Read Laura (Femmes Fatales) for Free Online Page A

household.”
    “It’s autographed by Cookie Lavagetto. That was his big year. Was she a Dodgers fan?”
    “There were many facets to her character.”
    “Was Shelby a fan, too?”
    “Will the answer to that question help you solve the murder, my dear fellow?”
    He set the baseball down so that it should lie precisely where Laura had left it. “I just wanted to know. If it bothers you to answer the question, Mr. Lydecker . . .”
    “There’s no reason to get sullen about it,” I snapped. “As a matter of fact, Shelby wasn’t a fan. He preferred . . . why do I speak of him in the past tense? He prefers the more aristocratic sports, tennis, riding, hunting, you know.”
    “Yep,” he said.
    Near the door, a few feet from the spot where the body had fallen, hung Stuart Jacoby’s portrait of Laura. Jacoby, one of the imitators of Eugene Speicher, had produced a flattened version of a face that was anything but flat. The best feature of the painting, as they had been her best feature, were the eyes. The oblique tendency, emphasized by the sharp tilt of dark brows, gave her face that shy, fawn-like quality which had so enchanted me the day I opened the door to a slender child who had asked me to endorse a fountain pen. Jacoby had caught the fluid sense of restlessness in the position of her body, perched on the arm of a chair, a pair of yellow gloves in one hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other. The portrait was a trifle unreal, however, a trifle studied, too much Jacoby and not enough Laura.
    “She wasn’t a bad-looking da—” He hesitated, smiled ruefully, “—girl, was she, Mr. Lydecker?”
    “That’s a sentimental portrait. Jacoby was in love with her at the time.”
    “She had a lot of men in love with her, didn’t she?”
    “She was a very kind woman. Kind and generous.”
    “That’s not what men fall for.”
    “She had delicacy. If she was aware of a man’s shortcomings, she never showed it.”
    “Full of bull?”
    “No, extremely honest. Her flattery was never shallow. She found the real qualities and made them important. Surface faults and affections fell away like false friends at the approach of adversity.”
    He studied the portrait. “Why didn’t she get married, then? Earlier, I mean?”
    “She was disappointed when she was very young.”
    “Most people are disappointed when they’re young. That doesn’t keep them from finding someone else. Particularly women.”
    “She wasn’t like your erstwhile fiancé, McPherson. Laura had no need for a parlor suite. Marriage wasn’t her career. She had her career, she made plenty of money, and there were always men to squire and admire her. Marriage could give her only one sort of completion, and she was keeping herself for that.”
    “Keeping herself busy,” he added dryly.
    “Would you have prescribed a nunnery for a woman of her temperament? She had a man’s job and a man’s worries. Knitting wasn’t one of her talents. Who are you to judge her?”
    “Keep your shirt on,” Mark said. “I didn’t make any comments.”
    I had gone to the bookshelves and removed the volume to which he had given such careful scrutiny. He gave no sign that he had noticed, but fixed his fury upon an enlarged snapshot of Shelby looking uncommonly handsome in tennis flannels.
    Dusk had descended. I switched on the lamp. In that swift transition from dusk to illumination, I caught a glimpse of darker, more impenetrable mystery. Here was no simple Police Department investigation. In such inconsistent trifles as an ancient baseball, a worn Gulliver , a treasured snapshot, he sought clues, not to the passing riddle of a murder, but to the eternally enigmatic nature of woman. This was a search no man could make with his eyes alone; the heart must also be engaged. He, stern fellow, would have been the first to deny such implications, but I, through these prognostic lenses, perceived the true cause of his resentment against Shelby. His private enigma,