The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  “My God, Garry, if anybody had the slightest suspicion, they’d take that island apart and …”

  “Why should they have? It’s a good place. There’s some rocky ridges. Way above high tide. There’s a hell of a big old rusty boiler up there. It must have been part of a wreck long ago, a pretty good-sized vessel. Take a hurricane to throw it way up into the rocks. It maybe weighs a couple of tons. One end is rusted away. That end is half buried in drifted sand, and half full of drifted sand. I’d shoved the knife into my belt. I used it to dig up a bush that blocked the open end. Then I dug down into the soft dry sand inside the boiler and worked the suitcase down into it and smoothed it over. I planted the bush back in the hole where it had been, and I brushed away my footprints when I backed away from there. It’s safe. It will be safe as long as we want to leave it there.”

  “But what happened to the boat the Boylston girl was in?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand why the air search didn’t find it. I thought I’d have to explain about it when I was taken back to Nassau. But while I was on the island I worked it out.”

  “Oh sure, you worked it out.”

  “I knew she was dead. So it would have to be one of those freak things. As if she’d come out onto the cockpit deck just before the Muñeca blew. I hadn’t seen her. It had blown her into the air and blown her clothes off and dropped her into the boat we were towing. I worried about there being no burns on her. Then when I realized she hadn’t been found that first week, they weren’t going to be able to tell much about burns when they did find her.”

  “But why didn’t they? What could have happened?”

  “It would drift pretty fast. Too much flotation for it to go down. It might get awash. One thing could have happened. She was pretty and she was new. And she was better than ten thousand worth. There are some rough people in those islands. Weight the body and drop it over the side. Run the boat up one of those creeks on Andros, cover it with brush and wait for the fuss to die down.”

  She shook her head slowly. “Luck, Captain. You were shot with luck. And you apparently almost died of burns and exposure. Oh, that makes it look real good, but if you had, maybe that money would have stayed right there forever. You cut it close.”

  “The way I did it, I found an old piece of cloth in the sand on the beach and I tied it around the end of a stick and soaked it with the gasoline. The matches stayed dry enough. I held it in my left hand and ran the flame up and down my right side. You could hardly see the flame in the sunlight. I could smell the stink of my hair scorching. It didn’t seem to last long enough and it didn’t seem to hurt enough, so I used some more gas and did it again. I buried the bottle and the matches and the rag in the sand. It began to hurt worse. The next morning it was a lot worse. It looked so bad it scared me.”

  She laughed aloud.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Just thinking about the money. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel like laughing and dancing. It’s sitting there, man, and it’s waiting for us. You act so sour. Doesn’t it make you feel good?”

  “Just wonderful. Sure.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Six people. That’s a lot of people. I keep thinking Mary Jane is wondering where the hell I am. Like I should phone. And then I remember. Crissy, you don’t know how many people it takes to add up to six. More than you think.”

  She squeezed his left ankle. “You did fine. What are you so gloomy about? Oh! Did you expect a better show of gratitude? So okay! Only can you wipe that goop off first with a towel. It smells funny.” She stood up and reached both arms back to undo the top hook and get the dress zipper started. “No, I didn’t mean anything like that,” he said sharply. She stared at him, then walked to the head of the bed and leaned over him and put her mouth down upon his. In a little while she straightened up. “When the man says no dice he means no dice.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why be sorry? It’s way too hot in here anyway. I was going to make a gesture. Like gratitude. It’ll keep.” She smoothed the seat of the dress with the backs of her hands and sat back where she had been before.

  “What comes next?”

  “Don’t you remember? It’s like we said. You stay holed up here. We can’t be seen together by anybody ever.”

  “It’s over. What difference does it make?”

  “Don’t be so dull! Somebody was in that deal with Bix. People like Bix, like the Senator, like those other buddies of his, they don’t trust anybody or anything. They’ll think it was some kind of cute way to get the money. And when they can’t find you, they’ll back track you to me. I can lie much better than you can, and I can size up the situation. Did anybody follow you, or try to follow you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t forget to do like we practiced, did you?”

