Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

Sam rolled the window down, and the man said, “Keep your hands where I can see them and get out slowly when I open— Oh! Hey, Mr. Boylston. I thought you were a flyer.”

Sam looked at the weather-brown face, went back through mental files, came up with the name. Shugg. He’d given official testimony two years ago when the son of a county judge had been killed on this same stretch of highway.

As Shugg quickly holstered the weapon, Sam looked at his sleeve markings and got out of the coolness into the highway heat and said, “How are you making it, Corporal Shugg?”

“Not too bad, I guess.”

“You thought I was a what?”

“A flyer. A kid who gets hold of something with a lot of horses, the old man’s, or he steals it, and looks for a long stretch where he can put it right down on the floor and keep it there. When I saw I wasn’t going to gain on you worth a damn, I radioed ahead for a road block, and then I canceled when you eased off.”

Sam, by an effort of will, kept his hands steady as he lit a cigarette. “Damn fool procedure, I guess. I’ve got a little front-end vibration at high speed, and I thought if I could pinpoint where it smooths out again, it would help them find out what it is.”

Shugg looked puzzled. “I was just going to apologize for holding you up and tell you I know you got a good reason for hustling back to Harlingen, but nobody has a reason good enough for what you were doing.”

“Reason?”

“You didn’t hear it on the news, then?”

“Hear what? ”

“There’s a big search going on for Mr. Kayd’s boat over there in the Bahamas. He didn’t make a radio check yesterday morning like he did every morning, and then he didn’t get to where he was supposed to be headed, and didn’t make radio contact this morning either, so they started an air search and can’t find a thing, not so far. Seven people aboard. The Kayd family and the hired captain and his wife and your sister Leila. I just guessed that was why you were in — a big hurry, Mr. Boylston.”

He went directly to the offices of Boylston and Worth, Attorneys at Law. He hurried through the silence and emptiness of Sunday afternoon back to his large corner office, turned the Sunday setting of the thermostat down ten degrees, made certain his phone was on the night plug and alive, then looked up the number of the newspaper, asked if Tom Insley was there, got him on the line immediately.

“Tom? Sam. I heard the three o’clock news on the car radio. Have you got anything new on the situation?”

“Not a thing, Sam. Hell of a note. I know how upset you must be. But as long as I’ve got you on the line, do you want to make any kind of a statement?”

“No harm in that, I guess. Let’s see now. Bixby Kayd’s cruiser, the Muñeca, is a custom-built boat, diesel powered, very solidly constructed, with all customary safety devices and navigation aids. I understand that the weather has been clear the past two days and the seas calm. I have every confidence that Bix would employ a captain over there who knows the waters and is totally qualified. I have two guesses. One is that they had some kind of electrical failure affecting the engines and have drifted out of the area now being searched. Or, they changed their announced destination, and Bix would have so indicated when he called the Nassau Marine Operator yesterday morning, but the electrical failure kept him from so doing, and again they would be outside the search area. I have — I have every confidence they’ll be spotted today, or no later than tomorrow, and we’ll have an explanation of what happened. Okay?”

There was too long a delay, too much hesitation before Tom Insley answered. Sam Boylston felt a prickling sensation at the nape of his neck, that most basic and primitive warning.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded.

“I guess we have a more complete report than you heard on the radio news, Sam. Bix bought another boat in Florida, a little over twenty feet, and took it in tow. It would get into places too shallow for the Muñeca. Thing is, it was equipped with a transistorized ship-to-shore. Thirty watts. And a good sea boat, fast, lots of power, the same kind of hull they use in those Miami to Nassau races. Look, I don’t want to upset you any more than you are, but the Bahamas are full of pleasure boats in May. There’s no news of any contact by any of them with either of Bix’s boats. I can’t see a simultaneous electrical failure.”

“Then you better say that I am optimistic about them being found.”

“Are you?”

“The reason has to be off the record, Tom.”

“Too many things are, but go ahead.”

“Bix Kayd never took a hundred percent pleasure trip in his life. I guess you know I did some law work for him. I resigned. We’re still reasonably friendly. There were too many surprises. You can’t do your best job for a client unless you know the whole picture, know everything he’s fiddling around with. Bix is a promoter. He likes to stay behind the scenes. He’s more secretive than he has to be because I guess he gets a boot out of it. Nobody but Bix and his personal tax accountants know the whole structure. The disappearance has the smell of one of his little games.”

“How could it do him any good?”

“Think it through, Tom. Some of the things he’s known to be behind could take quite a slide when the exchanges open tomorrow. Through a plausible dummy he could have set up to sell short, buy back at the bottom, and show up wearing a broad smile about Wednesday.”

“Until the S.E.C. digs into it?”

“The way he moves, he doesn’t leave many tracks. And there’s quite a swarm of congressmen who keep coming back to his place for barbecue and bourbon.”

“So you’ll just wait and see?”

“A little more than that. I have some sources. I’ll nose around and see if I can get some kind of a hint about what kind of business he was combining with pleasure this time.”

“Will you let me know? Off the record, of course.”

“That’s going to depend on what it is.”

After he hung up, Sam Boylston got up and walked over and stood with his hands shoved into his hip pockets, looking out the window wall, across at the empty asphalt acres of the Northway Shopping Plaza, and the new Valley Citizens Trust building beyond. He realized that he was staring at another byproduct of what Lyd called his compulsion to neaten up the world. With the increase in the size of their practice and the need for a larger staff and larger quarters, he and his partner, Taylor Worth, had started looking around.

They had found Bern Wallader sitting on this big tract, planning an eventual shopping center, fretting over traffic counts, moving all too slowly and conservatively, and planning too small. At that time Sam had just become a director of Valley Citizens and had known of the bank’s need to find a new site. After a long talk with the bank president, and a confidential talk with the appropriate people in local government, and another with some people in Houston specializing in the planning and construction of suburban shopping complexes, he had boosted Bern Wallader into nervous and apprehensive action, finally getting him to move only by putting up collateral and signing notes in return for a piece of the action. Now in addition to twice the number of retail outlets Bern had thought feasible, there was the bank, the professional office building, and acres of new housing going on on the rearward land which Sam had optioned the day he began to believe Bern Wallader could be persuaded to begin taking risks.

And it had started merely because they had needed more space and hadn’t been able to find anything suitable and had wondered if anyone would build to their requirements. It was a strange knack for commercial serendipity. Or perhaps, he thought, it was merely a trick of objectivity. You saw what was quite logical and necessary, and wondered why people dragged their feet, complained of digestive pains, worried about reducing their obligations before starting something new and, when they had something feasible, had this strange compulsion to dwarf their own concepts. With a geometrically increasing increment of nearly three hundred thousand new souls in the Republic each and every month, only the most visionary projects could hope to keep pace. Most minds were dim and dingy places, and most thinking a slow and muddied flow, full of unidentified emotional debris, obsolete concepts, frightened rites and superstitions.