The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  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.

  Five

  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?”

  “Some friend only I think.”

  Crissy stripped off the two bikini halfs, balled them, tossed them to the girl. “Now for once in your life get your mind off your friend and see if you can do three things right. I’m only going to tell you once.”

  Francisca gave her deft imitation of nervous, humble fright. We’re trapped in this act of ours, Crissy thought, the cruel mistress and the terrorized servant. But an act makes it easier. You know where you are.

  “First, go get that green ice bucket, fill it halfway with ice and bring it here and put it on the bar over there. Next, hang around the terrace until the sailboat boy comes after his money, and then bring him here—not through the place, but by way of the terrace. Third thing, I’ll be going out to eat. So go do as you please until you bring me my coffee tomorrow morning.”

  Her cowed repetition of the orders was marred by the little knowledgeable gleam in her chocolate eyes.

  As she hurried out, Crissy stared after her, thinking: Better you don’t laugh, you sexy little spook. Don’t tell your friend any funnies about Mees Creesy and the sailboat muchacho. Don’t smirk a smirk, sweetie, because everything has to add up just so, just exactly so, in a game where you don’t dare take a single chance.

  She went into her gold and white bath and took a very quick shower. Her body radiated the sun-heat of the sailing day, prickling to the spray of the water. She toweled her cropped hair with muscular energy, brushed it semi-dry, painted her mouth, touched her body with perfume, pulled on a Lilly Pulitzer shift, a coarse, heavy weave in a vertical pattern of wide orange and white stripes, lined with silk. It was short, almost to mid-thigh. At the shoe rack she hesitated, decided to stay barefoot.

  She turned on the overhead light in her largest closet, went to the back of it, opened the hinged panel and, biting at her lower lip, dialed the combination on the barrel safe. She opened the cash box, took out two twenties for the boy for the two days of sailing lessons, then took an additional amount to replenish her household and walk-around money. The amount left was dangerously thin. She did not want to count it nor to guess how much might be there.

  But it was no longer something to start up the little itchings of desperation, the feeling of bleakness and dread. Instead it gave her a feeling of excitement and tension and hope. This time it would work. It had to work. She would make it work. And it would be an end to any need to scramble, ever again.

  “Bless you, Bixby,” she whispered, “you big jolly Santy Claus. You ripe juicy pigeon.”

  She closed the safe, tweaked the dial, closed the panel and turned off the closet light as she left.

  When Francisca cat-scratched at the screen panel, Crissy was carefully adding the measured ingredients for two Planters Punches in the tall glasses.

  “Come right in, please, Oliver,” she called, then heard the panel slide open, slide shut, heard Francisca’s sandal-slap fading swiftly along the terrace stone.

  Without turning from the task, she said, “Do sit down, Oliver. Anywhere, please. I want to know why I keep getting into such foul trouble when I try to come about when we’re really dusting along.”

  “M’am, I guess it’s on account of the Dutchman, it’s a real tender boat, and you’ve got it in your head you can keep her on the plane coming about, so you try to slam her around too fast. You have to ease her, haul her pretty short when you bring her up to point, then feed it to her as fast as she’ll take it and she’ll get back planing. You can’t yank her around. But—you’re getting better at it.”

  She took the two tall glasses up, turned and walked toward him, saying, “Thank you, dear Oliver.” The carpeting, in a pale tone of cinnamon, was laid over foam rubber sheets, and the pliancy of it under her bare feet accentuated her awareness of herself, oiled sockets of hip and knee, the shift in alternating diagonal stress lines pulling the softness of lining against the sunheated flesh, of the stronger odor of her perfume vaporized in her private warmths, of the ice-cold glasses in her hands, of the slippery lining of her underlip where her tongue-tip touched it, even of the slight heaviness and dampness of a sun-white curl bobbing against her temple in the cadence of her walk toward the boy. No western light could enter this room, but a reflected orange-golden light came in, partly from the cocoanut fronds tall enough to reach into the sunlight and turn to copper. Beyond the brown boy she could see the homing boats of Saturday, a few of them, dots on the broad bay, heading northerly to Dinner Key and to the city. In the strange, fading light she felt leonine, softly powerful.

  She held a drink to him and said, “I hate these when they’re made too sweet.”

  “Please—I got to leave, I really got to leave.”

  He stood awkwardly in the shorts and white T shirt, one shoulder higher than the other, eyes moving swiftly from side to side, his vision moving across her at throat level, his throat bulging in an effortful, dry swallow, his hand reaching aimlessly behind him for the catch that would free the sliding panel.

  He had a bony face, and not quite enough chin. His ears stuck out, and his upper lip was lugubriously long, and even at nineteen there were the beginning signs of how the brown-dark hair would recede. Poor lamb, she thought as she put the drinks on the nearby table.

  She turned toward him, with pretty sigh, query in the tilt of head, moving so that he abandoned the escape place, trying to move casually away from her, with nervous social cough. She felt sad, wise, maternal and utterly gentle. Poor ordinary chick-child, scared almost sick of all the richnesses of maturity. Poor eagle-scout child, with its mama herding it relentlessly toward the ministry. Poor trembler, facing now the fleshy actuality, quite different from all those erotic little night-thoughts it fancied so evil.

  “I really got to leave,” he said in the golden stillness, his voice unsteady.

  “Of course, dear Oliver. I know.”

  Six

  AT CRISSY HARKINSON’S isolated and luxurious house on lower Biscayne Bay, the servant’s quarters were above the detached two-car garage and utility room. Crissy’s white Mercedes convertible was in one of the stalls. The vehicle of the young sailing instructor was parked in the turnaround area, inside the open vehicle gate, near the redwood fencing, a weary and solemn car, orange rust and blue paint.

  Outside stairs were affixed to the side of the carport structure, leading up to a shallow open porch which ran t
he length of the building. Raoul Kelly sat placidly on the railing of the porch smoking a cigar and watching the sunset, waiting for Francisca to return. From there he could see a few glints of his own car beyond the fence where he preferred to leave it, some beetle-blue gleamings between the fence boards and the broad leaves of the outside plantings.

  She came swiftly from the house, grinned up at him, waved, and came hurrying up the stairs, along the porch, gave him a quick hug, a little pat, and said, “It was an excellent guess. The working classes are given a little holiday. Until breakfast. And I think noon would be a very good guess for breakfast time.”

  “He’s a little out of his class, ’Cisca. He’s overmatched.”

  It was their practice for him to speak English and for her to respond in her brisk Cuban Spanish. Her understanding was far better than her ability to speak English.

  She leaned against a nearby porch post, hands in the pockets of her vivid red skirt. She made a face. “It is a common thing, they say, for women of her age to covet strong young men, just as fat bankers seduce school girls. I feel like an accomplice, Raoul. She had me bring the fat worm and drop it right into the web. He seemed extremely nervous. And she had set the stage very shrewdly, and dressed appropriately.”

  Sometimes, infrequently, he would detect in her voice some of the cadences and inflections of upper class pre-Castro Havana, the echo of yacht club, house parties, diplomatic functions.