Authors: John D. MacDonald
Little Annie took her past the table and over to the blank wall. She slipped the chain off the thumb. Head still bowed, Crissy Harkinson backed against the wall. She was breathing hard. She knuckled a strand of the damp hair away from her eye. There was a vivid odor of lysol in the room.
Sam had the feeling that the shocking transformation had made everyone forget their lines and their plans.
“I must ask you to let me answer any questions asked,” said Palmer Haas in what struck Sam as a strangely mild tone.
She lifted her gaze a little further and saw the money. She held her breath and then began panting as before. She seemed to be chewing an imaginary wad of gum. She knuckled her hair back. She made a whinnying giggle. “She thought it was
laughs
one left. Not last. Laughs. Grabbed that silly nigger bitch and ran her into the crapper after lights out, beat on her for laughing. Oh Jesus, what a
great place he picked, huh? Big old rusty boiler, he said. Half full of sand. Nobody’ll look there. Shit! That’s the ball game. Poor little Olly didn’t have the balls to cut his wrists even. Had to do it for him. Should have known you bastards would win. Botched the boat thing, let the little bitch float off. Ran over his own tow line for chrissake.”
The silence in the room was intense, awed, as deadly as fatal disease. She made a chewing sound. “Knew when it was sour. Stuck his little toy gun in his ear. Had it right up against the gunnel where I could pick it up in the dark. Sweet dumb jackassy kid thumping and banging around in the bottom of that boat. Nothing at all left in his head but getting laid. Nothing. Hit my knee getting off onto my dock. Aimed him off, southeast, loop on the tiller bar. Know what?”
“That’s enough!” Palmer Haas shouted at her, getting to his feet.
“I thought it was all roses,” she said. “Then I looked in at my bed and it was like something suddenly sliding sideways in my head. That thing I fixed in my bed was
me!
And the thing outside looking in, it was made of a wig and a pillow and towels.”
Haas moved toward her saying, “Stop talking, Cristen!”
She straightened herself from her hunched over position, her face showing strain. “I don’t know. I keep getting these cramps all the time, like I should woops my cookies, but I can’t make it.” She shook her head. “Funny. Like when I was thirteen, waiting down in that storage place off the furnace room, in the dark, wondering about rats, waiting for Mister Liborio to come and do it. I made him get me a whole five pound sack of that candy, then I didn’t have to give a shit whether old Satchel-Ass laid a demerit on me or not, but you know, it spoiled the game, jumping the squares to see who’d win, because what’s the point in winning when you got enough hid to make you sick of candy?”
Haas, standing near her, reached to take her arm, apparently to try to get her attention, to make her stop. When he reached, she
dodged violently, arm coming up to guard her head from a blow. Still holding her arm up, she stood in a crouch, and looked up at Haas, wary eyes looked out from under the crooked elbow, mouth making the childish chewing motions.
“I’m your lawyer,” Palmer Haas said gently. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She lowered her arm and straightened up. “Oh hell, I know that. Let me tell you. I can make out. All you smart bastards don’t change that. I bet it all, baby, and I lost it all. So I take the lumps. Don’t worry about me. Write up something I can sign, and then get off my back. I’m not going anywhere I haven’t been before.”
“Mrs. Harkinson, I am your attorney and …”
She moved around him, closer to Little Annie. “Now I’m tired,” she said. “I feel awful tired. I think I want to go lie down somewhere.” She smiled at Little Annie in a humble, shy, placating way, and in a gesture that Sam knew would haunt him as long as he lived, Cristen Harkinson held out her thumb for the come-along chain.
Little Annie looked at Lobwohl. Lobwohl nodded. Little Annie took Cristen by the upper arm and walked her out. Kindler held the door. Little Annie went at the same swift muscular stride, and Cristen jounced along beside her in the obedient half trot, bowed head bobbing, paper slippers making a scuff-pat sound on the institutional flooring.
The door closed. Sam had the feeling they were all exhaling at once, tensions fading. Scheff sat with his eyes closed.
“You realize, of course,” Haas said angrily, “that no part of that is in any sense admissible.”
