Laura (Femmes Fatales) by Vera Caspary Read Free Book Online Page A

to judge the people encountered in professional adventure.
    “The only thing that worries me, Mr. Lydecker, is that I can’t place the guy. I’ve seen that face before. But where and when? Usually I’m a fool for faces. I can give you names and dates and places I’ve seen them.” His jaw shot forward and his lips pressed themselves into the tight mould of determination.
    I laughed with secret tolerance as he gave me what he considered an objective picture of his visit to the offices of Rose, Rowe and Sanders, Advertising Counsellors. In that hot-air-conditioned atmosphere he must have seemed as alien as a sharecropper in a night club. He tried hard not to show disapproval, but opinion was as natural to him as appetite. There was a fine juicy prejudice in his portrait of three advertising executives pretending to be dismayed by the notoriety of a front-page murder. While they mourned her death, Laura’s bosses were not unaware of the publicity value of a crime which cast no shadow upon their own respectability.
    “I bet they had a conference and decided that a high-class murder wouldn’t lose any business.”
    “And considering the titillating confidences they could whisper to prospective clients at lunch,” I added.
    Mark’s malice was impudent. Bosses aroused no respect in his savage breast. His proletarian prejudices were as rigid as any you will find in the upper reaches of so-called Society. It pleased him more to discover sincere praise and mourning among her fellow workers than to hear her employers’ high estimate of Laura’s character and talents. Anyone who was smart, he opined, could please the boss, but it took the real stuff for a girl in a high-class job to be popular with her fellow employees.
    “So you think Laura had the real stuff?”
    He affected deafness. I studied his face, but caught no shadow of conflict. It was not until several hours later that I reviewed the conversation and reflected upon the fact that he was shaping Laura’s character to fit his attitudes as a young man might when enamored of a living woman. My mind was clear and penetrating at the time, for it was midnight, the hour at which I am most brave and most free. Since I learned some years ago that the terrors of insomnia could be overcome by a half-hour’s brisk walk, I have not once allowed lassitude, weather, nor the sorry events of a disappointing day to interfere with this nocturnal practice. By habit I chose a street which had become important to me since Laura moved into the apartment.
    Naturally I was shocked to see a light burning in the house of the dead, but after a moment’s reflection, I knew that a young man who had once scorned overtime had given his heart to a job.

Chapter 6
    Two rituals on Tuesday marked the passing of Laura Hunt. The first, a command performance in the coroner’s office, gathered together that small and none too congenial group who had been concerned in the activities of her last day of life. Because she had failed me in that final moment, I was honored with an invitation. I shall not attempt to report the unimaginative proceedings which went to hideous lengths to prove a fact that everyone had known from the start—that Laura Hunt was dead; the cause, murder by the hand of an unknown assailant.
    The second ritual, her funeral, took place that afternoon in the chapel of W. W. Heatherstone and Son. Old Heatherstone, long experienced in the internment of movie stars, ward leaders, and successful gangsters, supervised the arrangements so that there might be a semblance of order among the morbid who started their clamor at his doors at eight o’clock in the morning.
    Mark had asked me to meet him on the balcony that overlooked the chapel.
    “But I don’t attend funerals.”
    “She was your friend.”
    “Laura was far too considerate to demand that anyone venture out at such a barbaric hour and to exhibit emotions which, if earnest, are far too personal for scrutiny.”
    “But I