The Last One Left

Chapter Eighteen

On Friday afternoon, Staniker walked slowly down the steps from the Bahama Airways plane to the cement apron, holding onto the railing. His weakness made him feel slightly chilled in the sun heat of the Miami Airport, and made him aware of the small frictions of the clothing against his body. He felt the pull of the tender, healing skin on his right knee as he took each step, but there was little pain. McGregory had been pleased with how quickly he had healed.

The insurance company had advanced the money for the inexpensive clothing and toilet articles Nurse Chappie had purchased for him. He carried a small flight bag, blue and white. He had cleared U.S. Customs at Windsor Field on departure.

As he walked with the tourist passengers into the terminal he watched for reporters and photographers, but there were none. It was understandable. He had made it clear even before leaving the hospital that he had signed up with Banner Enterprises. And the story was old now. The Muñeca had been on the bottom in the endless silence and blackness for twenty-one days. And though he knew it was the last place she would be, he looked for Crissy.

“Captain? Captain Staniker?” A little man trotted up, beaming. He held his hand out. “Wezler. Hal Wezler. Banner Enterprises. All ready to go to work, Captain?” He had swift dark eyes, a ferret face, black hair, tie, suit and shoes, snow white shirt, gold accessories, a smile that came and went as swiftly as a facial tic. “Let’s find a saloon and get acquainted and I’ll tell you how we’re going to work it.”

They sat at a small table in a cocktail lounge. Wezler turned over the pale blue check for twelve hundred and fifty dollars. He talked so rapidly Staniker had trouble following him. Apparently time was very important. Wezler had taken a small suite. They would hole up there. Wezler used a tape recorder. He said he wanted a million words on tape. He’d fly back out to the coast and turn all that tape into a book. Everybody was very turned on about it, he said. Marty, whoever that was, was setting up the tie-ins. They were shooting for hard cover, magazine serialization, soft cover, book club and a movie deal. It was going to make everybody very rich. Marty was even thinking of setting up some kind of serial television project. But they had to get winging right now. These things cool off. So how about heading for the hotel right now? Great broads around the pool. Take a break once in a while. Ease off, have some laughs, then back to the old Ampex.

“Not right away,” Staniker said.

“What do you mean?”

“I have personal things to do, Wezler. And I need rest. I have to get my strength back.”

“Marty isn’t going to like this a bit, Staniker.”

“Too bad.”

“If it turns him off he might cut the whole deal down to practically nothing. You’re signed on percentage. You’d lose a pot.”

“So I’d lose a pot.”

Wezler studied him. “So I’ll see if I can con him a little on the phone. Only you got to tell me when, so I have something solid to go on.”

“A week.”

“Come on, baby!”

“A week.”

“The man says a week. Where’ll I find you, Captain?”

“I’ll phone your hotel.”

Wezler wrote the name of the hotel on the back of a business card and handed it over. “Where are you headed now? You want a lift? I got a rental out there someplace.”

Staniker accepted the ride to Parker’s Marina. Before Wezler drove off he pumped Staniker’s hand and said, “If you can make it five days, four days, you got a new friend, believe me.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Staniker said.

Parker wasn’t around. The new couple who worked there were curious about him, but when he sidestepped their questions they turned sullen and indifferent. They gave him the packet of mail which had been saved for him, and the man unlocked the storage shed so Staniker could sort through the things which had been moved out of the cottage. The heat was thick in the shed. Sweat stung his eyes as he sorted some personal clothing and belongings into two suitcases. He carried them outside, refastened the padlock, and went to where the woman was dipping up live shrimp from the bait tank for two leathery old senior citizens. He told her to tell Parker he’d get the rest of the stuff later. When she gave no sign she heard he repeated it. She turned and said, “You think I’m deef or something?”

He carried the suitcases around to the back of the main building. His old yellow Olds sat in the sunshine. One tire looked soft. The spare key was in a little magnetic box on top of a frame member under the left rear corner of the car. It had rusted shut. He banged it against the bumper and forced it open. He unlocked the car, stuck the suitcases in, left all four doors open for a few minutes to air out the bake-oven heat. He rolled all the windows down. Never have to own another one without air conditioning, he thought.

