Laura, page 18
I had no time to explain anything. It wasn’t easy to break away, leaving Laura to think that Waldo had been right in accusing me of using her sincerity as a trap. But he was gone and I could take no chance of losing him.
I lost him.
Behrens and Muzzio let him pass. By my own instructions Waldo Lydecker had been allowed to come and go as he chose. The two cops had been lounging on the stoop, bragging about their kids probably, and not paying the slightest attention to his movements. It was my fault, not theirs.
There was no trace of his great bulk, his decorated chin, his thick cane, on Sixty-Second Street. Either he had turned the corner or he was hiding in some dark area way. I sent Behrens toward Third Avenue and Muzzio to Lexington and ordered them to find and trail him. I jumped into my car.
It was just eighteen minutes of ten when I found Claudius putting up his shutters.
‘Claudius,’ I said, ‘tell me something. Are people who collect antiques always screwy?’
He laughed.
‘Claudius, when a man who’s crazy about this old glassware finds a beautiful piece that he can’t own, do you think he’d deliberately smash it so that no other man could ever enjoy it?’
Claudius licked his lips. ‘Guess I know what you’re talking about, Mr. McPherson.’
‘Was it an accident last night?’
‘I couldn’t say yes and I couldn’t say no. Mr. Lydecker was willing to pay and I took the money, but it could’ve been an accident. You see, I hadn’t put any shot in . . .’
‘Shot? What do you mean, shot?’
‘Shot. We use it to weight down stuff when it’s light and breakable.’
‘Not BB shot,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘BB shot.’
I had looked over Waldo’s antiques once while I was waiting for him. There had been no BB shot weighing the old cups and vases down, but he was not such a cluck as to leave unmistakable evidence around for the first detective. I wanted to make a thorough examination this time, but I had no time to get a warrant. I entered the building through the basement and climbed eighteen flights to his apartment. This was to avoid the elevator man, who had begun to welcome me as Mr. Lydecker’s best pal. If Waldo came home, he was not to have any suspicions that would cause him to leave hastily.
I let myself in with a passkey. The place was silent and dark.
There had been a murder. There had to be a gun. It wasn’t a shotgun, whole or sawed-off. Waldo wasn’t the type. If he owned a gun, it would look like another museum piece among the China dogs and shepherdesses and old bottles.
I made a search of cabinets and shelves in the living-room, then went into the bedroom and started on the dresser drawers. Everything he owned was special and rare. His favorite books had been bound in selected leathers, he kept his monogrammed handkerchiefs and shorts and pajamas in silk cases embroidered with his initials. Even his mouthwash and toothpaste had been made up from special prescriptions.
I heard the snap of the light switch in the next room. My hand went automatically to my hip pocket. But I had no gun. As I had once told Waldo, I carry weapons when I go out to look for trouble. I hadn’t figured on violence as part of this evening’s entertainment.
I turned quickly, put myself behind a chair, and saw Roberto in a black silk dressing-gown that looked as if he was paying the rent for this high-class apartment.
Before he had time to ask questions, I said: ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you usually go home nights?’
‘Mr. Lydecker need me tonight,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘He not feel himself.’
‘Oh,’ I said, and took the cue. ‘That’s why I’m here, Roberto. Mr. Lydecker didn’t feel himself at dinner, so he gave me the key and asked me to come up and wait for him.’
Roberto smiled.
‘I was just going to the bathroom,’ I said. That seemed the simplest explanation of my being in the bedroom. I went to the bathroom. When I came out, Roberto was waiting in the parlor. He asked if I’d like a drink or a cup of coffee.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘You run along to bed. I’ll see that Mr. Lydecker’s okay.’ He started to leave, but I called him back. ‘What do you think’s the matter with Mr. Lydecker, Roberto? He seems nervous, doesn’t he?’
Roberto smiled.
I said, ‘It’s this murder; it’s been getting on his nerves, don’t you think?’
His smile got me nervous. Even the Rhode Island clam was a big talker compared with this Filipino oyster.
I said, ‘Did you ever know Quentin Waco?’
That woke him up. There are only a few Filipinos in New York and they stick together like brothers.
