Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

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.

Sam sighed audibly. “Before all this happened, I would have appointed myself to bring him to his senses. Sure. I would have told Kelly it was foolish to take Francisca out of the state. What the hell good is logical behavior? It’s a cold satisfaction, gentlemen. I can verify that. I have always been a very logical type. You have to let people be as irrational as they want to be, and maybe there are better reasons than you know. Maybe what Jonathan is doing isn’t a crazy one-man search party and nothing but that. Maybe out there on those flats he’s putting up a bridge, a way to cross from a life with Leila in it to a life without her. He knows she wouldn’t have even been aboard that boat if I hadn’t sent her off with the Kayds to try to bust up the romance. I wanted to bust it up so she’d marry into the kind of status I thought was important, so I wouldn’t have to explain to people that my sister was off do-gooding in the jungle someplace for a very small dollar. Jonathan offended me because he doesn’t give a damn about the things I thought were important. I was awake at dawn this morning. I was making up a conversation, explaining to Jonathan what I was going to do. I could develop certain contacts, and I could afford to pay the fee to have some specialists pick up the Harkinson woman very quietly and take her to the right place and turn her over to me. But Jonathan kept asking me why. I told him because I expect it of myself. Then he asked me if I expected it of myself, or expected it of the man I have been imitating all my life. Good question. He wanted to know if I thought Leila would approve. Another good question. But I can’t just let go of it! Not all the way!”

He noticed that they were looking at him with strange expressions. He realized why, and shook his head and laughed at them. “The lawyer has flipped, huh? Ever notice how uneasy people get if you try to say some of the weird things that happen inside your head? I used to hold everything back. That’s part of the incantation, because if you let go, They come after you. I’m going to try to tell people what I think. It’s going to raise hell with my law practice. But it’s the only way I can think of to stop being completely alone in the world.”

“You’ve been under a lot of strain,” Lobwohl said.

“Starting before any of this started. Anxiety building up for years. The pursuit of perfection. But I imagine I’ll take one small hack at playing God. Some photographer is going to get a good shot of Crissy Harkinson. I’ll arrange to get some prints. I’ll turn them over to somebody who went into the deal with Bix Kayd and took a whipping. I’ll just tell them there’s a good chance she knows exactly where the money is. There’ll be no place in the world she can hide.”