The Last One Left

Chapter Twenty-three

Barney Scheff had spent four years of his professional life on the Miami Beach force. He had worked the big hotels along Collins, called in by the house detectives and protection agencies to work upon every form of bunco the guile of man and woman has been able to invent.

When Mrs. Harkinson met them at the door and let them in, he knew at once that he was in the presence of class merchandise. He had seen hundreds of them. The ones this good were usually celebrity imports, lined up for a full season by somebody with the scratch to pay the exclusive freight. Ten, twelve years ago that was the way she would be making it. Mink to the floor, glittering at ears, throat and wrist and fingers, swaying on the tall heels with the hair piled high, moving in the clubs and the show bars at the side of some little fat guy with his head tanned dark brown all over from playing poolside gin for high stakes. The small men wore the big young blondes with the same pebble-eyed indifference with which an iron curtain diplomat might treat the aides who follow a pace behind him.

Such women were one of the necessary outward manifestations of that special kind of coarse and curious money which accumulates in the lock boxes of casino owners, union officials, dealers in casino properties, in the raw products of addiction, in oil tankers, night clubs, prize fighters, television properties — in all the more or less legal services and products which, if a man were greedy enough and ruthless enough, could provide a way of channeling off cash without leaving any trace in the official books and records.

So they kept the tall blonde for that season or that place in tow, at the Beach, or Vegas, or Palm Springs, or London, or Acapulco, or Puerto Rico. She sat in the box at the track, a stick of tickets in her fist, squealing the smart money horse home. She leaned forward at ringside, face avid, cawing for blood. And in the night in the hundred and fifty a day suite, under lights turned low, while the cigar end smouldered and stank in the bedstand ashtray, she earned her keep in effortful requested ways. She would not get too drunk, or get quarrelsome, or make demands, or steal through the darkness to thin the pad of bills in the platinum clip, or give any wolf anything but immediate frost, not the smart ones. She would be a fun kid, because it was a smallish world and everybody knew everybody sooner or later. If you got labeled trouble, if you got too cute, the easiest fate would be no phone call from the next friend of a friend, no more first-class jets, no more silk sheets, no more thirty-dollar Chateaubriand for two. Or it could be a cancellation with a little more to remember if the friend of a friend was in one of the tough trades. Barney Scheff remembered taking one in who’d had her teeth uncapped with a pair of pliers. Between faints she was hysterical, yet not crazy enough to tell who’d done it.

Yes, this Harkinson was one of the great broads, years past the peak of it, but hanging in there so well, you had to marvel at what it had to be costing her in time and effort to keep the illusion of youth. Not only the masks and packs, and the oils and skin foods and lotions and the careful measuring of sun to keep that flawless brown gold of the expensive tennis-club tan, but on top of that, the daily measurements of every dimension to the quarter part of an inch, followed by exercises that would exhaust a stevedore. Then, once you had the pretty machine all assembled, you had to imitate the unconscious tricks of youth, no matter how tired the flesh. You had to walk pert, more trimly and quickly, smile saucy, exaggerate all expressions and all gestures, move the head quickly, and run the voice up and down as many notes of the scale as you could handle.

But, baby, the years are written on the backs of your hands, in bulged veins and thickened knucklebones, and written in the horizontal lines across your throat and in the little striated patterns on the slightly puffed flesh under the eyes.

She’d use every possible way to keep the machine going, from pep pills to those long, hearty romps in the sack at regular intervals to keep the girl-making glands humming.

She was obviously ready to go out. She wore a little beige dress in a linen weave, very unadorned, very simple, yet fitted so artfully and elegantly to that brick-house build the price tag almost showed. And elegance in the careful-casual tossle of the sun-streaked hair, sheen of nylons on the very special legs, a couple of expensive ounces of high-heeled sandals, white purse by the door with white gloves on it, and on the table beside the purse, one of those bright little hats they pull on to keep their hair from snapping around when they drive their convertibles.

There was a business with the eyes she did very well indeed, swinging the glance away slowly and then popping it back onto you, like being snapped with a little whip. Broad across the brows, heavy and prominent bones in the cheeks. Nose a little small, upsnubbed over a short upper lip. Lips of equal unusual heaviness in a considerable amount of mouth.

So there she was, one long arm away, all fresh and fragrant and resilient, unable to make any motion without effective and graceful display of a promise of goodies for me and thee, eyes making her cool speculations the way the man-smart ones can’t help doing, while the mouth made the words of another kind of conversation.

If something like this, Barney thought, really vectored in on that sailboat kid, it would be like going after a goldfish by sticking a twelve-gauge into the fish bowl and pulling both triggers.

“Well — if it is something really important,” she said. “I’m waiting for them to bring my car around. It’s been in the garage since Saturday morning. I have an appointment with the hairdresser, and then I was going to go...”

“We’re asking you to do a favor, or maybe more like a citizen’s duty,” Kindler said. “What we’ve got to get is a positive identification on a body.”

She put her fingertips to her throat and made her eyes round and sat on the broad arm of a low chair. It pulled the hem of the short little dress about four inches above her knees.

“My God, who is it?”

