You Live Once (12 page)

“You agreed to that?”

“Wait a minute. I said I would think about it. I said that I didn’t think it was wise to tell lies to the police. I said if I lied and they found out I had lied, it might make him look worse. Well, you know what happened at that meeting. It certainly seemed to me that Nels Yeagger had done it and they’d prove it—I just had that feeling. So when Sergeant Hilver asked me, I told him just what Dodd wanted me to say. Last night that Paul France came by the house. I told the same lie again. You saw the morning paper. They released Nels.”

“Yes?”

She lifted her glass in an uncertain hand. “Clint, I just don’t know what to think any more.”

“Are you trying to say this? Are you trying to say that now you’re wondering if he could have killed her? And you want me to tell you that’s nonsense?”

She looked down and when she looked up again, I heard tears in her voice. One tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped at it quickly with the back of her hand, a child’s appealing gesture. “I just don’t know any more.
I just don’t know. And I don’t know anyone else to talk to.”

“What has started you wondering?”

“He’s been … so very strange. He hasn’t been himself, I guess not since we came here to Warren. Last night he was up most of the night, pacing around. He doesn’t hear me when I speak to him.”

I told her of my conversation with him in the washroom. Perhaps I should have edited it.

“Six or seven times,” she said, a bitter expression on her mouth. “And I know nothing about it. Nothing at all. I suppose these things should have a mathematical value. Six or seven is better than twenty. But one is equal to a hundred, isn’t it?”

“I can’t see him killing her, Nancy. Not Dodd. He’d risk an affair, but not a murder. He’s too cold to risk murder. Too cold and too hard and too ambitious and … perhaps too selfish.”

I had hoped to comfort her. It was the wrong way. Her eyes flashed. “How can you say that? How can you say a thing like that? People have always liked him and always liked working with him. You’re entirely wrong about him. Entirely!”

I thought of Tory’s warning, and Ray’s warning. I could have told her, but I realized that she didn’t have much left. By telling her I would be taking away one more thing, the illusion he had created in her mind. Even though he had hurt her dreadfully with infidelity, she perhaps had a right to be proud of his professional makeup.

“Maybe I’m wrong about that, Nancy.”

“You are, Clint.”

It surprised me a little that Nancy had never been aware of his ruthlessness in business. He had pretended with her, as with everyone else. I wondered if there was anyone he showed his real face to. I wondered if he had been frank with Mary Olan.

She shivered. “It’s awful of me to keep wondering if he
could have done it. If he acted normal, I wouldn’t keep wondering. But he has something on his mind—something so important he seems far away, as if I don’t really know him any more.”

“It may be that he’s just afraid of the police finding out about the affair.”

“I’ve thought of that,” she said eagerly. “Clint, he
couldn’t
kill anybody, could he?”

“I don’t think so.”

She was happier for a moment, and then relapsed again into worry. She laughed, and it was an unhappy sound. “Six months ago,” she said, “I would have sworn that it was impossible that he’d ever … look for someone else. But he did. So what good is confidence?”

“There’s one way you can end the tension, Nancy.”

“How?”

“Tell Kruslov the truth about the night Mary was killed. He’ll find out if Dodd killed her.”

She looked at me blankly for what seemed a long time. She put on her gloves. “Thanks for listening to me, Clint. I thought you’d be able to help me. I’m sorry I was wrong.”

I watched her leave and sat down again. Poor Nancy. Her vast capacity for loyalty was at war with the hurt he had dealt her. She was a woman who seemed to have a face and a mind planned for a narrower, frailer body. There was something almost cumbersome about the richness of her body, as though it burdened her, troubled her, astonished her. As though it waited patiently, in thrall to the more pallid mind, yet knowing that when its inevitable moments came, it would once again, as so many times in the past, take full strong command of the total organism.

It was easy to sense that with her, physical love was a complete fulfillment, honestly given, honestly accepted. Betrayal struck her more deeply that it would a wife who merely endured the assault of the flesh. The completion she had found with him had given her a loyalty of mind
and body as well. A loyalty too strong to admit any genuine suspicion that he could have done murder. She teased herself with speculation, punished herself with suspicion that was never deep nor honest.

