style="font-size:15px;"> The scene took on a theatric quality. Mark saw Shelby through the woman’s eyes, clothed in the charm he had donned, like a bright domino, for the woman’s pleasure. The ripe color, the chiseled features, the clear, long-lashed eyes had been created, his manner said, for her particular enjoyment. Through it all Mark felt that this was not a new exhibition. He had seen it somewhere before. So irritated by faltering memory that he had to strain harshness from his voice, he told them he was through with them for the day, and rose to go.
Shelby rose, too. “I’ll go out for a bit of air. If you think you can get along without me for a while.”
“Of course, darling. It’s been wicked of me to take up so much of your time.” Shelby’s feeble sarcasm had softened the lady. White, faded, ruby-tipped hands rested on his dark sleeve. “I’ll never forget how kind you’ve been.”
Shelby forgave magnanimously. He put himself at her disposal as if he were already Laura’s husband, the man of the family whose duty it was to serve a sorrowing woman in this hour of grief.
Like a penitent mistress returning to her lover, she cooed at Shelby. “With all your faults, you’ve got manners, darling. That’s more than most men have nowadays. I’m sorry I’ve been so bad-tempered.”
He kissed her forehead.
As they left the house, Shelby turned to Mark. “Don’t take Mrs. Treadwell too seriously. Her bark is worse than her bite. It’s only that she’d disapproved of my marrying her niece, and now she’s got to stand by her opinions.”
“What she disapproved of,” Mark observed, “was Laura’s marrying you.”
Shelby smiled ruefully. “We ought all to be a little more decent now, oughtn’t we? After all! Probably Auntie Sue is sorry she hurt poor Laura by constantly criticizing me, and now she’s too proud to say so. That’s why she had to take it out on me this morning.”
They stood in the burning sunlight. Both were anxious to get away, yet both hesitated. The scene was unfinished, Mark had not learned enough, Shelby had not told all he wanted Mark to know.
When, after a brief pause devoted to a final struggle with his limping memory, Mark cleared his throat, Shelby started as if he had been roused from the remoteness of a dream. Both smiled mechanically.
“Tell me,” Mark commanded, “where have I seen you before?”
Shelby couldn’t imagine. “But I’ve been around. Parties and all that. One sees people at bars and restaurants. Sometimes a stranger’s face is more familiar than your best friend’s.”
Mark shook his head. “Cocktail bars aren’t in my line.”
“You’ll remember when you’re thinking of something else. That’s how it always is.” Then, without changing his tone, Shelby added, “You know, Mr. McPherson, that I was beneficiary of Laura’s insurance, don’t you?”
Mark nodded.
“I wanted to tell you myself. Otherwise you might think . . . well . . . it’s only natural in your work to—” Shelby chose the word tactfully “—suspect every motive. Laura carried an annuity, you know, and there was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar death benefit. She’d had it in her sister’s name, but after we decided to get married she insisted upon making it out to me.”
“I’ll remember that you told me,” Mark promised.
Shelby offered his hand. Mark took it. They hesitated while the sun smote their uncovered heads.
“I hope you don’t think I’m completely a heel, Mr. McPherson,” Shelby said ruefully. “I never liked borrowing from a woman.”
Chapter 4
When, at precisely twelve minutes past four by the ormolu clock on my mantel, the telephone interrupted, I was deep in the Sunday papers. Laura had become a Manhattan legend. Scarlet-minded headline artists had named her tragedy The Bachelor Girl Murder and one example of Sunday edition belles-lettres was tantalizingly titled Seek Romeo in East Side Love-Killing. By the necromancy of modern journalism, a gracious young woman had been transformed into a dangerous siren who practiced her wiles in that fascinating neighborhood where Park Avenue meets Bohemia. Her generous way of life had become an uninterrupted orgy of drunkenness, lust, and deceit, as titillating to the masses as it was profitable to the publishers. At this very hour, I reflected as I lumbered to the telephone, men were bandying her name in pool parlors and women shouting her secrets from tenement windows.
I heard Mark McPherson’s voice on the wire. “Mr. Lydecker, I was just wondering if you could help me. There are several questions I’d like to ask you.”
“And what of the baseball game?” I inquired.
Self-conscious laughter vibrated the diaphragm and tickled my ear. “It was too late. I’d have missed the first couple of innings. Can you come over?”
“Where?”
“The apartment. Miss Hunt’s place.”
“I don’t want to come up there. It’s cruel of you to ask me.”
“Sorry,” he said after a moment of cold silence. “Perhaps Shelby Carpenter can help me. I’ll try to get in touch with him.”
“Never mind. I’ll come.”
Ten minutes later I stood beside him in the bay window of Laura’s living room. East Sixty-Second Street had yielded to the spirit of carnival. Popcorn vendors and pushcart peddlers, sensing the profit in disaster, offered ice-cream sandwiches, pickles, and nickel franks to buzzards who battened on excitement. Sunday’s sweethearts had deserted the green pastures of Central Park to stroll arm-in-arm past her house, gaping at daisies which had been watered by the hands of a murder victim. Fathers pushed perambulators and mothers scolded the brats who tortured the cops who guarded the door of a house in which a bachelor girl had been slain.
“Coney Island moved to the Platinum Belt,” I observed.
Mark nodded. “Murder is the city’s best free entertainment. I hope it doesn’t bother you, Mr. Lydecker.”
“Quite the contrary. It’s the odor of tuberoses and the timbre of organ music that depress me. Public festivity gives death a classic importance. No one would have enjoyed the spectacle more than Laura.”
He sighed.
“If she were here now, she’d open the windows, pluck daisies out of her window-boxes and strew the sidewalks. Then she’d send me down the stairs for a penny pickle.”
Mark plucked a daisy and tore off the petals.
“Laura loved dancing in the streets. She gave dollar bills to organ-grinders.”
He shook his head. “You’d never think it, judging from the neighborhood.”
“She also had a taste for privacy.”
The house was one of a row of converted mansions, preserved in such fashion that Victorian architecture sacrificed none of its substantial elegance to twentieth-century chic. High stoops had given way to lacquered doors
