Laura (Femmes Fatales) Read online

  “So you think Laura had the real stuff?”

  He affected deafness. I studied his face, but caught no shadow of conflict. It was not until several hours later that I reviewed the conversation and reflected upon the fact that he was shaping Laura’s character to fit his attitudes as a young man might when enamored of a living woman. My mind was clear and penetrating at the time, for it was midnight, the hour at which I am most brave and most free. Since I learned some years ago that the terrors of insomnia could be overcome by a half-hour’s brisk walk, I have not once allowed lassitude, weather, nor the sorry events of a disappointing day to interfere with this nocturnal practice. By habit I chose a street which had become important to me since Laura moved into the apartment.

  Naturally I was shocked to see a light burning in the house of the dead, but after a moment’s reflection, I knew that a young man who had once scorned overtime had given his heart to a job.

  Chapter 6

  Two rituals on Tuesday marked the passing of Laura Hunt. The first, a command performance in the coroner’s office, gathered together that small and none too congenial group who had been concerned in the activities of her last day of life. Because she had failed me in that final moment, I was honored with an invitation. I shall not attempt to report the unimaginative proceedings which went to hideous lengths to prove a fact that everyone had known from the start—that Laura Hunt was dead; the cause, murder by the hand of an unknown assailant.

  The second ritual, her funeral, took place that afternoon in the chapel of W. W. Heatherstone and Son. Old Heatherstone, long experienced in the internment of movie stars, ward leaders, and successful gangsters, supervised the arrangements so that there might be a semblance of order among the morbid who started their clamor at his doors at eight o’clock in the morning.

  Mark had asked me to meet him on the balcony that overlooked the chapel.

  “But I don’t attend funerals.”

  “She was your friend.”

  “Laura was far too considerate to demand that anyone venture out at such a barbaric hour and to exhibit emotions which, if earnest, are far too personal for scrutiny.”

  “But I wanted you to help me identify some of the people whose names are in her address book.”

  “Do you think the murderer will be there?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “How’d we know him? Do you think he might swoon at the bier?”

  “Will you come?”

  “No,” I said firmly, and added, “Let Shelby help you this time.”

  “He’s a chief mourner. You must come. No one will see you. Use the side entrance and tell them you’re meeting me. I’ll be on the balcony.”

  Her friends had loved Laura and been desolate at her passing, but they had failed to enjoy the excitement. Like Mark, they hoped for some crisis of discovery. Eyes that should have been downcast in grief and piety were sliding this way and that in the hope of perceiving the flushed countenance, the guilty gesture that would enable lips, later, to boast, “I knew it the moment I saw that sly face and noted the way he rubbed his hands together during the Twenty-Third Psalm.”

  She lay in a coffin covered in white silk. Pale ringless hands had been folded against the lavender-tinted white moiré of her favorite evening gown. An arrangement of gardenias, draped like a confirmation veil, covered the ruined face. The only mourners deserving seats in the section reserved for deepest suffering were Auntie Sue and Shelby Carpenter. Her sister, brother-in-law, and some far-western cousins had been unwilling or unable to make the long journey for the sake of this hour in the mortuary. After the service was read, the organ pealed and Heatherstone attendants wheeled the casket into a private chamber from which it was later transferred to the crematorium.

  It is from the lush sentimentality of the newspaper versions that I prune this brief account of obsequies. I did not attend. Mark waited in vain.

  As he descended from the balcony and joined the slowly moving mass, he noted a hand, gloved in black, signalling him. Bessie Clary pushed her way through the crowd.

  “I got something to tell you, Mr. McPherson.”

  He took her arm. “Shall we go upstairs where it’s quiet or does this place depress you?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, we could go up to the flat,” Bessie suggested. “It’s up there, what I got to show you.”

  Mark had his car. Bessie sat beside him primly, black gloved hands folded in the lap of her black silk dress.

  “It’s hot enough to kill a cat,” she said by way of making conversation.

  “What have you got to tell me?”

