Laura (Femmes Fatales) by Vera Caspary

found a woman in his arms in the place of his hoe.
    “Among the Amish, who boasted that they were known as plain , buttons were considered ungodly ornament. To this moment in his life Conrad had seen only girls in faded ginghams hooked tight across their chests and with hair stretched from their temples into wiry pigtails. He wore a blue work shirt fastened severely to the throat and upon his chin a fringe, like monkey fur, of thin whiskers affected by his people as a mark of piety.
    “The injury to the lady’s carriage was repaired sooner than the damage to Conrad’s heart. Never could he close his eyes without beholding a vision of this creature with her powdered skin, her wanton lips, and mischievous eyes, as black as the ebony stick of her lilac-silk parasol. From that day on, Conrad was no longer content with his pigtailed neighbors and his rutabagas. He must find Troy and seek Helen. He sold his farm, walked dusty roads to Philadelphia, and being canny as the pious always are, invested his small capital in a lucrative business whose proprietor was willing to teach him the trade.
    “Without money, without access to the society frequented by the elegant creature, Conrad was actually no closer to her than he had been at Lebanon. Yet his faith never flagged. He believed, as he believed in evil and sin, that he would again hold her in his arms.
    “And the miracle occurred. Before so many years had passed that he was too old to know the joy of fulfillment, he held her close to his breast, his heart pounding with such a savage beat that its vigor gave life to every inanimate thing around him. And once again, as on the hot noon when he first beheld her, the lids lifted like curtains over those dark eyes . . .”
    “How did he make it?” Mark inquired. “How did he get to know her?”
    I waved aside the interruption. “She had never seemed so lovely as now, and though he had heard her name whispered in the city and knew her reputation to be unsavory, he felt that his eyes had never met such purity as he saw in that marble brow, nor such chastity as was encased in those immobile lips. Let us forgive Conrad his confusion. At such moments a man’s mind does not achieve its highest point of logic. Remember, the lady was clothed all in white from the tips of her satin slippers to the crown of blossoms in her dark hair. And the shadows, lilac-tinted, in the shroud . . .”
    At the word Mark recoiled.
    I fixed my eyes upon him innocently. “Shroud. In those days it was still the custom.”
    “Was she,” he asked, biting down slowly as if each word were poisoned fruit, “dead?”
    “Perhaps I neglected to mention that he had become apprenticed to an undertaker. And while the surgeon had declared her dead before Conrad was called to the dwelling, he afterward . . .”
    Mark’s eyes were dark holes burning through the white fabric of a mask. His lips puckered as if the poisoned fruit were bitter.
    “I cannot tell if the story is true,” I said, sensing his unrest and hastening the moral, “but since Conrad came of a people who never encouraged fantasy, one cannot help but pay him the respect of credence. He returned to Lebanon, but the folk around reported that women were forevermore destroyed for him. Had he known and lost a living love, he would never have been so marked as by this short excursion into necrophilia.”
    Thunder rumbled closer. The sky had become sulphurous. As we left the garden, I touched his arm gently.
    “Tell me, McPherson, how much were you prepared to pay for the portrait?”
    He turned on me a look of dark malevolence. “Tell me, Lydecker, did you walk past Laura’s apartment every night before she was killed, or is it a habit you’ve developed since her death?”
    Thunder crashed above us. The storm was coming closer.

PART TWO

Chapter 1
    When Waldo Lydecker learned what happened after our dinner at Montagnino’s on Wednesday night, he could write no more about the Laura Hunt case.