The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  When the next prospective employer phoned her she was prepared to recommend Staniker highly, but the man who phoned was the personnel manager of an electronics firm which owned a corporation boat, and in a most contentious and irritating way he cross-examined her over each answer she gave. “How do you know that?” “What makes you think he’s competent in that area?”

  She said, “Little man, you seem confused. I’m not applying for a job.”

  “It’s my job to double check these things, Mrs. Harkinson. Please don’t tell me how to do my job. When the safety of the executives of this corporation is involved …”

  His voice faded as she reached and dropped the phone back onto the cradle.

  Through the hot months she lazed and drifted in a self-indulgent stupor, baking herself in the sun, getting fuzzy on the midday drinks, taking long naps in the cool darkened bedroom, watching much television in the evenings. She told herself that she could not really make any plans until the cruiser was sold. The money was going. She knew she ought to get rid of Francisca, perhaps try to rent the house, make an effort to get a good price for the jewelry she had left. But she would push those thoughts aside, stretch and yawn and shout for Francisca to bring her a drink.

  Several times through the hot months and into the coolness of the beginning of a new season, she became aware of the dangerous softness and heaviness of her body. Then she would spend days in the disciplines of exercise, diet, abstinence. She would try on everything she owned and leave the bedroom and dressing room heaped with clothing for Francisca to put away.

  Staniker had gone to work at the marina where his Mary Jane worked. The man who had been working there had been caught pocketing some of the boat-rental money. The marina was not far away. There were no set hours when he had to be there. He and Mary Jane lived in a cottage on the marina property. Staniker stopped by to see Crissy quite often, arriving in his old car or in one of the rental outboards. He complained constantly. He said he was looking for better work all the time. Yet when she asked specific questions, he became vague and evasive.

  They would drink together. Sometimes they would go to bed. They quarreled often. She had lost a measure of control over him when he realized she was no longer capable of helping him find a job. Sometimes he became ugly when he drank too much, and a few times he struck her and hurt her. At those times he told her she was his bad luck. She had spoiled everything for him forever. For a time she could not understand why, after she would become so angry with him she would tell him never to come back, he would make such humble and earnest efforts to regain her favor.

  She realized one day that she was a necessary part of his status, of the fiction he made of himself. As long as he could come without invitation to this beautiful and isolated house where lived the attractive blonde ex-mistress of an influential man, and drink her liquor, be brought food by her maid, swim in her pool, pull her into bed, then he was maintaining one final contact with the golden world of yachts and ports and parties, and the inner image of the bronzed captain on the fly bridge, nodding down with amiable and knowing grin at the banquet of girls spread sun-struck on the foredeck.

  So long as this relationship could be maintained, he could pretend that the dreary little beer, bait, outboard rental marina was but a temporary setback in the shining career of youthful Garry Staniker. And she could guess that, for the sake of his self-esteem, he would by nod, wink, nudge, veiled phrase, let the people know that Staniker had a good thing going.

  In January the Odalisque was sold. She had cut the asking price several times. The offer she accepted was still lower. The expenses of sale were heavy. And there were bills to pay out of the cash she received, including back pay for Francisca. The amount she had left was frighteningly small.

  Still she could not seem to stir herself to change anything. There was still the house itself. Prime waterfront. It would sell for a good amount of cash. She did not try to find out how much. She did not want to think in exact terms, because if she knew how much, then she would begin to work out how long it would last her.

  In sleep she began to dream quite often of old times, before she had met Fer Fontaine. It was a life where you were told what you would do and where you would be. Punishment was brutal and immediate. She would awaken from such dreams with a curious sense of regret and nostalgia. It had not been a mode of life she had sought, or even realized what currents of chance had drifted her into it. She had told herself it was something she was doing for a little while. But the little while had been years.

  And then, as if awakening from another kind of sleep, she came out of the long lethargy of waiting on that last day of March when Bixby Kayd came to see her. He had been at the house several times when Fer was alive, when a small group of men were quietly buying up raw land, marl deposits, gravel pits and central mix plants along the route for a big new highway later to be announced officially by the State Road Board. As a familiar index of the man’s importance, Crissy knew he had also gone on some of the Senator’s little cruises aboard the Odalisque, those cruises which would include the more special members of the larger group, the ones capable of making those special arrangements which would make their share a little richer than the shares the smaller fry would get.

  Bix had phoned her and arrived a half hour later in a rental limousine. He sat in an armchair, facing her, in the living room beside her slate fireplace—a big, brown, beaming man with a loud jocular voice, custom-tailored suit in western style in sand-colored twill, elaborate stitching of boots, pale stetson on the floor beside his chair, the bourbon on ice she had fixed him looking dwarfed by the size of his hand. His hair, with the light behind him, was a sandy stubble a quarter inch long covering those places on his big skull which had not gone bald.

  Francisca, as she had requested, brought in the tray of small crackers, the spiced cheese melted and hot atop them, slightly brown by the broiler flame, passed them, put the tray down within Mr. Kayd’s reach.

