The Last One Left (53 page)

“Do you characters peddle that crap to the reporters?”

“Mrs. Harkinson, when we identified Staniker, it took these two men an hour and a half to follow the trail right to you. There are perhaps a hundred people from the papers, television, radio and the wires services jamming up the place downstairs, dreaming up cute tricks to be the first ones to get to you. It’s even too late now to have someone drive you back to your house to pick up what you’d need in the way of clothes and toilet articles. You can make a list and explain to a matron where she can find things, and we’ll send her to your place to pick them up.”

“My maid knows where my things …”

“She has been advised to leave the premises after locking the place up. We have men posted there now to keep people from breaking in.”

“What are you trying to
do
to me?”

“Protect your constitutional rights, Mrs. Harkinson, and protect your person not only from the news media but also from what is usually referred to as an aroused populace.”

She pressed her fists against her eyes, shuddered and said, “I think I’ll take that free phone call, mister.”

Just as Lobwohl got up and turned on the lights in his office, Tuck came to the doorway and said, “They got the kid’s car finally. Coast
Guard chopper spotted it. Deserted spot on the bay shore maybe two miles below the Harkinson place.”

“News out yet?”

“No, sir.”

“I want the top lab team on it. Harv and his people, and I want them to comb the area. Keep it sealed until they’ve got daylight, and then they can impound the car when they’re done.”

“They’re still on the Harkinson place.”

“Move them off it. They can go back to it. And where the hell is that maid?”

“Bert and Barney are on it. They’ll find her and bring her in.”

“I know, but when?”

“Who did Lady Harkinson get hold of?”

“Palmer Haas.”

Tuck whistled. “She went to the right place. Feisty little bastard. Miserable as he is, you got to give him credit.”

“He’s making all the motions, but he knows damn well the worst thing we could do for her right now is release her.”

Tuck grinned. “He listening to what we got?”

“Avidly.”

“Funny, isn’t it. A very cagey broad like that being half smart. She should have screamed for Palmy before she was brought in.”

“It’s the big myth. Innocent people don’t need counsel, they think. Asking for one makes a bad impression, they think.”

“But we still came up empty. Remember that.”

RAOUL KELLY
’
S CAR
was parked beside Sam Boylston’s rental car at the motel. Sam walked the couple through the soft night to the car. Raoul unlocked it and held the door for ’Cisca. The trunk was full, the back seat stacked with luggage.

Raoul came around the car and opened the door on the driver’s side. “Around Biloxi or a little ways this side of it we’ll hole up,” Raoul said. He moved away from the car, drawing Sam with him. “How are you going to handle it?”

“I’ll wait and see if they unravel it without help. When I lost her Friday night, it’s obvious she was going to meet Staniker. He told her where the money is. Once she knew that, she could sick the kid on him. That poor damned kid. If he hadn’t been rocked so bad he killed himself afterwards, and if he’d been charged with murder, I think he was too infatuated to tell them it was in any way her idea. And even if he did break, I don’t believe she would have left him with any kind of direct specific quote he could remember. It’s obvious
she expected it to happen Sunday night. That’s why she wanted verification she was home.”

“But if it looks as if she’s going to be cleared, Sam?”

They could see the lighted pool beyond a corner of the building. Sam watched The Chunk race off the high board, kicking and yelping on the way down, a rangy boy in close pursuit.

“I’m not as civilized an animal as I thought I was,” Sam said. “The instinct is to find a way to move in on her and let her think she’s conning me. Simple Sam Boylston. Crissy baby, this has been a wretched experience for both of us. I’d like to lease a boat and go back over there and take a look at the area where it actually happened. Keep me company, Crissy baby. Just the two of us. Raoul, that water is so fantastically clear. I can’t reach Staniker. He left the party. She’s the last one left now. That water is too beautiful to drown in. But Leila is down there somewhere. I dreamed about the Muñeca last night, or rather this morning after I got back here. I was in a little boat in the sunshine. I had one of those glass bottom buckets they use. I was looking straight down. It was all lighted up. I saw every one of them down there. They walked around in that slow funny way of people underwater. Carolyn’s hair and Leila’s hair floated. I could see their mouths move but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I knew my boat was drifting away from the spot, and looking down at them was like saying goodby because I knew somehow I could never find that exact same spot again, or tell anyone how to find it. I made some kind of noise that woke me up. I was sweaty.”

