Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“It could be a pretty good way,” he said at last. “You sure work things out, don’t you?”

“There’s a lot at stake. Isn’t it worth a lot of time and thought and work? What would it come to per hour?”

“I can make a call about the Bertram.”

“Not yet. Not until I tell you. You know, this hasn’t been much of a celebration, has it? Why do we have to be so tense and gloomy? We’re out of the bind, Garry. We broke loose. The hardest part is all over. Tell you what. I’ll come by here Sunday night. I’ll bring goodies. We’ll have our little celebration. It’s a funny thing, Garry. Now that I know that this is the only place we’ll ever be together again, I really think I’m going to miss you. Isn’t that weird?”

He looked at her and looked away. “Ever since the Senator died, things have been weird. I don’t know. I get the feeling this isn’t me. I get the feeling none of it happened. I don’t think I’ve known for one minute how you ever felt about anything.”

“Why should you want to know?”

“I guess it doesn’t make any difference. Not any more.”

She drove the little white car home in a roundabout way through empty streets, through a coolness of recent rain, the wet streets reflecting the caligraphies of all-night neon. For half the journey she thought of Staniker. There had been just enough toughness, just enough greed, just enough brutality for him to manage it. But now his eyes were wrong and his mouth was changed. He had expended something he’d never regain. It was, she thought, like what happened to a man who experienced a truly professional, cold, savage beating. It left him with all those little apologetic mannerisms, bob of head, ingratiating smile, a wariness very like shyness.

And then she planned herself for the boy. A horn blast behind her startled her and she realized she had slowed to almost twenty miles an hour and the rain had begun again, and she was trying to see through the blurred windshield without thought of turning the wipers on. The car roared irritably by her. She turned the wipers on. She tried to be amused at her absentmindedness, but it left a chilly little hollow of apprehension just under her heart.

The boy was waiting under the roofed part of the stone terrace, outside the locked doors of her bedroom. She turned on a single low light and unlocked the doors.

He held her close, wrapped in his strong young arms. She made herself tremble.

“You were gone so long!” he said. “It was driving me nuts. Why were you there so long, darling?”

“The r-rain is blowing in, d-dear. Please.”

He released her and closed the sliding door. She sat in the straight chair by her desk, knees together, fists in her lap, head lowered. He dropped to one knee by the chair, put his fingers under her chin and lifted her head. She saw agony in his face. “Did he — did you have to...”

She shook her head in violent negation and shuddered. “He tried to. I... made excuses. He — hurt me. He hit me in the stomach. It made me sick. Oh. Olly darling, he’s worse than before. He’s — very strange. He wanted to keep me there. I had to promise to go back there Sunday night. If I don’t he’ll come after me.”

“So that’s when we do it,” he said harshly.

“But can we? Can we really?”

“What’s it like where he is?”

“It’s — very good for what we were talking about. It’s a horrid little bungalow court near Coral Gables. It’s the sort of place you would go if you wanted to hide. I don’t think there’s anyone in the bungalows near him, and it’s all so jungly and overgrown you can’t see them from each other or from the road in front. It really seems like — well, like the kind of depressing place where — that kind of thing could happen.” She frowned. “He killed those people, Oliver.”

“He what! ”

“It wasn’t any accident. Oh, he didn’t admit it. He’s much too clever for that. Nobody will ever be able to prove a thing. But that place he’s in, he rented it under another name. He said it was to keep reporters from bothering him. I think it’s so he can really go into hiding if somebody gets suspicious about what really happened on the Muñeca.”

“What makes you think he killed them all?”

“I know him, Oliver. God, how I know him! He said little things that fit together. He said he wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while. And he gave me a slimy wink and said the cruise ended before he’d had time to decide which one was better stuff, the little lame girl or her step-mother. I suppose he got careless and Mr. Kayd or the brother caught him with one of them. If he hit one and killed him, he’d kill everybody. That’s how he is.”

“It isn’t wrong to kill a man like that,” said Oliver.

He moved closer to her, on both knees. She pulled his head into her lap. She slowly stroked his crisp hair. “He’s a monster,” she whispered. “We have to be so careful. It’s going to be like a nightmare for us, but when it’s over — we can go away together for a little while, to some marvelous place.”

There was no sound in the room except the breath of the air conditioning, and a faint whisper of the rain outside.

“Get up now, dear,” she said. “I want to make a drawing of the floor plan of that cottage while it’s fresh in my mind. We’ve got a lot of work to do. A lot of planning.”

She turned her chair to the desk, turned on the desk light, opened the drawer and got paper and pencil.

Leila did not know what had set the Sergeant off just when they were getting the noon meal on Saturday. It could have been the scene she had made the night before, crying and raving and cursing and carrying on until she had exhausted herself.

But he had not seemed angry about what she had done, or about the scene. He had seemed just — saddened, and disappointed in her. After she was certain he was asleep on Friday night, she had rubbed herself liberally with repellent, and had sneaked off the boat without a sound and up the stairs and into the shack and taken the big flashlight which had been aboard the Muñequita. Then, driven nearly out of her mind by those bugs which didn’t mind the repellent, in the windless night she had climbed the ladder to the platform high in the water oak, and had aimed the beam through an opening in the branches toward the houses on the mainland shore. It wasn’t too late. Many of them had lights on. She worked the switch until her thumb felt sprained. Dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. She had to stop to whack the insects on her face and arms and ankles.

“What are you trying to do?” the Sergeant had roared, so close at hand she had nearly leaped off the platform.

She had fought him on the way down and they had both nearly fallen. But she did not start the really large scene until he had strapped her into that impossible belt again and forced the link shut and said, sadly, “If’n you can’t be trusted at all, Missy, then I just have to do this ever’ time I have to leave you alone, and ever’ time I have to get some sleep. Don’t like it any better than you do. But you won’t pay attention to good sense!”

“Good sense!” she had yelled. “Good sense! You’re a crazy! Don’t you even know it? You got that great big dent in your head where they took your brains out. You’re kidnapping me! You know what they’ll do to you? They’ll take you away and they’ll lock you up forever in a big room full of other crazies!”

But he had just kept looking mournfully at her, shaking his head, and finally he had gone down and brought her bedding up and taken his own down and gone to sleep on the boat.