The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  “Does Mrs. Harkinson go out much in the evening?”

  “Very rarely. Can I leave now?”

  “You claim to be a newspaperman?”

  “It isn’t a claim. It’s what I am.”

  “You don’t do well in poker games, Kelly.”

  “That’s a flat statement, eh? A judgment from on high. All right. I lose. And I am not so great with a gun, either. What’s your point, Boylston?”

  “A reporter would try to pump me, my friend. What in the world is this man doing watching the Harkinson place? What’s that got to do with his sister being lost at sea? Not you. All you want to do is get away from me. You didn’t ask the right questions. So I have to assume you didn’t ask them because you know the answers. And if you do, you are part of the whole stinking game too. So you are coming along with me and we’re going to have a long talk.”

  “Coming where?”

  “Just lean forward and keep both hands braced against the dashboard, Mr. Kelly. No. Higher, so I can see them out of the corner of my eye. Fine.”

  Boylston was staying in a poolside cabana at a second-class mainland motel. There were only a few cars at the motel proper. Boylston turned the lights on, pulled the double thicknesses of draperies across the window wall facing the pool. He pulled a straight chair closer to where Raoul sat, sat astride it, his folded arms resting on top of the back, chin on his forearm. There was a taut agility about the way he moved, a look of power under careful control, which made Raoul uneasy. And the man’s eyes were as cold as a cat’s.

  “We have to find out if you are an animal, Kelly.” His tone was uncommonly gentle. “Even if we have to hurt you to find out.”

  Raoul shrugged. “Bad poker player, yes. Bad with a gun, yes. Does pain bother me? Yes. Will it break me? No. I have had some. I have endured some things. Bay of Pigs. Isle of Pines. Maybe a man should have some of those things, to find out about himself. But maybe there is no point in telling you that. Harlingen it said on the card. Border Texas, I believe. So to start with, in your eyes, I am—what are people of Latin American blood called there? Spic? So you can start with an assumption I am less as a human being than you are. It could be wrong.”

  Boylston looked thoughtful. “Correction. I’ve never faulted you people on guts. In other ways? Yes. But—recently I’ve been reconsidering a lot of old attitudes. It’s possible I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. But that’s neither here nor there.”

  “We’re lazy people, Lawyer. We drowse in the sun. We strum guitars and sing about broken hearts. We get very passionate and stick knives in each other. We lie a lot. Okay?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  “I think you were being honest. It was very refreshing. Perhaps I don’t think very quickly after being hit in the face. Perhaps I don’t react the way you think I should. But I am not mixed up in anything. You’ll have to take my word for that.”

  “When a man acts in an implausible manner regarding something of importance to me, I have to know why. We have to find out some way of trusting each other, maybe.”

  “A lot would depend on what you are trying to do, what you’re after.”

  “I want to be absolutely certain of something. Not legal proof. I don’t think I’m going to get legal proof. Just proof enough to satisfy me. And then I am going to arrange to have Staniker and whoever was in it with him taken quietly to some out of the way place. And the last thing I am going to do with them is toast their rotten hearts over a slow fire on a sharp stick.”

  It was said with a deadly and absolute conviction which took all melodrama out of it. Raoul had heard the expression about something making the blood run cold. He had never experienced it before. The eyes and the quiet voice filled the room, and he managed, with great effort, to stop looking at Boylston. He felt that humming sensation which precedes a dead faint. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, swallowed, and said, “You convince me, Señor.”

  “Are you glad you’re not one of them?”

  “I will be very glad if I can convince you I’m not. If you had talked about legal proof, about police, then I would not tell you a certain story about a young woman of aristocratic birth. But now perhaps it is very necessary to tell you. First, does the word pundonor mean anything to you?”

  “Point of honor? Of course. That’s another thing I respect about the latinos.”

  “Enough to observe the custom?”

  “Enough to be honored to be asked to observe it.”

