The Last One Left

Twenty-two

As dusk became night, Mrs. Mooney had begun to fight a familiar battle with her conscience and with her desire.

After she had fed the three old dogs, she turned the lights out in the house. She plodded from room to room, muttering to herself. From time to time she would climb the stairs and go into her bedroom and stand at the window overlooking the row of rental cottages and see through the leaves those fragments of yellowish glow from a light in Number 10, a light in that Mr. Stanley’s bedroom shining through the pale worn shade.

The logic of it was beyond question. With such dense shrubbery, the cottages had a lot of privacy. And on a night so hot, there could be but one reason for pulling the shades down.

She had fought it and won the other night. But tonight it was stronger. Like a terrible gnawing. It was so unfair that it should keep going on and on into these years when she thought it would be over, when she would have rest and peace.

She roamed the dark house, muttering her complaints, and explaining how terrible a thing it was, telling it all to Mr. Mooney, years in his grave now, reminding him that it had begun way back even when he was still alive, and how he had caught her at it once and given her the beating she deserved, told her they could send her off to jail, told her she was an evil woman, and even after she had promised she would never do it again, he had been nasty-polite to her for weeks.

She turned the television set on and sat to watch it, then found herself roaming back and forth across the living room in the pallid flickering light of the horses running, the men shooting and shouting.

The next time she went upstairs she avoided looking out the window and instead went to her big desk in the corner and turned on the desk light and opened the big scrapbook atop the litter of old invoices and receipts.

The three old dogs had already gotten into her bed for the night, and they lifted their heads to look at her, their eyes glowing in the reflected lamp light. She turned the pages, and looked for a long time at the clippings about her marriage to Michael Mooney on the Fourth of July in the center ring of the Coldwell Brothers Circus in Topeka, Kansas. Mr. Mooney had one of the best small-circus dog acts in the business, and she had worked the act with him, had done clown on the side, and had sewed a thousand costumes for the dogs during all the circus years.

All gone now but the three old dogs, all of them single-trick puppies, all eagerness, in the last months before it all came to an end. All gone but Jiggs and Tarzan and Maggie, fat and going blind.

Maybe, she thought, Mr. Stanley had been taken sick and it would be an act of Christian charity to go check on him...

And remembered that she had told herself exactly that same thing back in April when that same Mr. Stanley had taken a cottage for just one night. When their car had local plates and they checked in alone, for an overnight, you knew what the rascals had on their minds.

If I hadn’t slipped that last time, she thought, it wouldn’t be gnawing so terrible now. Maybe it wouldn’t count as a separate sin, but as a part of the sin of the last time.

She closed the scrapbook, reached and turned the desk light off, hit the closed book with her fist. The mind kept making up the shiny, easy excuses to make everything seem all right, and afterward you knew the reasons were dirty, but by then it was done and you were eased and you could say never, never, never again; you could say it was over forever.

She wondered if that Mr. Stanley had noticed how it had unsettled her to have him show up again. Usually you never saw them again. Her heart had bumped and her hands had been shaky. He was one of the ones who had to share the blame of it, leaving the lights on for it instead of liking darkness for it like decent folk.

As she went slowly down the stairs, sliding her hand on the bannister railing, she wondered if it would be the same one, the tall blonde woman with the beautiful slender tan body, but a very strong woman for all the slenderness, a match and more for the hammering brutishness of him.

Held out this long, you have, she thought. So heat yourself up a mug of warm milk and drink it down and go to your bed like a decent-minded widowed dwarf lady, with three old dogs depending on her. It’s late, Little Maureen. Somewhere around ten or later even. Drink the milk and kneel by the bed and pray to God to take away the gnawing and burning because you are too old now for evil.

