The Black Angel Read Free Page B

risk of blundering head-on into someone on the outside. It’s uncanny how quickly your instincts, if left to their own guidance, will adapt themselves even to the most bizarre, unlooked-for situations, as though you were used to meeting those situations every day in your life. Accordingly, instead of throwing the door open forthwith, I stood there listening intently beside it for several moments before making any further move.
    It was because I stood there motionless like that, and with my head tilted at just a certain angle, that I had a chance to become aware of this fleck of color against the creamy expanse of the door. It was in the seam, the opposite one where the hinges were located, and it was just over the lower one of these, as though it had sidled downward until the hinge had blocked its further descent.
    Even after it had caught my eye it meant nothing; there was not enough of it to convey any meaning in my present state of tension and anxiety to get out. Only, as I turned the knob and slowly drew the door inward from its frame, motion, the motion of a dab of color, caught my eye back to where it had been again, and I saw that it had fallen out with the reverse widening of the seam at that end and now lay on the floor, a postage-stamp-sized square from where I stood. I reached down and picked it up, and it was only then that I could make out what it actually was.
    It was simply the pasteboard cover of a match folder, or rather half the pasteboard cover of a match folder, torn off, then folded still again to smaller size and thrust into that seam to serve as a wedge. Its purpose obviously had been to retard the swing of the door slightly so that, though it might give the appearance of being closed, the latch tongue would fail by a fraction of an inch to meet and thrust into the socket meant to hold it. In other words, it could be reopened later and at will from the outside, simply by turning the knob, as I had done myself.
    It had clung to the seam during three entire passages, I felt sure: the entrance and exit of whoever had done this to her, and then my own entrance just now, only to be finally dislodged when I disturbed the door a fourth time, to leave. Until now, apparently, it had simply slid lower down within the seam until the hinge blocked it off.
    To my novice’s mind it seemed for a minute a great, a dazzling clue, but then as I breathlessly unpleated it my excited hopes died again and I saw that it was nothing, told nothing, except what was implicit in its being there in the first place.
    It was one of hers. It had the ubiquitous M on it. It was blue, but of a darker shade than the turquoise she favored so. It must have been a leftover from some previous color scheme that had preceded the turquoise deluge. I was about to throw it back again where it had been, let them find it for themselves, make what they could of it. And then the thought of fingerprints occurred to my unversed mind, and because I had already handled it generously and had a layman’s typical awe of that mystic science, I thrust it instead into my handbag with the address book.
    I peered out through the eye-width gap I had made ready in the door. There was no one in sight. I stepped quickly outside and closed the door after me. There was a staircase beside the elevator, and I chose that in preference to the car, as being both quicker and more secretive. There was no one below either. It was a tactfully serviced building.
    I opened the street door and came outside, and with the first fresh air a sense of unreality that I had been where I had been, had seen what I had seen, came over me overpoweringly. I walked quickly away from that bad place without looking back. I was frightened and sick and all the things you are after such a thing, but over and above everything else there was a persistent refrain running through my mind: “I have him back again now. She can’t take him from me ever, ever again.”
    For a moment I