John D MacDonald - You Live Once

by You Live Once(Lit)

  Cars went by at high speed, swirling heated winds around me. Sun glinted off the chrome. Trucks snored by.

  In between the clumps of traffic, I walked east, keeping my head well down so that traffic headed into the city could not see my face.

  I passed a drive-in. Fear had destroyed hunger. Yet even had I been hungry, I could not risk wasting that much time. I kept remembering what France had said about a six-state alarm.

  A half mile beyond the drive-in, as I walked, I heard a car coming behind me. I turned with upraised thumb and false smile. It was a highway patrol car. I whirled around, realizing as I did it that my quickness in itself would be cause of suspicion. The car sped by and just as I began to feel better about it, brakes screamed the tires on dry pavement. I saw that it was going to make a U turn as soon as traffic permitted. I turned and leaped the ditch, vaulted a low fence and ran across a cultivated field. As I reached a fringe of woods I looked back. The patrol car was stopped on the shoulder. A man stood by the fence, another near the car. The man by the fence was very still. Something whizzed near my head. A cut leaf circled slowly down. I heard a thin distant cracking sound, and then another.

  I dived into the shelter of the woods and ran in terror. I tripped and fell and rolled to my feet and kept running.

  Branches stung my cheeks. I lost all sense of direction. I knew only that people who wanted to kill me were after me. When I fell the second time it knocked the wind out of me. I lay where I had fallen and listened. I could hear traffic sounds far away. I heard a bird near by, a bird with a fluid intricate call. A jet went over, too high to see, rumbling faintly.

  After that I went on more slowly. The woods ended.

  There was a wide field, a dirt road beyond it. I squatted and watched the road for a time. Nothing came along. I started across the field toward the road. Ten steps from the shelter of the woods, I heard a car coming. I scrambled back. The car stopped a hundred yards down the road and let a man in uniform out. The man stared toward the woods. I knew he couldn't see me, but he seemed to be looking directly at me. I saw him sit on a fence and light a cigarette, still watching the woods.

  I moved back until I could no longer see him. I traveled in a line parallel to the road. Soon I came upon another man who waited as patiently as the first. I turned back the way I had come. The woods had seemed vast at first. Now it was a skimpy patch of brush, affording no good place of concealment. It did not take long to find they were on all sides of me. The sun was nearly gone. I knew I could run no longer.

  I remembered Toni and I realized I had been in an unthinking panic. France would report where I had hidden.

  Toni might be in custody already, charged with aiding me. This was a man hunt, and anyone who had assisted me would suffer.

  I came out of the woods at dusk, back by the main highway, my hands held high. Three patrol cars and two Warren police vehicles were there. I was nearly sick with exhaustion. Kruslov was there. They searched me and put me in a car.

  Back at police headquarters I was booked, photographed, searched again. They took everything from my pockets, plus my belt and shoelaces and necktie, and put me in a dingy cell. A half hour later I was taken out of the cell and upstairs to a small bare room with barred windows, a spavined conference table, six chairs, a spittoon, a wall clock and another girlie calendar. It was the same set of impossibly lush thighs, but this time a wind, rather than barbed wire, had lifted her skirt.

  A young sandy-haired, lantern-jawed patrolman guarded me. He sat on the table and chewed gum and watched me out of colorless eyes. When I asked him for a cigarette, he said he didn't smoke. There was a phone on the corner of the table. A piece of the earpiece had been chipped off.

  Fifteen minutes later Kruslov, Hilver, a strange civilian and a male stenographer came in in quick single file, banging the door back against the wall. Kruslov ordered the guard out. They all took chairs. Kruslov put thick hands on his hips and looked down at me.

  "Well, damn it, you didn't get very far. Hid out in your girlfriend's room and then tried to hike out of town. Not smart, Sewell."

  "Where is she?"

  "I ask the questions."

  -"She didn't have anything to do with it."

  "Did you spend the night in her room?"

  "That has no bearing on this, Captain."

  The back of his hand was like a board. It cut the inside of my mouth and rocked me so far over I nearly fell off the chair. He smiled, almost genially.