  “No. I did it. I felt like a damn fool, but I did it.”

  “I’m not sure anyone was following me. But there could have been. I thought I kept seeing the same car. We are not going to take any chances. This is the time to be most careful, Garry. Believe me. Somebody may be adding up two and two and trying very hard to get seven. Believe me and trust me.” She patted his ankle. “You’ve done so beautifully so far. Remember, it could be my neck too. Be a good boy. I know this is very very depressing, but I’ll sneak down here and keep you cheered up. Think of how we’re going to get the money.”

  He got up slowly and went to the bureau and took the Banner check out of the drawer and handed it to her.

  She stared at it and then up at him, her eyes narrow. “Just exactly what the hell is this!”

  “For my personal exclusive eye witness story of the ill-fated cruise of the Muñeca.”

  “Are you out of your mind!”

  “What are you so hot about? Look, it kept the rest of the people out of my hair. Once I was sewed up they knew there was no point in asking questions.”

  “But you don’t plan to do it!”

  “Why not?”

  “You idiot, we want the whole thing to be forgotten just as soon as possible. And what makes you think you need the money?”

  “I thought it would be—kind of a natural thing for me to do.”

  They argued for a few minutes. He told her about his promise to Hal Wezler, and where he was staying. She was silent and thoughtful for a few minutes and then she said, “You can’t do it, Garry, because I’ve decided we don’t really have to wait so long to go after that money. It’s too much risk to leave it on that same island where they found you. You were supposed to take it to a better place. When we made our plans, we thought it was going to be in a better place.”

  “How soon then?”

  “Maybe—next weekend?”

  She watched his face. He sat on the side of the bed. Finally he said, “We didn’t do much talking about after. Except we’d split.”

  “Because we could no longer afford each other, honey.”

  “I better know how you figure on handling it, Criss. From then on.”

  “Is it any of your business?”

  “If somebody gets interested in how you got rich all of a sudden, it could turn out to be my business.”

  “They won’t. I sold the last decent piece of jewelry. A damned fine emerald. So I’ve got a stake. I’m going to put the house on the market, and set the price low enough so it will move. I’ve got the bill of sale on the emerald to show how I happen to have cash. And I am going to turn the house money into cash. And then, dear boy, I am going to go from bank to bank, and I am going to turn that emerald money and house money into certified checks, just as many times as I have to to unload my share of the loot. Cashier’s checks. I learned that little trick from Fer. I’m going to sew them into the lining of something and fly to Italy and rent something rather nice on the Italian Riviera. As soon as I’m settled, I’m going to drive up to Zurich and open a lovely account with those checks and have those shrewd little men invest in very safe income things f
or me and deposit the income in another account I can draw on as I need it. I am going to swing just as long and hard as I want to, and I am going to grow old very very gracefully, and I am not going to have to beg any son of a bitch in creation for anything ever. I should be worrying about you, instead of you worrying about me. You’re more likely to fumble it, Captain.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “That in itself is …”

  “Shut up, Crissy,” he said in a tired voice. “While that Hal Wezler was giving me a ride out to Parker’s he kept looking at me whenever we had to stop for a light. Finally he said he was going to take a chance on something. He said he was going to stick his neck way out and recommend they make a lot more use of me than they’d figured on. He said that while he was doing the book from the tapes, I should go out to the Coast and he’d get me lined up with some people who’d—teach me how to handle myself in—public exposure situations. Create a celebrity image, he said. Then if I’ve got what he thinks I’ve got, it would be a bigger thing than just plugging the book and getting me on things like the Today show, things like that. He said I had a good chance of coming up with such a bankable image, it might even help swing a movie deal on the book, with me playing myself. He said I—project something that if it comes through on the screen, it could be big. He said the housewives were hungry for a more mature type guy and …”

  “Are you serious? For the love of God, are you trying to have me on, Staniker?”