“Never again!” she said aloud. She bit the inside of her mouth, tasted blood, groaned, trotted into the dark kitchen and folded the little aluminum stepladder she used to reach the dish cupboards. In her cotton housecoat, carrying the ladder, she slipped out into the dark, hot night and threaded her way in her hump-backed stealthy crouch along familiar paths that led behind the cottages. Moving swiftly and breathing shallowly, she set her ladder up under the lighted window and climbed it and stood upon the top of it, hands against the siding for support. She put her eye to the narrow opening between the shade and the framing of the window screen and looked into the room and into the tumbled emptiness of the sagging bed. Disappointment was as sharp as toothache. She saw a pattern of light on the floor which indicated the bathroom light was on across the hallway.

With an anxious agility she climbed down, folded the ladder, and trotted around the rear of the cottage and, as she set it up under the lighted bathroom window, she had a vivid, sweet, dizzying memory of that pair two years ago and more, ah, how they’d sloshed and strained in the suds, and all the while the girl, plump as a little dumpling, squealing and giggling, had teased the poor rascal shamelessly, giving him such little samples he was near out of his mind with the need of it, a torture Mr. Mooney would not have permitted for an instant.

She climbed up the ladder and put her eye to the opening and stood tiptoe tall so as to look down into the tub. She stopped breathing for two long seconds, then turned and stepped off the top of the little ladder into space. The tilt triggered the old reflexes and skills of the clown years, and she jacked her knees up, tucked her head down, rolled her right shoulder under, and relaxed her body completely at the instant before impact. She rolled over and back up onto her feet, gave a little hop to regain balance, and then leaned against the side of the cottage for a moment, feeling dizzy. Poor old Little Maureen, she thought. One little rollover makes her all shaky inside.

She folded the ladder and raced back to her house along the overgrown paths, the leaves brushing at her. The number to call was in the front of the phone book. “Miz Mooney talking,” she said in a voice like a contralto kazoo. “I got one needs help bad and needs it quick, in my number ten cottage. Maybe he’s breathing, maybe not, anyway in a tub so blood dark I can’t see if it was wrists he cut. What? Sonny boy, there’s no way in hell you can find it unless you stop talking and let me tell you where my place is. So kindly fermay the boosh and get your pencil out...”

At eight o’clock the following morning a brisk young man named Lobwohl sat at a steel and linoleum desk with his back to a big tinted window. He was reading the preliminary reports on the Mooney Cottages business and making notes on a yellow legal pad, and pausing from time to time to sip coffee from a large, waxed cardboard cup.

Two men, heavier and older than Lobwohl, came sauntering in. As one of them sat down, Lobwohl said, “It starts like one of those weeks. Did you get hold of Harv?”

“He should be started on it by now. I told him what you wanted. A complete job on the second time around, right? Every latent, every grain of dust, every thread, every hair. He said to tell you there’s one thing that makes it easier than usual.”

“Nothing ever makes anything any easier.”

“It was empty for two months before that midget rented it to him, and sitting empty and hot as a bakery, so Harv says the oils in all the old prints are dried out, and the way they take the powder, he can tell old from new right off. Anyway, his team should be working there now. He requisitioned one of the big lab trucks with everything on it.”

Lobwohl, nodding approval, continued his note taking. The other man, standing at the window, said, “I’m telling you. That damn Shaeffer. One forty-seven season average, and last night he rolls a six hundred series. Two twenty-eight the last game!”

“Shaeffer in Safe and Loft?” Lobwohl asked as he made a note.

“So they edge us out by five pins,” the man said with disgust.

“Okay, Bert, Barney, let’s get to it,” Lobwohl said. The man turned from the window and sat beside his partner, facing Lobwohl. “We have the make on him as Staniker. So his name was on the check in the bureau drawer and on his discharge from the hospital in Nassau. And the prints match, and he looks like Staniker’s daddy. So we are very clever people. But he is G. Stanley from Tampa as long as we can keep the lid on it.”

“Why should we?” Barney asked.

Bert said, “He likes the bright light they shine on you. He makes those faces. Any minute, CBS signs him.”

