Laura (Femmes Fatales)

by Caspary, Vera

  “You can’t call me a murderer and light my cigarette.”

  Now that I had said the word aloud, I felt freer. I stood up, stretched my legs, blew smoke at the ceiling. I felt that I belonged to myself and could fight my own battles.

  “Don’t be so childish,” Shelby said. “Can’t you see that you’re in a tight spot and that I’m trying to help you? Don’t you realize the chances I’ve taken, the lies I’ve told to protect you, and last night, driving up there? That makes me an accomplice; I’m in a rather bad spot myself, and for your sake.”

  “I wish I hadn’t phoned you last night,” I said.

  “Don’t be petty, Laura. Your instinct was sound. You knew as well as I that they’d go up and search your place as soon as they discovered that you were back.”

  “That’s not why I called you.”

  Bessie came in to say good night and tell me again that she was happy that I had not died. Tears burned the edges of my eyes.

  When the door had closed behind her, Shelby said: “I’d rest easier if I had that gun in my possession now. But how can we get it with detectives on our trail? I tried to shake the fellow, I took the back road, but the cab followed me all the way. If I’d as much as searched the place, I’d have given it away instantly. So I kept up the pretense of sorrow; I stood in the garden and wept for you; I called it a sentimental journey when that detective . . .”

  “His name is McPherson,” I said.

  “You’re so bitter,” Shelby said. “You’ll have to get over that bitterness, Laura, or you’ll never be able to fight it out. Now, if we stand together, my sweet . . .”

  Mark returned. I gave Shelby my hand and we sat on the couch, side by side, like lovers. Mark turned on the light; he looked into my face; he said he was going to speak the truth directly. That was when he brought out the cigarette case and Shelby lost his nerve and Mark’s face became the face of a stranger. It’s hard to deceive Mark; he looks at you as if he wants you to be honest. Shelby was afraid of honesty; he kept losing his temper like a schoolboy, and it was, in the end, Shelby’s fear that told Mark that Shelby believed me guilty.

  “Are you going to arrest me?” I asked Mark. But he went to Schwartz’s and got me the sleeping pills, and when he left, although I did not say so to Shelby, I knew he was going to Wilton to search my house.

  Chapter 4

  Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone. Every little movement has a meaning all its own, Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone. A small black mustache parted in the middle, a voice, the smell of mint, and all of this is an enigma, a rush of words and sense memories as I woke after a hard sleep and two small white pills. Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone . . . I attached the words to a melody . . . I heard music beyond my door and the words were Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone.

  The music was the vacuum cleaner outside my bedroom door. Bessie brought coffee and orange juice. The glass was beaded with ice, and as my hand chilled, grasping it, I remembered the dewy silvered vessel, the smell of mint, and the small black mustache crowning a toothpaste smile. It was on the lawn of Auntie Sue’s place at Sands Point; the black mustache had asked if I liked mint juleps and explained that he was young Salsbury of Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone.

  Bessie breathed heavily, adjusted her jaw, asked if I would eat a nice poached egg.

  “A lawyer,” I said, aloud. “He told me that if I ever needed a lawyer, they’re a very old firm.”

  Having worried enough over my failure to settle the poached egg question, Bessie sighed and departed while I, remembering Shelby’s advice, heard myself telling it all to the black mustache.

  “And your alibi, Laura? What is your alibi for Friday night, August twentieth?” young Salsbury would ask, tweaking the end, which might or might not be waxed. Then I should have to repeat for the mustache what I had told Mark about Friday night after I left Shelby waving after my taxi on Lexington Avenue.

  Mark had asked me while we were having breakfast together—it seems a thousand breakfasts ago—to tell him precisely how I had spent every minute of that Friday night. He had known, of course, that I had let Shelby give the taxi-driver Waldo’s address and that I had then instructed the man to take me to Grand Central.

  “And after that?” Mark had said.

  “I took the train.”

  “It was crowded?”

  “Terribly.”

  “Did you see anyone you know? Or anyone who might be able to identify you?”

