Read Laura (Femmes Fatales) for Free Online Page B

so much deeper than the professional solution of the crime, concerned the answer to a question which has ever baffled the lover, “What did she see in that other fellow?” As he glowered at the snapshot I knew that he was pondering on the quality of Laura’s affection for Shelby, wondering whether a woman of her sensitivity and intelligence could be satisfied merely with the perfect mould of a man.
    “Too late, my friend,” I said jocosely. “The final suitor has rung her doorbell.”
    With a gesture whose fierceness betrayed the zeal with which his heart was guarded, he snatched up some odds and ends piled on Laura’s desk, her address and engagement book, letters and bills bound by a rubber band, unopened bank statements, checkbooks, and old diary, and a photograph album.
    “Come on,” he snapped. “I’m hungry. Let’s get out of this dump.”

Chapter 5
    We’ve discovered certain clues, but we are not ready to make a statement.”
    The reporters found McPherson dignified, formal, and somewhat aloof that Monday morning. He felt a new importance in himself as if his life had taken on new meaning. The pursuit of individual crime had ceased to be trivial. A girl reporter, using female tricks to win information denied her trousered competitors, exclaimed, “I shouldn’t mind being murdered half so much, Mr. McPherson, if you were the detective seeking clues to my private life.”
    His mouth twisted. The flattery was not delicate.
    Her address and engagement books, bank statements, bills, check stubs, and correspondence filled his desk and his mind. Through them he had discovered the richness of her life, but also the profligacy. Too many guests and too many dinners, too many letters assuring her of undying devotion, too much of herself spent on the casual and petty, the transitory, the undeserving. Thus his Presbyterian virtue rejected the danger of covetousness. He had discovered the best of life in a gray-walled hospital room and had spent the years that followed asking himself timorously whether loneliness must be the inevitable companion of appreciation. This summing-up of Laura’s life answered his question, but the answer failed to satisfy the demands of his stern upbringing. He learned as he read her letters, balanced her unbalanced accounts, added the sums of unpaid bills, that while the connoisseur of living is not lonely, the price is high. To support the richness of life she had worked until she was too tired to approach her wedding day with joy or freedom.
    The snapshot album was filled with portraits of Shelby Carpenter. In a single summer, Laura had fallen victim to his charms and the candid camera. She had caught him full face and profile, closeup and bust, on the tennis court, and the wheel of her roadster, in swimming trunks, in overalls, in hip boots with a basket slung over his shoulder, a fishing reel in his hand. Mark paused at the portrait of Shelby, the hunter, surrounded by dead ducks.
    Surely the reader must, by this time, be questioning the impertinence of a reporter who records unseen actions as nonchalantly as if he had been hiding in Mark’s office behind a framed photograph of the New York Police Department Baseball Team, 1912. But I would take oath, and in that very room where they keep the sphygmomanometer, that a good third of this was told me and a richer two-thirds intimated on that very Monday afternoon when, returning from a short journey to the barber’s, I found Mark waiting in my apartment. And I would further swear, although I am sure the sensitive hand of the lie-detector would record an Alpine sweep at the statement, that he had yielded to the charm of old porcelain. For the second time I discovered him in my drawing room, his hands stretched toward my favorite shelf. I cleared my throat before entering. He turned with a rueful smile.
    “Don’t look so sheepish,” I admonished. “I’ll never tell them at the Police Department that you’re acquiring taste.”
    His