Laura (Femmes Fatales) Read online

  “Don’t be ashamed. Your heart’s no softer than any other Scot’s. Sir Walter and Sir James would have been delighted with you. A nature rocky as the hills, a tombstone and a wee bit o’ heather.”

  “You rockbound Americans, you’re sentimental like worms.” Bony hands gripped the table. “let’s have another drink.”

  I suggested Courvoisier.

  “You order. I can’t pronounce it.”

  After a short pause, he said: “Listen, Mr. Lydecker, there’s one thing I want to know. Why did she keep putting off the wedding? She was crazy about him, she had pictures of him all over the place, and still she kept postponing it. Why?”

  “The familiar curse of gold.”

  He shook his head. “Carpenter and I have gone into that. The guy’s fairly decent about it, if a man can be decent and take money from a woman. But this is what gets me. They’re going together for a hell of a long time and at last they decide to break down and get married. So she plans a vacation and a honeymoon, and then has to have a week by herself before she goes through with it. What was holding her back?”

  “She was tired. She wanted to rest.”

  “When everyone says the same thing and it’s the easiest answer, you know damn well it’s baloney.”

  “Are you suggesting that Laura might have been seeking excuses for postponing the wedding? That she wasn’t awaiting the great day with the tremulous expectancy of a happy bride?”

  “Could be.”

  “Strange,” I sighed. “Incredibly strange and tragic for us to be sitting here, at this very table, under these same weary lilacs, listening to her favorite tunes and stewing over our jealousy. She’s dead, man, dead!”

  Nervous hands toyed with the stem of the brandy snifter. Then, with his dark eyes piercing the gossamer of my defenses, he asked, “If you were so crazy about her, why didn’t you do something about Shelby?”

  I met this scrutiny contemptuously.

  “Why?”

  “Laura was a grown woman. Her freedom was dear to her and jealously guarded. She knew her own heart. Or thought she did.”

  “If I had known her . . .” he began in a voice of masculine omnipotence, but paused, leaving the rest unsaid.

  “What a contradictory person you are, McPherson!”

  “Contradictory!” He tossed the word into the very center of the garden. Several diners stared at us. “I’m contradictory. Well, what about the rest of you? And what about her? Wherever you turn, a contradiction.”

  “It’s the contradictions that make her seem alive to you. Life itself is contradictory. Only death is consistent.”

  With a great sigh he unburdened himself of another weighty question. “Did she ever talk to you about Gulliver?”

  My mind leaped nimbly in pursuit. “It’s one of your favorites, too, I take it.”

  “How do you know that?” he challenged.

  “Your boasted powers of observation are failing sadly, my dear fellow, if you failed to notice that I took care to see what volume it was that you examined so scrupulously in her apartment on Sunday afternoon. I knew that book well. It was an old copy and I had it rebound for her in red morocco.”

  He smiled shyly. “I knew you were spying on me.”

  “You said nothing, because you wished to let me think it was a murder clue you sought among the Lilliputians. If it gives you pleasure, young man, I’ll confirm the hope that she shared your literary enthusiasms.”

  His gratitude was charming. I counted the days that had passed since he had spoken of Laura as a two-timing dame. Had I reminded him tonight, I dare say he would have punched my face.

  The genial combination of good food, wine, music, brandy, and sympathy had corrupted his defenses. He spoke with touching frankness. “We lived within half a mile of each other for over three years. Must have taken the same bus, the same subway, passed each other on the street hundreds of times. She went to Schwartz’s for her drugs, too.”

  “Remarkable coincidence,” I said.

  The irony was lost. He had surrendered.

  “We must have passed each other on the street often.”

  It was a slender morsel of consolation he had found among all the grim facts. I resolved then and there to write about this frustrated romance, so fragile and so typical of New York. It was the perfect O. Henry story. I can hear old Sydney Porter coughing himself into a fever over it.

