Laura (Femmes Fatales) (12 page)

Mr. Carpenter: The reporters were making me quite uncomfortable, McPherson. I thought it best anyway not to have her telephoning her aunt’s house. When they phoned me on Wednesday night—or Thursday morning, it was—I knew at once. And although I don’t wish to seem ungrateful to my hostess, I knew Mrs. Treadwell to be an inquisitive woman. And since it would have been a shock for her to hear the voice of a person whose funeral she had just attended, I went out to a pay booth to telephone Miss Hunt.

Lieutenant McPherson: Repeat that conversation as fully as you remember it.

Mr. Carpenter: She said, “Shelby?” and I said, “Hello, my darling,” and she said, “Did you think I was dead, Shelby?” I asked her if she was all right.

Lieutenant McPherson: Did you say you thought she had died?

Mr. Carpenter: I asked if she was all right. She said that she felt terribly about poor Diane, and asked if I knew anyone who might have wished her to die. I knew then that Miss Hunt did not intend to give me her full confidence. Nor could I talk to her frankly on the telephone. But I knew there was one detail which might prove embarrassing—or downright dangerous—and I made up my mind to save her, if I could.

Lieutenant McPherson: What was that detail?

Mr. Carpenter: It’s right there on your desk, McPherson.

Lieutenant McPherson: You knew she had the shotgun?

Mr. Carpenter: I had given it to her. She frequently stayed alone in her country house. Those initials are my mother’s—Delilah Shelby Carpenter.

Lieutenant McPherson: And that’s why you borrowed Mrs. Treadwell’s car and drove up to Wilton?

Mr. Carpenter: Yes, that’s right. But when your man followed me in the cab, I didn’t dare go into the house. I stood in the garden for a while and I was considerably overcome because I couldn’t help remembering what that little cottage and garden had meant to us. When I returned to town and found you with Mrs. Treadwell, I was not completely untruthful in saying that it had been a sentimental pilgrimage. Later in the day you asked me to come up to the apartment. I was to be surprised at finding Miss Hunt alive and as you were going to study my reactions, McPherson, I decided to give you the show that you expected, for I still believed that there was a chance to save the situation.

Lieutenant McPherson: But after I left, you talked it over with Laura. You told her exactly what you thought.

Mr. Carpenter: Miss Hunt has admitted nothing.

Mr. Salsbury: Lieutenant McPherson, my client has gone to considerable trouble and risked his personal safety in order to protect another person. He is not obliged to answer any question which might incriminate that person.

Lieutenant McPherson: Okay, I’ve got it straight. I’ll get in touch with you if I need you, Carpenter. But don’t leave the city.

Mr. Carpenter: Thank you so much for your understanding attitude, McPherson.

PART FOUR

Chapter 1

Last week, when I thought I was to be married, I burned my girlhood behind me. And vowed never to keep another diary. The other night, when I came home and found Mark McPherson in my apartment, more intimate than my oldest friend, my first thought was gratitude for the destruction of those shameful pages. How inconsistent he would have thought me if he had read them! I can never keep a proper diary, simmer my life down to a line a day, nor make breakfast on the sixteenth of the month as important as falling in love on the seventeenth. It’s always when I start on a long journey or meet an exciting man or take a new job that I must sit for hours in a frenzy of recapitulation. The idea that I am an intelligent woman is pure myth. I can never grasp an abstraction except through emotion, and before I can begin to think with my head about any fact, I must see it as a solid thing on paper.

At work, when I plan a campaign for Lady Lilith Face Powder or Jix Soap Flakes, my mind is orderly. I write dramatic headlines and follow them with sales arguments that have unity, coherence, and emphasis. But when I think about myself, my mind whirls like a merry-go-round. All the horses, the bright and the drab, dance around a shining, mirrored center whose dazzling rays and frivolous music make concentration impossible. I am trying to think clearly of all that has happened in the last few days, to remember the facts and set them upon the horses and send them out in neat parade like sales arguments for Jix or Lady Lilith. They disobey, they whirl and dance to the music, and all I remember is that a man who had heard me accused of murder was concerned about my getting enough sleep.