He got in, pulled the doors shut, put the key in the ignition. Before he started it, he reached under the seat and slid his fingers along until he felt the thin packet of bills, folded once, he had scotch-taped to the underside of the seat. He pulled it loose, put it into his pants pocket along with the Banner check, Wezler’s card, and the money left from the insurance advance.

The car did not start. The battery began to fade. And he felt a sudden and quite unexpected wave of terror. If the car wouldn’t start, everything would go wrong. He made himself relax. That was ridiculous. If the car didn’t start, you walked over to the gas station over there and told Charlie your troubles.

When he tried again it caught. He revved the motor for a while before putting it in gear. He drove out and down the street and across into the Shell station. A boy was working on a car on the lift. Charlie came out of the station, a broad, bald man in gray coveralls, steel glasses, a smear of grease on his forehead.

“Figured you’d be back soon,” Charlie said, shaking hands.

“I got the card okay in the hospital. Thanks.”

“Hell of a time finding one that wasn’t some kind of funny joke. Nothing funny about six people getting blowed up. That tire’s way down, Garry.”

“Noticed it. Battery is low too.”

“I’ll check things out. You don’t look so great. Whyn’t you go in and set.”

Staniker went inside the station and sat in a plastic and aluminum chair. A fan turned back and forth, pushing stale air that smelled of gasoline and the perfumed deodorizing block in the nearby men’s room. In a little while Charlie came in and handed him an opened icy bottle of Coke. “Cells are okay. Battery level was down and I filled her up. Checked the tires all around. Your gas was full up. Oil is down maybe a half a quart.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

Charlie leaned on the desk. “I was thinking, if you’d been below too when she went, they never would have found out what happened. Mystery of the sea like they say.”

“Or if nobody had come along for another couple of days, it would have been the same deal.”

Charlie sighed. “You just never know. That Mary Jane was a real working woman. None of those people knew what hit ’em, I guess.”

“They never had a chance.”

“Those new folks Parky hired ain’t no improvement around here. They’re so sour I don’t go over for a beer even. I’d rather drive down to Smitty’s.”

“Well, I better be getting along. Thanks for everything, Charlie.”

“Where you going to go? Maybe move in with that stuff you got lined up down the bay shore? That one you used to work for?”

“You mean Mrs. Harkinson? I tell you, Charlie, I wish I could. But we broke up just a little bit before this last captain job came along. Broke it up big. No chance of mending that one. She was getting on my nerves anyway. I didn’t know you knew anything about her, Charlie.”

“Maybe I talked out of turn. The one told me was Fran, down at the sundries. A long time ago. Back in February maybe it was. Fran and Mary Jane, those two would tell each other their troubles I guess. Fran’s got her share for sure. As I remember Fran was bad-mouthing you for carrying on with that woman. I nodded, solemn as a preacher. Fran should know the fits I give my old lady back when I still had my hair.”

“Next time you see Fran you tell her I haven’t got a chance of moving in on that blonde. I guess she’ll say it serves me right. You know, Charlie, I wish now I’d — given Mary Jane a few more breaks than I did. I’m going to miss her. I miss her already.”

Charlie looked at him. “No trouble for you to find a woman. No trouble at all. But it won’t be easy to find a worker like her.”

As he drove away, Staniker thought that a lot of Crissy’s precautions didn’t make sense. But because everything else seemed to have worked out, perhaps it was best to go along with the whole thing. Nobody was going to check on anything at this late date. It was over and done, and the only thing left was a good way to go pick up the money. A good, safe, quick, quiet way.

And now he had to play more tricks. She wouldn’t tell him who had told her about this one. She had practiced it with him, in rush-hour traffic until they were both good at it. Any limited access highway with exit ramps and three lanes in each direction would do. Even when he knew how she was going to work it and she knew how he was going to work it, they had no trouble losing each other.

