Laura (Femmes Fatales)

by Caspary, Vera

  She held up her glass. “To life!”

  “To resurrection,” I said.

  We laughed.

  “Go and change your dress,” I said. “You’ll catch cold.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re giving me orders.”

  “Change it. You’ll catch cold.”

  “How masterful, Mr. McPherson!”

  She went. I was too nervous to sit down. I was like a kid in a dark house on Hallowe’en; everything seemed mystic and supernatural, and I listened at the door so I should hear her moving about the bedroom, and know that she had not vanished again. My mind was filled with a miracle, life and resurrection, and I had to battle my way through clouds before I could think like a human being. Finally I managed to anchor myself to a chair and light my pipe.

  There was, of course, no more Laura Hunt case. But what about the other girl? The body had been cremated. You’ve got to have a corpus delicti to prove murder.

  This did not mean that my job was finished. Neither the Department nor the D.A.’s office would let a case slip through their hands so smoothly. Our job was to establish circumstantial evidence of the girl’s disappearance, to discover where she had last been seen and by whom. Unless we had cogent evidence that the crime had been committed, the murderer might confess and still escape conviction.

  “What do you know about this girl?” I called in to Laura. “What did you say her name was? Were you close friends?”

  The bedroom door opened and there was Laura in a long, loose sort of gold-colored robe that made her look like a saint on the window of the Catholic Church. She carried the magazine that had been on the bed table. On the back cover there was a photograph of a girl in evening clothes smiling at a fellow as he lit her cigarette. The advertisement said:

  COMPANIONABLE!

  THERE'S NOTHING

  AS COMPANIONABLE

  AS A LANCASTER

  “Oh, she was a model?”

  “Wasn’t she lovely?” Laura asked.

  “She looks like a model,” I said.

  “She was beautiful,” Laura insisted.

  “What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “What was she like? How well did you know her? Where did she live? How much did she earn? Married, single, divorced? How old? Did she have a family? Who were her friends?”

  “Please, Mr. McPherson. One question at a time. What was Diane like?” She hesitated. “I don’t think a woman can answer that question quite honestly. You ought to ask a man.”

  “Your opinion would probably be safer.”

  “I might be prejudiced. Women with faces like mine can’t be too objective about girls like Diane.”

  “I see nothing wrong with your face, Miss Hunt.”

  “Skip it. I’ve never tried to get by on my beauty. And if I should tell you that I considered Diane rather unintelligent and awfully shallow and quite a negative person, you might think I was jealous.”

  “If you felt that way about her, why did you let her have your apartment?”

  “She lived in a hot little room in a boarding house. And since nobody would have been using this place for a few days, I gave her the key.”

  “Why did you keep it so secret? Even Bessie didn’t know.”

  “There was nothing secret about it. I had lunch with Diane on Friday. She told me how beastly hot it was in her room and I said she might come up here and live in comparative comfort. If I’d have come home on Friday afternoon or seen Bessie, I’d have mentioned it, but Bessie would have found it out anyway when she came to work on Saturday.”

  “Have you ever lent your apartment before?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “They said you were generous. Impulsive, too, aren’t you?”

  She laughed again. “My Aunt Susie says I’m a sucker for a hard-luck story, but I always tell her the sucker wins in the end. You don’t get neuroses worrying over people’s motives and wondering whether they’re trying to use you.”

  “Sometimes you get shot by mistake,” I said. “You happened to be lucky this time.”

  “Go on,” she laughed. “You’re not so hardboiled, McPherson. How many shirts have you given away in your life?”

  “I’m a Scotchman,” I said stiffly; I did not want to show too much pleasure in the way she had read my character.

  She laughed again. “Scotch thrift is vastly overrated. My granny Kirkland was the most liberal and open-handed woman in the world.”

  “You had a Scotch grandmother?”

  “From a place called Pitlochry.”

  “Pitlochry! I’ve heard of Pitlochry. My father’s people came from Blair-Atholl.”

  We shook hands.

  “Were your people very religious?” Laura asked.

  “Not my father. But original sin started in my mother’s family.”

  “Ah-hah!” she said. “Dissension in the home. Don’t tell me that your father read Darwin.”

  “Robert Ingersoll.”

  She clapped her hand to her head. “What a childhood you must have had!”

  “Only when my old man took a drop too much. Otherwise Robert Ingersoll never even got to the Apostles’ forty-yard line.”

  “But the name had a sort of magic and you read him secretly as you grew older.”

  “How did you know?”

  “And you decided to learn everything in the world so people couldn’t push you around.”

  That started the life story. It must have sounded like combination of Frank Merriwell and Superman in ninety-nine volumes, each worth a nickel. McPherson vs. Associated Dairymen. McPherson in Washington. McPherson’s Big Night with the Hopheads. Down Among the Bucket Shops with Mark McPherson. Labor Spy Rackets as Seen by McPherson. Killers I have Known. From there somehow we got back to Mark McPherson’s Childhood Days. From Rags to Riches, or Barefoot Boy in Brooklyn. I guess I described every game I’d pitched for the Long Island Mohawks. And told her about the time I knocked out Rocco, the Wop Terror, and how Sparks Lampini, who had bet his paper route on Rocco, knocked me out for revenge. And about my folks, my mother, and my sister who had made up her mind to marry the boss, and what a heel she had turned out to be. I even told her about the time we all had diphtheria and Davey, the kid brother, died. It must have been ten years since I had mentioned Davey.

