scowled. “Observant, aren’t you?”
“You walk carefully, McPherson. Most members of your profession tread like elephants. But since you’re sensitive, let me assure you that it’s not conspicuous. Extreme astigmatism gives me greater power in the observation of other people’s handicaps.”
“It’s no handicap,” he retorted.
“Souvenir of service?” I inquired.
He nodded. “Babylon.”
I bounced out of my chair. “The Siege of Babylon, Long Island! Have you read my piece? Wait a minute . . . don’t tell me you’re the one with the silver fibula.”
“Tibia.”
“How magnificently exciting! Mattie Grayson! There was a man. Killers aren’t what they used to be.”
“That’s okay with me.”
“How many detectives did he get?”
“Three of us with the machine-gun at his mother-in-law’s house. Then a couple of us went after him down the alley. Three died and another guy—he got it in the lungs—is still up in Saranac.”
“Honorable wounds. You shouldn’t be sensitive. How brave it was of you to go back!”
“I was lucky to get back. There was a time, Mr. Lydecker, when I saw a great future as a night watchman. Bravery’s got nothing to do with it. A job’s a job. Hell, I’m as gunshy as a traveling salesman that’s known too many farmers’ daughters.”
I laughed aloud. “For a few minutes there, McPherson, I was afraid you had all the Scotch virtues except humor and a taste for good whiskey. How about the whiskey, man?”
“Don’t care if I do.”
I poured him a stiff one. He took it like the pure waters of Loch Lomond and returned the empty glass for another.
“I hope you don’t mind the crack I made about your column, Mr. Lydecker. To tell the truth, I do read it once in a while.”
“Why don’t you like it?”
Without hesitancy he answered, “You’re smooth all right, but you’ve got nothing to say.”
“McPherson, you’re a snob. And what’s worse, a Scotch snob, than which—as no less an authority than Thackeray has remarked—the world contains no more offensive creature.”
He poured his own whiskey this time.
“What is your idea of good literature, Mr. McPherson?”
When he laughed he looked like a Scotch boy who has just learned to accept pleasure without fear of sin. “Yesterday morning, after the body was discovered and we learned that Laura Hunt had stood you up for dinner on Friday night, Sergeant Schultz was sent up here to question you. So he asks you what you did all evening . . .”
“And I told him,” I interrupted, “that I had eaten a lonely dinner, reviling the woman for her desertion, and read Gibbon in a tepid tub.”
“Yeh, and you know what Schultz says? He says this writer guy, Gibbon, must be pretty hot for you to have read him in a cold bath.” After a brief pause, he continued, “I’ve read Gibbon myself, the whole set, and Prescott and Motley and Josephus’ History of the Jews.” There was exuberance in the ’fession.
“At college or pour le sport?” I asked.
“When does a dick get a chance to go to college? But being laid up in the hospital fourteen months, what can you do but read books?”
“That, I take it, is when you became interested in the social backgrounds of crime.”
“Up to the time I was a cluck,” he confessed modestly.
“Mattie Grayson’s machine-gun wasn’t such a tragedy, then. You’d probably still be a cluck on the Homicide Squad.”
“You like a man better if he’s not hundred percent, don’t you, Mr. Lydecker?”
“I’ve always doubted the sensibilities of Apollo Belvedere.”
Roberto announced breakfast. With his natural good manners, he had set a second place at the table. Mark protested at my invitation since he had come here, not as a guest, but in pursuit of duty which must be as onerous to me as to himself.
I laughed away his embarrassment. “This is in the line of duty. We haven’t even started talking about the murder and I don’t propose to starve while we do.”
Twenty-four hours earlier a cynical but not unkindly police officer had come into my dining room with the news that Laura’s body had been discovered in her apartment. No morsel of food had passed my lips since that moment when Sergeant Schultz had interrupted a peaceful breakfast with the news that Laura Hunt, after failing to keep her dinner engagement with me, had been shot and killed. Now, in the attempt to restore my failing appetite, Roberto had stewed kidneys and mushrooms in claret. While we ate, Mark described the scene at the morgue where Laura’s body had been identified by Bessie, her maid, and her aunt, Susan Treadwell.
In spite of deep suffering, I could not but enjoy the contrast between the young man’s appreciation of the meal and the morbid quality of his talk. “When they were shown the body”—he paused to lift a morsel on his fork—“both women collapsed. It was hard to take even if you didn’t know her. A lot of blood”—he soaked a bit of toast in the sauce. “With BB shot . . . You can imagine . . .”
I closed my eyes as if she lay there on the Aubusson rug, as Bessie had discovered her, naked except for a blue silk taffeta robe and a pair of silver slippers.
“Fired at close range”—he spooned relish on his plate. “Mrs. Treadwell passed out, but the servant took it like a veteran. She’s a queer duck, that Bessie.”
“She’s been more than maid to Laura. Guide, philosopher, and worst enemy of all of Laura’s best friends. Cooks like an angel, but serves bitter herbs with the choicest roasts. No man that entered the apartment was, in Bessie’s opinion, good enough for Laura.”
“She was cool as a cucumber when the boys got there. Opened the door and pointed to the body so calmly you’d have thought it was an everyday thing for her to find her boss murdered.”
“That’s Bessie,” I commented. “But wait till you get her roused.”
Roberto brought in the coffee. Eighteen stories below a motorist blew his siren. Through open windows we heard the rhythms of a Sunday morning radio concert.
“No! No! No!” I cried as Roberto handed Mark my Napoleon cup. I reached across the table and took it myself, leaving the Empress Josephine for my guest.
He drank his coffee in silent disapproval, watching as I unscrewed the carnelian cap of the silver box in which I keep my saccharine tablets. Although I spread butter lavishly on my brioches, I cling religiously to the belief that the substitution of saccharine for sugar in coffee will make me slender and fascinating. His scorn robbed my attitudes of character.
“I must say you go about your work in a leisurely way,” I remarked petulantly. “Why don’t you go out and take some fingerprints?”
“There are times in the investigation of a crime when it’s more important to look at faces.”
I turned to the mirror. “How singularly innocent I seem this morning! Tell me, McPherson, have you ever seen such candid eyes?” I took off my glasses and presented my face, round and pink as a cherub’s. “But speaking of faces, McPherson, have you met the bridegroom?”
“Shelby Carpenter. I’m seeing him at twelve. He’s staying with Mrs. Treadwell.”
I seized the fact avidly. “Shelby staying there! Wouldn’t he just?”
“He finds the Hotel Framingham too public. Crowds wait in the lobby to see the fellow who was going to marry a