Lobwohl stared at him. “You are going to go through all your motions, Palmer, and we are going to go through all ours, and if there is any sense and justice in the world we are all going to find some nice quick legal way of avoiding courtroom circuses, and we are going to put that sick dirty animal away with a load of consecutive
sentences that will still have a long time to run when they box her and take her out the back gate. And we all live with it in our own way.”
Haas slowly wiped his face from forehead to chin with his open hand. He gave John Lobwohl a weak smile. “Right now I think that my colleague here from Texas and I are going to go quietly off someplace and get plastered. Maybe Boylston and I are the only ones who really know the names and numbers of all the players.”
After five rings Lydia Jean said, “Hello? Who is it?” She sounded blurred by sleep, slightly querulous.
“This is a drunken husband,” he said carefully. “Sodden, disreputable.”
“Sam! Are you really drunk?”
“I have discussed it carefully with a dear friend. After conducting certain tests, we have adjudged each other drunk. Yes.”
“You certainly are very stately about it.”
“It is a solemn occasion, dear wife. There is the matter of a certain paradox which needs exploring. I tried to explain it to my good friend, Mr. Palmer Christopher Haas, member of the Florida bar, and he suggested I should explore it with you.”
“Explore, sir.”
“I telephoned you when I learned that it was really Leila, not some girl they thought was Leila. I was sober. I cannot remember what I said. I am drunk at the moment, but I feel I will be able to recall this conversation perfectly. All I remember of the other one is a desire to tell you good news, and to tell you I love you. Did I relay that message adequately?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“I wish to say it again while drunk.”
“Please do.”
“I love you, Lydia Jean.”
“That was very nice dear. Thank you. I love you too.”
“I have been learning mysterious things about mysterious people. A certain dusky nurse named Theyma Chappie had messages for me. A certain Raoul Kelly pointed out a vague trail through the underbrush. My drinking companion, Mr. Haas, who is now asleep within range of my vision, has decoded some invisible writing.”
“About what?”
“It is supposed to be about me. And thus, indirectly, about you. But it disappears, like—like a dab of cotton candy on the tongue of a summertime child.”
“That’s a very lovely turn of phrase, Sam dear.”
“They seem to come imbedded in the liquor somehow. At any rate, what I am is me. I want to be looser.”
“You sound looser.”
“What I promised, you take care of things for Raoul and ’Cisca and you would have fair warning to zip back to Corpus. But I am going to be me, and you are going to be you, Am I right?”
“I—suppose.”
“The only change, if there is any change at all, dear wife, is that now I know it is not so great to be stuck in the world as a Sam Boylston. It is not so easy for either of us to live with it.”
“The wedding is Monday, dear. High noon. She is a darling. And he is a very wise good dear dumpy little man, and we are frantically laundering her English.”
“You aren’t answering my question, Miss Lydia Jean.”
“Jonathan is flying back tomorrow with Leila. They phoned me just at dinnertime. I asked if you were coming along. They said they didn’t have any idea.”
“Let’s get back to the promise I made you about …”
“You could, of course, stay solemnly drunk over there amid those flesh pots, Sammy, or you could get on the dime and come
home with the kids and lend a hand around here, like being a best man and mixing punch.”
“But I want to know what you are going to …”
“How can you know if I don’t know?”
“Excuse me. T’was brillig and those slithey toves were all over the dang place.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The gospel according to Palmer Christopher Haas. He says logic is man’s most destructive illusion. All thinking is done with the glands, and the logic part gets stuck on afterward to neaten things up. So—when I couldn’t follow what you were saying, any answer is okay.”
“Darling?”
“Yep.”
“Catch that plane. Get some sleep now, and catch that plane.”
On Sunday the twelfth day of June, Howard Prowt, humming happily to himself, read the water over the Bimini bar with the skill acquired in these weeks of cruising the islands, and when the hue of the morning water deepened to a dark rich shade, he put the HoJun on automatic pilot on the course which, allowing for wind, the flow of the Gulf Stream and compass deviation, should bring them in sight of the sea buoy off Fort Lauderdale in four plus hours.