  She sat with her hands folded against the gold-colored cloth of her dress and a look on her face as if she were hearing the Commandments read by Moses himself. That’s probably what Waldo meant by delicate flattery.

  She said, “You don’t seem at all like a detective.”

  “Have you ever known any detectives?”

  “In detective stories there are two kinds, the hardboiled ones who are always drunk and talk out the corners of their mouths and do it all by instinct; and the cold, dry, scientific kind who split hairs under a microscope.”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  “Neither,” she said. “I don’t like people who make their livings out of spying and poking into people’s lives. Detectives aren’t heroes to me, they’re detestable.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She smiled a little. “But you’re different. The people you’ve gone after ought to be exposed. Your work is important. I hope you’ve got a million more stories to tell me.”

  “Sure,” I said, swelling like a balloon. “I’m the Arabian Nights. Spend a thousand and one evenings with me and you won’t hear the half of my daring exploits.”

  “You don’t talk like a detective, either.”

  “Neither hardboiled nor scientific?”

  We laughed. A girl had died. Her body had lain on the floor of this room. That is how Laura and I met. And we couldn’t stop laughing. We were like old friends, and later, at half-past three, when she said she was hungry, we went into the kitchen and
opened some cans. We drank strong tea at the kitchen table like home-folks. Everything was just the way I had felt it would be with her there, alive and warm and interested in a fellow.

  Chapter 3

  “Listen!” she said.

  We heard the sound of rain and the crackling of wood in the fireplace and foghorns on the East River.

  “We’re in the midst of Manhattan and this is our private world,” she said.

  I liked it. I didn’t want the rain to stop or the sun to rise. For once in my life I had quit being restless.

  She said, “I wonder what people are going to say when they hear I’m not dead.”

  I thought of the people whose names were in her address book and the stuffed shirts at her office. I thought of Shelby, but what I said was, “One thing I don’t want to miss is Waldo when he finds out.” I laughed.

  She said: “Poor darling Waldo! Did he take it hard?”

  “What do you think?”

  “He loves me,” she said.

  I put another log on the fire. My back was turned so that I could not see her face when she asked about Shelby. This was Thursday, the twenty-eighth of August; it was to have been their wedding day.

  I answered without turning around. “Shelby has been okay. He’s been frank and cooperative, and kind to your aunt.”

  “Shelby has great self-control. You liked him, didn’t you?”

  I kept poking at the fire until I almost succeeded in smothering it. There had been the phoney alibi and the bottle of Three Horses Bourbon, the insurance money and the collection of unused shotguns. But now I had run into a new set of contradictions. Two and two no longer added up to four. The twenty-five-thousand-dollar insurance motive was definitely out.

  It was hard for me to start asking her questions. She seemed tired. And Shelby was to have been today’s bridegroom. I asked only one question:

  “Did Shelby know this girl?”

  She answered instantly. “Why, yes, of course. She modeled for several of the accounts in our office. All of us knew Diane.” She yawned.

  “You’re tired, aren’t you?”

  “Would you mind very much if I tried to get some sleep? In the morning—later, I mean—I’ll answer all the questions you want to ask.”

  I phoned the office and told them to send a man to watch her front door.

  “Is that necessary?” she said.

  “Someone tried to murder you before. I’m not going to take any chances.”

  “How thoughtful of you! Detectives are all right, I suppose, when they’re on your side.”

  “Look here, Miss Hunt, will you promise me something?”

  “You know me much too well to call me Miss Hunt, Mark.”

  My heart beat like a drum in a Harlem dance band.

  “Laura,” I said; she smiled at me. “You’ll promise, Laura, not to leave this house until I give you permission. Or answer the phone.”

  “Who’d ring if everybody thinks I’m dead?”

  “Promise me, just in case.”

  She sighed. “All right. I won’t answer. And can’t I phone anyone either?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But people would be glad to know I’m alive. There are people I ought to tell right away.”

  “Look here, you’re the one living person who can help solve this crime. Laura Hunt must find the person who tried to murder Laura Hunt. Are you game?”

  She offered her hand.

  The sucker took it and believed her.

  Chapter 4

  It was almost six when I checked in at the club. I decided that I’d need a clear head for the day’s work and left a call for eight. I dreamed for two hours about Laura Hunt. The dream had five or six variations, but the meaning was always the same. She was just beyond my reach. As soon as I came close, she floated off into space. Or ran away. Or locked a door. Each time I came to, I cursed myself for letting a dream hold me in such horror. As time passed and I struggled from dream to dream, the real incidents of the night became less real than my nightmares. Each time I woke, cold and sweating, I believed more firmly that I had dreamed of finding her in the apartment and that Laura was still dead.