  “Wonderful ankles,” he muttered, half-aloud. “The first thing I look at is the ankles. Wonderful.”

  They had turned off the music and most of the diners had left the garden. A couple passed our table. The girl, I noted, had remarkable ankles. Mark did not turn his head. He dwelt, for that brief moment, in the fancy of a meeting at Schwartz’s drugstore. He had been buying pipe tobacco and she had put a dime into the postage-stamp machine. She might have dropped her purse. Or perhaps there had been a cinder in her eye. She had uttered but a single word, “Thanks,” but for him sweet bells jangled and the harps of heaven were joined in mighty paean. A glance at her ankles, a meeting of their eyes, and it was as simple as with Charles Boyer and Margaret Sullavan.

  “Have you ever read my story of Conrad?” I inquired.

  My question interrupted the schoolboy reverie. He regarded me with a desolate glance.

  “It is a legend told over port and cigars at Philadelphia dining tables some seventy-five years ago, and whispered in softer tones over tapestry frames and macramé work. The story has of late been attributed to me, but I take no credit. What I am telling is a tale whose only basis of truth lies in its power over stolid folk celebrated for their honest and lack of imagination. I refer to the Amish of Pennsylvania.

  “Conrad was one of these. A stalwart, earthy lad more given to the cultivation of rutabagas than to flights of superstitious fancy. One day as he worked in the field, he heard a great crash upon the road. Running, hoe in hand, he came upon the confusion attendant upon an accident. A vegetable cart had collided with a smart carriage. To his great surprise Conrad found a woman in his arms in the place of his hoe.

  “Among the Amish, who boasted that they were known as plain, buttons were considered ungodly ornament. To this moment in his life Conrad had seen only girls in faded ginghams hooked tight across their chests and with hair stretched from their temples into wiry pigtails. He wore a blue work shirt fastened severely to the throat and upon his chin a fringe, like monkey fur, of thin whiskers affected by his people as a mark of piety.

  “The injury to the lady’s carriage was repaired sooner than the damage to Conrad’s heart. Never could he close his eyes without beholding a vision of this creature with her powdered skin, her wanton lips, and mischievous eyes, as black as the ebony stick of her lilac-silk parasol. From that day on, Conrad was no longer content with his pigtailed neighbors and his rutabagas. He must find Troy and seek Helen. He sold his farm, walked dusty roads to Philadelphia, and being canny as the pious always are, invested his small capital in a lucrative business whose proprietor was willing to teach him the trade.

  “Without money, without access to the society frequented by the elegant creature, Conrad was actually no closer to her than he had been at Lebanon. Yet his faith never flagged. He believed, as he believed in evil and sin, that he would again hold her in his arms.

  “And the miracle occurred. Before so many years had passed that he was too old to know the joy of fulfillment, he held her close to his breast, his heart pounding with such a savage beat that its vigor gave life to every inanimate thing around him. And once again, as on the hot noon when he first beheld her, the lids lifted like curtains over those dark eyes . . .”

  “How did he make it?” Mark inquired. “How did he get to know her?”

  I waved aside the interruption. “She had never seemed so lovely as now, and though he had heard her name whispered in the city and knew her reputation to be unsa
vory, he felt that his eyes had never met such purity as he saw in that marble brow, nor such chastity as was encased in those immobile lips. Let us forgive Conrad his confusion. At such moments a man’s mind does not achieve its highest point of logic. Remember, the lady was clothed all in white from the tips of her satin slippers to the crown of blossoms in her dark hair. And the shadows, lilac-tinted, in the shroud . . .”

  At the word Mark recoiled.

  I fixed my eyes upon him innocently. “Shroud. In those days it was still the custom.”

  “Was she,” he asked, biting down slowly as if each word were poisoned fruit, “dead?”

  “Perhaps I neglected to mention that he had become apprenticed to an undertaker. And while the surgeon had declared her dead before Conrad was called to the dwelling, he afterward . . .”