“We’re pretty sure he’s a fellow worked for you, Mrs. Harkinson. Staniker. Captain Garry Staniker. We can’t locate any next of kin.”

“Automobile accident?”

“No. What he did, he killed himself. He was holed up in a fleabag over near Coral Gables and he got loaded and sat in the bathtub and cut his wrists. What it looks like, he got depressed over the bad luck on that cruise, and getting burned and being the only one got out of it.”

She swallowed with an apparent effort and said, “I’m not going to be a hypocrite and tell you this is any horrid shock, men. Garry wasn’t one of my favorite people.” She shook her head and gave them a wry, disarming grin. “While he was still running my boat, he seemed like a nice guy. And really attractive in a kind of outdoorsy way. When — a very dear and close friend of mine passed away, I was very alone. And Garry was very sweet and understanding.” She stood up with a lithe quickness, made a little shrug, and a mouth of distaste. “But he tried to keep hanging on. Male pride, I suppose. Some men won’t admit it when something is over. He got to be a damned tiresome bore. He couldn’t get a good job. He’d come by and drink and tell me his problems and get mean drunk. It was a relief when he finally got a decent boat to run and took off.”

As she turned away, Barney Scheff read Bert Kindler’s quick glance. They had been teamed for five years. All the people they worked on fell into some familiar category. Approach had to be adjusted to the individuals. Staying in any pattern was a sure way to come up empty oftener than you should. You developed a feeling, like an extra sense of smell. Like with that Raoul Kelly, they shared the decision to play it his way, but had one of them been dubious, they would not have gone along. The weirds were easy to smell out, as easy as the chronic losers. Amateurs could be suckered by traps so old you had to brush off the cobwebs before you used them. But the cute ones took you onto uneasy ground, especially when they were intelligent and confident. A clumsy truth and a plausible lie could sound almost alike. The frankness of her implication of an intimacy between her and Staniker could be either because the news he was dead had shaken her up, or because she was one of those women who got a little bit of jolly out of letting practically anybody know that if the stars were right it was possible to get a hack at all that merchandise, or because she sensed there was a chance it would be checked out later, and if they came up with a relationship she had not implied in any way, they would wonder why she hadn’t.

Kindler’s glance said, “My turn” and Scheff’s slight shrug said, “Have fun.”

“I guess losing that boat and those people would give him some new problems to tell you, Mrs. Harkinson.”

She spun toward him, head a-tilt, and said, “Do you ever get a funny kind of superstition about people? I mean somebody is all right, and then they sort of turn into a loser, and everything starts to go wrong for them. You get the sort of spooky feeling you don’t want them anywhere near you. As if it could rub off and they could turn you into a loser too.”

“I know what you mean,” Kindler said.

“He wanted to tell me his problems all right,” she said grimly. “He phoned me as soon as he rented that place last Friday. He was going to come right out. I told him I’d made it very damned clear back in April we were all through. He said he was going to come and see me anyway and if I tried to keep him from coming here, he’d — give me a thumping I’d remember a long time. Garry was a brutal man, Sergeant. And I couldn’t afford to let him know I was scared of him. But I was. I’ve been terrified he’d force his way in here. So — I can’t be sorry he’s dead. But — there’s something funny about it.”

“Like what?”

“I wouldn’t say he was the kind of human being who’d brood about losing that boat and those people. He’d worry about not being able to find a job. But on the phone he didn’t seem depressed at all. Just kind of arrogant. He told me he had a big check in advance for an exclusive story on the whole thing. I don’t know how to say this — just that if he had money in his pocket, he felt good. And he just wasn’t sensitive — the way I guess people are who commit suicide.”

“Well,” said Kindler, “to get back to the point here, we’d like for you to come on in and take a look, just for the record. A formality.” She stood hip-shot, elbow resting in her palm, chin against her thumb, looking broodingly at the floor. “I want to do the right thing. And you have been nice about this, both of you. Please understand. I know it’s only a formality, really, but it wouldn’t be just a formality to me. It would be a very personal thing. And it would be like — confirming that something still exists that died a long time ago.”

Kindler said, “Look, we’re asking you as an ex-employer. That’s all.”

“Then if that’s the relationship, I think you’d better get maybe the man he worked for at that little marina. I just don’t care to be — identified with the whole thing. I’m really sorry.”

“We can’t force you,” Kindler said. “Can I use the phone and find out what they want us to do?”

“Of course.”

Scheff had an idea he knew was at least as good and possibly better than Kindler’s. It could even be the same idea. So he said, “I’ll check in, Bert.”

He dialed Lobwohl’s outside line. After the first four seconds Lobwohl caught on that Scheff was talking for the benefit of someone who could hear his end of the conversation. Scheff reported the Harkinson woman’s refusal and started to ask for instructions and then said, “What? No kidding! You know, that’s a funny thing because that’s just what this Mrs. Harkinson was saying. She said he wasn’t the type. Yeah. Sure. Well, nobody touched his money there and it wasn’t hard to find, so you can forget that angle. She might have some ideas. What? Well, it’s on account of she knew him real well, right up to a little while before he went to the Bahamas. Yes, that’s what I mean. Yes, that’s what I’d say it was. We can ask her, but if she didn’t want to do the other, why should she do this? I see. Sure. Well, put it this way, she’s a smart lady and I don’t think we’d have to do it that way.”

