The Last One Left (9 page)

He sat at the other end of the couch. “Honey, I didn’t know you were all this interested in the woman.”

“How not? There are just the two of us living here, no? Two women. I examine her. Perhaps it is—like the adventures in the daytime of the women of television. But they are good women in trouble. This one has the trouble of the money, and if she does not cure it, perhaps the house will go and my job will be gone. Perhaps she knows I watch her life as if it is television, but not so clear. Maybe not. She believes I am
estupida, una burra, verdad
. She asks about you. It would puzzle her, a journalist of importance visiting her maid, so I have told her you are a cook in a small Cuban restaurant. Also, I have invented others and say they visit me. It is that I do not care to have her enter my private life. It is a way—of hiding, perhaps. As, of course, she hides herself from me.”

“We all do some hiding,” he said as casually as he could manage.

“And what are
you
hiding, Señor?” Her look was flirtatious.

“My plans for us, chica.”

“But you said if she did not need me we would go all the way to the place in Fort Lauderdale where there is the Hawaiian food! Now you do not want to?” She looked like a troubled, disappointed child.

“Not the plans for tonight. The plans to get married and go to California to that new job I’ve been offered.”

“Oh. Do you think it would be better for me to wear high heels to that nice place, Raoul?”

He slid along the couch, put the empty beer can down, put his hands on her shoulders, held her strongly, gave her a little shake.

“Marriage, ’Cisca. Man and wife. Vows, home, kids.”

“Oh, I do not care to be married.”

He shook her again. “I care to marry you!”

Her face went absolutely still in a way he had not seen for many weeks. Her lips looked bloodless, and her eyes stared through him. He released her and she stood up and he expected her to say, as before, she had a headache, she did not feel well, he should leave, please.

Instead she said, “I am not one you would marry.”

“Why not?”

“One does not marry this description of woman. Now perhaps you would …”

He got up and said quickly, taking her hands, “High heels,
almita
, might make you feel more like fiesta, ha? And you will drink one of the enormous things of rum and become very foolish. Okay?”

He watched the stillness change, quite slowly, to animation, and her eyes focused upon him, merry and mischievous. “Red shoes! Red shoes!” she cried and went scuttling off to put them on.

Later in his car on the way up to Lauderdale, she wiggled closer to him and said, “I must tell you. I make up stories about my Señora Harkinson, to make it more like the television. I do it when I am ironing, mostly. When one does not think about what the hands are
doing. I have imagined it is some manner of plot, about El Capitán. It was all arranged between them the yacht would become missing, and so when it happened, then she was happy because the plan was working. And it would be money, somehow, because it is what she is so worried about. But you must help me with the story. It gets difficult.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the paper on Monday there was the picture of the Señor Kayd. Oh, a very important man. I saw the picture and knew it was the one I had seen visit my Señora. He is not one easily forgotten, a giant truly, with a big shaved head and a loud laugh, a very heavy man but not fat. Perhaps fifty years old. With a white cowboy hat and boots with silver buckles and an air of importance, with a young man who brought him in a very rich car which he polished while the huge Señor was visiting my Señora. He visited for an hour, and they had drinks together and talked. His laugh rang through the house. From what I overheard, he was a friend of the Senator Fontaine and had met her when the Senator was alive and visited her here. She got out the most expensive bottles. She had me fix the small things to eat while drinking. When I took them in, they were talking quietly, and ceased when I entered. She thanked me and told me she would not need me and I could go back to my place until she called me. After the big man left she did not call me. It was the last day of March. I am sure of that.”

“And what do you want from me?”

“A way to put Señor Kayd into the story, like television.”

“Hmmm. Let me see now. Staniker knows the Bahamas well. He tells Crissy Harkinson he knows where there’s sunken treasure, but if he goes after it he has to give a big share to the Crown. He can’t finance the venture. But she has a rich Texas friend with a big boat. He flies over and talks to her. Then, three weeks ago, he arrives here with the boat and takes on Staniker as captain and they go to find the
treasure. When they get the chance, they sneak off. They break contact. They hide the boat in some narrow cut and cover it with boughs. Now they are bringing up the treasure.”

“And what will happen?” she asked breathlessly.

