You Live Once

Chapter 6

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?”

“Rough.”

“He loses his job because the Olan girl went out with him. He gets in a big jam. It’s a real mess for that boy. He got drunk on account of the Olan girl.”

“Is that what he says?”

“I believe that, too. You know, that little girl was a bad actor. The more I dig, the more I find out. She went up there before her uncle opened the place at the lake just to make trouble for Yeagger. She took him back to the place. She had a key. She took him in there and taught him most of the facts of life in one big lesson. Getting that out of him was like pulling teeth. She went up a few more times, got him all mixed up and involved, and then dropped him like he was dirt.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“You know, he hates you, Sewell. He thinks you took her away from him. He thinks you were getting what he was missing.”

“I wasn’t. But it wasn’t for lack of trying, Captain.”

“I can believe that. I saw her alive a couple times. Nice little piece. Even dead she doesn’t look too bad. Here’s a funny thing. This Yeagger thought Willy Pryor knew what was going on.”

“I can hardly believe that.”

“I don’t believe it. He says he got that impression from something the Olan girl said to him. He can’t remember just what it was. He thinks she said Willy Pryor knew everything she did. That she told him, or something like that. As if she bragged to him.”

“She must have been just talking.”

“I figure it that way. Sewell, you didn’t drop that body off on your way to the lake, did you?”

My heart took a fast uppercut at the back of my throat and dropped back lower than where it belonged. Then I saw that he was half smiling.

“I didn’t want to get my car messed up. I dragged the body along behind.”

“I sure wish I knew who lugged her up there. It wasn’t Yeagger. You go on home and get your sleep, Sewell.”

He walked out with me. We stood near the door chatting when Yeagger came through, being escorted toward the door by Hilver. They had apparently grabbed him in his work clothes and he was still in them. He was overwhelmingly big, well over six feet tall, and physically hard. Thigh muscles bulged the tight jeans. He looked surly, weary, discouraged.

He recognized me and his face changed. He looked away quickly and went on out the front door. Hilver stood and watched him go. The door swung shut.

“How’ll he get back?” Kruslov asked.

“I asked him. He says he’ll get back. I guess he’s big enough to take care of himself.”

The three of us chatted for a few moments and then I left. It was well after midnight and the town was asleep. It is pretty much of a Saturday night town. I walked to my car. I knew that Yeagger was out here in the night. I remembered the way he had looked at me, and it made the back of my neck feel odd. I walked slower than I wanted to, to prove to myself that I wasn’t frightened.

My car was parked too far from the nearest street light. As I took my keys out of my pocket, a big shadow detached itself from the darker mass of my car and stood blocking the way.

“Yeagger?” I said. The night street was too empty, and my voice was too thin.

He called me a foul name and leaped toward me. I struck at him and hit an arm like an oak limb. He caught my wrist and twisted it. It spun me around, my wrist and hand pinned high between my shoulder blades. I’ve never felt frail or inadequate, but he handled me as easily as I’d handle a child. There was a thick sour smell of sweat about him. The pain in my arm made me gasp.

“Key to the car,” he said. I dropped my keys on the sidewalk. I thought he would let go of me to pick them up. I intended to run; he looked too muscle-bound to be able to run as fast as I intended to. But he bent me over with him as he picked up the keys. He opened the car door and shoved me in, past the steering wheel, and climbed in after me.

“Don’t try to get out,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you, Sewell. But not here.”

“How about my place?” I suggested.

He thought that over. “Who’s there?”

“There’s nobody there.”

He found the right key and drove my car. I gave him the directions. I didn’t know what I should do — he had started with painful violence, but he sounded reasonable. Maybe he just wanted to talk. I sensed that I could get the door open and get out of the car before he could grab me. We turned into my drive. He turned off the lights and motor and caught my wrist again. He forced me out my side of the car, following me. He looked toward the apartment door. I had left the lights on. He marched me over into the darkness of the side lot, twisted my wrist up into my back and cursed me again.

“What do you want?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice level and unafraid.

