The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  “Easy to get sentimental about young love. I insisted for her good, Lyd. The boy is an idealist, sort of permanently out of touch with reality.”

  “With your version of reality.”

  “Give me a chance. You asked me to explain. Leila is impressionable and imaginative. She’s been absorbing the boy’s do-good philosophy for a long time. They were going to spend the summer in Mexico on one of the Friends’ Service Committee things, in some village, painting huts, digging latrines, teaching English, all that stuff. Okay, so it’s a valid program. So is teaching in a backwoods school in Uruguay. But if that kind of life is not what Leila really believes in, if she only thinks she believes in it, then she could wake up one day and find herself trapped in a kind of—sacrificial existence, a flavor of charity and penance and austerity. If she has some time away from him, a chance to see another kind of life, maybe she’ll discover she’s victimized herself with a romantic vision of a life of good works. If it doesn’t work that way, then she’s probably genuine about it. But what’s the harm in making sure?”

  “She’s humoring you, you know. Quite a cruise for her. Bix Kayd, and that truly poisonous second wife of his, Carolyn. And poor ineffectual Roger Kayd. But there is a kind of sweetness about Stella. I guess you did the Kayd family a favor, at least. Carolyn won’t lean so hard on her step-children with Leila along. So you think the yacht clubs and marinas and the drinks around the pool are going to make Leila skeptical of Uruguay? It’s all going to make her ache to get back to Jonathan, dear. You see, what you are doing is not permitting them to live up to their own image of themselves. You are asking that they live up to your image of them. And when they marry, and they spend a year doing what Jonathan wants to do with his life, I will bet you a dollar to a dime you’ll tell them that now they’ve gotten the nonsense out of their systems, you have a great opportunity for them.”

  “Does she really know what she wants? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  She studied him, chin on her fist. “Sam, darling, when you suddenly look around you and see that—life itself is the basic magic, the real miracle, then we might have a chance. You are trying to impose your sense of order and fitness on the randomness of people and the illogic of fate. You want to refute the basic textures, the crazy mixture of life, and neaten it all up. Boy-Sam and I are refugees from that pattern, dear.”

  “I wish I could understand what you’re driving at.”

  “So do I, dear. So do I, believe me.”

  She had to get back. He paid the check and they walked out to the parking lot, in the dry white heat of mid-May, walked to her red Mustang, his present to her on her twenty-seventh birthday, three weeks before she packed and left him.

  When she grasped the door handle, he put his hand on the door to make her wait a moment. She turned toward him.

  He said, “Remember, on that four-day honeymoon up there in the Hill Country, that day we walked up those hills beyond Ingram and you could see the Guadeloupe River?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly.

  “I bought a forty acre piece of hillside. I had Seddon and Garvey draw me up plans for a hideaway lodge. They started construction three weeks ago. I can take some time off early in July. I’ll phone you. I can pick you up at your mother’s here, and we can go up there and really talk this out. I love you, Lyd. I need you. We can patch it up if we can get away together for a week, just the two of us, believe me. It will be beautiful up there then.”

  He put his hands on her arms just above the elbows, gave her a little shake, drew her closer. “Please, Lyd.”

  Her mouth softened, and her eyelids drooped with a sensual heaviness, and she took a deep slow breath. Then abruptly she pulled away, pushed her dark hair back with the back of her hand.

  “No, Sam. We tried to solve too many things just that way. And I want you that way. You know that. But the other has to be talked out, and I have to know that you know what I mean. Thank God you are too honest to fake it, to pretend to understand, and throw my words back at me. Why don’t you just—think about what we’ve said, and phone me in a month and we’ll meet—in another place like this one.”

  He opened the car door, and she got behind the wheel and looked up at him. He said, “I’m sending you enough?”

  “More than enough. You know that. It makes my pay for the part-time library job look—ludicrous. Well—do try to get some rest, dear. You have to understand that I had to do this.”

  “I’m taking your word for it, Lyd. You’re acting like a kook. But I know you’re not a kook. So I’m just missing the key somewhere. Take care of yourself, Lydia Jean.”

  “You too, dear.”

  “Give Boy-Sam a hug.”