He hung up and stood up and said, “Somebody tried to make it look like suicide. But the lab boys say he was killed. You were right, Mrs. Harkinson.”

“It’s — easy to understand. But it’s still dreadful.”

“I’m sorry to have to do this to you, Mrs. Harkinson, because I guess if you hadn’t been a little shook you wouldn’t have let us know Staniker and you had a relationship. But we do know it, and we can’t just forget you said it, and I was duty bound to report that.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

“They say you should come in and they’ll take a statement.”

“But why?”

“When somebody is murdered and it isn’t robbery, then what we have to do is find out who would want to kill him and why, and the quickest way to get a line on that is to interrogate somebody who knew him real well, would know what his habits were and so on. What I should explain, it’s a little different than the identification thing. You can come along voluntarily, but if you say you won’t, then because you might have some information bearing on a known murder, we’d have to set it up to take you in anyway. You could refuse to answer questions once you’re there, but that would be up to you. What you can do if you want, you can phone your lawyer to meet you there, or go in with you.”

“Are you charging me with anything?”

“No m’am. Not if you come in voluntarily.”

She spread her arms wide, and with rueful grin said, “Why don’t I learn to keep my mouth shut? So you’ve convinced me. Voluntary cooperation. There isn’t a thing I can help you with as far as I know, but I’ll go in. And I certainly don’t need a lawyer. But there’s one errand I’d like to do on the way in. Some material I have to leave off with my dressmaker. Can we do that?”

“Sure can,” said Kindler.

“Excuse me a few minutes while I get it ready. Then we can go.” When she closed her bedroom door behind her, she hurried to the closet in her dressing room, and pulled out the twine-wrapped package of the clothing she had worn. One of her suits had been returned in a white cleaner bag. She wrapped the bundle neatly, tied it with twine, snipped the twine with her nail scissors.

She stood quietly and made herself review every possible thing which might turn up in a painstaking search of the house. After putting the single shell in Olly’s little rifle, and hiding the rifle under the edge of decking where she could grasp it quickly enough, she had dropped the extra shells into the bay as she had sailed the Skatter down to the place where Olly was waiting for her in the dark in his car. The notes and plans had been burned in an ashtray and the ashes flushed down the toilet. He’d taken his other belongings home.

It was strange, she thought. You brace yourself for the police. You wait. You expect them to be narrow deadly people, and poisonously clever. But when they arrive, earlier than you had expected, it is just two placid dumpy apologetic men with mild heavy faces and an air of clumsy courtesy.

The car was delivered as they walked out. She had the man put it in the carport under the servant quarters. He brought her the key and the copy of the service charge. She put them in her purse and as he was unhooking his scooter from the rear bumper, she called to Francisca and told her she would be back in a couple of hours.

Kindler sat in the cage, and she sat up in front beside Scheff. Scheff drove very sedately. She directed him to a large shopping plaza. “It will just be a minute,” she said. “She works daytimes and sews at night. Don’t go away.” She left her white purse on the car seat. She went toward the shops and turned into a long arcade. When she was out of sight she quickened her pace. She went through the arcade and came out behind the buildings. Trucks were parked back there. Garbage cans were lined up behind a supermarket. She looked around. A man rolling a loaded dolly out of a big truck seemed oblivious of her. She plucked the top from a garbage can, dropped the package onto a viscid mass of brown lettuce and rotten fruit, picked up a stick from a shattered crate and pushed the bundle into the garbage and replaced the lid. Flies swarmed like small chars in an updraft, a blue-bellied buzzing audible in the sunlight. She re-entered the arcade.

When they were back on the highway, Scheff said, “That maid of yours a Cuban? Pretty little thing.”

“Francisca is very good natured. But she’s no mental giant. She tries to do what she’s told, but sometimes she doesn’t understand and other times she forgets. I’m losing her, darn it. You get them to where you can trust them to do things the way you want them done, and they take off. There ought to be a way to make them sign up for three years, like the army.”

At two o’clock on Monday afternoon, Sam Boylston sat in his poolside cabana with Raoul Kelly and Francisca. Her manner was constrained, puzzled, apprehensive.

“Promising for Wednesday,” she said. “I keep telling.”

“Miss Torcedo,” Sam said softly.

“Si?”

“Raoul and I must talk. If all your belongings are out there in his car, maybe you have a swim suit. It’s a very nice pool. I think a swim would be relaxing.”

She looked questioningly at Raoul. “Why don’t you, chica?” he said.

Raoul went out with her to unlock the car. They came back and she changed in Sam’s bathroom. She seemed happier. After she had gone out, with swim cap and towel, Sam said, “She’s a lovely one, friend. Congratulations.”

“You know, you’re very good with her, Sam. She has a good reaction to you. With a stranger she usually goes into her shell. On the way here I told her we can trust you. What was it when we came in? You were okay and then strange for a minute.”

