You Live Once (10 page)

She undid her belt and I pulled it back through the loops and threaded it through the one she had missed. Then I had reached my arms around her and I had just started fumbling with the belt buckle when Yeagger walked into the bam. He’d stopped quickly. Mary had said hello to him, moved out of my arms and buckled her own belt. Even at the time I realized that it must have looked damn funny to Yeagger, because he had no way of knowing how we had gotten into that situation—my arms around her, a pile of straw handy, and her belt undone. I realized now that it must have driven him crazy, finding us like that. Apparently she had stopped seeing him, and he was jealous.

It wasn’t too hard to imagine him driving down into the city on Saturday night and hunting for her. He could very easily have spotted her car at the club. He looked like a man with a lot of patience. He could have followed us. It could have been Nels Yeagger who put the car lights on us. He was born and raised in the woods; it would have been no trouble for him to park up the street and come back silently through the grass. Maybe just in time to hear me give her the key. The rest would not have been hard to arrange, and he had provocation.

It made me feel better about my part of it. I hadn’t done anything. The body had been found. If Yeagger had done it, and I was growing more convinced every moment that he had, they would break him down and my part would be forgiven in the triumph of catching him.

After a few more questions which uncovered nothing,
the meeting broke up. Myrna Pryor had already left the room, right after Kruslov gave the account of the phone call. I walked out into the grey afternoon with Nancy and Dodd.

“She was so very much alive,” Dodd murmured.

“And now she is so very much dead,” Nancy said too sharply. I looked at her. I did not like the look in her eyes. She was not a nice woman at that moment.

They drove off. As I stopped on the way toward my car to light a cigarette, Paul France caught up with me. He wore a pale grey felt hat with the brim turned up all the way around. It was pushed back a little. He looked like a mild rabbit.

“You like Yeagger for it,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Her kid brother hired me, Sewell. I sat and watched people. Don’t ever play poker with me. You came into that room and you held a straight open in the middle with all your money on the table. Then the call came. For you it was like a one card draw that filled that belly straight. You lost the lines in your face and your shoulders dropped a good two inches with relief.”

“You have quite an imagination.”

“I have none. I never believe anything I don’t see. That’s maybe why I do good at this business.”

“Maybe I was afraid Kruslov was aiming at me, Mr. France.”

“Was that all?”

“I don’t see how it could be anything else, do you?”

He smiled at me. I did not like his smile. There are certain sharp-toothed tropical fish that wear that same smile all the time. He went back toward the house. He wore a rumpled blue suit that looked too big for him. I watched the way he moved. Bullfighters move that way, and very good dancers, and top ring professionals. I was glad he had broken off the conversation, he made me uncomfortable. I was particularly glad I hadn’t killed her. France had a certain gothic menace about him. And his eyes
were as wise and ancient and knowing as those of a great lizard.

It was ten of six when I turned into the plant road. Just as I made the turn the black sky opened and the rain sluiced down, lifting a six-inch fringe of silver off the asphalt, so heavy that the wipers were useless. As I crept cautiously along I saw Toni MacRae, distorted by the windshield water, galloping along the side of the road toward the bus stop, holding her purse over her head. The rain had caught her midway between the plant and the bus stop shelter.

She ran girl-fashion, knees in, heels kicking out, hips switching. It is awkward, and sometimes ludicrous, often charming. There seems an unpleasant distortion about any girl who runs as a boy runs.

I swung the car door open and yelled at her. She ran for the car, grabbed the door handle, swung herself in and plumped down on the seat, slamming the car door in the same motion. She was panting and she smelled of damp cloth and damp girl.

“Glub,” she said.

“Bad timing.”

“Another fifty feet and I could have stopped running. It wouldn’t have made any difference then. I thought I could make it to the shelter before it hit. Bad guess. Gosh, I’m soaking.”

The jumper was a darker blue and a closer fit. The white blouse showed pink where rain had pasted it to her arms. Her hair was fairly dry right on top, but the ends were drenched. At the plant I swung around and headed back out toward the road.

“This time I get to take you home,” I said.