You hung in the fast lane, furthest from the exit ramps, and you found a hole in the traffic, and you adjusted your speed in relation to the hole so that when you were coming up on an exit ramp, you could speed up at just the right time, angle across the other two lanes and duck down the ramp. You then took the cloverleaf and got back onto the pike but heading the opposite way, and did it again. That put you back in your original direction, and anybody who had tried to trail you would be swept helplessly past the exit, locked in the river of fast traffic. He killed time, driving north. On Interstate 95 north of the airport, traffic thickened and he obediently played the game. “You see,” she had said, “we won’t know we’re really in the clear. They might be playing cat and mouse. And what does it cost to play it safe? Nothing. So do it? Don’t give me arguments. Do it!”

He drove west on the bypass, and after he had turned south again toward Coral Gables, just for luck, he played the game again, the second time cutting it almost too fine, making horns blare in anger and brakes shriek as he angled across.

The row of a dozen identical cottages was in a defeated area near Coral Gables. Heavy, unkempt tropical growth hemmed the cottages in, cutting off any chance of breeze. The pink paint on the hard pine siding was faded and flaking away, exposing gray wood. The woman lived in a larger cottage on the corner, on a bigger lot. She was four and a half feet tall. Her back was badly humped. Her voice had a metallic resonance, like announcements over a bad loudspeaker. Her face was stone gray, her hair the impossible yellow of industrial sulfur. She wore a green smock, blue canvas shoes, and she smelled like a boarding kennel.

She peered up at Staniker. She tapped a front tooth with a fingernail. “You was here before.”

“Couple of months ago.”

“Just one night like before?”

“Two weeks this time.”

“By God, you’re the first repeat business in I can’t remember. I don’t need to show you one. They’re all alike. Let’s see. Two and a half a day, fourteen a week. Two weeks I’ll make it twenty-five in advance, okay? And ten deposit on the utilities. You get that back when you give me the key back. The tax is just on the twenty-five. Seventy-five cents. Come in and sign the book, mister.”

He went onto her screened porch with her, signed the ruled notebook with her ball point pen that wrote in red. Gerald Stanley. General Delivery. Tampa. She turned the notebook around, made change, pawed through the keys in the shallow desk drawer.

“I got ten empties,” she said, “but there’s three of them need plumbing work I can’t afford, at least till by some kind of miracle I get nine full up. Mister Stanley, I better give you number ten, on account it’s the one furthest down from that one machine shop across the way there that went on night shift last week. It’s just up to midnight, but it does screech some. Mr. Mooney, my dear departed, said once we got zoned industrial it would be no trouble selling off the whole thing for nice money. It’s maybe a blessing he died before they zoned so damn much industrial there’s no market at all for it. Got to hang on by my social security until it gets better, if it ever does. Thank you kindly. You see anything that needs doing, come tell me. If it’ll cost money to get it done, we’ll move you to another empty.”

She gave him the key. “Like I must have told you last time because I tell everybody, the only three rules I got is don’t smash the place up, don’t steal the furnishing, don’t set fire to it.”

He drove down the row to number ten. There were no garages, but each had a narrow driveway. The untrimmed shrubbery brushed the sides of the car at the driveway mouth. He turned hard right and parked in front of the bungalow steps. The car was out of sight of the road. The front door stuck. He had to kick it to get it open. The layout was exactly the same as the one he’d taken overnight the second week in April after Crissy had told him to find a place where he could hide, a place where they could safely meet after he came back alone from the Bahamas. He remembered how out-of-place she had looked when she had joined him there after dark.

Living room, bedroom, hallway, kitchen, bath. Old porch furniture, torn grass rugs, crusted stove, plastic ashtrays, swaybacked double bed, water stains on the ceiling, gloom, dust and the smell of dampness, and cockroaches scuttling swift and clever in kitchen and bath. Rust stains in the toilet and the sinks. Patched windowshades, gray curtains, jelly glasses, corroded tableware, a refrigerator that made a chattering, whining vibration when he plugged it in.

He brought his suitcases in. He stood in the silence of the cottage and heard, outside, the early evening songs of the mockingbirds, hiss of truck brakes and grunt of diesel horn, a continuing sound of some heavy piece of automatic shop equipment, a slow, brutal whickity-bump, whickity-bump, mingled with the less regular sound of metal being cut at high speed, a prolonged screeching.