  It was a time of mutual appraisal, as Kayd offered belated sympathies about the Senator, said how pleased he was to find her still living here, had phoned on the off chance, killing time between the flight from the Bahamas which had brought him into Miami International and his jet flight to Houston, where his own plane and pilot would meet him to take him back home to the Valley.

  She was alert to all familiar nuances in the male attitude. He had that automatic courtliness, that appreciative manner of the self-confident man who finds himself alone with an attractive woman. She considered, and dismissed, the possibility he had come to check the possibility of sampling wares he had found interesting back when Ferris Fontaine’s presence made all curiosity academic. It was not that sort of visit, nor was it a social call.

  Finally he gobbled a cracker, wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, took a large swallow of his drink and, hunching forward, lowered his voice to what, for most people, would have been the normal conversational level.

  “Fer Fontaine was a damn careful man, Crissy. That’s why it was a pleasure doing business with him. That and having his handshake worth anybody else’s notarized signature. That’s how I know if you were the kind that runs off at the mouth, he wouldn’t have kept you around a week, much less all the time he did keep you. And he wouldn’t have left you fixed up pretty good like this, with the house and all. So I can ask your help in a little private problem I’ve got.”

  “I’ll help any way I can, Bix.”

  “Fer wouldn’t have had anybody around who wasn’t solid. So the times we did business aboard that boat of his, that fella I chatted with, that captain that ran it, with the chunky little wife who could cook up a storm, they had to be just as reliable as you. For the life of me, I can’t remember his name.”

  “Staniker.”

  Kayd snapped his fingers. “Right! Larry? No. Garry. And is her name Jane?”

  “Mary Jane.”

  “I remember him telling me about knowing every foot of water in the Bahamas. Do you know if he’
s still in this area? Do you think you could locate him?”

  “I don’t think it would be difficult.”

  He lowered his voice a little more. “When you find him, you tell him Bix Kayd wants to hire him and his wife for six weeks, maybe a little longer, starting sometime after the middle of April, to work aboard my boat for a long cruise in the Bahamas. Tell him it’s a fine boat, fifty-three foot, custom built in North Carolina, twin diesels, every extra and navigation aid you can dream up, comfortable crew quarters. Name of it is the Muñeca. Soon as I get back, we’re going to get her ready to go and take off. She’s in Brownsville, Texas, right now, and me and my boy Roger will bring her around the Gulf, and my wife and daughter will be aboard, maybe a friend of Stel’s too. Stella is my daughter. Once we get here, we’ll buy some kind of runabout and take her in tow, so we can get to places too shallow for the big boat, and so the kids will have something to horse around with, skin diving and water skiing and so on.

  “Now I know that a man as good as Staniker around boats must be working for somebody, and to get loose, he’d have to locate somebody reliable to take his job while he’s with me. So when you talk to him, you tell him I’ll pay him three thousand for the six weeks, him and his wife, and if it runs longer, I’ll pay him at the same rate. You line it up for me, and I’ll phone you from New Orleans or Biloxi on the way around the Gulf, and I’ll give you a little present for your trouble, Miss Crissy.”

  “You don’t have to do that! I’m glad to do it, for old time’s sake, really. But …”

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “You know what he’s going to say. He’s going to want to know why you’re willing to pay so much.”

  She got up and took his empty glass and her own over to the drink cupboard. He remained silent and thoughtful. When she handed him his new drink he said, “My pretty little wife is itching and aching to see the Bahamas. I’ve been too busy for a vacation. Stel and Roger are my kids by my first wife. I’ve got an interest in some resort land over there. Trying to do business with some people who aren’t what you’d call eager to take the bait. You tell Staniker I might have to meet some of those people on the sly, maybe on one of the Out Islands, and offer a little sweetening their partners might not get to know about. So I’d be paying extra for I’d guess the same thing Fer wanted, a real bad memory about where we went and when we went and who might have come aboard. I remember him being bright enough to buy that.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  Kayd looked troubled. “There’s one thing he doesn’t have to know. But it’s the reason I want a man Fer was willing to trust. It isn’t likely Staniker would ever have to know, but there’s always the off chance him or his Mary Jane might find out somehow that I’ve got all that sweetening aboard, a stack of it I sure wouldn’t want to risk having a pick-up captain or ship’s cook knowing about.”

  “And there’s no point in letting even Staniker know about it if you can avoid it.”

  He looked at her warmly and appreciatively. “Fer sure found himself a smart gal. Don’t ever tell anybody one word more than they need to know. Decided to tell you because what I want you to do, if there isn’t enough, I authorize you to boost it on up to where he’ll say yes. But not over five. I pay for what I need, but I don’t want somebody trying to guess what the traffic will bear. If you know all my reasons, you can do a better job on Staniker. Maybe, later on, if things work out right, and you’ve got the time, you could go over there to Nassau on a little vacation once in a while and do me a little favor now and then. You’d get some little presents. Enough so as to know you weren’t wasting your time.”

  “Little favors?”