  “You needn’t to yell at me. I ain’t afraid of cops, or dicks either.” She drew out her best handkerchief and blew such a clarion note that her nose seemed an instrument fashioned for the purpose of sounding defiance. “I was brought up to spit whenever I saw one.”

  “I was brought up to hate the Irish,” Mark observed, “but I’m a grown man now. I haven’t asked for love, Miss Clary. What is it you want to tell me?”

  “You won’t get on my good side by that Miss Clary stuff either. Bessie’s my name, I’m domestic and I got nothing to be ashamed of.”

  They drove across the Park in silence. When they passed the policeman who stood guard at the door of Laura’s house, Bessie smiled down upon him with virtuous hauteur. Once in the apartment, she assumed the airs of ownership, raised windows, adjusted curtains, emptied trays filled with ashes from Mark’s pipe.

  “Cops, brought up in barns,” she sniffed as she drew hatpins from out of the structure that rode high on her head. “Don’t know how to act when they get in a decent house.” When she had drawn off black gloves, folded them and stored them in her bag, settled herself on the straightest chair, and fixed a glassy stare upon his face, she asked, “What do they do to people that hide something from the cops?”

  The question, so humble in contrast with her belligerence, provided him with a weapon. “So you’ve been trying to shield the murderer? That’s dangerous, Bessie!”

  Her knotted hands unfolded. “What makes you think that I know the murderer?”

  “By hiding evidence, you have become an accessory after the fact. What is the evidence, and what was your purpose in concealing it?”

  Bessie turned her eyes ceilingward as though she expected help from heaven. “If I’d hold out on you, you’d never know nothing about it. And if they hadn’t played that music at the funeral, I’d never’ve told you. Church music makes me soft.”

  “Whom were you shielding, Bessie?”

  “Her.”

  “Miss Hunt?”

  Bessie nodded grimly.

  “Why, Bessie? She’s dead.”

  “Her reputation ain’t,” Bessie observed righteously and went to the corner cabinet, in which Laura had always kept a small stock of liquor. “Just look at this.”

  Mark leaped. “Hey, be careful. There may be fingerprints.”

  Bessie laughed. “Maybe there was a lot of fingerprints around here! But the cops never seen them.”

  “You wiped them off, Bessie? For God’s sakes!”

  “That ain’t all I wiped off,” Bessie chuckled. “I cleaned off the bed and table in there and the bathroom before the cops come.”

  Mark seized bony wrists. “I’ve a good mind to take you into custody.”

  She pulled her hands away. “I don’t believe in fingerprints anyway. All Saturday afternoon the cops was sprinkling white powder around my clean flat. Didn’t do them no good because I polished all the furniture on Friday after she’d went to the office. If they found any fingerprints, they was mine.”

  “If you don’t believe in fingerprints, why were you so anxious to get rid of those in the bedroom?”

  “Cops got dirty minds. I don’t want the whole world thinking she was the kind that got drunk with a fellow in her bedroom, Go
d rest her soul.”

  “Drunk in her bedroom? Bessie, what does this mean?”

  “So help me,” Bessie swore, “there was two glasses.”

  He seized her wrists again. “Why are you making up this story, Bessie? What have you to gain by it?”

  Hers was the hauteur of an enraged duchess. “What right you got to yell at me? You don’t believe me, huh? Say, I was the one that cared about her reputation. You never even knew her. What are you getting so mad about?”

  Mark retreated, the sudden display of temper puzzling and shaming him. His fury had grown out of all proportions to its cause.

  Bessie drew out a bottle. “Where do you think I found this? Right there.” She pointed through the open door to the bedroom. “On the table by the bed. With two dirty glasses.”

  Laura’s bedroom was as chaste and peaceful as the chamber of a young girl whose experience of love has been confined to sonnets, dreams, and a diary. The white Swiss spread lay smooth and starched, the pillow rounded neatly at the polished pine headboard, a white-and-blue knitted afghan folded at the foot.

