The Last One Left

by John D. MacDonald

  “Mrs. Harkinson, I am your attorney and …”

  She moved around him, closer to Little Annie. “Now I’m tired,” she said. “I feel awful tired. I think I want to go lie down somewhere.” She smiled at Little Annie in a humble, shy, placating way, and in a gesture that Sam knew would haunt him as long as he lived, Cristen Harkinson held out her thumb for the come-along chain.

  Little Annie looked at Lobwohl. Lobwohl nodded. Little Annie took Cristen by the upper arm and walked her out. Kindler held the door. Little Annie went at the same swift muscular stride, and Cristen jounced along beside her in the obedient half trot, bowed head bobbing, paper slippers making a scuff-pat sound on the institutional flooring.

  The door closed. Sam had the feeling they were all exhaling at once, tensions fading. Scheff sat with his eyes closed.

  “You realize, of course,” Haas said angrily, “that no part of that is in any sense admissible.”

  Lobwohl stared at him. “You are going to go through all your motions, Palmer, and we are going to go through all ours, and if there is any sense and justice in the world we are all going to find some nice quick legal way of avoiding courtroom circuses, and we are going to put that sick dirty animal away with a load of consecutive sentences that will still have a long time to run when they box her and take her out the back gate. And we all live with it in our own way.”

  Haas slowly wiped his face from forehead to chin with his open hand. He gave John Lobwohl a weak smile. “Right now I think that my colleague here from Texas and I are going to go quietly off someplace and get plastered. Maybe Boylston and I are the only ones who really know the names and numbers of all the players.”

  After five rings Lydia Jean said, “Hello? Who is it?” She sounded blurred by sleep, slightly querulous.

  “This is a drunken husband,” he said carefully. “Sodden, disreputable.”

  “Sam! Are you really drunk?”

  “I have discussed it carefully with a dear friend. After conducting certain tests, we have adjudged each other drunk. Yes.”

  “You certainly are very stately about it.”

  “It is a solemn occasion, dear wife. There is the matter of a certain paradox which needs exploring. I tried to explain it to my good friend, Mr. Palmer Christopher Haas, member of the Florida bar, and he suggested I should explore it with you.”

  “Explore, sir.”

  “I telephoned you when I learned that it was really Leila, not some girl they thought was Leila. I was sober. I cannot remember what I said. I am drunk at the moment, but I feel I will be able to recall this conversation perfectly. All I remember of the other one is a desire to tell you good news, and to tell you I love you. Did I relay that message adequately?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “I wish to say it again while drunk.”

  “Please do.”

  “I love you, Lydia Jean.”

  “That was very nice dear. Thank you. I love you too.”

  “I have been learning mysterious things about mysterious people. A certain dusky nurse named Theyma Chappie had messages for me. A certain Raoul Kelly pointed out a vague trail through the underbrush. My drinking companion, Mr. Haas, who is now asleep within range of my vision, has decoded some invisible writing.”

  “About what?”

  “It is supposed to be about me. And thus, indirectly, about you. But it disappears, like—like a dab of cotton candy on the tongue of a summertime child.”

  “That’s a very lovely turn of phrase, Sam dear.”

  “They seem to come imbedded in the liquor somehow. At any rate, what I am is me. I want to be looser.”

  “You sound looser.”

  “What I promised, you take care of things for Raoul and ’Cisca and you would have fair warning to zip back to Corpus. But I am going to be me, and you are going to be you, Am I right?”

  “I—suppose.”

  “The only change, if there is any change at all, dear wife, is that now I know it is not so great to be stuck in the world as a Sam Boylston. It is not so easy for either of us to live with it.”

  “The wedding is Monday, dear. High noon. She is a darling. And he is a very wise good dear dumpy little man, and we are frantically laundering her English.”

  “You aren’t answering my question, Miss Lydia Jean.”

  “Jonathan is flying back tomorrow with Leila. They phoned me just at dinnertime. I asked if you were coming along. They said they didn’t have any idea.”

  “Let’s get back to the promise I made you about …”

  “You could, of course, stay solemnly drunk over there amid those flesh pots, Sammy, or you could get on the dime and come home with the kids and lend a hand around here, like being a best man and mixing punch.”

  “But I want to know what you are going to …”

  “How can you know if I don’t know?”

  “Excuse me. T’was brillig and those slithey toves were all over the dang place.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The gospel according to Palmer Christopher Haas. He says logic is man’s most destructive illusion. All thinking is done with the glands, and the logic part gets stuck on afterward to neaten things up. So—when I couldn’t follow what you were saying, any answer is okay.”

  “Darling?”

  “Yep.”

  “Catch that plane. Get some sleep now, and catch that plane.”