All the houseboys used to put their money on Quentin Waco, who was top lightweight until he got mixed up with the girls around the Sixty-Sixth Street dance-halls. He spent more than he made, and when young Kardansky knocked him out, they accused him of pulling the fight. One of Quentin’s pals met him at the door of the Shamrock Ballroom one night and pulled a knife. For the honor of the Islands, he told the judge. A little later it came out that Quentin hadn’t pulled the fight, and the boys made a martyr of him. The religious ones kept candles burning in a church on Ninth Avenue.
I happened to have been the man who got hold of the evidence that cleared Quentin’s name and, without knowing it, restored the honor of the Islands. When I told this to Roberto, he stopped smiling and became human.
We talked about Mr. Lydecker’s health. We talked about the murder and about Laura’s return. Roberto’s point of view was strictly out of the tabloids. Miss Hunt was a nice lady, always friendly to Roberto, but her treatment of Mr. Lydecker showed her to have been no better than a dance-hall hostess. According to Roberto all women were the same. They’d turn down a steady fellow every time for a big sport guy who knew all the latest steps.
I jerked the talk around to the dinner he had cooked on the night of the murder. It wasn’t hard to get him going on that subject. He wanted to give me a mushroom by mushroom description of the menu. Every half-hour during the afternoon, Roberto said, Mr. Lydecker had quit his writing and come into the kitchen to taste, smell, and ask questions.
‘We have champagne; six dollars a bottle,’ Roberto bragged.
‘Oh, boy!’ I said.
Roberto told me there had been more than food and wine prepared for that evening. Waldo had arranged the records on his automatic phonograph so that Laura should enjoy her favorite music with the meal.
‘He certainly prepared. What a disappointment when Miss Hunt changed her mind!’ I said. ‘What did he do, Roberto?’
‘Not eat.’
Waldo told us he had eaten a solitary meal and spent the evening reading Gibbon in the bathtub.
‘He didn’t eat, huh? Wouldn’t go near the table?’
‘He go table,’ Roberto said. ‘He have me bring food, he put on plate, not eat.’
‘I don’t expect he played the phonograph either.’
‘No,’ said Roberto.
‘He hasn’t played it since, I suppose.’
The phonograph was big and expensive. It played ten records, then turned them over and played the other side. I looked at them to see if any of the tunes checked with the music they had talked about. There was none of this Toccata and Fugue stuff, but a lot of old songs from shows. The last was ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’
‘Roberto,’ I said, ‘maybe I’ll have a whiskey anyway.’
I thought of that hot night in Montagnino’s back yard. A storm had been rolling in and the lady at the next table sang with the music. Waldo had talked about hearing that song with Laura as if there had been a lot more to it than just listening to music with a woman.
‘I think I’ll have another, Roberto.’
I needed Scotch less than I needed time to think it out. The pieces were beginning to fit together. The last dinner before her marriage. Champagne and her favorite songs. Memories of shows they had seen together, talk of the past. Old stories retold. And when the meal was over and they were drinking brandy, the last record would fall into place, the needle fit into the groove.
Roberto waited with a glass in his hand. I drank. I was cold and sweating.
Since that Sunday when I’d first walked into his apartment, I’d been reading the complete works of Waldo Lydecker. There is no better key to a man’s character than his use of the written word. Read enough of any man’s writing and you’ll have his Number One Secret. There was a line that I remembered from one of his essays: ‘The high crisis of frustration.’
He had planned so carefully that even the music was timed for it. And that night Laura had failed to show up.
I said: ‘Go to bed, Roberto. I’ll wait up for Mr. Lydecker.’
Roberto disappeared like a shadow.
I was alone in the room. Around me were his things, spindly overdecorated furniture, striped silks, books and music and antiques. There had to be a gun somewhere. When murder and suicide are planned like a seduction, a man must have his weapon handy.
( II )
While I waited in his parlor, Waldo was pounding his stick along the pavements. He dared not look backward. His pursuers might see him turn his head and know that he was frightened.
