The Last One Left

Chapter Fifteen

That Friday, the twenty-seventh day of May, was a very hot still day. A mist hung over the land, a broad area of silvery glare showing where the sun was. The mist caught and held the aroma of the fires of the drying, dying Everglades, a faint stink — like a memory of disaster. The mist held the sharp pungencies of a hundred thousand tail pipes. Days such as this in Dade County, infrequent, corroded the broad leaves of tropical plantings, stung the eyes, smudged white roofs, and lay an almost invisible scum on the motionless water of ten thousand swimming pools. Off-season tourists, lard white from the long midwestern winter, would be deceived by the overcast look, spend hours on the beaches, and a certain predictable number would die days later of the merciless ultraviolet burns.

Raoul Kelly had worked all morning in his rented room in the heart of the Cuban colony along Southwest Eighth Street in West Miami. His second-floor room in the peeling stucco building had four windows across the front overlooking Eighth Street. They were double-hung windows, all with the bottom sash opened as far as they would go. He had taken the screens out and stacked them against the wall as invitation to any elusive breeze. Eighth Street was also Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, and the big diesel tractor-trailer trucks halted by the traffic signal a half block away, made a blue stench and resonant fartings as they worked their way back up through the gears, overwhelming the piercing nasal agonies of the gypsy singer on the big stereo juke in the cantina underneath his room.

His desk was a four-by-eight sheet of marine plywood laid across three two-drawer filing cabinets. On one wall he had scotch-taped detailed maps of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, South America, Venezuela. He had made marks on all the maps, a private alphabetical and numerical code cross-referenced to file cards which were in a personal shorthand meaningless to anyone but himself. He had improvised an open bookcase of boards and cinderblock, and it was stacked with reference works, the overflow piled on a table beside the shelves. On another wall he had hung a big cork board to which he thumbtacked working outlines, notes to himself, reminders of appointments.

He had a sagging bed, a chest of drawers, a noisy floor fan, two straight chairs, a fraying grass rug, a shallow closet, a key to the bathroom at the back of the second-floor hallway, and an old rebuilt Underwood standard. He was a very fast four-finger typist, using unlined sheets of yellow legal-size paper. He turned such sheets in at the editorial desk at the paper. For the magazine work, he would take his final draft down the street to the bakery where Señora de Onís, wife of the owner, would type them properly and carefully onto white bond with two good carbon copies for twenty cents a page. In Havana she had been a private secretary in a large insurance agency.

Raoul Kelly had worked all morning in his underwear shorts, the floor fan hurling the stifling air at his naked back. Sweat found its tickling way down through the thick mat of black hair on his chest and belly. The sheets of copy paper stuck to the undersides of his forearms when he rested them on the desk, and had to be peeled away. Just within reach was a little radio with a cracked gold and white plastic case. He kept it at a station which announced each news break with a grandiose blast of trumpets, kept it at a volume where he could hear the trumpets and nothing else, and would hear them and reach out without conscious thought to turn the volume up.

He was doing an article in depth — a phrase which never failed to irritate him — about the background, present, and guessable future of subversion in Venezuela. From time to time he would refresh his memory by finding the right portion of the three hours of tape he had recorded during an interview with one of El Caballo’s underground agents who had defected after two years in Caracas, had slipped into the states illegally, and had been fingered for Kelly by the sister of the man who was hiding him.

Though he knew it would annoy his newspaper, he had decided to place the article in, he hoped, The Atlantic, and let the wire services pick up the news breaks from the text when it was published.

It was going reasonably well, but his concentration was shaky because of the letter in the shallow straw bowl he used as an inbasket. If he could decide how to answer it, then he could forget it.

It was on the creamy bond of the Waterman Foundation:

I can make out, he thought. I can keep on doing what I am doing, which is, in effect, a one-man version of their Project Round-Table. In a world where the semantics of politics is like smoke in the wind, nothing is gained by ringing words, exhortation, cries of alarum. Facts move the world.

He turned back several pages and looked at one of the facts in the article he had just finished:

Orderly, triple-checked, plausible and ultimately provable, as was the shameful illiteracy rate in the Republic of Panama, the record infant-mortality rate, and the recorded voice of the President of the Republic saying, “The question is not whether we will have a Castro-type revolution, but when we will have it.”

But he yearned for access to the great flow of economic and sociological and political information the huge grant by the Waterman Foundation could create. Facts could then be interrelated, timetables predicted, causes isolated, countermeasures recommended. Facts in abundance, fed into the twin computers of the human mind and the transistor could illuminate all the misty patterns of conflict and change. Otherwise it was all blindfold chess where the opponent’s moves were neither announced nor recorded.

Yet he had promised, on his honor, to look after Francisca.

Just as he finished his penciled corrections, he heard the trumpet call of news once more and turned the volume up.

Furious debate in the Senate on the proposal to recruit mercenary combat battalions in Japan and the Philippines, uniform them in a distinct fashion to sustain nationalistic pride, staff the battalions with American officers, and use these people to fight the brushfire wars which were promising to last a hundred years, giving each man after twenty years of service the option to return to his home place, or accept United States citizenship. Mercenary was as dirty a word as empire.