  On Sunday the twelfth day of June, Howard Prowt, humming happily to himself, read the water over the Bimini bar with the skill acquired in these weeks of cruising the islands, and when the hue of the morning water deepened to a dark rich shade, he put the HoJun on automatic pilot on the course which, allowing for wind, the flow of the Gulf Stream and compass deviation, should bring them in sight of the sea buoy off Fort Lauderdale in four plus hours.

  He clambered spryly down to the cockpit deck. The girls, June and Selma, were cooking bacon in the galley below, and chattering back and forth. Howard peered over the transom to check on his water circulation through the engines. Kip came back from the bow along the side deck, carrying the made-up bow lines. As he stowed the lines he said, “All clear forward, Skipper.”

  “Good deal. Hatch too?”

  “Dogged down tight.”

  “We’ll take some water forward when we get into the Stream.”

  Kip lit a cigarette and said, “Damn, I hate to have this thing ending. I was saying to Selma in the night, we’ve never had a better time.”

  “Glad you people could make it.”

  “Howard, I swear to God you’ve taken off two inches around the middle, and you’ve got a tan there, man, that won’t quit.”

  “The thing about cruising, the boat is moving all the time and you’re balancing yourself against it and so all day long you’re getting exercise without hardly knowing it.”

  June called them to breakfast. Howard perched where he could watch the open sea ahead. Getting to be so many pleasure boats with automatic pilot there was no guarantee anybody would get out of your way. Kip got the eight o’clock news on the transistor, a Miami station.

  They had all been following the Staniker case, theorizing about it. The announcer said that an informed source had said that it now appeared, based on new evidence, that the Harkinson woman was going to be indicted for the murders of Staniker and the Akard boy.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!” Kip said. “That old gal must be a real pistol.”

  “A face that sunk one ship anyway,” Selma said tartly. “Some part of her at least,” Kip said. “Here we go again, kids,” June said.

  “Honestly though,” Selma said, “it was really like a miracle the Boylston girl lived through such a terrible ordeal.”

  As he put his plate aside and picked up his coffee cup, Howard saw his wife look obliquely at him and look away. And he knew only he was sick of that particular expression.

  He cleared his throat and said, “Are we all friends?”

  “What have I done now?” Selma
said.

  Without looking toward June, Howard said, “I should have told you kids this sooner, I guess. Confession is good for the soul or something. When June and I brought this bucket across the Gulf Stream alone, I wasn’t scared. I was plain terrified. I didn’t know there was so much water. I was green, and I didn’t know what the boat could take and I didn’t know how to handle it in seas like that.”

  “Howard!” June said.

  “Anyway, we saw that Muñequita, bobbing and drifting along, sliding up and down those big damn swells. June thought she saw something for a moment, like a child’s hand. I tried to come about and see if I could take that boat in tow, but I couldn’t make myself do it. That’s how I tore the radio cable loose and busted the television. It was such a sad chicken performance that when we got into Bimini, I didn’t open my mouth.”

  June said quickly, “Howard, really! It probably wasn’t that same boat at all. And what I saw was a rag flapping or something. Honestly, if you can find anything to blame yourself for, you’ll do it. It’s like a compulsion with you.” She looked at the others. “I begged him not to try to get near that boat. But you know my Howard. He has to try. You know, if it was that same boat, and if she was aboard it, can you imagine the mess if we came too close and sort of hit it and tipped it and rolled her out of it. It was just some old hulk that floated away from someplace, dear.”

  Kip said solemnly, “I want to do all my cruising with somebody with the good sense to get scared at least once a day.”

  “Howard dear,” Selma said, “you make this boat feel safe as a church, you really do.”

  June came to take Howard’s cup to refill it with hot coffee. She let her fingertips rest on his hand for a moment as she took the cup. She looked into his eyes. It was not the same look as that other look. He could not read this one either, but he knew it was better. He knew a lot of things were better.

  “What’s he saying about visibility?” Kip asked.

  They listened, and the announcer said that with the change of wind during the night to a mild two to three knots out of the southwest, the whole southeast coast of Florida was becoming blanketed with smog from the fires burning in large areas of the Everglades.

  Howard Prowt went out on deck and climbed to the flying bridge. Already the horizon was blurred ahead, and the sun, rising behind them, was haloed.

  By eleven it had become so murky Howard Prowt halved his speed and recomputed the effect of the Gulf Stream and reset the automatic pilot on the new course. There was a small stench of burning in the heavy air, and the sun above the smog made an eerie light on the cruiser and the nearby sea, a light tinged with saffron. They all made jokes and laughed too quickly at them. “If you look up, kids, and see a man standing up there about forty feet in the air, he’s on the bow of a freighter.”

  A small tired bird fluttered aboard, some kind of a warbler, and flew below and sat on a bunk with his bill agape. The women made tiny voices to him, and cooing sounds, and provided water and crumbs, but he would not touch them.