  When the desk clerk called, I jumped as if a bomb had gone off under my bed. Exhausted, my head aching, I swore never to drink Italian wine again. The return of Laura Hunt seemed so unreal that I wondered if I had ever actually considered reporting it to the Department. I stared hard at real things, the steel tubes of the chairs and writing desk, the brown curtains at the windows, the chimneys across the street. Then I saw, on the bureau with my wallet and keys, a spot of red. This brought me out of bed with a leap. It was the stain of lip rouge on my handkerchief which she had used. So I knew she was alive.

  As I reached for the telephone, I remembered that I had told her not to answer it. She was probably sleeping anyway, and wouldn’t have been pleased if a thoughtless mug called her at that hour.

  I went down to the office, wrote out my report on the typewriter, sealed and filed all copies. Then I went in to see Deputy Commissioner Preble.

  Every morning I had gone into his office to report on the Laura Hunt case and every day he had said the same thing.

  “Stick to the case a little longer, my boy, and maybe you’ll find that murder’s big enough for your talents.”

  His cheeks were like purple plums. I wanted to squash them with my fists. We represented opposing interests, I being one of the Commissioner’s inside men, and more active than anyone in the Department on the progressive angle. Deputy Commissioner Preble was his party’s front. Now that they were out of power, his was strictly an appeasement job.

  As I walked into his office, he gave me the usual razzberry. Before I could say a word he started: “Do you know what this case is costing the Department? I’ve had a memo sent to your office. You’d better step on it or I’ll have to assign someone to the case who knows how to handle homicide.”

  “You might have thought of that in the beginning,” I said, because I wasn’t going to let him know that I hadn’t been on to his tactics. He had been waiting all along to show me up by letting me work until I’d hit a dead end and then handing the case to one of his favorites.

  “What have you to say? Another of those minute-and-a-half reports, huh?”

  “You needn’t worry about our not getting Laura Hunt’s murderer,” I said. “That part of the case is completed.”

  “What do you mean? You’ve got him?” He looked disappointed.

  “Laura Hunt isn’t dead.”

  His eyes popped like golf balls. “She’s in her apartment now. I had Ryan on guard until eight this morning, then Behrens came on. No one knows of this yet.”

  He pointed at his head. “Perhaps I ought to get in touch with Bellevue, McPherson. Psychopathic Ward.”

  I told him briefly what had happened. Although the heat wave was over and there was a chill in the air, he fanned himself with both hands.

  “Who murdered the other girl?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What does Miss Hunt say about it?”

  “I’ve reported everything that she told me.”

  “Do you think she knows anything she hasn’t told you?”

  I said: “Miss Hunt was suffering from shock after she heard that her friend had been killed. She wasn’t able to talk a lot.”

  He snorted. “Is she pretty, McPherson?”

  I said: “I’m going to question her this morning. I also intend to surprise several people who think she is dead. It would be better if this were kept out of the newspapers until I’ve had time to work out my plans.”

  It was strictly Front Page even for the Times, and a coast-to-coast hook-up on the news broadcasts. I could tell by his face that he was working out an angle that would immortalize the name of Preble.

 
He said: “This changes the case, you know. There is no corpus delicti. We’ll have to investigate the death of the other girl. I’m wondering, McPherson . . .”

  “I wondered, too,” I said. “You’ll find it all in my report. A sealed copy has been sent to the Commissioner’s office and you’ll find yours on your secretary’s desk. And I don’t want to be relieved. You assigned me to the case in the beginning and I’m sticking until it’s finished.” I shouted and pounded on the desk, knowing that a man is most easily intimidated by his own methods. “And if one word of this gets into the papers before I’ve given the green light, there’ll be hell to pay around here Monday when the Commissioner gets back.”

  I told only one other person about Laura’s return. That was Jake Mooney. Jake is a tall, sad-faced Yankee from Providence, known among the boys as the Rhode Island Clam. Once a reporter wrote, “Mooney maintained a clam-like silence,” and it got Jake so angry that he’s lived up to the name ever since. By the time I came out of Preble’s office, Jake had got a list of the photographers for whom Diane Redfern posed.

  “Go and see these fellows,” I said. “Get what you can on her. Look over her room. Don’t tell anyone she’s dead.”

  He nodded.

  “I want all the papers and letters you find in her room. And be sure to ask the landlady what kind of men she knew. She might have picked up some boyfriends who played with sawed-off shotguns.”

  The telephone rang. It was Mrs. Treadwell. She wanted me to come to her house right away.

  “There’s something I ought to tell you, Mr. McPherson. I’d intended going back to the country today: there was nothing more I could do for poor Laura, was there? My lawyers are going to take care of her things. But now something has happened . . .”

  “All right, I’ll be there, Mrs. Treadwell.”

  As I drove up Park Avenue, I decided to keep Mrs. Treadwell waiting while I saw Laura. She had promised to stay in the apartment and keep away from the telephone, and I knew there was no fresh food in the house. I drove around to Third Avenue, bought milk, cream, butter, eggs, and bread.