And then the announcer said, “The official investigation and hearings on the Muñeca tragedy in the Bahamas which resulted in the death of Texas millionaire Bixby Kayd, his beautiful young second wife, his grown children, Stella and Roger, and his daughter’s

guest, Miss Leila Boylston of Harlingen, Texas, have now ended. Captain Garry Staniker has been cleared of any suspicion of negligence. His wife, Mary Jane Staniker, also perished in the explosion and fire which sank the yacht a few miles north of Andros Island on the night of the thirteenth, just two weeks ago today. Staniker, who was marooned for a week with serious injuries before being rescued by a pleasure boat out of Jacksonville, was earlier listed as being in critical condition, but improved rapidly enough to be interrogated earlier this week, and it is expected he will be released from the Princess Margaret Hospital at Nassau sometime next week. In a prepared statement released an hour ago, Captain Staniker said he was pleased at the decision of the Board of Inquiry and felt it was just and fair. He refused to answer any questions about the tragedy or about his future plans.”

Raoul Kelly tilted his chair back and slowly scratched at the sweat-damp bristle on his chin. Damn the pack-rat mind of the newspaperman, he thought. Grab everything that has a curious shine to it and stuff it into the back of the nest. And then, in odd moments, keep trying to fit the little pieces into a pattern.

After the weather news — thunderstorms during the night, clear and cooler tomorrow with a northeast wind — he turned the volume down. He had not gone hunting for background on the Staniker story, but he had read everything he had come across, from the two columns about Mister Bix in Time to Dud Weldon’s carefully researched history of Staniker’s maritime career in the Record.

He recalled the way, in Weldon’s feature story, Cristen Harkinson had given Staniker a clean bill, and that Weldon had not exercised his considerable talent for innuendo in trying to make something of the fact she had been Senator Fontaine’s special friend, and Kayd was known to have been associated in some vague business way with men Fontaine knew well. So it meant Weldon had put his own stamp of approval on the Harkinson woman.

There was a long scream of rubber, a janglingly expensive crunch. He leaned out of a window and saw two cars partway up the block, their front corners merged and locked in a tangle of torn metal, two men getting out of the two cars, starting to wave their fists at each other. Tempers ran short in this weather.

He turned his chair to sit facing his fan. He could not dismiss his uncomfortable awareness of certain facts which, had Dud Weldon known them, would have given him leverage for a far fatter feature.

Kayd had visited the Harkinson woman on the last day of March, over two weeks before he had returned aboard the Muñeca and hired Staniker. And Staniker and the Harkinson woman had been having a lengthy affair.

The Crissy-Staniker setup was not likely to be known. Even without the planned isolation of the house Fontaine had given her, an intimate arrangement between a woman and her hired captain was not anything which would be likely to attract any interest in the steamy social climate of the Miami area, even if the affair continued long after the lady had given up boating. It would be of moment only to those it happened to affect in some way — Crissy Harkinson, Garry Staniker, Francisca, Mary Jane Staniker and one sweaty Cuban newspaperman.

“And so what?” he said aloud. What has it got to do with anything? He’s been cleared.

And, of course, one could not take any chances with ’Cisca’s hard-won adjustment. The only possible reason for opening up the can of worms would be to find out if some sort of curious conspiracy had resulted in the sinking of the Muñeca. And, if so, the whole story would suddenly become twice as big as it had ever been. ’Cisca would have to testify as to Kayd’s visiting the house, as well as to the relationship between Crissy and the Captain. All news media would zero in on one emotionally disturbed girl, and they would unearth every portion of her personal history. It was obvious she could not endure that sort of exposure, that intensity of focus of public interest.

He leaned and picked up Addyson’s letter, scanned it again, flipped it back into the basket. Dilemma-time, he thought. Problems with no solutions.

Just as he was trying to stop thinking about the whole thing, an inadvertent process of logic took it one step further. If there was indeed some kind of dangerous and deadly motive underlying the loss of the Muñeca, it would surely occur to Staniker and the Harkinson woman that Francisca had seen Kayd in Crissy’s house, and that she could verify the Staniker-Harkinson relationship.

Assume a maximum shrewdness and deadliness, and you had to suppose that they would further guarantee their own safety by effectively silencing the little Cuban maid, no matter how stupid Crissy assumed her to be. In fact they might think stupidity more dangerous to them than guile. It would be natural to tidy up now the most immediate danger was over.

So get her out of there, Kelly, just in case. And before el Capitán returns to his pussycat.

He showered, shaved, put on a fresh sports shirt and slacks, left the manuscript at the bakery, and drove down to the Ingraham Highway, heading for the Harkinson place.

In the development house of his parents, a cement block house with a red tile roof on a small lot beside a weedy canal, Oliver Akard lay upon his bed in his underwear shorts, the last of the daylight coming through the window beside the bed making oily highlights on the gleam of perspiration on his long muscular legs. His hands were laced behind his head. When there were two hesitant knocks at the closed bedroom door he did not answer. The door opened slowly and his mother peered in, then came into the room, closing the door behind her.

“Sonny? Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

She came and sat on the foot of his bed, facing him. He moved his legs to make room for her. He felt a remote fondness for her, tinged with nostalgia, as if he were looking at a picture of her long after she had died. But he also felt a restless irritation at what he knew was coming. She verified it with a long long sigh.