He left and drove to a little Handy-Andy food store a few blocks away. As arranged he called Crissy’s number from an outdoor pay booth. It was 532–1732. It was six thirty.

After the third ring Crissy said, “Hello?”

“Charlie there?”

“What number were you calling?”

He told her 532–1710. The last two digits were the number of the bungalow he was in at the Mooney Cottage Court. She said he had the wrong number. He said he was sorry and hung up.

He bought twenty-five dollars’ worth of groceries, beer and magazines and went back to number ten. He parked closer to the steps to make room for her small white car beside his. He felt hungry. He ate half a thick sandwich of cold cuts and cheese, but the next big bite turned into a gluey ball in his mouth. He went in and spat it into the toilet, gagging as he did so. He stripped down to his shorts, put a fan on a chair beside the bed to blow the air across his body. Under the weak bedlamp he sipped cold beer and tried to read one of the magazines. He had to keep going back and reading the same part over. Finally he threw it aside. The beer tasted watery. Night was coming. Crissy would come with the night.

He felt as if it had all been one long linked series of events. Everything had happened in the order it was supposed to happen. It was like looking out a train window and seeing the familiar stations one after the other. It had all been designed right from the day they headed out toward the Stream with the Muñequita in tow, to bring him full circle right back to this place. It was as if the train had stopped. It was on a siding somewhere. They had unhooked the engine and taken it away.

Night was coming, and the Sergeant went over to the table and pumped the pressure up in the gasoline lantern. He cracked the valve and lighted the mantle. It made a hissing sound and filled the shack with its hard white light.

Leila Boylston sat crosslegged on a cushion on a wooden crate. She wore one of the new pair of slacks, the blue ones, and a blue and white checked blouse. She looked down at the dusty sole of her bare foot. Another sob came. A wrenching thing — half snort, half hiccup. So maybe that one was the last. Funny how you could be cried out and have so many dry sobs remaining. Her face felt bloated.

Before he sat down the Sergeant reached and gave her shoulder a little pat. “Now there,” he said. The shyness and gentleness of it made her give him a small quick smile.

“I guess my mind was trying to remember all along,” she said. “I’d get little flashes, like pictures, that didn’t make any sense. Terrible little parts of it. But when I saw you kneeling down there and cleaning that fish.” She shuddered again.

“You said part of it, Missy, when you were out of your head. Those were the bad times for you, yelling and sweating and churning around. I thought it was bad dreams.”

“She was the last. Maybe she was dying anyway. I don’t know. She was running out of the lounge toward the stern when the bullet hit her. Stel. Stel there on the teak cockpit deck in the light that shone out from the lounge, and the boat dead in the water, rocking so far over and back loose things were all thumping and jingling and banging. I was on the roof of the lounge part, holding onto the ladderway that went up to the fly bridge. She was crumpled against the big fish box. Making that terrible sound. With every breath. Like a cawing. And he was below me. Right below me. He kept working the bolt on that rifle and firing at her. But it was just a click every time. It was empty but he kept firing at her. Firing and yelling at her to shut up. He dropped the rifle. It was always up on the flybridge, in clamps. Sometimes Mister Bix fired at beer cans back in the wake with it. Or sharks.”

“Now Missy.”

“He went running back to where Stel was. He tried to kind of saw at her neck with that fish knife. But her head and neck were — loose. Too wobbly to cut. She kept cawing...”

“Missy!”

“He pulled her away from the fish box and straddled her on his knees. She was on her face. He dug his fingers into her hair and pulled her head up and back. And with the knife he...”

She stopped. His hands were hurting her shoulders. She seemed to hear the echoes of her own voice in the shack, too shrill, too loud. The Sergeant was shaking her.

“I’m all right. I’m all right now. Let me finish,” she said in her normal tone. “I remember the end now.”

“It’s a bad thing to talk about.”