  He watched her wait for traffic, then move into the tempo of it, heading toward the city. It seemed a saucy little car, unsuitable for someone who wasn’t having much fun lately.

  He walked to his car, a dusty white Pontiac sedan with the maximum power option, heavy-duty tires, springs, shocks, load levelers. He went west on Forty-Four, and by the time he turned south on Seventy-Seven, toward the valley, Harlingen, and home, he had turned the air conditioner back to low. There had been other talks during the five months. And now, as after the other times, the flavor of plausibility of the things she said faded quickly away, and it all became nonsense, a neurotic and inexplicable and corroding rejection by the woman he thought he had known so well.

  Below Kingsville, recalling the many things said, he kept thinking of better responses. His attitude had been wrong. She was having some kind of girlish tizzy, and the right approach would have been to tell her that he had humored her long enough. Tell her firmly and pleasantly that fantasy time was over, there was the wife-job to do, the one she had contracted for, so let’s go get the kid and the suitcases and take you home where you belong. But being with her made him feel uncertain, an unfamiliar and unpleasant state of mind, wanting to confess to crimes he could not comprehend.

  He felt a tremor in the steering wheel and glanced at the speedometer and saw it resting at just under a hundred miles an hour. It irritated him to have been unaware of such high speed, and even as he accepted the need to drop down to eighty, he pushed the gas pedal to the floor, hands locked on the wheel. At a hundred and fifteen the slight tremor smoothed out. But at a hundred and twenty-five the heavy car began to feel light, buoyant, floating slightly on the irregularities in the paving, no longer under his total control. Sam Boylston felt an angry exaltation, a pleasure in an unnamed defiance. The speedometer moved upward a bit more, but so reluctantly he knew the car was at its limit. If any one of several variables went astray now, the car would stop only as smoking junk far off the right of way, and the damned woman could wonder the rest of her life how much her stupid intractability had contributed to the death of the husband.

  Something attracted his eye, and when he glanced in the rear vision mirror he saw, far behind him on the long straight stretch, bleached by sunlight, the pulsing of the chase-light atop the roof of the patrol car in pursuit.

  He took his foot off the gas at once. An asinine performance. Erratic and juvenile. Sober man indulging in the kind of dramatics usually reserved for the drunk or the disturbed.

  But, he thought, damn Lyd anyway. I kept everything in order, kept everything moving along very nicely for three months. But for the past two the world has been going out of focus. Sudden irritability with people who haven’t deserved it. Appointments forgotten. Some very sour decisions—in small matters, fortunately. A drink or two too many at the club. That curious impulse to smack Bern Wallader in the mouth last week. And, too, that sweatiness and sense of sick anticipation when I stopped at the light in Brownsville and that little chippy in her short tight skirt, rolling her hips, walked so impudently across in front of the car, glanced, half smiled and glanced again, Indio blood showing in the breadth of her face, tilt of dark eyes, stepped up on the curb, stopped there to give me the chance, turning with a certain hauteur, arching herself in display.
All I had to do was reach over and swing the door open. Came damned close to it. Not over sixteen, I’d guess, more probably fifteen. Disaster in a prematurely ripe package. But the car behind me honked, the light was green, and I went on, with the palms of my hands cold and slippery on the wheel.

  “What are you trying to do to me?” he said aloud, striking the top of the wheel with the heel of his right hand.

  His speed was down to fifty. The patrol car was on his bumper and the siren gave an imperative growl. He braked and steered over onto the shoulder and stopped. The patrol car passed him and cut in and stopped directly in front of him, chase-light still revolving. The husky trooper got out quickly and as he approached, Sam was mildly surprised to see that he had the revolver ready in his hand.

  Sam rolled the window down, and the man said, “Keep your hands where I can see them and get out slowly when I open—Oh! Hey, Mr. Boylston. I thought you were a flyer.”

  Sam looked at the weather-brown face, went back through mental files, came up with the name. Shugg. He’d given official testimony two years ago when the son of a county judge had been killed on this same stretch of highway.

  As Shugg quickly holstered the weapon, Sam looked at his sleeve markings and got out of the coolness into the highway heat and said, “How are you making it, Corporal Shugg?”

  “Not too bad, I guess.”

