Laura (Femmes Fatales)

by Caspary, Vera

  The gun was a clue to Shelby. It was marked with his mother’s initials. C stood for Carpenter, S for Shelby, and D for Delilah. I could see him as a kid in knee pants and a Buster Brown collar reciting pieces for a mother named Delilah.

  He told me the gun had been used a month before. He had shot a rabbit.

  I said: “Look here, Carpenter, you can relax. If you tell the truth now, we might be able to overlook a few dozen lies that make you an accessory after the fact. Tomorrow may be too late.”

  He looked at me as though I’d said out loud what I thought about Delilah. He would never turn State’s evidence, no suh, not a descendant of the Shelbys of Kentucky. That was an underworld trick which no gentleman could sanction.

  It took three hours for me to make him understand the difference between a gentleman and an ordinary heel. Then he broke down and asked if he might send for his lawyer.

  I let Preble give out the news of Shelby’s confession because I was playing a game with him, too. In world politics it’s called appeasement. From Preble’s point of view, the gun and Shelby’s confession clinched the evidence against Laura. She looked as guilty as Ruth Snyder. We could have booked her then and there on suspicion of murder. A quick arrest, Preble thought, would bring a juicy confession. And orchids for the Department under the efficient administration of Deputy Commissioner Preble.

  I could see his hand as clearly as though he’d shown me the cards. This was Friday, and on Monday the Commissioner would be back from his vacation. Preble had little time to garner his share of personal publicity. And this case, since Laura had come back alive, was strictly Front Page, and coast to coast on the networks. Preble’s wife and kids were waiting at a summer hotel in the Thousand Islands to hear over the air waves that Papa had solved the murder mystery of the decade.

  We had a knock down and drag out argument. I wanted time, he wanted action. I called him the worn-out wheelhorse of a political party that should have been buried years ago under a load of cow manure. He told the world that I was hanging on to the bandwagon of the party in power, a bunch of filthy Reds who’d sell the country short for thirty pieces of Moscow gold. I said he belonged back with the Indian chiefs who’d given their name to his stinking loyalties, and he said I’d send my old mother out on the Bowery if I thought it would further my career. I am not reporting our actual language because, as I mentioned before, I haven’t had a college education and I keep my writing clean.

  It ended in a draw.

  “If you don’t bring in the murderer, dead or alive, by tomorrow morning . . .”

  “You’re damned tooting,” I said. “I’ll have him stuffed and trussed and ready for your breakfast.”

  “Her,” he said.

  “Wait,” I bluffed.

  I hadn’t a shred of evidence that wasn’t against Laura. But even though my own hands had dragged that gun from the chest in her bedroom, I couldn’t believe her guilty. She might conk a rival with a trayful of hors d’oeuvres, but she could no more plan a murder than I could go in for collecting antique glassware.

  It was around eight o’clock. I had about twelve hours to clear Laura and prove that I wasn’t one hundred percent sucker.

  I drove up to Sixty-Second Street. When I opened the door, I knew that I had burst in on a love scene. It was the fat man’s field day. Shelby had betrayed her and I seemed to be threatening her with arrest. He was the man in possession, and the deeper the spot she was in, the greater her need for him, the surer his hold. It would have been to his advantage in more ways than one to have her tried for murder.

  My presence was poison to him. His face took on the color of cabbage and his fat flesh shook like cafeteria jello. He tried his best to make a woman fall for me so that I could advance myself. It was something like Preble’s remark about my sending my mother out on the Bowery to help my career. Remarks like this one are not so much accusations as revelations. Frightened people try to defend themselves by accusing others of their own motives. This was never so clear as when Waldo began to make cracks about my bad leg. When a man goes so far below the belt, you can be sure he’s hiding his own weakness.

  At that moment I quit thinking of Waldo as the faithful old friend. I understood why his manner toward me had changed after Laura came back. He had made a great romance of my interest in the dead girl; it gave him a companion in frustration. But with Laura alive, I had become a rival.