“He let go. He dropped her. Into all the wetness spreading on the teak. I was glad the noise stopped, the noise she was making. That’s terrible, I guess. To be glad. He stood up slowly and he saw me. It gave him a terrible start. I guess he had lost track or something. I guess he thought she was the end of it. He came slowly toward the ladderway, never taking his eyes off me. He didn’t have the knife. He’d left it in that — puddle. I couldn’t make a sound. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t make my hands let go of that ladder, not even when he was out of sight and then he appeared again, and stopped, his head a little ways above the level of the roof of the lounge part where I was standing. He held onto the railings and swung out to one side to look up at me. His eyes were so big and round. And the whole bottom part of his face was... soft and loose. And he had a funny little smile. People drop things by accident and they break and they know they’re valuable and that’s the smile they wear.”

She stopped and held her fists against her eyes for a few moments. She frowned at the Sergeant. “His voice was little. He was trying to explain something to me. ‘It was supposed to be the way I practiced,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean for it to go wrong like this. Miss Leila, believe me, Crissy kept telling me over and over the time to do it was when you were all together. Bunched. All eating. But when I started there were only four of them. You should have been there. Both of you. Then you wouldn’t have to be scared.’ I told him to please leave me alone. He said in a very reasonable voice that he couldn’t. I should be able to understand why he couldn’t. He said it never would have had to happen if it hadn’t been for the money. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said it was so much money Crissy was able to make him do it. He told me not to be scared any more, not to look at him like that. He said he’d make certain there wouldn’t be any pain, the way it was with Stella. He was mad at Stella for running.”

“Missy?”

“I’m... okay, Sarg. I’ve got it all now, every bit of it. Suddenly he reached very quickly and grabbed my ankle. It got me out of my trance. I tried to run and fell and yanked myself loose, and as I jumped up he came bounding up like — an animal. I knew my only chance was to dive into the water. I knew he couldn’t catch me in the water in the dark. I had on a pretty shift. Stel and I each bought one in the Nassau Shop. Mine was orange and hers was pink. He grabbed at me and caught the back of the neck of the shift. They were very loose fitting. A light material but a close weave. I felt it rip all the way down. I spun out of it and nearly fell again. I wasn’t wearing a thing under it. I whirled and dived from up there toward the sea, but then I saw the boat, too late. I was going to dive right into it. I don’t remember hitting my head at all. It was just like diving into — a huge deep snowbank. And then I was here.”

“And what day was that?”

“It was — the thirteenth. It was Friday the thirteenth. I wouldn’t remember what day it was, except Mister Bix was making jokes about it being a lucky day. That’s a spooky thing to remember.”

Sergeant Corpo counted it out on his fingers. “Miss Leila, you were eight days drifting in that boat, coming this way on that east wind! Busted head. Fevers eating the meat off you. Sun cooking the hide off you. Missy, you must be hardy as a she-gator. The life must run strong in you. Rains must have come down on you just in time to keep you going. Missy, there in’t one man in fifty’d make it through that. And you’re getting more bright and sassy every single day.”

She looked pleadingly at him. “Try to understand that this makes a big difference in — our plans, Sarg. I have to get away from here. They’ll think I was killed too. I bet Staniker thought that dive killed me. I guess it should have. He was insane, Sarg. His face just — it just wasn’t a human face any more. What if he isn’t locked up? He could be doing terrible things to other innocent people. And then it would be your fault, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s one way to think about it.”

“My brother will think I’m dead. So will Jonathan.”

“That much gladder to see you when you come running.”

“Please, Sarg! Please! Oh God, please!”

“Now there. Now you know nobody is going to go off into the dark night. There’s time to think on it.”

“The longer you keep me the more trouble you’re going to be in.”

He looked puzzled. “Looks to me like it’s just the other way around.” He stood up. “Time people should be in their beds. Anyways, you haven’t even opened up half the stuff I brang you back from town. Pretties keep a gal’s mind off her problems.”

It was night. Gordon Dale was using both halves of his mind to full capacity. He sat at his digestive ease in his leather chair, following the plot of an hour-long western on the television set, while the other half of his mind walked around and around and around the special problems in the brief he was preparing in a civil action for one of his more important clients — like a puppy circling a hedgehog looking for any reasonable place to sink his teeth.

