Laura (Femmes Fatales) Read online

  “Poor Diane,” Laura said. “She wasn’t the sort of person anyone could hate. I mean . . . she didn’t have much . . . well, passion. Just beauty and vague dreams. I can’t imagine anyone hating a kid like that. She was so . . . I mean . . . you wanted to help her.”

  “Was that Shelby’s explanation?” Waldo asked. “His was a purely philanthropic interest, I take it.”

  Bright spots burned on Laura’s cheeks. “Yes, it was!” she said hotly. “I’d asked him to be kind to her, hadn’t I, Shelby?”

  Shelby went to the cupboard for a log. He was glad for the excuse to move around. Laura’s eyes followed his movements.

  “Had you asked him to be particularly kind to her last Wednesday, darling?” Waldo pretended to ask the question innocently, but he was slanting curious glances at me.

  “Wednesday?” she said with an effort to appear absentminded.

  “Last Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday? The night they did the Toccata and Fugue at the Stadium, wasn’t that Wednesday?” He rolled his eyes toward the fireplace and Shelby. “When was your cocktail party, Laura?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “On Wednesday.”

  “You should have been here, McPherson,” Waldo said. “It was too, too jolly.”

  Laura said, “You’re being silly, Waldo.”

  But Waldo wanted to put on a show and nothing could stop him. He got up with the champagne glass in his hand and gave an imitation of Laura as hostess to a lot of cocktail-drinkers. He did not merely speak in a falsetto voice and swing his hips the way most men do when they imitate women. He had a real talent for acting. He was the hostess, he moved from guest to guest, he introduced strangers, he saw that the glasses were filled, he carried a tray of sandwiches.

  “Hell, darling. I’m so glad you could come . . . you must meet . . . I know you’ll simply adore . . . Don’t tell me you’re not drinking . . . Not eating! . . . Come now, this tiny caviar sandwich wouldn’t put weight on a sturgeon . . . You haven’t met . . . but how incredible, everyone knows Waldo Lydecker, he’s the heavyweight Noel Coward . . . Waldo darling, one of your most loyal admirers . . .”

  It was a good show. You could see the stuffed shirts and the highbrow women, and all the time that he moved around the room, imitating Laura and carrying that imaginary tray, you knew she had been watching something that was going on at the bay window.

  Now Waldo skipped to the bay window. He changed his movements and his gestures became manly. He was Shelby being gallant and cautious. And he was a girl, looking up at Shelby, blinking her eyes and tugging at his lapels. He caught Shelby’s voice perfectly, and while I never heard her voice, I’d known plenty of dolls who talked as he had Diane talking.

  “Oh, but darling, you are the best-looking man in the room . . . Can’t I even say so?” “You’re drunk, baby, don’t talk so loud.” “What harm can there be, Shelby, if I just quietly worship you?” “Quietly, for God’s sakes, kid. Remember where we are.” “Shelby, please, I’m not tight, I never get tight, I’m not talking loud.” “Sh-sh, honey, everyone’s looking at you.” “Let ‘em look, you think I care?” The doll-voice became shrill and angry. Drunken young girls in bars always scream like that.

  Shelby had left the fire. His fists were clenched, his jaw pushed forward, his skin green.

  Laura was trembling.

  Waldo walked to the middle of the room, said in his own voice: “There was a terrible hush. Everyone looked at Laura. She was carrying that tray of hors d’oeuvres.”

  Everyone in the room must have felt sorry for Laura. Her wedding was to have taken place in a week and a day.

  Waldo crossed toward the bay window with catlike, female steps. I watched as if Diane were there with Shelby.

  “Diane had taken hold of his lapels . . .”

  Laura, the real one, the girl on the couch in the tan dress, said: “I’m sorry. For God’s sakes, how often do I have to say I’m sorry?”

  Shelby raised his clenched fists and said: “Yes, Lydecker, we’ve had enough. Enough of your clowning.”

  Waldo looked at me. “What a shame, McPherson! You’ve missed the best part of the scene.”