“This time,” she agreed. It was a standing argument between us, her not letting me drive her to or from work. She lives in a rooming house at 985 Jefferson. My apartment is at 989, just two doors away. I hadn’t known she was in the neighborhood until I had seen her one Sunday afternoon at the corner store. Then she told me
the story. Her father lives with his second wife on the other side of town. He stayed single for several years after Toni’s mother died, and then married again. The house is small and there was a new crop of children. Toni moved out, with no ill will on either side. It was a question of space, primarily.

“Is there anything new about Mary Olan?” she asked.

“They found her body. She was strangled. They found the body north of here, in the woods.”

“How awful!” Toni said. “How perfectly dreadful! Who did it?”

“They don’t know. They think a handyman named Yeagger did it.” I told her why they thought he might have done it.

She sneezed three times, making of each small paroxysm a delectable thing indeed. I turned on the car heater. She pulled off her sodden shoes and curled nyloned toes in the direct heat.

“Poor Mary Olan,” she said.

“I don’t know, Toni. I really don’t know. She had health and money and position. But she didn’t seem to be having a very good time. She wasn’t enjoying herself. She had a set of demons riding her, making with the spurs and flailing the whips.”

The rain slackened a bit but as I turned into our street it came down again harder than before, making floods in the gutters and a metallic hammering on the car roof over our heads, turning the car into a small isolated world. I parked in her driveway, and when she reached for the door handle I said, “Relax a minute. It’ll ease up. No need to get a worse soaking. I’ve got no place to go.”

We sat there in the rain. Slow traffic crept by, headlights shining. I said, “I’ll start this old phonograph record again. Why can’t I drive you to work and back. You’d save money and you’d get fifteen extra minutes sleep in the morning.”

She smiled at me. “You could almost sell me on that sleep thing. But no, Clint. Thanks, but no.”

It irritated me a little, because of the inference that I made the offer with ulterior motives. “Why not?” I asked, too harshly over the tin drumming of the rain.

“Strange things happen to the local C.P.P. girls who date the fair-haired boys who get shipped in here, Clint. They seem to get fired, and I like my work. Any more questions?” She had matched my harshness with her anger.

“Just a ride to and from work. What’s wrong with that?”

She looked at me speculatively, lips pursed. “Just a ride. That’s it, isn’t it? For now. Be practical, Clint, please. We’re both lonely. I’m aware of that and I guess you are. Just a ride, to work every morning and home every night. And every night I get out neatly and say thanks. Is that what you think? How soon before we’d stop on the way home? Just a cup of coffee, Tina. Sure. Later a steak. Fine. No, Clint. We keep this formal. We work in the same office. That’s all and that’s all there will be, because I like you too much already.”

She had worked her feet into her damp shoes while she spoke. She opened the car door and was gone, running through the rain, up onto the front porch of the old yellow house. She gave a shy wave and went inside.

I forgot everything else she said and remembered only that she had said she liked me too much already. It was the first chink in cool armor. I suspected that she had said it impulsively and would be sorry later. Tina was not one to plot, to connive a chance to say a thing like that.

I went home and thought about her, about long quick legs and the tilt of her smile, about eyes that held gravity and shyness.

My local sonorous evening commentator said in part, at ten o’clock that evening, “Chief of Police Judson Sutton told your reporter earlier this evening that he expects an early solution to the brutal murder of Mary Olan. Rain and darkness prevented as thorough a search of the area where the body was found as was desired. The roped off and guarded area will be searched again in the morning in the hope that some clue can be found that will point to the identity of the murderer.”

I hoped they would not look in any holes in rotten birch trees.

“Earlier today Nels Yeagger, handyman at the Pryor estate at Smith Lake was brought down to the city for questioning. He was picked up by two of the men assigned to Captain Kruslov, who is handling the case personally. At the time of this broadcast Yeagger has not yet been released, and it is assumed that he is still being interrogated.