“What’s happening to you, dear? What’s made you change so?”

“Why should something be happening?”

“We’re so worried, Sonny. Your father is terribly upset. You’ve always been such a good boy. We’ve always been so proud of you, dear.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“There’s no need to take the name of the Lord in vain, son.”

“If he’d get off my back he wouldn’t have any reason to get upset, right? He kept riding me, didn’t he? I’ve got cuts coming, and if I want to use them, that’s my business.”

“Betty told me you haven’t been to classes all this week.”

“So I haven’t been to classes. So?”

“What makes you so cruel and hard? What makes you be so ugly to your own parents, Oliver? It just isn’t like you.”

“Betty had to come running to you, didn’t she?”

“Sonny, she’s worried about you, the same as we are. You hurt her dreadfully. I guess you know that. She’s a fine girl.”

“The very best. Yes indeed.”

“We’ve always been able to talk things out. And I think I know just a little bit more about the world than you give me credit for knowing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re an attractive young man, Oliver. And you’ve always been easily led. The world is full of idle, vicious women who take their pleasure in corrupting young men like you.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Maybe you’d like to tell me what I’m talking about. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea.”

“You don’t seem to be keeping your sailboat at Dinner Key these days, Sonny. It hasn’t been there for weeks. And your sailboat friends haven’t seen you for weeks either.”

“Betty isn’t all nose! She’s half mouth!”

“If you’re not doing something you’re ashamed of, why are you upset?”

“What I do with my time is my business. I earned the money for my car, and I earned the money for the Dutchman. It’s none of Betty’s damn business what I do.”

“Or my damn business either?”

“You said it. I didn’t.”

“Where is your boat, Oliver?”

“It’s moored at a friend’s place.”

“A new friend?”

“Okay, okay, okay! What else did she have to tell you?”

“The last time any of your old friends saw you out on the Bay was some time ago, apparently. Betty didn’t find out until she started asking. You had a blonde-headed woman in your boat. A girl from school named Cricket saw you. Cricket told Betty the woman was nearly naked, a very cheap-looking type, and as old as I am.”

“She happens to be twenty-eight.”

“I can imagine. I can just imagine.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Sarcasm or something?”

“Oh, Sonny, it’s so easy for a clever woman like that to amuse herself with a boy like you.”

“You don’t even know her, so you don’t know what you’re talking about. How could you know what she’s like?”

“I know this. To change you as much as you’ve changed in these past weeks, she has to be an evil creature. A slut!”

He sat up. “You watch it!”

She reached and turned on the lamp on his homework desk. “Don’t yell at your mother,” she said calmly.

“Don’t call her names and I won’t!”

She stared at him until he averted his gaze and lay back once more. “You’ve gotten seriously involved with her, haven’t you?”

“Well — she’s a pretty tremendous person.”

“Is she married?”

“Her husband died. They didn’t have any kids. He died a long time ago.”

“Sonny, look at me. I am going to ask you something. If the answer is yes, I promise I won’t tell your father. It will be between you and me. Have you had — sex with this woman?”

“We’re in love.”

“I knew what the answer had to be. What else could a person like that possibly want of you? Oh, Sonny, she’s got you twisted around her little finger. You don’t know up from down, right from wrong. Behind your back she snickers at you, believe me. She’s callous and vicious. She’s just using you. You just happened to be handy. How many other strong young boys have there been?”

“You’re out of your mind. You don’t know how it is. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You were going to dedicate your life to the service of God.”

“Let’s say it isn’t going to work out that way. Okay?”

“You’ve got hate in you now. I can feel it. You never had it before. Sonny, will you get down on your knees with me right now and pray to God for the strength to break the hold of the flesh that she has over you?”

“Knock it off, will you?”

“This is a good Christian home.”

“That could be the trouble with it.”

“What is that supposed to mean, Oliver?”

“I’m grown up. To you I’m still twelve years old or something. You and Betty. My God! Thanks but no thanks. I don’t even belong here any more. So don’t count on me staying here. And the more you keep twisting things and bugging me, the sooner I go. Okay?”

“Why warn me, son? What didn’t you just leave without a word? That would be more like the new Oliver Akard, wouldn’t it? You’re cruel and cold and — h-hateful.”

“I knew that was coming next. The weeps. Oh how could you! Oh dear. Oh what am I going to do.”

She tilted her head and stared at him, her cheeks wet with tears. “Where have you gone!” she asked wonderingly. “What has happened to my son?”

He felt a sudden fullness of his throat, a smarting of his eyes, and he had the impulse to reach to her and be taken into her arms. But he made himself laugh to hide any look of potential tears. “Where’d he go? Your little boy grew up, lady. Too bad. But they all do. So get used to it. Take up something else, huh? Bridge lessons maybe?”

