You Live Once

by John D. MacDonald

  I had learned during the short time I had been dating her that her private life had been sufficiently lurid so that without the large bucks she could have been termed a bum. The trust funds relabeled it “eccentric” and “lively.” There had been one marriage, an annulment, other escapades and scandals. Such knowledge did nothing for my self-esteem. Inability to make any kind of time with a virginal lassie is no stamp of failure, but the brushoff from a lively one causes what might be termed an agonizing reappraisal. She had begun to make me feel as virile and fascinating as a teaberry leaf. I kept telling myself it was singlemindedness that blocked my path. She had Dodd on her mind.

  Perhaps today, I thought, she will arrive at that moment of awareness. And then Nancy Raymond will be happy again. Dodd will suffer and get over it. Mary will melt, and Sewell will munch clover.

  I smacked my Tabasco lips, shed robe and pajamas, and headed for the shower. After five minutes of water—warm, then cold, my head felt better, and I tested the resonance of the shower stall with a high-volume rendering of “April Showers.” I scraped brown stubble from my face, brushed the brown brush cut, showed myself my teeth in the mirror and padded out for a judicious selection of sport shirt. The yellow one, I decided. And the new grey wool and Dacron slacks, and take along the white hopsacking jacket should we decide to eat out at one of those places at the lake.

  I went to the closet to get dressed. It’s a nice, roomy closet. There was sun in the room and light spilled into the closet when I opened the door. As I took out the grey slacks, I looked down and saw one brown female foot in a high-heeled gunmetal pump. I looked at it with the greatest blankness in my mind that I have ever experienced. My overcoat and topcoat were in the way. I slid them along the closet bar and looked down at the hideous, bloated, empurpled, barely recognizable face of Mary Olan. Her thickened tongue protruded from her lips.

  The world stopped. I could hear traffic going by the house, hear a bird song in the elms. I could not look away from her face. It had the ugly, chilling, frightening fascination of an open wound.

  There is no stillness like that special stillness of the dead. I shut the closet door slowly and carefully. The latch clicked. I sat on the bed. Though the room was warm, I was shivering. I went over to the bureau and took a cigarette from the opened pack. I wanted some way of finding out that it wasn’t true. Yet I knew it was no trick of light, no aberration that went with the fading headache.

  I sat numbed by the enormity of this thing. Staring at the closed closet door, I could see the horror beyond it. She could not be dead and she could not be in my closet—but she was there. I stubbed out the cigarette and opened the closet door again. I forced myself to kneel and touch her ankle. Her flesh was cold—a special kind of coldness. And within the closet, mingled with the musky scent of the perfume she used, there was the dank, cloyed odor of the dead.

  After a time, I pushed more of my clothing out of the way and turned on the closet light. And I saw what was around her neck.

  Back in the fall when I had purchased some shirts, an energetic salesman had sold me a red fabric belt with an arrangement of brass rings rather than a buckle. It wasn’t the sort of thing I usually buy. I believe I have worn it twice. The last I had seen of it, it was hanging from a belt and tie rack on the inside of my closet door.

  Now it was around Mary Olan’s neck, the brass of the rings biting into the tender flesh at the side of her throat, the flesh above the belt darkened and grotesquely swollen. The long red end of the belt hung down across her shoulder and between her breasts. She still wore last night’s dress, a sleeveless, strapless affair with a gunmetal top and full white skirt. She sat back in the corner of the closet, propped up, her head canted to the right. One leg was out straight—it was that foot I had first seen. Her other leg was sharply bent. Her white skirt had slid up her thighs exposing the white sheen of diaphanous panties contrasting with the dark tan of her legs. Her right hand was on the floor, palm upward, fingers curled. Her left hand was in her lap, hidden by the folds of the skirt.

  I found after a time that I could look at her more calmly. The closet fight glinted on one gold hoop earring. Careful examination told me nothing more than that she was dead, and had died by violence. These lips, hideous now, had been warm when I had kissed them. These arms had been around me. These brown legs had walked ahead of me, the white skirt swinging, and she had looked back over her shoulder, with a quick wry glint of smile. She had looked good last night, and she had known it.