“Sleep,” he said to me, “get some sleep.” As if sleep were something you could buy at the Five-and-Ten. After he’d been gone for a little while, he came back with a package from Schwartz’s drugstore. They were pills to make me sleep, but he would only leave me two because he knew how sick I was with fear and worry.

“Do you believe I killed Diane?” I asked him again.

“It doesn’t matter what I think.” His voice grated. “It isn’t my business to think; it’s only facts I want, facts.”

Shelby watched. He looked more than ever like a beautiful tomcat, ready to leap. Shelby said: “Be careful, Laura. Don’t trust him.”

“Yes,” he said, “I’m a cop, you mustn’t trust me. Anything you say might be used against you.” His lips were drawn hard over his teeth; he spoke without opening his mouth.

“Are you going to arrest me?” I said.

Shelby became very man-of-the-house, protector of frail womanhood. It was all pretense, his courage was as thin as tissue paper, he trembled inwardly. Shelby used phrases like “false arrest” and “circumstantial evidence”; you could tell he was proud of displaying technical knowledge like when he could explain to people about the rules of fencing and backgammon. Auntie Sue once told me I’d grow tired of a six-foot child. Auntie Sue said that when a woman feels the need for a man that way, she ought to have a baby. I kept thinking of Auntie Sue’s remarks while Shelby talked about circumstantial evidence and Mark walked around and around the room, looking at things, at my autographed baseball and my Mexican tray and the shelf where I keep my very favorite books.

“She’ll get in touch with her lawyer,” Shelby said. “That’s what she’ll do.”

Mark came back to me. “You mustn’t try to leave here, Laura.”

“No, I won’t leave.”

“He’s got a man outside. You couldn’t leave anyway,” Shelby said. “He’s having you watched.”

Mark left without another word, without telling me to sleep again or good-bye.

“I don’t like that fellow. He’s a sly one,” Shelby said as soon as the door had closed.

“You said that before.”

“You’re gullible, Laura. You trust people too easily.”

I stood with my back to Shelby, looking at the shelf with all my favorite books. “He’s been very kind,” I said—“considering. I think he’s nice. You’d never think of a detective being like that.”

I felt Shelby’s hands stretching toward me and I moved away. He was quiet. I knew, without turning, how his face would look.

He picked up the two pills that Mark had left on the table. “Do you think you ought to take these, Laura?”

I whirled around. “Great God, you don’t think he’s trying to give me poison!”

“He ought to be hardboiled. You’d expect him to be tougher. I don’t like his trying to act like a gentleman.”

“Oh, pooh!” I said.

“You don’t see it. The man’s trying to make you like him so you’ll break down and confess. That’s what he’s been working for all along, a confession. Damned caddish, I’d say.”

I sat down on the sofa and pounded my fists against a pillow. “I hate that word. Caddish! I’ve begged you a million times to quit using it.”

Shelby said, “It’s a good English word.”

“It’s old-fashioned. It’s out of date. People don’t talk about cads any more. It’s Victorian.”

“A cad is a cad, whether the word is obsolete or not.”

“Quit being so Southern. Quit being so righteous. You and your damn gallantry.” I was crying. The tears ran down my cheeks and dripped off my jaw. My tan dress was all wet with tears.

“You’re nervous, sweet,” Shelby said. “That damned cad has been working on you subtly, he’s been trying to wear you down.”

“I told you,” I screamed, “that I wish you’d stop using that word.”

“It’s a perfectly good English word,” he said.

“You said that before. You’ve said it a million times.”

“You’ll find it in Webster,” he said. “And in Funk and Wagnalls.”

“I’m so tired,” I said. I rubbed my eyes with my fists because I’m never able to find a handkerchief in a crisis.

“It’s a perfectly good English word,” Shelby said again.

I jumped up, the pillow in my arms like a shield against him. “A fine one you are to talk about cads, Shelby Carpenter.”

“I’ve been trying to protect you!”