In a sad and wondering way, as she stood up slowly, she said, “I don’t know you. I don’t even know you.” She moved slowly toward the closed door. She stopped a few feet from it, head lowered. She turned quickly, startling him. Standing slightly crouched, her face contorted, her fists clenched, she said, “You got into that chunk chocolate that time! Two whole pounds of it! Aaah, you gobbled it, you did. You crammed it down. Chocolate smeared all over your face and your clothes. Aaah, how sick you were! Vomiting, vomiting. I held you while you were emptying yourself. Do you know something? You disgusted me. I worried about it. I wondered if maybe I didn’t have enough mother love. You DIS GUS TED MEEEE!”

She ran out and banged the door shut.

“Mom?” he said, but too quietly to be heard. He was propped up on his elbow. He lowered himself back to the pillow. She had slammed the door so hard it had jingled the row of little trophy cups on the high shelf over the doorway.

It was night. The light on the desk reached far enough to show indistinctly a slow movement of the three scale-model aircraft suspended from nylon filaments, hanging from the ceiling over his tall chest of drawers. Spitfire. Hurricane. B-29. Atop the chest of drawers in a narrow chromed frame was the picture of Betty. He could not see it, but he knew exactly how it looked. I looked right into the lens, darling, and pretended I was looking right at you. Happy birthday, darling. Happy, happy birthday.

This was his room, he thought. He won those trophies. He made those models. He slept in this bed. That was his girl. It was a strange kind of sadness.

There was no way they could understand. Not any of them. How could they be made to see how special and how terrible it was, last night when Crissy had clung to him, weeping hopelessly, like a little kid afraid of the dark. She did not have anyone else. Their time was growing short. She kept saying there was nothing they could do. Nothing. But the idea of Staniker having her again was unendurable. She had made those funny little hints. And she had said, “Don’t you see? This was all we were meant to have. But it’s so much more than most people in their whole lives, my dearest. There’s one clean way to finish it. If we have the strength.”

And then later, all too casual, turning away when he tried to look into her eyes, she had said, “There’s some horrid, big, brown rats living in the tops of my palm trees, dear. They’re getting terribly bold. Do you have a gun you could bring over? You could shoot them for me, maybe?”

It wasn’t much of a gun. He had checked to make sure it was still in the back of his closet. His father had given it to him one Christmas, when he was fifteen. It was a single-shot 22 rifle chambered for longs. Montgomery Ward. It threw high to the right. The half box of shells was in the back of the bottom bureau drawer.

The best way, he thought, would be to take the bolt out and wear those khakis which were roomier in the leg, and put it down his pant leg, muzzle down. In a little while. It was their bowling night. If they went, he could carry it out to the car without any pantleg nonsense. They might not go. Just to show him how upset they were. See what you’ve done to us? You’re spoiling everything for us, Sonny. After we’ve devoted our lives to you, boy.

He yawned and stretched. When he was away from her it was like being half alive. Everything was in monotone, like an old movie. Thoughts moved slowly, and his bones felt old.

Once again he let himself float back into sensual reverie, the images of the flesh, halted when his mother had knocked at his door. He knew that he could never have guessed how difficult it could be. Sometimes he would feel powerful as a giant, and, gathered into his great hands and sinewed arms, she would feel so sweet and little and whimperingly fragile, he would take her with a measured care, such a cautious awe and tenderness it seemed to make his heart melt and flow. And other times, in the tumbly striving gloom, she would seem to grow to an overwhelming weight, a huge warm bulging of thighs big as trees, belly like a meadow, furnace-door mouth, breasts like dunes, and the strong pulling of her arms would dwindle him to a little stick-figure of a man, drowned in the softness, held in purring, chuckling hunger, ticked close, and at last made to go into the scary puppety leapings that was not like pleasure but like all the world pulled down to a whine of bright lights, a shrillness of a single vivid and indescribable color, a grating and drawing and diminishing that was like the sense of falling which comes at the end of dreams.

When Sam Boylston walked into Staniker’s hospital room on Sunday afternoon at one thirty, the Captain was sitting in the arm chair in a cotton robe. Theyma Chappie was fixing a bowl of tropical blooms on the deep windowsill, pinching off the dead blossoms and dry leaves. She gave Sam a swift sidelong glance.

“I shall be down at the floor-nurse station, Captain,” she said. “Ring if you need me, please.”

As she was leaving, Sam went to Staniker, started to put his right hand out, changed to his left hand. As Staniker took it, Sam said, “I appreciate your giving me some time, Captain.”

“Sit down, Mr. Boylston. Sit down. I know how you must feel. Miss Leila was a fine little lady. It was a terrible thing to happen. You just never know. One minute everything is fine and the next minute — You just never know.”

Sam sat on the straight chair by the bed, readjusting his mental image of Staniker to fit the reality. The man was both bigger and better looking than he had expected. And there was a certain flavor of earnestness about him, of staunchness, one might easily find attractive. Yet there was something about him which reminded Sam of someone he did not like. It took him but a few seconds to pin it down. Big Tom Dorra, who along with old Judge Billy Alwerd had invested half the cash in Bix’s venture. Staniker did not have the hugeness of Big Tom, but the impact seemed strangely the same. There was the same flavor of a lazy gentleness which underscored rather than diluted an almost tangible maleness. The Captain and Tom Dorra both projected effortlessly that same promise of brute masculinity which had given some extraordinarily wooden actors long long careers in motion pictures. And just like Big Tom, in spite of the weather wrinkles and the smile wrinkles, the eyes themselves, pale, with coarse lashes, had the empty, bored distant malevolence of the bull elephant, the ruthless look and pattern of the stud.