Sam said, “Something that will keep happening to me, I guess. I don’t know how long. When she walked over and sat down — Leila had that same slimness, and she moved the way your girl does, handled her body the same way. And I knew I’d never see Leila again, see her cross a room like that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, cursed softly. He leaned back. “Take it from the top. God damn it! That sappy kid kills Staniker, then himself. They take her in. What are they trying to get her for? A morals charge?”

Raoul Kelly went through it all, pausing only to organize the material into as orderly a presentation as possible. And again he was aware of how totally and intently Sam Boylston could listen.

“So now I need advice, Lawyer,” Raoul said.

“From a lawyer who’s been up all night two nights in a row waiting for the little white car that wasn’t even there? I wondered about your car there, parked and locked, and I figured you’d tucked it out of sight and moved in with the girl. What’s the problem? I’ll try to think.”

“I want to get Francisca out of range of this whole mess. I was going to leave Thursday the ninth. Only a very few people know about me and Francisca. But that’s a few too many. I have to know how much trouble I can get into if I leave in the morning. The stuff in my room I was going to take to the paper, I can mail in. I could leave her here and go close out the bank account, pack what I need, get a friend to crate up the rest of my stuff, the files and research and so on and hold it all until I send a shipping address. I have to report out there on the nineteenth. A Monday. Those two cops were good guys. When they find out I’m gone, they’re going to be very, very unhappy. What can they do to me, to us? I don’t want to mess up the new job. I don’t want her extradited and brought back here by some damned matron. But I can’t let her get caught up in the kind of fantastic publicity mess there’s going to be. How should I handle it?”

Sam Boylston stood up and roamed the room, stopping to look at Francisca swimming quite prettily and gracefully. He turned and clapped his hands once. “Here it is, client. You are going to go pick up your money and your gear, mail your stuff, with a note of explanation that you are leaving a few days earlier than planned. Come back here and sign a statement that I am representing you and the girl. Then we’ll use my tape recorder and you can question her in Spanish. I’ll put the necessary identifications at the beginning. Take her through everything she knows they might use against the Harkinson woman. Set the background first. How long she worked for her and so on. We want to establish the relationship with Staniker, and the relationship with the boy. How late the boy was at the house, how often, the times she’d hear him drive out. And get in everything she remembers about that last day of March when Kayd visited Crissy Harkinson. Finally, go over the weekend, the locked gates, going to see if the boat was there, looking in at her, bringing her the cocoa.”

“How can you represent us if you aren’t...”

“You are going to leave when we have a good tape, Kelly. And you are going to drive right on through to Texas, and down to Harlingen. I’m going to give you the address of my house there, and by the time you get there, my wife will be expecting you and she’ll know what to do. I advise marriage as soon as my partner can get the usual restrictions bypassed. And if anybody gets ugly, I’ll see that there is a doctor and a judge who see eye to eye on the inadvisability of her being returned here. You sit tight. I can represent you. You’ll be in the state where I’m licensed. I can get a local man to work with me here if it comes to that. If it hasn’t blown over by the eighteenth, you leave your wife with my wife and fly out to California and report in, and we’ll get her out there to you as soon as it makes sense to do so.”

Raoul Kelly stared at him in a long silence and shook his head and said in Cuban Spanish, “You are a one! Truly.”

“El fantástico, seguro, hombre.”

“I should make big protests, Sam. Can’t impose. All that. But for her sake, if it would help her in any way, I’d go beg bread in the streets.”

Raoul went out to the pool and spoke with Francisca and then hurried away.

Sam phoned Lydia Jean at her mother’s home in Corpus. “Sam? Where are you? Why are you still over there?”

“It’s a long story, honey. But right now I want you to do me a favor.”

“Such as?”

“Two friends of mine are leaving here this evening and driving right on through. What I want you to do, honey, is go back home and open the house up and...”

“Now just a minute!”

“It isn’t a trick. You’re the only one I’d trust to handle the situation. The girl is an emotional disaster area. She and her guy are in a strange kind of a jam. He can explain it to you better than I can. And it is important to get them married as fast as we can arrange it, as you can arrange it. I think you can put more leverage on my partner than I can in a situation like this.”

“Married?”

“If it could be done with a few trimmings, I think it would help. And at the house. I know this is a hell of a thing to ask...”

“Who are these people?”

“His name is Raoul Kelly and he looks like somebody’s gardener, but don’t be deceived. Francisca Torceda is her name, very beautiful, and racked up so bad maybe she makes it, maybe she doesn’t. You could have a lot to do about that, and it could be worth it.”

“These are important people, Sam? Is that why you want me to...”

“They are very important people. I am going to have my neck way out for them here, and somebody might chop it pretty good.”

“Very important. Yes, dear. I understand you perfectly.”

“She’s a housemaid and he’s a newspaper reporter, and they’ll have every personal thing they own in that car with them, and if I can get them out of this jam, my fee is going to be five dollars, and I probably won’t see either of them again ever. But they are very important.”

“Is that the truth?”

“I swear it.”

“I wasn’t going to do it.”

“I know. Why should you? Sam Boylston always looks out for Sam Boylston, and uses you or anybody else.”

“Or,” she said slowly, “Sam Boylston makes a big, fat gesture. He imitates an honest to God human being for a little while, and I might fall for it. Oh, Sam! What are you trying to do to me?”