  I sat back and listened while he called me names. The shabbier he tried to make me look, the more clearly I saw his motives. For eight years he had kept her for himself by the destruction of her suitors. Only Shelby had survived. Shelby might have been a weak man, but he was too stubborn to let himself be ousted. He had allowed Waldo to insult him again and again, but he had stuck, finding solace in playing a big shot for Diane.

  The pattern had straightened out, but evidence was lacking. I saw myself as the Deputy Commissioner might see me, a stubborn jackass working on instinct against known fact. Training and experience had taught me that instinct had no value in the courtroom. Your Honor, I know this man to have been bitterly jealous. Try that on the witness stand and see how far you get.

  Under ordinary circumstances I do my lovemaking in private. But I had to turn the screws on Waldo’s jealousy. When I took Laura in my arms, I was playing a scene. Her response almost ended my usefulness in the case. I knew she liked me, but I hadn’t asked for heaven.

  She believed that I was embracing her because she had been hurt and I, loving her, offered comfort and protection. That was the deeper truth. But I had Waldo on my mind, too. The love scene was too strong for his sensitive nerves, and he slipped out.

  I had no time to explain anything. It wasn’t easy to break away, leaving Laura to think that Waldo had been right in accusing me of using her sincerity as a trap. But he was gone and I could take no chance of losing him.

  I lost him.

  Behrens and Muzzio let him pass. By my own instructions Waldo Lydecker had been allowed to come and go as he chose. The two cops had been lounging on the stoop, bragging about their kids probably, and not paying the slightest attention to his movements. It was my fault, not theirs.

  There was no trace of his great bulk, his decorated chin, his thick cane, on Sixty-Second Street. Either he had turned the corner or he was hiding in some dark areaway. I sent Behrens toward Third Avenue and Muzzio to Lexington and ordered them to find and trail him. I jumped into my car.

  It was just eighteen minutes of ten when I found Claudius putting up his shutters.

  “Claudius,” I said, “tell me something. Are people who collect antiques always screwy?”

  He laughed.

  “Claudius, when a man who’s crazy about this old glassware finds a beautiful piece that he can’t own, do you think he’d deliberately smash it so that no other man could ever enjoy it?”

  Claudius licked his lips. “Guess I know what you’re talking about, Mr. McPherson.”

  “Was it an accident last night?”

  “I couldn’t say yes and I couldn’t say no. Mr. Lydecker was willing to pay and I took the money, but it could’ve been an accident. You see, I hadn’t put any shot in . . .”

  “Shot? What do you mean, shot?”

  “Shot. We use it to weight down stuff when it’s light and breakable.”

  “Not BB shot,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “BB shot.”

  I had looked over Waldo’s antiques once while I was waiting for him. There had been no BB shot weighing the old cups and vases down, but he was not such a cluck as to leave unmistakable evidence around for the first detective. I wanted to make a thorough examination this time, but I had no time to get a warrant. I entered the building through the apartment. This was to avoid the elevator man, who had begun to welcome me as Mr. Lydecker’s best pal. If Waldo came home, he was not to have any suspicions that would cause him to leave ha
stily.

  I let myself in with a passkey. The place was silent and dark.

  There had been a murder. There had to be a gun. It wasn’t a shotgun, whole or sawed-off. Waldo wasn’t the type. If he owned a gun, it would look like another museum piece among the China dogs and shepherdesses and old bottles.

  I made a search of cabinets and shelves in the living-room, then went into the bedroom and started on the dresser drawers. Everything he owned was special and rare. His favorite books had been bound in selected leathers, he kept his monogrammed handkerchiefs and shorts and pajamas in silk cases embroidered with his initials. Even his mouthwash and toothpaste had been made up from special prescriptions.

  I heard the snap of the light switch in the next room. My hand went automatically to my hip pocket. But I had no gun. As I had once told Waldo, I carry weapons when I go out to look for trouble. I hadn’t figured on violence as part of this evening’s entertainment.

