The Last One Left (19 page)

“I see what you mean, sure. A boat is a good place to have a quiet little conference. Fontaine would have known Staniker was loyal and discreet when he recommended you take him on, and known he was competent. That should have been good enough for Kayd. Did Staniker tell you he’d landed a job?”

“He called up to tell me. He was very pleased and excited. He said it was a marvelous cruiser and fine people. But in the next breath he was complaining about it being a temporary job, perhaps six weeks, a little more or a little less. He said his wife was worried about giving up their job of operating the marina to take a temporary job, and he said that even though it was very good pay, maybe she was right. I told him that he should do the most marvelous job he could, and there was the chance Mr. Kayd might keep them on permanently, and without any children to tie them down, there was no reason they couldn’t take the Muñeca back to Texas. And even if Mr. Kayd didn’t want a permanent couple aboard, certainly he might recommend them to some of his Texas friends with yachts. It seemed to cheer him up. Frankly, it was a relief to me to know he’d found something, and he wouldn’t be heckling me for a while.”

“You read the story of what Staniker told those people, about the way it happened. You seem to know boats pretty well.”

“Not really. I only had that one cruiser, and I don’t think I’d want another one. They’re too much expense and responsibility. I’ve been learning to sail lately, and loving it.”

“When you read that account, Mrs. Harkinson, did you feel Staniker had maybe pulled a bad goof?”

“Not at all. It’s sort of natural to turn things on when you’re running. Blowers and bilge pumps and so on. And with that boat being diesel powered, and with a switch up on the fly bridge to turn on the generator and bring the other bank of batteries up, I’d think it would be a normal thing for anyone to just switch the generator on. A good captain tries to make everything as comfortable as he can for the owner and the passengers, so he would be thinking of the noise the generator would make if he had to run it at an anchorage after he’d set the hooks. Cruisers are very complex things, and there’s an old saying that no single thing ever goes wrong. It’s always three things
going wrong at the same time. Things go wrong that you can’t anticipate. Like when the Sea Room blew up last year.”

“Something about bottled propane?”

“They finally figured out what had happened. That woman had found a piece of brain coral on the beach, worn almost round, and she put it in a saucer on top of a cupboard in the galley. When they came in through the pass the boat rolled and the hunk of coral fell and hit the copper tubing to the galley stove just right, and the gas leaked out and being heavier than air, filtered right down into the bilge, and when there was enough of it to ignite, that poor woman happened to be sitting on the cockpit hatch cover, and it broke her back and threw her into the sea.”

“I gather you think they’ll clear Staniker.”

“I think any other action would be terribly unfair.”

“There’s one thing for sure. Nobody is going to get a look at what’s left of the Muñeca. She’s a couple of thousand feet down. I’m grateful to you for giving me so much of your time, and being so frank and helpful, Mrs. Harkinson. It’ll give us a good chance to do a report in depth when we cover the investigation, and I’ll make sure there isn’t any wording in it that might embarrass you in any way.”

“I’ll be very grateful, Mr. Weldon. It certainly is getting an awful lot of publicity, isn’t it?”

“These things depend on the ingredients. Texas millionaire, young beauty-contest wife, crippled daughter, pretty young guest, luxurious cruise in the tropic isles, and pow! And the captain is the only one left. How long the media keeps leaning on it will depend on how soon something else comes along with juicy ingredients. Thanks again, and if I come up with a question I forgot to ask, can I get back to you?”

“Of course. It’s been nice talking to you.”

She reached and replaced the pink Princess phone on the cradle in
the recess built into the headboard. It had gone well. And now if Garry was only playing his role just as it had been planned.

She remembered drilling one thing into him. “You are going to be stunned, sweetheart. Shocked and stunned. You’ll have lost a boatload of people, including your own dear Mary Jane. So slow yourself down. You won’t be tracking well. You won’t seem to hear some of the questions. Give yourself lots of time to answer. If you let anybody trick you, it could be my neck too.”

“You’re so right, baby.”