Muzzio caught sight of him almost a block ahead on Lexington. Waldo gave no sign that he observed Muzzio, but walked on quickly, turning east at Sixty-Fourth. At the end of the block, he saw Behrens, who had turned north on Third Avenue.
Waldo disappeared. The two men searched every areaway and vestibule on the block, but Waldo had evidently used the service tunnel of a big apartment house, gone through the basement to the rear of the building, and found another basement and service entrance on Seventy-Second.
He walked for three hours. He passed a lot of people on their way home from theatres and picture shows and bars. He met them in the light of arc lamps and under the lighted marquees of picture shows. We learned about it later the way we always do when an important case is finished and people phone in to make themselves important. Mary Lou Simmons, fifteen, of East Seventy-Sixth, had been frightened by a man who darted out of the vestibule as she came home from an evening at a girl chum’s house. Gregory Finch and Enid Murphy thought it was Enid’s father leaning over the banister in the dark hall where they were kissing. Mrs. Lea Kantor saw a giant ghost behind her newsstand. Several taxi-drivers had stopped in the hope of picking up a passenger. A couple of drivers had recognized Waldo Lydecker.
He walked until the streets were quiet. There were few taxis and hardly any pedestrians. He chose the darkest streets, hid in doorways, crouched on subway steps. It was almost two o’clock when he came back to Sixty-Second Street.
There was only one lighted window on the block. According to Shelby, that light had been burning on Friday night, too.
Her door was not guarded. Muzzio was still waiting on Sixty-Fourth Street and Behrens had gone off duty; I had given no instructions for a man to replace him, for I had no idea, when I left Laura alone and sent the men to follow him, that he was carrying his weapon.
He climbed the steps and rang her doorbell.
She thought I had come back to arrest her. That seemed more reasonable than a return of the murderer. For a moment she thought of Shelby’s description of Diane’s death. Then she wrapped herself in a white bathrobe and went to the door.
By that time I knew Waldo’s secret. I found no gun in his apartment; he was carrying the gun concealed on his person, loaded with the rest of the BB shot. What I found was a pile of unfinished and unpublished manuscript. I read it because I was planning to wait in the apartment, confront him, make the accusation, and see what happened. I found the following sentence in a piece called ‘The Porches of Thy Father’s Ear.’
In the cultivated individual, malice, a weapon darkly concealed, wears the garments of usefulness, flashes the disguise of wit or flaunts the ornaments of beauty.
The piece was about poisons hidden in antique rings, of swords in sticks, of firearms concealed in old prayerbooks.
It took me about three minutes to realize that he was carrying a muzzle-loader. Last night, when we were leaving the Golden Lizard, I had tried to look at his stick. He had snatched it away with a crack about getting me a rubber-tipped cane. That crack was loaded. Resentment kept me from asking any more questions. Possessions were like people with Waldo. He wanted to protect his precious stick from my profane hands, so he brought out his malice without the garments of wit or beauty. I had thought that he was showing off another of his whims, like drinking his coffee from the Napoleon cup.
Now I knew why he had wanted to keep me from examining his cane. He carried it, he had told me, to give himself importance. There was the man’s hidden power. He probably smiled as he stood before Laura’s door, preparing to use his secret weapon. The second time was like the first. In his failing and disordered mind there was no original crime, no repetition.
When the doorknob turned, he aimed. He knew Laura’s height and the place where her face would appear like an oval in the dark. As the door opened, he fired.
There was a shivering crash. Turning, Laura saw a thousand slivers of light. The shot, missing her by the fraction of an inch, had shattered the glass bowl. Its fragments shone on the dark carpet.
He had missed his aim because, as he fired, his legs were jerked out from under him. I had left his apartment as soon as I realized where the gun was hidden and remembered that I had deliberately put on a scene to stir up his jealousy. He was on the third-floor landing, his finger on the bell, when I opened the door downstairs.
The old-fashioned hall was dimly lighted. On the landings pale bulbs glowed. Waldo was struggling for his life with an enemy whose face he couldn’t see. I am a younger man, in better condition, and know how to handle myself in a fight. But he had the strength of desperation. And a gun in his hand.
