The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  At eight o’clock the following morning a brisk young man named Lobwohl sat at a steel and linoleum desk with his back to a big tinted window. He was reading the preliminary reports on the Mooney Cottages business and making notes on a yellow legal pad, and pausing from time to time to sip coffee from a large, waxed cardboard cup.

  Two men, heavier and older than Lobwohl, came sauntering in. As one of them sat down, Lobwohl said, “It starts like one of those weeks. Did you get hold of Harv?”

  “He should be started on it by now. I told him what you wanted. A complete job on the second time around, right? Every latent, every grain of dust, every thread, every hair. He said to tell you there’s one thing that makes it easier than usual.”

  “Nothing ever makes anything any easier.”

  “It was empty for two months before that midget rented it to him, and sitting empty and hot as a bakery, so Harv says the oils in all the old prints are dried out, and the way they take the powder, he can tell old from new right off. Anyway, his team should be working there now. He requisitioned one of the big lab trucks with everything on it.”

  Lobwohl, nodding approval, continued his note taking. The other man, standing at the window, said, “I’m telling you. That damn Shaeffer. One forty-seven season average, and last night he rolls a six hundred series. Two twenty-eight the last game!”

  “Shaeffer in Safe and Loft?” Lobwohl asked as he made a note.

  “So they edge us out by five pins,” the man said with disgust.

  “Okay, Bert, Barney, let’s get to it,” Lobwohl said. The man turned from the window and sat beside his partner, facing Lobwohl. “We have the make on him as Staniker. So his name was on the check in the bureau drawer and on his discharge from the hospital in Nassau. And the prints match, and he looks like Staniker’s daddy. So we are very clever people. But he is G. Stanley from Tampa as long as we can keep the lid on it.”

  “Why should we?” Barney asked.

  Bert said, “He likes the bright light they shine on you. He makes those faces. Any minute, CBS signs him.”

  “We’ll move faster and better if it’s just another four lines on page forty, at least for now. I checked upstairs. If we start making the big effort, somebody wonders why. So it’s just us. Here’s what we’ve got from medical. Ten o’clock last night, plus or minus an hour. Pretty good load of barbiturates, but hard to tell how much exactly with all the blood gone out of it. But here is the clincher. No false tries on the wrists. One cut each, and as deep as you’ll ever see. The point is this. The cuts went so deep they destroyed the motor ability of the fingers. So he could cut one that way, but not both, unless he held the blade in his teeth, and that’s not very damn possible. Here’s what I go for. Somebody half cute. Wanted him dead. Didn’t figure the wrist business. Forgot to fix the catch so the door would lock itself. Let’s hope he was so sure it would go over he didn’t worry about prints. It’s about time we were due for one where prints would do us some good. How long has it been now?”

  “Three years anyway,” Barney said.

  “A hundred and fifty dollars in the same bureau drawer. We’ve got two directions to go for motive.”

  “What’s with the G. Stanley bit?” Bert asked.

  “That leads into one of the motives. The dwarf-lady said he was a one-night customer back in April. At that time he and his wife were living at that marina. The word is that he was stud. This time he signed for two weeks. The layout is fine for a sneak job, if you don’t mind a little squalor. The husband could have showed up instead of the lady and figured it that it would seem reasonable Staniker would be depressed by losing that yacht and those people and his wife and being the only one to get out of it alive.”

  “And,” said Bert, “if you go the other way, it’s somebody doing it because he lost the boat.”

  “You’re a better cop than a bowler,” Lobwohl said. “I remember a sob story about a girl on that boat. Her boyfriend and her brother came flying over from Texas to be in Nassau while the search was still going on. See if you can get me that clip without anybody smelling anything. Then we see if either or both are in the area, or maybe left the area this morning. I can have that checked out other ways once you get me that article. Meanwhile, you two dig into Staniker’s love life. He got to town Friday. He took that place Friday. I want to know exactly who he was banging before he went cruising. Move fast on it. And quietly.” He tapped one of his phones with his pencil. “And come back to me on this outside line, not through the radio net. Start at that marina and work out from there. Neighborhood. Bars. I don’t have to tell you your business.”

