You Live Once (8 page)

Half the time it is like working in a madhouse, and the rest of the time you are merely a one-armed juggler. I love it. There is always more than just keeping the thing running. Right now, coordinating with Engineering, I was in the middle of changing one of the lines, unbolting equipment, jackhammering places for new equipment, resetting conveyor lines. Sales, in New York, was hollering. I knew that once the new line was set and checked out, we’d have to go on two-shift operation.

I like to get there early. I like to stand out on the catwalk and look down for a few minutes at the silent waiting equipment. Its arrangement is an exercise in logic. All the beds and housings and turrets are cold grey, and all the moving parts are bright Chinese red. It is a good
place to work. It is clean, air conditioned, well lighted. Labor relations are pretty good. C.P.P. is very mildly paternalistic, but not so much that the guy on the machine wishes they’d knock off the expensive fluff and put the difference in his envelope.

I took my morning look at the floor and then went into the small office next to mine where my records clerk works. I studied the big score board, made a mental note of the weak spots and went into my own office. It is air conditioned and sound-proofed, but with the door shut once the day gets going, the rumble of the floor can make you feel as though you’re on an ocean liner. People go in and out my door all day long. Every time the door is opened the blast of pure noise, metal-cutting noise, is monstrous.

I had picked up a morning paper on the way to work, but I hadn’t had a chance to do more than glance at a fat black headline—
OLAN HEIRESS MISSING
. I had expected newspaper coverage, but not so much. This went all the way across the top of page one, dwarfing a second headline about a Paris conference. I hadn’t known Mary Olan was quite that important.

I spread the paper out on my desk to read the account. Warren has two papers, the morning
Ledger-Tribune
and the evening
Ledger-Record
, both owned by the same firm. Except on Monday, the morning paper is usually a warmed over version of the evening paper. They are excessively dull papers, full of editorial caution, unwilling to offend any local group. No particularly controversial syndicate columnist is ever used.

The subhead said,
CAR FOUND ABANDONED NEAR HIGHLAND
.

It was typical tippy-toe Warren coverage. No mention of the family killing. No mention of Mary’s abortive marriage and annulment. No hint of her mother’s incurable illness. They’d even had her going home from the club at a more reasonable hour. I was glad that the police had apparently kept the name of her dinner dance companion to themselves. Otherwise I would have had a reporter or two hanging around. Or maybe not; perhaps the Warren papers thought there was something unclean
about going out and tracking down the principals in a disappearance of this kind.

I knew where Highland was. It was a small rural community about fifteen miles from town. Mary had driven me out through there to the Pryor farm one day to show me a horse. The horse had rolled his eyes, laid his ears back and tried to make a meal off my arm. She had said he was “spirited.” I watched from a safe place while John Fidd saddled the horse and Mary took him out and ran him. He was foaming and wilted when she brought him back. Fidd took him and started walking him around. She showed me most of the farm and then we went back to town, with Mary smelling faintly of horse.

The paper had run a cut of Mary. It saddened me to look at it. It had been taken some years ago, before life had put that look of mockery and hardness in her eyes. She looked very young, very earnest.

My girl came in at quarter to nine. Her name is Antonia MacRae. She is a slim pleasant morsel, and satisfyingly bright. She decorates and implements an office adequately. Italian and Scots combine to make an intriguing woman. Her mother gave her her coloring, her suggestively rounded figure with its promise of languor and lazy Sundays in bed. But from Papa she inherited a cool, canny eye, a lot of skepticism, and a brain that goes click like an I.B.M. machine.

She came in wearing a blue jumper over a white blouse. With her crow-wing hair and white white teeth, the effect was good. The beltless waist of the jumper was so beautifully fitted to her figure that, had I not had Mary on my mind, it would have been distracting.

It makes for a peculiar relationship to share an office with a girl who is lovely and desirable, as well as efficient. When work piled up I could forget everything except her quickness and her loyalty. It was during the lulls that I would become aware of other things. As when she would sit on her heels and dig for something in the
bottom drawer of a file cabinet, and I would find myself staring at the way her waist would curve richly into the fullness of hips. Or she would bring something to me at my desk and, out of the corner of my eye, I would see the impertinence of breast under a sheen of office blouse, a bare six inches away. Or I would be standing over her, dictating to her, and, while hunting for the right phrase, realize I was bobbing my head around like a fool trying to find a vantage point from where I could look down the front of her dress.

Toni MacRae was quite aware of my interest, my speculative admiring interest. It caused her to change certain postures rather quickly. It often caused a very delicate blush. I had made a pass the second week she was in my office. It had been repulsed with unmistakable firmness, and no anger. She made it clear for the record. Another type of girl in those same circumstances, quite aware of her figure and of the boss’s interest in it, might have done a certain amount of flaunting and posturing. Not Toni. She couldn’t very well wear a Mother Hubbard, but she dressed and carried herself so as to minimize office tension.

“Good morning,” she said, putting her purse in her desk drawer.

“Morning. I’m reading about Mary.”

“You were one of the friends she had dinner with, weren’t you? I heard you talking to Mr. Raymond about it Friday.”

“I was one of the ones, yes.”

“Funny thing,” she said, frowning thoughtfully. She leaned back in her little secretarial chair. Her desk is cattycorner near the outside windows, facing mine. She laced her fingers across the nape of her neck, elbows out, frowning as she thought about Mary’s disappearance. I must have stared at the front of the jumper with horrid intensity. She straightened up, lowering her arms hastily, bringing her typing machine up out of the bowels of the desk with one practiced muscular wrench.