He clambered spryly down to the cockpit deck. The girls, June and Selma, were cooking bacon in the galley below, and chattering back and forth. Howard peered over the transom to check on his water circulation through the engines. Kip came back from the bow along the side deck, carrying the made-up bow lines. As he stowed the lines he said, “All clear forward, Skipper.”
“Good deal. Hatch too?”
“Dogged down tight.”
“We’ll take some water forward when we get into the Stream.”
Kip lit a cigarette and said, “Damn, I hate to have this thing ending. I was saying to Selma in the night, we’ve never had a better time.”
“Glad you people could make it.”
“Howard, I swear to God you’ve taken off two inches around the middle, and you’ve got a tan there, man, that won’t quit.”
“The thing about cruising, the boat is moving all the time and you’re balancing yourself against it and so all day long you’re getting exercise without hardly knowing it.”
June called them to breakfast. Howard perched where he could watch the open sea ahead. Getting to be so many pleasure boats with automatic pilot there was no guarantee anybody would get out of your way. Kip got the eight o’clock news on the transistor, a Miami station.
They had all been following the Staniker case, theorizing about it. The announcer said that an informed source had said that it now appeared, based on new evidence, that the Harkinson woman was going to be indicted for the murders of Staniker and the Akard boy.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!” Kip said. “That old gal must be a real pistol.”
“A face that sunk one ship anyway,” Selma said tartly. “Some part of her at least,” Kip said. “Here we go again, kids,” June said.
“Honestly though,” Selma said, “it was really like a miracle the Boylston girl lived through such a terrible ordeal.”
As he put his plate aside and picked up his coffee cup, Howard saw his wife look obliquely at him and look away. And he knew only he was sick of that particular expression.
He cleared his throat and said, “Are we all friends?”
“What have I done now?” Selma said.
Without looking toward June, Howard said, “I should have told
you kids this sooner, I guess. Confession is good for the soul or something. When June and I brought this bucket across the Gulf Stream alone, I wasn’t scared. I was plain terrified. I didn’t know there
was
so much water. I was green, and I didn’t know what the boat could take and I didn’t know how to handle it in seas like that.”
“Howard!” June said.
“Anyway, we saw that Muñequita, bobbing and drifting along, sliding up and down those big damn swells. June thought she saw something for a moment, like a child’s hand. I tried to come about and see if I could take that boat in tow, but I couldn’t make myself do it. That’s how I tore the radio cable loose and busted the television. It was such a sad chicken performance that when we got into Bimini, I didn’t open my mouth.”
June said quickly, “Howard, really! It probably wasn’t that same boat at all. And what I saw was a rag flapping or something. Honestly, if you can find
anything
to blame yourself for, you’ll do it. It’s like a compulsion with you.” She looked at the others. “I begged him not to try to get near that boat. But you know my Howard. He has to try. You know, if it
was
that same boat, and if she was aboard it, can you imagine the mess if we came too close and sort of hit it and tipped it and rolled her out of it. It was just some old hulk that floated away from someplace, dear.”
Kip said solemnly, “I want to do all my cruising with somebody with the good sense to get scared at least once a day.”
“Howard dear,” Selma said, “you make this boat feel safe as a church, you really do.”
June came to take Howard’s cup to refill it with hot coffee. She let her fingertips rest on his hand for a moment as she took the cup. She looked into his eyes. It was not the same look as that other look. He could not read this one either, but he knew it was better. He knew a lot of things were better.
“What’s he saying about visibility?” Kip asked.
They listened, and the announcer said that with the change of wind during the night to a mild two to three knots out of the southwest, the whole southeast coast of Florida was becoming blanketed with smog from the fires burning in large areas of the Everglades.
Howard Prowt went out on deck and climbed to the flying bridge. Already the horizon was blurred ahead, and the sun, rising behind them, was haloed.
By eleven it had become so murky Howard Prowt halved his speed and recomputed the effect of the Gulf Stream and reset the automatic pilot on the new course. There was a small stench of burning in the heavy air, and the sun above the smog made an eerie light on the cruiser and the nearby sea, a light tinged with saffron. They all made jokes and laughed too quickly at them. “If you look up, kids, and see a man standing up there about forty feet in the air, he’s on the bow of a freighter.”