You Live Once Part 25

"You can go to h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.ned! 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l, 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 club 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 w.i.l.l.y Pryor. He had done some aging since the conference at his home.

He looked less like himself in a business suit. He was as brown and hard looking as before, but he did not move the same way. He moved like a much older man. His head trembled a little and his eyes looked sick. It was the d.a.m.nedest conversation I have ever had with anybody.

"Mr. Pryor, I want you to know that I didn't kill your niece."

"Mary was a wild, reckless girl, Mr. Sewell."

"I didn't kill her."