Miriam was on the couch writing to their married daughter in Atlanta, and she said, “If he has family, I don’t see why it has to be up to you anyway.”

It was statement, but also a question. He did not want to wonder what she meant. It was one of Miriam’s small and special talents to come out with a statement so oblique, so unrelated to anything anyone had said recently, you could not ignore it. It would paste itself to some outer layer of husbandly attention and then begin to bore a hole.

“Um?” he said at last.

“Well even if they didn’t have any legal responsibility, I would think they’d want to take care of their own.”

He sighed. He put the brief back on a shelf somewhere in the back of his head. And when the ranch hands tracked the stolen horse herd out the far end of the canyon, the wind had blown the sand and covered all the tracks. So they milled around, arguing with one another.

“Whose family, dear?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on, Lieutenant!” she said.

Then Gordon Dale knew, with a certain resignation, they were to have another little chat about Corpo. He had made captain before VE day. And upon discharge he had been given a termination promotion to major. He had no patience with courtesy titles anyway, any more than he had with those uncurably boyish men who kept green the memories of college fraternity or football triumphs or Let-me-tell-you-how-it-was-at-Omaha-Beach.

“Corpo hasn’t any family.”

“Apparently that’s what he told you.”

“No, honey. Really. When I found out he was still alive after thinking he was dead all those years, the doctors said he wasn’t a danger to anybody, but he couldn’t cope without some help on the outside. They’d tried to turn up somebody, anybody, up in Georgia who’d take over. I looked in the book and found a fellow I knew from law school practicing in the area, and I had him check it out. No family.”

“Well, it certainly is strange, then.”

“Exactly what is strange, dear?” he asked patiently.

She put the unfinished letter aside. “Well, I was at the hairdresser this afternoon, and Jeanie did me. She’s the young one I told you about. Very pretty, and she’s real good too. Anyway, her best girlfriend works in that expensive dress shop out on Sea Crescent Circle. The Doll House. They have darling sports clothes. Jeanie’s girlfriend’s name is Andra something, and they call her Andy. Anyway, the day before yesterday, Wednesday, your precious Sergeant had the entire place in a turmoil.”

“Now Miriam, if Corpo gets into any kind of trouble anywhere in the Broward Beach area, the police would call me.”

“Did I say he got into trouble? Did I?”

“You said turmoil.”

“In the store. Yes. You can imagine how really weird it would be to have him walk into a place like that. At least he didn’t have that fantastic beard. But that raggedy haircut and that ghastly dent in his forehead and those stary eyes were enough to make those girls out there pretty jumpy, Jeanie said. When they asked him what he wanted, he had some little lists and he went through them and picked out one that said clothing and handed it to the clerk. When the clerk saw how many things were on it, she took it to Mrs. Wooster, the owner, so Mrs. Wooster came out of the back and told the Sergeant it would come to quite a lot of money. So he took a really fantastic roll of bills out of his pocket and said it should be enough. He had a taxi waiting outside. He said that it was going to be his little sister’s birthday up in Georgia and he wanted to send her a lot of nice things. Andra told Jeanie the list was in a girl’s handwriting, and from the sizes she was a little thing, a size eight or ten. It was quite a list. Underwear, blouses, shorts, slacks, sandals, skirts, a sweater, everything. Mrs. Wooster picked everything out, and Jeanie said Andy said she could have made it come out to twice as much money as she did, but even so it is an expensive place and it came to almost three hundred dollars. It didn’t faze him a bit. He had a drugstore list and a grocery list too. Andy told Jeanie it looked as if there was hundreds of dollars left in what Mrs. Wooster gave back to him, and after he was gone Mrs. Wooster explained about him to the girls, and how you are sort of his guardian or something, and that was why Jeanie told me about it. She started off thinking I probably knew about it. That was why I said that his family should be looking out for him.”

“The way he lives, Mim, he isn’t exactly a heavy responsibility.”

“I suppose he picked up his check at your office Wednesday.”

“He was there waiting when I got there. I noticed the beard was gone, and I was going to ask him about it, but he seemed to be in a big hurry. The check he gets and cashes every time is always the check from the month before. Sometimes he loses track and comes in too early, so I worked it out that way to save him extra trips. I don’t think it’s good for him to come to town too often. It gets him too confused and agitated.”