  “You thought I was a what?”

  “A flyer. A kid who gets hold of something with a lot of horses, the old man’s, or he steals it, and looks for a long stretch where he can put it right down on the floor and keep it there. When I saw I wasn’t going to gain on you worth a damn, I radioed ahead for a road block, and then I canceled when you eased off.”

  Sam, by an effort of will, kept his hands steady as he lit a cigarette. “Damn fool procedure, I guess. I’ve got a little front-end vibration at high speed, and I thought if I could pinpoint where it smooths out again, it would help them find out what it is.”

  Shugg looked puzzled. “I was just going to apologize for holding you up and tell you I know you got a good reason for hustling back to Harlingen, but nobody has a reason good enough for what you were doing.”

  “Reason?”

  “You didn’t hear it on the news, then?”

  “Hear what?”

  “There’s a big search going on for Mr. Kayd’s boat over there in the Bahamas. He didn’t make a radio check yesterday morning like he did every morning, and then he didn’t get to where he was supposed to be headed, and didn’t make radio contact this morning either, so they started an air search and can’t find a thing, not so far. Seven people aboard. The Kayd family and the hired captain and his wife and your sister Leila. I just guessed that was why you were in—a big hurry, Mr. Boylston.”

  He went directly to the offices of Boylston and Worth, Attorneys at Law. He hurried through the silence and emptiness of Sunday afternoon back to his large corner office, turned the Sunday setting of the thermostat down ten degrees, made certain his phone was on the night plug and alive, then looked up the number of the newspaper, asked if Tom Insley was there, got him on the line immediately.

  “Tom? Sam. I heard the three o’clock news on the car radio. Have you got anything new on the situation?”

  “Not a thing, Sam. Hell of a note. I know how upset you must be. But as long as I’ve got you on the line, do you want to make any kind of a statement?”

  “No harm in that, I guess. Let’s see now. Bixby Kayd’s cruiser, the Muñeca, is a custom-built boat, diesel powered, very solidly constructed, with all customary safety devices and navigation aids. I understand that the weather has been clear the past two days and the seas calm. I have every confidence that Bix would employ a captain over there who knows the waters and is totally qualified. I have two guesses. One is that they had some kind of electrical failure affecting the engines and have drifted out of the area now being searched. Or, they changed their announced destination, and Bix would have so indicated when he called the Nassau Marine Operator yesterday morning, but the electrical failure kept him from so doing, and again they would be outside the search area. I have—I have every confidence they’ll be spotted today, or no later than tomorrow, and we’ll have an explanation of what happened. Okay?”

  There was too long a delay, too much hesitation before Tom Insley answered. Sam Boylston felt a prickling sensation at the nape of his neck, that most basic and primitive warning.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “I guess we have a more complete report than you heard on the radio news, Sam. Bix bought another boat in Florida, a little over twenty feet, and took it in tow. It would get into places too shallow for the Muñeca. Thing is, it was equipped with a transistorized ship-to-shore. Thirty watts. And a good sea boat, fast, lots of power, the same kind of hull they use in those Miami to Nassau races. Look, I don’t want to upset you any more than you are, but the Bahamas are full of pleasure boats in May. There’s no news of any contact by any of them with either of Bix’s boats. I can’t see a simultaneous electrical failure.”

  “Then you better say that I am optimistic about them being found.”

  “Are you?”

  “The reason has to be off the record, Tom.”

  “Too many things are, but go ahead.”

  “Bix Kayd never took a hundred percent pleasure trip in his life. I guess you know I did some law work for him. I resigned. We’re still reasonably friendly. There were too many surprises. You can’t do your best job for a client unless you know the whole picture, know everything he’s fiddling around with. Bix is a promoter. He likes to stay behind the scenes. He’s more secretive than he has to be because I guess he gets a boot out of it. Nobody but Bix and his personal tax accountants know the whole structure. The disappearance has the smell of one of his little games.”

  “How could it do him any good?”

  “Think it through, Tom. Some of the things he’s known to be behind could take quite a slide when the exchanges open tomorrow. Through a plausible dummy he could have set up to sell short, buy back at the bottom, and show up wearing a broad smile about Wednesday.”

  “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.