“The coroner’s office, after an examination of the body, has established the time of death as some time between two
A.M.
and five
A.M.
Sunday morning. Death was caused by a thin band of fabric that was tightened around the throat. There is no indication that the fabric was knotted. Coroner Walther stated that the object used could have been a belt used as a slip noose. The actual throat injury was slight, and it is believed that strangulation took place slowly. The absence of any marks of conflict on the body seem to indicate that the girl was
unconscious at the time she was killed. She had not been criminally attacked. The body was taken to the place where it was found in a car, and the tire marks were carefully obliterated where the car passed over soft bare ground. An extremely valuable wristwatch had not been removed from the body, and police have eliminated robbery as a motive, despite the fact that the dead girl’s purse has not yet been found. At the dinner party before her death she was carrying a small black envelope purse with a gold clasp. She …”

My phone rang and I turned the radio down. It was Hilver. “Mr. Sewell, the captain wants you should come down and leave off fingerprints. I was supposed to tell you today out at Pryor’s but he sent me off and I forgot about it.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

There isn’t any answer to that. I agreed, put my tie and jacket back on and went on down to police headquarters. It is a grimy old red stone building, full of the varied stinks of a hundred years of crime and punishment. A sergeant behind a wicket told me where to go. A bored man wrote down my name, age, height, weight, marital status, employment, and place of birth. He rolled my fingers on an ink pad and then on a printed card. When he was through he gave me one paper towel and sent me over to a chipped sink in the corner of the room.

“Can I go now?”

“Sit down over there,” he said. I sat. He left the room. I sat and sat. There was an electric clock on the wall. Every two minutes it clacked loudly, jumped forward two minutes and caught up with Time. A garage girl on a wall calendar had snared her skimpy skirt crawling through a barbed wire fence. Some jokester had given her a complete set of hirsute adornment. I kept yawning so hard I shuddered. I got sick of looking at the wooden floor, one high table, one low table, four chairs, the tan
institutional plaster wall. Sometimes people would walk down the hall, by the open door. That, at least, was mildly entertaining. A sniffling girl went by once, a short fat matron prodding her in the back with a bitter knuckle. Another time a man started whooping and yelling and roaring. He stopped in the middle of a roar, stopped very, very abruptly. A young cop went by trying to sing.

At eleven-thirty Kruslov came in. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie untied, the two ends hanging down in discouraged fashion. He stared at me, obviously puzzled. He turned on his heel and left. I called after him but he didn’t answer.

Ten minutes later he came back with a sheet of paper in his hand, studying it. He sat on the low table. “Sewell. Let’s see what we got. Clear print of first and second finger of left hand on rear of side mirror, smudged print of left thumb on face of mirror. Section of print of right thumb, clear, on horn ring.” He put the paper aside and stared at me.

“I told you I drove the car,” I said angrily. “I adjusted the side mirror. I guess I blew the horn once. Now you’ve proved I’ve driven the car.”

He yawned and stuck a fist against his mouth. “Relax. Relax. You shouldn’t have been told to stay around.”

“Can I go now?”

“Gus says you’re a working fool. He says you spend more time on his back than off it.”

“Gus and I get along.”

“He said that too. He hasn’t missed a day, except vacations, since they opened that plant. Twenty years around machines, the last six at that place.”

“He’s a good man.”

He yawned again. “I should have gone into that racket. I figured this would give me retirement. Now Gus gets retirement too, maybe better than I do. What’s there left to make a man go on the cops?”

“Has Yeagger confessed?”

“No. We’re letting him go. It took a long time to
check, but it checked out finally. We had to contact half the people in the hills. He quit work Saturday at six. He spent from eight to midnight in a beer joint. Then he and another guy picked up two girls who came into the beer joint. They had a car and a bottle. They went to a hunting camp up near Grey Lake and stayed right there until noon Sunday. This Yeagger had tied on such a load he was pretty shaggy about the details. But we got it all checked out. He wouldn’t say anything for a while, until we convinced him he was in bad trouble. He didn’t want to talk because there is going to be some trouble with the husband of one of the two girls they picked up. You know something funny? He says this and I believe him. It’s the first time in his whole life he ever did anything like that. How about that?”