He didn’t want to talk with me, he wanted to tell me. He told me I had taken her away from him. He told me she was dead and it was my fault. He kept his voice low, his mouth close to my ear. I sensed that he was losing control. He told me I had to keep away from her. I felt lost and helpless. In his increasing excitement he was close to breaking my arm. I groaned with pain, wishing I had tried to get away from him while we were in the car. I knew my arm would snap. I tried to yell for help, hoping to arouse somebody, hoping to frighten him, or startle him back to relative sanity. He caught my throat, choking off the yell, his heavy forearm across my throat, big knee digging into the small of my back. I managed to turn in his grasp and we both fell. He grasped my throat in his big hands. My right arm was useless. Red pinwheels circled behind my eyes and somebody turned the night off, the way you turn off a light.

When I recovered consciousness I was flat on my back in the night, on the grass, looking up at stars through the May leaves of the elms, my throat hurting with each breath. I could hear heavy breathing close by. After a long time I sat up. Yeagger was beside me on his face, blood on his cheek shining black in the faint starlight.

I massaged my right arm; it felt weak and limp. I wobbled a bit when I stood up. I felt as though someone watched me from the deep shadows under the trees. I managed to roll Yeagger over onto his back. He grunted and threw a big forearm across his eyes. After a long time he sat up and stared at me blankly. I helped him to his feet. He leaned on me heavily and I took him into the apartment. He sat in a chair, elbows on his knees, eyes closed. I moved the light so I could see his head. Above his left temple there was a split in the scalp about an inch long. The area around it was badly swollen. I wet the end of a towel in the bathroom sink and brought it to him. He wiped the blood from his face and held the towel against the slowly bleeding wound.

“What happened?” I asked. I had to ask him twice before he looked directly at me.

“I... I guess I was trying to kill you. I heard somebody behind me. I started to turn and... that’s all.”

“It’s a damn good thing somebody stopped you,” I said.

He looked at me and frowned. “I... Everything is shot. Everything. Mary was the one thing that meant anything. You were the one who...”

“I didn’t do a damn thing. She was a tramp, Yeagger. You were just temporary fun and games. If it meant a hell of a lot to you, that just made the game more interesting. Blame yourself, don’t blame me.”

He looked away from me. “I guess I know that. I guess I knew it all along. But... I’m sorry I went after you and...” Astonishingly, the big tough face crumpled, twisted up like a child’s, and he began to cry. It made me acutely embarrassed. He covered his eyes with a big hand and sobbed harshly. After a time he stopped, and knuckled his eyes. He wouldn’t look toward me again. I told him he ought to have a stitch taken in his head; he said it didn’t matter. I asked him how he’d get back up to the lake country; he said that didn’t matter either. He was anxious to go. If he hadn’t been hit he would have killed me. But I could no longer feel indignation or anger. I felt sorry for him. Big and hard as he was, he was a child underneath. He blamed me for breaking his toys, that was all. I stood out in the drive and watched him walk to the street and turn toward town, a big shadow fading into the night.

I looked out toward the lot and felt again that someone was there. It was an atavistic quiver of warning, legacy from the days of the sabertooth. The world was suddenly dark and large and unfriendly. Yeagger had been eliminated. Someone, for an unknown reason, had halted a murder. On this night I could believe it had been halted only to be consummated later, by someone else. I went in to bed and wondered if it would have mattered to anyone if my life had ended there with Yeagger’s hands on my throat. It could so easily have ended — and my last conscious perception would have been of the rockets behind my eyes and the world turned off by a monster switch.

The feeling of depression was still with me the next morning when I awoke. My arm was lame, but more serviceable than I had expected. My throat was sore, my voice husky. The episode with Yeagger seemed like a dream sequence, too unreal to reawaken fear. During all my dreams that night, someone had stood in shadow and watched me.

As I went out my driveway I saw Mrs. Speers standing in a window. I remembered that I had not collected her trash.

At the plant the floor was ready for two new pieces of heavy equipment. Two experts were there from the machine tool company. It took half the morning to set the equipment in place, make the power hookups and bolt it down. Then we went over it with Gus and with engineering and the experts until we knew all the tricks. At three I still hadn’t had lunch. I went to the locker room, took the protective coveralls off, scoured the grease off my hands and put my suit coat on.

Dodd Raymond came in. He seemed vague, distracted.

“Understand they let Yeagger go,” he said.

“That’s right. Last night. I was there.”

“What were you doing down there, Clint?”

“They wanted fingerprints. Did they get yours?”