  I turned quickly, put myself behind a chair, and saw Roberto in a black silk dressing gown that looked as if he was paying the rent for a high-class apartment.

  Before he had time to ask questions, I said: “What are you doing here? Don’t you usually go home nights?”

  “Mr. Lydecker need me tonight,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “He not feel himself.”

  “Oh,” I said, and took the cue. “That’s why I’m here, Roberto. Mr. Lydecker didn’t feel himself at dinner, so he gave me the key and asked me to come up and wait for him.”

  Roberto smiled.

  “I was just going to the bathroom,” I said. That seemed the simplest explanation of my being in the bedroom. I went to the bathroom. When I came out, Roberto was waiting in the parlor. He asked if I’d like a drink or a cup of coffee.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “You run along to bed. I’ll see that Mr. Lydecker’s okay.” He started to leave, but I called him back. “What do you think’s the matter with Mr. Lydecker, Roberto? He seems nervous, doesn’t he?”

  Roberto smiled.

  I said, “It’s this murder; it’s been getting on his nerves, don’t you think?”

  His smile got me nervous. Even the Rhode Island clam was a big talker compared with this Filipino oyster.

  I said, “Did you ever know Quentin Waco?”

  That woke him up. There are only a few Filipinos in New York and they stick together like brothers. All the houseboys used to put their money on Quentin Waco, who was top lightweight until he got all mixed up with the girls around the Sixty-Sixth Street dancehalls. He spent more than he made, and when young Kardansky knocked him out, they accused him of pulling the fight. One of Quentin’s pals met him at the door of the Shamrock Ballroom one night and pulled a knife. For the honor of the Islands, he told the judge. A little later it came out that Quentin hadn’t pulled the fight, and the boys made a martyr of him. The religious ones kept candles burning in a church on Ninth Avenue.

  I happened to have been the man who got hold of the evidence that cleared Quentin’s name and, without knowing it, restored the honor of the Islands. When I told this to Roberto, he stopped smiling and became human.

  We talked about Mr. Lydecker’s health. We talked about the murder and about Laura’s return. Roberto’s point of view was strictly out of the tabloids. Miss Hunt was a nice lady, always friendly to Roberto, but her treatment of Mr. Lydecker showed her to have been no better than a dancehall hostess. According to Roberto all women were the same. They’d turn down a steady fellow every time for a big sport guy who knew all the latest steps.

  I jerked the talk around to the dinner he had cooked on the night of the murder. It wasn’t hard to get him going on the subject. He wanted to give me a mushroom by mushroom description of the menu. Every half-hour during the afternoon, Roberto said, Mr. Lydecker had quit his writing and come into the kitchen to taste, smell, and ask questions.

  “We have champagne; six dollars a bottle,” Roberto bragged.

  “Oh, boy!” I said.

  Roberto told me there had been more food and wine prepared for that evening. Waldo had arranged the records on his automatic phonograph so that Laura should enjoy her favorite music with the meal.

  “He certainly prepared. What a disappointment when Miss Hunt changed her mind!” I said. “What did he do, Roberto?”

  “Not eat.”

  Waldo told us he had eaten a solitary meal and spent the evening reading Gibbon in the bathtub.

  “He didn’t eat, huh? Wouldn’t go near the table?”

  “He go table,” Roberto said. “He have me bring food, he put on plate, not eat.”

  “I don’t expect he played the phonograph either.”

  “No,” said Roberto.

  “He hasn’t played it since, I suppose.”

  The phonograph was big and expensive. It played ten records, then turned them over and played the other side. I looked at them to see if any of the tunes check with the music they had talked about. There was none of this Toccata and Fugue stuff, but a lot of old songs from shows. The last was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

  “Roberto,” I said, “maybe I’ll have a whiskey anyway.”

  I thought of that hot night in Montagnino’s back yard. A storm had been rolling in and the lady at the next table sang with the music. Waldo had talked about hearing that song with Laura as if there had been a lot more to it than just listening to music with a woman.

