Laura. Vera Caspary

      Chapter 1

      The city that Sunday morning was quiet. Those millions of New Yorkers who, by need or preference, remain in town over a summer weekend had been crushed spiritless by humidity. Over the island hung a fog that smelled and felt like water in which too many sodawater glasses have been washed. Sitting at my desk, pen in hand, I treasured the sense that, among those millions, only I, Waldo Lydecker, was up and doing. The day just past, devoted to shock and misery, had stripped me of sorrow. Now I had gathered strength for the writing of Laura’s epitaph. My grief at her sudden and violent death found consolation in the thought that my friend, had she lived to a ripe old age, would have passed into oblivion, whereas the violence of her passing and the genius of her admirer gave her a fair chance at immortality.

      My doorbell rang. Its electric vibrations had barely ceased when Roberto, my Filipino manservant, came to tell me that Mr. McPherson had asked to see me.

      “Mark McPherson!” I exclaimed, and then, assuming the air of one who might meet Mussolini without trepidation, I bade Roberto ask Mr. McPherson to wait. Muhammad had not rushed out to meet the mountain.

      This visit of a not unimportant member of the Police Department—although I am still uncertain of his title or office—conferred a certain honor. Lesser folk are unceremoniously questioned at Headquarters. But what had young McPherson to do with the murder? His triumphs were concerned with political rather than civil crime. In the case of The People of New York v. Associated Dairymen his findings had been responsible—or so the editorial writers said—for bringing down the price of milk a penny a quart. A senatorial committee had borrowed him for an investigation of labor rackets, and only recently his name had been offered by a group of progressives as a leader of a national inquiry into defense profits.

      Screened by the half-open door of my study, I watched him move restlessly about my drawing room. He was the sort of man, I saw at once, who affects to scorn affectation; a veritable Cassius who emphasized the lean and hungry look by clothing himself darkly in blue, double-breasted, worsted, unadorned white shirt and dull tie. His hands were long and tense, his face slender, his eyes watchful, his nose a direct inheritance from those dour ancestors who had sniffed sin with such constancy that their very nostrils had become aggressive. He carried his shoulders high and walked with a taut erectness as if he were careful of being watched. My drawing room irritated him; to a man of his fiercely virile temperament, the delicate perfection must be cloying. It was audacious, I admit, to expect appreciation. Was it not slightly optimistic of me to imagine that good taste was responsible for the concentration with which he studied my not unworthy collection of British and American glassware?

      I noted that his scowl was fixed upon a shining object, one of my peculiar treasures. Habit, then, had made him alert to detail. On the mantel of Laura’s living-room he had, no doubt, observed the partner to my globe-and-pedestal vase of mercury glass. He stretched his hand toward the shelf.

      I leaped like a mother leopard.

      “Careful, young man. That stuff’s priceless.”

      He turned so sharply that the small rug slid along the polished floor. As he steadied himself against the cabinet, porcelain and glass danced upon the shelves.

      “A bull in the china shop,” I remarked. The pun restored my humor. I extended my hand.

      He smiled mechanically. “I’m here to talk about the Laura Hunt case, Mr. Lydecker.”

      “Naturally. Have a seat.”

      He settled his long frame carefully upon a frail chair. I offered cigarettes from a Haviland casket, but he pulled out a pipe.

      “You’re supposed to be quite an authority on crime, yourself, Mr. Lydecker. What do you think about this business?”

      I warmed. No writer, however popular, disdains a reader, however humble. “I am honored to know that you read And More Anon.”

      “Only when my paper happens to open the page.”

      The affront was not displeasing. In the world I frequent, where personality is generously exposed and friendship offered without reticence, his aloofness struck an uncommon note. I offered my charm. “You may not be a Lydecker fan, Mr. McPherson, but I confess that I’ve followed your career with breathless excitement.”

      “You ought to know enough not to believe everything you read in the papers,” he said dryly.

      I was not to be discouraged. “Isn’t criminal investigation a bit out of your line? A trifle unimportant for a man of your achievements?”

      “I’ve been assigned to the case.”

      “Office politics?”

      Except for the purp-purp of his pipe, the room was silent.

      “The month is August,” I mused. “The Commissioner is off on his holiday, the Deputy Commissioner has always been resentful of your success, and since retail murder is somewhat out of fashion these days and usually, after the first sensation, relegated to page two or worse, he has found a convenient way of diminishing your importance.”

      “The plain truth, if you want to know it”—he was obviously annoyed with himself for bothering to give an excuse—“is that he knew I wanted to see the Dodgers play Boston yesterday afternoon.”

      I was enchanted. “From trifling enmities do great adventures grow.”

      “Great adventures! A two-timing dame gets murdered in her flat. So what? A man did it. Find the man. Believe me, Mr. Lydecker, I’m seeing the game this afternoon. The killer himself couldn’t stop me.”

      Pained by his vulgar estimate of my beloved Laura, I spoke mockingly. “Baseball, eh? No wonder your profession has fallen upon evil days. The Great Detectives neither rested nor relaxed until they had relentlessly tracked down their quarry.”

      “I’m a workingman, I’ve got hours like everyone else. And if you expect me to work overtime on this third-class mystery, you’re thinking of a couple of other fellows.”

      “Crime doesn’t stop because it’s Sunday.”

      “From what I’ve seen of your late girlfriend, Mr. Lydecker, I’d bet my bottom dollar that whoever did that job takes his Sunday off like the rest of us. Probably sleeping until noon and waking himself up with three brandies. Besides, I’ve got a couple of men working on detail.”

      “To a man of your achievement, Mr. McPherson, the investigation of a simple murder is probably as interesting as a column of figures to a public accountant