Authors: John D. MacDonald
He set it up and turned it on. He counted to ten, moved six feet back and counted to ten again, and went over to the door and counted to ten, a third time. He rewound the tape and played it back. Within the cycles-per-second range of the human voice, it had good fidelity, better than it had sounded in the shop.
He saw he had aroused Jonathan’s interest. “What’s that for?”
“I used to do some trial work. They kept telling me I did it just fine. But I couldn’t get to like it. I learned one thing. You think you are listening to everything, but you always miss a little. You catch it when you play it back. Sometimes it’s important.”
“What good is it going to do?”
“It’s a pretty good little machine.”
“I mean what’s the point in talking to those people?”
“They saw Staniker in bad shape. Conscious and in bad shape.”
“So?”
“So maybe they heard something he won’t talk about when he gets his health back.”
“You’re playing games, Sam.”
“How’s that?”
“Maybe to keep busy, go through some motions. What difference does it make how it happened? Maybe Staniker screwed up the details. The only thing that matters is that he thinks he’s the only one who escaped. I guess maybe you think so too. So you want to go thrashing around to find out how it happened. Why? Who cares about
how
? There’s just one thing I care about. She’s alive! No matter what Staniker might think, Leila is alive!”
“Easy, boy.”
“God
damn
it, don’t give me that look of pity! I haven’t flipped. And I am not that kind of sentimental jackass who thinks the virtuous survive and the evil ones die.” He stood up slowly. “And I think—I really think I’m strong enough to endure losing her. It would rack me up for a long time, Sam. But eventually I’d work my way out of it. Listen carefully. I sat in that chair for most of the night. And a lot of today. And I’ve said to myself that she is dead. Leila is dead. There isn’t anything anybody can do about it. Dead and gone and you’ll never see her again. And only a damned fool would think anybody below decks could survive explosion and fire. But something keeps me from really believing it. Almost as if she were standing over there in the corner behind me and shaking her head sadly and wondering how I could be so stupid. You know how she was in the water. Dazed and burned and half-conscious, she’d keep afloat by instinct. Somehow she was thrown clear, I swear it. We were close, Sam. As close as people ever get. It wasn’t kid stuff. We were lovers. For over a year now. And that was good, but it wasn’t the basic part of us. It was just a way to—say something to
each other about what we were to each other. If she’s left this world, my heart would be a stone. But it isn’t. But if I don’t find her soon enough, one day, all of a sudden, I’ll know she’s gone.” He sat again, face in his hands, made a single dry sound, a cough like a sob.
Sam Boylston poured a half tumbler of Canadian whisky from the bottle he’d bought in the package store in the lobby. He dropped in two cubes, swirled it, took it over and fitted it into Jonathan’s big hand. “Knock it down,” he ordered.
Jonathan drank half, coughed, finished it, gagged and shuddered and handed the glass back. Sam once again debated telling the boy about the money. It would justify Sam’s interest in finding out just what had happened. Yet it might be the final proof that Leila had died. If somebody had gone after the money, there would be no survivors. If the money was the target, then Staniker was in on it. And Sam knew that one of the rarest traits in the world is the ability to tell a complex lie time after time without slipping somehow.
The boy did not realize that his conviction she was alive was merely a device to protect himself from a blow he was not yet ready to endure. Sam realized it would be quite easy to explain it to the boy and tell him about the money. Irrational reactions had always made him impatient.
“I sound like a nut,” Jonathan said. “I can’t help what I believe.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
Jonathan looked mildly surprised. “Go look for her. Now I know where to look.” He got the chart and opened it up on the bed. “Here is where it happened. Here is where they found Staniker. So Leila had to get carried onto the Bahama Banks to the north of the Joulters. It’s all shallows. There’s supposed to be at least two thousand little hummocks of sand and rock, some with vegetation, that are still out of the water at high tide. I’m going to go to Andros, get some kind of a little boat and—go find her. She wouldn’t panic, you
know. She’ll manage to stay alive long enough. Long enough for me to find her. And she looks fragile, but she’s tough. She could endure a lot.”