“We’ll move faster and better if it’s just another four lines on page forty, at least for now. I checked upstairs. If we start making the big effort, somebody wonders why. So it’s just us. Here’s what we’ve got from medical. Ten o’clock last night, plus or minus an hour. Pretty good load of barbiturates, but hard to tell how much exactly with all the blood gone out of it. But here is the clincher. No false tries on the wrists. One cut each, and as deep as you’ll ever see. The point is this. The cuts went so deep they destroyed the motor ability of the fingers. So he could cut one that way, but not both, unless he held the blade in his teeth, and that’s not very damn possible. Here’s what I go for. Somebody half cute. Wanted him dead. Didn’t figure the wrist business. Forgot to fix the catch so the door would lock itself. Let’s hope he was so sure it would go over he didn’t worry about prints. It’s about time we were due for one where prints would do us some good. How long has it been now?”

“Three years anyway,” Barney said.

“A hundred and fifty dollars in the same bureau drawer. We’ve got two directions to go for motive.”

“What’s with the G. Stanley bit?” Bert asked.

“That leads into one of the motives. The dwarf-lady said he was a one-night customer back in April. At that time he and his wife were living at that marina. The word is that he was stud. This time he signed for two weeks. The layout is fine for a sneak job, if you don’t mind a little squalor. The husband could have showed up instead of the lady and figured it that it would seem reasonable Staniker would be depressed by losing that yacht and those people and his wife and being the only one to get out of it alive.”

“And,” said Bert, “if you go the other way, it’s somebody doing it because he lost the boat.”

“You’re a better cop than a bowler,” Lobwohl said. “I remember a sob story about a girl on that boat. Her boyfriend and her brother came flying over from Texas to be in Nassau while the search was still going on. See if you can get me that clip without anybody smelling anything. Then we see if either or both are in the area, or maybe left the area this morning. I can have that checked out other ways once you get me that article. Meanwhile, you two dig into Staniker’s love life. He got to town Friday. He took that place Friday. I want to know exactly who he was banging before he went cruising. Move fast on it. And quietly.” He tapped one of his phones with his pencil. “And come back to me on this outside line, not through the radio net. Start at that marina and work out from there. Neighborhood. Bars. I don’t have to tell you your business.”

“We’ll call in just before noon anyway to see if Harv has anything juicy.”

Bert Kindler and Barney Scheff arrived at the Harkinson place a few minutes past eleven on Monday morning, drove through the open gate and got out of the department sedan slowly.

A maid in a blue and white uniform, and a man in dark pants and a blue shirt, suit coat over his arm, were coming down the open staircase from an apartment over the garages. Both were apparently Cuban. The maid hurried toward them with smiling greeting.

“No, not Mrs. Harkinson,” Scheff said after they had identified themselves. “We want to ask you some questions, honey. What’s your name?”

“Why question? Why?” the girl demanded.

“Your name,” Kindler said.

The girl looked very frightened. She backed away slowly. “Why?” she asked again.

“Honey,” Scheff said, “maybe you haven’t got papers, huh? Maybe we just put you in the car and take you down and...”

“No!” she said. “No! Oh please!”

“ ’Cisca!” the man said sharply in Spanish. “Go back up to the apartment and wait. They will not take you anywhere!”

As she went running up the stairs they stared blandly and curiously at the man. “Comprendemos un poquito, hombre,” Kindler said.

“My English is adequate. Her name is Miss Francisca Torcedo. What do you wish to know?”

“What’s your name?”

“Raoul Kelly.”

“You work for the Harkinson woman too?”

“No.”

“Kelly, what makes you think you can stop us from taking that little broad in for questioning if we want to? Man, I get a reaction like that from anybody, my ears grow points,” Scheff said.

“I think I can stop you if you will listen to why it would be a bad idea. If you won’t listen, I can’t. You look as if you’ve both been in your line of work long enough to want to listen.”

“Talk a little,” said Kindler.

“First, her papers, and mine, are in perfect order. She does not have much English. She is of a family which was very wealthy and important in Havana. When the Castro militia came into the city, her father was shot and killed in the confusion. She went into the street and wounded a militiaman. They took her to a military compound and kept her there. She was mistreated. There was serious emotional damage. Her brother and I were in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was killed. I was captured and exchanged later. He told me to look after her. I am going to marry her. She is getting better, little by little, day by day. Taking her in for questioning might push her way, way back, out of anybody’s reach, and she might not come out of it. I am close enough to her to be able to answer any question you might want to ask her. If you try to bother her, I will try to stop you, believe me.”