  I closed the closet door for the second time. The presence of the body was like an oppressive weight. I knew only that I wanted it out of there, wanted to take it out of my apartment and put it in some other place. I could not think clearly while she was there.

  I thought of phoning the police and tried to imagine myself carrying off that particular conversation. “Two men were here asking about Miss Olan. I just found her in my closet, dead, strangled with my belt.” I’d seen a lot of her lately and I’d been with her last night. I had been drinking, but I wouldn’t be able to prove how little. The two officers could testify that I had been in bed, and was so hard to awaken that I could have been sleeping off a blind drunk. The door had been locked.

  The alternative was just not plausible. I had gone to bed and gone to sleep. Somebody had brought her in. She had been alive when brought in, so she must have been strangled here. And I had slept through all of it.

  Yet somebody had done just that. Somebody who had hated her, and me. Somebody who would like to have me as dead as Mary Olan. It was not good to think about that kind of hate.

  I dressed slowly and made a pot of coffee. I drank the coffee too hot, scalding my mouth. The cup rattled on the saucer when I set it down. I could feel time passing while I struggled with my decision. I reached for the phone several times, but never quite got to the point of making the call. I did not dare face the police with the feeble, implausible truth. When I checked my watch I found to my surprise that an hour had passed since I had found the body. I believe it was that hour which weighed the scales. I told myself it was too late to phone the police now. I knew I had to get the body out of there.

  Once I was able to face that as a specific problem, my mind began to work better. I mechanically made my bed and cleaned up the few dishes I had used, while I perfected a plan that should work properly. While I was making my bed, I found one thing that puzzled me. There was fine granular dirt on the pillow and top sheet. I wondered about it for some time, but I could think of nothing that could cause it. I brushed it off. There wasn’t much of it.

  When there was nothing else I could do, I decided that I might as well get my car. I certainly couldn’t take the body anywhere on my back. If I was going to move it, I had to have a car. I phoned a cab and it arrived in ten minutes. I got the extra key from the table drawer, and went out, testing the lock on the door after it shut behind me.

  The driver took me to the club, mentioning several times what a fine day it really was. My black Merc sat dozing in the sun. I drove it back to the apartment, my heart bumping. I expected sirens and a ring of prowl cars around the place. It was unchanged. Bees clambered over dandelions and it was shady under the elms of the side yard.

  Back in the apartment I looked out the window at my car. Object: to get body from closet into trunk compartment of car. There was no guarantee that Mrs. Speers, my busybody landlady, wouldn’t be watching from one of her many windows. The body must not only appear to be something else, I should be able to prove it was something else if questioned later. The body would have to be wrapped in something disposable. I had heard of the police using a vacuum cleaner on cars and then doing spectroanalysis of face powder and such like. And making identification from a single human hair.

  I knew what I could use to wrap her up. In the back end of the car there was an old tarpaulin, a greasy mess. I had laid it under the wheels during the winter to get out of heavy snow. On the coldest nights I had kept it over the hood of the ungaraged Merc, a h
undred-watt bulb on an extension cord burning inside the hood. I went out through my kitchen and looked at the collection of debris in the attached shed. Warren has garbage collection, but they do not take cans and bottles. You save those until you have enough to warrant a trip to the dump. I had a reasonable collection.

  My plan was set and it seemed practical. I went out and backed the car up close to my front door. I opened the rear compartment and took the tarp into the house. I loaded a small cardboard carton with cans and bottles and took it out and put it in the rear compartment, well over to one side. Mrs. Speers appeared with her usual magic, materializing sixty feet away, strolling toward me, smiling, a big unbending woman in a black and white Sunday print, wearing one white canvas work glove and carrying a pair of small red garden shears.

  “Going to the dump, Mr. Sewell?”