I signaled for another drink. I watched the bare velvet of the shoulders of the piano girl. She had a style like Previn. I drank up, paid the check and left.

That was Tuesday evening. I fed my martini hunger on spaghetti al dente with sailor sauce, read the evening paper’s rehash of our big murder and went back to my apartment. I parked the car, started toward my door, then decided to walk off the spaghetti heaviness. It was just getting dark. Children shrilled and leaped the barberry hedges. I walked by the yellow house and wondered which window was Toni’s.

I guess I walked aimlessly for nearly an hour, turning right or left on impulse, but gradually circling back toward my place. I suddenly remembered the trash, and my promise to Mrs. Speers. It wouldn’t be too late. I lengthened my stride. From far up the street I saw the lights in my windows. I hadn’t been in to leave any on. I left the sidewalk and started across the grass of the big side lawn. I planned to stare in my windows and see who it was who felt so much at home. One key was in my pocket. I had given the other to Mary Olan, and it had been used to put her in my closet. It made me feel strange to see the lights.

When I moved further to the side I saw something that stopped me. It was a silhouette between me and my lighted window. The hat shape was official and distinctive and unmistakable. A police car was parked beside my car, and a policeman stood quietly in the night, leaning against my car.

I moved to put the safe wide trunk of a big elm between me and the waiting man. It took me closer to
him. When bright headlights swung into the driveway, I moved again to keep the elm between me and the lights. It was a noisy vehicle and when it turned, I saw that it was a tow truck. I could see men moving around inside my apartment. The door opened and Captain Kruslov stood in the doorway and looked out. He walked out into the driveway and a thin man followed him.

The tow truck backed into position by my car and when its motor quieted I heard Kruslov saying, “… and Bird can finish the apartment. You ride on in with the car, Danny, and get to work on the trunk right away. See if you can find anything else.”

That “else” chilled my blood. The chain from the hoist on the. wrecker clinked against the front bumper of my car. A man got the hook in place, the hoist whined and the front end lifted off the ground. The thin man got into the truck beside the driver and it went away, my car swaying behind it.

Kruslov watched it go. The patrolman who had been leaning against my car stood beside him. Light shone from my open front door. Into the light came Mrs. Speers, a shawl around her shoulders.

“Did you take Mr. Sewell’s car away?” she asked sharply.

“Yes m’am, we did,” Kruslov replied.

“Mr. Sewell is going to be very angry.”

“I guess so, m’am. You told me he went for a walk. Is that right?”

“Of course it’s right or I wouldn’t have said so. I don’t know what right you have to go into his apartment and take his car away.”

“We’ve got a warrant, m’am. It’s legal.”

“It may be legal, but it isn’t decent. He’s a nice young man.”

“Mrs. Speers, would you mind if I asked you some more questions about last Sunday?”

“Not at all. But if you think that …”

“You said that Mr. Sewell filled up the back end of
his car with trash and took it to the city dump. You mind telling me what he put in his car?”

“Cans and bottles and trash. Why the city can’t collect trash the way they do in other places, I’ll never …”

“I mean, m’am, what were the cans and bottles in? Cartons?”

“There was one carton of trash and then he had a big brown canvas thing packed with trash.”

“How big was the canvas thing?”

“Oh, I’d say about as big as a blanket. He had it full of trash and he held it by the four corners, like a sack.”

“Did he handle it as if it was heavy?”

“Of course it was heavy! It was full of trash.”

“Could the Olan girl’s body have been in there?”

I distinctly heard her gasp, and I could imagine the expression on her face. “Why what a ridiculous idea! You must be out of your mind.”

“No, lady, I am not out of my mind.”

“You must be! Why aren’t you out after dangerous criminals, instead of bothering Mr. Sewell?”

“Because I think Mr. Sewell is a dangerous criminal, lady.”

“That’s incredible!”

Kruslov sighed heavily. Their voices had carried well in the night quiet. I was not more than twenty-five feet from them. The police car radio began to make insane sounds—Donald Duck under a tin wash tub. The patrolman’s heels scuffed the gravel as he went quickly over to the car. He spoke a few times in a low voice.

“Nothing yet, sir,” he said to Kruslov.

“You are making a dreadful mistake,” Mrs. Speers said hotly. Her loyalty touched me.