  "I am going to ask a lot of questions. I want a lot of answers. I have missed a lot of sleep. I am impatient. I do not want smart answers, or a smart attitude. I want a little humility, Sewell. You killed a society girl and you did it very neatly and damn near got away with it. Smart police work caught you. We looked in the trunk of the car of everybody connected with this thing, and in your car we found proof you had her body in there. You ran and you didn't run good enough so you've lost all the way around.

  You outsmarted Paul France, which is something nobody does very often. That was the last piece of luck you had, the last piece of luck you're going to get. Now I'll ask questions and you answer them. Why did you kill her?"

  "I didn't kill her."

  He struck me again, in the same place. I wiped my mouth and said, "I want a lawyer."

  "You're here for questioning. We haven't placed a formal charge yet. When we place a formal charge, you'll be entitled to an attorney. In the meantime, you can refuse to answer questions. Naturally, we'll have to accept your refusal, but we'll keep asking them. When I'm tired, somebody else will ask them. Where did you kill her?"

  "I didn't kill her."

  This time I was knocked off the chair. The others watched without any great show of interest.

  "You don't want to be stupid about this, Sewell. You see, we can prove you had the body in the back of your car."

  "I know I did."

  "That's cooperative. Let's have a little more cooperation. If you admit that, then will you admit killing her?"

  "But I didn't kill her."

  He smiled at me.

  "I know. The body came in the mail.

  Special delivery. Or you found it under a bush. Where did you get the body, Sewell?"

  "Somebody brought it in in the night and put it in my closet. Mary had a key. I gave it to her so she could wake me up if I was still asleep when she came to get me to go up to the lake Sunday. After your men left I found the body. I was scared. So I got rid of it."

  He moved with the bulky quickness of a bear, and all the strength. He lifted me out of the chair with one hand on my throat, swung me around and banged me back against the wall. My head hit hard, dazing me. Through the momentary fog I saw his face wearing a gentle smile, heard his soft voice.

  "You just found her in your closet.

  Just like that. Dead."

  "Yes," I croaked.

  He let go of me, turned with a snort of disgust and sat down again.

  "Sit down, Sewell."

  "It's the truth. She had a belt of mine around her neck.

  A red fabric belt. It's in the top drawer of my bureau. And I suppose you want the tarp I carried her in. That's in a hole in a rotten birch, about a hundred and fifty feet back in the woods, a hole about seven feet off the ground. I moved the body. I know that was wrong. But I was scared. I didn't think clearly."

  Kruslov rattled his fingers on the scarred table top.

  "Sewell, I'll tell you how it happened. You invited her in.

  She came in. She was a teaser. She got you all hot and upset and she wouldn't give. You were drunk. You killed her and put her in the closet and went peacefully to sleep."

  "How about her car?"

  "You drove it out and left it."

  "And walked fifteen miles back? Anyway, if I did that, why not take the body along with the car?"

  "You were drunk. You didn't know what you were doing." He leaned toward me, smiling softly.

  "Come on, Clint. We're all men of the world. We know t
he score. We know how a thing like that can happen. Hell, we know it wasn't premeditated. I'll personally see that you get every break in the world. Honest."

  "I didn't kill her. Somebody else killed her and wished the body on me."

  He got up and hammered the other side of my face with the back of his hand. It was the sore side. I got my balance and looked up at him.

  "If you keep your damn hands, off me you'll get further."

  And he knocked me off the chair.

  The civilian interrupted. He was an oily joker with white hair and confidential eyes.

  "Joe, let me have a minute alone with this boy."

  "Okay, Bernie," Kruslov said. They trooped out and left me with Bernie. He gave me a cigarette and lighted it. I fingered the inside of my cheek.

  "Son, Captain Kruslov is a good officer, but he's used to handling the lower element. I can see right away that he's not used to dealing with a man like you. But that won't change his methods. He's tireless. He won't give up. He'll give you hell on earth until you come clean with him. Just between the two of us, I think you'd be doing the smart thing to open up. I really do. And he meant it when he said he'd see that you get every break."

  "You think I ought to?"

  He patted my shoulder.

  "I'm positive of it. It's pretty sickening the way he cuffs people around. He hasn't injured anybody permanently-yet."

  "You can go to hell. I found the body in my closet and that's the entire truth."

  Bernie was not like Captain Kruslov; Bernie used the palm of his hand instead of the back. I nailed him right between the eyes, hurting hell out of my hand. He rocked back on the table, legs kicking, and fell off on the other side, taking a chair down with him. Kruslov, Hilver and the stenographer came tearing back in. Bernie wanted me held while he got even. Kruslov told him to sit down and shut up.