“Should he be walking around with all that money?”

“Honey, I gave up trying to get him to put it in the bank long ago. He certainly gets more than he needs, a lot more, on a total disability pension. He must have a pretty good bundle by now, and I’d guess he’s got it buried in fruit jars all over that damn island. Maybe he shouldn’t be walking around with hundreds of dollars in cash, but I can’t think of any good way to stop him. And I can’t think of any less rewarding outdoor sport than trying to take it away from him.”

“Well, if he hasn’t got any family, I guess some girl is taking it away from him, one way or another.”

“Which I am going to check out right now.”

As he walked to the bedroom phone he knew it was a good chance that one or the other of the men he wanted to talk to would be on duty at headquarters. He asked the duty desk for either Detective Sergeant Lamarr, or Detective Sergeant Dickerson.

Dickerson was there, but in interrogation, and would call back. The call came back in fifteen minutes.

“Dave? This is Gordon Dale. I’m a little worried about our Robinson Crusoe.”

“If there was any kind of a complaint at all, Mr. Dale, I’d have heard about it for sure. Nothing at all in a long time.”

“When he was in town Wednesday, apparently he spent almost three hundred dollars on clothes for a girl. He bought the stuff out at The Doll House. She wasn’t with him. He had a list. It sounds to me as if he ran into a smart operator at that waterfront place.”

“Shanigan’s?”

“She’d be a small woman, size eight or ten.”

“Mmm. Funny. I wouldn’t think Harry would be stupid enough to let any of them get cute with Corpo. I made it clear a long time ago. Harry remembers good. I told him that if his bartenders ever tried to put the clip on that poor guy, or if those semi-pros he runs down there ever tried any kind of con on the Sergeant, the Department of Regulatory Services was going to find a lot of expensive things wrong down there, like maybe having to move the whole building back a foot and a half because there isn’t any exception to the set-back regulations on file.”

“Could he be going somewhere else?”

“Mr. Dale, he’s a little too buggy-looking to get service in a good place, and all the other places know the standing order not to serve him. And they know him by sight. I’ll check it out. But if I wanted to make a guess, I’d say some little hustler is working him without Harry knowing about it. Maybe somebody new in town. The next step would be money for the operation on her poor old bedridden mom.”

“Dave, I appreciate your helping me keep old Corpo out of as much trouble as we can.”

“It was a long war, and a lot of people got shot in the head, and I had as good a chance as anybody. We’re having a busy Friday night here, Mr. Dale. Okay if I report back to you in the morning?”

“I’ll be at the office from eight thirty until a little after eleven. And thanks.”

It was night, and Jonathan Dye awakened with a start when a water-bird flew over the anchored catamaran, a night bird making eerie hollow cries of agony. He settled back, rolled and looked up at the incalculable stars. They were anchored in the open flats over sand bottom. There was enough breeze to slap little waves against the hulls. There was an almost imperceptible bump, and then another, and he realized that with the tide ebbing they were beginning to touch the sand bottom as Stanley Moree had said they would. In the morning they would still be hard aground and Stanley would stay with the cat while Jonathan walked over to search the four tiny islands and sand spits they had approached in the dusk.

He stretched and felt the pull of his thigh muscles. Never had he reached such a peak of physical condition before. He could not guess at how many miles he had walked through shallow water, swum through deeper water. He had never thought that his tough sallow skin would take a tan. But it seemed to darken more each day. He knew he had lost weight, but he could not guess at how much.

He looked over at the stillness of Stanley Moree, asleep a few feet away on the bow deck, and felt gratitude and affection. Jonathan had known Sam Boylston had been humoring what he considered wishful fantasy when he financed the search. Sam had not concealed it well. Never had Stanley given him the slightest indication he did not believe in this search. Stanley did not say cheering words, make heartening predictions. Those would have rung false. He did his job. He made valid suggestions. He worked as hard at it as Jonathan. Something of value had drifted off, and they would find it. Jonathan wondered if it was the very essence of gentle Bahamian courtesy, or if Stanley did indeed share his belief. He had not dared question him about it, afraid to learn that Stanley might be humoring him as one would any mad person.

