The Last One Left (43 page)

“But can we? Can we really?”

“What’s it like where he is?”

“It’s—very good for what we were talking about. It’s a horrid little bungalow court near Coral Gables. It’s the sort of place you would go if you wanted to hide. I don’t think there’s anyone in the bungalows near him, and it’s all so jungly and overgrown you can’t see them from each other or from the road in front. It really seems like—well, like the kind of depressing place where—that kind of thing could happen.” She frowned. “He
killed
those people, Oliver.”

“He
what!
”

“It wasn’t any accident. Oh, he didn’t admit it. He’s much too clever for that. Nobody will ever be able to prove a thing. But that place he’s in, he rented it under another name. He said it was to keep reporters from bothering him. I think it’s so he can really go into hiding if somebody gets suspicious about what really happened on the Muñeca.”

“What makes you think he killed them all?”

“I know him, Oliver. God, how I know him! He said little things that fit together. He said he wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while. And he gave me a slimy wink and said the cruise ended before he’d had time to decide which one was better stuff, the little lame girl or her step-mother. I suppose he got careless and Mr. Kayd or the brother caught him with one of them. If he hit one and killed him, he’d kill everybody. That’s how he is.”

“It isn’t wrong to kill a man like that,” said Oliver.

He moved closer to her, on both knees. She pulled his head into her lap. She slowly stroked his crisp hair. “He’s a monster,” she whispered. “We have to be so careful. It’s going to be like a nightmare for us, but when it’s over—we can go away together for a little while, to some marvelous place.”

There was no sound in the room except the breath of the air conditioning, and a faint whisper of the rain outside.

“Get up now, dear,” she said. “I want to make a drawing of the floor plan of that cottage while it’s fresh in my mind. We’ve got a lot of work to do. A lot of planning.”

She turned her chair to the desk, turned on the desk light, opened the drawer and got paper and pencil.

LEILA DID NOT KNOW
what had set the Sergeant off just when they were getting the noon meal on Saturday. It could have been the scene she had made the night before, crying and raving and cursing and carrying on until she had exhausted herself.

But he had not seemed angry about what she had done, or about the scene. He had seemed just—saddened, and disappointed in her. After she was certain he was asleep on Friday night, she had rubbed herself liberally with repellent, and had sneaked off the boat without a sound and up the stairs and into the shack and taken the big flashlight which had been aboard the Muñequita. Then, driven nearly out of her mind by those bugs which didn’t mind the repellent, in the windless night she had climbed the ladder to the platform high in the water oak, and had aimed the beam through an opening in the branches toward the houses on the mainland shore. It wasn’t too late. Many of them had lights on. She worked the switch until her thumb felt sprained. Dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash
dash dot dot dot. She had to stop to whack the insects on her face and arms and ankles.

“What are you trying to do?” the Sergeant had roared, so close at hand she had nearly leaped off the platform.

She had fought him on the way down and they had both nearly fallen. But she did not start the really large scene until he had strapped her into that impossible belt again and forced the link shut and said, sadly, “If’n you can’t be trusted at all, Missy, then I just have to do this ever’ time I have to leave you alone, and ever’ time I have to get some sleep. Don’t like it any better than you do. But you won’t pay attention to good sense!”

“Good sense!” she had yelled. “Good
sense!
You’re a
crazy!
Don’t you even know it? You got that great big dent in your head where they took your brains out. You’re
kidnapping
me! You know what they’ll do to you? They’ll take you away and they’ll lock you up forever in a big room full of other crazies!”

But he had just kept looking mournfully at her, shaking his head, and finally he had gone down and brought her bedding up and taken his own down and gone to sleep on the boat.

This morning he had seemed the same as usual. Perhaps a little quieter. He’d been opening a can of franks and beans when suddenly the can and the can opener fell from his hands. He stood there swaying from side to side in a strange way, and then she remembered what it reminded her of, a long time ago, stopping at that roadside place when she was little, and there was an elephant there chained in the sun, swaying just like that.