“My friend. My good friend …”

“Very, very nice, I think, to let her get her hands on the money. She should have that thrill. Then do you know the best way to do it? What you do is hit her right on the button. Nice short little right hand punch, just slightly overhand. Then you wire her ankles together. You find about ten feet of water. When she wakes up, you
talk about the nice money and you talk about how smart she is, and then you roll her off the boat into the pretty water. She’d last a long time I think. If it was going to be over too soon, you could give a little assist with a boat hook. You could watch it all.”

“Could you?”

“I don’t know. That’s the part I don’t know. I talked about the money to Staniker in the hospital. He’d tell her I visited him. What I’ll do is give you enough running room, then I’ll go in and do some dickering. Accept the Francisca tapes as is, boys, and I’ll play you some other tapes.”

“Information you withheld?”

“Because, boys, there wasn’t enough motive to make sense. Does a man who wants to shed his wife take five other people along?”

“More than that, on airplanes.”

“But the bomb is remote. It’s almost abstract. The nut doesn’t know the names, see the faces, let the eyes see him. The nut is in a bed someplace with his heart pumping and the radio on. Boys, it was just today I heard there was a fat basket of cash on that boat, so I came running. And damned if I know what’s on the Francisca tape because my Spanish isn’t that good.”

“Kayd is on there. So why didn’t I come running?”

“That’s one you won’t have to answer. But you and I know the answer. Better roll it, Raoul Kelly.”

Before Kelly got in, Sam bent and looked across at the girl beyond the steering wheel.
“Bien viaje. Buena suerte,”
he said.

“Mil gracias,”
she answered, smiling.
“Adios, Señor.”

He turned to shake hands with Raoul, but received instead the gruffly sentimental
abrazo
of the semi-Americanized latino.

“I will tell Mrs. Boylston you are a remarkable man.”

They backed out. The girl waved. The car waited at the mouth of the drive until a traffic gap large enough to accommodate it came
along. Moments later they were lost in the anonymous patterns of all the east-bound flow of red tail lights.

He stood in the night shadows watching the traffic. He had an awareness of all the weight of the night city around him, of all the animal tensions of this single moment in time in this place, a shrewd and tawdry city, shining like toyland between the swamps and the sea. The night was weighted with derelicts and dancers, terminal breathing in wards, clenched fists of women as they pushed each time the pains came, chips in perfect alignment on green felt as men thumbed up the corners of the hole cars just enough to read the news, giggling young men in a chickenwire apartment painting the body of one of their chums a lovely gold, ambulances and tow trucks moving away in separate directions with a load of torn flesh or a load of ripped metal, thousands and thousands of picture tubes all telling the same jokes at the same instant to a hundred thousand living rooms, frantic rumps ram-packing the beach sand under the spread toweling, the simultaneous squirts of red tomato and yellow mustard in a hundred different places to disguise the flannelly taste of fried meat, a thousand simultaneous sobbings, thrashings, swallowings, vomitings, ejaculations, coughings, scratchings, cursings, shy touchings, whisperings, kickings.…

He had never considered himself particularly imaginative. Never before had he felt this way about a city, and he knew that it could only be possible in a strange city, and at a time when grief and uncertainty and introspection had sharpened and heightened awareness.

This great Gold Coast became a gigantic cruise ship moving through time rather than space, constantly assimilating the foods, the newborn, the gadgetry, spewing aft the unending tonnage of garbage and waste and dead bodies and broken toys, rolling imperceptibly in the slow tides of history, the passengers unaware that no
city is forever, that it will end one day and the eternality of time will cover it in a silence of dust, sand and vines. Each passenger, whether first class or steerage, was compelled to accept the constants of pain and time, greed and need, joy and love, fear and lust, and the iron paradox of self-awareness.