It was his obvious duty to point out to the boy that such a search was pure fantasy. He had no useful experience with boats and the sea, and no first-hand knowledge of that area. It was pure damned foolishness. And what good was this sort of idiotic hope if in the end it would finally collapse.
As he began to choose his words, he saw himself in the mirrored door of the bath. And he could remember other times, other mirrors, when he began to choose those words which would open the paths of logic for Leila, or for Lydia Jean, or for Boy-Sam. Why in God’s name were the emptiest dreams the very ones they thought most important? They wrote their stupid little melodramas and then were so terribly terribly hurt when you didn’t come on stage and say the lines they’d written for you. Did they want humoring? Did they want accomplices in utter sappiness to make themselves more secure in delusion?
So this time, he thought, instead of turning off the stage lights and dropping the curtain, I’ll play it their way. He turned toward Jonathan and said, “If you say that’s where she is, then that’s where she is. And the more help I give you, the sooner you’ll find her.”
“I—I guess that’s right, sir.”
“I’ll pay the shot on leasing a decent boat with a crew who know those waters. If the boat doesn’t draw much over three feet, she can thread around through the channels. And you can use a dinghy with a kicker for shallower work. Can you handle it, or will it take both of us?”
“I can handle it. Is it okay if I see what I can do right now about lining up a boat?”
“Sooner the better.”
The moment the boy left, Sam Boylston felt irritated at himself.
Humoring them involved a curious kind of weakness, and created an uncomfortable obligation. Once you started the game, you had to keep on playing it. And it was a game which could bring you nothing.
Now, with his visit to the Barths and the Hilgers aboard the Docksie III, he was beginning a game more to his liking. It would have an ending, and in the ending there would be a hard and merciless satisfaction. After that would come time to mourn the sister lost. But was not his game as pointless as Jonathan’s, actually? That fragment of insight jarred him, and he thrust it aside. Delicate little philosophical comparisons were good parlor games for people like—Lyd, Leila and Jonathan. Any man who went around inventing doubts and reservations was emasculating himself. Neither compulsion, his or Jonathan’s, would bring Leila back. But his might well keep someone from profiting through the loss of her. When a man released his clasp They snatched everything from him forever.
At quarter to seven on Monday morning, Sam Boylston tapped at the door of Apartment 6, Harbour Heights Apartments. In a few moments the door opened as far as the safety chain would permit, and the girl in white looked at him through the gap.
“Sam Boylston,” he said. “I know I’m a little early. If it’s inconvenient I can come back …”
She closed the door, released the chain and let him into the small, bright, tidy living room. “Yes, you are early, Mr. Boylston, but perhaps it is better. I might not do this thing you want. Would you have some coffee with me?”
In her speech she had the Bahamian trait of emphasizing the unexpected word. Her face was too narrow for beauty, black bright eyes set too closely, her skin dusky sallow in the way of the mixed blood of the Islands. But she had freshness and style. Special Nurse
Theyma Chappie was assigned to the daytime trick, eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, caring for Captain Garry Staniker in his private room at the Princess Margaret Hospital.
She brought his coffee to the table by the windows where she had been eating her breakfast, and they sat facing each other.
“I understand, Nurse. There’s no way I can force you.”
“It is what I said to my brother. Sir Willis has been very good to him, very helpful. If he had not been, perhaps I could not have had my training. But I am a professional person. There is an obligation to the patient. Also to the hospital. And there could be trouble with the officials too. To take a risk, I told my brother, I would have to believe it is a good thing to do, perhaps a necessary thing. We have been ordered to say nothing to reporters. Perhaps this is lies. A trick.”
He took out his wallet, unsnapped the packet of identifications and handed it to her. “I am exactly what I say I am, Nurse, a lawyer from Harlingen, Texas.” After she had looked at the identifications, as she handed them back, he handed her the color snapshot of Leila he took from another compartment of the wallet. “This is my kid sister. She was a guest aboard the Muñeca.”
“So pretty!” she said, and in a little while handed it back to him. “But they will question this captain carefully, no? What is the need of what you wish me to do?”
“There is one reason I cannot explain either to you or to the authorities, a reason to believe that Staniker may have—with or without help—killed those six people aboard and sunk the cruiser.”
