was her first job and it represented the apex of her ambitions at the time. She had visited sixty-eight advertising agencies before she got the job. Buried beneath the air of timidity was a magnificent will. Laura knew she was clever, and she was willing to suffer endless rebuffs in order to prove her talents. When she had finished, I said, ‘I suppose you think I’m moved by your story and that I’m supposed to break down and give you that endorsement.’”
“Did you?” Mark inquired.
“McPherson, I am the most mercenary man in America. I never take any action without computing the profit.”
“You gave her the endorsement.”
I bowed my head in shame. “For seven years Waldo Lydecker has enthusiastically acclaimed the Byron Pen. Without it, I am sure that my collected essays would never sell one hundred thousand copies.”
“She must have been a terrific kid,” he remarked.
“Only mildly terrific at that period. I recognized her possibilities, however. The next week I entertained her at dinner. That was the beginning. Under my tutelage she developed from a gauche child to a gracious New Yorker. After a year no one would have suspected that she came from Colorado Springs. And she remained loyal and appreciative, McPherson. Of all my friends she is the only one with whom I was willing to share my prestige. She became as well known at opening nights as Waldo Lydecker’s graying Van Dyke or his gold-banded stick.”
My guest offered no comment. The saturnine mood had returned. Scotch piety and Brooklyn poverty had developed his resistance to chic women. “Was she ever in love with you?”
I recoiled. My answer came in a thick voice. “Laura was always fond of me. She rejected suitor after suitor during those eight years of loyalty.”
The contradiction was named Shelby Carpenter. But explanation would come later. Mark knew the value of silence in dealing with such a voluble creature as myself.
“My love for Laura,” I explained, “was not merely the desire of a mature man for a pretty young thing. There was a deeper basis for affection. Laura had made me a generous man. It’s quite fallacious to believe that we grow fond of those whom we’ve hurt. Remorse cannot compensate. It’s more human to shun those whose presence reminds us of a shoddy past. Generosity, not evil, flourishes like the green bay tree. Laura considered me the kindest man in the universe, hence I had to grow to that stature. For her I was always Jovian, in humanity as well as intelligence.”
I suspected doubt behind his swift glance of appraisal. He rose. “It’s getting late. I’ve got a date with Carpenter.”
“Behold, the bridegroom waits!” As we walked to the door, I added, “I wonder how you’re going to like Shelby.”
“It’s not my business to like or dislike anyone. I’m only interested in her friends . . .”
“As suspects?” I teased.
“For more information. I shall probably call on you again, Mr. Lydecker.”
“Whenever you like. I do indeed hope to aid, if I can, in the apprehension of the vile being—we can’t call him human, can we?—who could have performed such a villainous and uselessly tragic deed. But in the meantime I shall be curious to know your opinion of Shelby.”
“You don’t think much of him yourself, do you?”
“Shelby was Laura’s other life.” I stood with my hand on the doorknob. “To my prejudiced way of thinking, the more commonplace and less distinguished side of her existence. But judge for yourself, young man.”
We shook hands.
“To solve the puzzle of her death, you must first resolve the mystery of Laura’s life. This is no simple task. She had no secret fortune, no hidden rubies. But, I warn you, McPherson, the activities of crooks and racketeers will seem simple in comparison with the motives of a modern woman.”
He showed impatience.
“A complicated, cultivated modern woman. ‘Concealment, like a worm i’ the bud, fed on her damask cheek.’ I shall be at your command whenever you call, McPherson. Au revoir.”
I stood at the door until he had got into the elevator.
Chapter 2
While a not inconsiderable share of my work has been devoted to the study of murder, I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story. At the risk of seeming somewhat less modest, I shall quote from my own works. The sentence, so often reprinted, that opens my essay “Of Sound and Fury,” is pertinent here:
“When, during the 1936 campaign, I learned that the President was a devotee of mystery stories, I voted a straight Republican ticket.”
My prejudices have not been shed. I still consider the conventional mystery story an excess of sound and fury, signifying, far worse than nothing, a barbaric need for violence and revenge in that timid horde known as the reading public. The literature of murder investigation bores me as profoundly as its practice irritated Mark McPherson. Yet I am bound to tell this story, just as he was obliged to continue his searches, out of a deep emotional involvement in the case of Laura Hunt. I offer the narrative, not so much as a detective yarn as a love story.
I wish I were its hero. I fancy myself a pensive figure drawn, without conscious will, into a love that was born of violence and destined for tragedy. I am given to thinking of myself in the third person. Many a time, when I have suffered some clumsy misadventure, I am saved from remorse by the substitution for unsavory memory of another captivating installment in The Life and Times of Waldo Lydecker. Rare are the nights when I fail to lull myself to sleep without the sedative of some such heroic statement as “Waldo Lydecker stood, untroubled, at the edge of a cliff beneath which ten thousand angry lions roared.”
I make this confession at the risk of exhibiting absurdity. My proportions are, if anything, too heroic. While I measure three inches above six feet, the magnificence of my skeleton is hidden by the weight of my flesh. My dreams dwindle in contrast. Yet I dare say that if the dreams of any so-called normal man were exposed, like Dali drawings, to vulgar eyes of the masses, there would be no more gravity and dignity left for mankind. At certain times in history, flesh was considered a sign of good disposition, but we live in a tiresome era wherein exercise is held sacred and heroes are always slender. I always give it up when I reflect that no philosophy or fantasy dare enter a mind as usurious as Shylock’s over each pound of flesh. So I have learned, at the age of fifty-two, to accept this burden with the same philosophical calm with which I endure such indecencies as hot weather and war news.
But it will not be possible to write of myself heroically in those chapters wherein Mark McPherson moves the story. I have long learned to uphold my ego in a world that also contains Shelby Carpenter, but the young detective is a more potent man. There is no wax in Mark; he is hard coin metal who impresses his own definite stamp upon those who seek to mould him.
He is definite but not simple. His complexities trouble him. Contemptuous of luxury, he is also charmed by it. He resents my collection of glass and porcelain, my Biedermeier and my library, but envies the culture which has developed appreciation of surface lusters. His remarking upon my preference for men who are less than hundred percent exposed his own sensitivity. Reared in a world that honors only hundred percents, he has learned in maturity what I knew as a miserable, obese adolescent, that the lame, the halt, and the blind have more malice in their
