Laura (Femmes Fatales) Page 4

  I awaited his answer like a touchy Jehovah. If he failed to appreciate the quality of a woman who had adorned this room, I should know that his interest in literature was but the priggish aspiration of a seeker after self-improvement, his sensitivity no more than proletarian prudery. For me the room still shone with Laura’s luster. Perhaps it was in the crowding memories of firelit conversations, of laughing dinners at the candle-bright refectory table, of midnight confidences fattened by spicy snacks and endless cups of steaming coffee. But even as it stood for him, mysterious and bare of memory, it must have represented, in the deepest sense of the words, a living room.

  For answer he chose the long green chair, stretched his legs on the ottoman, and pulled out his pipe. His eyes traveled from the black marble fireplace in which the logs were piled, ready for the first cool evening, to softly faded chintz whose deep folds shut out the glare of the hot twilight.

  After a time he burst out: “I wish to Christ my sister could see this place. Since she married and went to live in Kew Gardens, she won’t have kitchen matches in the parlor. This place has—” he hesitated “—it’s very comfortable.”

  I think the word in his mind had been class, but he kept it from me, knowing that intellectual snobbism is nourished by such trivial crudities. His attention wandered to the bookshelves.

  “She had a lot of books. Did she ever read them?”

  “What do you think?”

  He shrugged. “You never know about women.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a misogynist.”

  He clamped his teeth hard upon his pipestem and glanced at me with an air of urchin defiance.

  “Come, now, what of the girlfriend?” I pleaded.

  He answered dryly: “I’ve had plenty in my life. I’m no angel.”

  “Ever loved one?”

  “A doll in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me. And I’m a Scotchman, Mr. Lydecker. So make what you want of it.”

  “Ever know one who wasn’t a doll? Or a dame?”

  He went to the bookshelves. While he talked, his hands and eyes were concerned with a certain small volume bound in red morocco. “Sometimes I used to take my sisters’ girl friends out. They never talked about anything except going steady and getting married. Always wanted to take you past furniture stores to show you the parlor suites. One of them almost hooked me.”

  “And what saved you?”

  “Mattie Grayson’s machine gun. You were right. It was no tragedy.”

  “Didn’t she wait?”

  “Hell, yes. The day they discharged me, there she was at the hospital door. Full of love and plans; her old man had plenty of dough, owned a fish store, and was ready to furnish the flat, first payment down. I was still using crutches so I told her I wouldn’t let her sacrifice herself.” He laughed aloud. “After the months I’d put in reading and thinking, I couldn’t go for a parlor suite. She’s married now, got a couple of kids, lives in Jersey.”

  “Never read any books, eh?”

  “Oh, she’s probably bought a couple of sets for the bookcase. Keeps them dusted and never reads them.”

  He snapped the cover on the red morocco volume. The shrill blast of the popcorn whistle insulted our ears and the voices of children rose to remind us of the carnival of death in the street below. Bessie Clary, Laura’s maid, had told the police that her first glimpse of the body had been a distorted reflection in the mercury-glass globe on Laura’s mantel. That tarnished bubble caught and held our eyes, and we saw in it fleetingly, as in a crystal ball, a vision of the inert body in the blue robe, dark blood matted in the dark hair.

  “What did you want to ask me, McPherson? Why did you bring me up here?”

  His face had the watchfulness that comes after generations to a conquered people. The Avenger, when he comes, will wear that proud, guarded look. For a moment I glimpsed enmity. My fingers beat a tattoo on the arm of my chair. Strangely, the padded rhythms seemed to reach him, for he turned, staring as if my face were a memory from some fugitive reverie. Another thirty seconds had passed, I dare say, before he took from her desk a spherical object covered in soiled leather.

  “What’s this, Mr. Lydecker?”

  “Surely a man of your sporting tastes is familiar with that ecstatic toy, McPherson.”

  “But why did she keep a baseball on her desk?” He emphasized the pronoun. She had begun to live. Then examining the tattered leather and loosened bindings, he asked, “Has she had it since ’38?”