  “What did she do?” I asked.

  “May I tell him?” said Waldo.

  “You’d better,” said Shelby, “or he’ll imagine something far worse.”

  Laura began to laugh. “I conked her with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. I conked her!”

  We waited until her hysteria had died down. She was crying and laughing at the same time. Shelby tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. Then she looked at me with shame on her face and said: “I’d never done anything like that before. I didn’t dream I could do such a thing. I wanted to die.”

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  “All!” said Shelby.

  “In my own house,” Laura said.

  “What happened afterward?”

  “I went into my bedroom. I wouldn’t let anyone come in and talk to me. I was so ashamed. Then after a while Shelby did come in and he told me Diane had left and that I’d simply have to come out and face my guests.”

  “After all,” said Shelby.

  “Everyone was tactful, but that made me feel worse. But Shelby was darling, he insisted that we go out and get a little tight so I wouldn’t think about it and keep reproaching myself.”

  “How kind of him!” I couldn’t help saying.

  “Shelby’s broad-minded, he forgives easily,” added Waldo.

  “Shelby couldn’t help it if Diane fell in love with him.” Laura ignored the other two; she was explaining it to me. “He’d been kind and polite and thoughtful as he always is. Diane was a poor kid who’d come from the sort of home where they beat up women. She’d never met a . . . a gentleman before.”

  “Oddzooks!” Waldo said.

  “She wanted something better than she’d had at home. Her life had been terribly sordid. Even her name, silly as it sounded, showed that she wanted a better sort of life.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Waldo said.

  Laura took a cigarette. Her hands were unsteady. “I’m not so different. I came to New York, too, a poor kid without friends or money. People were kind to me—” she pointed with a cigarette at Waldo “—and I felt almost an obligation toward kids like Diane. I was the only friend she had. And Shelby.”

  It sounded simple and human as she stood there, so close that I could smell her perfume. I backed away.

  She said, “You believe me, don’t you, Mark?”

  “What was this lunch on Friday? An armistice?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “Yes, yes, an armistice. I went around from Wednesday evening until Friday morning feeling like a hell. And I knew if I didn’t see Diane and say I was sorry my whole vacation would be ruined. Do you think I’m very silly?”

  “A soft-hearted slob,” said Waldo.

  Shelby picked up the poker, but it was only to stoke the fire. My nerves were on edge and I saw violence every time a cigarette was lighted. That was because I craved violence. My hands itched for a fat neck.

  I took two steps forward and was close to Laura again. “Then it was at lunch that you smoked . . .”

  I stopped right there. She was whiter than the white dress that Diane had been buried in.

  “Smoked,” she whispered the word.

  “Smoked the pipe of peace,” I said, “and offered her your apartment.”

  “Yes, the pipe of peace,” Laura said. She had come to life again. Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks glowed with color. Her thin, strong fingers lay on my coat sleeve. “You must believe me, Mark, you must believe that everything was all right when I offered her the apartment. Please, please believe me.”

  Shelby didn’t say a word. But I think he was smiling. Waldo laughed aloud and said, “Careful, Laura, he’s a detective.”

  Her
hand slipped off my coat sleeve.

  Chapter 9

  I ate dinner again that night with Waldo. Ask me why. I asked myself as I looked at his fat face over a bowl of bird’s-nest soup at the Golden Lizard. It was raining. I was lonely. I wanted to talk. I wanted to talk about Laura. She was eating steak and French fries with Shelby. I clung to Waldo. I was afraid of losing him. I despised the guy and he fascinated me. The deeper I got into this case, the less I seemed like myself and the more I felt like a greenhorn in a new world.

  My mind was foggy. I was going somewhere, but I’d lost the road. I remember asking myself about clues. What were clues, what had I looked for in other cases? A smile couldn’t be brought into court as evidence. You couldn’t arrest a man because he had trembled. Brown eyes had stolen a peep at gray eyes, so what? The tone of a voice was something that died with a word.

