The Last One Left (6 page)

“Until the S.E.C. digs into it?”

“The way he moves, he doesn’t leave many tracks. And there’s
quite a swarm of congressmen who keep coming back to his place for barbecue and bourbon.”

“So you’ll just wait and see?”

“A little more than that. I have some sources. I’ll nose around and see if I can get some kind of a hint about what kind of business he was combining with pleasure this time.”

“Will you let me know? Off the record, of course.”

“That’s going to depend on what it is.”

After he hung up, Sam Boylston got up and walked over and stood with his hands shoved into his hip pockets, looking out the window wall, across at the empty asphalt acres of the Northway Shopping Plaza, and the new Valley Citizens Trust building beyond. He realized that he was staring at another byproduct of what Lyd called his compulsion to neaten up the world. With the increase in the size of their practice and the need for a larger staff and larger quarters, he and his partner, Taylor Worth, had started looking around.

They had found Bern Wallader sitting on this big tract, planning an eventual shopping center, fretting over traffic counts, moving all too slowly and conservatively, and planning too small. At that time Sam had just become a director of Valley Citizens and had known of the bank’s need to find a new site. After a long talk with the bank president, and a confidential talk with the appropriate people in local government, and another with some people in Houston specializing in the planning and construction of suburban shopping complexes, he had boosted Bern Wallader into nervous and apprehensive action, finally getting him to move only by putting up collateral and signing notes in return for a piece of the action. Now in addition to twice the number of retail outlets Bern had thought feasible, there was the bank, the professional office building, and acres of new housing going on on the rearward land which Sam had
optioned the day he began to believe Bern Wallader could be persuaded to begin taking risks.

And it had started merely because they had needed more space and hadn’t been able to find anything suitable and had wondered if anyone would build to their requirements. It was a strange knack for commercial serendipity. Or perhaps, he thought, it was merely a trick of objectivity. You saw what was quite logical and necessary, and wondered why people dragged their feet, complained of digestive pains, worried about reducing their obligations before starting something new and, when they had something feasible, had this strange compulsion to dwarf their own concepts. With a geometrically increasing increment of nearly three hundred thousand new souls in the Republic each and every month, only the most visionary projects could hope to keep pace. Most minds were dim and dingy places, and most thinking a slow and muddied flow, full of unidentified emotional debris, obsolete concepts, frightened rites and superstitions.

When things did not move, you checked until you found that point where the minimum leverage would create the maximum motion. It took time, certainly. And a cold and lasting attention to both the details and the total objective. You had to conceal your impatience with those associates who could not keep pace, and take practical advantage of those on the other side of the table with the same defects.

And why should Lyd disapprove of that? Wasn’t it the essential stuff of survival? Did she want softness, apathy, amiable sloth?

You had to hold on tight, or it could all go wrong. That was something Lydia Jean didn’t comprehend. He looked back across the years to the way it had all gone bad, so quickly. He had been taking Moon Lad, his big gray, across open country at a full run and the left foreleg had gone deep into the unseen hole, big bones cracking like a tree branch, and as he had rolled over and over across the turf he’d
heard the strange, breathy screaming of the big, beloved horse. It kept trying to get up and could not, but stopped the terrible noise and lay watching him as if confident he could fix any bad thing. He had taken off his T shirt and fashioned a blindfold for the horse, patting him, talking to him, because he could not use the carbine from the saddle sheath with those eyes looking at him and at the gun. He placed the slug perfectly, walking through a swimming landscape and was cried out before he got back to get the hands and the jeep with the dozer blade and the shovels and go back and bury Moon Lad before the
zopilotes
got to him.

Two weeks later, he lost the first set, but took the second and third to eliminate Rooster Hines and thus get into the finals of the tennis championship, where he would face Bill Cupp, whom he knew he could take readily. He showered and joined the group of his friends at the pool and got into a spirited game of tag. Avoiding a tag he had run and taken a flat racing dive into the pool, only to have the hefty Indrigan girl surface directly in front of him. He had put his hands palm outward, hit her massive shoulder, felt the pain like hot knives in his right wrist, and knew even as he sat on the pool apron and saw the puffing begin that Bill Cupp had the trophy by default.