“Set you up, kid. I hired this couple from an acting studio. See if you can trip them up, then you can hate me forever.”

“I’ve never hated you!”

“Resent me forever, then. Do I keep my word?”

“So scrupulously it’s almost irritating.”

“Word of honor, then. I won’t come near the house until they’re gone and you’ve had a chance to go back to Corpus. I happen to need some help from somebody — with more than their share of sympathy and understanding, at least toward everybody but me.”

“Now why do you have to...”

“Will you do it? Please, Lyd... Lyd?”

“Oh, I’m still here. I’ll drive down early tomorrow.”

“Thanks, dear.”

“Are you going to get into some kind of trouble there?”

“I don’t know. And I can’t seem to give too much of a damn. Maybe — maybe no matter how careful you are, no matter how well you play the percentages, They bitch you anyway, one way or another. They get at you through the side door. The rain comes down, baby, and we’ve all got sixteen buckets and seventeen holes in the roof.”

“Have you had some drinks?”

“Not yet today, but it’s a creative suggestion.”

“You sound so strange. When will those people get to Harlingen?”

“I’d guess it’s around seventeen hundred miles. I’m going to tell him to take a break midway. Make it late Wednesday.”

“Will he be able to tell me why you’re acting so strange, Sam?”

“I don’t know.”

Kelly’s girl swam for a long time. She was showering when Kelly returned.

Lobwohl swiveled his chair and put his heels on the corner of his desk, ankles crossed. “Let’s let her stew another ten or fifteen minutes before we give her another session. Agree?”

Scheff nodded. He reached and picked up the ID sheet which had been transmitted over the wire from Atlanta and looked at it again. Cristen Harkinson, ten years younger. Smudged pictures, indistinct in outline, flawed by wire-relay technique. But in both the full face and profile the look of surly defiance was quite obvious. Also known as Crissy Harker, Chris Harkins, Christy Harvey. Five arrests. Soliciting, public prostitution, conspiracy to defraud. Two convictions, with each time, a hundred dollar fine and a suspended sentence.

“Between the lines,” Kindler said, “you read pretty good protection. Not a free-lance situation. What it was, there’s always pressure on the operation. League of decency, PTA and so forth. So they run like a roster on the hookers, an arrest once in a while. It takes the civilian pressure off the department, and it’s a good way to keep the broads in line. A high-price call circuit, they get uppity, and give each of them a record of convictions, it locks them into the circuit and keeps them from getting ideas, or leaving the business.”

“But she left,” Lobwohl said. “From the only rumor I could pick up, she was one of a pack they brought down to stock a party at Key West around eight years ago, and that’s where she met Fontaine and he took her over.”

“So what was she then?” Kindler said. “Twenty-seven maybe? Twenty-eight. You could guess special enough to be a good earner, but easier to pry her loose than if she was twenty. I’d say what Fontaine did was maybe ask a favor of a friend in a political way in Georgia, and maybe he had to sweeten it with cash to make them let go, and maybe he didn’t. Anyway, as the name was the same here as there, we didn’t have to work through a print classification for the ID on her.”

Lobwohl, frowning, tugging at his nose, said, “All these nice prints on record, and Harv can’t pick up a partial down there of any one of them, but we have that palm print on the rim of the tub, nice and fresh and clear, and Harv says the size could indicate a woman, but you know and I know what will happen if Lab asks her to please press her little patties against the Stockis block and then against the pretty white paper. She has to be tough and smart. The longer we can keep this absolutely voluntary, the better chance we have of catching her in contradiction. I’d sure God like to prove she was there, egging the kid on.”

“How about this?” Scheff said. “Let me be dumb guy. It won’t be too hard to act like she gives me some ideas. I let on you’ve got a good reason to believe she was at number ten, and you’re going to try to trick her, and maybe she should yell for a lawyer. Then we see how she jumps. If she yells for the lawyer, we could take a chance on booking her and taking the palm print for Harv.”

“Give it a try,” Lobwohl said.

When Scheff sent the matron out to wait in the hall, Crissy Harkinson jumped up and threw her cigarette on the floor, stepped on it and said, “I am getting damned sick of being stuck here all day long, Sergeant.”

“Scheff. Barney Scheff. Just be a little patient, Mrs. Harkinson.”

“Patient!”

He winked at her, held his fingers to his lips, then pointed at the ventilation grill. All the interrogation rooms were wired, and he guessed she would realize that also. But she looked astonished and indignant. He went up to her and put his mouth close to her ear and in an almost soundless whisper said, “I want to do you a little favor, Crissy. Maybe sometime I can drop around your place and explain why I’m doing it. Okay?”

She gave an abrupt little nod.

“What I think you better do, you better shut your mouth until you get a lawyer in here.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“I don’t know what they got, but they got something that makes them think you could have been in that number ten cottage. It makes the whole thing look different, and Lobwohl is tricky. He could fake you out and maybe put you in real trouble.”

He turned away from her and said loudly, “These things take a little time. We appreciate your cooperation, Mrs. Harkinson.”

“I just want to get it over and get out of here, Barney. I wish they were all as nice as you.”

