The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  “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, sla
ck off on trying to bring Francisca back here?”

  Lobwohl pondered the question, sighed and said, “You told me you do not handle criminal cases. Do you know anything about poroscopy?”

  “Only that it takes a good man to get it across to a jury without confusing them.”

  “Right. The sweat pores on the ridges of prints have as distinctive and unique a pattern as the prints themselves, and we use it when we have fragmentary prints.” He opened a large folder on his desk and said, “Come around here, Boylston. This is the palm print we found on the rim of the tub in that number ten cottage. Here is the palm print Mrs. Harkinson let the Lab take for comparison purposes. We have twelve characteristic points of similarity, making it a positive match. She explains plausibly how she happened to leave the print on the tub on Friday night when she went to see Staniker. Now look at this area here.” He pointed to the pad at the base of the thumb. “This next glossy is a blowup of that portion of the hand, using a waxy material to bring up the pore structure. Ink hides it. Here is an impression of that same area. It came off the barrel of the 22 rifle. Here is another taken from the aluminum tiller bar of the sailboat. All we can really nail down is four points of similarity on the gunbarrel impression, and five points on the tiller impression. No absolute value as evidence.”

  “What does she say?”

  “What she says now is filtered through Palmer Haas. She says that as she was taking sailing lessons, it would not be surprising to have some sort of print on the tiller bar. She says also that Oliver brought the gun over because of the palm-tree rats. He shot five of them and buried them next to the roots of some kind of plant out there.”

  “Scheff found them,” Kindler said.

  “She says that she remembered the gun and before she took her sleeping pill, she took it down and put it in the boat so he wouldn’t have the excuse of coming back for it. Right now we are trying to locate any friend of the Akard boy who could have brought him around to get the sailboat out of her little boat basin Sunday evening.”

  Lobwohl, yawning again, got up and went over to the chalk board on his office wall. Swiftly he drew a shoreline, a crude outline of the Harkinson house, a symbol for the sailboat, a box to show where the boy’s car was parked.

  “Here is what we have to wonder about, Boylston. Was the palm print made Friday night or Sunday night. Lab found two blonde hairs in the cottage, and microscopic comparison of root structure and cross sections show they came from her head. Were they left there Friday or Sunday night? What would the scheduling be if they were left there Sunday night. The boy comes and gets the boat, because apparently she was still there when it was gone. He picks her up, sails down to where he left the car. They go see Staniker and kill him. Drive back in his car. The boy sails her back to her place and leaves her off. Then he can’t stand the thought of losing her forever and the idea of having helped kill somebody, so he knocks himself off. You see the hole in all that, of course.”

  “Motive,” Sam Boylston said. “She would have a lot easier ways of shedding a boyfriend. What if I could give you all the motive you’d need?”

  Lobwohl, teetering from heel to toe, regarded him somberly. “You wouldn’t get on my nerves so bad, Boylston. That’s all I can give you.”

  Sam Boylston hesitated and then took the two tapes in their metal boxes out of his jacket pocket. “These are the Francisca Torcedo tapes. In Spanish, so you’ll need a transcript in English.”

  Lobwohl held them out to Kindler. “Put Lopez on it.”

  “Don’t say anything fascinating until I’m through in the kitchen,” Kindler said as he left.

  “They goofed,” Lobwohl said. “Scheff and Kindler. When they couldn’t come up with the maid, they had to tell me how it happened. Telling it practically made their teeth ache. They’re the best I’ve got in homicide. Want to know a funny thing? If they hadn’t goofed, I wouldn’t still have the case. There are some people upstairs who like to reach down and take over the jazzy cases, if everything is going smooth. It is a celebrity angle. But if things are going a little sour, they’d rather have it stay down here where the pros are. No glory in having to make explanations.”

  When Kindler came back he had Barney Scheff with him. Scheff was introduced. He did not seem entirely pleased to know Sam Boylston. They sat down.

  When Lobwohl nodded at Sam, he said, “If you check it out you will find that Bixby Kayd and Ferris Fontaine were associated in some business ventures. You will find that the members of the inner circle sometimes held their conferences aboard the boat Fontaine gave his mistress. I can guess that Kayd was aboard that cruiser for one or more of those meetings. When you get the transcript of the Francisca tapes, you will find out that Bix Kayd visited Cristen Harkinson at her home on the last day of March, a little over two weeks before he arrived back in Miami and hired Staniker. He had a rental limousine and driver. You should be able to trace that. Questions?”

  Lobwohl no longer looked tired enough to yawn. “Is this the implication? Kayd was trying to locate Staniker through Crissy Harkinson?”

