Laura (Femmes Fatales) Read online

  “He finds the Hotel Framingham too public. Crowds wait in the lobby to see the fellow who was going to marry a murder victim.”

  “What do you think of Shelby’s alibi?”

  “What do I think of yours?” he retorted.

  “But you’ve agreed that it’s quite normal for a man to spend an evening at home with Gibbon.”

  “What’s wrong about a man going to a Stadium concert?” Puritan nostrils quivered. “Among a lot of music-lovers and art collectors, that seems a pretty natural way to spend an evening.”

  “If you knew the bridegroom, you’d not think a twenty-five-cent seat normal. But he finds it a convenient way of not having been seen by any of his friends.”

  “I’m always grateful for information, Mr. Lydecker, but I prefer forming my own opinions.”

  “Neat, McPherson. Very neat.”

  “How long had you known her, Mr. Lydecker?”

  “Seven, eight—yes, it was eight years,” I told him. “We met in thirty-four. Shall I tell you about it?”

  Mark puffed at his pipe, the room was filled with its rancid sweet odor. Roberto entered noiselessly to refill the coffee cups. The radio orchestra played a rhumba.

  “She rang my doorbell, McPherson, much as you rang it this morning. I was working at my desk, writing, as I remember, a birthday piece about a certain eminent American, the Father of Our Country. I should never have committed such a cliché, but, as my editor had asked for it and as we were in the midst of some rather delicate financial rearrangements, I had decided that I could not but gain by appeasement. Just as I was about to throw away a substantial increase in earning power as indulgence for my boredom, this lovely child entered my life.”

  I should have been an actor. Had I been physically better suited to the narcissistic profession, I should probably have been among the greatest of my time. Now, as Mark let the second cup of coffee grow cold, he saw me as I had been eight years before, wrapped in the same style of Persian dressing gown, padding on loose Japanese clogs to answer the doorbell.

  “Carlo, who was Roberto’s predecessor, had gone out to do the daily marketing. I think she was surprised to see that I answered my own doorbell. She was a slender thing, timid as a fawn and fawn-like, too, in her young uncertain grace. She had a tiny head, delicate for even that thin body, and the tilt of it along with the bright shyness of her slightly oblique dark eyes further contributed to the sense that Bambi—or Bambi’s doe—had escaped from the forest and galloped up the eighteen flights to this apartment.

  “When I asked why she had come, she gave a little clucking sound. Fear had taken her voice. I was certain that she had walked around and around the building before daring to enter, and that she had stood in the corridor hearing her own heart pound before she dared touch a frightened finger to my doorbell.

  “‘Well, out with it!’ Unwilling to acknowledge that I had been touched by her pretty shyness, I spoke harshly. My temper was more choleric in those days, Mr. McPherson.

  “She spoke softly and very rapidly. I remember it as all one sentence, beginning with a plea that I forgive her for disturbing me and then promising that I should receive huge publicity for reward if I would endorse a fountain pen her employers were advertising. It was called the Byron.

  “I exploded. ‘Give me publicity, my good girl! Your reasoning is sadly distorted. It’s my name that will give distinction to your cheap fountain pen. And how dared you take the sacred name of Byron? Who gave you the right? I’ve a good mind to write the manufacturers a stiff letter.’

  “I tried not to notice the brightness of her eyes, McPherson. I was not aware at this time that she had named the fountain pen herself and that she was proud of its literary sound. She persisted bravely, telling me about a fifty-thousand-dollar advertising campaign which could not fail to glorify my name.

  “I felt it my duty to become apoplectic. ‘Do you know how many dollars’ worth of white space my syndicated columns now occupy? And do you realize that manufacturers of typewriters, toothpaste, and razors with fifty-thousand-dollar checks in their pockets are turned away from this door daily? You talk of giving me publicity!’

