Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

He looked at her. “The minute I heard about his shopping spree I should have gone out there. But I didn’t. Too busy. Too indifferent. Too much trouble. So I’m annoyed at myself, and I feel guilty, so the Sergeant is a handy target. Okay, girl. I’ll fight them off and pry him loose one more time.”

“As many more times as you have to.”

“But humor me a little. Let me keep telling myself it’s the last time.”

The nurse gave Sam Boylston a shy and luminous smile and ducked out of the room, closing the door gently. He approached the bed, shocked at her emaciated look, yet with a great joy that it was indeed Leila. On the way up, traveling at high speed in the official sedan, he had convinced himself that it was a case of some stupid girl hunting for publicity. With her eyes closed Leila looked emptied of all her familiar vitality.

As he neared the bed she opened her eyes and looked quite vaguely at him, then gave a yelp of joy, grinned widely, stretched her arms out to him and began to cry. He bent awkwardly over the bed to hold her in a close embrace.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey, Sam. You’re not supposed to cry too. You play things cool.”

“Very cool. Very remote. Sure, honey. I’ve taken up crying lately. I might have to use it on a jury sometime.”

He pulled a chair close to her bed. She blew her nose. “You know something, Sambo? I’ve never been really sure you love me. I guess you do. I guess you sent me on that crummy cruise because you love me. Where’s Jonathan?”

“Hunting for you. In a homemade boat out there on the Bank. Maybe they’ve made radio contact by now. He... He knew you weren’t dead. Everybody knew you were. Everybody but him. Fool performance. He wanted to do it. I gave him some money.”

“You? Financing foolishness?”

“I wanted somebody believing in it, even if I knew it wasn’t true.”

“If I’d died, he’d have felt that I wasn’t in the world any more. He’d have felt the emptiness. I would if he died. You go into one room, and you can tell if the whole house is empty. You can always tell. Damn it, they made me take a sedative. They keep prodding at me and saying Hmmm and Hmph. It scalds them they can’t find something wrong, really wrong.”

“Leila, have they told you how they want to handle this?”

“Yes. Complete loss of memory. But — I do remember. God, I remember! Have they found that crazy man?”

“Take it easy, Leila. A man named Lobwohl wants to talk to you. Friend of mine. I’ll call Lyd while he’s talking to you. Is there anything I can get you?”

“Jonathan, and quickly please.”

At nine o’clock on Thursday morning, the red and white float plane came snoring and chattering down to circle the catamaran. Jonathan realized how silent his world had been. Sounds of the sea birds, slap of waves, creak of mast, the long exhalations of the wind. He thought the plane might be in trouble. It straightened out and ran downwind, then turned and landed, heading directly for them. Stanley turned the cat directly into the eye of the gentle breeze. The sail flapped. The plane stopped a hundred feet away, and then with short, sharp bursts it came toward them. Two dozen feet away the engine coughed and died. A man in weather-bleached khakis climbed out and stood on the float.

“Jonathan Dye?” the man called.

“That’s right, who are you?”

“Can you heave a line over?”

Stanley caught some wind and moved closer. He threw the line, and the pilot caught it deftly, made it fast to a brace. Stanley dropped the sail and pulled the catamaran and float plane together.

“What do you want?” Jonathan asked.

“Want to give you a plane ride, boy.”

“No thanks.”

“Had a time finding you the way the glare comes off these flats. I would say that from here it is just under a hundred miles a few points off due west, there’s a little Boylston girl wondering what’s taking me so long.”

Jonathan stared at the pilot. He was a crickety old man, charred by the sun, brows and hair bleached white, tiny bright blue eyes, teeth like spoiled corn.

“Flew wet goods out of these islands, you know, until that goddam FDR blew the business all to hell. The little bit you can tote in one of those old buckets, all struts and fabric and spit, it had to be prime goods to pay off. Ask anybody. They’ll tell you Jake Lord has flew everything that can get off the runway. Get your gear together now, boy.”

“She’s alive?” Jonathan asked. “Leila?”

He saw the mouth moving, knew the man was making words, but he could no longer hear them. He felt as if each of these long and silent days had been pulling some part of him to an unbearable thinness and length and tension, like a silvery ribbon reaching from him to the most distant pieces of rock and scrub they had searched.

“She’s dead!” he bayed, as the strand broke. Then Stanley Moree was close to him, grin big, eyes wet, chopping his fist into Jonathan’s upper arm, telling him he was one crazy mon, and he would bring his woman back one day, and they would sail and sing and laugh.

When the float plane turned back into the wind and lifted, Jonathan looked down and saw Stanley waving from the deck of the cat.

On Friday, in the early afternoon of the tenth day of June, John Lobwohl had lunch with Palmer Haas in a booth in one of the back alcoves of Fritzhoff’s.

Haas, a small man in his middle thirties, had the aggressive tough-nut face of a workmanlike welterweight, one of the spoilers managers avoid when they are bringing a promising boy up through the ratings.

“Now what the hell, Johnny! What the hell!” Palmer Haas said in his abrupt rasping voice.

“Now don’t plant your feet. Okay? I know and you know that you’re not going to enter into any conspiracy against your client.”

“You’ve got a better name?”

“Let’s call it a search for truth.”

“Real idealism, Captain. Makes my eyes sting a little.”

“Any client deserves the best you’ve got. This one, this Cristen Harkinson is as poisonous as they come.”

“Johnny, would you say to a doctor don’t treat that fellow, he beats up on his wife and kids?”

“All right. You have a professional obligation. Everybody is entitled to every protection under the law. And we’re both stuck with the antagonist theory. I am a cop. My job is to accumulate a solid file, one with a reasonable chance of conviction, and present it to the States Attorney. Then you and him fight. Except for my people testifying for the prosecution, I’m out of the picture from that point on.”

“Except you throw them too many files with big holes in the middle, you get shifted into some other line of cop work, Johnny.”

The waiter brought the two steinkrugs of dark draft beer. Lobwohl took several deep swallows and set the stein down. “That confrontation rocked her, Palmy. You saw that. The last thing she ever expected was somebody to show up off that Muñeca. The Boylston girl tired fast, but she gave us a picture of how Staniker acted and what he said, and how he sawed the Kayd girl’s throat open that was as convincing as anything either of us are ever going to hear.”

“But it was essentially bush, my friend. And having that Sam Boylston, the brother, right there was bush too. He never took his eyes off my client. You want to see what murder looks like before it happens, it was right there in his eyes. But it was a damn fool tick. You know better.”

“It shook her. But you put on your big act about trickery and so on and it gave her time to steady down.”

“I get paid to put on my acts.”

“Let me ask you this. In complete confidence. An opinion between friends. What if the Boylston girl had been found in time for us to grab Staniker alive? Now forget all this crap about jurisdiction. Pretend it happened in my back yard. I’ve put my cards face up for you. Kayd visited Crissy Harkinson. Staniker gets the captain job. The Boylston girl’s story verifies what her lawyer brother dug up about the money. Don’t you think, based on what we both know and can guess about Staniker, that he would sing it all loud and clear, and implicate Harkinson?”