  “I’m sure I didn’t notice the precise date when this object d’art was introduced into the household.”

  “It’s autographed by Cookie Lavagetto. That was his big year. Was she a Dodgers fan?”

  “There were many facets to her character.”

  “Was Shelby a fan, too?”

  “Will the answer to that question help you solve the murder, my dear fellow?”

  He set the baseball down so that it should lie precisely where Laura had left it. “I just wanted to know. If it bothers you to answer the question, Mr. Lydecker . . .”

  “There’s no reason to get sullen about it,” I snapped. “As a matter of fact, Shelby wasn’t a fan. He preferred . . . why do I speak of him in the past tense? He prefers the more aristocratic sports, tennis, riding, hunting, you know.”

  “Yep,” he said.

  Near the door, a few feet from the spot where the body had fallen, hung Stuart Jacoby’s portrait of Laura. Jacoby, one of the imitators of Eugene Speicher, had produced a flattened version of a face that was anything but flat. The best feature of the painting, as they had been her best feature, were the eyes. The oblique tendency, emphasized by the sharp tilt of dark brows, gave her face that shy, fawn-like quality which had so enchanted me the day I opened the door to a slender child who had asked me to endorse a fountain pen. Jacoby had caught the fluid sense of restlessness in the position of her body, perched on the arm of a chair, a pair of yellow gloves in one hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other. The portrait was a trifle unreal, however, a trifle studied, too much Jacoby and not enough Laura.

  “She wasn’t a bad-looking da—” He hesitated, smiled ruefully, “—girl, was she, Mr. Lydecker?”

  “That’s a sentimental portrait. Jacoby was in love with her at the time.”

  “She had a lot of men in love with her, didn’t she?”

  “She was a very kind woman. Kind and generous.”

  “That’s not what men fall for.”

  “She had delicacy. If she was aware of a man’s shortcomings, she never showed it.”

  “Full of bull?”

  “No, extremely honest. Her flattery was never shallow. She found the real qualities and made them important. Surface faults and affections fell away like false friends at the approach of adversity.”

  He studied the portrait. “Why didn’t she get married, then? Earlier, I mean?”

  “She was disappointed when she was very young.”

  “Most people are disappointed when they’re young. That doesn’t keep them from finding someone else. Particularly women.”

  “She wasn’t like your erstwhile fiancé, McPherson. Laura had no need for a parlor suite. Marriage wasn’t her career. She had her career, she made plenty of money, and there were always men to squire and admire her. Marriage could give her only one sort of completion, and she was keeping herself for that.”

  “Keeping herself busy,” he added dryly.

  “Would you have prescribed a nunnery for a woman of her temperament? She had a man’s job and a man’s worries. Knitting wasn’t one of her talents. Who are you to judge her?”

  “Keep your shirt on,” Mark said. “I didn’t make any comments.”

  I had gone to the bookshelves and removed the volume to which he had given such careful scrutiny. He gave no sign that he had noticed, but fixed his fury upon an enlarged sn
apshot of Shelby looking uncommonly handsome in tennis flannels.

  Dusk had descended. I switched on the lamp. In that swift transition from dusk to illumination, I caught a glimpse of darker, more impenetrable mystery. Here was no simple Police Department investigation. In such inconsistent trifles as an ancient baseball, a worn Gulliver, a treasured snapshot, he sought clues, not to the passing riddle of a murder, but to the eternally enigmatic nature of woman. This was a search no man could make with his eyes alone; the heart must also be engaged. He, stern fellow, would have been the first to deny such implications, but I, through these prognostic lenses, perceived the true cause of his resentment against Shelby. His private enigma, so much deeper than the professional solution of the crime, concerned the answer to a question which has ever baffled the lover, “What did she see in that other fellow?” As he glowered at the snapshot I knew that he was pondering on the quality of Laura’s affection for Shelby, wondering whether a woman of her sensitivity and intelligence could be satisfied merely with the perfect mould of a man.

  “Too late, my friend,” I said jocosely. “The final suitor has rung her doorbell.”

