The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  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 goi
ng 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.”