Into the Night

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.”

He toned it down a little.

He knows his job, inside and out, she thought.

“I’m glad to see you don’t wear jewelry,” he said. “Jewelry distracts, takes the eye away from the face, which should be the focus of the picture.”

She thought of the watch. She hoped the girl didn’t go into the powder room too soon, before she managed to get out of the studio.

“Turn a little bit this way. Do you see that seam running up and down between the two walls over there? Keep your eyes on that. No, that’s too blank. Think of something a little puzzling. Can you? A little baffling, mystifying.”

“Puzzling?”