John D MacDonald - You Live Once

by You Live Once(Lit)

  John D MacDonald - You Live Once

  Copyright 1956

  chapter 1.

  I have never awakened easily. I have always had a sneaking envy for those people who seem to be able to bound out of bed, functioning perfectly. I have to use two alarm clocks on work mornings.

  The prolonged hammering at my door finally awakened me. I groped blindly for my bathrobe, and shouldered into it as I walked heavily, still drugged with sleep, from the bedroom of my apartment out through the living room to the front door.

  I knew that it was a Sunday morning in May, and knew that I had a truly sickening headache, far out of proportion to the drinking I had done on Saturday night-two cocktails before dinner and two widely spaced highballs afterward. I wondered if I had been poisoned by something I had eaten. The headache seemed focused over my right ear in a tender area as big as an apple. My hangover headaches are aches that go straight through. And why the sore spot?

  I opened my front door and squinted at the two men standing on the shallow front stoop in the bright morning sunshine. One was in uniform and one was not. Their prowl car stood where I usually park my car. I remembered where my car was.

  "You Clinton Sewell?" the man in the grey suit asked. I said I was and they walked in.

  "Were you out with Mary Olan last night?"

  I sat down and looked up at them. I was afraid I knew what this was all about.

  "An accident? Is she hurt?"

  Grey suit was spokesman.

  "What makes you ask that?"

  "I swear she seemed all right to me. The night air straightened her out. She said she could drive and I believed her."

  "You had a date with her last night."

  "That's right. She played golf with some woman yesterday afternoon at the Locust Ridge Club. It was arranged that I'd meet her later, along with the Raymonds, and we'd have dinner there. There was a dance last night. I drove out about six, and the Raymonds arrived a little later. Mary had brought a change of clothing with her, and she was waiting in the cocktail lounge."

  "When did you leave?"

  "About two this morning. That was about... nine hours ago according to my watch."

  "But you didn't take her home?" The uniformed man strolled over and looked in my bedroom, then the bathroom, and came back.

  "No. She had her own car. She got a little high. Too high to drive safely. That made it complicated. I had my car there. It's still there, in fact. After an argument she agreed to let me drive her home. I was going to take a cab from her house, either back here or back to my car, whichever I felt like. I hadn't decided. We had the top down on her car. I got her almost home and she said she felt fine. She seemed to be okay. So I turned around and drove back here and got out and she went on home. Did something happen on the way home?"

  "She never got home, Mr. Sewell. Her aunt got Mr. Stine, the Commissioner of Public Safety, out of bed this morning. That gave it a priority. I guess you know what the Olans and the Pryors mean in this town. Did Miss Olan say anything about going any place else?"

  "No. She was pretty tired. She'd played twenty-seven holes of golf. We planned to go up to Smith Lake this afternoon and do some water skiing."

  "Why did she drive you here, instead of back to your car?"

  "She started to, but then we decided that she'd drive me on up to Smith Lake in her car today, picking me up here.

  Then when we got back to town late today, she would leave me ofi at the club."

  They had both relaxed a bit. The one in uniform said, "It'll turn out she went to see somebody and stayed with them."

  Grey suit shrugged.

  "Could be. Thanks, Mr. Sewell.

  Sorry we woke you up."

  I stood in the doorway and watched them get in the prowl car, swing around and drive out. It was a beautiful day-bright, clear and warm. This would be my second summer in Warren, my second summer in the Midwest. I wondered what had happened to Mary. I wasn't particularly worried; she was unpredictable. I decided I would go up to the lake anyway, on the off chance that she'd show up. Some of her friends would be up there.

  I was close to the phone when it rang.

  "Clint?" It was the cautious voice of Dodd Raymond, my new boss.

  "Good morning to you, Dodd. Do you feel as bad as I do? You had the lobster too, didn't you? Got a headache like mine?"

  "Clint, have they asked you about Mary?" I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was speaking so that his wife, Nancy, couldn't overhear the call. I ached to call him a fool.