  We started again. I stuck doggedly to the truth. They kept trying to mix me up. They began to work it in shifts. It is funny what happens to you when people keep driving questions at you, pounding them in, jeering at your answers. You eventually arrive at a semi-hypnotic state. Their heads all looked as big as bushel baskets.

  Their voices seemed to start inside my head. I no longer knew or cared who asked what. My voice deteriorated to a husky rasp. Somebody started snapping the end of my nose with his finger, every time I answered a question. I don't know when it got dark and the room lights went on.

  My nose hurt like fire each time it was snapped, but I got too weary to duck. I don't know when the belt and the tarp and the glossy pictures of the body were brought in. I only know that it went on and on and on.

  I sat in the bottom of a well with searchlights shining down on me, big heads looking down in there at me. I answered up out of the bottom of my well, my voice hollow. I squatted down there and knew the well was getting deeper and deeper. Their questions were further away. The lights were dimmer.

  Suddenly everything stopped. I sat with my chin on my chest. The room was too silent.

  "Midnight, Joe," somebody said.

  "Yeah," Kruslov said. He yawned mightily. I had trouble establishing which midnight. Wednesday midnight?

  I remembered that they'd buried Mary Olan this afternoon. It seemed that I had missed the funeral.

  "What do you think?"

  "Let him cool. We'll try again. Or maybe we won't.

  There's enough. Principi says there's enough to go ahead on. I'm sick of his damn face. Take him out of here."

  They hauled me onto my feet. I felt drunk. Kruslov was by the door. As they started to walk me by him I yanked my right arm free and swung at him. It was a pretty feeble effort. He moved easily away. He looked at me and shook his head and smiled and said, "I'll be damned! Protect me, boys." They walked me out. They had a nice way of getting me down the hall. I couldn't walk at the right speed. They would either prod me in the back, or grab the back of my collar and yank me back. I made it to the dark safety of the grim little cell. It had been there the full hundred years, and it smelled like a flooded cellar.

  There was a bare bulb in the narrow corridor. The bar shadows striped the cell and me. I lay sore in the dimness and tried to reconstruct my pride, my oneness, the lost uniqueness of me. In my special innocence I had thought police brutality a thing of myth, of newsstand legend. Oh, they might pound young punks around, beat some humility into street-corner arrogance, slap respect into the weasel-faced, duck tail-haircut ted pimpled little thieves-and it would do them good-but not me. Not Sewell.

  Pride in manhood is perhaps a precarious thing. But it is so seldom tested; you so seldom have to lay it on the line. I was a lost child and the big boys had beaten me up in a corner of the school yard. It takes something out of you.

  But it puts something back.

  I had been somewhat of a wise guy. They couldn't do this to me. I looked back at the last few years-too much pride in my own rightness, in the skills, in the job, in being tall, free, respected and unmarked. Now I was no longer unique. They could reach me. They knew where I lived. It wasn't a big game any more; it wasn't a joke. I realized fully for the first time that a girl was dead, and knew what her death meant. You can't be bright about death. Bright and wise and untouched.

  If the heavy hands of Kruslov had done nothing else, they had done one thing. They had awakened me to my own responsibility-the responsibility I had not yet squarely faced. I had to find out who had done it. Her death was my affair.

  In a few hours I had done a lot of growing up, most of it overdue. I lay on the thin hard mattress and tried to heal myself by thinking of Toni. But she was far away, and I had not known her. There were other things which had to be done first. Olan money pushed heavily against Kruslov. He had passed the pressure along to me. I was no longer amused.

  chapter 9.

  I spent all day Thursday in the cell. Tasteless food arrived at intervals. There was nothing to read, nothing to hear. It was a quiet place.

  Kruslov came as the small high window was turning grey in the May dusk. He came into the cell, rested and amiable, a folded newspaper in his hand.

  "Well, boy, the D.A."s office has approved the file for prosecution and we don't hold you for questioning any more. Now we hold you on a first degree charge."

  "What does that mean?"

  "They figure they have enough to go on. Now you can have a lawyer. You got enough dough to hire a good one, don't you?"

  "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 c
lub 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.