  “I think I’ll have another, Roberto.”

  I needed Scotch less than I needed time to think it out. The pieces were beginning to fit together. The last dinner before her marriage. Champagne and her favorite songs. Memories of shows they had seen together, talk of the past. Old stories retold. And when the meal was over and they were drinking brandy, the last record would fall into place, the needle fit into the groove.

  Roberto waited with a glass in his hand. I drank. I was cold and sweating.

  Since that Sunday when I’d first walked into his apartment, I’d been reading the complete works of Waldo Lydecker. There is no better key to a man’s character than his use of the written word. Read enough of any man’s writing and you’ll have his Number One Secret. There was a line that I remembered from one of his essays: “The high crisis of frustration.”

  He had planned so carefully that even the music was timed for it. And that night Laura had failed to show up.

  I said: “Go to bed, Roberto. I’ll wait up for Mr. Lydecker.”

  Roberto disappeared like a shadow.

  I was alone in the room. Around me were his things, spindly overdecorated furniture, striped silks, books and music and antiques. There had to be a gun somewhere. When murder and suicide are planned like a seduction, a man must have his weapon handy.

  Chapter 2

  While I waited in his parlor, Waldo was pounding his stick along the pavements. He dared not look backward. His pursuers might see him turn his head and know that he was frightened.

  Muzzio caught sight of him almost a block ahead on Lexington. Waldo gave no sign that he observed Muzzio, but walked on quickly, turning east at Sixty-Fourth. At the end of the block, he saw Behrens, who had turned north on Third Avenue.

  Waldo disappeared. The two men searched every area-way and vestibule on the block, but Waldo had evidently used the service tunnel of a big apartment house, gone through the basement to the rear of the building, and found another basement and service entrance on Seventy-Second.

  He walked for three hours. He passed a lot of people on their way home from theatres and picture shows and bars. He met them in the light of arc lamps and under the lighted marquees of picture shows. We learned about it later the way we always do when an important case is finished and people phone in to make themselves important. Mary Lou Simmons, fifteen, of East Seventy-Sixth, had been frightened by a man who darted out of the vestibule as she came home from an evening
at a girl chum’s house. Gregory Finch and Enid Murphy thought it was Enid’s father leaning over the banister in the dark hall where they were kissing. Mrs. Lea Kantor saw a giant ghost behind her newsstand. Several taxi drivers had stopped in the hope of picking up a passenger. A couple of drivers had recognized Waldo Lydecker.

  He walked until the streets were quiet. There were few taxis and hardly any pedestrians. He chose the darkest streets, hid in doorways, crouched on subway steps. It was almost two o’clock when he came back to Sixty-Second Street.

  There was only one lighted window on the block. According to Shelby, that light had been burning on Friday night, too.

  Her door was not guarded. Muzzio was still waiting on Sixty-Fourth Street and Behrens had gone off duty. I had given no instructions for a man to replace him, for I had no idea, when I left Laura alone and sent the men to follow him, that he was carrying his weapon.

  He climbed the steps and rang her doorbell.

  She thought I had come back to arrest her. That seemed more reasonable than a return of the murderer. For a moment she thought of Shelby’s description of Diane’s death. Then she wrapped herself in a white bathrobe and went to the door.

  By that time I knew Waldo’s secret. I found no gun in his apartment; he was carrying the gun concealed on his person, loaded with the rest of the BB shot. What I found was a pile of unfinished and unpublished manuscript. I read it because I was planning to wait in the apartment, confront him, make the accusation, and see what happened. I found the following sentence in a piece called “The Porches of Thy Father’s Ear”:

  In the cultivated individual, malice, a weapon darkly concealed, wears the garments of usefulness, flashes the disguise of wit or flaunts the ornaments of beauty.

  The piece was about poisons hidden in antique rings, of swords in sticks, of firearms concealed in old prayer books.