“And when the time and place is right, do it, and don’t let yourself stop or think until that part of it is all over, and then for what happens next,
keep thinking every minute!
”

“Stop worrying!”

“Go over it for me now, every little thing.”

“Again? For God’s sake, Crissy!”

“Again, yes. And again and again and again. Lover, this means clover forever. This is big casino. Every chance you’ve had, somebody or something has messed you up. A man like you! Who should have had the whole ball of wax. You’re
due
, Garry!”

It was strange how gradually it had dawned upon her that Staniker could be turned into a weapon, and used. When Fer had told her he had hired a captain to go with the gift cruiser, and they had gone to give her her first look at it and take the first short shakedown cruise, she had been startled and slightly amused at the Senator’s selection of a captain. Garry Staniker was a familiar type, one of those big, easy-moving, outdoor studs, in fact almost a caricature of the breed. Big brown craggy face, an acre of shoulders, bulging wads and pads of muscle, boyish lock of brown hair to fall across the seamed forehead, dimming tattoos on the powerful arms, a slim waist and even his work clothing tailored to display the power of his build. The crinkles around blue eyes had been shaped by weather and amusement. He had that lazy, half-mocking assurance of the
man whose animal magnetism has given him his choice of women wherever he had roamed. And he looked at her with interest and approval, which did not displease her. It did not seem plausible that he could be so theatrically decorative and still be able to run the boat. He looked as if Central Casting had dug him up to play a bit part, a smuggler in the China Sea, a gun runner in the Indian Ocean.

But he could take the Odalisque in and out of tricky dock spaces in wind and tide with the casual competence of a taxi driver stealing a parking place. He maintained the cruiser beautifully, doing all chores not only with a tidy efficiency, but with a manner which seemed to say that he was indeed from Central Casting, but had learned the procedures aboard his own series of luxury vessels.

Ferris Fontaine obviously liked him and trusted his ability and judgment and discretion. On longer cruises Mary Jane would come along to take care of cooking, buying provisions, bunk-making, laundry. She was a plump, subdued, busy and docile little woman of about forty. Her only flaw as an employee was a somewhat uncomfortable anxiety to please. She obviously adored Staniker. He had an amiable manner toward her most of the time, the gentle, condescending attitude one might have toward a house dog one is used to and fond of. When displeased with her, he would put an edge in his voice which would make her jump as if stung by a lash. Crissy, by getting Mary Jane to talk a few times, learned that when they were married Garry had just gotten out of the Navy, and she was working as a waitress in San Diego. It had been mostly her savings they had used for the payment on the Bahamian ketch. After two stillborn babies and a series of miscarriages, her tubes had been tied for reasons of health. She said she often felt homesick for the Bahamas. It had been hard work. But so lovely. From little nuances when Crissy was able to get her to talk about her husband, she could guess at the emotional adjustment Mary Jane had achieved. Her rationalization was that women threw themselves at her husband, and
men were often weak and did not have very good sense about women.

On cruises, sunning herself, Crissy often felt Staniker’s eyes upon her. She wondered what sort of approach he would make. She intended to fend it off with vivid directness. Finally she tested him by having him take her, alone, down the Waterway, inside the Florida Keys and anchor overnight in the seclusion of protected Tarpon Bay. Not only did he make no move, but the situation seemed to unnerve him. She made him join her for a nightcap out on the stern deck while the Odalisque swung at anchor in the moonlight, and got him talking enough to confirm her growing suspicion that he was not going to take any chance which might lose him the job. It paid five hundred a month. His small triumphs seemed to be all in the past. He had some vague conviction things would get better, but he was frightened by any idea they might get worse. Studying him the next day she saw more clearly how his forty plus years were eroding his image of himself. Pucker of flesh under the chin. Slight discoloration of the whites of the eyes, a little softness bulging over the tight-drawn belt. When she was alone on the boat she poked around in the crew quarters forward and found his little bottle of hair dye, and the gummy little applicator brush. The evidences were plaintive. As with athletes and beach boys and beefcake movie stars, the years were nibbling away the morale by corrupting the image, and he had to convince himself that nothing had really changed, that nothing really would, ever.

