Laura. Vera Caspary
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 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, 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