Джон Макдональд - You Live Once

“I guess so.”

“If I was in your shoes, Sewell, I’d want Jerry Hyers. He’s tough and he’s smart. If you want, I’ll give him a ring. He’s got a good batting average. Too damn good sometimes.”

He puzzled me. He seemed relaxed, friendly.

“I don’t know who I want.”

“I’m giving you a good steer. Don’t look so suspicious. You’re not in the killing business. You just got mixed up with the wrong dolly. You’d have had a lot easier time of it last night if you’d talked up.”

“Go to hell, Kruslov.”

“Okay. Get hard. What’s the point? I do my job. It isn’t personal with me.”

I looked at him and said, as steadily as I could, “I didn’t kill that girl.”

He laughed. “Come off it, Sewell. Save that for the trial. That’s when you’ll need it. Shall I phone Jerry?”

“All right. Phone him. I’ll talk to him.”

“Gosh, thanks!” He tossed the paper on the bunk. “Here, read all about yourself.”

I read it after he left. They used a page one picture of me, the picture taken the night I had come home from the police station after getting smacked by Yeagger. I stood looking into the camera with a sickly smile, a perfect picture of guilt.

The write-up was discouraging. The newspaper had tried me and found me guilty. The authorities had certainly not been reticent about leaking their case to the press. They had even figured out how I had worked the car arrangement. According to the paper, we had ridden around until she felt better and then gone back to the club for my car. Driving two cars, we had headed out toward the Pryor farm, getting as far as Highland. Then I had signaled to her to stop. I had overpowered her somehow and brought her back to my apartment in my car. That was the car Mrs. Speers heard driving in at four. I had taken her into the apartment, killed her, taken my car back to the club and walked the two miles back to the apartment. It was fantastic, but it made a frightening kind of sense. Much was made of the belt, the tarp, the juice can, the thread. Nice juicy clues for the reading public.

My first visitor Friday morning was Willy Pryor. He had done some aging since the conference at his home. He looked less like himself in a business suit. He was as brown and hard looking as before, but he did not move the same way. He moved like a much older man. His head trembled a little and his eyes looked sick. It was the damnedest conversation I have ever had with anybody.

“Mr. Pryor, I want you to know that I didn’t kill your niece.”

“Mary was a wild, reckless girl, Mr. Sewell.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“After my sister became ill, Myrna and I tried to do our best for Mary. A good Christian home. We taught her right from wrong. But there was the wildness in her. It couldn’t be helped, I guess. She was promiscuous, Mr. Sewell. She was evil.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“She lived for lust and the gratification of the body. You must know that, Mr. Sewell. You went out with her. You certainly had carnal knowledge of her.”

“No. I didn’t. In the vernacular, I never got beyond first base. I think you’re low-rating her.”

He looked at me. There was an Old Testament sternness about him I had not seen before. “Do you deny possessing her, Mr. Sewell?”

“I certainly do. And I didn’t kill her.”

“She died eternally damned. It was the blood of her father, Mr. Sewell. He was evil. She sinned with many men. I did what I could. I have three young daughters to bring up. She was a bad example in my home, but I was responsible for her. I don’t grieve for her, Mr. Sewell. I feel sorry for her. Whoever killed her was acting as the instrument of God.”

He was beginning to give me the creeps. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t sleep with her. What are you trying to do? Get me to say I did?”

“No, Mr. Sewell.” He stood up and looked down at me, thick white brows flaring, nostrils wide. “God have mercy on you.”

“Now wait a minute.”

“Be of good faith,” he said. “Do not despair.”

They let him out and he went away.

Jerome B. Hyers came bustling importantly in about ten minutes later. He was a short stocky man in his fifties with a great bulge of forehead and black hair long enough on one side so that he was able to paste it down across his bald pate. He had a mouth as big as a bucket, a ringing baritone voice and small sharp brown eyes. We did not get along at all. Every time I’d explain that I hadn’t killed her, Hyers would talk about the privileged conversations a client could have with his lawyer. Then he tried to tell me that the lack of premeditation would make a first degree charge difficult to sustain.

We yelled at each other for a good fifteen minutes. He paced the small cell, with gestures. Suddenly he dropped all his mannerisms. He sat down and took out a big white handkerchief and wiped his mouth and looked at me calmly.

“Didn’t do it, eh?”

“No! I’ve been...”

“All right. All right. Let me think. Beautiful circumstantial case. Beautiful! Quarrel at the club. Your belt. Disposal of body.”

“I admit getting rid of the body.”

He smiled a little sadly. “Young man, I might say that I do not look with great anticipation on basing my case on the assumption that somebody entered your apartment while you were sleeping and put the body in your closet.”

“That’s what happened!”

“Kindly stop repeating yourself. I accept that. Let me see. May. I’ll have until early December to prepare.”

“December! Can you get me out of here?”

“There is no bail for a first degree charge. You remain here until then.” He looked around the cell and sniffed. He said, “Of course we can see that they make you a good deal more comfortable than this.”

“Kruslov and his people knocked me around a lot. Can you make anything out of that?”

“I doubt it. If you had signed a confession we could start thinking about physical duress. But you signed nothing, so we’ll just have to forget that. My fee, young man, will be five thousand dollars, plus expenses if I should decide to employ an investigator.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I’m a lot of lawyer, young man.”

I grinned at him. “Okay.”

“I will do some thinking and review the facts we have and come back and bring a tape recorder and we’ll go into this in detail, young man.”

“What happened to... Miss MacRae, my secretary? I’m anxious to keep her out of this.”

“That investigator, France, reported where he had found you. Kruslov had her brought in. She was here when they brought you in. Kruslov was willing to be convinced that she had no part at all in the murder. He knows her father, and I guess his brother knows her. He talked to France about it. So the papers didn’t get it yet. But I think they will when it comes to trial. The prosecution will want to show that you acted like a guilty man. That includes hiding, and whoever hid you.”

“The company will fire her.”

He looked at me sadly. “They’re not likely to give you a medal, Mr. Sewell.”

At about six o’clock they took me to the same room, that shabby defeated room with its smell of violence, where they had roughed me up. Toni was waiting there for me. They closed the door and left us alone. I suspected the influence of Jerry Hyers in that nice arrangement.

We kissed and both talked at once and kissed again. She put gentle fingertips against my swollen face and cried about that, and about us and about the whole miserable mess.

“It can’t be true, Clint. It’s hideous. It can’t really be true.”

“Part of it was true.”

She flushed. “Yes. Oh, yes. You know, they came to the plant and got me. Captain Kruslov said awful things to me. About helping you. Mr. France was there too. He was terribly angry at you. You chipped one of his teeth. I talked to Mr. France afterward. I asked him if his assignment was over and he said he thought it was. I asked him if he’d work for you. I didn’t think he would he was so angry, but he said he would, and I’m going to pay him.”