When he spoke like that, his voice deep with reproach, I felt as if I had hurt a helpless child. Shelby knew how his voice worked on me; he could color his voice with the precise shade of reproach so that I would hate the heartless bitch, Laura Hunt, and forgive his faults. He remembered as well as I the day we went duck hunting and he bragged and I said I despised him, and he won me again with the tones of his voices; he remembered the fight we had at the office party and the time he kept me waiting two hours in the Paramount lobby, and our terrible quarrel the night he gave me the gun. All of those quarrels rose in our minds now; there were almost two years of quarrels and reproach between us, and two years of love and forgiveness and the little jokes that neither could forget. I hated his voice for reminding me, and I was afraid because I had always been weak with a thirty-two-year-old baby.

“I’ve been trying to protect you,” Shelby said.

“Great God, Shelby, we’re right back where we started from. We’ve been saying the same thing over and over again since five o’clock this afternoon.”

“You’re getting bitter,” he said, “terribly bitter, Laura. Of course, after what’s happened, one can’t completely blame you.”

“Oh, go away,” I said. “Go home and let me sleep.”

I took the two white pills and went into the bedroom. I slammed the door hard. After a while I heard Shelby leave. I went to the window. There were two men on the steps. After Shelby had gone a little way, one followed him. The other lit a cigarette. I saw the match flame and die in the misty darkness. The houses opposite mine are rich people’s private houses. Not one of my neighbors stays in town during the summer. There was only a cat, the thin yellow homeless cat that nuzzles against my legs when I come from work at night. The cat crossed the street daintily, pointing his feet like a ballet dancer, lifting them high as if his feet were too good for the pavement. On Friday night when Diane was killed, the street was quiet, too.

Chapter 2

Sleep he had said, try to get some sleep. Two pills weren’t enough. When I turned out the lights, the darkness whined around me. The old dead tenants came creeping up the stairs, their footsteps cautious on the tired boards. They sighed and whispered behind doors, they rattled the old latches, they plotted conspiracies. I saw Diane, too, in my aquamarine house coat; I saw her with dark hair flowing about her shoulders, running to answer the doorbell.

The doorbell had rung, Shelby told me, and he stayed in the bedroom while she ran to answer it. As soon as she had opened the front door, he heard the shot. Then the door snapped shut. After a time that might have been thirty seconds or thirty years, Shelby said, he had left the bedroom. He tried to speak to her, his lips framed her name, but his voice was dead. The room was dark, the light came in from the street lamp in stripes through the Venetian blinds. He saw the pale silk of my robe spread about her on the floor, but he could not see her face. It seemed gone. When his blood had thawed, Shelby said, he had stopped to feel for the place where her heart should have been. His hand was paralyzed, he felt nothing, he knew she was dead. He went to the telephone, meaning to call the police. When Shelby told me about that part of it, he stretched out his hand as he stretched it toward the telephone, and then he pulled his hand back quickly just as he had done that night. If the police had known he was there in my apartment with Diane, they would have known, too, who had killed her, Shelby said.

“That was your guilty conscience,” I told him. “Guilty because you were here. In my own house with her. You wanted to believe
that
, because you were ashamed.”

“I was trying to protect you,” Shelby said.

This was early in the evening, after Mark had gone off for dinner with Waldo, and before Mark came back with the cigarette case.

Auntie Sue told me I was a fool when I bought that cigarette case. I am so gullible that I trust a detective, but Auntie Sue didn’t even trust Uncle Horace to make his will; she sat behind the curtains while he and the lawyer figured out the bequests. Auntie Sue said I’d always regret the cigarette case. I gave it to Shelby because he needed grandeur when he talked to prospective clients or had drinks with men he’d known at college. Shelby had his airs and graces, manner and a name that made him feel superior, but these were things that mattered in Covington, Kentucky, not in New York. Ten years in and out of precarious jobs hadn’t taught him that gestures and phrases were of less importance in our world than aggressiveness and self-interest; and that the gentlemanly arts were not nearly so useful as proficiency in double-dealing, bootlicking, and pushing yourself ahead of the other fellow.

The tea was pale, pale green with one dark leaf curled in it, when I saw the cigarette case in Diane’s hand. I saw Diane’s pointed magenta nails curving over the edge of the gold case, but I could not look at her face. The tea had a delicate Chinese smell. I did not feel pain or anger, I felt giddy. I said to Diane, “Please, dear, I have a headache, do you mind if I leave now?” It was not like me to be calm. I tell the truth shrilly and then I am sorry. But this was deeper, so deep that I could only watch the leaf floating in the teacup.

