Laura. Vera Caspary
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Park to stroll arm-in-arm past her house, gaping at daisies which had been watered by the hands of a murder victim. Fathers pushed perambulators and mothers scolded the brats who tortured the cops who guarded the door of a house in which a bachelor girl had been slain.
“Coney Island moved to the Platinum Belt,” I observed.
Mark nodded. “Murder is the city’s best free entertainment. I hope it doesn’t bother you, Mr. Lydecker.”
“Quite the contrary. It’s the odor of tuberoses and the timbre of organ music that depress me. Public festivity gives death a classic importance. No one would have enjoyed the spectacle more than Laura.”
He sighed.
“If she were here now, she’d open the windows, pluck daisies out of her window-boxes and strew the sidewalks. Then she’d send me down the stairs for a penny pickle.”
Mark plucked a daisy and tore off the petals.
“Laura loved dancing in the streets. She gave dollar bills to organ-grinders.”
He shook his head. “You’d never think it, judging from the neighborhood.”
“She also had a taste for privacy.”
The house was one of a row of converted mansions, preserved in such fashion that Victorian architecture sacrificed none of its substantial elegance to twentieth-century chic. High stoops had given way to lacquered doors three steps down; scrofulous daisies and rachitic geraniums bloomed in extraordinarily bright blue and green window-boxes; rents were exorbitant. Laura had lived here, she told me, because she enjoyed snubbing Park Avenue’s pretentious foyers. After a trying day in the office, she could neither face a superman in gilt braid nor discuss the weather with politely indifferent elevator boys. She had enjoyed opening the street door with a key and climbing the stairs to her remodeled third floor. It was this taste for privacy that led to her death, for there had been no one to ask at the door if Miss Hunt expected a visitor on the night the murderer came.
“The doorbell rang,” Mark announced suddenly.
“What?”
“That’s how it must have happened. The doorbell rang. She was in the bedroom without clothes on. By the time she’d put on that silk thing and her slippers, he’d probably rung a second time. She went to the door and as she opened it, the shot was fired!”
“How do you know all this?” I demanded.
“She fell backward. The body lay there.”
We both stared at the bare, polished floor. He had seen the body, the pale blue garment blood-stained and the blood running in rivulets to the edge of the green carpet.
“The door downstairs had evidently been left unlocked. It was unlocked when Bessie came to work yesterday morning. Before she came upstairs, Bessie looked for the superintendent to bawl him out for his carelessness, but he’d taken his family down to Manhattan Beach for the week-end. The tenants of the first and second floors are away for the summer and there was no one else in the house. The houses on both sides are empty, too, at this time of year.”
“Probably the murderer thought of that,” I observed.
“The door might have been left open for him. She might have been expecting a caller.”
“Do you think so?”
“You knew her, Mr. Lydecker. Tell me, what kind of dame was she anyway?”
“She was not the sort of woman you call a dame,” I retorted.
“Okay. But what was she like?”
“Look at this room. Does it reveal nothing of the person who planned and decorated it? Does it contain, for your eyes, the vulgar memories of a young woman who would lie to her fiancé, deceive her oldest friend, and sneak off to a rendezvous with a murderer?”
I awaited his answer like a touchy Jehovah. If he failed to appreciate the quality of a woman who had adorned this room, I should know that his interest in literature was but the priggish aspiration of a seeker after self-improvement, his sensitivity no more than proletarian prudery. For me the room still shone with Laura’s luster. Perhaps it was in the crowding memories of firelit conversations, of laughing dinners at the candle-bright refectory table, of midnight confidences fattened by spicy snacks and endless cups of steaming coffee. But even as it stood for him, mysterious and bare of memory, it must have represented, in the deepest sense of the words, a living room.
For answer he chose the long green chair, stretched his legs on the ottoman, and pulled out his pipe. His eyes traveled from the black marble fireplace in which the logs were piled, ready for the first cool evening, to softly faded chintz whose deep folds shut out the glare of the hot twilight.
After a time he burst out: “I wish to Christ my sister could see this place. Since she married and went to live in Kew Gardens, she won’t have kitchen matches in the parlor. This place has—” he hesitated “—it’s very comfortable.”
I think the word in his mind had been class, but he kept it from me, knowing that intellectual snobbism is nourished by such trivial crudities. His attention wandered to the bookshelves.
“She had a lot of books. Did she ever read them?”
“What do you think?”
He shrugged. “You never know about women.”
“Don’t tell me you’re a misogynist.”
He clamped his teeth hard upon his pipestem and glanced at me with an air of urchin defiance.
“Come, now, what of the girlfriend?” I pleaded.
He answered dryly: “I’ve had plenty in my life. I’m no angel.”
“Ever loved one?”
“A doll in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me. And I’m a Scotchman, Mr. Lydecker. So make what you want of it.”
“Ever know one who wasn’t a doll? Or a dame?”
He went to the bookshelves. While he talked, his hands and eyes were concerned with a certain small volume bound in red morocco. “Sometimes I used to take my sisters’ girl friends out. They never talked about anything except going steady and getting married. Always wanted to take you past furniture stores to show you the parlor suites. One of them almost hooked me.”
“And what saved you?”
“Mattie Grayson’s machine gun. You were right. It was no tragedy.”
“Didn’t she wait?”
“Hell, yes. The day they discharged me, there she was at the hospital door. Full of love and plans; her old man had plenty of dough, owned a fish store, and was ready to furnish the flat, first payment down. I was still using crutches so I told her I wouldn’t let her sacrifice herself.” He laughed aloud. “After the months I’d put in reading and thinking, I couldn’t go for a parlor suite. She’s married now, got a couple of kids, lives in Jersey.”
“Never read any books, eh?”
“Oh, she’s probably bought a couple of sets for the bookcase. Keeps them dusted and never reads them.”
He snapped the cover on the red morocco volume. The shrill blast of the popcorn whistle insulted our ears and the voices of children rose to remind us of the carnival of death in the street below. Bessie Clary, Laura’s maid, had told the police that her first glimpse of the body had been a distorted reflection in the mercury-glass globe on Laura’s mantel. That tarnished bubble caught and held our eyes, and we saw in it fleetingly, as in a crystal ball, a vision of the inert body in the blue robe, dark blood matted in the dark hair.
“What did you want to ask me, McPherson? Why did you bring me up here?”
His face had the watchfulness that comes after generations to a conquered people. The Avenger, when he comes, will wear that proud, guarded look. For a moment I glimpsed