  “We’ll call in just before noon anyway to see if Harv has anything juicy.”

  Bert Kindler and Barney Scheff arrived at the Harkinson place a few minutes past eleven on Monday morning, drove through the open gate and got out of the department sedan slowly.

  A maid in a blue and white uniform, and a man in dark pants and a blue shirt, suit coat over his arm, were coming down the open staircase from an apartment over the garages. Both were apparently Cuban. The maid hurried toward them with smiling greeting.

  “No, not Mrs. Harkinson,” Scheff said after they had identified themselves. “We want to ask you some questions, honey. What’s your name?”

  “Why question? Why?” the girl demanded.

  “Your name,” Kindler said.

  The girl looked very frightened. She backed away slowly. “Why?” she asked again.

  “Honey,” Scheff said, “maybe you haven’t got papers, huh? Maybe we just put you in the car and take you down and …”

  “No!” she said. “No! Oh please!”

  “ ’Cisca!” the man said sharply in Spanish. “Go back up to the apartment and wait. They will not take you anywhere!”

  As she went running up the stairs they stared blandly and curiously at the man. “Comprendemos un poquito, hombre,” Kindler said.

  “My English is adequate. Her name is Miss Francisca Torcedo. What do you wish to know?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Raoul Kelly.”

  “You work for the Harkinson woman too?”

  “No.”

  “Kelly, what makes you think you can stop us from taking that little broad in for questioning if we want to? Man, I get a reaction like that from anybody, my ears grow points,” Scheff said.

  “I think I can stop you if you will listen to why it would be a bad idea. If you won’t listen, I can’t. You look as if you’ve both been in your line of work long enough to want to listen.”

  “Talk a little,” said Kindler.

  “First, her papers, and mine, are in perfect order. She does not have much English. She is of a family which was very wealthy and important in Havana. When the Castro militia came into the city, her father was shot and killed in the confusion. She went into the street and wounded a militiaman. They took her to a military compound and kept her there. She was mistreated. There was serious emotional damage. Her brother and I were in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was killed. I was captured and exchanged later. He told me to look after her. I am going to marry her. She is getting better, little by little, day by day. Taking her in for questioning might push her way, way back, out of anybody’s reach, and she might not come out of it. I am close enough to her to be able to answer any question you might want to ask her. If you try to bother her, I will try to stop you, believe me.”

  Both officers looked sleepy. “Kelly means it,” Scheff said.

  “What we could do,” Kindler said, “we could stand in the shade.” They walked to the nearby shade. Kindler said, “If you are like we call unresponsive, then we take her in where we got somebody can speaka the spic.”

  “And you take me too, I suppose. Horizontal, if I make a fuss. Cubans are tricky. You got to watch them.”

  “He’s real sensitive, Bert,” Scheff said.

  “You know what I think about Cubans?” Kindler said. “I wish there wasn’t any other kind of civilian in Dade Cou
nty except Cubans. You know what that would do statistically, man? It would cut crime almost in half. I could spend more time with the wife and kids. So unpucker yourself, bud.”

  Raoul grinned ruefully. “So all right. My mistake. What do you want to know?”

  Scheff gestured toward the main house. “Word has it here and there the boss lady is prime gash, and it was old Fer Fontaine set her up here before he died. Bert and me have a thing about bothering anybody who has real good friends in politics. Anybody we might know subbing for the Senator?”

  “No.”

  “So then if we happen to be trying to locate somebody by the name of Staniker, and if we leaned on her some, like saying we know Staniker kept on using her as a shack job after she sold the boat he operated for her, she wouldn’t phone anybody in the court house or in Tallahassee.”

  “It’s not very likely.”

  “Would she say it wasn’t like that with Staniker?” Kindler asked.

  “I don’t know. She might deny it. She might admit it.”