“Let me see. Oh, of course! When they have the treasure, they won’t dare try to bring it out in Kayd’s boat. They had a sailboat hidden too, and Mrs. Harkinson and Oliver are going to sneak over there and sail it back.”

She leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “Oh, you are such a very clever man, Raoul Kelleeeee! Treasure! Mystery! Dark plots!” Then she gave that hard little bark of laughter which so often preceded her infrequent experiments with the English she had picked up at the Homestead café. “Sotch a crock of sheet!” she said merrily, and, as he winced inwardly, he wondered if she had the faintest idea what she had said.

ON THAT MONDAY MORNING
after the news of the missing cruiser had been announced, two men sat waiting in a second floor office in Brownsville, in a mottled old stucco building two blocks from the old bridge across the Rio Bravo to Matamorros. The windows faced a narrow street where the mid-morning heat was increasing. The windows were closed. The noisy compressor on the old window unit set up a sympathetic resonance in the metal cover of the air conditioner and in the glass of the window, a resonance that built and faded like engines out of sync.

The wooden furniture was heavy, scarred, marked with the burns where cigarettes and cigars had been forgotten. The grass rug was scuffed thin, broken in places. Only the file cabinets looked new, three of them aligned against one wall, thick, gray, fire-resistant, with combination locks. Below the office was a small grocery store and bar, specializing in Mexican food, Mexican beer. The juke music
was always turned high, but over the sound of the air conditioner only the repetitive thud of the bass could be heard.

The girl rapped at the door and came in from the outer office without waiting for a reply. She brought letters in and silently placed them in front of the older man who sat behind the desk. He read each one slowly and carefully, lips moving, before signing it. A straw ranch hat was pushed back from a scramble of untidy white hair. His moustache, thick and unkempt, shaded from white at the hairy nostrils down to a stain of yellow at the lips. He wore khakis, the shirt sweated through so many times the pale streaks of salt formed overlapping patterns at the armpits. In the frigid air of the office the sharp stale smell of him was still detectable.

He signed the last letter and the tall, frail girl picked them up from in front of him as he leaned back.

“Francie,” the old man said, “you go on over to the courthouse and get them two notorial certificates the fella over in Tulsa wants.”

“I could take the deeds along, Judge, and mail them from there.”

“You do that, Francie. And leave that door there open so as we’ll know it when Sam Boylston gets here.”

She nodded, and as she turned and walked out, she gave big Tom Dorra a sidelong, speculative glance. Tom Dorra stared at her hips and legs as she walked out. He dwarfed the oak armchair he was slouched into, a man big enough to be stared at in the street, five inches over six feet, broad as a man and a half. He added almost another foot with the heels of his western boots, and with the very high crown on the custom Stetson. He was half Judge Billy Alwerd’s age. Their skin was almost the same shade of brown, but whereas the Judge’s looked desert dry, Tom Dorra’s hide looked oiled. His tailored khakis were pressed and fresh. His belt buckle was a half pound of ornate Mexican silver.

After the outer door closed behind Francie, Tom Dorra said
lazily, “Your Francie, she give me the look about one more time, Billy, even though she got no more ass on her than Fred Astaire, I’m going to purely run her over to the Orange Tree Motel and give her my message.”

The Judge yawned. “Don’t you mess with her, Tom D. I need for her to keep her mind on her work, not wobbling around all sprung and breathing hard. After Milly died, I run through four of them before I found Francie. She’s no Milly, God knows, but she keeps track. Get back to what you were starting to say when she came in.”

“Oh. Here’s the way I see it, why Boylston wants to see us both together. It figures that Bix Kayd cut him into it too, didn’t tell us he was in, but told Boylston we were. So what’s happened has got him a little jumpy too, and he wants to know what we plan on doing.”

Judge Billy shook his head slowly, contemptuously. “That kind of thinking is the best reason in the wide world you better keep checking everything out with me, Tom. First off, young Sam hasn’t got the yen for anything too tricky, and that’s why he give up doing any law chores for Bix, knowing that if he didn’t know the whole story and anything went a little sour, he could spend a lot of time in tax court, explaining. Second, that means that Bix wouldn’t be about to beg Boylston to come in on anything, because the way Bix likes it is having folks lined up and itching to let him he’p them get rich. Third off, that young Boylston is handling himself smart enough he doesn’t rightly
need
to come in on a little piece of a big one when he can do just as good taking a big piece of a little one and running the show himself.”