  The Chinese waiter brought a platter of eggrolls Waldo reached for it like a man on the breadline.

  “Well,” he said, “what do you think of her now that you’ve met her?”

  I helped myself to an eggroll. “It’s my job . . .”

  He finished for me. “ . . . to look at facts and hold no opinions. Where have I heard that before?”

  The waiter brought a trayful of covered dishes. Waldo had to have his plate arranged just so, pork on this side, duck over there, noodles under the almond chicken, sweet and pungent spareribs next to lobster, Chinese ravioli on a separate plate because there might be a conflict in the sauces. Until he had tried each dish with and without beetle juice, there was no more talk at our table.

  At last he stopped for breath and said: “I remember something you said when you first came to see me on Sunday morning. Do you remember?”

  “We said a lot of things on Sunday morning. Both of us.”

  “You said that it wasn’t fingerprints you’d want to study in this case, but faces. That was very dull of you, I thought.”

  “Then why did you remember it?”

  “Because I was moved by the sorry spectacle of a conventional young man thinking that he had become radically unconventional.”

  “So what?” I said.

  He snapped his fingers. Two waiters came running. It seems they had forgotten the fried rice. There was more talk than necessary, and he had to rearrange his plate. Between giving orders to the Chinese and moaning because the ritual (his word) of his dinner was upset, he talked about Elwell and Dot King and Starr Faithful and several other well-known murder cases.

  “And you think this is going to be the unsolved Diane Redfern case?” I asked.

  “Not the Redfern case, my friend. In the public mind and in the newspapers, it will be the Laura Hunt case forevermore. Laura will go through life a marked woman, the living victim of unsolved murder.”

  He was trying to get me angry. There were no direct hits, only darts and pinpricks. I tried to avoid his face, but I could not escape that doughy smirk. If I turned around, he moved too, his fat head rolling like a ballbearing in his starched collar.

  “You’d die before you’d let that happen, my gallant Hawkshaw? You’d risk your precious hide before you’d let that poor innocent girl suffer such lifelong indignity, eh?” He laughed aloud. Two waiters poked their heads out of the kitchen.

  “Your jokes aren’t so funny,” I said.

  “Woof! Woof! How savage our bark is tonight. What’s tormenting you? Is it fear of failure or the ominous competition with Apollo Belvedere?”

  I could feel my face getting red. “Look here,” I said.

  Again he interrupted. “Look here, my dear lad, at the risk of losing your esteemed friendship . . . and the friendship of such an estimable character as yourself I do value, whether you believe me or not . . . at the risk, I say of losing . . .”

  “Get to the point,” I said.

  “Advice to a young man: don’t lose your head. She’s not for you.”

  “Mind your goddamned business,” I said.

  “Some day you will thank me for this. Unless you fail to heed my advice, of course. Didn’t you hear her describing Diane’s infatuation for Shelby? A gentleman, oddzooks! Do you think that Diane has died so completely that chivalry must die, too? If you were more astute, my friend, you would see that Laura is Diane and Diane was Laura . . .”

  “Her real name was Jennie Swobodo. She used to work in a mill in Jersey.”

  “It’s like a bad novel.”

  “But Laura’s no dope. She must have known he was a heel.”

  “Long after the core of gentility is gone, the husks remain. The educated woman, no less than the poor mill girl, is bound by the shackles of romance. The aristocratic tradition, my dear good friend, with its faint sweet odor of corruption. Romantics are children, they never grow up.” He helped himself to another round of chicken, pork, duck, and rice. “Didn’t I tell you the day we met that Shelby was Laura’s softer, less distinguished side? Do you see it now, the answer to that longing for perfection? Pass the soy sauce, please.”

  Romance was something for crooners, for the movies. The only person I ever heard use the word in common life was my kid sister, and she’d raised herself by romance, married the boss.

  “I was hopeful once that Laura’d grow up, get over Shelby. She’d have been a great woman if she had, you know. But the dream still held her, the hero she could love forever immaturely, the mould of perfection whose flawlessness made no demands upon her sympathies or her intelligence.”