She watched him. She moistened her lips. She glanced at the belt and chain over by the post. The shorts and halter top she wore were good enough for swimming. Run and grab a cushion off the Muñequita. Jump in and swim his little channel through the mangroves and out into the open bay. A hundred yards of channel. Lots of boats on a Saturday.

He wasn’t looking at her, or at anything. Then she saw the water running out of his eyes. She had to tug and pull at him to get him turned around and, in his sticklike walk, over to his thinking place. She put his big hands on the greasy places on the peeled uprights. He moaned and gripped with such a terrible strength she heard little gratings and poppings of muscle and bone and gristle. He thunked his head against the beam so violently, she screamed and ran and got the thin faded cushion from the old wicker chair and folded it once and held it against the beam. He butted his head against it.

“You’re not crazy, Sarg,” she kept telling him in a pleading tone. “You’re not. I’m sorry.”

His hands fell to his sides. He looked at her, half frowning, and he walked over and sat on the bed, face in his hands.

“Missy?” he said at last.

“I’m right here, Sarg.”

“Things spin around and around and get sucked down, like they went down a drain.”

He shook himself like a big, tired hound and stood up. “Takes it out of me,” he said.

“That lump on your head is getting huge.”

He felt of it with cautious fingertips. “Whomped me a good one that time.”

He started toward the kerosene stove then stopped and looked at her. “I wouldn’t have knowed you’d left, Miss Leila. Why didn’t you?”

“It never entered my mind.”

He picked up the can and the opener. “Lost my hunger, but you could eat some I expect. If you’d eat real good—and sleep as much as you can …”

“Yes?”

“And if you could run that nice boat down to the city all by
yourself and promise word of honor you wouldn’t remember a thing about where you were or who doctored you …”

“I promise, Sarg. Honest. Cross my heart.”

“Three or four days more, I could let you go.”

“Do you mean it?”

“It’s a promise for sure. Can you wait just that little bitty time more, Missy?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Then I don’t have to put that danged chain on you. I sure to God hate to see you fastened up that way. In the night I decided I just couldn’t do it one more time, no matter what.”

Gordon Dale liked to work in the silence and emptiness of the law offices on Saturday morning. He solved the problems of the brief, and when he was ready to leave he remembered he hadn’t heard from Detective Sergeant Dickerson. He was told that Dickerson should just about be arriving at his home. He phoned the home number. Dickerson had just walked in. His voice was weary.

“Who? Oh, Mr. Dale. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. Just when I was ready to go off at midnight, we had a real dandy. I wish to God they’d been one motel further away. That would have taken it over the city line. Fellow on vacation got slopped and beat his little kid to death. His wife put the body in the car and tried to be an ambulance, and took out two palm trees and a light post. So I worked on through. The post showed the kid had a lot of old breaks, green stick fractures that had healed without attention. A lousy night, Mr. Dale. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to …”

“That’s all right. No rush. Get some sleep, Dave.”

“Soon as I can get anything, I’ll get back to you, Mr. Dale.”

• • •

Sam Boylston lay propped up on two pillows on one of the Bahama beds in the motel cabana. He wore blue swim trunks he had purchased at a dime store in the shopping center a block away. He talked on the phone to Corpus Christi. He was listening for the third time to the kid’s excited tale of danger and injury. He made the right sounds in the right places. He could look out through the window wall and see the three girls horsing around, taking turns off the low board—the fat girl with the red sunburn, the skinny dark one with a loud laugh, and the little chunky one with the deep tan and the straight hair bleached egg white.

“Well,” he said, “you sure had yourself a time, Boy-Sam. Want to put your mom back on?”

Lydia Jean came back on the line. “
That
was a long talk,” she said. “Oh, just a minute.” In the background he heard her shouting something to Boy-Sam. “Sorry. He was going to go running out without his sweater. There’s an edge in the wind for this time of year. Out of the north.”

“Was it a bad break?”