And the following week the parents who would have applauded and celebrated victory were both dead.

There was a kind of infection about disasters, both large and small. They were linked somehow. Most importantly, they did not strike with total randomness. It had been careless to run Moon Lad across that kind of country. It had been foolish to play the tag game when the pool was that crowded. Ask for two, and they give you the third free.

He knew that it was not logical, and knew that superstition was a weakness. But long ago, after the world had gone wrong, he had vowed he would tighten down, that he would not let any first wedge
be driven in, and if there was a small disaster not of his making, then he would be double careful to keep chance at arm’s length long enough for the infection to heal itself.

But now he could sense a new darkness. Lyd’s voluntary defection was a disaster which was making his days ever more bleak. The idiocy with the car was another disaster trying to happen. And it had some tenuous link with Leila, with Bix, with the Muñeca.

He hunched his shoulders slightly and turned away from the window. He was a slender man of middle height, sandy hair, gray eyes, a face just round enough to give him a deceptive boyishness. He was slight enough so that in repose, had he not had the weathered pigmentation of the range lands, the sun-squint furrows near his eyes, he might have had a somewhat frail look. But in all movement he had a wiry precision, a taut and springy economy and swiftness of those with the inherited musculature and reflexes of the athlete. This was his vanity, its outward expression the excellent fit of custom shirts, tailored business suits, and the expensive informal clothes and sports clothes.

He sat and stared at the phone and reviewed all the hints and rumors of Bix’s activities he could remember hearing during the past months. He narrowed the possible sources of information down to the two most likely—old Judge Billy Alwerd down in Brownsville, and big Tom Dorra who owned all those groves and had his home place over near McAllen. He knew that they had hitchhiked in a small way on some of Kayd’s previous operations, and he knew they had been seen together before the Muñeca had embarked from Brownsville for the trip up around the Gulf Coast and down around the Florida keys.

He picked up the phone before it completed the first ring. Person to person to Mr. Samuel Boylston.

“This is Jonathan, sir. Is Leila okay?”

“I probably don’t know any more than you do. Just what’s on the news.”

“I began to worry before there was anything on the news. You see, sir, yesterday was my birthday. She was going to phone me. You know how she is. She wouldn’t forget. And she’d make a real effort.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I guess the only thing we can do is wait.”

“I think, sir—I’ll go over there.”

“What can you do that isn’t being done?”

“I don’t know. But neither of us liked this thing right from the start. We didn’t have a good feeling about it. And—I’d just feel better if I wasn’t so far away from where the trouble is. Maybe it’s stupid. But we haven’t done too well being sensible, it seems like.”

“When did you last hear from her, Jonathan?”

“I got an airmail postcard Friday. She mailed it in Nassau. She said she was going to try to get the call through to me between seven and ten yesterday night, my time, so that’s when I should stay near the phone here.”

“Anything else?”

“The rest was just personal.”

“I can’t stop you from flying over.”

“I know. I haven’t made up my mind for sure, sir. I think I’ll see if there’s anything on the news tomorrow morning and then decide. I talked to Mr. Wing about it. He’s being very nice about it. He said to tell you he hopes everything works out okay about Leila.”

“Bud Wing gave me a good report on you, Jonathan.”

After a silence Jonathan Dye said, “I guess the nice thing to do would be to act pleased or something. But I’m not in the mood for it. I never could get it across to you I’ve been doing any kind of work I could get since I was fourteen years old. I’ve done easier
work than this, and I’ve done harder work than this. And nobody has ever given me any bad reports on how I do. I like Mr. Wing. But he gets an hour of work for every hour of pay. Sir, I guess we could leave it this way. If there’s nothing new tomorrow morning, you’ll know I’m going over there, and when I know where I’ll be, I’ll wire you.”

“Fine. And—good luck.”

