You Live Once Part 11

"What's right?"

"That it's none of your d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l 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."

"h.e.l.l!"

"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.. 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 sc.r.a.p 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.

Chapter 5.

Though the a.s.semblage 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.

w.i.l.l.y 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 ma.s.sive 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 w.i.l.l.y, and that seems to have been the extent of her partic.i.p.ation in life. No beautician, no couturier could ever make Myrna Pryor look like any thing 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 w.i.l.l.y had wanted and needed. And it had helped the blood, if the bouncy health of Jigger, Dusty and Skeeter was any indication.

I nodded and spoke to Dodd and Nancy. They sat side by side on a creation neither couch nor chair- something resembling an upholstered coffee table with a back six inches high.

The only other person in the room I knew by sight was the plain clothes partner of the uniformed patrolman who had come to wake me up Sunday morning.

w.i.l.l.y performed the introductions quickly and clearly.

The wiry big-handed blonde who looked as if she had been nailed to a barn to dry in the sun was Neale Bettiger, Mary's golf partner. A wide, impa.s.sive, sleepy-eyed man was Captain Joseph Kruslov, in charge of the case. I asked him if he was related to Gus at the plant.

"Brother," he said.

A tall, stooped, sick-looking man with grey bags under his eyes was Mr. Stine, Commissioner of Public Safety.

The plain clothes cop was named Hilver. Chief of Police Sutton was colorless, roly poly and asthmatic. When he spoke he honked. w.i.l.l.y skipped over a police stenographer sitting stiffly, uncomfortably at a corner desk and introduced me to a mild little guy sitting off by himself.

He looked like a frail bank teller until you took the second look. Then you saw the sardonic cut of the mouth, the alive quick eyes, the unexpected thickness of the wrists.

"This is Mr. Paul France. He's a licensed investigator and I've asked him to sit in, with Chief Sutton's permission."

w.i.l.l.y shooed me to a chair next to the sun-dried blonde, rubbed his hands together and said, "Well, Chief, I guess we can get started."

"Captain Kruslov will ask some questions," the chief said.

Kruslov paced to the center of the room.

"We called you people together to see if we can come up with anything we missed so far. We're interested mostly in anybody any of you could have seen hanging around, acting funny, anything like that. We're sort of thinking of a s.n.a.t.c.h. We'll take up this angle first. Miss Benson?"

"Bettiger. No, I didn't see a thing. Mary and I played twenty-seven holes. At the end of eighteen we were even in holes and even in score so we played another nine. I won three and two. I didn't see a thing out of line."

"How did she act? Same as usual?"

"Oh yes. We gabbed, kidded around, talked about people.

She was fine. n.o.body was lurking about, if that's what you mean."

"Now will you tell the chief and these people what you told Sergeant Hilver this morning."

Miss Bettiger looked uncomfortable.

"Well, I don't think it was important. It was just talk."

"Go ahead, please."

"We talked about men. We do that a lot, I guess, maybe too much. Mary was laughing about what she called her 'reserve love nest." She said there was this man who had been making a big play and he kept trying to give her a key to a place he had rented somewhere in town. She said if she ever wanted to hide, that would be the place, because he wouldn't dare give her away."

"Did she tell you his name?"

I did not dare look over at Dodd and Nancy. I was afraid of what I'd see on their faces.

"No, she didn't tell me his name. She just said he's married. She made a big joke of it."

Kruslov turned to Mr. Pryor.

"Mr. Pryor, do you think Miss Olan could be at that apartment or room or house she spoke of to Miss Benson?"

"Bettiger," the girl said.