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.”