak bottle, purchased Globe Liquor Store.
    1 ticket stub, Loge A-1, Elgin Theater.
    Case Unsolved.

    Part Three
    MORAN
    Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom When the jungle shadows fall, Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock As it stands against the wall
    Cole Porter

    THE WOMAN
    M
    IRIAM LAST NAME LONG forgotten within the confines of the Helena Hotel was a short pugnacious person the color of old leather. She had three things she clung to tenaciously; her British citizenship which had been passively acquired through the accident of birth on the island of Jamaica; a pair of gold-coin earrings; and her "system" of doing rooms. No one had ever made the slightest attempt to interfere with the first two, and the few abortive efforts at tampering with the latter had met with resounding failure.
    Numerical progression of the rooms had nothing to do with it. Nor had their location along the dim, creaky, varileveled corridors. In fact, it was a sort of mystic algebra known only to the innermost workings of her mind. No one could disturb it not with impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long malevolent tirade, down endless reaches of labyrinthine corridor, that went on or seemed to for hours afterward, long after the original cause of it had slunk away, frustrated.
    "The fo'teen come after the seventeen. It got to wait tell I finish the seventeen. I ain't never yet do fo'teen first."
    Nor did this precedence have anything to do with gratuities, which were in any case an almost nonexistent factor at the Helena. Habit, perhaps, would be the clos-

    dage; not the logical "daddy," "Mista Moran," he parroted.
    She said something about a door. "How doorable." Then she said, "Have you any brothers and sisters?"
    "Nope."
    "Ah, what a shamel Don't you miss them?"
    How could you miss them when you never had them? However, he could vaguely sense some sort of personal reflection involved in not having any, so he immediately tried to make good the lack with substitutes. "I got a grandma, though."
    "Isn't that lovely? Does she live right with you?"
    One's grandma never did, didn't she know that? "She lives in Garrison." Another substitute came to mind with that mental image, so he threw her into the gap, too. "So does my Aunt Ada, too." Wasn't she ever going to let him go ahead bouncing his ball?
    "Oh, all the way up there!" she marveled. "Were you ever up there to meet her?"
    "Shoe I was, when I was little. But Dr. Bixby said I made too much noise, so mommy hadda bring me back home again."
    "Is Dr. Bixby your grandma's doctor, dear?"
    "Shoe, he comes there lots."
    "Tell me, dear, have you started school yet?"
    What an insulting question! How old did she think he was, anyway twol "Shoe. I go to kindergarten every day," he said self-importantly.
    "And what do you do there, dear?"
    "We draw ducks and rabbits and cows. Miss Baker gave me a gol' star for drawin' a cow." Wasn't she ever going to go away and leave him be? This felt like it had kept up for hours. He could have bounced his ball all the way up to the comer and back, the time she'd made him waste.
    He tried to go around one side of her, and she finally

    took the hint. "Well, dear, run along and play, I won't keep you any longer." She patted him twice on the bullet-shaped back