  “Her embarrassment was painful. I asked if she would stay and have a glass of sherry. Doubtless she would have preferred flight, but she was too shy to refuse. While we drank the sherry, I made her tell me about herself. This was her first job and it represented the apex of her ambitions at the time. She had visited sixty-eight advertising agencies before she got the job. Buried beneath the air of timidity was a magnificent will. Laura knew she was clever, and she was willing to suffer endless rebuffs in order to prove her talents. When she had finished, I said, ‘I suppose you think I’m moved by your story and that I’m supposed to break down and give you that endorsement.’”

  “Did you?” Mark inquired.

  “McPherson, I am the most mercenary man in America. I never take any action without computing the profit.”

  “You gave her the endorsement.”

  I bowed my head in shame. “For seven years Waldo Lydecker has enthusiastically acclaimed the Byron Pen. Without it, I am sure that my collected essays would never sell one hundred thousand copies.”

  “She must have been a terrific kid,” he remarked.

  “Only mildly terrific at that period. I recognized her possibilities, however. The next week I entertained her at dinner. That was the beginning. Under my tutelage she developed from a gauche child to a gracious New Yorker. After a year no one would have suspected that she came from Colorado Springs. And she remained loyal and appreciative, McPherson. Of all my friends she is the only one with whom I was willing to share my prestige. She became as well known at opening nights as Waldo Lydecker’s graying Van Dyke or his gold-banded stick.”

  My guest offered no comment. The saturnine mood had returned. Scotch piety and Brooklyn poverty had developed his resistance to chic women. “Was she ever in love with you?”

  I recoiled. My answer came in a thick voice. “Laura was always fond of me. She rejected suitor after suitor during those eight years of loyalty.”

  The contradiction was named Shelby Carpenter. But explanation would come later. Mark knew the value of silence in dealing with such a voluble creature as myself.

  “My love for Laura,” I explained, “was not merely the desire of a mature man for a pretty young thing. There was a deeper basis for affection. Laura had made me a generous man. It’s quite fallacious to believe that we grow fond of those whom we’ve hurt. Remorse cannot compensate. It’s more human to shun those whose presence reminds us of a shoddy past. Generosity, not evil, flourishes like the green bay tree. Laura considered me the kindest man in the universe, hence I had to grow to that stature. For her I was always Jovian, in humanity as well as intelligence.”

  I suspected doubt behind his swift glance of appraisal. He rose. “It’s getting late. I’ve got a date with Carpenter.”

  “Behold, the bridegroom waits!” As we walked to the door, I added, “I wonder how you’re going to like Shelby.”

  “It’s not my business to like or dislike anyone. I’m only interested in her friends . . .”

  “As suspects?” I teased.

  “For more information. I shall probably call on you again, Mr. Lydecker.”

  “Whenever you like. I do indeed hope to aid, if I can, in the apprehension of the vile being—we can’t call him human, can we?—who could have performed such a villainous and uselessly tragic deed. But in the meantime I shall be curious to know your opinion of Shelby.”

  “You don’t think much of him yourself, do you?”

  “Shelby was Laura’s other life.” I stood with my hand on the doorknob. “To my prejudiced way of thinking, the more commonplace and less distinguished side of her existence. But judge for yourself, young man.”

  We shook hands.

  “To solve the puzzle of her
death, you must first resolve the mystery of Laura’s life. This is no simple task. She had no secret fortune, no hidden rubies. But, I warn you, McPherson, the activities of crooks and racketeers will seem simple in comparison with the motives of a modern woman.”

  He showed impatience.

  “A complicated, cultivated modern woman. ‘Concealment, like a worm i’ the bud, fed on her damask cheek.’ I shall be at your command whenever you call, McPherson. Au revoir.”

  I stood at the door until he had got into the elevator.

  Chapter 2

  While a not inconsiderable share of my work has been devoted to the study of murder, I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story. At the risk of seeming somewhat less modest, I shall quote from my own works. The sentence, so often reprinted, that opens my essay “Of Sound and Fury,” is pertinent here:

  “When, during the 1936 campaign, I learned that the President was a devotee of mystery stories, I voted a straight Republican ticket.”