Yet Stanley had found that tank key the day before yesterday. He had seen the small object at a fantastic distance through the mid-morning glare, on the slope of sand on an island big enough to have given root to a single bush no larger than a basketball. It was a cylindrical white styrofoam float, half the size of a beer can. A short small brass chain was threaded through it, held in place by a brass disc atop the float. At the bottom end of the chain was fastened a bronze tank key, a device with two spindles spaced to fit into the recesses of the countersunk screw top of marine fuel tanks.

Stanley had examined it with great care. He had rubbed at the green frosting of tiny bits of marine growth it had begun to acquire. He had looked carefully at the amount of corrosion on the metal parts. And he had said that it had been in the water less than a month, that the pattern of wind and tides across the Bank would have brought it from the east, that it appeared to come from a good, big boat. One could not say it had come from the Muñeca. But one could be almost certain.

Jonathan remembered a grassy knoll in Texas, a cool night when the stars were brilliant, Leila beside him, stretched out on her back, her hand in his. A parsec is a light year. A light year is nearly six trillion miles. The faint glow of light from the nearest galaxy has been en route a hundred and thirty-seven thousand years, traveling six trillion miles a year toward us.

“The light that’s starting from there now,” she’d said. “Who will see it? Or what will see it? Or will it shine on a big cinder?”

“We won’t know or care.”

“So the time to care is now, huh? And wonder. Jonathan, the light from it shines into my eyes and I’m sending it right on back. It doesn’t matter it’s too little to measure, or there’s nothing there to measure it or care. It’s on its way back up there. Have a nice trip. Don’t get lonely.”

“You’re a nut.”

“I better be kissed, or I’ll get the uglies.”

He turned onto his side on the catamaran deck, thinking, I’ll find you tomorrow. If you were dead the night breeze wouldn’t be as soft or the stars as bright. If you were dead I couldn’t smile at the way your mind takes those wild dips and unexpected turns. All the stars would wink out and the wind would rise and blow a gale that would never end.

It was nearly midnight. Raoul Kelly on his way from the bathroom back to his room heard his phone ringing and quickened his pace.

“Raoul?” Sam Boylston’s voice said. “That thing Staniker pulled, it wasn’t a mistake.” He sounded disgusted and irritable.

“She did the same thing?”

“Exact damn same thing you described, and even though I knew it could happen, I couldn’t do anything about it. She left at about eleven. I hung pretty well back. She didn’t have as much traffic to work with as Staniker had. But she found a little pack, passed on the left, gunned it, swung back and ducked off the pike and I got swept right on by. I tried to backtrack, but it’s hopeless. I’m calling from a booth at a gas station. I think I’ll go on back and see what time she comes home.”

“So Staniker didn’t suddenly realize he was about to go past his exit.”

“It’s clever. And it’s also stupid.”

“Very stupid. Sure. We lost them both.”

“No, I’m thinking of how clever people end up sweating blood when you put them on the stand. There are little tricks here and there, and they can give a perfectly reasonable explanation for each one. But after a while they begin to add up. The jury begins to wonder why so much strange behavior. Then you come on with the so-it-just-happened technique.”

“What?”

“Well now, Mr. Defendant, so you just happened to decide not to bowl that Wednesday night after not missing a league game all season, and you just happened to decide to go back to the office that night to finish a report, and you just happened to drive twelve miles out of your way to stop and have a beer on the way home, and you just happened to have that bag packed in case you had to take a business trip all of a sudden, and you just...”

“I get it. But you say you can’t make a case anyway.”

“What’s the story on your girl?”

“I’ve got a line on a replacement that woman can’t have any reason to turn down, Sam. References up to here. She owes a friend of mine a big favor. I can trust her. What she’ll do is make an offer to work for about half what she’s getting, with the idea it will pry ’Cisca loose, and after we’re on our way, she can quit the job.”

“And if the Harkinson woman says no?”

“Then I know I have to get her away from there fast.”