Each passenger knew beyond doubt that he was the only one aboard who could truly experience the ultimates of love and loss, that he was the only one with a secret destiny which would be made manifest to him some day, and that on that day everyone would come to understand what should have been evident to them all along.

So I am an impertinence, he thought. The weight of the night city is the weight of indifference, because they are busy with their own changings of bandages, their own cautious reachings to find out if, after all, there is anyone near enough to touch.

And using my life to buy better accommodations aboard ship is only another way to keep from thinking too often how short the journey is for each passenger. Bix Kayd and Carolyn, Roger and Stella, Staniker and his wife, Leila and Oliver Akard, they are back there in the darkness left forever at that exact moment when they left the big cruise, and we go wallowing along toward one as yet unmarked minute in time, one for me, one for Lyd, one for Boy-Sam, one for Cristen Harkinson, one for Nurse Theyma Chappie, one for The Chunk.

There was a concept, a justification, almost within reach. It was like awakening in the night from a dream, knowing you have The Answer to Everything.

Like the old joke, he thought. Okay, so life
isn’t
a grain of rice. Get a box, lawyer. Go yell the word from a park somewhere. Become one of those incredible people who have one simplified credo and try to make it fit every wrong in the world. Organic food.
Communist conspiracy. Early rising. Do unto others. THINK. Balanced diet. Zen tennis. Auto-hypnosis. Rosicrucianism. Fasting.

Step right up to the cave of mysteries and yell your solution at the audio-lock. Somebody is going to yell the right word some day, and when the door swings open and suddenly we all know the answer to that primary question—Why?—we may find it unendurable to live with that answer.

On Tuesday afternoon at four o’clock, June seventh, Sam Boylston sat across the steel desk from John Lobwohl. Kindler was over at the right, straight chair tilted back against the wall. The Staniker tape ended. Sam pushed rewind, and the little machine began to whirr the tape back onto the reel.

Lobwohl yawned. “You’re all we needed, Mr. Boylston. A Texas lawyer messing up the scene, making like spy movies. Okay, it was your sister who died with the Kayd family. But what’s the point in you trying to cover for Kelly and that maid?”

“I explained that. And Kelly explained it to Kindler and Scheff. I’m trying to make a point here. We’ll never get to it unless you let me go through it in my own way, and ask the questions later.”

“You’re in a pretty poor position to try to make any points, Boylston. But go ahead.”

“Would you say that those tapes give a fair basis for suspecting that accident was fishy, Captain?”

“How did you get those tapes anyway?”

“They can’t be used as evidence of anything, so that’s beside the point, isn’t it? I want to know how you’d interpret them.”

Kindler asked permission to speak. Lobwohl nodded. Kindler said, “It’s a set piece all right. Memorized. But what I wonder is this. Staniker had a week alone on that island over there. He lost a good
boat and a lot of people. He was a hired captain. It was his livelihood. So I think all that week, he’d be going over and over it, how to say it, because he’d know there’d be a lot of questions if and when he was rescued. So it would sound like that, like it had been memorized. And we can’t exactly bring Staniker in and sweat it out of him, Mr. Boylston.”

“What can you nail Mrs. Harkinson with, Captain?”

“As far as I can see, absolutely nothing.”

“But you’d like to find something you could make stick?”

“So bad everybody around here can taste it,” Kindler said.

Lobwohl said, “We’ve got her stashed. Apartment hotel. Kind of a compromise deal with her lawyer, Palmer Haas. Sneaked her out at noon today. Two men outside her door at all times. Damn it, we have some blanks to fill in. We’ve got to have that maid of hers.”

“Let me ask a hypothetical question. Just imagine I happened to have a tape of the maid’s story, very detailed, covering everything of interest to you. In Spanish, because she has little English. I listened to the whole thing. I have enough Spanish to follow it. And suppose I made proper identifications as the tape starts.”

“As a lawyer, certainly you know that tape is not …”

“Captain, I’m not talking about admissibility. I’m talking about leads and angles for investigation. And suppose I could give you a very pertinent and substantial piece of information, one that might change your thinking on the whole matter. Would you then, if you think the information valuable enough, slack off on trying to bring Francisca back here?”