  “Because he could have heard and remembered that Staniker knew the Islands well. And because he would know Fontaine wouldn’t have used a hired captain who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about private affairs and business deals. This is speculation, of course.”

  “And so?” the Captain asked.

  “And so there happened to be eight hundred thousand dollars in cash aboard the Muñeca when that accident happened.”

  The three police faces had the same listening look as, in the silence, they reshuffled the facts.

  “Son of a bitch,” murmured Barney Scheff. “Why cash?”

  “To swing a land deal, buy some votes on a Board.”

  “Will we be able to prove that money was aboard?” Lobwohl asked.

  “Not a chance. The people who can verify it would lie like hell to save their skins from the tax man.”

  “Have you ever heard of withholding evidence?” Lobwohl asked with dangerous courtesy.

  Sam Boylston looked hurt and astonished. “Without information about the money, I didn’t have a thing worth telling, Captain. I got a lead on the money this morning, from a friend of a friend, and here I am.”

  “This gets out,” Scheff said, “and the news guys are going to fall on the floor and foam at the mouth and giggle themselves to death.”

  Lobwohl hit his own forehead lightly with the heel of his right hand. “Friday she goes to see Staniker. He tells her where he cached the money. If she was sure he wasn’t lying, and the money was reasonably safe, the best thing for her would be Staniker dead.”

  “And,” said Kindler with a certain note of awe, “he was the deadest looking dead I ever did see. He was a husk, like something shed him and crawled off.”

  “Captain,” Sam said, “what is the time of death on Staniker?”

  “Ten o’clock, plus or minus an hour.”

  “When you get the transcript of the Francisca tape, you’ll see that it takes Mrs. Harkinson out of the picture. I could understand enough of it to realize Raoul Kelly was being very thorough about nailing down the exact times. Francisca looked in and saw Mrs. Harkinson asleep in her bed at quarter after nine. There was a night light on. Later, at quarter to midnight, Francisca and Kelly heard the pump running and knew Mrs. Harkinson was using water in the main house. At ten past midnight Mrs. Harkinson called Francisca on the intercom and asked for some cocoa and crackers. She said she had awakened and taken a shower to see if it would relax her enough to go back to sleep, but it hadn’t. With the gates locked and with no car available to her, I guess it would check out that she just wouldn’t have had time to sail two miles, drive with the boy to Coral Gables, drive back, sail back to her place. It could be done, I suppose, if Staniker was all ready to hop into the tub and hold his wrists out. But you say he took on a pretty fair load of alcohol and barbiturates. It would take time for that to work.”

  “Assuming,” said Lobwohl, “that the maid
wasn’t given a little present of money to establish those times, Mr. Boylston.”

  “No. Not that one. Or Kelly.”

  “So you’re a great judge of character, eh?” Scheff asked Sam.

  “Knock it off,” Lobwohl ordered. “Let’s see where we are. You represent Kelly and the maid, Boylston. We’ve got tangible evidence that the Akard kid killed Staniker. If he’d cut one wrist and fixed the door so it would lock when he left, we might have bought it as suicide, at least until we got a look at what was in the kid’s wallet. Harv says with the kid it was definitely suicide. The arm was long enough and the barrel short enough, and the muzzle was right in his ear when he thumbed the trigger. And I don’t see how we’ve got a chance in the world of proving the Harkinson woman pressured the kid into killing Staniker. We keep the Harkinson woman on ice until the Grand Jury indicts Akard on a murder first charge, then takes up Akard as a new matter and accepts our file and calls it suicide. Now let me make a little prediction. The Harkinson woman will disappear. She’ll sell that house. And some day she’ll go pick up all that money. So I wonder a little about you, Boylston. You’re convinced she was the moving force behind Staniker’s killing the people, taking the money, and convincing a lot of people it was an accident. We have you and we have your sister’s boyfriend, that Jonathan Dye, to wonder about. You just don’t look like somebody who’s going to say it’s too bad, she got away with it, let’s go home and forget it. There’s something about you Texans. Maybe it’s a vigilante attitude. A sense of family. Blood for blood. You’re a lawyer. You should know better. But I wonder if you do.”

  Sam heard his own accent thicken as he said mildly, “And I wonder if it’s any of your business to wonder, Cap’n.”

  “Where is the Dye boy?”

  “Looking for Leila. Searching the Great Bahama Bank. Leased a catamaran and hired the fellow who owns it. He’s sure she got out of it somehow.”

  “He must be out of his damn mind!” Scheff said.