You Live Once Part 18

"Yes?"

She lifted her gla.s.s 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 c.u.mbersome 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.

It was easy to sense that with her, physical love was a complete fulfillment, honestly given, honestly accepted.

Betrayal struck her more deeply that it would a wife who merely endured the a.s.sault of the flesh. The completion she had found with him had given her a loyalty of mind and body as well. A loyalty too strong to admit any genuine suspicion that he could have done murder. She teased herself with speculation, punished herself with suspicion that was never deep nor honest.

I signaled for another drink. I watched the bare velvet of the shoulders of the piano girl. She had a style like Previn. I drank up, paid the check and left.

Chapter 7.

That was Tuesday evening. I fed my martini hunger on spaghetti al dente with sailor sauce, read the evening paper's rehash of our big murder and went back to my apartment. I parked the car, started toward my door, then decided to walk off the spaghetti heaviness. It was just getting dark. Children shrilled and leaped the barberry hedges. I walked by the yellow house and wondered which window was Toni's.

I guess I walked aimlessly for nearly an hour, turning right or left on impulse, but gradually circling back toward my place. I suddenly remembered the trash, and my promise to Mrs. Speers. It wouldn't be too late. I lengthened my stride. From far up the street I saw the lights in my windows. I hadn't been in to leave any on. I left the sidewalk and started across the gra.s.s of the big side lawn. I planned to stare in my windows and see who it was who felt so much at home. One key was in my pocket. I had given the other to Mary Olan, and it had been used to put her in my closet. It made me feel strange to see the lights.

When I moved further to the side I saw something that stopped me. It was a silhouette between me and my lighted window. The hat shape was official and distinctive and unmistakable. A police car was parked beside my car, and a policeman stood quietly in the night, leaning against my car.