  My prejudices have not been shed. I still consider the conventional mystery story an excess of sound and fury, signifying, far worse than nothing, a barbaric need for violence and revenge in that timid horde known as the reading public. The literature of murder investigation bores me as profoundly as its practice irritated Mark McPherson. Yet I am bound to tell this story, just as he was obliged to continue his searches, out of a deep emotional involvement in the case of Laura Hunt. I offer the narrative, not so much as a detective yarn as a love story.

  I wish I were its hero. I fancy myself a pensive figure drawn, without conscious will, into a love that was born of violence and destined for tragedy. I am given to thinking of myself in the third person. Many a time, when I have suffered some clumsy misadventure, I am saved from remorse by the substitution for unsavory memory of another captivating installment in The Life and Times of Waldo Lydecker. Rare are the nights when I fail to lull myself to sleep without the sedative of some such heroic statement as “Waldo Lydecker stood, untroubled, at the edge of a cliff beneath which ten thousand angry lions roared.”

  I make this confession at the risk of exhibiting absurdity. My proportions are, if anything, too heroic. While I measure three inches above six feet, the magnificence of my skeleton is hidden by the weight of my flesh. My dreams dwindle in contrast. Yet I dare say that if the dreams of any so-called normal man were exposed, like Dali drawings, to vulgar eyes of the masses, there would be no more gravity and dignity left for mankind. At certain times in history, flesh was considered a sign of good disposition, but we live in a tiresome era wherein exercise is held sacred and heroes are always slender. I always give it up when I reflect that no philosophy or fantasy dare enter a mind as usurious as Shylock’s over each pound of flesh. So I have learned, at the age of fifty-two, to accept this burden with the same philosophical calm with which I endure such indecencies as hot weather and war news.

  But it will not be possible to write of myself heroically in those chapters wherein Mark McPherson moves the story. I have long learned to uphold my ego in a world that also contains Shelby Carpenter, but the young detective is a more potent man. There is no wax in Mark; he is hard coin metal who impresses his own definite stamp upon those who seek to mould him.

  He is definite but not simple. His complexities trouble him. Contemptuous of luxury, he is also charmed by it. He resents my collection of glass and porcelain, my Biedermeier and my library, but envies the culture which has developed appreciation of surface lusters. His remarking upon my preference for men who are less than hundred percent exposed his own sensitivity. Reared in a world that honors only hundred percents, he has learned in maturity what I knew as a miserable, obese adolescent, that the lame, the halt, and the blind have more malice in their souls, therefore more acumen. Cherishing secret hurt, they probe for pains and weaknesses of others. And probing is the secret of finding. Through telescopic lenses I discerned in Mark the weakness that normal eyesight might never discover.

  The hard coin metal of his character fails to arouse my envy. I am jealous of severed bone, of tortured muscle, of scars whose existence demands such firmness of footstep, such stern, military erectness. My own failings, obesity, astigmatism, the softness of pale flesh, can find no such heroic apology. But a silver shinbone, the legacy of a dying desperado! There is romance in the very anatomy of man.

  For an hour after he had gone, I sat upon the sofa, listless, toying with my envy. That hour exhausted me. I turned for solace to Laura’s epitaph. Rhythms failed, words eluded me. Mark had observed that I wrote smoothly but said nothing. I have sometimes suspected this flaw in my talent, but have never faced myself with the admission of failure. Upon that Sunday noon I saw myself as a fat, fussy, and useless male of middle age and doubtful charm. By all that is logical I should have despised Mark McPherson. I could not. For all of his rough edges, he was the man I should have been, the hero of the story.

  The hero, but not the interpreter. That is my omniscient role. As narrator and interpreter, I shall describe scenes which I never saw and record dialogues which I did not hear. For this impudence I offer no excuse. I am an artist, and it is my business to recreate movement precisely as I create mood. I know these people, their voices ring in my ears, and I need only close my eyes and see characteristic gestures. My written dialogue will have more clarity, compactness, and essence of character than their spoken lines, for I am able to edit while I write, whereas they carried on their conversations in a loose and pointless fashion with no sense of form or crisis in the building of their scenes. And when I write of myself as a character in the story, I shall endeavor to record my flaws with the same objectivity as if I were no more important than any other figure in this macabre romance.