When I jerked his legs out from under him, he rolled over on top of me. Laura came out of her door, looked down at us, straining to see our dark struggle on the staircase. We rolled down the steps.
Under the bulb of the second-floor landing I saw his face. He had lost his glasses, but his pale eyes seemed to see into the distance. He said, ‘ While a whole city pursued the killer, Waldo Lydecker, with his usual urbanity, pursued the law.’
He laughed. My spine chilled. I was fighting a madman. His face contorted, his lips writhed, pointed eyeballs seemed to jerk out of their sockets. He wrenched his arm loose, raised the gun, waved it like a baton.
‘Get back! Get out of the way!’ I shouted up at Laura.
His flesh had seemed flabby, but there were over two hundred and fifty pounds of it, and when I jerked his arm back, he rolled over on me. The light flashed in his eyes, he recognized me, sanity returned, and with it, hatred. White streaks of foam soaped his lips. Laura called out, warning me, but his groans were closer to my ears. I managed to shove my knees up under his fat belly and push him back toward the post of the banister. He waved his gun, then shot wild, firing without aim. Laura screamed.
With the firing of that shot, his strength was gone. His eyes froze, his limbs became rigid. But I was taking no chances. I knocked his head against the banister post. On the third-floor landing, Laura heard bone crack against wood.
In the ambulance and at the hospital he kept on talking. Always about himself, always in the third person. Waldo Lydecker was someone far away from the dying fat man on the stretcher, he was like a hero a boy has always worshiped. It was the same thing over and over again, never straight and connected, but telling as much as a sworn confession.
Ever the connoisseur who cunningly mates flavor with occasion, Waldo Lydecker selected the vintage of the year ‘ 14 . . .
As might Cesare Borgia have diverted himself on an afternoon pregnant with the infant of new infamy, so Waldo Lydecker passed the nervous hours in civilised diversion, reading and writing . . .
A man might sit thus, erect as a tombstone, while composing his will; so sat Waldo Lydecker at his rosewood desk writing the essay that was to have been his legacy . . .
The woman had failed him. Secret and alone, Waldo
Lydecker celebrated death”s impotence. Bitter herbs mingled their savor with the mushrooms. The soup was rue-scented . . .
Habit led Waldo Lydecker that night past windows illumined by her treachery . . .
Calm and untroubled, Waldo Lydecker stood, pressing an imperious finger against her doorbell . . .
When he died, the doctor had to unclasp the fingers that gripped Laura’s hand.
‘Poor, poor Waldo,’ she said.
‘He tried to kill you twice,’ I reminded her.
‘He wanted so desperately to believe I loved him.’
I looked at her face. She was honestly mourning the death of an old friend. The malice had died with him and Laura remembered that he had been kind. It is generosity, Waldo said, not evil, that flourishes like the green bay tree.
He is dead now. Let him have the last word. Among the papers on his desk I found the unfinished piece, that final legacy which he had written while the records were waiting on the phonograph, the wine being chilled in the icebox, Roberto cooking the mushrooms.
He had written:
Then, as the final contradiction, there remains the truth that she made a man of him as fully as man could be made of that stubborn clay. And when that frail manhood is threatened, when her own womanliness demands more than he can give, his malice seeks her destruction. But she is carved from Adam s rib, indestructible as legend, and no man will ever aim his malice with sufficient accuracy to destroy her.
THE END
VERA CASPARY has been around. She has slaved in the advertising business, promulgated house-organs and throw-aways, worked in a public dance hall, started a mail-order dancing course, edited Finger Print Magazine and Dance Magazine, interviewed stage celebrities, gone free to nearly every New York night club, written five novels, about twelve original motion picture stories, and about half as many screen plays. Her movie original ‘The Night of June 13,’ was so successful that she resold the story six times. A genius of selling things by mail, she has distributed in the way cold cream, milking machines, dancing, singing, one-pipe furnaces, rat virus, Zane Grey, Sax Rohmer, heredity, and sex. To avoid sports of every kind, she goes in for building and buying houses, doing gardens, and giving parties. A Chicagoan by birth, she has a home in Connecticut, but most of her mail reaches her in Hollywood, where she works half the year in motion pictures.