  “Why do you ask me these questions?”

  “Routine,” he said, and handed me his empty cup. “You make excellent coffee, Laura.”

  “You ought to come up sometime when I bake a cake.”

  We laughed. The kitchen was cozy with the checked cloth and my blue Danish cups. I poured cream and put two lumps of sugar into his coffee.

  “How did you know?” he said.

  “I watched you before. Now when you come here, you will get so much cream and two lumps.”

  “I’ll come often,” he said.

  He asked about my arrival in Wilton, and I told him about getting off the train at South Norwalk and of walking quickly alone down that deserted street to the garage back of Andrew Frost’s house for my car. Mark wanted to know if there weren’t any public garages near the station, and I said I saved two dollars a month this way. That made him laugh again. “So you do have some thrift in you.” There was little of the detective in him and much of the admiring male, so that I laughed, throwing back my head and searching his eyes. He asked if Andrew Frost or any of his family had seen me, and when I told him that Mr. Frost is a misogynist of seventy-four who sees me only the first Saturday of the month when I give him two dollars, Mark laughed uproariously and said, “That’s a hell of an alibi.”

  I told him about driving to Norwalk on Saturday for my groceries, and he asked if anyone there would remember. But I told him I had saved money again, going to the Super-Market and trundling a basket through aisles filled with the working people of Norwalk and the summer crowd from the surrounding countryside. I could not remember whether it had been the red-headed cashier who took my money or the man with the cast in his eye. After I left the market, I told him, I had driven home, worked in the garden again, cooked myself a light dinner, and read until bedtime.

  He said, “Is that all, Laura?”

  Safe and friendly in my warm kitchen, I shuddered. Mark’s eyes were fixed on my face. I seized the coffee pot and ran with it to the stove, turning my back to him and chattering swiftly of irrelevant things, wanting to cleanse my mind. There, at the stove, the coffee pot in my hand, I felt his eyes burning through me, piercing flesh and bone, seeing me as he had seen Diane’s face, with all the pain and prettiness gone and only blood and membrane and hideous shattered bone.

  He said: “And you stayed alone for the rest of the time you were there, Laura? You didn’t see anyone who might have heard the radio or read the newspaper and come to tell you that you were dead?”

  I repeated what I had told him the night before, that my radio was broken, and that the only people I had seen were the gardener and the Polish farmer from whom I had bought some corn and lettuce and farm fresh eggs.

  Mark shook his head.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said.

  “It doesn’t sound like . . . like your sort of woman.”

  “What do you mean, my sort of woman?”

  “You have so many friends, your life is so full, you’re always surrounded by people.”

  “It’s when you have friends that you can afford to be lonely. When you know a lot of people, loneliness becomes a luxury. It’s only when you’re forced to be lonely that it’s bad,” I said.

  Thin fingers drummed the table. I set the coffee pot upon the blue tile and my hand ached to stretch out and touch the wrist that protruded bonily from his white cuff. Mark’s lonel
iness had not been luxury. He did not say this aloud, for he was a strong man and would never be wistful.

  As I thought about this, lying in bed with the breakfast tray balanced on my legs, I knew I could never speak so easily to the black mustache of young Salsbury. A hell of an alibi, he would say, too, but it would be without the humor or tolerance that were in Mark’s eyes and his voice.

  Bessie brought the poached egg. “He’s a man,” Bessie said abruptly. Bessie’s attitudes are high Tenth Avenue; she is off the sidewalks of New York and as unrelenting as any snob that came out of Murray Hill’s stone mansions. I had met her brothers, outspoken and opinionated workingmen whose black-and-white rules of virtue my intellectuals and advertising executives could never satisfy.

  “A man,” Bessie said. “Most of them that comes here are big babies or old women. For once, even if he’s a dick, you’ve met a man.” And then, completely in the groove of man-worship, added, “Guess I’ll bake a chocolate cake.”