  Mark’s eyes were dark holes burning through the white fabric of a mask. His lips puckered as if the poisoned fruit were bitter.

  “I cannot tell if the story is true,” I said, sensing his unrest and hastening the moral, “but since Conrad came of a people who never encouraged fantasy, one cannot help but pay him the respect of credence. He returned to Lebanon, but the folk around reported that women were forevermore destroyed for him. Had he known and lost a living love, he would never have been so marked as by this short excursion into necrophilia.”

  Thunder rumbled closer. The sky had become sulphurous. As we left the garden, I touched his arm gently.

  “Tell me, McPherson, how much were you prepared to pay for the portrait?”

  He turned on me a look of dark malevolence. “Tell me, Lydecker, did you walk past Laura’s apartment every night before she was killed, or is it a habit you’ve developed since her death?”

  Thunder crashed above us. The storm was coming closer.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  When Waldo Lydecker learned what happened after our dinner at Montagnino’s on Wednesday night, he could write no more about the Laura Hunt case. The prose style was knocked right out of him.

  He had written the foregoing between ten o’clock on Wednesday night and four on Thursday afternoon with only five hours’ sleep, a quart of black coffee, and three hearty meals to keep up his strength. I suppose he had intended to fit the story to one of those typical Lydecker last paragraphs where a brave smile always shows through the tears.

  I am going on with the story. My writing won’t have the smooth professional touch which, as he would say, distinguishes Waldo Lydecker’s prose. God help any of us if we’d tried to write our reports with style. But for once in my life, since this is unofficial anyway, I am going to forget Detective Bureau shorthand and express a few personal opinions. This is my first experience with citizens who get their pictures into that part of the funny papers called the Society Section. Even professionally I’ve never been inside a night club with leopard-skin covers on the chairs. When these people want to insult each other, they say darling, and when they get affectionate they throw around words that a Jefferson Market bailiff wouldn’t use to a pimp. Poor people brought up to hear their neighbors screaming filth every Saturday night are more careful of their language than well-bred smart-alecks. I know as many four-letter words as anybody in the business and use them when I feel like it. But not with ladies. Nor in writing. It takes a college education to teach a man that he can put on paper what he used to write on a fence.

  I’m starting the story where Waldo ended . . . In Montagnino’s back yard after the third brandy.

  As we stepped out of the restaurant, the heat hit us like a blast from a furnace. The air was dead. Not a shirttail moved on the washlines of McDougal Street. The town smelled like rotten eggs. A thunderstorm was rolling in.

  “Can I drive you home?”

  “No, thanks; I feel like walking.”

  “I’m not drunk. I can drive,” I said.

  “Have I implied that you’re drunk? It’s my whim to walk. I’m working tonight.” He started off, pounding his stick against the pavement. “Thanks for the feast,” he called as I drove off.

  I took it slowly because my head was still heavy. I drove past the corner where I should have turned for the Athletic Club, and then I knew that I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t feel like bowling or pool, my mind wasn’t sharp enough for poker, and I’ve never sat in the lounge in the two years I’ve lived there. The steel furniture in my bedroom reminded me of a dentist’s office. There wasn’t a comfortable chair in the room, and if you lay on the couch the cover wrinkled under you. These are all the excuses I can find for going to Laura’s apartment that night. Maybe I was just drunk.

  Before I went upstairs, I stopped to raise the top of my car and shut the windows. Later, when the thing that happened caused me to question my sanity, I remembered that I had performed the acts of a sober man. I had the key in my pocket and I let myself in as coolly as if I’d been entering my own place. As I opened the door I saw the first streaks of lightning through the blinds. Thunder crashed. It was followed by the stillness that precedes heavy rain. I was sweating and my head ached. I got myself a drink of water from the kitchen, took off my coat, opened my collar, and stretched in the long chair. The light hurt my eyes and I turned it off. I fell asleep before the storm broke.

