You Live Once

Chapter 5

Though the assemblage was unexpectedly large — eleven already gathered when I walked in — they looked muted and dwarfed by the big dramatic living room. The white fireplace wall was at least twenty feet high. There was just enough edge in the day, with the change of wind, so that a small fire glowed in the waist-high fireplace set into the wall.

Willy Pryor greeted me. He acted nervous, keyed up. He has a heavy shock of white hair which has not receded a bit, though he must be about fifty. His massive white eyebrows curl upward and outward. He is as brown as any Polynesian all year round. His standard costume is riding pants and boots and a cotton shirt unbuttoned halfway to the waist with the sleeves rolled up. The grey hair is thickly matted on his chest. He’s about five seven, stocky, trim and powerful, with arms like a stevedore. I guess he has never had to do a day’s work in his life, but he does manual labor on the Pryor farm, rides, hunts, flies, goes after marlin and tuna each year. You sense that had it been necessary for him to work, had he started with nothing, he would somehow have ended up just where he is, and just what he is. He’s a good talker, a sometimes extravagant personality.

His wife, Myrna, smiled a bit timidly at me. She is a round, warm, dull, comfortable woman. She bore three daughters for Willy, and that seems to have been the extent of her participation in life. No beautician, no couturier could ever make Myrna Pryor look like anything other than precisely what she was — a farm girl from the Highland area. Maybe with his neurotic murderous sister, and all his other highly-charged relatives, Myrna was exactly what Willy had wanted and needed. And it had helped the blood, if the bouncy health of Jigger, Dusty and Skeeter was any indication.

I nodded and spoke to Dodd and Nancy. They sat side by side on a creation neither couch nor chair — something resembling an upholstered coffee table with a back six inches high.

The only other person in the room I knew by sight was the plain clothes partner of the uniformed patrolman who had come to wake me up Sunday morning.

Willy performed the introductions quickly and clearly. The wiry big-handed blonde who looked as if she had been nailed to a barn to dry in the sun was Neale Bettiger, Mary’s golf partner. A wide, impassive, sleepy-eyed man was Captain Joseph Kruslov, in charge of the case. I asked him if he was related to Gus at the plant.

“Brother,” he said.

A tall, stooped, sick-looking man with grey bags under his eyes was Mr. Stine, Commissioner of Public Safety. The plain clothes cop was named Hilver. Chief of Police Sutton was colorless, rolypoly and asthmatic. When he spoke he honked. Willy skipped over a police stenographer sitting stiffly, uncomfortably at a corner desk and introduced me to a mild little guy sitting off by himself. He looked like a frail bank teller until you took the second look. Then you saw the sardonic cut of the mouth, the alive quick eyes, the unexpected thickness of the wrists. “This is Mr. Paul France. He’s a licensed investigator and I’ve asked him to sit in, with Chief Sutton’s permission.”

Willy shooed me to a chair next to the sun-dried blonde, rubbed his hands together and said, “Well, Chief, I guess we can get started.”

“Captain Kruslov will ask some questions,” the chief said.

Kruslov paced to the center of the room. “We called you people together to see if we can come up with anything we missed so far. We’re interested mostly in anybody any of you could have seen hanging around, acting funny, anything like that. We’re sort of thinking of a snatch. We’ll take up this angle first. Miss Bettson?”

“Bettiger. No, I didn’t see a thing. Mary and I played twenty-seven holes. At the end of eighteen we were even in holes and even in score so we played another nine. I won three and two. I didn’t see a thing out of line.”

“How did she act? Same as usual?”

“Oh yes. We gabbed, kidded around, talked about people. She was fine. Nobody was lurking about, if that’s what you mean.”

“Now will you tell the chief and these people what you told Sergeant Hilver this morning.”

Miss Bettiger looked uncomfortable. “Well, I don’t think it was important. It was just talk.”

“Go ahead, please.”

“We talked about men. We do that a lot, I guess, maybe too much. Mary was laughing about what she called her ‘reserve love nest.’ She said there was this man who had been making a big play and he kept trying to give her a key to a place he had rented somewhere in town. She said if she ever wanted to hide, that would be the place, because he wouldn’t dare give her away.”

“Did she tell you his name?”

I did not dare look over at Dodd and Nancy. I was afraid of what I’d see on their faces. “No, she didn’t tell me his name. She just said he’s married. She made a big joke of it.”

Kruslov turned to Mr. Pryor. “Mr. Pryor, do you think Miss Olan could be at that apartment or room or house she spoke of to Miss Bettson?”

“Bettiger,” the girl said.

“Sorry. Miss Bettiger.”

Uncle Willy said hotly, “I think it’s a damned outrage to suggest any such thing. Mary is a good girl. She’s unpredictable, but basically good. She’d be no part of any cheap arrangement like that. If she was I’d... I’d throw her out of my home. I’m raising three daughters here.” I saw the bulge of his brown forearms and was convinced.