  “Then, Mr. Boylston, I will tell you everything I know or suspect. And you, in turn, will promise not to go near Francisca, or take any action which will cause others to go to her and question her.” As Boylston started to speak, Raoul stopped him and said. “And whatever you do, or however you do it, you will do it in such a way she will not be involved in it, in publicity, in questions, anything.”

  “I swear I will do my best—but if I find out you have held anything back or changed the facts in any way, the bets are off.”

  “Pundonor works both ways, Lawyer.”

  Sam Boylston let Raoul go through it, beginning to end. There was such a marked immobility about Boylston, such an absence of random movement, change of position, physical mannerism, Raoul had the feeling no one had ever listened to him as intently, no attention had ever been as consistent and unflawed.

  When he was done, Boylston went out to the ice machine and filled the plastic pitcher, came back and mixed two drinks of bourbon and water in the glistening tumblers stripped clean of their crackly packaging of waxed paper. Sam stretched out on one of the Bahama beds, head propped up, ankles crossed. He had expected to have to come back with those questions which would cut through the familiar fuzziness of both thought and expression. He had accumulated a few questions in the beginning, but Kelly had eventually answered them. Sam found himself respecting the quality of this stocky, swarthy, broad-faced man’s mind. Unlike most laymen, Kelly had made a clear distinction between fact and assumption, and between first-hand, second-hand and third-hand information.

  “Raoul? I’ve got the name right?”

  “You have.”

  “I need help. I was going to line up somebody I can trust. Import them from Texas. I think you’re a better one to help me unravel this. I think we’re in business together. I think you better call me Sam.”

  “I just told you why I don’t want any part of it, Sam.”

  “Not exactly. You told me some very good reasons why you don’t want your ’Cisca involved in any way. And the best way you can bring that about is to keep me from making some stupid blunder that will bring the police and the press into the act. Miami is your back yard, Raoul. If that girl is as shaky as you seem to think she is, and if she is in danger from Staniker and company, as you think she might be, then the best thing you can do for her is ride with me.”

  “My God, you know where the leverage is, don’t you? But why do you want Fearless Kelly on your team?”

  “Because you’re so good with a gun. Because you’re so stupid and agile and savage. One little thing, Raoul—didn’t it itch like a place you couldn’t scratch to know about Kayd seeing the woman in March, and Staniker carrying on with the woman ever since the boat was sold, and keeping it to yourself?”

  “By then, by that time, whether it was planned or not, it was done. It was over for that family. Where would my motive be? A big scoop? A terrible concern to see justice done? Okay, it was stuck in my mind where I couldn’t get at it, like a berry seed in the teeth. Because, I guess, I have the inquiring mind. The mind that wants to know what actually happened. Like when you get a call and have to leave in the middle of a movie. But we’re in a bloody world, Sam. And it grows ever more bloody. People die badly for very small reasons. It was my concern only in the way it could affect Francisca.”

  Sam sat up and finished his drink. “I am an officer of the court. To that extent, a law man. Given the same kind of situation, I’d probably keep my mouth shut too. That’s our disease, isn
’t it? Don’t get involved. But this thing is too close. It was my blood, and the last, aside from my son, still living in the world. And I set her up for it. Not knowing, of course. You can go crazy trying to trace all the way back, playing that game of ‘if’. If I hadn’t done this, or had done that, if the timing had been different, if I had listened, if I had understood.”

  “Better to play that game than the other one.”

  “The other one?”

  “The game of righteousness. The one that says I weighed every move, every tangible and intangible, and I made my decision in cold blood, so I am not to blame if something went wrong.”

  Sam stared over at Raoul Kelly, feeling strangely agitated. “Why should that be worse? What’s wrong with logic?”