  With a gesture whose fierceness betrayed the zeal with which his heart was guarded, he snatched up some odds and ends piled on Laura’s desk, her address and engagement book, letters and bills bound by a rubber band, unopened bank statements, checkbooks, and old diary, and a photograph album.

  “Come on,” he snapped. “I’m hungry. Let’s get out of this dump.”

  Chapter 5

  We’ve discovered certain clues, but we are not ready to make a statement.”

  The reporters found McPherson dignified, formal, and somewhat aloof that Monday morning. He felt a new importance in himself as if his life had taken on new meaning. The pursuit of individual crime had ceased to be trivial. A girl reporter, using female tricks to win information denied her trousered competitors, exclaimed, “I shouldn’t mind being murdered half so much, Mr. McPherson, if you were the detective seeking clues to my private life.”

  His mouth twisted. The flattery was not delicate.

  Her address and engagement books, bank statements, bills, check stubs, and correspondence filled his desk and his mind. Through them he had discovered the richness of her life, but also the profligacy. Too many guests and too many dinners, too many letters assuring her of undying devotion, too much of herself spent on the casual and petty, the transitory, the undeserving. Thus his Presbyterian virtue rejected the danger of covetousness. He had discovered the best of life in a gray-walled hospital room and had spent the years that followed asking himself timorously whether loneliness must be the inevitable companion of appreciation. This summing-up of Laura’s life answered his question, but the answer failed to satisfy the demands of his stern upbringing. He learned as he read her letters, balanced her unbalanced accounts, added the sums of unpaid bills, that while the connoisseur of living is not lonely, the price is high. To support the richness of life she had worked until she was too tired to approach her wedding day with joy or freedom.

  The snapshot album was filled with portraits of Shelby Carpenter. In a single summer, Laura had fallen victim to his charms and the candid camera. She had caught him full face and profile, closeup and bust, on the tennis court, and the wheel of her roadster, in swimming trunks, in overalls, in hip boots with a basket slung over his shoulder, a fishing reel in his hand. Mark paused at the portrait of Shelby, the hunter, surrounded by dead ducks.

  Surely the reader must, by this time, be questioning the impertinence of a reporter who records unseen actions as nonchalantly as if he had been hiding in Mark’s office behind a framed photograph of the New York Police Department Baseball Team, 1912. But I would take oath, and in that very room where they keep the sphygmomanometer, that a good third of this was told me and a richer two-thirds intimated on that very Monday afternoon when, returning from a short journey to the barber’s, I found Mark waiting in my apartment. And I would further swear, although I am sure the sensitive hand of the lie-detector would record an Alpine sweep at the statement, that he had yielded to the charm of old porcelain. For the second time I discovered him in my drawing room, his hands stretched toward my favorite shelf. I cleared my throat before entering. He turned with a rueful smile.

  “Don’t look so sheepish,” I admonished. “I’ll never tell them at the Police Department that you’re acquiring taste.”

  His eyes shot red sparks, “Do you know what Doctor Sigmund Freud said about collectors?”

  “I know what Doctor Waldo Lydecker thinks of people who quote Freud.” We sat down. “To what kind whim of Fate do I owe this unexpected visit?”

  “I happened to be passing by.”

  My spirits rose. This casual visit was not without a certain warm note of flatter. Yesterday’s disapproval had melted like an ice cube surprised by a shower of hot coffee. But even as I hastened to fetch whiskey for my guest, I cautioned myself against an injudicious display of enthusiasm. Whereas a detective may be a unique and even trustworthy friend, one must always remember that he has made a profession of curiosity.

  “I’ve been with Shelby Carpenter,” he announced as we drank a small toast to the solution of the mystery.

  “Indeed,” said I, assuming the air of a cool but not ungracious citizen who cherishes a modicum of privacy.

  “Does he know anything about music?”

  “He talks a music-lover’s patter, but his information is shallow. You’ll probably find him raising ecstatic eyes to heaven at the name of Beethoven and shuddering piously if someone should be so indiscreet as to mention Ethelbert Nevin.”

