Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

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, slack 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?”