You Live Once (11 page)

“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.

“Don’t try to get out,” he said.

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you, Sewell. But not here.”

“How about my place?” I suggested.

He thought that over. “Who’s there?”

“There’s nobody there.”

He found the right key and drove my car. I gave him the directions. I didn’t know what I should do—he had started with painful violence, but he sounded reasonable. Maybe he just wanted to talk. I sensed that I could get the door open and get out of the car before he could grab me. We turned into my drive. He turned off the lights and motor and caught my wrist again. He forced me out my side of the car, following me. He looked toward the apartment door. I had left the lights on. He marched me over into the darkness of the side lot, twisted my wrist up into my back and cursed me again.

“What do you want?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice level and unafraid.

He didn’t want to talk with me, he wanted to tell me.
He told me I had taken her away from him. He told me she was dead and it was my fault. He kept his voice low, his mouth close to my ear. I sensed that he was losing control. He told me I had to keep away from her. I felt lost and helpless. In his increasing excitement he was close to breaking my arm. I groaned with pain, wishing I had tried to get away from him while we were in the car. I knew my arm would snap. I tried to yell for help, hoping to arouse somebody, hoping to frighten him, or startle him back to relative sanity. He caught my throat, choking off the yell, his heavy forearm across my throat, big knee digging into the small of my back. I managed to turn in his grasp and we both fell. He grasped my throat in his big hands. My right arm was useless. Red pinwheels circled behind my eyes and somebody turned the night off, the way you turn off a light.

When I recovered consciousness I was flat on my back in the night, on the grass, looking up at stars through the May leaves of the elms, my throat hurting with each breath. I could hear heavy breathing close by. After a long time I sat up. Yeagger was beside me on his face, blood on his cheek shining black in the faint starlight.

I massaged my right arm; it felt weak and limp. I wobbled a bit when I stood up. I felt as though someone watched me from the deep shadows under the trees. I managed to roll Yeagger over onto his back. He grunted and threw a big forearm across his eyes. After a long time he sat up and stared at me blankly. I helped him to his feet. He leaned on me heavily and I took him into the apartment. He sat in a chair, elbows on his knees, eyes closed. I moved the light so I could see his head. Above his left temple there was a split in the scalp about an inch long. The area around it was badly swollen. I wet the end of a towel in the bathroom sink and brought it to him. He wiped the blood from his face and held the towel against the slowly bleeding wound.

“What happened?” I asked. I had to ask him twice before he looked directly at me.

“I … I guess I was trying to kill you. I heard somebody behind me. I started to turn and … that’s all.”

“It’s a damn good thing somebody stopped you,” I said.

He looked at me and frowned. “I … Everything is shot. Everything. Mary was the one thing that meant anything. You were the one who …”

“I didn’t do a damn thing. She was a tramp, Yeagger. You were just temporary fun and games. If it meant a hell of a lot to you, that just made the game more interesting. Blame yourself, don’t blame me.”

He looked away from me. “I guess I know that. I guess I knew it all along. But … I’m sorry I went after you and …” Astonishingly, the big tough face crumpled, twisted up like a child’s, and he began to cry. It made me acutely embarrassed. He covered his eyes with a big hand and sobbed harshly. After a time he stopped, and knuckled his eyes. He wouldn’t look toward me again. I told him he ought to have a stitch taken in his head; he said it didn’t matter. I asked him how he’d get back up to the lake country; he said that didn’t matter either. He was anxious to go. If he hadn’t been hit he would have killed me. But I could no longer feel indignation or anger. I felt sorry for him. Big and hard as he was, he was a child underneath. He blamed me for breaking his toys, that was all. I stood out in the drive and watched him walk to the street and turn toward town, a big shadow fading into the night.

I looked out toward the lot and felt again that someone was there. It was an atavistic quiver of warning, legacy from the days of the sabertooth. The world was suddenly dark and large and unfriendly. Yeagger had been eliminated. Someone, for an unknown reason, had halted a murder. On this night I could believe it had been halted only to be consummated later, by someone else. I went in to bed and wondered if it would have mattered to anyone if my life had ended there with Yeagger’s hands on my throat. It could so easily have ended—and my
last conscious perception would have been of the rockets behind my eyes and the world turned off by a monster switch.

The feeling of depression was still with me the next morning when I awoke. My arm was lame, but more serviceable than I had expected. My throat was sore, my voice husky. The episode with Yeagger seemed like a dream sequence, too unreal to reawaken fear. During all my dreams that night, someone had stood in shadow and watched me.

As I went out my driveway I saw Mrs. Speers standing in a window. I remembered that I had not collected her trash.