He noticed an odd thing about the hair at Staniker’s temples. It was gray at the roots, gray for the first half inch, the dividing line between new color and old almost mathematically precise.

“Was my sister having a good time on the cruise, Captain?”

“That was a fine comfortable vessel, Mr. Boylston, and Mr. and Mrs. Kayd had me take them to interesting places. It would be a nice experience for anyone who didn’t know the Islands.”

“Did she seem to be having a good time?”

Staniker scowled in heavy thought. “I guess you’d want to know just how it was. She’d get moony about her boyfriend back in Texas. But that wasn’t all the time. There’s another thing, and I’ve run pleasure boats enough years to see it happen over and over. You put people on a boat and what it does, Mr. Boylston, it makes any little differences a lot bigger, especially if it’s family. Stella was a meek little thing, and that Mrs. Kayd, her step-mother, seemed bound on making that cruise pure hell for that little girl. Nasty nice. You know?”

“I know.”

“And Mr. Kayd kept criticizing his own boy every chance he got. Not a bad kid, that Roger, but his old man didn’t give him much of a chance. I guess Mister Bix kept getting the uglies on account of his wife was forever whining and complaining at him. When things got rough, Miss Leila would sidestep pretty good. She and my wife and me, we had to stay out of the line of fire. They’d keep trying to get outsiders to take sides in family trouble. I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Boylston, off the record, that Carolyn Kayd was real trouble. I think she liked things all messed up. Hell of a good-looking piece of woman, and she started giving me the eye after we’d been cruising a week or so. Just to needle Mister Bix. Even if my Mary Jane hadn’t been along, I’ve been around too long to walk into any kind of a setup like that. Maybe I’m making it sound worse than it was. Your sister had some good times. She hung one bull dolphin that like to give her fits. He spent more time in the air than he did in the water, but she got him up to the gaff, and when I yanked him aboard and he started going through all those colors as he died, she said she was sorry she hadn’t lost him. Nice little girl. A nice happy little girl. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, as the good book says, but it doesn’t seem to be worked out too fair sometimes.”

“I guess my friend Bix Kayd conducted business as usual.”

“That man was on the horn ever’ single morning. I bet he put enough on that credit card in phone calls to damn near buy another boat the same size.”

“And conferences too, I imagine. Meeting people here and there.”

Staniker stared down at his big left fist and then looked at Sam with a troubled earnestness. “He met with some men, sure. And only he and me knew about it. That was most of the reason why he bought that Formula 233 boat in Miami. He told me what kind of performance he wanted in a small boat we could take in tow, and I picked it out for him. What he’d do, we’d leave the big boat in a good anchorage and the two of us would take off in that Muñequita, with billfish gear, and meet up with people like he’d arranged it. But I wouldn’t feel right about talking about that, Mr. Boylston. The way Mister Bix set it up in the beginning, he was paying me a big wage partly for keeping my mouth shut. He had reason to know I could. Now God knows it doesn’t matter to him any more what I say to anybody one way or the other. But perhaps it could matter to some of the men he had dealings with. I’ve signed a contract to tell the whole exclusive story to a man who’s going to write it up, but I’m going to leave out all of the business stuff, because I expect to stay in the business of hiring out as captain, and if you get a reputation for too much mouth, jobs get scarce.”

“I appreciate your point, Captain. You know, it’s a funny thing. If my sister hadn’t been aboard, I’d be upset about something that doesn’t seem important at all to me now.”

“What’s that, sir?”

Watching Staniker closely, Sam shrugged, smiled wryly, and said, “I had a deal going with Bix. A couple of hundred thousand dollars of mine went down with that boat.”

Staniker stared, eyes wide. “Cash money?” he said in a hushed tone.

“Cash money. And a lot more that Bix put in the kitty.”

Staniker shook his head. “Now why would a sane man take a chance and tote that much money all over the Bahamas on a fifty-three foot boat?”

“Sometimes, when something is for sale, cash is the only way you can buy it. Cash doesn’t leave tracks, Staniker.”

“I never had any idea!” Staniker said.

“I wouldn’t have mentioned it. But when you told me you felt — a moral responsibility not to discuss his business dealings, I knew there wouldn’t be any harm in it.”

“I’d never mention it to a soul, Mr. Boylston, I swear.”

Sam sighed. “Funny thing. I had a hunch about that cruise. I should have followed it. I felt a little edgy about having my kid sister go along. Careful as Bix was about everything, there was a chance somebody might figure out he had it aboard. Nobody knew except me and Bix. If somebody went after that money, I thought, it would be a damned poor place for Leila to be. Oh. Correction. Two other men knew it would be aboard, even though Leila and nobody else in Bix’s family knew. The other two are business associates. Known them for years. They stood to make too much out of the deal to try anything tricky anyway.”

Staniker poked very gently at his burned thigh, biting his lip. “Mr. Boylston?”

“What?”

“I was wondering. Is it going to come out there was all that money aboard? I mean through the estate or insurance or anything?”

