Laura (Femmes Fatales) (4 page)

“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 been 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.

“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, God 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.