At the plant the floor was ready for two new pieces of heavy equipment. Two experts were there from the machine tool company. It took half the morning to set the equipment in place, make the power hookups and bolt it down. Then we went over it with Gus and with engineering and the experts until we knew all the tricks. At three I still hadn’t had lunch. I went to the locker room, took the protective coveralls off, scoured the grease off my hands and put my suit coat on.

Dodd Raymond came in. He seemed vague, distracted.

“Understand they let Yeagger go,” he said.

“That’s right. Last night. I was there.”

“What were you doing down there, Clint?”

“They wanted fingerprints. Did they get yours?”

“Yes. That Paul France stopped in at the house last night. Asked a lot of questions. Strange sort of guy.”

I finished drying my hands and turned to face him. “Did he ask about the key the Bettiger woman mentioned?”

“Why should he?”

“Dodd, Mary told me about you and the key and your little hideaway.”

He flushed angrily. “She promised not to say anything to anybody.”

“You were pretty foolish, weren’t you?”

I saw his face change. “Don’t forget yourself, Sewell.”

“Forget you’re the boss? No. But what do I say if I’m asked about it?”

He immediately became ingratiating. “Clint, I didn’t mean to get stuffy. Actually, it wouldn’t help the police any to tell them that. If she told you, you know I had a place on the west side of town. I’m going to get my stuff out of there as soon as I get a chance. It was a damn fool thing to do. But I lost my head, I guess. We met there six or seven times, that’s all. It wouldn’t help the police, and it might break up my home. Nancy doesn’t know anything about it. I’d appreciate it if you’d just … let it ride. After all, I didn’t kill her. That ought to be pretty obvious.”

“So who did kill her, Dodd?”

He moved over to a mirror, straightened his necktie. “I haven’t any idea,” he said. But I saw his eyes in the mirror. I sensed that he lied. Maybe he didn’t actually know, but I think he had an idea. A good idea.

After he extracted my halfhearted promise not to mention it, he left. I went back to my office. Toni and I had been slightly awkward with each other all day, and I had covered up by being intensely impersonal. Now hunger gnawed at my nerves and I snarled at her, and saw her eyes fill with tears as she turned hastily away. I apologized to her, tried to get her to smile. It was a cool little smile at first, and then it turned into the grin that was so good to see. She went out and brought me back milk and a sandwich.

Nancy Raymond phoned me at five o’clock. She wanted to talk to me but wouldn’t say what it was about. She wanted me to meet her at Raphael’s, a little place on Broad, not far from the bridge. I agreed.

Toni finished up at about twenty after five. I walked out onto the catwalk and looked down at the big silent production area. I watched Toni walk down the walk toward the iron staircase. She wore a brown linen suit with
a burnt orange scarf knotted around her neck. Her long legs swung nicely, hips moving firmly under brown linen, dark head held high. She went out of sight down the circular stairs, heels tamping the metal—and reappeared below. She smiled up at me, flash of white teeth in shadowed face, and then she was gone. I heard the muted distant bell as she punched out.

Raphael’s is a logical outgrowth of the new money that has come to town. It is a small place, wedged in where there was logically no room for it. It is ten feet wide and quite deep. Forty feet from the front door it makes a right angle turn and widens out to twenty feet. A zebra-striped spinet piano sits in the angle, dividing the bar from the lounge. During the cocktail hour a girl with lovely bare shoulders sits at the piano, facing a tilted mirror that is placed in the angle of the wall in such a way that from bar or lounge you can see her face and her clever fingers. The lighting is muted, the soundproofing dense, the chairs deep. People talk softly there, drink quietly, and make little schemes that break hearts.

Nancy smiled at me from a corner of the lounge as I walked toward her. She looked as though she had been there some time. She had done something severe with her hair and it made her head look too small.

The waiter came over to the table as I sat. All the other tables were occupied. I asked for a martini. He replaced the ashtray, took Nancy’s empty glass and eased away.

“I’ve had two for courage, Clint,” she said. “No, don’t look like that. I’m not going to make problems for you like I did that time at the club.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you did. Old reliable Clint.”

“Yes you would mind. And so would I. I don’t know … how to start this.”

“Just start.”

She paused while the drinks came. “I told you that we quarreled and Dodd went out and didn’t come back until five. Remember that?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I guess you’re the only person who knows that. He picked me up yesterday to take me out to Pryor’s and on the way out he said, very reasonably, that if something had happened to Mary, it might cause a lot of unnecessary talk and trouble if he had to account for that period of time. He told me that he had driven out of town, maybe fifty or sixty miles. He said he had parked beside the road and smoked and listened to the car radio. He said that he was merely sulking like a child, and wanted me to be worried about him. He hadn’t seen anyone. He said that after he was there about an hour, he turned around and came home, a little ashamed of himself. He said it would be a lot simpler if I would say that we had gone right home from the club and he hadn’t gone out at all.”