Free You Live Once by John D. MacDonald Page A

is cattycorner 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 I.B.M. 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 damn man to put on that number three mill.”
    “You’ll have to take King off setup then.”
    “He’ll raise hell.”
    “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 comer, clicked my lamp on and off. “They still don’t know a damn 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 damn business but were you … intimate with her?”
    I looked him in the eye. I’d never noticed before howpale his eyes were. I smiled and said, “I guess that’s right.”
    “What’s right?”
    “That it’s none of your damn 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 hell 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.”
    “Hell!”
    “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,