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

wanted you to help me identify some of the people whose names are in her address book.”
    “Do you think the murderer will be there?”
    “It’s possible.”
    “How’d we know him? Do you think he might swoon at the bier?”
    “Will you come?”
    “No,” I said firmly, and added, “Let Shelby help you this time.”
    “He’s a chief mourner. You must come. No one will see you. Use the side entrance and tell them you’re meeting me. I’ll be on the balcony.”
    Her friends had loved Laura and been desolate at her passing, but they had failed to enjoy the excitement. Like Mark, they hoped for some crisis of discovery. Eyes that should have been downcast in grief and piety were sliding this way and that in the hope of perceiving the flushed countenance, the guilty gesture that would enable lips, later, to boast, “I knew it the moment I saw that sly face and noted the way he rubbed his hands together during the Twenty-Third Psalm.”
    She lay in a coffin covered in white silk. Pale ringless hands had been folded against the lavender-tinted white moiré of her favorite evening gown. An arrangement of gardenias, draped like a confirmation veil, covered the ruined face. The only mourners deserving seats in the section reserved for deepest suffering were Auntie Sue and Shelby Carpenter. Her sister, brother-in-law, and some far-western cousins had been unwilling or unable to make the long journey for the sake of this hour in the mortuary. After the service was read, the organ pealed and Heatherstone attendants wheeled the casket into a private chamber from which it was later transferred to the crematorium.
    It is from the lush sentimentality of the newspaper versions that I prune this brief account of obsequies. I did not attend. Mark waited in vain.
    As he descended from the balcony and joined the slowly moving mass, he noted a hand, gloved in black, signalling him. Bessie Clary pushed her way through the crowd.
    “I got something to tell you, Mr. McPherson.”
    He took her arm. “Shall we go upstairs where it’s quiet or does this place depress you?”
    “If you wouldn’t mind, we could go up to the flat,” Bessie suggested. “It’s up there, what I got to show you.”
    Mark had his car. Bessie sat beside him primly, black gloved hands folded in the lap of her black silk dress.
    “It’s hot enough to kill a cat,” she said by way of making conversation.
    “What have you got to tell me?”
    “You needn’t to yell at me. I ain’t afraid of cops, or dicks either.” She drew out her best handkerchief and blew such a clarion note that her nose seemed an instrument fashioned for the purpose of sounding defiance. “I was brought up to spit whenever I saw one.”
    “I was brought up to hate the Irish,” Mark observed, “but I’m a grown man now. I haven’t asked for love, Miss Clary. What is it you want to tell me?”
    “You won’t get on my good side by that Miss Clary stuff either. Bessie’s my name, I’m domestic and I got nothing to be ashamed of.”
    They drove across the Park in silence. When they passed the policeman who stood guard at the door of Laura’s house, Bessie smiled down upon him with virtuous hauteur. Once in the apartment, she assumed the airs of ownership, raised windows, adjusted curtains, emptied trays filled with ashes from Mark’s pipe.
    “Cops, brought up in barns,” she sniffed as she drew hatpins from out of the structure that rode high on her head. “Don’t know how to act when they get in a decent house.” When she had drawn off black gloves, folded them and stored them in her bag, settled herself on the straightest chair, and fixed a glassy stare upon his face, she asked, “What do they do to people that hide something from the cops?”
    The question, so humble in contrast with her belligerence, provided him with a weapon. “So you’ve been trying to shield the murderer? That’s dangerous, Bessie!”
    Her knotted hands unfolded. “What makes you think that I