I could sense the plant filling up. I could hear the faraway ding-ding-ding of the I.B.M. time clock as they filed in. A few pieces of equipment started and then, on the stroke of nine the place came to full life for the long Monday. Hangover day. Absentee day. Gus Kruslov was my first customer. He waddled in and said, “I ain’t got me a single damn man to put on that number three mill.”

“You’ll have to take King off setup then.”

“He’ll raise hell.”

“Put him on. Lean on him. I’ll stop by later and sweet-talk him.”

As soon as he was gone, Ratcher came in with one of his kid engineers who had dreamed up a cutie over the weekend. We spread the drawing out on the table and went over it, and it looked fine. The kid was beaming. Toni had gotten the summary report from the records clerk and she was making a stencil, so I went down on the floor with the engineers.

It was that kind of a day. A jumping bean day. Dodd Raymond came up to my office at about eleven. Toni had spotted him down on the floor and tipped me. He came in and shut the noise out, and glanced at Toni. I told her to go get me that tool list. That was code to go powder her nose.

Dodd placed a haunch on my desk comer, clicked my lamp on and off. “They still don’t know a damn thing,” he said. “I just talked to Sutton.”

“Who would Sutton be?”

“Chief of Police. There isn’t enough yet to warrant bringing in the F.B.I, but they’re standing by.” He glanced at me. “Clint, do you think she could be doing all this for a gag? For excitement. For some kind of a laugh.”

“It doesn’t seem reasonable to me.”

“The police are going to keep digging. Clint, I know it’s none of my damn business but were you … intimate with her?”

I looked him in the eye. I’d never noticed before how
pale his eyes were. I smiled and said, “I guess that’s right.”

“What’s right?”

“That it’s none of your damn business.”

He had the grace to flush. He got off my desk and off my back. “Well, maybe we’ll know soon.”

“Maybe we will.”

He left. It annoyed me that he would be sly enough to use the smoke screen of her disappearance to try to find out if she’d been cheating on him. It annoyed me, and yet it planted some serious doubts about the correctness of my bedtime conjectures about him. If he knew she was dead, having killed her, he wouldn’t be concerned about her possible promiscuity. Evidently Mary Olan had given him a hell of a time, and I couldn’t be precisely sorry.

I had just gotten back from a late lunch, having missed the closing time of the cafeteria by minutes, when Harvey Wills phoned down to me. “Clint, I just had a call from Mr. Willis Pryor. They’re having a little conference out at his house this afternoon about this Olan girl. They want you and Dodd there. Dodd has already left. I didn’t want either of you to go at first, but Mr. Pryor hinted that it could be made official if I didn’t cooperate.”

“Hell!”

“Are you loaded up?”

“I’m jammed. Well, I guess I gotta.”

I explained the situation to Toni and asked her if she’d mind hanging around after five if I hadn’t gotten back by then. She said she wouldn’t mind. I told her not to wait beyond six. I had a few instructions and she took them down in her notebook. She looked up at me when I had finished, her eyes serious.

“Clint, does she mean a lot to you?” She calls me Clint when we are alone, never anything but Mr. Sewell when anybody else is there. She flushed and looked away after asking the question.

“Not too much, Toni. She’s a spoiled brat. She thinks
she’s better than practically anybody else. But … it’s been something to do in the evening.”

“I shouldn’t have asked that. But you’ve been so … odd this morning. As if you’re very troubled.”

“I guess I am.” But I couldn’t tell her why.

The day was still dismal as I drove out toward the Pryor home. The sky was dark and I wondered if it was raining in the hills. It occurred to me I might have picked the spot too well—it might be a year before anyone found her. Then just the delicate yellowed skull, black hair clinging to dried scrap of scalp. Skirt shredded by the winds and the rain, rotten to the touch. If no one found her, I knew I would live with nightmares for a long, long time.

Though the assemblage was unexpectedly large—eleven already gathered when I walked in—they looked muted and dwarfed by the big dramatic living room. The white fireplace wall was at least twenty feet high. There was just enough edge in the day, with the change of wind, so that a small fire glowed in the waist-high fireplace set into the wall.

Willy Pryor greeted me. He acted nervous, keyed up. He has a heavy shock of white hair which has not receded a bit, though he must be about fifty. His massive white eyebrows curl upward and outward. He is as brown as any Polynesian all year round. His standard costume is riding pants and boots and a cotton shirt unbuttoned halfway to the waist with the sleeves rolled up. The grey hair is thickly matted on his chest. He’s about five seven, stocky, trim and powerful, with arms like a stevedore. I guess he has never had to do a day’s work in his life, but he does manual labor on the Pryor farm, rides, hunts, flies, goes after marlin and tuna each year. You sense that had it been necessary for him to work, had he started with nothing, he would somehow have ended up just where he is, and just what he is. He’s a good talker, a sometimes extravagant personality.

His wife, Myrna, smiled a bit timidly at me. She is a round, warm, dull, comfortable woman. She bore three daughters for Willy, and that seems to have been the extent of her participation in life. No beautician, no couturier could ever make Myrna Pryor look like
anything other than precisely what she was—a farm girl from the Highland area. Maybe with his neurotic murderous sister, and all his other highly-charged relatives, Myrna was exactly what Willy had wanted and needed. And it had helped the blood, if the bouncy health of Jigger, Dusty and Skeeter was any indication.