Both officers looked sleepy. “Kelly means it,” Scheff said.

“What we could do,” Kindler said, “we could stand in the shade.” They walked to the nearby shade. Kindler said, “If you are like we call unresponsive, then we take her in where we got somebody can speaka the spic.”

“And you take me too, I suppose. Horizontal, if I make a fuss. Cubans are tricky. You got to watch them.”

“He’s real sensitive, Bert,” Scheff said.

“You know what I think about Cubans?” Kindler said. “I wish there wasn’t any other kind of civilian in Dade County except Cubans. You know what that would do statistically, man? It would cut crime almost in half. I could spend more time with the wife and kids. So unpucker yourself, bud.”

Raoul grinned ruefully. “So all right. My mistake. What do you want to know?”

Scheff gestured toward the main house. “Word has it here and there the boss lady is prime gash, and it was old Fer Fontaine set her up here before he died. Bert and me have a thing about bothering anybody who has real good friends in politics. Anybody we might know subbing for the Senator?”

“No.”

“So then if we happen to be trying to locate somebody by the name of Staniker, and if we leaned on her some, like saying we know Staniker kept on using her as a shack job after she sold the boat he operated for her, she wouldn’t phone anybody in the court house or in Tallahassee.”

“It’s not very likely.”

“Would she say it wasn’t like that with Staniker?” Kindler asked.

“I don’t know. She might deny it. She might admit it.”

“Then Staniker wasn’t just making a brag to his marina pals?” Scheff asked.

“No. But whether she admits it or denies it, I imagine she’d tell you the same thing she told Francisca, that she and Staniker had a quarrel before he took the job aboard the Muñeca, and she told him to stay away from her. And she’d tell you that since Staniker came back from the Bahamas last Friday he’s been bothering her by calling her up and asking to see her.”

“So,” Scheff said idly, “last night she went to see him to tell him to stop bugging her?”

Raoul explained that Crissy Harkinson hadn’t been off her property since Saturday afternoon, and explained about the car and the locked gate.

“But she didn’t know you were right here all the time with your girl, Kelly?”

“No. I’ve never stayed here before. But it seemed like a good idea to talk Francisca into it. That locked gate wouldn’t keep out anybody who wanted to get in. Staniker used to thump Crissy Harkinson around sometimes. I thought he might get loaded and come around and Francisca might try to keep him from bothering Mrs. Harkinson. And there was another unknown factor too, a kid Mrs. Harkinson just broke up with because he was acting strange. The locked gate was to keep both of them out.”

Scheff and Kindler both began to speak at once, then Scheff let Kindler take it. He said, “Was the kid getting any?”

“I know she would deny that. But he was. She hired him to teach her how to sail, and it went on from there.”

“Name?”

“Oliver something. Nineteen, twenty. A big, husky kid. Kept his sailboat in her boat basin. Flying Dutchman. I looked it over once when Mrs. Harkinson was out. You could probably trace him through the name of his boat. The Skatter, with a k.”

Raoul saw the two men glance at each other with identical expressions of bland satisfaction. “And,” said Scheff, “I guess the reason the kid began acting weird and getting on her nerves was because he knew she used to be Staniker’s piece, and he knew Staniker was back and he knew Staniker was bothering her.”

“She told Francisca the kid knew Staniker was bothering her.”

“So she gave Oliver the old heave? Like take your sailboat and go, Sonny.”

“He came and got the boat in the early evening last night. She’d taken a pill and gone to bed early. She asked Francisca to take a look later on and be sure the boat was gone and the kid wasn’t hanging around the area or bothering Mrs. Harkinson. I went with Francisca when she took a look.”

“What time was that?”

“A little after nine last night. Then Francisca went and looked into the bedroom and Mrs. Harkinson was there asleep.”

“Good-looking woman?” Kindler asked.