“For personal reasons, Staniker, I hope not. But there’s always that chance, isn’t there? One of our associates might try to set it up as a casualty loss. But I don’t understand, Captain. Why should any publicity about it be upsetting to you?”

Staniker stared blankly at him. “Upsetting? Oh, no. Listen, maybe you don’t like it, me making a few bucks by signing that contract. Maybe you think it isn’t right to make money out of a terrible accident like that. But it’s going to be hard for me to get work. I got to worry about how I’m going to keep eating. My contract has book royalties in it and movie rights. Now I swear to you I won’t tell a soul about that money. You can trust me all the way in a thing like that. But what I was thinking, the reason I asked, if it did happen to come out, it might mean a lot more money for me out of that contract. You can hate me if you want to, but nobody is going to look after me except me.”

“I understand.” Sam stood up. “Thanks for giving me the time. You coming along all right?”

“Better than they thought I would, I guess. They’re letting me leave Wednesday. That’s what? June first? Yes. I got a little advance on an insurance settlement. I might maybe try a hotel a couple days to get used to getting around, then fly on back to Miami. But I guess it will be a long time before I really get over this thing, or maybe never. It’s a nightmare for sure, Mr. Boylston.”

On his way to the stairway he saw Theyma Chappie coming along the corridor toward him. He beckoned her into a small alcove.

“Do you now see what I was trying to tell you?” she asked in a low tone.

“Yes. I see it.”

“Some terrible thing hides behind his eyes. When he put his hand on me, after I jumped away, I felt so cold for a long, long time. That was when I knew he could do what you say he did. Then I was sure.”

“He’s good, Theyma. Believe me, he’s damned good. It’s a great front, all that bumbling slowness and sincerity and troubled manner. There aren’t many ways. Trick him, or trap him, or break him. I don’t know how it can be done. But I have to do it.”

“What will doing it do to you, Sam?”

“Balance the ledger.”

“God’s business, no?”

“With man’s help sometimes. Your place? Five thirty?”

“Good.”

“Just get the recorder out of the room, and that’s the last of it. I’m grateful to you for taking the chance.”

“Perhaps it would have been better not to. I think. For you. I am not sure. But — it is done. And you go tomorrow. Sam, go all the way home. Go all the way to your Texas and your Lydia Jean.”

“This evening I’ll play you something I put together out of all those tapes.”

“Perhaps I do not wish to hear it, eh?”

“I want you to.”

She made a face. “Why should such things you want matter to me in any way? You bully me, Mr. Boylston. It is a disgrace. Excuse me. I must go tuck your monster into bed for a nap.” She pulled her shoulders high, canted her head, gave him an odd look. “I watch him asleep. When his lids quiver and his hands twitch and his mouth changes shapes I know he dreams. And I wonder.”

Sunday afternoon after Leila awakened from another of her long naps, she fought back the insidious lethargy and drowsiness and told the Sergeant, sweetly and politely, that she felt she would be more comfortable aboard the Muñequita. Had he not said it was moored under the house? Then it would not get too hot. There were screens which could be zipped in place, a bow hatch propped open for ventilation, a marine head, bedding in a locker under the port bunk. She said he would then have his own bed back. She would be able to do more for herself. The suggestion seemed to displease him, and he went out without a word. She felt herself sliding back into sleep, fought it for a little while and then let go. Never had she slept so heavily and continuously. She wondered if the blow on the head had anything to do with it.

She had seen herself in the mirror he brought her when she asked for it. It had frightened her. Her cheekbones looked sharp enough to poke through her sallow-tan skin. Her eyes were sunk back into her head. Her matted hair was clumsily brushed over the shaved area of the wound. Her lips were swollen, pulpy, pale, cracked and split.

She knew everybody would be looking for her. She could not sustain a sense of urgency longer than a few minutes before sinking back into that lethargy that was so like having had too many drinks. He brought her bowls of spiced, rich, heavy food, big mugs of hot tea. She would feed herself until her arm tired, and then he would take the spoon and feed her, coaxing her to take more, making little clicking sounds with his mouth, the way some people speak to horses.

Once she had awakened — yesterday? the day before? — to find she had been turned face down, the improvised night-gown pulled high, while hands that were at once strong and gentle rubbed a pungent ointment into her back, working from high on her shoulders all the way to the backs of her calves and back again. In that disjointed world of half-sleep, Daddy was once again putting on that stuff that stopped the terrible itching-burning of the poison oak. Sam didn’t get it as bad as I did, she thought.

Then she heard the stranger-voice, crooning to itself, “... enough skin come off to build a whole new gal, I do swear... no bad places left... coming pink and new like a baby... pore little burned ass ain’t board-flat no more, plumping up again...”

Just as her body began to tighten in alarm, he had given her a little pat on the shoulder, grunted to his feet, spread the clean white shirt down over her, pulled the sheet back in place. Her thought of protest faded into the velvet dark of sleep.

Remembering, as she wondered why the Sergeant had left without a word, she reached a hand under the back of the shirt and felt of herself, felt on her back and buttocks, under a slight oiliness of medication, an ugly random pattern of welts and lumps and ridges instead of the familiar smoothness. There was no pain, yet here and there a special tenderness.