After a few moments he began looking up Billy Alwerd’s home phone number.

CRISTEN HARKINSON CRAWLED
forward in the little Dutchman, feeling the sailboat right itself as the boy, Oliver, pulled the last of the mainsail down out of the push of the wind off Biscayne Bay. He had managed it, as always, at precisely the right moment, so that the momentum carried them through the slot and into the protected private boat basin south of Crissy’s house, just around the point on which the house had been built, where the basin was sheltered from winds out of any northerly quarter.

With the last of its momentum, it glided at an angle toward the dock. She stood, reached, caught the sun-warm planking, fended the boat to a stop near a mooring cleat, pulled the dock line down and made it fast to the bow ring. Oliver pulled the stern in and made it fast. He had another half hour of work, hosing her down, stowing the gear, buttoning the sailboat up, then mooring her across the angle of the dock where she would ride without rubbing.

Crissy climped up onto the dock and turned and looked down at
the nineteen-year-old boy. He had begun his work, keeping his solemn face turned away from her. With each motion he made, the big muscles bunched and slid under the hide of his broad back. The hair on his long brown legs was sunbleached to a powder white, making a strange halo against the orange light of the evening sun.

Standing there, Crissy had a sense of how they would look from the proper dramatic angle. The elegant figure of the tall woman on the dock, hair tousled, salty, bleached several shades of blonde white by all the sailing. Pale blue bikini. Black-hued wraparound sun glasses. Ratsey bag, red and white, swinging from a crooked finger. The body, youthful and taut enough for the bikini, sunned to a gold tinged now with the bronze red of the day on the water, contrasting with the leather brown of the pale-eyed, white-toothed, sailboat boy.

She stood well, remembering the lessons. Grass green, thinking the lessons would aim you right at the cover of
Harper’s Bazaar
, but you ended up doing your turns and pirouettes in those schlock outfits, pirated designs, in front of the buyers who’d stroke the fabric and call you Crissy-baby, and ordered in hundred dozen lots for little chains nobody ever heard of. At a hundred yards, old buddies, the figure is still twenty years old. But put a hard-focus closeup on the face in the cruel sunlight and it will read thirty, which is just as much a triumph because that is still a half dozen and better years off the truth.

“Oliver?”

“M’am?”

He still did not look up at her standing there above him on the dock. “Now don’t you go running off, hear? I owe you for the last two days, so you come to the house when you’re through here.”

“Yes m’am.”

She went slowly and lazily up the long curve of the stone stairway—wide shallow steps hewn out of coquina rock and set into
the slope of the lawn. Halfway up she made a mental wager with herself, turned her head quickly and caught him motionless, hunkered there, sail cover in hand, staring at her. He looked down quickly. Smiling to herself she climbed the last step and crossed the patio to the roofed terrace, walked to the far end of it, rolled the glass door back and went into her bedroom. It was a few minutes before six. She opened the panel in the wall of the lounge portion of the bedroom and turned the television set on. Local news at six on Saturday night.

She opened the door to the bedroom wing corridor and bawled, “Francisca! Francisca, damn it!”

In moments her little Cuban housemaid came scurrying in, eyes wide in mock alarm.

“Damn it, you
had
to see us come in!”

“I’m not watch. Honest to Jesus, Miss Creesy.”

Local news had begun. “Hold it a minute,” Crissy said. She moved over to the television set.

After a report of a drowning and a bloody automobile accident on the Tamiami Trail and an averted strike, he said, “As yet the large-scale air and sea search in the Bahamas for the missing yacht, the Mu—”

Crissy clicked it off and said, “Did they come and fix that damned pump?”

“Si! Yes. What was in it?” The girl frowned, wrinkling most of her delicate face. She held forefingers a few inches apart. “
Una lagartija
. Eh?”

“A what?”

“How is it a snake, but has feets?”

“A lizard. You mean a lizard got into the pump?”

Francisca’s smile was full of joy. “Damn well told.” She wore a bright red skirt, white blouse, gold sandals.

“Got a guest, have you?”