  “I figured it out this way. That money. I could rent a deposit box under another name and pay three years ahead. I could just let it sit there. Then suppose it’s like Hal said, and I happen to hit? Why should he kid me anyway? They’ve signed me up for what they want. So I could make good money at it. I could buy the kind of motor sailer I was telling you about. Then pick up my share and I’m off around the world in it, enough to keep going on as long as I live. If I don’t hit, the money is still there, and I think of some other way.”

  “Oh boy,” she said. “You are really it! You didn’t want money after all. You wanted to be a celebrity. You were getting too beat to line up the really first class tail the way you used to, but this way you can start getting it again, as much as you need whenever you need it.”

  “When we split,” he said sullenly, “what we do is our own business.”

  “They get you into a corset and cap your teeth, you’ll look just darling.”

  “Get off my back, Crissy!”

  She slid close to him. “Let’s not pout. People with that lovely raw wad of money don’t have to pout. We have to be a ways and means committee. Can you still borrow that fast boat from your old buddy?”

  “The Bertram? Sure.”

  “And it will get all the way over there and back?”

  “Almost. Oversize tanks. Lay an extra thirty gallons aboard in five gallon cans and it’s no sweat.”

  “Garry, how fast could you make the round trip in the dark?”

  “There’s a weather factor. Give me a fairly flat sea, and allow time to go ashore and get the suitcase, add a reasonable safety factor—ten hours, eleven say. Leave at seven and be back by six in the morning. But when we were planning it, you kept talking about the risk of coming back here and finding a reception committee.”

  “That’s why I’ve been taking sailing lessons.”

  “You what?”

  “You can run more southerly on the way back and come to Biscayne Bay below Cape Florida, Captain, and when you pass a blonde in a yellow bikini sailing her Flying Dutchman, you drop the pretty suitcase off. Maybe with a float tied to it just in case. She picks it up and sails home and puts the cash in her wall safe, and that night, after you’ve returned the boat and driven back to this charming hideaway, the blonde brings you your share of the bread. A sailboat has such an innocent look, don’t you think? I hired a boy to teach me. The poor dear has the most terrible crush on me.”

  “It could be a pretty good way,” he said at last. “You sure work things out, don’t you?”

  “There’s a lot at stake. Isn’t it worth a lot of time and thought and work? What would it come to per hour?”

  “I can make a call about the Bertram.”

  “Not yet. Not until I tell you. You know, this hasn’t been much of a celebration, has it? Why do we have to be so tense and gloomy? We’re out of the bind, Garry. We broke loose. The hardest part is all over. Tell you what. I’ll come by here Sunday night. I’ll bring goodies. We’ll have our little celebration. It’s a funny thing, Garry. Now that I know that this is the only place we’ll ever be together again, I really think I’m going to miss you. Isn’t that weird?”

  He looked at her and looked away. “Ever since the Senator died, things have been weird. I don’t know. I get the feeling this isn’t me. I get the feeling none of it happened. I don’t think I’ve known for one minute how you ever felt about anything.”

  “Why should you want to know?”

  “I guess it doesn’t make any difference. Not any more.”

  She drove the little white car home in a roundabout way through empty streets, through a coolness of recent rain, the wet streets reflecting the caligraphies of all-night neon. For half the journey she thought of Staniker. There had been just enough toughness, just enough greed, just enough brutality for him to manage it. But now his eyes were wrong and his mouth was changed. He had expended something he’d never regain. It was, she thought, like what happened to a man who experienced a truly professional, cold, savage beating. It left him with all those little apologetic mannerisms, bob of head, ingratiating smile, a wariness very like shyness.

