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 saber tooth 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 ofi 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 chanc
e. 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 half-hearted 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."
"You agreed to that?"
"Wait a minute. I said I would think about it. I said that I didn't think it was wise to tell lies to the police. I said if I lied and they found out I had Bed, it might make him look worse. Well, you know what happened at that meeting. It certainly seemed to me that Nels Yeagger had done it and they'd prove it-I just had that feeling. So when Sergeant Hilver asked me, I told him just what Dodd wanted me to say. Last night that Paul France came by the house. I told the same lie again.
You saw the morning paper. They released Nels."
"Yes?"
She lifted her glass in an uncertain hand.
"Clint, I just don't know what to think any more."
"Are you trying to say this? Are you trying to say that now you're wondering if he could have killed her? And you want me to tell you that's nonsense?"
She looked down and when she looked up again, I heard tears in her voice. One tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped at it quickly with the back of her hand, a child's appealing gesture.
"I just don't know any more.
I just don't know. And I don't know anyone else to talk to."
"What has started you wondering?"
"He's been... so very strange. He hasn't been himself, I guess not since we came here to Warren. Last night he was up most of the night, pacing- around. He doesn't hear me when I speak to him."
I told her of my conversation with him in the washroom. Perhaps I should have edited it.
"Six or seven times," she said, a bitter expression on her mouth.
"And I know nothing about it. Nothing at all. I suppose these things should have a mathematical value.
Six or seven is better than twenty. But one is equal to a hundred, isn't it?"
"I can't see him killing her, Nancy. Not Dodd. He'd risk an affair, but not a murder. He's too cold to risk murder.
Too cold and too hard and too ambitious and... perhaps too selfish."
I had hoped to comfort her. It was the wrong way. Her eyes flashed.
"How can you say that? How can you say a thing like that? People have always liked him and always liked working with him. You're entirely wrong about him.
Entirely!"
I thought of Tory's warning, and Ray's warning. I could have told her, but I realized that she didn't have much left.
By telling her I would be taking away one more thing, the illusion he had created in her mind. Even though he had hurt her dreadfully with infidelity, she perhaps had a right to be proud of his professional makeup.
"Maybe I'm wrong about that, Nancy."
"You are, Clint."
It surprised me a little that Nancy had never been aware of his ruthlessness in business. He had pretended with her, as with everyone else. I wondered if there was anyone he showed his real face to. I wondered if he had been frank with Mary Olan.
She shivered.
"It's awful of me to keep wondering if he could have done it. If he acted normal, I wouldn't keep wondering. But he has something on his mind-something so important he seems far away, as if I don't really know him any more."
"It may be that he's just afraid of the police finding out about the affair."
"I've thought of that," she said eagerly.
"Clint, he couldn't kill anybody, could he?"
"I don't think so."
She was happier for a moment, and then relapsed again into worry. She laughed, and it was an unhappy sound.
"Six months ago," she said, "I would have sworn that it was impossible that he'd ever... look for someone else.
But he did. So what good is confidence?"
"There's one way you can end the tension, Nancy."
"How?"
"Tell Kruslov the truth about the night Mary was killed.
He'll find out if Dodd killed her."
She looked at me blankly for what seemed a long time.
She put on her gloves.
"Thanks for listening to me, Clint. I thought
you'd be able to help me. I'm sorry I was wrong."
I watched her leave and sat down again. Poor Nancy.
Her vast capacity for loyalty was at war with the hurt he had dealt her. She was a woman who seemed to have a face and a mind planned for a narrower, frailer body.
There was something almost cumbersome about the richness of her body, as though it burdened her, troubled her, astonished her. As though it waited patiently, in thrall to the more pallid mind, yet knowing that when its inevitable moments came, it would once again, as so many times in the past, take full strong command of the total organism.
John D MacDonald - You Live Once Page 9