Read Laura (Femmes Fatales) for Free Online

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 enmity. My fingers beat a tattoo on the arm of my chair. Strangely, the padded rhythms seemed to reach him, for he turned, staring as if my face were a memory from some fugitive reverie. Another thirty seconds had passed, I dare say, before he took from her desk a spherical object covered in soiled leather.
    “What’s this, Mr. Lydecker?”
    “Surely a man of your sporting tastes is familiar with that ecstatic toy, McPherson.”
    “But why did she keep a baseball on her desk?” He emphasized the pronoun. She had begun to live. Then examining the tattered leather and loosened bindings, he asked, “Has she had it since ’38?”
    “I’m sure I didn’t notice the precise date when this object d’art was introduced into the