“I say live and let live,” Scheff said, and winked at her again. She was staring at him and though she was smiling he was aware of cold speculation, of that kind of suspicion which will never accept a cop at face value. “I’ll go see if I can hurry it up some.”

A few minutes later they came back in, Lobwohl, Scheff, Kindler, the clerk with the tape recorder, and the clerk with the stenotype. They seated themselves around the oblong table as before, and Lobwohl smiled disarmingly at her, and read the identifications and date and time into the record before saying, “Once again, Mrs. Harkinson, I wish to establish for the record that you are here voluntarily, that there are no charges against you, that you are here out of a willingness to help us in our investigation of the death of Garry Staniker. You have been apprised of your right to have your attorney present if you so choose. Am I correct in saying that this is your understanding?”

“Yes sir.”

“And do you wish to have an attorney present at this time?”

“No sir.”

“Then I would like to get back to your recollection of what Staniker told you over the phone.”

“Some of it was over the phone, and some of it was in person.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“When a person does a dumb stupid thing, you kind of hate to admit it to anybody, right? I told you I was frightened of Garry and what he might do. But I decided I could maybe — run a bluff. I guess that when you don’t tell the police the whole story, it just gets you in trouble. So I guess I better tell you now to clear the air. Friday night I went to that grubby cottage. I had a horrible time even finding it. I thought that the more I refused to see him, the more he’d keep bothering me. I didn’t want him coming to my home, so I thought that if I went to him and told him right out that I didn’t ever want to see him again, it might put an end to it. I guess I was thinking that he was like a mean dog. If you don’t look or act scared, they’ll leave you alone — you hope.”

“Did it work?”

“God, no! It was a vile experience. It was suffocatingly hot in that crummy little cottage. He was half tight. If his burns hadn’t still been hurting him, I know I wouldn’t have been able to fight him off. He said ugly things to me. He showed me a check he had gotten from Banner something or other, to tell his story of the accident in the Bahamas. He told me how important he was going to be. He said they were going to make a movie and he was going to play the lead. I begged him to stop bothering me. He said he’d think about it. He said no woman had ever walked out on him and no woman ever would. He said he always did the walking out. On the way home I decided I’d better go away for a while, just pack a bag and get in my car and go. I thought I’d go Saturday afternoon, but I had to get the car fixed and it wasn’t done in time, so I had my maid lock the gates and I told her that if he came around, she should tell him I’d gone away. As a matter of fact, when you two men came to talk to me, I had no idea Garry was dead, and I was going out to do some errands, and then I was going to leave today in the late afternoon, or at least by tomorrow morning.”

“Were you at that cottage long?”

“I got there at midnight. I think I was home by three in the morning. It was sort of spur of the moment. I’ve had better ideas, believe me. But I really think going away for a while would have solved the problem. He would have had to get busy on that contract he signed.”

“Did he give you any idea why he registered under a false name?”

“I think he was worried about somebody close to the Kayds or the Boylston girl thinking he had lost the yacht because of carelessness or incompetence, and coming after him to beat him up.”

“And that was the only time you were ever in that cottage?”

“Being there once wouldn’t give you any reasons to want to go back.”

“What rooms were you in?”

“The bedroom and the bathroom. Oh, and I sat in the living room a while. Why are you asking me that? Oh, I see! Wow, even though it so happens I can prove I never left the house Sunday night, it would look pretty strange if you found evidence I was in the cottage. I guess I had a good motive, too. But I couldn’t do anything like that. I really couldn’t. Blood. I’m the kind who can prick a finger with a needle and faint dead away.”

“A lab unit has collected every scrap of possible evidence from that cottage, Mrs. Harkinson. There is a fresh palm print which was dusted and photographed. From the size and characteristics, it seems to be a female hand. It was on the rim of the tub. How could your palm print, if it is yours, have gotten there?”

She looked puzzled. “On the bathtub? I don’t see how that could be mine. Oh! Just a minute. On the far side of the tub, next to the wall? If that’s where it is, I know how it happened. He made me cry. I went into the bathroom to repair the damage. I was standing at the sink. He came to the doorway and gave me one hell of a shove.” She stood up and backed away from the table and showed them a bruise on the outside of her right knee. “I went staggering back and hit my leg against the tub and I would have tumbled right in if I hadn’t sort of turned in time and stuck my hand back and caught that far edge.” She sat down again. “Is that where the print was?”

“Would you voluntarily let us take a palm print, Mrs. Harkinson.”

“I don’t think so.”

“We wouldn’t require fingerprints also.”

“I think that if the police are asking you to give them prints and all, then there ought to be charges or something, and I ought to have a lawyer. I mean you seem to be asking a hell of a lot, and I’m getting sick of this place.”

“I believe we’re through now.”

“And I can go?”

“Any minute, just as soon as we bring in the statement from the first series of questions for you to read over and sign. They might be ready now, in fact. Why don’t you all wait here and I’ll go check on it right now.”

“I’ll go see,” Scheff said and hurried out. He found Tuck working at a desk in the bull pen. Tuck, a slight, sallow man with heavy bags under his eyes, was pecking out a report.

“We’re about to hit her with phase three,” Scheff said.

