Джон Макдональд - You Live Once

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.”