  “For playing games, it’s a fine thing. Chess, bridge, solving puzzles. Maybe it’s handy for practicing law or making money. But people don’t stand around on game boards, waiting to be moved or captured. There isn’t any rule book. Freud isn’t Hoyle. You can put in fifty cold facts and leave out one hot little emotion, and you come out dead wrong. Kelly’s equation. Want to hear it? When it comes to emotions, everybody is usually wrong. So the only chance you’ve got is to try not to be wrong so often. And give other people permission to be wrong too. What’s the matter? I’m upsetting you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Last year I would have said that was weak, stupid nonsense. I would have been surprised a man could sound so bright one minute and so soft the next minute. I would have felt superior. Now I feel—I might be able to understand Kelly’s Equation if I work on it long enough.”

  “Don’t expect too much. That’s part of it.”

  Sam built two more drinks, handed one to Raoul. “Anyway, aboard the boat that rescued Staniker, one of the women heard him, out of his head, trying to explain or apologize to somebody named Christy or Crissy. I got in from Nassau yesterday. Early this morning I researched what the papers had written about Staniker. I went to that Parker’s Marina and talked to the guys that hang around there. It came into focus. He did as little work as he could get away with. A cottage goes with the job. There’s a new couple in it now. Staniker’s wife was a cowed little woman. A sufferer. She did all her work and a good deal of what he was supposed to do. He took off when he felt like it. His car is parked out there too. An old yellow Olds. Staniker had been cozy with a Harkinson woman. Ran her boat until she sold it. One old boy kept nudging me and winking and saying that the Harkinson woman had belonged to one of the ex-governors of the state. I got on the phone and called a lawyer I know in Tampa. He knows the political scene. He said, as you confirmed a while ago, it had been an old man named Fontaine paying her bills. He’d been a State Senator once upon a time and hung onto the title. Made a pot of money in land speculation. Died last year. Rumor had it the old boy didn’t leave Crissy Harkinson too well fixed. I remembered that Bix Kayd had been into a few Florida deals, but my friend didn’t know the name. I phoned Brownsville, Texas, and woke up an old boy who would know, and he said Kayd and Fontaine had teamed up a time or two, but not recently.”

  “What are you leaving out?”

  “Very good! I’ll get to it in a minute. First I was going to just walk in on Mrs. Harkinson, when I located the house. Then I gave it some second thoughts. I visited Staniker in the hospital. He’s as rough as he’d have to be. But his record is clean. A man with larceny in his heart doesn’t get to be as old as Staniker with a clean record. Somebody had to push him into it. He won’t crack. Maybe he would have, if somebody got to him soon enough, but he’s had time to adjust to it. The Harkinson woman could be the planning department. If so, she could be too shrewd to accept any cover story from me. So I thought I’d better wait for her to come out and follow her and try to get enough of a look at her to see what type she might be. If she could send a man like Staniker after the jackpot.”

  “Which was?”

  “The only thing you can pass under the table. Money. With no memory, no record, no conscience. Cash. Eight hundred thousand.”

  Raoul was holding his glass in both hands. His eyebrows went up and stayed up. “My, my, my!” he said softly, and drank like a child holding a mug. He scowled. “Maybe he didn’t get it after all. Maybe he didn’t have the nerve to do what the woman wanted him to do. He was burned. He was marooned. I remember something that happened in Havana years ago that took the police a long time to figure out. A store blew up in the middle of the night. The explosion killed two men. They were identified as professional thieves. It seemed they had the extraordinary bad luck to be in the place when one of the partners had set a time bomb to go off, as revenge for being cheated by the other partner.”

  “Now you get a chance to listen to something.” Raoul watched Sam Boylston get out a small battery-operated tape recorder. As he selected the right reel and threaded it he said, “Staniker was interrogated several times. I got it all on tape. I don’t have the skill to do a lot of splicing. So I used two recorders and hooked them together, and took off just what I wanted onto new tape. I don’t practice criminal law. But you can’t get through law school without being exposed to some of the things to watch for. Just listen. Then tell me what you think.”