Shelby had given her the cigarette case so that he might feel rich and generous, too. Like a gigolo seeking revenge against a fat old dowager with a jet band binding the wattles under her chin. It was all clear then, as if the tea leaf had been my fortune in the cup, for I knew why Shelby and I had quarreled so that we could go on pretending to love. He not sure of himself; he still needed the help I could give him; but he hated himself for clinging to me, and hated me because I let him cling.

They had been lovers since April eighteenth. I remember the date because it was Paul Revere’s ride and Auntie Sue’s birthday. The date smells of cleaning fluid. We were in a taxi on the way to the Coq d’Or where Auntie Sue was having her birthday party. I wore my sixteen-button fawn gloves; they had just come from the cleaner and the smell was stronger than the odor of taxi-leather and tobacco and the Tabu with which I had scented my handkerchief and my hair. That was when Shelby told me about losing the cigarette case. He used the hurt voice and his remorse was so real that I begged him not to feel it too deeply. Shelby said I was a wonderful woman, tolerant and forgiving. Damned patronizing bitch, he must have been thinking as we sat in the taxi, holding hands.

Lovers since April eighteenth. And this was almost the end of August. Diane and Shelby had been holding hands, too, and laughing behind my back.

When I walked through the office after lunch, I wondered if all the faces knew and were hiding themselves from my humiliation. My friends said they could understand my having fallen in love impulsively with Shelby, but they did not see how I could go on caring. This would make me angry; I would say they judged unfairly because Shelby was too handsome. It was almost as if Shelby’s looks were a handicap, a sort of deformity that had to be protected.

Usually I anger quickly. I flame and burn with shrill vehemence and suffer remorse at the spectacle of my petty female spleen. This time my fury had a new pattern. I can feel that frigid fury now as I remember how I counted the months, the weeks, the days since the eighteenth of April. I tried to remember when I had seen Diane alone and what she said to me; and I thought of the three of us together with Diane humbly acknowledging Shelby my lover; and I tried to count the evenings that I had spent alone or with other friends, giving Shelby to her on those evenings. How tolerant we were, how modern, how ridiculous and pitiful! But I had always told Shelby about dining with Waldo and he had never told me that he was seeing Diane.

Desperate, my mother used to say, I’m desperate, when she locked herself in her bedroom with a sick headache. I always envied her; I wanted to grow up and be desperate too. On Friday afternoon, as I walked up and down my office, I whispered it over and over. Desperate, desperate, at last I’m desperate, I said, as if the word were consummation. I can see the office now, the desk and filing-case and a proof of a Lady Lilith color ad with Diane lying backward on a couch, head thrown back, breasts pointed upward like small hills. I feel, rather than smell, the arid, air-conditioned atmosphere, and I tense my right hand as if the letter-opener were still cutting a ridge across my palm. I was sick, I was desperate, I was afraid. I hid my face in my hands, my forehead against the wood of my desk.

I telephoned Waldo and told him I had a headache.

“Don’t be difficult, wench,” Waldo said. “Roberto has scoured the markets for our bachelor dinner.”

“I’m desperate,” I said.

Waldo laughed. “Put your headache off until tomorrow. The country is a good place for headaches, that’s all it’s fit for; have your headache among the beetles. What time shall I expect you, angel?”

I knew that if I dined with Waldo, I should tell him about the cigarette case. He would have been glad to hear that I was done with Shelby, but he would have wrapped his satisfaction elegantly in sympathy. Waldo would never have said, I told you so, Laura, I told you at the start. Not Waldo. He would have opened his best champagne and, holding up his glass, would have said, “And now, Laura, you’ve grown up, let us drink to your coming of age.”

No, thank you, no urbanity for me tonight, Waldo. I am drunk already.

When Shelby came to my office at five o’clock, I rode down in the elevator with him, I drank two dry martinis with him, I let him put me into the cab and give Waldo’s address to the driver just as if I had never seen the cigarette case.