“But you said he said on the phone it was about Bix.”

“So he smelled something out, figured you and me had something riding this time, and wants to know what the hell goes on because his little sister is on that cruise, boy, or maybe you forgot.”

“Do you think we ought to tell him anything?”

The Judge chewed at the corner of his moustache. “I think I’m
going to wait and see just how he comes at us, and then I’m going to make up our minds for us, Tom D. One thing to bear in mind is that young Sam don’t have a lot of real weight yet, but come a few years from now the way he’s going, you and me could find ourselves needing a favor.”

Tom Dorra looked bleak. “I sure God hope old Bix didn’t get careless about anything. It would give me a case of the shorts for some spell. And you tell me, Billy, just why in the world old Bix had to turn it into some kind of damn game, making it look like a big old family cruise, when by God, he could have fly over and got it all settled in three, four, five days at the most.”

The Judge took a half-eaten cigar from the top drawer of his desk, bit an inch off it, put it back, chewed slowly. “Now you know how Bixby Kayd is. He doesn’t like for anything to look like what it is. He wants the whole world wondering and guessing what’s up his sleeve. Besides, taking his own boat makes the transportation problem easier in one sense. Then, too, the delay would like to make that pack of limeys a little edgier and readier to deal. And being there like that would give him a chance to do some thinking on just how the whole thing should be operated once he’s got hold of it. Bix likes to put on a show, but dog knows he’s no fool.”

He stared at Tom. “Am I keeping you awake?”

“Huh? Oh, I heard what you were saying. I was just thinking back on the onliest time I ever did see that little sister, that Leila Boylston. About four years back, which would make her about fifteen then. Wally and me had flew up to Ritchie’s spread to look over some blooded stock, and that Leila was up there visiting the youngest Ritchie girl. The little Leila, she came riding along with us when we went looking for that stock. She set that roan real nice and pretty, and goddam, Judge, she was dressed like for a street parade in white britches so tight she could have set on a dime and told which president it was. Now a gallop was right interesting, and a canter was
something to see, but when that roan moved at a slow walk, that little round can on her, it tippy-tilted back and forth so sweet and fine. I could have fell off my horse like the sun stroke and lay there howling and a-tearing up the sod. That roan liked to stay out in front, and I tell you that Leila was prime. There don’t one like that come along every year. I swear, we stayed there one more day, I’d have slung her under my arm and took off up into Ritchie’s high timber and never been seen since.”

Judge Alwerd sighed, spat into his tin waste basket. “One day, big Tom, you’ll find out how it quietens and eases a man to get past all that stud time of life.”

“Sounds a little too quiet to me,” said Dorra.

Judge Billy shook his head. “A fifteen-year-old girl child you saw that one time four years back. Agitates you to this day. And going on about my Miss Francie. You with seven kids. Makes me wonder if you got enough attention left over for business.”

“Now, Billy, you know I …”

“All I know is we’d better be talking about money around here.” He began to say more, but stopped as Francie touched the buzzer to signal the Judge that Sam Boylston was on his way in.

As the door opened, Billy Alwerd said, “Come on in, Sam. Come in and set. You know Tom D. Pull the door shut, you don’t mind.”

Sam shook hands with them and took an oak armchair about the same distance from the scarred desk as Tom’s was. He wiped his forehead on a handkerchief and said, “Summer seems to be starting up earlier ever’ year. Tom D., you gained some weight?”

“Not one bit. Just seems like I must always look bigger than folks remember. I stay just under two ninety like always, Sam.”

There was a silence as they waited for Boylston to decide how he wanted to bring it up. Sam clicked his lighter shut, huffed smoke and said, “One of the things I learned when I did a little work for Bix, he hates having his name in the paper. I remember when there
was a little trouble, he was paying a man to keep it out. Now he’s in the news, and he’s on the front page. The papers keep calling that cruiser a yacht. Bix would be stomping and cursing, wondering how many IRS boys might be wondering if he was being audited close enough. But then again, I was wondering if something might come along that looked good enough so that he wouldn’t mind being in the papers, if it was necessary.”