“A very clean simple fracture, and he really didn’t cry very much. He turned white as ghosts. You were very very patient with him, dear. He’s being a terrible bore about it. He can make a description of falling out of a tree last practically forever. He had to be so sure you found out he didn’t cry very much. Sam, all the time he was talking to you, I kept thinking of what you told me about Jonathan. How long is he going to—keep doing that, keep looking for her?”

“Until he accepts the fact she’s dead.”

“With Leila, that isn’t easy. She was so much more alive than—most of the rest of us.”

“I know.”

“Are you going back to Harlingen now?”

“Pretty soon, I guess. Why don’t you go down and open the house and wait for me there?”

“I thought of it.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Sam, dear, my heart bleeds for you in this whole thing. I know how you felt about your sister. I loved her too. You know that. And I should be with you. Time of need and all that. I don’t want to be cold and hard, but it would be coming back for the wrong reason. I’ve invested—too much heartache in this to come back for anything but the right reason. You’ll have to understand why I had to leave. And when you
do
understand, I can come back to you.”

“Same old paradox. Try this for a partial answer. Remember Rosalie’s brother?”

“Of course.”

“I was wrong.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said I was wrong. Dead wrong. Does that mean anything?”

After a long pause she said, “It’s interesting. I think I would like to know why you think you were wrong, Sam.”

“I know now that I let Rosalie down and I let you down.”

“Indeed! I see. You did not live up to what we expected of you.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“But you were perfectly content with yourself, of course. You
knew
it would be stupid and out of character for Sam Boylston to go down there and defend that fellow. But because I wanted it, you should have gritted your teeth and—humored me.”

“What the hell do you want of me!”

Her voice sounded far away. “A little more than that, I’m afraid. A little more than that. Take care of yourself, Sam.”

She was gone. He rolled onto his shoulder and slammed the phone back onto the cradle. The chunky young girl appeared just outside his window wall, shading her eyes, peering in at him. She grinned, made a beckoning gesture, pointed toward the pool and
made swimming motions. He shook his head no, and she made a pouting face and shrugged and went away.

He could not stop asking himself what Lyd wanted of him. Talking with Theyma Chappie in her little apartment, when, to his confusion and dismay the tears had begun without warning, he had felt close to an understanding, as though suddenly it would be revealed to him, the way a light bulb appears over the head of the comic strip character, and he could say: Of course!
Now
I know.

But if he could never understand, and could not alter some inner perfectionistic coolness, some chronic insistence upon a world of reasonable cause and effect, why could she not accept the flaw for the sake of the rest of it? A presentable man, of scrupulous marital fidelity, fair in his dealings, achieving through all the long shrewd hours of work a position of status, social and professional, and the income to give her a life without want or drudgery. Father of her healthy son. Would she prefer a sickly romanticism, a variant of a Jonathan, baying his lover way across the Grand Bahama Bank? She could not seem to understand that it was a world wherein, if you faltered, They ripped you down quite casually and went on Their way.

Yet Lydia Jean was not a dreamer. She had that practical streak, that capacity for acceptance of the things she could not change. If he was forever incapable of change, she would not be so merciless. It meant she believed in something within him which he could not identify. And it meant that she believed that if he could grasp it, use it, the benefit would be as much his as hers.

It was paradox, and as so many times before during the months of their separation, it seemed to spin faster and faster in his mind until a kind of centrifugal force flung it out and away.

He looked out at the pool. The other two had left. The brown chunk solemnly practiced dives from the low board. He had bought the trunks and gone swimming because his body had begun to feel
stale. He was accustomed to exercise. The chunk had challenged him to a race. He had heard her friends call her Toby. The races had given him the excuse to extend himself, the challenge to stretch the long muscles, empty the bottoms of the lungs. When it was just two lengths, she could beat him in free style, most of her advantage coming from the quick racing turn she knew. Three lengths was the best for them, a tossup. When they had tried four lengths, he had won as decisively as she won in the two-length competition.