  Chapter 3

  Laura’s Aunt Susan once sang in musical comedy. Then she became a widow. The period between—the hyphen of marriage—is best forgotten. Never in the years I have known her have I heard her lament the late Horace Q. Treadwell. The news of Laura’s death had brought her hastily from her summer place on Long Island to the mausoleum on upper Fifth Avenue. One servant, a grim Finn, had accompanied her. It was Helga who opened the door for Mark and led him through a maze of dark canals into a vast uncarpeted chamber in which every piece of furniture, every picture and ornament, wore a shroud of pale, striped linen.

  This was Mark’s first visit to a private home on Fifth Avenue. As he waited he paced the long room, accosting and retreating from his lean, dark-clad image in a full-length gold-framed mirror. His thoughts dwelt upon the meeting with the bereaved bridegroom. Laura was to have married Shelby Carpenter on the following Thursday. They had passed their blood tests and answered the questions on the application for a marriage license.

  Mark knew these facts thoroughly. Shelby had been disarmingly frank with the police sergeant who asked the first questions. Folded in Mark’s coat pocket was a carbon record of the lovers’ last meeting. The facts were commonplace but not conventional.

  Laura had been infected with the weekend sickness. From the first of May until the last of September, she joined the fanatic mob in weekend pilgrimages to Connecticut. The mouldy house described in “The Fermenting of New England,” was Laura’s converted barn. Her garden suffered pernicious anaemia and the sums she spent to fertilize that rocky soil would have provided a purple orchid every day of the year with a corsage of Odontoglossum grande for Sundays. But she persisted in the belief that she saved a vast fortune because, for five months of the year, she had only to buy flowers once a week.

  After my first visit, no amount of persuasion could induce me to step foot upon the Wilton train. Shelby, however, was a not unwilling victim. And sometimes she took the maid, Bessie, and thus relieved herself of household duties which she pretended to enjoy. On this Friday, she had decided to leave them both in town. She needed four or five days of loneliness, she told Shelby, to bridge the gap between a Lady Lilith Face Cream campaign and her
honeymoon. It would never do to start as a nervous bride. This reasoning satisfied Shelby. It never occurred to him that she might have other plans. Nor did he question her farewell dinner with me. She had arranged, or so she told Shelby, to leave my house in time to catch the ten-twenty train.

  She and Shelby had worked for the same advertising agency. At five o’clock on Friday afternoon, he went into her office. She gave her secretary a few final instructions, powdered her nose, reddened her lips, and rode down in the elevator with him. They stopped for martinis at the Tropicale, a bar frequented by advertising and radio writers. Laura spoke of her plans for the week. She was not certain as to the hour of her return, but she did not expect Shelby to meet her train. The trip to and from Wilton was no more to her than a subway ride. She set Wednesday as the day of her return and promised to telephone him immediately upon her arrival.

  As Mark pondered these facts, his eyes on the checkerboard of light and dark woods set into Mrs. Treadwell’s floor, he became aware that his restlessness was the subject of nervous scrutiny. The long mirror framed his first impression of Shelby Carpenter. Against the shrouded furniture, Shelby was like a brightly lithographed figure on the gaudy motion picture poster decorating the sombre granite of an ancient opera house. The dark suit chosen for this day of mourning could not dull his vivid grandeur. Male energy shone in his tanned skin, gleamed from his clear gray eyes, swelled powerful biceps. Later, as Mark told me of the meeting, he confessed that he was puzzled by an almost overwhelming sense of familiarity. Shelby spoke with the voice of a stranger but with lips whose considered smile seemed as familiar as Mark’s own reflection. All through the interview and in several later meetings, Mark sought vainly to recall some earlier association. The enigma enraged him. Failure seemed to indicate a softening process within himself. Encounters with Shelby diminished his self-confidence.

  They chose chairs at opposite ends of the long room. Shelby had offered, Mark accepted, a Turkish cigarette. Opressed by Fifth Avenue magnificence, he had barely the courage to ask for an ashtray. And this a man who had faced machine guns.