  “I guess it’s about time. Thought I’d drop some stuff off.”

  “Oh dear, do you think you could take mine too this time? Joseph forgot it when he did the yard work Thursday.”

  “Gee, I’d be glad to, but I’ve got a lot of my own. Tell you what, after work Monday I’ll run it over for you.”

  “I don’t want to put you out.”

  “That’s okay. I’d do it today, but I’m going right on up to the lake.”

  “Joseph is getting so absent-minded.”

  She wanted desperately to have a nice little chat. It was too bad that she hadn’t rented her apartment to someone she could have talked to. The woman was obviously bored and lonely. Her life had been busy with husband and kids. Now the kids were grown and had moved away, and the husband was dead.

  “Monday for sure, Mrs. Speers,” I said.

  “You’re so kind.” She smiled and sidled off to snip something. I went in and shut the door. I spread the tarp on the floor in front of the closet and opened the door. I felt squeamish; I didn’t want to touch her again. I went in and fumbled with the belt. I had to stop and then try again. It came loose and I slipped it off over her head and unloosened it the rest of the way. I found two hairs clinging to the fabric, two of her black hairs. I brushed them off onto the tarp, rolled the belt up and put it in my top bureau drawer.

  The next was the worst. She was sickeningly heavy. I got her by wrist and ankle. I tried to hold her out away from me, but she swung against my shins. Her free arm and leg dragged and her head thudded against the door frame. I put her in the middle of the tarp. She sprawled on her side, hair across her darkened face. I was breathing hard. I got my flashlight and carefully inspected the inside of the closet. I couldn’t see anything, but the walls were smooth enough to take prints. I took a towel from the laundry bag and wiped the inside of the closet. It was good that I did because the damp towel picked up three more long black hairs that I had missed. I wiped it again and found nothing.

  I picked up the four corners of the tarp, and joined them. She curled into a ball in the middle. Taking a good grip on the four corners, I picked her up off the floor with my right hand. She must have weighed somewhere around one twenty. I moved over to where I could inspect the sight in the full-view mirror. The tarp fit her body snugly and it was unmistakably a woman in a tarp. Nothing else. If I’d gone out with that, Mrs. Speers’ eyes would have bulged like a Thanksgiving dinner.

  I set her down and thought some more. Then I went through into the shed and came back with a paper bag of cans and bottles. I held the four corners up again and wedged the cans and bottles down between her body and the tarp so as to destroy the distinctive rounded outlines. I missed on the first try. The next time, after I had gotten some down around her hips, she no longer looked like a woman in a tarp. She looked like a tarp stuffed with angular junk.

  After counting to ten I hoisted her off the floor again and walked through the living room and out the front door. Mrs. Speers was alarmingly close, snipping at a rose bush. I wanted the tarp to look as light as possible. I used every ounce of strength to handle it negligently, swinging it into the back end of the car, lowering it without too much of a thump. As I swung it I heard the old rotten fabric rip. I saw Mary’s tan elbow sticking through the rip. I banged the lid down and did not dare look at Mrs. Speers.

  “My, you do have a load,” she said.

  “Quite a load this time. I let it accumulate too long.”

  “Why, I thought you went last week!”

  “I didn’t take it all that time.”

  “This is certainly a lovely day to be going up to the lake. Do you go to Smith Lake?”

  “Yes m’am.”

  “Mr. Speers and I used to go up there years ago. He adored bass fishing. He was never very lucky, but he loved to fish.”

  “I guess it used to be a good bass lake. There’s talk of restocking it.”

  “It’s nice that you have friends up at Smith Lake, Mr. Sewell, with summer coming on and all. It makes a nice change. Who are you going to see up there? Any of the old families?”

  “Mary Olan invited me up.”

  “You don’t say! Their place is one of the oldest places on the lake. It certainly is the biggest, at least it was the last time I was up there. You know, Mr. Speers and I used to know Rolph and Nadine Olan quite well. I mean we weren’t close friends. When Mary was quite little my youngest girl used to play with her. Their tragedy was a terrible shock to this city, Mr. Sewell, they were so prominent.”

