Джон Макдональд - You Live Once

I had learned during the short time I had been dating her that her private life had been sufficiently lurid so that without the large bucks she could have been termed a bum. The trust funds relabeled it “eccentric” and “lively.” There had been one marriage, an annulment, other escapades and scandals. Such knowledge did nothing for my self-esteem. Inability to make any kind of time with a virginal lassie is no stamp of failure, but the brushoff from a lively one causes what might be termed an agonizing reappraisal. She had begun to make me feel as virile and fascinating as a teaberry leaf. I kept telling myself it was singlemindedness that blocked my path. She had Dodd on her mind.

Perhaps today, I thought, she will arrive at that moment of awareness. And then Nancy Raymond will be happy again. Dodd will suffer and get over it. Mary will melt, and Sewell will munch clover.

I smacked my Tabasco lips, shed robe and pajamas, and headed for the shower. After five minutes of water — warm, then cold, my head felt better, and I tested the resonance of the shower stall with a high-volume rendering of “April Showers.” I scraped brown stubble from my face, brushed the brown brush cut, showed myself my teeth in the mirror and padded out for a judicious selection of sport shirt. The yellow one, I decided. And the new grey wool and Dacron slacks, and take along the white hopsacking jacket should we decide to eat out at one of those places at the lake.

I went to the closet to get dressed. It’s a nice, roomy closet. There was sun in the room and light spilled into the closet when I opened the door. As I took out the grey slacks, I looked down and saw one brown female foot in a high-heeled gunmetal pump. I looked at it with the greatest blankness in my mind that I have ever experienced. My overcoat and topcoat were in the way. I slid them along the closet bar and looked down at the hideous, bloated, empurpled, barely recognizable face of Mary Olan. Her thickened tongue protruded from her lips.

The world stopped. I could hear traffic going by the house, hear a bird song in the elms. I could not look away from her face. It had the ugly, chilling, frightening fascination of an open wound.

There is no stillness like that special stillness of the dead. I shut the closet door slowly and carefully. The latch clicked. I sat on the bed. Though the room was warm, I was shivering. I went over to the bureau and took a cigarette from the opened pack. I wanted some way of finding out that it wasn’t true. Yet I knew it was no trick of light, no aberration that went with the fading headache.

I sat numbed by the enormity of this thing. Staring at the closed closet door, I could see the horror beyond it. She could not be dead and she could not be in my closet — but she was there. I stubbed out the cigarette and opened the closet door again. I forced myself to kneel and touch her ankle. Her flesh was cold — a special kind of coldness. And within the closet, mingled with the musky scent of the perfume she used, there was the dank, cloyed odor of the dead.

After a time, I pushed more of my clothing out of the way and turned on the closet light. And I saw what was around her neck.

Back in the fall when I had purchased some shirts, an energetic salesman had sold me a red fabric belt with an arrangement of brass rings rather than a buckle. It wasn’t the sort of thing I usually buy. I believe I have worn it twice. The last I had seen of it, it was hanging from a belt and tie rack on the inside of my closet door.

Now it was around Mary Olan’s neck, the brass of the rings biting into the tender flesh at the side of her throat, the flesh above the belt darkened and grotesquely swollen. The long red end of the belt hung down across her shoulder and between her breasts. She still wore last night’s dress, a sleeveless, strapless affair with a gunmetal top and full white skirt. She sat back in the corner of the closet, propped up, her head canted to the right. One leg was out straight — it was that foot I had first seen. Her other leg was sharply bent. Her white skirt had slid up her thighs exposing the white sheen of diaphanous panties contrasting with the dark tan of her legs. Her right hand was on the floor, palm upward, fingers curled. Her left hand was in her lap, hidden by the folds of the skirt.

I found after a time that I could look at her more calmly. The closet fight glinted on one gold hoop earring. Careful examination told me nothing more than that she was dead, and had died by violence. These lips, hideous now, had been warm when I had kissed them. These arms had been around me. These brown legs had walked ahead of me, the white skirt swinging, and she had looked back over her shoulder, with a quick wry glint of smile. She had looked good last night, and she had known it.

I closed the closet door for the second time. The presence of the body was like an oppressive weight. I knew only that I wanted it out of there, wanted to take it out of my apartment and put it in some other place. I could not think clearly while she was there.

I thought of phoning the police and tried to imagine myself carrying off that particular conversation. “Two men were here asking about Miss Olan. I just found her in my closet, dead, strangled with my belt.” I’d seen a lot of her lately and I’d been with her last night. I had been drinking, but I wouldn’t be able to prove how little. The two officers could testify that I had been in bed, and was so hard to awaken that I could have been sleeping off a blind drunk. The door had been locked.

The alternative was just not plausible. I had gone to bed and gone to sleep. Somebody had brought her in. She had been alive when brought in, so she must have been strangled here. And I had slept through all of it.

Yet somebody had done just that. Somebody who had hated her, and me. Somebody who would like to have me as dead as Mary Olan. It was not good to think about that kind of hate.

I dressed slowly and made a pot of coffee. I drank the coffee too hot, scalding my mouth. The cup rattled on the saucer when I set it down. I could feel time passing while I struggled with my decision. I reached for the phone several times, but never quite got to the point of making the call. I did not dare face the police with the feeble, implausible truth. When I checked my watch I found to my surprise that an hour had passed since I had found the body. I believe it was that hour which weighed the scales. I told myself it was too late to phone the police now. I knew I had to get the body out of there.

Once I was able to face that as a specific problem, my mind began to work better. I mechanically made my bed and cleaned up the few dishes I had used, while I perfected a plan that should work properly. While I was making my bed, I found one thing that puzzled me. There was fine granular dirt on the pillow and top sheet. I wondered about it for some time, but I could think of nothing that could cause it. I brushed it off. There wasn’t much of it.

When there was nothing else I could do, I decided that I might as well get my car. I certainly couldn’t take the body anywhere on my back. If I was going to move it, I had to have a car. I phoned a cab and it arrived in ten minutes. I got the extra key from the table drawer, and went out, testing the lock on the door after it shut behind me.

The driver took me to the club, mentioning several times what a fine day it really was. My black Merc sat dozing in the sun. I drove it back to the apartment, my heart bumping. I expected sirens and a ring of prowl cars around the place. It was unchanged. Bees clambered over dandelions and it was shady under the elms of the side yard.

Back in the apartment I looked out the window at my car. Object: to get body from closet into trunk compartment of car. There was no guarantee that Mrs. Speers, my busybody landlady, wouldn’t be watching from one of her many windows. The body must not only appear to be something else, I should be able to prove it was something else if questioned later. The body would have to be wrapped in something disposable. I had heard of the police using a vacuum cleaner on cars and then doing spectroanalysis of face powder and such like. And making identification from a single human hair.