  “Then Staniker wasn’t just making a brag to his marina pals?” Scheff asked.

  “No. But whether she admits it or denies it, I imagine she’d tell you the same thing she told Francisca, that she and Staniker had a quarrel before he took the job aboard the Muñeca, and she told him to stay away from her. And she’d tell you that since Staniker came back from the Bahamas last Friday he’s been bothering her by calling her up and asking to see her.”

  “So,” Scheff said idly, “last night she went to see him to tell him to stop bugging her?”

  Raoul explained that Crissy Harkinson hadn’t been off her property since Saturday afternoon, and explained about the car and the locked gate.

  “But she didn’t know you were right here all the time with your girl, Kelly?”

  “No. I’ve never stayed here before. But it seemed like a good idea to talk Francisca into it. That locked gate wouldn’t keep out anybody who wanted to get in. Staniker used to thump Crissy Harkinson around sometimes. I thought he might get loaded and come around and Francisca might try to keep him from bothering Mrs. Harkinson. And there was another unknown factor too, a kid Mrs. Harkinson just broke up with because he was acting strange. The locked gate was to keep both of them out.”

  Scheff and Kindler both began to speak at once, then Scheff let Kindler take it. He said, “Was the kid getting any?”

  “I know she would deny that. But he was. She hired him to teach her how to sail, and it went on from there.”

  “Name?”

  “Oliver something. Nineteen, twenty. A big, husky kid. Kept his sailboat in her boat basin. Flying Dutchman. I looked it over once when Mrs. Harkinson was out. You could probably trace him through the name of his boat. The Skatter, with a k.”

  Raoul saw the two men glance at each other with identical expressions of bland satisfaction. “And,” said Scheff, “I guess the reason the kid began acting weird and getting on her nerves was because he knew she used to be Staniker’s piece, and he knew Staniker was back and he knew Staniker was bothering her.”

  “She told Francisca the kid knew Staniker was bothering her.”

  “So she gave Oliver the old heave? Like take your sailboat and go, Sonny.”

  “He came and got the boat in the early evening last night. She’d taken a pill and gone to bed early. She asked Francisca to take a look later on and be sure the boat was gone and the kid wasn’t hanging around the area or bothering Mrs. Harkinson. I went with Francisca when she took a look.”

  “What time was that?”

  “A little after nine last night. Then Francisca went and looked into the bedroom and Mrs. Harkinson was there asleep.”

  “Good-looking woman?” Kindler asked.

  “I’ve seen her at a distance. Well built. I would guess about thirty, but Francisca is certain she is close to forty.”

  “And fooling around with young kids,” Scheff said. “I got a boy nineteen. My old lady is thirty-eight. Look, why is your girl working for a bum like the Harkinson woman?”

  “Until day after tomorrow.”

  “How long has she been working for her?”

  “A year. A little more than a year.”

  “What’s the Harkinson woman’s background?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Francisca wouldn’t know either.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “She said something to Francisca once about living in Atlanta.”

  “She’s in the house now?” Kindler asked. Raoul nodded.

  “Look her over?” Scheff asked Kindler.

  “She’ll keep, Barney. The kid might not.”

  “Can I ask a question?” Raoul said.

  “Sure, Kelly.”

  “Why are you looking for Staniker?”

  “Routine. Just routine,” Kindler said.

  As they walked toward the car, Francisca came timidly out to the railing of the shallow porch and looked down. They all looked up at her. Her eyes were huge and her mouth was sucked into a small bloodless button.

  Kindler called up, in wretched but understandable Spanish, “Señorita, you are a very beautiful lady. We do not take you away. This man of yours is a good man.”

  She looked startled and then beamed down upon them happily. “Kaylee is beauty-ful fella!” she cried.

  Raoul felt heat in his cheeks. Both officers laughed and ’Cisca waved busily to them as they drove off. “Sotch nice!” she said to Kelly.