“We’ll see, lady.”

“What makes you think he’d do a thing like that?”

I had sensed the growing irritation of Kruslov. Mrs. Speers had a penetrating, indignant voice, and he had had too little sleep. Perhaps under other circumstances he
would have kept police business to himself. But Mrs. Speers had refused to be brushed off. He said in a hard voice, “Lady, I do not know what would make him do a thing like that. All I know is we took a look at his car today, at the plant. An expert opened the trunk and he found an empty tin can. There had been frozen orange juice in it. There was a white thread caught where the metal was ragged. The lab boys say that white thread came off the Olan girl’s skirt. Now why don’t you go back in the house?”

Mrs. Speers was defeated. She left without a word. I was defeated too. I remembered climbing down the slope to get the can. If I’d remembered Mrs. Speers’ trash on Monday night, the can would now be in the dump and covered up, white thread and all. Maybe there was a moral there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I stood in the night behind the tree and felt as naked as the day I was born.

A man carrying a black case came out of my apartment. “You through, Bird?” Kruslov asked.

“I’m through.”

Kruslov turned to the patrolman. “You wait in the apartment with the door locked and the lights out. Just because it’s dark don’t go to sleep. I’ll take the car in now. If he’s missed by the other cars, you take him when he comes in. Don’t take any chances. Cuff him to the radiator and phone in. I’ll bet a buck he went to the movies or a bar. If he was still walking, they’d have him.”

Kruslov and Bird got in the car and went away. The patrolman stood in the doorway. He took out a cigar, bit the end off and lighted it. He looked at the night for a while and then went into my apartment. The lights went off. I moved slowly back across the side yard, keeping the tree trunk between me and the apartment. There was a high hedge at the far end of the side yard. I wedged myself into it and tried to do some constructive thinking, but my mind wouldn’t work. If I turned myself in I
would have to try to explain why, after finding the body, I had gotten rid of it. The action seemed to scream of guilt. I kept plaguing myself by asking myself why I’d taken the body away in the first place. It was hardly constructive thought.

Fear grew larger and larger in my mind, fear that I was not going to get out of this. I’d taken her into my apartment and strangled her. I’d driven her car away and abandoned it. I’d come back and slept and disposed of the body the next day. My prints were on her car. Now they’d be looking for the tarp and they’d find it. It seemed to me I’d read that they could type sweat, and my hands had certainly been sweaty when I’d lifted the tarp with her body in it. It had been my belt around her throat, and they’d find that too. I wanted to start running through the night. I wanted to run hard out across the night fields, away from this place.

I thought of everybody I knew, and I could think of only two people in the whole world who would listen to me and believe me. Tory Wylan and Toni MacRae. Tory was far away, but Toni was close.

I moved like a thief through the adjoining back yard. Through a window I saw a woman washing dishes, white dishes with blue rims under hard white fluorescence. I kicked a child’s tin toy and scurried into deeper shadows and waited until my heart quieted. I stood by a lilac bush and looked at the lighted windows of the big yellow house. I had an insane wish to throw my head back and yell, “Toni! Toni!” Cry of terror; plea for help. Child in the night.

I circled the big yellow house, all but the front side, staying back far enough so I could see the high windows, but I did not see her. I worked my way back to the original place. I saw her then, in a second story window near the rear of the house. She walked by in front of the window, wearing a yellow robe, both hands fooling with her hair at the back of her dark head. I crouched and felt the ground and found three small stones. The first one
rapped off the wood beside her window. The second made a clear sharp clink against the glass. Toni appeared in the window. The light was behind her so that I couldn’t see her expression. I threw the last one and it hit the glass, startling her. No one was looking out the other windows. I took my lighter out and held it near my chin and lighted it. The night wind wavered the flame. I put my hand in the area of light and crooked my finger a few times in a beckoning gesture before a stronger puff of wind blew the flame out.

She stood there, not moving. I could guess what was going on in her head: the boss was now reaching for the payoff. I guessed at her anger, yet knew somehow that curiosity would bring her down—and besides, she would want a chance to express indignation. She moved away from the window. When she appeared again she was dressed. She looked down and then left the window. A minute or so later she came walking down through the grass beside the house.