  “I cleaned up the room and washed the glasses before the first cop got here. Lucky I come to my senses in time,” Bessie sniffed. “The bottle I put in the cabinet so’s no one would notice. It wasn’t her kind of liquor. I can tell you this much, Mr. McPherson, this here bottle was brought in after I left on Friday.”

  Mark examined the bottle. It was Three Horses Bourbon, a brand favored by frugal tipplers. “Are you sure, Bessie? How do you know? You must keep close watch on the liquor that’s used in this place.”

  Bessie’s iron jaw shot forward; cords stiffened in her bony neck. “If you don’t believe me, ask Mr. Mosconi, the liquor fellow over on Third Avenue. We always got ours from Mosconi, better stuff than this, I’m telling you. She always left me the list and I ordered on the phone. This here’s the brand we use.” She swung the doors wider and revealed, among the neatly arranged bottles, four unopened fifths of J and D Blue Grass Bourbon, the brand which I had taught her to buy.

  Such unexpected evidence, throwing unmistakable light on the last moments of the murdered, should have gladdened the detective heart. Contrarily, Mark found himself loath to accept the facts. This was not because he had reason to disbelieve Bessie’s story, but because the sordid character of her revelations had disarranged the pattern of his thinking. Last night, alone in the apartment, he had made unscientific investigation of Laura’s closets, chests of drawers, dressing table, and bathroom. He knew Laura, not only with his intelligence, but with his senses. His fingers had touched fabrics that had known her body, his ears had heard the rustle of her silks, his nostrils sniffed at the varied, heady fragrances of her perfumes. Never before had the stern young Scot known a woman in this fashion. Just as her library had revealed the quality of her mind, the boudoir had yielded the secrets of feminine personality.

  He did not like to think of her drinking with a man in her bedroom like a cutie in a hotel.

  In his coldest, most official voice he said, “If there was someone in the bedroom with her, we have a completely new picture of the crime.”

  “You mean it wasn’t like you said in the paper, that it must have happened when the doorbell rang and she went to open it?”

  “I accepted that as the most probable explanation, considering the body’s position.” He crossed from the bedroom slowly, his eyes upon the arrangement of carpets on the polished floor. “If a man had been in the bedroom with her, he might have been on the point of leaving. She went to the door with him, perhaps.” He stood rigid at the spot where the river of dark blood had been dammed by the thick pile of the carpet. “Perhaps they were quarreling and, just as he reached the door, he turned and shot her.”

  “Gosh,” said Bessie, blowing her nose weakly, “it gives you the creeps, don’t it?”

  From the wall Stuart Jacoby’s portrait smiled down.

  Chapter 7

  On Wednesday afternoon, twenty-four hours after the funeral, Lancaster Corey came to see me. I found him contemplating my porcelains lustfully.

  “Corey, my good fellow, to what do I owe this dispensation?”

  We wrung each other’s hands like long-lost brothers.

  “I’ll not mince words, Waldo. I’ve come on business.”

  “I smelled sulphur and brimstone. Have a drink before you reveal your diabolical schemes.”

  He twisted the end of his white, crisp mustache. “I’ve got a great opportunity for you, my good friend. You know Jacoby’s work. Getting more valuable every day.”

  I made a sound with my lips.

  “It’s not that I’m trying to sell you a picture. As a matter of fact, I’ve already got a buyer. You know Jacoby’s portrait of Laura Hunt . . . several of the papers carried reproductions after the murder. Tragic, wasn’t it? Since you were so attached to the lady, I thought you’d want to bid before . . .”

  “I knew there was something divine about your visit, Corey. Now I see that it’s your insolence.”

  He shrugged off the insult. “Merely a courtesy.”

  “How dare you?” I shouted. “How dare you come to my house and coolly offer me that worthless canvas? In the first place, I consider it a bad imitation of Speicher. In the second place, I deplore Speicher. And in the third, I loathe portraits in oil.”

  “Very well. I shall feel free to sell it to my other buyer.” He snatched up his Fedora.