“I still think we have to consider that as a possibility,” Captain Kruslov said. “Now, Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. Did you notice anything at all suspicious about Saturday night?”

They looked at each other and I read Nancy’s lips as she said to go ahead. “No,” Dodd said. “It was a perfectly standard evening.”

“Did Miss Olan drink too much?”

“I... well, yes. Frankly, she did.”

“Was she in the habit of drinking too much?”

“No.”

“Why did she drink so much Saturday?”

“I don’t think she intended to. I think she made a mistake ordering. She got thirsty playing golf and she should have started on something tall instead of cocktails.”

“Did you witness the quarrel between her and Mr. Sewell?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Would you tell us about it?”

“That’s very simple. Clint was trying to help her. He wanted her to stop drinking. She got nasty about it, but Clint didn’t. He just kept coaxing her and after she made quite a little scene at the bar, she let him lead her out of there. I thought he handled it rather well. It really wasn’t anything important.”

“A drunken woman is a despicable thing,” Willy said firmly. “It is always important.”

“I mean the quarrel wasn’t important, Mr. Pryor.”

“Did you or your wife notice anyone hanging around, or see anything you thought odd at the time?”

“No sir. I guess we left a few minutes before Mr. Sewell left with Miss Olan. I understand he planned to drive her home and take a cab from here. Later he told me that...”

“Never mind that. You saw nothing out of line.”

“No sir.”

Kruslov turned to me. He moved closer to me than he had to the others. He looked more intent. I gave him exactly the same story I had given the two cops. He took me over it twice. I didn’t especially care for his manner. I wondered if he was getting even for the times I had chewed out his brother.

“So when she drove away you went right to bed.”

“I’ve told you that.”

“What time was it?”

“Two-thirty. Something like that.”

“You went right to sleep.”

“Yes. I was tired.”

“Your landlady says you didn’t get in until four.”

“Does she? I can’t help that. I was in by two-thirty, and asleep by no later than two-thirty-five. She must be mistaken.”

“She is positive that a car drove in at four.”

“Captain, I’m a very sound sleeper. Your sergeant over there can verify that. It is entirely possible that one of my less responsible friends drove in at four and couldn’t wake me and drove away again.”

He dropped that line and went back to the questions he had asked the others. “Did you see anything suspicious? Did any car follow you? Anything like that?”

“No, I didn’t see...”

“What’s the matter?”

“I just remembered something. Mary and I sat out in her car in my driveway for a few minutes and talked. Somebody came into the driveway, backed out and went away. I figured they were just turning around. I just now remembered it.”

Kruslov gave a grunt of satisfaction. “There’s a new fact. It could mean something. Did the car lights shine on you?”

“Yes they did. The top was down. I’ll tell you more than I have to, Captain. At the moment we were illuminated, I happened to be kissing Miss Olan.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I kiss her goodnight. Now here’s some more while we’re at it. We made a date to go up to the lake yesterday. I went anyway, thinking she’d show up. She was going to pick me up at noon. It was entirely possible that I would have been pounding my ear, so I gave her a key. I went in and got it, and took it out to her. So that if I was still sleeping she could come in and drag me out of the sack so we wouldn’t be held up. But I assure you, Captain, that the key I gave her is not the love nest key she spoke to Miss Bettiger about. I had no such designs on Miss Olan. No, that doesn’t sound right. I had designs, I’m that normal. But they didn’t include setting up a menage of that special type.”

The phone on the free form desk rang. The police stenographer jumped, picked it up timidly, spoke into it in an inaudible voice.

He held the phone out. “For you, Captain sir.”

Kruslov walked heavily over and took the phone. “Yes...? Yes... I see... Where...? No, that’s okay... Yes, I’ll tell them.”

He hung up. He had his own little sense of drama. He walked back to the middle of the room and said, “They found her.”

“Is she all right?” Uncle Willy asked.

“She was strangled to death. Probably some time Saturday night. Her body was dumped in the brush up in the hills, a half mile or so off the main road. Damnedest thing. There was a troop of Brownies on a hike yesterday. What the hell are Brownies? One little girl wandered off and saw the body and was too scared to tell anybody. Today she was so upset her mother finally got her to talk and drove her up there to prove it was just the little girl’s imagination. But it wasn’t. She got hold of the state troopers.”

In the long silence Willy said softly, “Oh my God.”

Myrna leaned forward and put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook gently. I looked over at the Raymonds. Nancy held her head high, her face tilted slightly upward. From a long high window, a sort of skylight effect, the light of the pale grey day came down, touching the delicacy of her face, the parted lips. Cherry glow of fire made a highlight on the soft line of her jaw. It was a face almost without expression, clear, clean and perfect. If there was any expression, it was as though she listened for some expected sound. Dodd sat with his head bent, staring at his large clenched fist as though he held something small there, captive.

