Джон Макдональд - You Live Once

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.