She came in wearing a blue jumper over a white blouse. With her crow-wing hair and white white teeth, the effect was good. The beltless waist of the jumper was so beautifully fitted to her figure that, had I not had Mary on my mind, it would have been distracting.
It makes for a peculiar relationship to share an office with a girl who is lovely and desirable, as well as efficient. When work piled up I could forget everything except her quickness and her loyalty. It was during the lulls that I would become aware of other things. As when she would sit on her heels and dig for something in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, and I would find myself staring at the way her waist would curve richly into the fullness of hips. Or she would bring something to me at my desk and, out of the corner of my eye, I would see the impertinence of breast under a sheen of office blouse, a bare six inches away. Or I would be standing over her, dictating to her, and, while hunting for the right phrase, realize I was bobbing my head around like a fool trying to find a vantage point from where I could look down the front of her dress.
Toni MacRae was quite aware of my interest, my speculative admiring interest. It caused her to change certain postures rather quickly. It often caused a very delicate blush. I had made a pass the second week she was in my office. It had been repulsed with unmistakable firmness, and no anger. She made it clear for the record. Another type of girl in those same circumstances, quite aware of her figure and of the boss’s interest in it, might have done a certain amount of flaunting and posturing. Not Toni. She couldn’t very well wear a Mother Hubbard, but she dressed and carried herself so as to minimize office tension.
“Good morning,” she said, putting her purse in her desk drawer.
“Morning. I’m reading about Mary.”
“You were one of the friends she had dinner with, weren’t you? I heard you talking to Mr. Raymond about it Friday.”
“I was one of the ones, yes.”
“Funny thing,” she said, frowning thoughtfully. She leaned back in her little secretarial chair. Her desk 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 how pale 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, Toni. She’s a spoiled brat. She thinks she’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.