  “Wait a minute,” I commanded. “How can you offer what you don’t own? That picture is hanging on the wall of her apartment now. She died with out a will, the lawyers will have to fight it out.”

  “I believe that Mrs. Treadwell, her aunt, is assuming responsibility for the family. You might communicate with her or with Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone, her attorneys. The landlord, I heard this morning, had released the estate from its obligation to fulfill the lease on condition that the apartment is vacated by the first of the month. They’re going to make a special effort to hurry the proceedings . . .”

  His knowledge infuriated me. “The vultures gather!” I shouted, smacking my forehead with an anguished palm. And a moment later cried out in alarm: “Do you know what arrangements have been made for her other things? Whether there’s to be a sale?”

  “This bid came through a private channel. Someone who had seen the portrait in her apartment, no doubt, made inquiries of several dealers. He hadn’t known that we were Jacoby’s agents . . .”

  “His taste makes it clear that he knows very little about painting.”

  Corey made a purse of his lips. “Everyone is not as prejudiced as you are, Waldo. I prophesy the day when Jacoby will be worth real money.”

  “Comfort yourself, my sweet buzzard. Both you and I shall be dead by that time. But tell me,” I continued mockingly, “is your prospective sucker some connoisseur who saw the picture in the Sunday tabloids and wants to own the portrait of a murder victim?”

  “I do not believe that it would be strictly ethical to give my customer’s name.”

  “Your pardon, Corey. My question must have shocked your delicate sensibilities of a business man. Unfortunately I shall have to write the story without using names.”

  Lancaster Corey responded like a hunting dog to the smell of rabbit. “What story?”

  “You have just given me material for a magnificent piece!” I cried, simulating creative excitement. “An ironic small story about the struggling young painter whose genius goes unrecognized until one of his sitters is violently murdered. And suddenly he, because he had done her portrait, becomes the painter of the year. His name is not only on the lips of collectors, but the public, the public, Corey, know him as they know Mickey Rooney. His prices skyrocket, fashionable women beg to sit for him, he is reproduced in Life, Vogue, Town and Country . . .”

  My fantasy so titivated his greed that he could no longer show pr
ide. “You’ve got to mention Jacoby’s name. The story would be meaningless without it.”

  “And a footnote, no doubt, explaining that his works are on view in the galleries of Lancaster Corey.”

  “That wouldn’t hurt.”

  I spoke bitterly. “Your point of view is painfully commercial. Such considerations never enter my mind. Art, Corey, endures. All else passes. My piece would be as vivid and original as a Jacoby portrait.”

  “Just include his name. One mention of it,” Corey pleaded.

  “That inclusion would remove my story from the realms of literature and place it in the category of journalism. In that case, I’d have to know the facts, even if I did not include all of them. To protect my reputation for veracity, you understand.”

  “You’ve won,” Corey admitted and whispered the art-lover’s name.

  I sank upon the Biedermeier, laughing as I had not laughed since Laura had been here to share such merry secrets of human frailty.

  Along with this genial and amusing tidbit, Corey had, however, brought some distressing information. As soon as I had got rid of him, I changed my clothes, seized hat and stick, and bade Roberto summon a taxi.

  Hence to Laura’s apartment, where I found not only Mrs. Treadwell, whom I had expected to find there, but Shelby and the Pomeranian. Laura’s aunt was musing on the value of the few genuinely antique pieces, Shelby taking inventory, and the dog sniffing chair legs.

  “To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?” cried Mrs. Treadwell, who, in spite of expressing open disapproval of my friendship with her niece, had always fluttered before my fame.

  “To cupidity, dear lady. I have come to share the booty.”

  “This is a painful task.” She sank back into an upholstered chair watching, through heavily blackened lashes, my every movement and glance. “But my lawyer simply insists.”

  “How generous of you!” I chattered. “You can spare yourself no pains. In spite of grief and sentiment, you carry on bravely. I dare say you’ll account for every button in poor Laura’s wardrobe.”