“Yes. That Paul France stopped in at the house last night. Asked a lot of questions. Strange sort of guy.”

I finished drying my hands and turned to face him. “Did he ask about the key the Bettiger woman mentioned?”

“Why should he?”

“Dodd, Mary told me about you and the key and your little hideaway.”

He flushed angrily. “She promised not to say anything to anybody.”

“You were pretty foolish, weren’t you?”

I saw his face change. “Don’t forget yourself, Sewell.”

“Forget you’re the boss? No. But what do I say if I’m asked about it?”

He immediately became ingratiating. “Clint, I didn’t mean to get stuffy. Actually, it wouldn’t help the police any to tell them that. If she told you, you know I had a place on the west side of town. I’m going to get my stuff out of there as soon as I get a chance. It was a damn fool thing to do. But I lost my head, I guess. We met there six or seven times, that’s all. It wouldn’t help the police, and it might break up my home. Nancy doesn’t know anything about it. I’d appreciate it if you’d just... let it ride. After all, I didn’t kill her. That ought to be pretty obvious.”

“So who did kill her, Dodd?”

He moved over to a mirror, straightened his necktie. “I haven’t any idea,” he said. But I saw his eyes in the mirror. I sensed that he lied. Maybe he didn’t actually know, but I think he had an idea. A good idea.

After he extracted my halfhearted promise not to mention it, he left. I went back to my office. Toni and I had been slightly awkward with each other all day, and I had covered up by being intensely impersonal. Now hunger gnawed at my nerves and I snarled at her, and saw her eyes fill with tears as she turned hastily away. I apologized to her, tried to get her to smile. It was a cool little smile at first, and then it turned into the grin that was so good to see. She went out and brought me back milk and a sandwich.

Nancy Raymond phoned me at five o’clock. She wanted to talk to me but wouldn’t say what it was about. She wanted me to meet her at Raphael’s, a little place on Broad, not far from the bridge. I agreed.

Toni finished up at about twenty after five. I walked out onto the catwalk and looked down at the big silent production area. I watched Toni walk down the walk toward the iron staircase. She wore a brown linen suit with a burnt orange scarf knotted around her neck. Her long legs swung nicely, hips moving firmly under brown linen, dark head held high. She went out of sight down the circular stairs, heels tamping the metal — and reappeared below. She smiled up at me, flash of white teeth in shadowed face, and then she was gone. I heard the muted distant bell as she punched out.

Raphael’s is a logical outgrowth of the new money that has come to town. It is a small place, wedged in where there was logically no room for it. It is ten feet wide and quite deep. Forty feet from the front door it makes a right angle turn and widens out to twenty feet. A zebra-striped spinet piano sits in the angle, dividing the bar from the lounge. During the cocktail hour a girl with lovely bare shoulders sits at the piano, facing a tilted mirror that is placed in the angle of the wall in such a way that from bar or lounge you can see her face and her clever fingers. The lighting is muted, the soundproofing dense, the chairs deep. People talk softly there, drink quietly, and make little schemes that break hearts.

Nancy smiled at me from a corner of the lounge as I walked toward her. She looked as though she had been there some time. She had done something severe with her hair and it made her head look too small.

The waiter came over to the table as I sat. All the other tables were occupied. I asked for a martini. He replaced the ashtray, took Nancy’s empty glass and eased away.

“I’ve had two for courage, Clint,” she said. “No, don’t look like that. I’m not going to make problems for you like I did that time at the club.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you did. Old reliable Clint.”

“Yes you would mind. And so would I. I don’t know... how to start this.”

“Just start.”

She paused while the drinks came. “I told you that we quarreled and Dodd went out and didn’t come back until five. Remember that?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I guess you’re the only person who knows that. He picked me up yesterday to take me out to Pryor’s and on the way out he said, very reasonably, that if something had happened to Mary, it might cause a lot of unnecessary talk and trouble if he had to account for that period of time. He told me that he had driven out of town, maybe fifty or sixty miles. He said he had parked beside the road and smoked and listened to the car radio. He said that he was merely sulking like a child, and wanted me to be worried about him. He hadn’t seen anyone. He said that after he was there about an hour, he turned around and came home, a little ashamed of himself. He said it would be a lot simpler if I would say that we had gone right home from the club and he hadn’t gone out at all.”

“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.