Джон Макдональд - You Live Once

The houses began to thin out. Weeds grew high in vacant lots. Junked cars rusted behind small service garages. Finally I came to the end of a dead end street. The pavement was heaved and cracked. People had dumped rubbish at the end of the street.

I looked south and saw fast truck traffic a quarter mile away and knew that was the highway I was looking for. I cut across lots where the ground was marshy. At one place I had to jump from hummock to hummock. I slipped and went into black mud well over my shoes. I wiped my feet on the grass. Halfway to the highway I came across a young girl and a boy who had made a nest for themselves on a blanket in the tall grasses. After the first glance I did not look toward them. They did not move or make a sound.

At the highway I stopped behind a billboard and tried to regain some confidence. I wanted to crawl into the thick grass and hide there. It was far too easy to think of how they would kill me, quite legally, if they caught me. I walked across the highway, stood on the shoulder and began to thumb the eastbound traffic.

Cars went by at high speed, swirling heated winds around me. Sun glinted off the chrome. Trucks snored by. In between the clumps of traffic, I walked east, keeping my head well down so that traffic headed into the city could not see my face.

I passed a drive-in. Fear had destroyed hunger. Yet even had I been hungry, I could not risk wasting that much time. I kept remembering what France had said about a six-state alarm.

A half mile beyond the drive-in, as I walked, I heard a car coming behind me. I turned with upraised thumb and false smile. It was a highway patrol car. I whirled around, realizing as I did it that my quickness in itself would be cause of suspicion. The car sped by and just as I began to feel better about it, brakes screamed the tires on dry pavement. I saw that it was going to make a U turn as soon as traffic permitted. I turned and leaped the ditch, vaulted a low fence and ran across a cultivated field. As I reached a fringe of woods I looked back. The patrol car was stopped on the shoulder. A man stood by the fence, another near the car. The man by the fence was very still. Something whizzed near my head. A cut leaf circled slowly down. I heard a thin distant cracking sound, and then another.

I dived into the shelter of the woods and ran in terror. I tripped and fell and rolled to my feet and kept running. Branches stung my cheeks. I lost all sense of direction. I knew only that people who wanted to kill me were after me. When I fell the second time it knocked the wind out of me. I lay where I had fallen and listened. I could hear traffic sounds far away. I heard a bird near by, a bird with a fluid intricate call. A jet went over, too high to see, rumbling faintly.

After that I went on more slowly. The woods ended. There was a wide field, a dirt road beyond it. I squatted and watched the road for a time. Nothing came along. I started across the field toward the road. Ten steps from the shelter of the woods, I heard a car coming. I scrambled back. The car stopped a hundred yards down the road and let a man in uniform out. The man stared toward the woods. I knew he couldn’t see me, but he seemed to be looking directly at me. I saw him sit on a fence and light a cigarette, still watching the woods.

I moved back until I could no longer see him. I traveled in a line parallel to the road. Soon I came upon another man who waited as patiently as the first. I turned back the way I had come. The woods had seemed vast at first. Now it was a skimpy patch of brush, affording no good place of concealment. It did not take long to find they were on all sides of me. The sun was nearly gone. I knew I could run no longer.

I remembered Toni and I realized I had been in an unthinking panic. France would report where I had hidden. Toni might be in custody already, charged with aiding me. This was a man hunt, and anyone who had assisted me would suffer.

I came out of the woods at dusk, back by the main highway, my hands held high. Three patrol cars and two Warren police vehicles were there. I was nearly sick with exhaustion. Kruslov was there. They searched me and put me in a car.

Back at police headquarters I was booked, photographed, searched again. They took everything from my pockets, plus my belt and shoelaces and necktie, and put me in a dingy cell. A half hour later I was taken out of the cell and upstairs to a small bare room with barred windows, a spavined conference table, six chairs, a spittoon, a wall clock and another girlie calendar. It was the same set of impossibly lush thighs, but this time a wind, rather than barbed wire, had lifted her skirt.

A young sandy-haired, lantern-jawed patrolman guarded me. He sat on the table and chewed gum and watched me out of colorless eyes. When I asked him for a cigarette, he said he didn’t smoke. There was a phone on the corner of the table. A piece of the earpiece had been chipped off.

Fifteen minutes later Kruslov, Hilver, a strange civilian and a male stenographer came in in quick single file, banging the door back against the wall. Kruslov ordered the guard out. They all took chairs. Kruslov put thick hands on his hips and looked down at me.

“Well, damn it, you didn’t get very far. Hid out in your girlfriend’s room and then tried to hike out of town. Not smart, Sewell.”

“Where is she?”

“I ask the questions.”

“She didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Did you spend the night in her room?”

“That has no bearing on this, Captain.”

The back of his hand was like a board. It cut the inside of my mouth and rocked me so far over I nearly fell off the chair. He smiled, almost genially. “I am going to ask a lot of questions. I want a lot of answers. I have missed a lot of sleep. I am impatient. I do not want smart answers, or a smart attitude. I want a little humility, Sewell. You killed a society girl and you did it very neatly and damn near got away with it. Smart police work caught you. We looked in the trunk of the car of everybody connected with this thing, and in your car we found proof you had her body in there. You ran and you didn’t run good enough so you’ve lost all the way around. You outsmarted Paul France, which is something nobody does very often. That was the last piece of luck you had, the last piece of luck you’re going to get. Now I’ll ask questions and you answer them. Why did you kill her?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

He struck me again, in the same place. I wiped my mouth and said, “I want a lawyer.”

“You’re here for questioning. We haven’t placed a formal charge yet. When we place a formal charge, you’ll be entitled to an attorney. In the meantime, you can refuse to answer questions. Naturally, we’ll have to accept your refusal, but we’ll keep asking them. When I’m tired, somebody else will ask them. Where did you kill her?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

This time I was knocked off the chair. The others watched without any great show of interest.

“You don’t want to be stupid about this, Sewell. You see, we can prove you had the body in the back of your car.”

“I know I did.”

“That’s cooperative. Let’s have a little more cooperation. If you admit that, then will you admit killing her?”

“But I didn’t kill her.”

He smiled at me. “I know. The body came in the mail. Special delivery. Or you found it under a bush. Where did you get the body, Sewell?”

“Somebody brought it in in the night and put it in my closet. Mary had a key. I gave it to her so she could wake me up if I was still asleep when she came to get me to go up to the lake Sunday. After your men left I found the body. I was scared. So I got rid of it.”

He moved with the bulky quickness of a bear, and all the strength. He lifted me out of the chair with one hand on my throat, swung me around and banged me back against the wall. My head hit hard, dazing me. Through the momentary fog I saw his face wearing a gentle smile, heard his soft voice. “You just found her in your closet. Just like that. Dead.”