Джон Макдональд - You Live Once

“I was one of the ones, yes.”

“Funny thing,” she said, frowning thoughtfully. She leaned back in her little secretarial chair. Her desk is cattycorner near the outside windows, facing mine. She laced her fingers across the nape of her neck, elbows out, frowning as she thought about Mary’s disappearance. I must have stared at the front of the jumper with horrid intensity. She straightened up, lowering her arms hastily, bringing her typing machine up out of the bowels of the desk with one practiced muscular wrench.

I could sense the plant filling up. I could hear the faraway ding-ding-ding of the I.B.M. time clock as they filed in. A few pieces of equipment started and then, on the stroke of nine the place came to full life for the long Monday. Hangover day. Absentee day. Gus Kruslov was my first customer. He waddled in and said, “I ain’t got me a single damn man to put on that number three mill.”

“You’ll have to take King off setup then.”

“He’ll raise hell.”

“Put him on. Lean on him. I’ll stop by later and sweet-talk him.”

As soon as he was gone, Ratcher came in with one of his kid engineers who had dreamed up a cutie over the weekend. We spread the drawing out on the table and went over it, and it looked fine. The kid was beaming. Toni had gotten the summary report from the records clerk and she was making a stencil, so I went down on the floor with the engineers.

It was that kind of a day. A jumping bean day. Dodd Raymond came up to my office at about eleven. Toni had spotted him down on the floor and tipped me. He came in and shut the noise out, and glanced at Toni. I told her to go get me that tool list. That was code to go powder her nose.

Dodd placed a haunch on my desk comer, clicked my lamp on and off. “They still don’t know a damn thing,” he said. “I just talked to Sutton.”

“Who would Sutton be?”

“Chief of Police. There isn’t enough yet to warrant bringing in the F.B.I, but they’re standing by.” He glanced at me. “Clint, do you think she could be doing all this for a gag? For excitement. For some kind of a laugh.”

“It doesn’t seem reasonable to me.”

“The police are going to keep digging. Clint, I know it’s none of my damn business but were you... intimate with her?”

I looked him in the eye. I’d never noticed before how pale his eyes were. I smiled and said, “I guess that’s right.”

“What’s right?”

“That it’s none of your damn business.”

He had the grace to flush. He got off my desk and off my back. “Well, maybe we’ll know soon.”

“Maybe we will.”

He left. It annoyed me that he would be sly enough to use the smoke screen of her disappearance to try to find out if she’d been cheating on him. It annoyed me, and yet it planted some serious doubts about the correctness of my bedtime conjectures about him. If he knew she was dead, having killed her, he wouldn’t be concerned about her possible promiscuity. Evidently Mary Olan had given him a hell of a time, and I couldn’t be precisely sorry.

I had just gotten back from a late lunch, having missed the closing time of the cafeteria by minutes, when Harvey Wills phoned down to me. “Clint, I just had a call from Mr. Willis Pryor. They’re having a little conference out at his house this afternoon about this Olan girl. They want you and Dodd there. Dodd has already left. I didn’t want either of you to go at first, but Mr. Pryor hinted that it could be made official if I didn’t cooperate.”

“Hell!”

“Are you loaded up?”

“I’m jammed. Well, I guess I gotta.”

I explained the situation to Toni and asked her if she’d mind hanging around after five if I hadn’t gotten back by then. She said she wouldn’t mind. I told her not to wait beyond six. I had a few instructions and she took them down in her notebook. She looked up at me when I had finished, her eyes serious.

“Clint, does she mean a lot to you?” She calls me Clint when we are alone, never anything but Mr. Sewell when anybody else is there. She flushed and looked away after asking the question.

“Not too much, Toni. She’s a spoiled brat. She thinks she’s better than practically anybody else. But... it’s been something to do in the evening.”

“I shouldn’t have asked that. But you’ve been so... odd this morning. As if you’re very troubled.”

“I guess I am.” But I couldn’t tell her why.

The day was still dismal as I drove out toward the Pryor home. The sky was dark and I wondered if it was raining in the hills. It occurred to me I might have picked the spot too well — it might be a year before anyone found her. Then just the delicate yellowed skull, black hair clinging to dried scrap of scalp. Skirt shredded by the winds and the rain, rotten to the touch. If no one found her, I knew I would live with nightmares for a long, long time.

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.”