She looked shocked. “But he does not seem such a person!”
“I want to know how he responds to questioning. I will be looking for things they will not be looking for. I think they are worried about carelessness. I am worried about guilt.”
“Then why not tell them your reasons, Mr. Boylston?”
“Because then, from their questions, he will know they know
that reason. And he will be much more careful in his answers. It is a standard interrogation procedure, Nurse. If you pick up a murderer and charge him with a small robbery that happened on the same night, you will learn more than if you charge him with murder.”
“If I help you will it become—evidence in a court so it will come out how I helped you?”
“No. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe the boat blew up. If I learn anything that makes it seem otherwise, I’ll have to get him in some other way.”
She studied him. “He is like a thing to you. Something to hunt.”
“Do you think people should get away with mass murder?”
“Of course not. But if you want—too badly to believe he is guilty of something, maybe you will believe what you want to believe.”
“I’m not like that.”
She tilted her head. “… No. Perhaps not.” She took a quick look at the gold watch pinned to the bodice of her uniform. “I guess you must show me now how the machine works.”
“You’ll do it then.”
“But if it is found, I will have no idea how it came to be there.”
She marveled at how small the recorder was. She caught on very quickly as he explained the operation. She said that there was a deep shelf in the bedside stand, and she could place it on the back of that shelf behind a stack of fresh face towels, a place where she could easily turn it on or off.
When he asked her opinion of Staniker’s condition, she said, “He is a very strong one. He went a long time without help. For many persons, it might have been too long. There could be bad luck, perhaps more kidney damage than Dr. McGregory thinks. Or a pneumonia which will not respond to antibiotics, or a pulmonary edema we cannot control. He seemed dazed. And the tongue is very bruised and lacerated from the convulsions. He speaks with difficulty.
Maybe the Doctor will permit an interrogation today. I would guess tomorrow. It will depend on his condition, of course.”
She fitted the recorder into her white shoulder bag, patted it. “I am glad it is such a small thing. And works so silently.” She looked amused and said, “Perhaps I can borrow it one day and find out if Helena entertains someone I know here when I am on a night shift and she is working days.” She flushed and said, “We share this place. There were three, but that is too many. The other went to an out island clinic. Now we must go, or I shall be late.”
Down on the street level, he watched her trundle her pale blue motor scooter out to the curb, kick down upon the starter lever and move away into morning traffic, her slender back very straight.
He had a professional uneasiness about the little electronic ear she carried with her. It was an eavesdropper with total recall. The slow considerations of the law have not kept pace with the technology, and so the explosive expansion of listening devices and techniques exists in a gray area. Inevitably, when the law lags too far behind the realities, an eventual permissiveness is achieved through the mere weight of investment, employment and universal use. The average citizen, when he thought of it at all, saw nothing wrong in the good guys bugging the homes and offices and phones of the bad guys. But history had the queasy trick of constantly reversing the roles. Had the redcoats been able to bug G. Washington’s winter encampment, he could have been fatally surprised on the shores of the Delaware.
The clever and compact little microphones and transmitters could spy on all sounds. The polygraph could, in a sense, spy upon the mind itself. And there was a dreadful inevitability about that day in the future when the state of the art obsoleted the business of affixing the sensors to the subject, the day when polygraphs could be taken without the knowledge of the subject. This would be the final and deadly invasion of all privacy.
He could recall the precise incidents which had led to his feeling of uneasiness. He had consented to handle a divorce action for an old friend. It was an area of the law he found distasteful. The old friend showed up with the specialist he had employed. The specialist had traced the wife to the particular motel where she would go with her lover. He had then installed equipment in a particular room and arranged that the couple be given that room. With obvious professional satisfaction, the specialist, in Sam Boylston’s darkened office, had projected his infra-red 8-mm movie film, taken by a camera mounted inside a ventilator grill, and had concurrently played a tape captured by a mike and transmitter affixed to the underside of the motel bed. He heard the voice of the woman whose parties he and Lyd had attended, saying in a moaning and gritty voice, “Now! Now! O God! O beautiful! O beautiful!”