After Fer’s sudden and badly timed death, and after she had failed in her clumsy effort at blackmailing Fer’s cronies, she knew she ought to sell the Odalisque as quickly as possible. The money had stopped. She had a few thousand in a checking account, and half that much in her safe in the back of the closet wall. But the money had stopped.

Yet when Staniker, obviously troubled about his own future,
sought her out and said that he guessed she would be getting rid of the cruiser, she found herself staring at him in an imitation of astonishment, and heard herself saying, “Why should I sell my lovely boat, Captain?”

It gave her a sour amusement to let him believe Fer had left her enough money to live in the same style as when he was alive. She had him take her cruising alone, knowing she was wasting money because of this foolish game of impressing her own hired captain, yet reluctant to end it. For a time she sought to solve the problem by making the job so unpleasant for him he would quit. She gave him the most menial chores and complained constantly about everything he did. But he refused to let it upset him and did all she asked with that amiable tolerance of someone humoring a child or a sick person. She learned, by talking to other boat people, why Staniker endured the abuse. He had captained the Odalisque for two years and more. And it was on his record that he had lost his own vessel in the Bahamas. Without a solid and impressive reference from the owner of the Odalisque he could not hope to find another position as good.

She stopped persecuting him. Weeks passed and she felt caught in a strange lethargy. She would not look directly at her future, at the step she would eventually have to take. While she still had the money to finance the venture, she would have to go hunting, posing perhaps as the stunned and tragic widow, going alone to some likely resort area where she could find a man of years and means and loneliness, a man who would believe every detail of the history she would invent, and who would marry her.

At her age she knew marriage was far safer than any other arrangement. She had no doubt of her ability to find such a man and, having found him, capture him completely regardless of all protestations by relatives and advisors. But she would be trapped then, for good. The contract would have to be honored, because her past
could not stand the close scrutiny it would receive if any divorce action was brought. And the old man, she suspected, would live forever. She had not felt trapped in her arrangement with Fer. But he had not been with her day and night. She knew she needed the sense of freedom, whether she used it or not. Her mirror told her that she was attractive, vital and exciting. Yet she knew in her heart that when her looks began to go, they would go very quickly no matter how desperate her efforts to save them. She could not settle for less than marriage, and, in marriage, for less than what Fer had planned to give her.

In her mood of listlessness, in April, three months after Fer had died, she had Staniker take the Odalisque on down to the keys. In a bemused, half-hearted way she seduced Staniker, overcoming a suspicious reluctance on his part that it might be a trap, an excuse for firing him. She had not been with a man for months, nor with a man like Staniker for years. Yet he was just as she had expected him to be, a powerful, sensuous and domineering animal, very knowing and skillful, lasting, heavily built, quickly resurgent. She matched his pace and needs, and they remained at anchor in the secluded bay for a week, using each other up, dwindling at last into that softened drowsy lethargy of the slack and emptied faces, the smudged eyes, the little sorenesses and stiffnesses of the flesh.

For a time she amused herself by seeing if she could turn his simple carnality into self-destructive infatuation. But he was an old dog who had trotted down a thousand alleys, and had learned that some of it was good and some of it was better. She knew that in their topside roles of owner and captain he was totally aware of her as Crissy Harkinson. But down in all the tumble of the broad bunk in the master stateroom, he was aware only of Female, of her as an anonymous volunteer in an ancient army, a familiar ritual of arms, heat, gasping, holding and bursting, varying from all the others in
such minor detail of skill, endurance, demands and size he was not aware of any difference at all, and aware only of himself after all.

The episode made it seem pointless to continue any pretense with Garry Staniker. On the way back up Biscayne Bay she told him she had to get rid of the Odalisque, that she couldn’t afford it, or him, and she was going to take her personal belongings off it and turn it over to a broker. She said she would pay him through the month of May. The abruptness of it soured him, but she saw him work to bring his temper under control and guessed he had remembered the recommendation he would need from her.