“How are you making it?”

“Like nowhere. By now she is probably the only person in Dade County who doesn’t know about the dead kid. What did you get?”

“We didn’t get a thing until we split the Akards up. Then after a lot of hemming and hawing, she told me that she hadn’t dared tell the kid’s old man, but a week or so ago when she had fought with the kid about his attitude, he admitted he was getting it from an older woman. He said she was twenty-eight. He wouldn’t tell his old lady who it was. Some girl saw the Akard kid in his sailboat with the Harkinson woman, evidently, and told the girlfriend the kid had dropped when he got tangled up with Harkinson, and the girlfriend told his old lady. It gave her enough to pry it out of him, but she didn’t dare tell his old man.” He shook his head. “It’s days like this, Barney baby. Those are good people. Their life from today on is lousy. There better be a special corner of hell reserved for kids who kill themselves, and for the Crissy Harkinsons. Is she getting edgy at all?”

“If she is, she could have been a great actress, Tommy.”

“Remember Ackles, retired two three years back? He used to say the top-dollar whores are the best actresses around. Whatever act the mark wants, shy, scared, bold, college girl, spooky, cold, take charge, exotic, comedian, athlete — whatever he seems to want, that’s what he gets, because that’s where the bonuses and the repeats are.”

Scheff went back to the interrogation room and, as planned ahead, gave the Harkinson woman a bleak look, and took Lobwohl over to a far corner and whispered to him. All he had to tell him was what Tuck had turned up, but they kept it going longer to match the amount of information he was supposed to be imparting.

Lobwohl went back to his chair. He regarded her for a few very long moments. “A boy died today, Mrs. Harkinson. He was a suicide. He had a serious head wound. They couldn’t save him. There were a few moments of semi-consciousness toward the end. He said he did it for you. He said he had to protect you from Staniker. We have all the proof we need that he did it. It was curious you did not mention your visit to Staniker on Friday night until a little while ago. It is more curious that you have not mentioned the boy. It makes me wonder just how much — suggestion was involved, Mrs. Harkinson.”

Scheff, watching her closely, saw an expression of wild astonishment. She put her fingers to her throat. In a hoarse whisper she said, “Olly? Olly Akard? Dead? Oh God, oh dear God!” She lowered her head, hands hiding her face. “But it was just talk! Just brave kid-talk! That’s all.”

“But he had to get Staniker’s address from you.”

She looked up sharply. Her tears were flowing. “No! I swear he didn’t. I don’t know how he could have found that place...” she frowned. “Unless — unless he followed me. When I got back, he was waiting at my place for me.”

“What was your relationship with the boy?”

“He... He was a very wonderful boy. I was really fond of him. I wanted to learn to sail. At Dinner Key they said he taught people. And while he was teaching me, he — got a sort of a crush on me. I guess it was sort of flattering for a while. But then I realized it wasn’t a good thing for him, to feel like that about a woman practically old enough to be his mother. I made a very bad mistake. I told him about the relationship I had with Garry. And one of the times Garry phoned last Friday, Oliver was there. He made such a scene I told him if he kept it up, I wouldn’t let him see me any more. He kept it up. Saturday I told him to go away and stay away. You can ask my maid, Francisca. She knows the locked gate was to keep him away too. He came early Sunday evening and got his boat and took it away. He had somebody bring him by boat, I guess. I didn’t see him. I went to bed very early. I was exhausted, emotionally. I told him that his ideas about me were childish and foolish and absolutely impossible. I told him to go back to his nice little girl. Betty I think her name is. You must believe me! I had no idea Olly would do such a crazy thing. Even if he thought of something silly, like beating Garry up, how could he find him? No, this is a terrible terrible thing.”

“You imply that the relationship was innocent?”

“If you mean did I have intercourse with that nineteen-year-old boy, I certainly did not!”

“But that boy was apparently willing to stage a clumsy murder for your sake and then sacrifice himself, Mrs. Harkinson.”

“Oliver was — a very romantic and idealistic boy. I guess that when I saw how he was beginning to feel toward me I should have laughed at him and called him a silly kid. Okay, I let him kiss me. I let him dream a little. I let him talk about life, the way kids do. It’s like — being young again. He made crazy plans about us. Impossible, of course. Maybe I was being as silly as he was. The difference was he could believe it and I knew it was nonsense. I’m a woman alone. If I’d ever told that poor kid the kind of life I’ve really had, it could have driven him out of his mind I guess. It was just — sweet. A game. I stopped playing that game when he got so worked up about Garry being back and phoning me and demanding to see me. Saturday I told him to stay away from me. I told him — in a pretty ugly way, I guess. I felt responsible for letting him get such nutty ideas and not stopping him sooner. I tried to jolt him, shake him up.”

Lobwohl said, “As this crush, as you call it, developed, Mrs. Harkinson, the boy became sullen and difficult and withdrawn. It worried his parents. The girl he used to go with told his mother about someone seeing an older woman in the sailboat with Oliver, a blonde woman in a bikini. She could not make Oliver tell her who the woman was, but he admitted he was physically intimate with the woman.”