  The machine started. For long seconds there was a hissing sound. Then a man’s slow, heavy and slightly thickened voice:

  “On the Muñeca you’ve got—you had every control duplicated up on the flying bridge.” Pause. “On the Muñeca you’ve got … you had every control duplicated up on the flying bridge” Pause. “On the Muñeca you’ve got—you had every control duplicated up on the flying bridge.” Pause. “On the Muñeca you’ve got—you had every control duplicated up on the flying bridge.”

  There was a longer pause and then: “He had a loud laugh … He had a loud laugh … He had a loud laugh … He had a loud laugh.…”

  Raoul could tell they were not precise duplications of the same part of a master tape. They were said with slightly changed intonations, slight changes in rhythm. There were a few other phrases said over and over: “She wasn’t a good swimmer on account of her leg.” And, “That means doll in Spanish.” “We got into nice dolphin a few miles out. Spent a lot of time.”

  Sam turned the machine off. Raoul said, “I see the point, of course. He starts to speak of the boat in the present tense and changes it to the past tense. But he does it every time. After the first time or maybe two, he would have learned to adjust to the past tense and he wouldn’t make that mistake.”

  “So it was memorized, of course. For significant details of any story, people will have a tendency to use the same expressions over and over. So repetition means nothing. But what you watch for are the asides. People telling about something which happened do not bring in the same random thoughts in the same exact words every time. When they do it means they have been coached on those things, and they are trying to give the entire story a flavor of plausibility.”

  “So what was the real story, then?”

  “I know one way I would do it. I would kill them. I would lash them to solid parts of the cruiser. I would put the money in the smaller boat. It was fast and seaworthy. I’d open the seacocks on the big one and let it go down in a mile of water. I’d make a fast run, without lights, down to the northern tip of Andros and maybe somewhere near Morgan’s Bluff I’d hide that money where it would keep a long time. I’d run north again, and maybe I’d have loaded rocks into the smaller boat to overcome the flotation. I’d sink her closer to the Joulter Cays. But still in plenty of water. I’d wear a life belt and I’d swim to South Joulter Cay and bury the belt in the sand. I’d have a little can of gasoline with me and some matches in a waterproof case, and I would give myself some convincing burns and then wait to be rescued, rehearsing my story while I waited. It’s easy to give yourself more of a burn than you intend. And if he’d been picked up in a day or two or three, which was a reasonable expectation, he would have been in much better shape. Next I would come back here and I’d meet with the woman, and we w
ould decide how long it would be best to wait before going after the money, and what would be the best cover story for going after it, the best way to pick it up and run.”

  “When does he get back here?”

  “Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, this week. I’ll know in advance. A nurse will phone me. The woman doesn’t know me by sight. The man doesn’t know you by sight. That’s the way we divide it up. I don’t think he’ll head for her house. That would be stupid. He’ll hole up. She’ll go to him.”

  “You seem very sure.”

  “Even the way she’s acted through the whole thing, the moods your girl told you about—it all fits.”

  “So let the police have it, Sam Boylston.”

  “Isn’t that just what you don’t want?”

  “Let me start west with ’Cisca. Then blow the whistle. They’ll have to prove the same things some other way. About Kayd seeing her. About her relationship with Staniker.”

  “With what I’ve got, I don’t think you could get a Grand Jury to indict. There’s no way in the world I can prove that money was aboard. Who has the jurisdiction? If he was cleared at Nassau, are we into a double jeopardy problem? Could she ever be nailed as an accomplice? Not if she keeps her head, no matter what he says. No provable motive. No witnesses. If they could be indicted, and if it came to trial, any clown in town could get them off, and then no matter what came up later, they’d be in the clear forever.”

  “Then let go of it, Sam. Go home.”

  “Let go!”

  “People like that find better ways of destroying themselves than you could ever dream up. Everybody dies, Sam. It all ends for everybody. So you are a clever man. And you are a hater. So suppose you get away with it. Will your sister know? Would you want to tell your wife or your boy?”

  “I would know!”

  “And you might have twenty years in Raiford Prison to think about how dead they would be. How come you appoint yourself the avenging angel? Maybe this is your chance to grow up, and all you have to do is recognize it.”