  Thunder sounded like a squadron of bombers above the roof. Lightning did not flash away immediately. After a few seconds I saw that it was not lightning at all, but the lamp with the green shade. I had not turned it on. I had not moved from the long chair.

  Thunder crashed again. Then I saw her. She held a rain-streaked hat in one hand and a pair of light gloves in the other. Her rain-spattered silk dress was moulded tight to her body. She was five-foot seven, weighed about one-thirty, dark eyes slightly slanted, dark hair, and tanned skin. Nothing wrong about her ankles either.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  I couldn’t answer.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I remembered the wine and looked around to see if she’d brought any pink elephants.

  “If you don’t get out this moment,” she said, and her voice trembled, “I’ll call the police.”

  “I am the police,” I said.

  My voice told me that I was alive. I jerked myself out of the chair. The girl backed away. The picture of Laura Hunt was just behind her.

  I had a voice. I spoke with authority. “You’re dead.”

  My wild stare and the strange accusation convinced her that she was facing a dangerous lunatic. She edged toward the door.

  “Are you . . .” But I couldn’t say the name. She had spoken, she was wet with rain, she had been frightened and had tried to escape. Were these real evidences of life just another set of contradictions?

  I don’t know how long we stood, facing each other and awaiting revelation. For a crazy half-second I remembered what my grandmother used to tell me about meeting in heaven those whom we had lost on earth. Peal after peal of thunder shook the house. Lightning flashed past the window. The ground seemed to be trembling below us and the skies splitting overhead. This was Laura Hunt’s apartment; I felt in my pocket for my pipe.

  I had bought a paper. As I unfolded it, I said: “Have you seen any newspapers lately? Don’t you know what’s happened?” The questions made me feel sane again.

  She shrank away, clinging with both hands to the table.

  I said: “Please don’t be frightened; there must be an explanation, if you haven’t seen the papers . . .”

  “I haven’t. I’ve been in the country. My radio’s broken.” And then slowly, as if she were fitting the pieces together, she said: “Why? Do the papers say I’m . . .”

  I nodded. She took the paper. There was nothing on Page One. A new battle on the Eastern Front and a speech by Churchill had pushed her off the front pages. I turned to Page Four. There was her picture.

  Wind howled throug
h the narrow court between the houses. Rain spattered the windowpanes. The only sound inside the house was the rhythm of her breathing. Then she looked over the paper into my face and her eyes were filled with tears.

  “The poor thing,” she said. “The poor, poor kid.”

  “Who?”

  “Diane Redfern. A girl I knew. I’d lent her the apartment.”

  Chapter 2

  We sat on the couch while I told her about the discovery of the body, the destruction of the face by BB shot, and the identification at the morgue by her aunt and Bessie Clary.

  She said: “Yes, of course. We were about the same size and she had my robe on. We wore the same size; I’d given her a few of my dresses. Her hair was a little lighter, but if there was a lot of blood . . .”

  She groped for her purse. I gave her my handkerchief.

  After she had dried her eyes, she read the rest of the story in the paper. “Are you Mark McPherson?”

  I nodded.

  “You haven’t found the murderer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did he want to murder her or me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do now that I’m alive?”

  “Find out who murdered the other girl.”

  She sighed and sank back against the cushions. “You’d better have a drink,” I said, and went to the corner cabinet. “Scotch, gin, or Bourbon?”

  There was the bottle of Three Horses. I should have asked her about it then, before she had time to think. But I was thinking less about the job than the girl, and still so dazed that I wasn’t even sure I was alive, awake and in my right mind.

  “How do you know my house so well, Mr. McPherson?”

  “There isn’t much about you I don’t know.”

  “Gosh,” she said; and after a little while, she laughed and asked: “Do you realize that you’re the only person in New York who knows I’m alive? The only one of six million people?”

  Thunder and lightning had ceased, but rain beat on the windows. It made us feel separate from everyone else in the city, and important because we shared a secret.