Stine had a high weak voice. “Willy, I’ll tell you this. I’ll tell you this definitely. And Jud Sutton will back me up, I know. No man assigned to this case is going to get a complete night’s rest until we’ve got the person or persons who did this thing.”

“I appreciate that, Tom,” Willy Pryor said in a low voice. He turned and faced the fire, hard brown hands locked behind him.

Kruslov broke into the mood with his heavy factual voice. “We’ll forget the kidnaping angle for right now. Let’s all put our heads together as long as we’re here and figure out who might want to kill that girl. Who hates her?”

Miss Bettiger, surprisingly, was the one who answered. “I guess I, or nearly anybody who knew Mary, could make out a list of the people who didn’t like her. She didn’t go around trying to make friends. She had a lot of friends, but she snubbed a lot of people. Phonies, mostly. People who wanted to be seen with her and sponge off her. She got that income from the trust funds and...”

“How much income?” Kruslov asked.

Willy, without turning, said, “Sixty thousand a year. She didn’t throw it away. She had her own investment program. Got money sense from her father, I guess. She was getting a good return from her own investments and reinvesting that too.”

“Who gets it now?” Kruslov asked. I could understand why Stine and Sutton had brought him along. He could ask the ugly questions they couldn’t ask because of their personal relationship with the Pryors.

Willy turned and gave him a look of mild surprise. “I guess that what the government doesn’t get will stay in the family. We’ll get it. If I remember Rolph’s will correctly, it set up trust funds for Nadine, John and Mary. I guess Rolph considered each settlement ample, because in the case of the death of any of them — the children without issue — Myrna and I, or our children, were named as residual legatees.”

“Wouldn’t he have wanted to leave it all to his kids, to the survivor?” Kruslov asked.

Willy’s face hardened. “I have no idea what was in his mind, my good man. It may be that he remembered, at the time he made out his will, that he married Pryor money at a time when he needed it very badly to save the Olan interests. Perhaps he felt that it was proper, after providing for his wife and children adequately, to see that in case of common disaster or the death of any of them, the money would revert to the Pryor family. The Citizens Bank and Trust acts as executor. If you check with them you will find that the estate has not been entirely settled, even after sixteen years, due to the unfortunate illness of my sister. Furthermore, Captain, I can assure you that we do not need the money. I assume you can check that fact somehow.”

Kruslov refused to be backed down. I had to admire his stolid dignity. “Thanks for the information, Mr. Pryor. I will have to have a list of the men Miss Olan has been going out with.”

“I can tell you that,” Miss Bettiger said. “At least I can tell you who she’s gone out with since she got back from Spain in February.”

“How long was she in Spain?”

“Six months,” Willy said. “I disapproved of her going on a trip like that alone. She was restless. I couldn’t stop her.”

Bettiger frowned into the fire. “Let’s see. Bill Mulligan. Don Rhoades. Mr. Sewell.” She looked apprehensively at Willy. “There’s one other, but...”

“But what?” Kruslov asked, moving closer to her.

“I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

“I’ll have to know that name, Miss Bettson.”

She looked at Kruslov with exasperation, but didn’t correct him. “All right, but there goes a good job. Nels Yeagger.”

Willy’s brown face turned the color of a brick. “That’s a damn lie!”

“It’s not a damn lie!” Miss Bettiger shrilled. “And don’t try to call me a liar, Willy Pryor.”

“Who is this guy?” Kruslov demanded.

“He works at our place at Smith Lake,” Willy said. “He takes care of the boats and does odd jobs. Mary wouldn’t...”

“But she did,” Bettiger said. “She went out with him quite a few times. She’d drive up there and meet him before you opened the place at the lake. He was crazy about her. She told me about it. She stopped going out with him because she said he had started to bore her. He was beginning to act jealous and possessive, and that was the one thing Mary never could stand.”

Kruslov said, as though speaking to himself, “The body wasn’t far off the main road between here and Smith Lake. Jealous.” He turned and nodded at Hilver. Hilver left his post by the far wall and headed toward the door.

At the door Hilver stopped and said, “The state boys?”

“No. This is ours. Take Watson along and pick him up yourself and bring him in. Any more, Miss Bettiger?”

“No more that I know of. I think I know them all. We... always told each other everything. Gosh, it’s going to seem kind of...” She dived into her purse for a handkerchief.

The more I thought about it, the better Yeagger fitted the role of murderer. He’d seen me with her up there at the lake. And I remembered a rather awkward little incident. It had happened the first time I went there with her. We were looking for somebody, I forget who. We’d walked up to the horse barn. Mary was wearing slacks. When she went in ahead of me I told her that she’d missed one of her belt loops in the back. She had stopped at once and said, “So fix it!”

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 barn. 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.