Her eyes went wide, and her voice was thin as she said, “Told his mother that? But it wasn’t so! Why would he want to hurt her like that? It doesn’t make any sense at all. I guess he was trying to — break loose.”

“In what sense?”

“His mother wanted him to become a minister. His girl, Betty something, was going to become a nurse. Then they were going to be missionaries. It was all planned, and he said that he hadn’t been able to tell them that he was losing his faith. Maybe he thought that if he told her — that lie, she would stop trying to push him into the ministry.” She shrugged, sighed, wiped her eyes with a tissue. “It’s the only thing I can think of. Can I go now? Can I please go? He was such a fine boy. And I’m to blame. It makes me feel sick.”

Lobwohl opened the folder in front of him and took out the wire copy of the Atlanta ID card and with a long reach, he put it in front of her. “We’re all deeply touched by your sensitivity, Crissy.”

She looked at the card without expression. She looked at Kindler, Scheff and Lobwohl in turn, a measured three seconds for each one. “Very cute,” she said. “Real fancy nifty cute, you sick-minded bastards. Real careful timing. Let me ask you something. Do you think for one minute that if this is all I am, or all I could be, a man like Ferris Fontaine could have endured me for the last seven years of his life? I never conned him. He knew the score about me. You know what a hustler learns first of all? Don’t trust anybody. And I learned to trust that wonderful old man. You know what he gave me back? Some dignity. Some self respect.” She rapped the wire copy with her knuckles. “I remember this kid pretty well. She had a lot of hate in her. She kidded herself. She drifted into the trade telling herself it was just for a while. She thought she was better than the others she worked with, in New York and Savannah and Atlanta. Then she found out she was just another hooker. Then Fer came along, and after a long time she got her pride back. Every cell in your body is supposed to change every seven years, right? So don’t get me mixed up with some rental playmate in Atlanta a long, long time ago.”

“I will remind you again that we can suspend this until you are represented by counsel, Mrs. Harkinson.”

“Where can you go from here? You don’t need any more from me!”

“Your attorney will advise you that you are providing essential evidence regarding motive in a homicide investigation. He will tell you that even though we have sufficient proof as to who committed the crime, and even though that person is now deceased, Florida law requires that evidence be presented to the Grand Jury for preparing an indictment, and that the subsequent suicide must be handled as a separate matter. He will inform you that we can hold you in interrogation for twenty-four hours, or until early afternoon tomorrow, and at that time we can bring charges against you, if we find sufficient basis therefore, or, if we feel it is in the best interests of the proper investigation of the case, we can ask for a court order which will empower us to hold you in protective custody until such time as the Grand Jury decides whether or not you should be asked to give direct testimony during their deliberations.”

“Hold me for the best interests of what, damn you?”

“You are news, Mrs. Harkinson. Big, gaudy, melodramatic news. You are bright enough to figure it out. What’s their approach? Infatuated youth slays only survivor of the Muñeca disaster to protect blonde mystery woman from unwanted attentions. Future minister a suicide after slaying rival for favors of ex-mistress of deceased State Senator. Heartbroken mother says Akard boy was a model boy until blonde twice his age started taking sailing lessons.”

“Do you characters peddle that crap to the reporters?”

“Mrs. Harkinson, when we identified Staniker, it took these two men an hour and a half to follow the trail right to you. There are perhaps a hundred people from the papers, television, radio and the wires services jamming up the place downstairs, dreaming up cute tricks to be the first ones to get to you. It’s even too late now to have someone drive you back to your house to pick up what you’d need in the way of clothes and toilet articles. You can make a list and explain to a matron where she can find things, and we’ll send her to your place to pick them up.”

“My maid knows where my things...”

“She has been advised to leave the premises after locking the place up. We have men posted there now to keep people from breaking in.”

“What are you trying to do to me?”

“Protect your constitutional rights, Mrs. Harkinson, and protect your person not only from the news media but also from what is usually referred to as an aroused populace.”

She pressed her fists against her eyes, shuddered and said, “I think I’ll take that free phone call, mister.”

Just as Lobwohl got up and turned on the lights in his office, Tuck came to the doorway and said, “They got the kid’s car finally. Coast Guard chopper spotted it. Deserted spot on the bay shore maybe two miles below the Harkinson place.”

“News out yet?”

“No, sir.”

“I want the top lab team on it. Harv and his people, and I want them to comb the area. Keep it sealed until they’ve got daylight, and then they can impound the car when they’re done.”

“They’re still on the Harkinson place.”

“Move them off it. They can go back to it. And where the hell is that maid?”

“Bert and Barney are on it. They’ll find her and bring her in.”

“I know, but when?”

“Who did Lady Harkinson get hold of?”

“Palmer Haas.”

Tuck whistled. “She went to the right place. Feisty little bastard. Miserable as he is, you got to give him credit.”

“He’s making all the motions, but he knows damn well the worst thing we could do for her right now is release her.”

Tuck grinned. “He listening to what we got?”

“Avidly.”

“Funny, isn’t it. A very cagey broad like that being half smart. She should have screamed for Palmy before she was brought in.”

“It’s the big myth. Innocent people don’t need counsel, they think. Asking for one makes a bad impression, they think.”

“But we still came up empty. Remember that.”