“I’ve seen her at a distance. Well built. I would guess about thirty, but Francisca is certain she is close to forty.”

“And fooling around with young kids,” Scheff said. “I got a boy nineteen. My old lady is thirty-eight. Look, why is your girl working for a bum like the Harkinson woman?”

“Until day after tomorrow.”

“How long has she been working for her?”

“A year. A little more than a year.”

“What’s the Harkinson woman’s background?”

“I wouldn’t know. Francisca wouldn’t know either.”

“Where’s she from?”

“She said something to Francisca once about living in Atlanta.”

“She’s in the house now?” Kindler asked. Raoul nodded.

“Look her over?” Scheff asked Kindler.

“She’ll keep, Barney. The kid might not.”

“Can I ask a question?” Raoul said.

“Sure, Kelly.”

“Why are you looking for Staniker?”

“Routine. Just routine,” Kindler said.

As they walked toward the car, Francisca came timidly out to the railing of the shallow porch and looked down. They all looked up at her. Her eyes were huge and her mouth was sucked into a small bloodless button.

Kindler called up, in wretched but understandable Spanish, “Señorita, you are a very beautiful lady. We do not take you away. This man of yours is a good man.”

She looked startled and then beamed down upon them happily. “Kaylee is beauty-ful fella!” she cried.

Raoul felt heat in his cheeks. Both officers laughed and ’Cisca waved busily to them as they drove off. “Sotch nice!” she said to Kelly.

Ten minutes north of the Harkinson turnoff, Scheff and Kindler stopped at a shopping center and phoned Lobwohl’s outside-line number.

“This is Bert,” Kindler said. “Did Harv get...”

“Better come on in,” Lobwohl said. “A flippy kid did it and then shot himself. Had a note on him saying he was afraid he was going to do some crazy thing. Had a map and a floor plan of number ten. Even had the wrappings off the blade in his pocket. Coast Guard spotted him dead in a sailboat grounded off Eliott Key.”

“Named Oliver maybe?” Kindler said.

After a long silence Lobwohl said wearily, “All right. All right. Come on in and show off, you smart-ass.”

“Is it all going to break now? The ID on Staniker?”

“Yes. Why?”

“When it breaks wide open and the news people get a look at the motive, we’re going to get swarmed worse than anything since the Mossler thing. Look, the broad that Staniker and the kid got to is a Mrs. Cristen Harkinson, late thirties, blonde, a swinger. The late Senator Ferris Fontaine had her stashed in a very lush bay house down here a little southeast of Goulds, all very private. He probably built it for her and deeded it to her. And she had a cruiser...”

“And up to the time she sold it, Staniker worked for her, running the boat. I’ve been reading the clippings, Bert.”

“She broke off with Staniker. He gets the job running the Kayd boat. She lines up the kid to give her sailing lessons. So she takes one kind of lessons and gives another kind. Staniker comes back from the islands. He wants to start making it again with Harkinson. This bugs the kid. He gets so hairy about it she tosses him out too. What I’d guess, the kid thinks he gets cut loose because she’s going to pick up with Staniker again. A green kid would be way out of his league with a live one like that. So how did the kid know where Staniker was? You see what kind of can of worms that opens up?”

“They’d both become nuisances. She could aim one at the other and either way it came out, Bert, she’d be rid of both of them. Two rejected suitors taking it out on each other. But she would have to be pretty cold to set them up like that, wouldn’t she?”

“She was home in bed, and I think that will check out. And I think that even if she conned the kid into killing Staniker, she’ll deny it up down and sideways, and nothing we can do. I am just saying that the hints in the papers are going to stop just short of actionable, and it is going to be dirty laundry week, and a mob scene at her house, guys in trees with telephoto lenses, the whole treatment.”

“So?”

“Protective custody? She’ll have to make a statement anyway. She’s the link between Staniker and the kid. We’ve got to go through the routine of the murder one indictment anyway and...”

“I try to keep from telling you your end of the business, Bert.”

“Sorry about that.”

“So you want to bring her in. And you happily married and all that. Or maybe you collect autographs.”

