I want to know just what they're celebrating without me

All through last night's dream I kept thinking that I should write about it for Patreon, but it decohered too fast when I woke for me to hang on to anything but the anachronism of its late-'40's RKO B-values and its premise that would never have passed the PCA as a mother's quest to discover the fate of her missing child began to transform her into more than one of Woolrich's black angels, instead a kind of Lilith who preys not on children but on their predators, all plausible-deniable as to the degree of supernatural or ill-luck which befalls the men she interviews and sometimes the women who enable them, except for the other women she meets along the way, some older, some younger, a silently watchful, rook-winged quality about all of them who never explain to her what she is becoming, but recognize and welcome her until she seems to trail them wherever she goes, a murder of retribution. It ended in the meta-frame of a movie theater, with the small-time informer-type who has been aiding the heroine from the start of her descent into the more or less literal underworld catching up on some B-picture of his own, sheltered by the projector's flickering distractions from the knowledge that she's learned of his involvement in a kidnap-ransom gone unspeakably wrong, for which his assistance has been his furtive apology. He didn't know it would be a child; he didn't know it would end in a death. He doesn't know what she's become that he should be afraid of as she slips into the seat beside him, as naturally as if they were spending their usual evenings together, never quite romantically. Whatever she murmurs to him is noise, the signal is the hand she lays against his chest, so curiously intimate a gesture that he's actually reaching for her as she rises, leaves the theater with the other women drifting after her, one by one out of the shadows, perhaps they were watching all along. Guys have heart attacks all the time, right in the middle of the second feature. She'd felt so sorry for him, doing his second-rate best to help her, he'd meant every second of his atonement. The credits came up over the film still running and she didn't look back once.