Free You Live Once by John D. MacDonald Page B

Toni. She’s a spoiled brat. She thinksshe’s better than practically anybody else. But … it’s 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 scrap 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 assemblage 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.
    Willy 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 massive 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 unbuttoned 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 Willy, and that seems to have been the extent of her participation in life. No beautician, no couturier could ever make Myrna Pryor look likeanything 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 Willy 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.
    Willy 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, impassive, 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, rolypoly and asthmatic. When he spoke he honked. Willy 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.”
    Willy shooed me to a chair next to the