  "The police were here. She didn't get home last night.

  She dropped me off here."

  "I thought you were going to drive her home?"

  "We had the top down. She felt better after a while."

  "They phoned me. Her aunt told them she heard her say she planned to see us at the club. I told them she had a date with you."

  "In a manner of speaking."

  "Knock it off! I told them where you live."

  "Thanks. So why didn't you phone me and tell me they were coming?"

  "Clint, that damn phone rang twenty-three times before I hung up."

  "Well, they don't know anything so far. She'll turn up.

  I'm going on up to the lake anyway. Will you?"

  "I don't know yet. See you Monday if we don't."

  He hung up. I went and opened the can of cold tomato juice, poured a high glass and laced it with Tabasco. I leaned against the sink and let it go down slowly. The headache throbbed over my right ear.

  I thought about Mary and about my damn fool boss, Dodd Raymond. My dating Mary Olan was supposed to be misdirection, the way a magician operates. I wouldn't have stood still for any such fool arrangement had it not been for Dodd's wife, Nancy. And I had earnestly tried to follow Nancy's unspoken plea. Even last night when I had parked Mary's car in the dark driveway beside my apartment, turned out the lights and made an expansive pass. Mary had permitted herself to be kissed. But her heart wasn't in it. She was a highly exciting, and excitable, woman but I was just a good friend. She told me so.

  Emboldened by her intake of liquor, not my own, I had suggested that she leave Dodd alone. She hadn't gotten angry; she had just laughed. I had made another halfhearted try, but it had been ruined by some damn fool who had used my driveway to turn around in, lighting us up like a stage.

  That had spoiled the mood. We'd planned the trip to the lake and I had explained to her my unique habits of sleep.

  After she'd promised not to use cold water if I wasn't up, I went and unlocked my front door and took the key out to her. The spare key was in the drawer of my desk. I made a mental note to take it with me to the lake.

  I remembered that after I had gone to bed, in the few minutes before sleep fell on me like a woolly bear, I had gotten erotically fanciful about Mary Olan's coming in to wake me the next day. There wasn't a chance in the world that she would let me float up out of sleep and pull her down into my warm bed, but there was no law against dreaming.

  In some ways I couldn't blame Dodd Raymond. Mary Olan is smallish but sturdy. I think I could span her waist with my hands. She is brown and rounded and firm. She has black, black hair and about all she does with it is keep it out of her eyes. She has a thin face, a wide mouth, black caterpillar eyebrows, a go-to-hell expression, limitless energy and several million bucks tied up in various trust funds. She has an air of importance. Waiters and doormen snap, pop and crackle when she lifts one finger, or one millimeter of eyebrow. In a faded bathing suit in the middle of Jones Beach she would still be unmistakably Somebody. She has an electric something that could disorganize the equipment in a research lab. Even the halfhearted kisses she had allowed me
would each have melted an acre of permafrost above Nome.

  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 tea berry leaf. I kept telling myself it was single mindedness 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, em purpled 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 light 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.

  I knew what I could use to wrap her up. In the back end of the car there was an old tarpaulin, a greasy mess. I had
laid it under the wheels during the winter to get out of heavy snow. On the coldest nights I had kept it over the hood of the un garaged Merc, a hundred-watt bulb on an extension cord burning inside the hood. I went out through my kitchen and looked at the collection of debris in the attached shed. Warren has garbage collection, but they do not take cans and bottles. You save those until you have enough to warrant a trip to the dump. I had a reasonable collection.

  My plan was set and it seemed practical. I went out and backed the car up close to my front door. I opened the rear compartment and took the tarp into the house. I loaded a small cardboard carton with cans and bottles and took it out and put it in the rear compartment, well over to one side. Mrs. Speers appeared with her usual magic, materializing sixty feet away, strolling toward me, smiling, a big unbending woman in a black and white Sunday print, wearing one white canvas work glove and carrying a pair of small red garden shears.