  I bathed and dressed slowly, and said to Bessie, “I’ll wear my new suit on account of claustrophobia.” In spite of the rain, I had decided to leave the house, looking so calmly adjusted to my own importance—like a model in Vogue—that the officer at the door would never dare question my leaving. I pulled on my best gloves and tucked my alligator bag under my arm. At the door, my courage failed. So long as I made no move that showed the desire to leave, this was my home; but it needed only a word from the man at the door to make it a prison.

  This is a fear which has always lived in me. I leave my doors open because I am not so frightened of intruders as of being locked in. I thought of a movie I had once seen with Sylvia Sidney’s pale, frightened face behind bars. “Bessie,” I said, “I’d better stay home today. After all, the world still thinks I am dead.”

  My name was at that moment being shouted by hundreds of newsboys. When Bessie came from the market, she brought the papers. Laura Hunt Alive! streamed across all the front pages. On one tabloid my face was blown up to page proportions and looked like a relief map of Asia Minor. What, I asked myself, would tomorrow’s pages scream?

  Laura Hunt Guilty?

  I read that I was staying at an unnamed hotel. This was to fool the newspapermen and my friends and keep me safe from intrusion, Aunt Sue said when she came with red roses in her hand. She had not learned about me from the newspapers, but from Mark, who had awakened her that morning to bring the news.

  “How thoughtful he is!” said Aunt Sue.

  She had brought the roses to show that she was glad that I had not died, but she could do nothing except condemn me for having lent Diane my apartment. “I always said you’d get into trouble, being so easy with people.”

  Mark had not told her of the later developments. She knew nothing of the cigarette case nor of Shelby’s suspicions. Shelby, who had been staying at her house, had not come home last night.

  We talked about my funeral. “It was lovely,” Aunt Sue said. “You couldn’t expect a great attendance at this time of the year, too many people out of town, but most of them wired flowers. I was just about to write the thank you notes. Now you can do it yourself.”

  “I wish I had seen the flowers,” I said.

  “You’ll have to outlive them all. Nobody could take a second funeral seriously.”

  Bessie said there were people coming to the door in spite of the fact that I was supposed to be hidden in an unnamed hotel. But there were now two detectives on my doorstep and the bell did not ring. I kept looking at the clock, wondering why I had not heard from Mark.

  “I’m sure he can’t make more than eighteen hundred a year, two thousand at the most,” Auntie Sue said suddenly.

  I laughed. It was psychic, like Bessie’s suddenly saying, “He’s a man.”

  “Some men,” said Auntie Sue, “are bigger than their incomes. It’s not often that you find one like that.”

  “From you, Auntie Sue, that’s heresy.”

  “Once I was crazy about a grip,” she said. “Of course it was impossible. I had become a star and I was young. How would it have looked to the chorus girls? Natural selection is the bunk, darling, except in jungles.”

  Auntie Sue is always nicer when there are no men around. She is one of those women who must flirt with every taxi-driver and waiter. And then she is horrid because she must punish men for not desiring her. I love Auntie Sue, but when I am with her I am glad that I was never a famous beauty.

  She said, “Are you in love with him, Laura?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve only known him . . .”

  I couldn’t count the hours.

  She said: “You’ve been watching the clock and cocking your ear toward the door ever since I came. You don’t hear half that I say . . .”

  “There may be other things on my mind, Auntie Sue. Certain things about this murder,” I said, knowing I should have asked about Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone.

  “You’re preoccupied, Laura. Your mind is filled with the man.” She came across the room; she touched me with her soft, boneless hand. Through the varnish, I saw a young girl’s face. “Don’t fight yourself too hard, Laura. Not this time. I’ve seen you give yourself too easily to all the wrong people; don’t hold out against the right one.”

  That was strange advice from Auntie Sue, but in it I saw the design of her discontent. After she had gone, I sat for a long time uncomfortably on the arm of a chair, thinking.

  I thought of my mother and how she had talked of a girl’s giving herself too easily. Never give yourself, Laura, she’d say, never give yourself to a man. I must have been very young when she first said it to me, for the phrase had become deeply part of my nature, like rhymes and songs I heard when I was too small to fasten my own buttons. That is why I have given so much of everything else; myself I have always withheld. A woman may yield without giving, as Auntie Sue had yielded to Uncle Horace when she had wanted to give herself to a grip in the theatre.