  I was tired of his talk. “Come on, let’s get out of this dump,” I said. He made me feel that everything was hopeless.

  While we were waiting for change, I picked up his cane.

  “What do you carry this for?” I said.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s an affectation.”

  “You’re a prig,” he said.

  “Just the same,” I said, “I think it’s a phoney.”

  “Everyone in New York knows Waldo Lydecker’s walking stick. It gives me importance.”

  I was willing to let the subject drop, but he liked to brag about his possessions. “I picked it up in Dublin. The dealer told me that it had been carried by an Irish baronet whose lofty and furious temper became a legend in the country.”

  “Probably used it for beating up the poor devils who dug peat on his lands,” I said, not being very sympathetic to hot-blooded noblemen, my grandmother’s stories having given me the other side of the picture. The cane was one of the heaviest I have ever handled, weighing at least one pound, twelve ounces. Below the crook, the stick was encircled by two gold bands set about three inches apart.

  He snatched it out of my hands. “Give it back to me.”

  “What’s eating you? Nobody wants your damn cane.”

  The Chinese brought change. Waldo watched out of the corner of his eye, and I added a quarter to the tip, hating myself but too weak to give him a reason to sneer.

  “Don’t sulk,” he said. “If you need a cane, I’ll buy you one. With a rubber tip.”

  I felt like picking up that big hunk of blubber and bouncing him like a ball. But I couldn’t take any chances of losing his friendship. Not now. He asked where I was going, and when I said downtown, asked me to drop him at the Lafayette.

  “Don’t be so ungracious,” he said. “I should think you’d be glad for an extra quarter-hour of my admirable discourse.”

  While we were driving along Fourth Avenue, he grabbed my arm. The car almost skidded.

  “What’s the idea?” I said.

  “You must stop! Please, you must. Be generous for once in your life.”

  I was curious to know the cause of his excitement, so I stopped the car. He hurried back along the block to Mr. Claudius’s antique shop.

  Mr. Claudius’s last name was Cohen. He was more like a Yankee than a Jew. He was about five-foot eleven, weighed
no more than a hundred and fifty, had light eyes and a bald head that rose up to a point like a pear. I knew him because he had once had a partner who was a fence. Claudius was an innocent guy, absentminded and so crazy about antiques that he had no idea of his partner’s double-crossing. I had been able to keep him out of court, and in gratitude he had given me a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  It was natural that he and Waldo should know each other. They could both go into a trance over an old teapot.

  What Waldo had seen in Claudius’s window was a duplicate of the vase he had given Laura. It was made like a globe set upon a pedestal. To me it looked like one of those silver balls that hang on Christmas trees, strictly Woolworth. And I understand that it is not so rare and costly as many of the pieces that cause collectors to swoon. Waldo valued it because he had started the craze for mercury glass among certain high-class snobs. In his piece, “Distortion and Refraction,” he had written:

  Glass, blown bubble thin, is coated on the inner surface with a layer of quicksilver so that it shines like a mirror. And just as the mercury in a thermometer reveals the body’s temperature, so do the refractions in that discerning globe discover the fevers of temperament in those unfortunate visitors who, upon entering my drawing room, are first glimpsed in its globular surfaces as deformed dwarfs.

  “Claudius, you dolt, why in the sacred name of Josiah Wedgwood have you been keeping this from me?”

  Claudius took it out of the window. While Waldo made love to the vase, I looked at some old pistols. The conversation went on behind my back.

  “Where did you get it?” Waldo asked.

  “From a house in Beacon.”

  “How much are you going to soak me for it, you old horse thief?”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “Not for sale! But my good man . . .”

  “It’s sold,” Claudius said.

  Waldo pounded his stick against the skinny legs of an old table. “What right have you to sell it without offering it to me first? You know my needs.”

  “I found it for my customer. He’d commissioned me to buy any mercury glass I found at any price I thought was right.”