  “A man on my payroll with some cute ideas about what he can get away with, seeing as how I’m so far away, might want to put on the brag to some pretty tourist gal who never heard of Bix Kayd. Or some old boy who didn’t land a contract to barge building materials to one of the islands I hope to buy, might tell the big-eyed tourist gal how the boy who did get the contract is making kick-backs to the builder. When I get to wondering about something I get to fretting about it. A smart, pretty woman is the best pair of ears a man can buy. I’m into a lot of things, scattered here and there. I get the big sell from these investigation firms. They want me to put in what they call a security system. Screening, lie detectors, concealed microphones, psychological tests, plant some investigators on the pay rolls. Know what they never understand? Why should I pay some outfit forty or fifty thousand a year to find out everything about what I’m doing? Who do they sell that information to? I have a few smart gals here and there. They do little favors. I make a little present. They like it, the smart ones. It’s kind of a game. And nobody knows they’ve got any connection at all with Bix Kayd. It’s a little excitement. Something different.”

  He looked at his watch, gulped the remainder of his drink, put the glass down and stood up. “Don’t want to miss that flight.” He took an alligator billfold out of his inside jacket pocket, fingered ten hundreds out of what he was carrying, said, “Here. Give it to Staniker so he’ll know we’ve got a deal.”

  “I hope he isn’t off somewhere on a cruise, Bix.”

  “Do your best, Miss Crissy.”

  She thought about it all night long. Staniker did not come by. She paced and thought and drank and nibbled at the knuckle of her thumb. She would stop and study herself in her mirrors. The excitement kept starting in the pit of her belly, coiling up through her to burst like bright rockets in her skull, dazing her. In the bright dawn she closed the draperies and went to bed to sleep heavily for several hours.

  She awakened not knowing for a little time where she was. Then it came tumbling back into her head. She got up and went to the money Bix had given her. The money made it real. The money made all the rest of the money possible.

  She willed Staniker to come to her. He came strolling in at four thirty in the afternoon, smelling of beer, complaining about the condition the rental skiffs had been in when they were returned. The terrace was in shade at that time of day. They sat at a table, and she fixed drinks and brought them out. She had told Francisca she would not need her. At last Staniker noticed how unresponsive she was. “Is anything wrong?” he asked. “You sore about something, Cris?”

  “How’s the job hunting?”

  “Something will turn up.”

  “Oh, certainly. Because you make such a marvelous impression these days, Captain. Let me list your charms. You’re getting a beer belly. You missed a couple of places on your jaw when you shaved. You smell sweaty. Look at your fingernails. It’s been a year, Captain, a whole year since you ran a good boat for good pay. And downhill all the way. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “What the hell, Cris!”

  She leaned toward him and said with a slow and deadly emphasis. “Do you know what’s going to turn up for you? More of the same, Captain. More of just what you’ve got. Nothing. Ten years from now your Mary Jane will be working as hard as she is right now. And by then you won’t even pretend to work. You’ll hang around the marinas with the other old nothings. You’ll tell lies about the navy and about the Bahamas and about me. I’ll be somebody you used to know, Garry. Just lies, my friend. Beer and dirt and no money and fancy lies that not even the other old bums are going to believe. Starting today I think I’m going to become somebody you used to know. You never had it. I guess that’s the secret. You always looked as though you had it. You acted as though you had it. But on the inside, Garry, nothing. Nothing I need. Nothing I can use.”

  “What are you trying to do to me?” he whispered.

  “Me. You’re doing it to yourself. You just haven’t noticed. You’re a slob. Everything you’ve touched has turned to nothing. It’s your great talent, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I had some bad luck, but …”

  “Your luck is going to change? Why? Because you’re so young and competent and charming? Staniker, you are a silly, stupid, middle-aged man who puts dark goop on his gray
hair and keeps forgetting to hold his belly in when he stands up.”

  “Do you know what you are!”

  “Go ahead. Say it. It will help me decide.”

  He hesitated too long. “Decide what?”

  She laughed. “It’s all pretty funny, you know. We’ve run the string out, you and me. We’re both on the long downhill ride. The big chance came along, and it’s too late for us to try to grab it. Maybe back when you had some guts left and some pride. When you still wanted things badly enough to go after them.”

  “How do you know how bad I want things? What do you mean, big chance? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re not hard enough, Garry. Believe me, you couldn’t carry it off. I couldn’t take the chance. Not with you. You’d mess it up somehow. And the sad part of it is that I haven’t got time to find the right man for it. A hard man. One I could trust. So instead of a big, beautiful cake, all you get is a couple of crumbs. You might as well have the crumbs. He did ask for you.”

  She reached into the pocket of her slacks and took out the little packet of bills Kayd had given her. They were folded once. She flipped them onto the table. “Go ahead. Pick them up, Captain. You’ve got a job. That’s an advance on your salary.”

  His big hands shook as he counted it. “A job?”

  She forced a yawn. “Running a boat. What else? You aren’t able to do anything else, are you? Six weeks, or so, beginning about the middle of this month. Oh, and he wants your wife aboard too, to cook. He wants to cruise the Bahamas. He said it’s a fifty-three foot cruiser, custom built, twin diesels. He’s bringing it around the Gulf from Texas and when he gets in touch with me I’ll tell him how to get in touch with you. He’ll pay three thousand total. That’s five hundred a week for the pair of you.”