You Live Once Part 10

Then I have to go down on the floor with my time and motion study man and quack with the steward.

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, jack hammering 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.

Mary Olan, twenty-six-year-old niece of Mr. and Mrs. Willis Pryor of this city, and heiress to the Rolph Olan estate, has been missing since late Sat.u.r.day evening, and police state today that no trace of her has been found. A late model black convertible found yesterday near an abandoned farm south of Highlands was identified as belonging to the missing woman. A search of the surrounding area has been organized.

Miss Olan left the Pryor home on Sat.u.r.day at noon, alone. She lunched at the Locust Ridge Club and, during the afternoon, played golf with Miss Neale Bettiger. She had taken other clothing to the club with her, and she dressed there and met friends for dinner and a club dance.

She left the club after midnight, with the stated intention of returning to her home. It has been reported that Miss Olan did not seem disturbed or emotionally upset in any way.

Police have not ruled out the possibility of kidnapping, and a close watch is being kept on the Pryor home. They found no evidence of foul play in Miss Olan's automobile. She was last seen wearing a white skirt, a dark grey' sleeveless blouse and high-heeled dark grey shoes. She is five feet four, brunette and weighs approximately a hundred and twenty pounds. Her eyes are grey.

Miss Olan is the granddaughter of Thomas Burke Olan who founded the Warren Citizens Bank and Trust Company, and Olan Tool and Die, which is now the Federated Tool Company, Inc. Miss Olan was born in this city at the old Olan home on Prospect Street, now headquarters of the Heart of America Historical a.s.sociation, which was given the property under the terms Of Mr. Rolph Olan's will. Miss Olan was educated in private schools here and abroad, and has made her home here for the past four years.

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 princ.i.p.als 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 Mac Rae 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 IBM. 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 belt less 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 Mac Rae 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 pa.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 catty corner 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 IBM. 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 d.a.m.n man to put on that number three mill."

"You'll have to take King off setup then."

"He'll raise h.e.l.l."

"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 corner, clicked my lamp on and off.

"They still don't know a d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.n 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."