After a long time she heard him clumping up the outside steps. It took a moment to remember the name of the song he was singing without words. Lili Marlene. “Dum dum dah dum dah — dum ti dum ti dah.”

He told her the boat was ready. He wrapped her in a blanket and picked her up. From the top of the stairs she had expected to be able to see water beyond the shoreline of the island, but the trees were too high. The light hurt her eyes. The world seemed far too huge and bright. The steps looked unsafe. She clung to him. She saw the small boat basin, like a pond in a swamp, the water black and still, and saw the channel where it entered the thick mangrove growth and curved out of sight.

Over his few dum-dah-dum bars of the song, repeated over and over, she heard the tiny song of mosquitoes around her ears, face and throat. In the shadows of the mooring place under the house he stepped lightly aboard the Muñequita from his sheltered dock. The overhead was far too low for him to carry her into the forward cabin space. He set her down and steadied her as she backed down the step and clambered weakly into the bunk he had made up. He came in, closing the screening behind him, sat on his heels and sprayed the mosquitoes which had come in with them. The hatch was propped open overhead, the screening in place.

He flicked on a weak bulb over her bunk, turned it off again. “The batteries are charged up pretty good, Missy, so if you’re wan-tin to use the light it shouldn’t take it down much, and the gas is full near to the top so as I can run the engines in neutral and recharge, comes to that. And you can run this little fan too I’d say, when the air gets too still.”

He pressed a switch. The little rubber-bladed fan began to whir. She felt the wind against her face, glanced up at it, and a picture formed quickly in her mind and disappeared, leaving an aftertaste of fear and despair she could not identify. She had too brief a glimpse of the dark, bloated, horrid face of the woman to identify her. Eyes bulged from the sockets. Thickened tongue protruded from the mouth. And a long strand of her hair had been caught in a small fan, wound around shaft and blade. The fan did not move. It hummed and stank.

“You all right, Miss Leila?”

“... Yes. Yes, I’m all right.”

After he left her alone she made herself get out of the bunk and look for the things she had hoped to use. The search did not take long. The little pistol and the shotgun were gone. The spear guns were gone. Both bronze keys were gone from the ignition switches and from the compartment under the instrument panel where the little Japanese transistorized ship-to-shore radio was locked away. She stretched out on the bunk and wept for a little while. Then she collected from the compartment under the other bunk a few things she could use. Towels, insect repellent, a terry beach coat which belonged to Roger, one of Stel’s swim suits, the yellow one with white trim.

There’s one way, she thought, when I’m strong enough. Put this suit on and slip over the side and swim out his crazy channel to the open water. Even if it’s five miles to shore, I can make it. So I better work it into the conversation sometime that I can’t swim.

But there was another thing to try first. And planning it, she fell asleep.

On Monday, far stronger than she had hoped to be, she was able to walk halfway up the steps, clinging to the Sergeant before she tired and had to be carried the rest of the way. With his primitive sewing kit, she had fashioned herself underwear pants from a piece of sheeting, a short skirt from a beach towel, a bandeau top from a smaller towel. After she had rested and eaten well, she said, in polite accusation, “You should have taken me to a doctor right away, you know.”

“Missy, you don’t know about head wounds. You don’t know a thing.” He touched the sickening dent in his forehead. “After I was sound as a dollar, they kept me in that place three whole years!”

“But this isn’t the same!”

“Well — there’s another thing I expect you better know about. If it wasn’t for the Lieutenant, all them pretty little people in those little houses over there on the mainland shore, they would have got me stuck back into that place long ago. I get mixed up a little sometimes. One of them fat little sons of bitches — excuse me — he stood right up in court and he asked the judge that time how they had any garntee I wasn’t going to sneak over there some dark night and kill them all in their beds, like I was some kind of maniac. I don’t bother them. Why’d they want to bother me like they do? Missy — from the minute I found you, I had that on my mind. You understand? What if I took you to a doctor and you were dead when we got there? What if you died and never come to? All those people over there would jump right onto a thing like that and say Sergeant Corpo, he hurt that pore girl and he should ought to be locked up. Missy, the onliest thing I could do was nurse you good as I could and hope.”

“But what if I had died?”

“I had a spot picked out, and I got lumber to make a good box, and a Bible to say words over you. I would have took that good boat out on a dark night on an outgoing tide and let it go on out the pass into the ocean. It would have been the best I could do, Missy.” He gave a single loud clap of his hands. “But what good is this kind of talk? Here you are setting up, smart as paint, and everything is fine as can be.”

She smiled at him. “I’m very very grateful to you, Sergeant. It’s nice things worked out this way. Now I’d like you to take me to Broward Beach in the boat so I can get in touch with my people.”

He leaned forward and stared at her. “What’s the matter with you, girl? You haven’t heard what I’ve been saying to you?”

“Certainly I have!”

“Any damn fool could take one look at you and he’d know you were a mighty sick little gal. Your head is healing good but it sure God looks recent like. And the fever’s melted all the meat off your bones and you’re weak as a kitten. Why, if I took you in there the shape you’re in, they’d all know I kept you here and doctored you myself and it would be pretty near as bad as taking you in dead.”

