“I’m Miss Chalmers,” Madeline said. “I phoned in for an appointment.”
“Oh, yes,” the girl remembered. “You asked for the last appointment of the day, if possible. Well, I have you down for it. Won’t you have a seat? Mr. Herrick will be ready for you in just a few minutes.”
He had framed samples of his work displayed on the walls. They did him credit, she thought, looking them over. He was more than an expert craftsman at his work, he was an artist. Each was more arresting than the last.
He was almost a surrealist in portrait photography, she told herself. There was one haunting study of a young girl that, once you had looked at it, you couldn’t keep your eyes off from then on. He had achieved the impossible by violating all the laws of photography. The light was behind the subject, not in front of it. A dazzlingly bright light, almost explosive, almost like a chemical reaction. He must have had a large bare-faced bulb hanging concealed in back of her head. You could almost see the rays streaking out from it, like sun rays when the sun is embedded in a tangle of cloud. As a result, the face itself was in shadow, of course, only a contour, a silhouette. Then he had taken some reflective surface, possibly a narrow strip of mirror, and centered it on the face from in front, so that the eyes were lighted up in misty suffusion, a narrow line ran down the center of the nose, and the curve of the underlip was faintly traced. No more than that. It was like a sketch of a face done in chalk on a blackboard. It was like a negative, where all the white area shows black. And yet all the girl’s delicacy of feature managed to come through, and with it something of the loneliness and awe of youth. It was a cameo of grace, a camera chiaroscuro.
“Who is that?” Madeline asked, open-mouthed.
“Everyone who comes in here asks that,” the girl smiled. Then she added, “Can’t you guess? It took real love to create a piece of work like that, not just skill with a camera. It’s his wife.”
Are those the same eyes that closed against my heart? Madeline wondered. Is that the face I saw die out? The eyes, she thought now that she knew, seemed to have a knowledge of approaching death, seemed to be looking at it from a great distance, waiting, waiting...
“It could easily take a prize in any show,” the girl was saying, “but he won’t exhibit it. I’ve heard people offer to buy it, and he just gives them a look—”
“Is that what she was like?” asked Madeline. Meaning, in full life, before she was struck down.
“I never saw her,” the girl said.
“Wasn’t it made right here, at the studio?”
“He must have done it at home. Or somewhere else. He brought it in one day. They’re separated now, you know.”
“Oh,” said Madeline, realizing — she doesn’t know Starr is dead.
“Or so I understand.” Then she confided, with that typical feminine freemasonry that springs up whenever affairs of the heart are under discussion. “I came to work one morning and I found him asleep in the chair here. That one there, facing it. He’d never gone home all night. Thousands of cigarette butts. A small empty bottle. He had the shade of the lamp tilted so that it shone directly on it. All night long...”
She shook her head compassionately.
“I pretended I didn’t notice anything. Which was a hard thing to do. He never did it again, though. Did it at home, I suppose.”
Madeline looked down pensively.
The girl said, “He’ll be ready for you any minute now. Would you like to freshen up before you go in? There’s a little powder room behind that door there. You’ll find everything you need in there, I think.”
Madeline got up and went in.
There was a long dressing table, backed by a mirror of matching length. A number of bottles on it, hair glosses and the like.
She took off her watch and put it down on the table. Then she combed her hair over a little. Then she pulled two or three Kleenex tissues out of their slotted mirrored holder and put them down over the watch. She got up and went toward the door. She glanced back, and you could still partly see the watch. She went back and rearranged the tissues so that they hid it more fully, covered it completely over. Then she stepped out.
She had the last appointment of the day. No one else would be coming in here. Only the girl, to lock up and put out the lights. Madeline hoped she was honest. At any rate, she already had a watch of her own, Madeline had noticed it on her, so there was that much of a safeguard.
“You can go right in,” the girl said. The door to the studio proper was standing open now.
Madeline stepped in past it, and there was a man in there standing looking at her.
For the first time they saw one another. For the first time their eyes met and looked at one another. For the first time in the world. The killer and the one to be killed.
She only received an overall impression, a summary of him, at first. Two-dimensional, without depth. There was no time for anything else, her senses were too preoccupied with the physical immediacy of the meeting to be able to stand aside and study him in detail. Comely of face, unhandsome but agreeable. Well-proportioned bone structure, no slackness of jaw or anything like that, but otherwise undistinguished. Was this the jaw, the lips, from the photograph? Hair a very light brown, but still not quite blond, with a crisp crinkle to it. Eyebrows a little darker, eyes darker still. Intelligence in them, also some sensitivity. About five-ten, not heavily built but symmetrical, on the spare side. And when he spoke, in another moment, a light voice, but not a high one, no localized dialect overtones, just basic well-bred eastern-seaboard United States.
To sum up: someone you could quite easily have taken to — if you didn’t have to kill him.
“You’re very pretty, Miss Chalmers,” was his opening remark.
It was said with professional objectivity, not personal interest, that much she could tell.
“You probably know it already,” he added, “so there’s no sense in my telling you.”
“One knows,” she said quite simply. “If not, one’s a fool. Or a liar.”
He gave her a quick look, as though he liked that. Found it refreshing.
“Is that your wife out there?” she asked. “She’s very beautiful too.”
“The girl already told you who it was,” he said quietly.
She accepted the dig unruffledly. “I wanted to make sure.”
He answered her previous remark. “Yes, she is,” he agreed. “Starr is very beautiful.”
Now at last, she told herself exultantly, and clenched her fist in mental imagery and brought it down. Now at long, long final last. No more mistakes, no more false alarms. No more noisy baseball fans, no more pathetic war derelicts. The right one at last. The man that Starr had married, here before her.
“I think I’d like to have you sit here,” he said, shifting a shell-backed chair. “I’m just going to take the face and throat.”
He moved around her, shifting and adjusting various screens and reflectors, every move a sure one, knowing just what he wanted to do.
“Just relax. You can cross your legs if you want to. I want to make a few preliminary tests with the lights first.”
“It’s my hands that I don’t know what to do with,” she admitted.
“Do anything you want with them. They won’t be in the picture. Here. Here’s something that I sometimes use.” He thrust a common ordinary lead pencil into her hand. “Do anything with it. Fiddle with it. Just so long as it keeps your hands from becoming clenched and tight. That can have an effect on the shoulder line and even the neck, sometimes.”
He turned on something, and the reflectors threw a dazzling light all over her, bright as magnesium.
“Try not to blink. You’ll get used to it in a moment.”