Read Online The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich - Free Book Online

Just under the upper brackets of ultra-smartness, perhaps, but spelling a sort of solid, substantial, middle-class affluence. That was likely to prove a point in my favor, I realized immediately as I stepped in. This type hotel attracted a very small percentage of transients. It would have a far slower and less continuous turnover than an ordinary commercial hotel, and the guests individually would be far more likely to be known personally to the management and to be recalled by name even after they had gone.
    They were courteous to me. Sight at firsthand evidently improved my status. The assistant manager himself came out to me.
    â€œI’m sorry, Miss——?”
    â€œMiss French.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Miss French. As the desk already told you, there is no one registered with us at the moment whose given name is ‘Marty’ or Martin. I’ve had someone go over the register. Are you sure that’s all the information you can give us?”
    â€œI’m afraid that’s all.”
    â€œCould you give me an idea of what the person looks like?”
    â€œI’m afraid not,” I had to admit. “You see, the person is not known to me. But it’s very important that I get in touch with him. And this first name and the address here are the only clues I have.” At least I was able to impress him with my earnestness, if nothing else; I could see that.
    â€œI’m sorry, I’d be only too glad to help you.” He stroked his immaculately shaven jowls. “But I don’t see how I can.”
    I did, and I didn’t hesitate to make the suggestion. “I don’t like to impose, but if I wait out here, couldn’t you have someone go back through your back registers—just for a short distance—and see if such a person was here formerly?”
    â€œWell——” he said. “Well——” And then, “Just a moment.”
    He left me sitting out there while he went in to give the order to someone. So I knew I’d won that point, at least.
    It took quite some time, and while I was sitting there I tried to form a composite impression of this mysterious “Marty” by piecing him together from the other habitués of the place. Not, I knew, that there was any guarantee he need necessarily resemble the others just because he had formerly dwelt here; he could have been a different type altogether who simply had happened to live in the same building for a while. But there is a degree of truth after all in the old saying about birds of a feather, and I felt he would not have lodged here at any time if he had not had a certain something in common with those I now glimpsed about me here and there passing through from the elevators to the street and vice versa, stopping for a moment at the desk or to chat with an acquaintance in the lobby.
    This, then, was how he would be if he ran true to form: a man already past the financial hazards of the twenties and entered now upon the prosperous calm of early middle age, when money, if it is to be made at all, has already been made. That is to say, not that the process of making it is discontinued, but the system of making it is set, runs more or less under its own momentum, releasing the individual from a great many of the earlier strains and stresses. He would be jovial, complacent, a little self-assertive (and entitled to be). Beginning to round a little at the waistline, but not enough as yet to worry about it overmuch. Hair beginning to thin a little, but that would still be a secret between him and his barber. He would stroll about, preceded by an expensive Havana cigar, and he would have an appreciative eye for the female stranger that would grow stronger as time went on. Not one of them failed to look me over, though not in a blatant, disconcerting manner.
    Well, that would be about him. A little of all that would enter into his personality, and then there would be other elements,