She stared at him in dismay. He had that careful and earnest logic of the deranged. He had the raw sinewy look of enormous strength. His homemade haircut was grotesque. His eyes, of the palest gray she had ever seen, had an eerie luminosity about them, as though lighted from behind. She had seen animal eyes like that.

With a catch in her voice she asked hopelessly, “When can I leave? Please.”

“When it’s time! When nobody could ever know you’d ever had a sick day in your life, Miss Leila. Why, you’re going to get so you’re fat and sassy and laughing the whole day long. Your hair will all be grown back to cover that scar. You’ll be healthy like never before. Don’t you fret about things to do around here. There’s a thousand things, Missy. I can show you the kinds of wild orchids and air plants, and how the fiddler crabs make signals to each other, and how comical them baby pelicans are. Misty mornings, early, I can take you out on the flats, and sometimes I can have you scrunch down in the skiff and we can go to some beaches I go to where real good stuff washes up and there’s nobody there at all. We’ll have us a fine time, and you’ve got Sergeant Corpo’s word on that. Then, say along toward fall, you can just say goodby and set off in that fine boat. If you don’t know how to run it, I can teach you easy. And you can bet that boy Jonathan and your brother Sam will be glad to see you looking so fine and happy. They see you now, it could scare them some.”

“How do you know about them!”

“I swear, you asked me that three times now and ever’ time I tell you it was from listening to you talking to that whole mess of people when you were sickest.”

“But they’ll be so worried about me, Sergeant!”

He shook his head sadly. “You know if you fret about it, you’re not going to have you a good time on my island at all. You’ll spoil it for sure for the both of us. Now don’t you worry about the ladystuff you’ll need. A gal has her needs and she has to have pretties and all, and when I get set to go on into town, you can give me a list of anything you can think of.”

He got up quickly and went over to his great jumble of boxes and containers and came back with a green metal box and put it on the floor beside her feet. “This here is an ammunition box and they’re good things because the damp can’t get into what you put in them.” He opened it and looked expectantly up at her and she saw that it was full almost to the top with money.

“Where did you get all that!”

“I cash the army check and I don’t never need that much for what I have to buy, so I just bring the rest of it on back and put it in this box. Been doing it for years and years. I got a box that filled up a long time back and I had to start a new one. It’s over there someplace. I surely would like to know how much there is all told. Maybe you could he’p me count it out. I used to try but it took so long I’d get all mixed up somewhere in what number thousand it was I got to. So I gave up on it.”

He closed the box and put it back with his other boxes. He sat down again and said in a tone of wonder, “I know I got to keep you here like I said, Missy, but I never thought in my whole life I’d be glad to have anybody close by again. Folks make me edgy. But you, somehow, it doesn’t bother me one little bit. I swear, when I didn’t know if you was living or dying, you were still the prettiest little thing I ever saw anyplace, and I can see now that all you’re going to do as you get better is get prettier. It’ll be a nice thing, having you here with me for a long long time, Missy.”

He seemed to be implying something, and it gave her a little crawling feeling of growing apprehension. She looked wide-eyed at him and moistened her lips and said, “I... I don’t want to be — your girl, Sergeant!”

He was motionless and then he jumped up so wildly he knocked his chair over. He glared at her and said, “Who said any such thing as that? You think I’m some kind of animal? You think I ought to be locked up? That it? Why I wouldn’t lay a hand on you...” He gave a grunt of astonishment and stared down at his right hand as if he had never seen it before. He turned it this way and that.

“Never happen again anyways,” he said in a strange voice. “Happen again and I cut you off, finger by finger.”

“What happened?”

“When I first toted you up here. I had to look close at you to see every hurt place. This fool hand — it reached itself out and felt your little bare titty.” He looked at her in shame and distress. “It was only that one time, I swear, and nothing can’t ever happen again like that, Miss Leila, on my word of honor— All I want— All I want...”

He stopped and his eyes changed, looking through her rather than at her. He turned slowly and in a wooden manner quite unlike his normal movement walked to a place to one side of the door where he grasped two uprights fashioned of peeled poles. She could guess from the tension of his body how strongly he held them. They were a few feet apart, and the areas where he held them were darkened with the past times of standing there. He leaned forward, put his head against a heavy cross beam. He rolled his head slowly from side to side and made an almost inaudible moan. He leaned his head back and then thudded it so heavily against the beam she felt her stomach turn over.

“Sergeant!” she cried. “No!”

When he did it again, she made her way to him, clung to one arm, tried to pull his grip loose and turn him. His arm was like marble.

He turned slowly at last and looked at her. He said empty syllables that fitted his mouth loosely and did not combine into words. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. She got him over to the bed and he sat down. He frowned up at her. “Get a little bit mixed up now and again.”

She felt no fear of him and knew there would never be any fear. The luminous look of those strange eyes was the limpid clarity of a kind of innocence. A child looked out at her. The rigid ethic of boyhood controlled the big tough body. It was as though he had built a tree house, a place to play pretend, and had filled it with toys, and she was another toy, the newest of all.

There would be chances to get away from him just as soon as she was strong enough.

“It’ll be just like you say, Sergeant. We’ll have a fine time. We’ll have fun.”

The slow smile lasted a long time. “Surely will,” said the Sergeant.