  Ten minutes north of the Harkinson turnoff, Scheff and Kindler stopped at a shopping center and phoned Lobwohl’s outside-line number.

  “This is Bert,” Kindler said. “Did Harv get …”

  “Better come on in,” Lobwohl said. “A flippy kid did it and then shot himself. Had a note on him saying he was afraid he was going to do some crazy thing. Had a map and a floor plan of number ten. Even had the wrappings off the blade in his pocket. Coast Guard spotted him dead in a sailboat grounded off Eliott Key.”

  “Named Oliver maybe?” Kindler said.

  After a long silence Lobwohl said wearily, “All right. All right. Come on in and show off, you smart-ass.”

  “Is it all going to break now? The ID on Staniker?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “When it breaks wide open and the news people get a look at the motive, we’re going to get swarmed worse than anything since the Mossler thing. Look, the broad that Staniker and the kid got to is a Mrs. Cristen Harkinson, late thirties, blonde, a swinger. The late Senator Ferris Fontaine had her stashed in a very lush bay house down here a little southeast of Goulds, all very private. He probably built it for her and deeded it to her. And she had a cruiser …”

  “And up to the time she sold it, Staniker worked for her, running the boat. I’ve been reading the clippings, Bert.”

  “She broke off with Staniker. He gets the job running the Kayd boat. She lines up the kid to give her sailing lessons. So she takes one kind of lessons and gives another kind. Staniker comes back from the islands. He wants to start making it again with Harkinson. This bugs the kid. He gets so hairy about it she tosses him out too. What I’d guess, the kid thinks he gets cut loose because she’s going to pick up with Staniker again. A green kid would be way out of his league with a live one like that. So how did the kid know where Staniker was? You see what kind of can of worms that opens up?”

  “They’d both become nuisances. She could aim one at the other and either way it came out, Bert, she’d be rid of both of them. Two rejected suitors taking it out on each other. But she would have to be pretty cold to set them up like that, wouldn’t she?”

  “She was home in bed, and I think that will check out. And I think that even if she conned the kid into killing Staniker, she’ll deny it up down and sideways, and nothing we can do. I am just saying that the hints in the papers are going to stop just short of actionable, and it is going to be dirty laundry week, and a mob scene at her house, guys in trees with telephoto lenses, the whole treatment.”

  “So
?”

  “Protective custody? She’ll have to make a statement anyway. She’s the link between Staniker and the kid. We’ve got to go through the routine of the murder one indictment anyway and …”

  “I try to keep from telling you your end of the business, Bert.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “So you want to bring her in. And you happily married and all that. Or maybe you collect autographs.”

  “Well, I like to see Barney have a little fun on the job too, but I was thinking that if we have her before she knows who did what to who, and make it a long slow ride, and fake her out a little, there might be something we could make stick later on, because there will be all kinds of pressure we should do something about her. The exposure is going to heat up every weird and rapo in the files, and with a full moon coming up, the cronkies are going to line up three deep, breathing through their mouths anyplace they think she might show.”

  After a silence, Lobwohl said, “All right, but we don’t know how much clout she might have, so go very, very easy.”

  “We have this little roll of red carpet we carry, and …”

  “Somehow, Kindler, when you make those little funnies I keep thinking of all the kicks Mercer and Tuck are having bringing the Akards in to make a positive on the only son they’re ever going to have. The kid was born and raised here and there is no j.d. record on him at all, so the mother is going to keep telling Mercer and Tuck that he was always a good boy.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “No apology necessary. I shouldn’t chew you. And by now I’ve been around long enough so I should stop bleeding.”

  “When you do, it’s time to get into another line of work.”

  “Before you unroll your little red carpet, the lady will be apprised of her right to have an attorney present while her statement is being taken, and she will be permitted to phone and arrange to have said attorney either meet her here or meet her at her house and drive in with her while you follow along.”

  “So what do I tell her about why we’re bringing her in?”

  “Hey! There’s no next of kin on Staniker. Central records hasn’t sent back a match on the prints yet.”