Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“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 would 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.”