  I was ashamed; I kept thinking of my own life that had seemed so honest; I hid my face from daylight; I thought of the way we proud moderns have twisted and perverted love, making arguments for this and that substitute, just as I make arguments for Jix and Lady Lilith when I write advertisements. Natural selection, Auntie Sue had said, was the bunk, except in jungles.

  Someone had passed the detectives at the threshold. Feet ascended to my door. I hurried to open it.

  And there was Waldo.

  Chapter 5

  Millions of people in the city and environs,” Waldo said, with envy in his voice, “are talking about Laura Hunt. Your name, witch, is sizzling on all the wires in the country.”

  “Do stop being childish, Waldo. I need help. You’re the only person in the world I can talk to. Will you be serious?”

  His eyes were small islands beyond rippling light on thick lenses. “What of Shelby?” His voice rang richly with triumph. “Isn’t it his place to be at your side in the hour of travail?”

  “Waldo, darling, this is a terrible and serious moment. You mustn’t torture me now with your jealousy.”

  “Jealousy!” He hurled the word like a weapon. “Oughtn’t you to be more tolerant of jealousy, my sweet?”

  We were strangers. A wall had risen between us, Waldo’s jealousy had been there long before Shelby’s time; Waldo had been clever and cruel at the expense of other attractive men. I had been wickedly amused and proud that my charms had roused passion in this curiously unimpassioned creature. What a siren I had thought myself, Laura Hunt, to have won the love of a man born without the capacity for loving! People used to remark, to tease, to raise questioning eyebrows when they spoke of Waldo’s devotion, but I had smugly enjoyed my position as a companion and protégée of a distinguished man. The solid quality of our friendship had been, from my side, founded on respect for his learning and joy in the gay acrobatics of his mind. He had always insi
sted on the gestures of courtship; wooing had gone on for seven years with flattery and flowers, expensive gifts and oaths of undying affection. The lover role had been too unwavering for honesty, but Waldo would never relax it, never for a moment let either of us forget that he wore trousers and I skirts. But there had been a certain delicacy in our avoiding any implication that the wooing might have purpose beyond its charm. Auntie Sue had often said that she would shiver if Waldo kissed her; he had kissed me often; it was his habit to kiss when we parted, and often affectionately over some compliment. I felt nothing, neither shivering repulsion nor answering flame. A kitten nuzzled against my legs, a dog licked my hands, a child’s moist lips touched my cheeks: these were like Waldo’s kisses.

  He caught my two hands, sought my eyes, said: “I love your jealousy, Laura. You were magnificent when you assaulted her.”

  I jerked my hands free. “Waldo, what would you think if I were accused of the murder?”

  “My dear child!”

  “I have no alibi, Waldo, and there’s a gun up at my place in the country. He went there last night, I’m sure. I’m frightened, Waldo.”

  The color had left his face. He was waxen.

  “What are you trying to tell me, Laura?”

  I told him about the cigarette case, the Bourbon bottle, about my lies and Shelby’s lies, and of Shelby’s saying before Mark that he had lied to protect me. “Shelby was here with Diane that night, you know. He says he knew when the gun was fired that I had come back.”

  Sweat shone on Waldo’s upper lip and on his forehead. He had taken off his glasses and was staring at me through pale, naked eyes.

  “There is one thing you haven’t told me, Laura.”

  “But Waldo, you don’t believe . . .”

  “Did you, Laura?”

  Newsboys filled the streets with gutturals whose syllable formed my name. The colors of the day were fading. A phosphorescent green streaked the sky. The rain was thin and chill like summer sleet.

  “Laura!”

  His naked eyes, conical in shape and gleaming with white light, were hard upon my face. I shrank from that strained scrutiny, but his eyes hypnotized me so that I could neither turn away nor lower my eyelids.