Laura (Femmes Fatales) (10 page)

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.”

“You had it in your window. That means you’re offering it for sale.”

“It don’t mean that at all. It means I like to show the public something nice. I got a right to put things in my window, Mr. Lydecker.”

“Did you buy it for Philip Anthony?”

There was a silence. Then Waldo shouted: “You knew I’d be interested in anything he’d want. You had no right not to offer it to me.”

His voice was like an old woman’s. I turned around and saw that his face had grown beet red.

Claudius said: “The piece belongs to Anthony, there’s nothing I can do about it now. If you want it, submit an offer to him.”

“You know he won’t sell it to me.”

The argument went on like that. I was looking at an old muzzle loader that must have been a relic when Abe Lincoln was a boy. I heard a crash. I looked around. Silver splinters shone on the floor.

Claudius was pale. Something human might have been killed.

“It was an accident, I assure you,” Waldo said. Claudius moaned.

“Your shop is badly lighted, the aisles are crowded, I tripped,” Waldo said.

“Poor Mr. Anthony.”

“Don’t make such a fuss. I’ll pay whatever you ask.”

From where I stood, the shop looked like a dark cavern. The antique furniture, the old clocks, vases, dishes, drinking-glasses, China dogs, and tarnished candlesticks were like a scavenger’s storehouse. The two men whispered. Waldo, with his thick body, his black hat and heavy stick, Claudius with his pear-shaped head, reminded me of old women like witches on Halloween. I walked out.

Waldo joined me at the car. He had his wallet in his hand. But his mood had improved. He stood in the rain, looking back at Claudius’s shop and smiling. Almost as if he’d got the vase anyway.

Chapter 10

Mooney’s report on the murdered model hadn’t satisfied me. I wanted to investigate for myself.

By the time I got to Christopher Street he had already interviewed the other tenants. No one had seen Miss Redfern since Friday.

The house was one of a row of shabby old places that carried signs:
vacancy
,
persian cats
,
dressmaking
,
occult science
,
French home cooking
. As I stood in the drizzle, I understood why a girl would hesitate to spend a hot weekend here.

The landlady was like an old flour sack, bleached white and tied in the middle. She said that she was tired of cops and that if you asked her opinion, Diane was staying with a man somewhere. There were so many girls in the city and they were such loose creatures that it didn’t make any difference whether one of them got misplaced once in a while. She wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Diane turned up in the morning.

I left her chattering in the vestibule and climbed three flights of mouldy stairs. I knew the smells: sleep, dried soap, and shoe leather. After I left home I’d lived in several of these houses. I felt sorry for the kid, being young and expecting something of her beauty, and coming home to this suicide staircase. And I thought of Laura, offering her apartment because she had probably lived in these dumps, too, and remembered the smells on a summer night.

Even the wallpaper, brown and mustard yellow, was familiar. There was a single bed, a secondhand dresser, a sagging armchair, and a wardrobe with an oval glass set in the door. Diane had made enough to live in a better place, but she had been sending money to the family. And the upkeep of her beauty had evidently cost plenty. She’d been crazy about clothes; there were hats and gloves and shoes in every color.

There were stacks of movie magazines in the room. Pages had been turned down and paragraphs marked. You could tell Diane had dreamed of Hollywood. Less beautiful girls had become stars, married stars, and owned swimming pools. There were some of those confession magazines, too, the sort that told stories of girls who had sinned, suffered, and been reclaimed by the love of good men. Poor Jennie Swobodo.

Her consolation must have been the photographs which she had thumbtacked upon the ugly wallpaper. They were proofs and glossy prints showing her at work; Diane Redfern in Fifth Avenue furs; Diane at the opera; Diane pouring coffee from a silver pot; Diane in a satin nightgown with a satin quilt falling off the chaise lounge in a way that showed a pretty leg.

It was hard to think of those legs dead and gone forever.

I sat on the edge of her bed and thought about the poor kid’s life. Perhaps those photographs represented a real world to the young girl. All day while she worked, she lived in their expensive settings. And at night she came home to this cell. She must have been hurt by the contrast between those sleek studio interiors and the secondhand furniture of the boarding house; between the silky models who posed with her and the poor slobs she met on the mouldy staircase.

Laura’s apartment must have seemed like a studio setting to Jennie Swobodo, who hadn’t been so long away from Paterson and the silk mills. Laura’s Upper East Side friends must have been posing all the time in her eyes, like models before a camera. And Shelby . . .

I saw it all then.

I knew why Shelby was so familiar.

I’d never met him while I was pursuing crooks. He’d never mixed with the gents I’d encountered in my professional life. I’d seen him in the advertisements.

Maybe it wasn’t Shelby himself. There was no record of his ever actually having been a photographer’s model. But the young men who drove Packards and wore Arrow shirts, smoked Chesterfields, and paid their insurance premiums and clipped coupons were Shelby. What had Waldo said?
The hero she could love forever immaturely, the mould of perfection whose flawlessness made no demands upon her sympathies or her intelligence
.

I was sore. First, at myself for having believed that I’d find a real clue in a man who wasn’t real. I’d been thinking of Shelby as I had always thought of common killers, shysters, finks, goons, and hopheads. The king of the artichoke racket had been real; the pinball gang had been flesh-and-blood men with hands that could pull triggers; even the Associated Dairymen had been living profiteers. But Shelby was a dream walking. He was God’s gift to women. I hated him for it and I hated the women for falling for the romance racket. I didn’t stop to think that men aren’t much different, that I had wasted a lot of adult time on the strictly twelve-year-old dream of getting back to the old neighborhood with the world’s championship and Hedy Lamarr beside me on the seat of a five-grand roadster.

But I had expected Laura to be above that sort of nonsense. I thought I had found a woman who would know a real man when she saw one; a woman whose bright eyes would go right through the mask and tell her that the man underneath was Lincoln and Columbus and Thomas A. Edison. And Tarzan, too.

I felt cheated.

There was still a job to be done. Sitting on a bed and figuring out the philosophy of love was not solving a murder. I had discovered the dream world of Jennie-Swobodo-Diane-Redfern, and so what? Not a shred of evidence that she might also have been playing around with the kind of pals who used sawed-off shotguns.

The trail led back to Laura’s apartment and Shelby. I found evidence in Diane’s green pocketbook.

Before I left the house, I checked with the landlady, who told me that Diane had carried the green pocketbook on Friday. But I knew without being told. She had respected her clothes; she had put her dresses on hangers and stuffed shoe-trees into twenty pairs of slippers. Even at Laura’s, she had hung her dress away and put her hat on the shelf and her pocketbook in the drawer. So I knew she had dressed in a hurry for a date on Friday night. Green hat, gloves, and pocketbook had been left on the bed. Her shoes had been kicked under a chair. I had seen the same thing happen at home. When my sister used to get ready for a date with her boss, she always left stockings curled over the backs of chairs and pink step-ins on the bathroom floor.

I picked up the green pocketbook. It was heavy. I knew it should have been empty because Laura had showed me the black purse she had found in her drawer, the purse into which Diane had put her compact, her lipstick, her keys, her money, and a torn straw cigarette case.

There was a cigarette case in the green pocketbook. It was made of gold and it was initialed with letters S. J. C.