The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich

think you’re going to meet someone there who will change your whole life around from then on. You go to some dance or party, just because you’ve got nothing better to do, and you think by the next night after you won’t even remember about it any more. And here ten years later you can still remember everything about it as clear as if it was just the night before. You can’t remember any of the other nights around then, or even the months or years, but just that one night; you’ve saved it whole, the way it was.”
    His voice stopped. I waited without using my own, afraid if I did he would become too aware of me, wouldn’t go on again. He was talking to himself more than to me. I was just the sounding board against which his voice projected itself. Presently he’d gone on again.
    â€œIn a little blue dress that sort of swung out wide from here down. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and I just stood there looking at her.”
    Like me, I thought, like me. I’d first met Kirk at a dance like that too.
    â€œAnd I can even remember the piece they happened to be playing just then too. ‘Always.’ Every time I’ve ever heard it since, it meant her in a little blue dress, the first time I ever saw her. It was our song, hers and mine, while we were together, and now that we’re not, it’s just mine, I guess.
    â€œI guess I would have stood there all night like that, just looking. That would have been enough for me. But then the fellow that had taken me there, he came back to me and said: ‘What’s the matter? What’re you going to do, just stand there? Don’t you want to dance or nothing?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but only with one girl. That one over there.’ And I showed her to him. He was one of these fellows don’t stand back about anything; he laughed and said, ‘That can be arranged easy enough,’ and grabbed my arm and hauled me over to her then and there, without paying any attention to who she was with. And I went on from there under my own——” He couldn’t find the word.
    â€œEvil destiny,” I supplied silently to myself.
    â€œSo that’s how you first met her,” I said. “That’s how she was when you first met her.”
    The room was getting cloudier all the time. He was sprawled diagonally on the bed, back on his elbow, picking at the covering as he spoke. I was seated there on a chair drawn up close beside him. Its back was toward the bed, and I was straddling it in reverse, my arms folded along the top of it and my chin resting on them.
    He and the bed were between me and the door. It would have been impossible for me to get out of the room in time, in case anything——
    I’d been downstairs just now, a few minutes ago, and I’d told them to send somebody up and have them knock on the door in ten minutes’ time. No sooner, no later. Seven minutes of the ten were up now.
    The two pillows on the bed, pillows such as she’d been smothered with, were lying there undisturbed. They were within easy reach of him, the way he lay. The window looked out on a blind surface of shaft wall, and we were alone in the room, cut off, isolated. He didn’t know someone was coming up to knock on the door outside in three more minutes. For all he knew, no one was coming near here for the rest of the night.
    I dropped my wrist a little on the inside of the chair back, glanced at it. Two and a half minutes.
    â€œI know who did it, Marty,” I said quietly.
    His eyeballs rolled upward at me like marbles, stayed that way, peering from under his upper lids. Finally he said uncertainly, “Yeah, that guy they’ve got up there now; everybody knows.”
    â€œNo, no, I don’t mean him. I know who really did it.” I kept my lashes inscrutably down. “I’m the only one who does. Here’s something that no one knows, no one but me, and now