  Ten minutes later a blue heron flapped out of the murk and perched on the big basket-work fish trap Selma had bought in Nassau. It was of Haitian design, and she planned to make some kind of decorative hanging thing out of it beside her pool. Howard had lashed it fast in the port transom corner, and the heron landed on the upper bulge of it which extended above the transom.

  The heron had a brooding silence about it, a self-possession which seemed to match the strange overcast. His eyes were a startling savage yellow. The limited visibility made the sounds of the engines louder, as well as the sound of the bow wave. They seemed to be going faster than they were.

  “Howard’s Ark,” Kip said. “We are rescuing the animals, one by one. Welcome aboard, boids.”

  “A vote of confidence, dear,” said June, patting Howard’s arm.

  “In about twenty minutes now, people, let’s hope we edge up to some hunk of mainland we can recognize. Pretty soon now I’ll put her on manual and slow her to a crawl.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Want a lookout forward?”

  “I’ll tell you when, Kip.”

  When Selma went below for something she startled the small tired bird and it flew out on deck and landed on the fish trap about six inches from the heron’s talons. Howard said it would make quite a picture. The long and the short of it. June scurried and got her Instamatic and edged closer to the birds as Howard watched. Suddenly, with both slyness and a terrible indifference, the heron reached one taloned foot out to the side and clenched it on the small bird. He dropped the body and it fell down through the wide mesh of the fish trap.

  “God damn it! God damn it!” Howard yelled, and without conscious impulse he hurled his half can of beer at the heron. It missed by a yard, spewing beer as it turned through the air. The heron gave a rusty gawking sound and flapped away.

  “Look!” Selma called. “Hey, look right straight ahead! Isn’t that a building, a tall building?”

  Howard hurried to the controls and just as he switched to manual control and dropped his speed, he saw the sea buoy about fifty yards off his port quarter.

  June came and stood beside him. “Right on the nose again, honey. Old Captain Hornblower himself.”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” he said, irritably.

  She put her fingertips on his wrist. “I know. It made me feel lousy too. It was so cute, having the birds riding with us. But I guess it wasn’t like on purpose. You know? It’s more like kind of an instinct.”

  “Maybe, if it occurs to you, you’d get some lines out?”

  “Please don’t get in one of your moods. It’s been a lovely trip. It really has, sweetheart.” She patted him and went and got the lines. As she took one line forward he thought of a giant claw reaching down out of the dirty mist overhead and clenching her once and dropping the broken body over the side.

  I’d throw beer cans at it, he thought. Do that to my wife, will you, you crummy buzzard.

  “What’s the matter with the crew?” he roared. “Where’s the Captain’s drink? Shape up, you people!”

  I dedicate this novel to Travis McGee who lent invaluable support and encouragement.

  By John D. MacDonald

  The Brass Cupcake

  Murder for the Bride

  Judge Me Not

  Wine for the Dreamers

  Ballroom of the Skies

  The Damned

  Dead Low Tide

  The Neon Jungle

  Cancel All Our Vows

  All These Condemned

  Area of Suspicion

  Contrary Pleasure

  A Bullet for Cinderella

  Cry Hard, Cry Fast

  You Live Once

  April Evil

  Border Town Girl

  Murder in the Wind

  Death Trap

  The Price of Murder

  The Empty Trap

  A Man of Affairs

  The Deceivers

  Clemmie

  Cape Fear (The Executioners)

  Soft Touch

  Deadly Welcome

  Please Write for Details

  The Crossroads

  The Beach Girls

  Slam the Big Door

  The End of the Night

  The Only Girl in the Game

  Where Is Janice Gantry?

  One Monday We Killed Them All

  A Key to the Suite

  A Flash of Green

  The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything

  On the Run

  The Drowner

  The House Guest

  End of the Tiger and Other Stories

  The Last One Left

  S*E*V*E*N

  Condominium

  Other Times, Other Worlds

  Nothing Can Go Wrong

  The Good Old Stuff

  One More Sunday

  More Good Old Stuff

  Barrier Island

  A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974

 
THE TRAVIS MCGEE SERIES

  The Deep Blue Good-by

  Nightmare in Pink

  A Purple Place for Dying

  The Quick Red Fox

  A Deadly Shade of Gold

  Bright Orange for the Shroud

  Darker Than Amber

  One Fearful Yellow Eye

  Pale Gray for Guilt

  The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

  Dress Her in Indigo

  The Long Lavender Look

  A Tan and Sandy Silence

  The Scarlet Ruse

  The Turquoise Lament

  The Dreadful Lemon Sky

  The Empty Copper Sea

  The Green Ripper

  Free Fall in Crimson

  Cinnamon Skin

  The Lonely Silver Rain

  The Official Travis McGee Quizbook

  About the Author

  JOHN D. MACDONALD was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.