  And then she planned herself for the boy. A horn blast behind her startled her and she realized she had slowed to almost twenty miles an hour and the rain had begun again, and she was trying to see through the blurred windshield without thought of turning the wipers on. The car roared irritably by her. She turned the wipers on. She tried to be amused at her absentmindedness, but it left a chilly little hollow of apprehension just under her heart.

  The boy was waiting under the roofed part of the stone terrace, outside the locked doors of her bedroom. She turned on a single low light and unlocked the doors.

  He held her close, wrapped in his strong young arms. She made herself tremble.

  “You were gone so long!” he said. “It was driving me nuts. Why were you there so long, darling?”

  “The r-rain is blowing in, d-dear. Please.”

  He released her and closed the sliding door. She sat in the straight chair by her desk, knees together, fists in her lap, head lowered. He dropped to one knee by the chair, put his fingers under her chin and lifted her head. She saw agony in his face. “Did he—did you have to …”

  She shook her head in violent negation and shuddered. “He tried to. I—made excuses. He—hurt me. He hit me in the stomach. It made me sick. Oh. Olly darling, he’s worse than before. He’s—very strange. He wanted to keep me there. I had to promise to go back there Sunday night. If I don’t he’ll come after me.”

  “So that’s when we do it,” he said harshly.

  “But can we? Can we really?”

  “What’s it like where he is?”

  “It’s—very good for what we were talking about. It’s a horrid little bungalow court near Coral Gables. It’s the sort of place you would go if you wanted to hide. I don’t think there’s anyone in the bungalows near him, and it’s all so jungly and overgrown you can’t see them from each other or from the road in front. It really seems like—well, like the kind of depressing place where—that kind of thing could happen.” She frowned. “He killed those people, Oliver.”

  “He what!”

  “It wasn’t any accident. Oh, he didn’t admit it. He’s much too clever for that. Nobody will ever be able to prove a thing. But that place he’s in, he rented it under another name. He said it was to keep reporters from bothering him. I think it’s so he can really go into hiding if somebody gets suspicious about what really happened on t
he Muñeca.”

  “What makes you think he killed them all?”

  “I know him, Oliver. God, how I know him! He said little things that fit together. He said he wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while. And he gave me a slimy wink and said the cruise ended before he’d had time to decide which one was better stuff, the little lame girl or her step-mother. I suppose he got careless and Mr. Kayd or the brother caught him with one of them. If he hit one and killed him, he’d kill everybody. That’s how he is.”

  “It isn’t wrong to kill a man like that,” said Oliver.

  He moved closer to her, on both knees. She pulled his head into her lap. She slowly stroked his crisp hair. “He’s a monster,” she whispered. “We have to be so careful. It’s going to be like a nightmare for us, but when it’s over—we can go away together for a little while, to some marvelous place.”

  There was no sound in the room except the breath of the air conditioning, and a faint whisper of the rain outside.

  “Get up now, dear,” she said. “I want to make a drawing of the floor plan of that cottage while it’s fresh in my mind. We’ve got a lot of work to do. A lot of planning.”

  She turned her chair to the desk, turned on the desk light, opened the drawer and got paper and pencil.

  Twenty

  LEILA DID NOT KNOW what had set the Sergeant off just when they were getting the noon meal on Saturday. It could have been the scene she had made the night before, crying and raving and cursing and carrying on until she had exhausted herself.

  But he had not seemed angry about what she had done, or about the scene. He had seemed just—saddened, and disappointed in her. After she was certain he was asleep on Friday night, she had rubbed herself liberally with repellent, and had sneaked off the boat without a sound and up the stairs and into the shack and taken the big flashlight which had been aboard the Muñequita. Then, driven nearly out of her mind by those bugs which didn’t mind the repellent, in the windless night she had climbed the ladder to the platform high in the water oak, and had aimed the beam through an opening in the branches toward the houses on the mainland shore. It wasn’t too late. Many of them had lights on. She worked the switch until her thumb felt sprained. Dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. She had to stop to whack the insects on her face and arms and ankles.