“Well, I like to see Barney have a little fun on the job too, but I was thinking that if we have her before she knows who did what to who, and make it a long slow ride, and fake her out a little, there might be something we could make stick later on, because there will be all kinds of pressure we should do something about her. The exposure is going to heat up every weird and rapo in the files, and with a full moon coming up, the cronkies are going to line up three deep, breathing through their mouths anyplace they think she might show.”

After a silence, Lobwohl said, “All right, but we don’t know how much clout she might have, so go very, very easy.”

“We have this little roll of red carpet we carry, and...”

“Somehow, Kindler, when you make those little funnies I keep thinking of all the kicks Mercer and Tuck are having bringing the Akards in to make a positive on the only son they’re ever going to have. The kid was born and raised here and there is no j.d. record on him at all, so the mother is going to keep telling Mercer and Tuck that he was always a good boy.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“No apology necessary. I shouldn’t chew you. And by now I’ve been around long enough so I should stop bleeding.”

“When you do, it’s time to get into another line of work.”

“Before you unroll your little red carpet, the lady will be apprised of her right to have an attorney present while her statement is being taken, and she will be permitted to phone and arrange to have said attorney either meet her here or meet her at her house and drive in with her while you follow along.”

“So what do I tell her about why we’re bringing her in?”

“Hey! There’s no next of kin on Staniker. Central records hasn’t sent back a match on the prints yet.”

“Oh I like that! Duty of a citizen. Ex-employer, et cetera. Voluntary all the way. And a good jolt for her that ought to knock loose something useful — if there is anything. Meanwhile, maybe somebody could start backtracking her, develop a line to somebody who knew Fontaine well enough. And there’s a chance she lived in Atlanta. While we’re in the place I can let light-fingered Scheff see if he can pick up anything with a chance of enough prints on it to get a principal registration.”

“Pretty remote.”

“Let me get Harv to tell you how it worked a couple times where we knew a single print registration wouldn’t do us any good at all.”

Halfway along the shell road to the Harkinson place they met Raoul Kelly trudging toward the highway.

When they stopped, Raoul came over to the car, wearing a troubled frown.

“Kelly,” Barney Scheff said, “we’re taking the Harkinson woman in. With any luck we’ll keep her around awhile. And you maybe better clear your little gal out of there today instead of waiting until Wednesday. You got a car?”

“I left it parked down the highway, in a grove.”

“If nobody clouted the wheels and the engine, after we leave she should lock the place up and pack and leave with you, because if we scared her that bad, she’s going to get a lot worse time from the spooks who’ll come swarming around the place.”

“What’s the matter? What are you talking about?”

“When we were here before, we knew somebody faked Staniker for a suicide. Stuck him in a bath tub and cut his wrists. From what we got from you, it looked like Oliver might fit, and they found him floating around in his sailboat. After he fixed Staniker, he killed himself. The woman is the motive. You have no idea how miserable the newspaper guys and the rest of them can get when they get a sniff of a story like this. Those bastards will really shake up that Francisca. What you do, Kelly, you stash her someplace where they can’t get at her. Then if we have to get a statement or anything, we’ll keep it as quiet as we can. What we’ll do, we’ll get in touch with you if we need her. Where do you work?”

“On the Record.”

Bert Kindler said, “I hope to God you work around the presses or peddle ads.”

“Reporter. But I do features. Latin American politics. Foreign affairs. Stop looking at me like that. Look, you did me two favors. Both large. So I am going to run to a phone and get the city desk and yell they should stop the presses. Scoop. Gimme rewrite. Here’s my card. Home address.”

“And,” said Scheff, “when they start beating the bushes looking for Francisca Whosis, everybody knows she’s Kelly’s girl. So you can make a very fine deal for an exclusive maybe?”

“I won’t have any idea where she is.”

After a long thoughtful stare, Scheff said, “Let’s buy it, Bert. But if he leaves us with any egg on the face, all we have to do is tell his boss what kind of a piece of news his boy sat on. Let’s go get Crissy-wissy and take her bye-bye.”