  “I haven’t heard much about that. Mary doesn’t mention it, of course.”

  “She wouldn’t, poor child. I can remember it like it was yesterday, the expression on Mr. Speers’ face when he read it in the morning paper. Nadine always seemed like such a quiet woman. Almost shy. Sensitive, too. And Rolph was so clever at business. They say she never has responded to a single treatment and she’ll have to stay in that place the rest of her natural days. I suppose it’s a blessing though that she isn’t well enough to realize she killed her husband. Afterwards we heard that he had been … seeing someone else.” Mrs. Speers blushed delicately. “I suppose that’s what drove Nadine out of her mind. She was Pryor, you know. Willy Pryor was her brother. He went for a time with my youngest sister before he married that Myrna Hubbard. I understand Mary Olan lives with them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a wonder that Mary, poor child, survived the shock, finding her father’s body like that. Well, if you’re expected up there at the lake, you mustn’t let an old woman hold you up with all her chatter and reminiscences. Give my best regards to Mary.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “I understand … I know this is none of my business … that Mary travels with a rather fast set. They say there’s a lot of drinking.”

  “Quite a bit, I guess.”

  “Well, I suppose you have to forgive her. With that background and all. You really can’t blame her if she’s a little wild. Now you run along and enjoy yourself, Mr. Sewell.”

  I waved to her as I drove away and headed out toward the city dump. I drove as though the car rolled over eggs. A few minutes ago it had been a body, something I had to get rid of. Mrs. Speers’ conversation had turned it back into Mary Olan, the girl I had kissed last night. My hands were wet on the steering wheel.

  I had to go to the dump. If there was any question, I’d be checked on that. The Warren dump is east of the city. It is a very orderly dump with bulldozer-dug trenches. There was a pickup truck unloading, and a station wagon with a father and two yellow-headed sons further down the line. I parked way beyond both of them and backed up to the trench. Nobody could see into the back end of the car, and nobody was likely to park right beside me. People seem to like privacy for disposing of trash. I opened the trunk and took out the cardboard box and heaved it into the trench. Then I opened the tarp and took out the cans and bottles, trying not to touch her and trying not to look directly at her. The sun caught the two big diamonds in her wrist watch. I thought I could smell the odor of death about her. I wrapped her up hastily, shut the lid, got back in the car and drove away. As I came toward
the station wagon it was pulling out. I saw my chance to be remembered. There was plenty of room to swing around him. Instead I leaned on the horn, a long heavy blast. The man and his two sons turned and stared at me with indignation and disgust. I gave them another blast, glaring at them, and they drove away.

  Back on the highway, I turned toward town. I had to go down into town to catch the highway that leads north into the hills of the lake country. There seemed to be an exceptional number of police around for an early Sunday afternoon. I drove over the bridge in heavy traffic headed north. A mile and a half north of the river I passed the Warren Tube and Cylinder Division of Consolidated Pneumatic Products, Incorporated—my employer. The place is six years old, cubical, landscaped and sleekly efficient. I rode by my place of employment with her body in the trunk compartment.

  I have never driven so carefully. It was like the extra care you seem to use when you cross a street while carrying a batch of expensive phonograph records. I had visions of what could happen if somebody smacked into me just hard enough to spring the trunk open. The more care I used, the more narrow squeaks I had. The road was crowded with damn fools, all of them in a hurry.

  Once in the hills, I was in an area where many small roads branched off to small lakes. I took one of the less traveled ones. It was black narrow asphalt, lumpy and extensively patched. It climbed over steep crests and fell into crooked valleys. I had met no car as yet and I looked frantically for a turnoff. I braked hard when I saw an old lumber road, a faint trace leading off to the left. Leaves and branches scraped the sides of the Merc as I turned into it. I drove about three hundred feet. I was well out of sight of the road.