  “Would he know the difference—” Mark consulted his notebook “—between ‘Finlandia’ by Si-bee-lee-us and ‘Toccata and Fugue’ by Johann Sebastian Bach?”

  “Anyone who can’t distinguish between Sibelius and Bach, my dear fellow, is fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils.”

  “I’m a cluck when it comes to music. Duke Ellington’s my soup.” He offered a sheet from his notebook. “This is what Carpenter told me they were playing on Friday night. He didn’t bother to check on the program. This is what they played.”

  I drew a sharp breath.

  “It shoots his alibi as full of holes as a mosquito net. But it still doesn’t prove he murdered her,” Mark reminded me with righteous sharpness.

  I poured him another drink. “Come now, you haven’t told me what you think of Shelby Carpenter.”

  “It’s a shame he isn’t a cop.”

  I cast discretion to the wind. Clapping him on the shoulder, I cried zestfully: “My dear lad, you are precious! A cop! The flower of old Kentucky! Mah deah suh, the ghosts of a legion of Confederate Colonels rise up to haunt you. Old Missy is whirling in her grave. Come, another drink on that, my astute young Hawkshaw. Properly we should be drinking mint juleps, but unfortunately Uncle Tom of Manila has lost the secret.” And I went off into roars of unrestrained appreciation.

  He regarded my mirth with some skepticism. “He’s got all the physical requirements. And you wouldn’t have to teach him to be polite.”

  “And fancy him in a uniform,” I added, my imagination rollicking. “I can see him on the corner of Fifth Avenue where Art meets Bergdorf Goodman. What a tangle of traffic at the hour when the cars roll in from Westchester to meet the husbands! There would be no less rioting in Wall Street, I can tell you, than on a certain historic day in ’29.”

  “There are a lot of people who haven’t got the brains for their education.” The comment, while uttered honestly, was tinged faintly with the verdigris of envy. “The trouble is that they’ve been brought up with ideas of class and education so they can’t relax and work in common jobs. There are plenty of fellows in these fancy offices who’d be a lot happier working in filling stations.”

  “I’ve seen many of them break under the strain of intelligence,” I agreed. “Hundreds have b
een committed for life to the cocktail bars of Madison Avenue. There ought to be a special department in Washington to handle the problem of old Princeton men. I dare say Shelby looks down with no little condescension upon your profession.”

  A curt nod rewarded my astuteness. Mr. McPherson did not fancy Mr. Carpenter, but, as he had sternly reminded me on a former occasion, it was his business to observe rather than to judge the people encountered in professional adventure.

  “The only thing that worries me, Mr. Lydecker, is that I can’t place the guy. I’ve seen that face before. But where and when? Usually I’m a fool for faces. I can give you names and dates and places I’ve seen them.” His jaw shot forward and his lips pressed themselves into the tight mould of determination.

  I laughed with secret tolerance as he gave me what he considered an objective picture of his visit to the offices of Rose, Rowe and Sanders, Advertising Counsellors. In that hot-air-conditioned atmosphere he must have seemed as alien as a sharecropper in a night club. He tried hard not to show disapproval, but opinion was as natural to him as appetite. There was a fine juicy prejudice in his portrait of three advertising executives pretending to be dismayed by the notoriety of a front-page murder. While they mourned her death, Laura’s bosses were not unaware of the publicity value of a crime which cast no shadow upon their own respectability.

  “I bet they had a conference and decided that a high-class murder wouldn’t lose any business.”

  “And considering the titillating confidences they could whisper to prospective clients at lunch,” I added.

  Mark’s malice was impudent. Bosses aroused no respect in his savage breast. His proletarian prejudices were as rigid as any you will find in the upper reaches of so-called Society. It pleased him more to discover sincere praise and mourning among her fellow workers than to hear her employers’ high estimate of Laura’s character and talents. Anyone who was smart, he opined, could please the boss, but it took the real stuff for a girl in a high-class job to be popular with her fellow employees.