Stanley caught some wind and moved closer. He threw the line, and the pilot caught it deftly, made it fast to a brace. Stanley dropped the sail and pulled the catamaran and float plane together.
“What do you want?” Jonathan asked.
“Want to give you a plane ride, boy.”
“No thanks.”
“Had a time finding you the way the glare comes off these flats. I would say that from here it is just under a hundred miles a few points off due west, there’s a little Boylston girl wondering what’s taking me so long.”
Jonathan stared at the pilot. He was a crickety old man, charred by the sun, brows and hair bleached white, tiny bright blue eyes, teeth like spoiled corn.
“Flew wet goods out of these islands, you know, until that goddam FDR blew the business all to hell. The little bit you can tote in one of those old buckets, all struts and fabric and spit, it had to be prime goods to pay off. Ask anybody. They’ll tell you Jake Lord has flew everything that can get off the runway. Get your gear together now, boy.”
“She’s alive?” Jonathan asked. “Leila?”
He saw the mouth moving, knew the man was making words, but he could no longer hear them. He felt as if each of these long and silent days had been pulling some part of him to an unbearable thinness and length and tension, like a silvery ribbon reaching from him to the most distant pieces of rock and scrub they had searched.
“She’s dead!” he bayed, as the strand broke. Then Stanley Moree was close to him, grin big, eyes wet, chopping his fist into Jonathan’s upper arm, telling him he was one crazy mon, and he would bring his woman back one day, and they would sail and sing and laugh.
When the float plane turned back into the wind and lifted, Jonathan looked down and saw Stanley waving from the deck of the cat.
On Friday, in the early afternoon of the tenth day of June, John Lobwohl had lunch with Palmer Haas in a booth in one of the back alcoves of Fritzhoff’s.
Haas, a small man in his middle thirties, had the aggressive tough-nut face of a workmanlike welterweight, one of the spoilers managers avoid when they are bringing a promising boy up through the ratings.
“Now what the hell, Johnny! What the hell!” Palmer Haas said in his abrupt rasping voice.
“Now don’t plant your feet. Okay? I know and you know that you’re not going to enter into any conspiracy against your client.”
“You’ve got a better name?”
“Let’s call it a search for truth.”
“Real idealism, Captain. Makes my eyes sting a little.”
“Any client deserves the best you’ve got. This one, this Cristen Harkinson is as poisonous as they come.”
“Johnny, would you say to a doctor don’t treat that fellow, he beats up on his wife and kids?”
“All right. You have a professional obligation. Everybody is entitled to every protection under the law. And we’re both stuck with the antagonist theory. I am a cop. My job is to accumulate a solid file, one with a reasonable chance of conviction, and present it to the States Attorney. Then you and him fight. Except for my people testifying for the prosecution, I’m out of the picture from that point on.”
“Except you throw them too many files with big holes in the middle, you get shifted into some other line of cop work, Johnny.”
The waiter brought the two steinkrugs of dark draft beer. Lobwohl took several deep swallows and set the stein down. “That confrontation rocked her, Palmy. You saw that. The last thing she ever expected was somebody to show up off that Muñeca. The Boylston girl tired fast, but she gave us a picture of how Staniker acted and what he said, and how he sawed the Kayd girl’s throat open that was as convincing as anything either of us are ever going to hear.”
“But it was essentially bush, my friend. And having that Sam Boylston, the brother, right there was bush too. He never took his eyes off my client. You want to see what murder looks like before it happens, it was right there in his eyes. But it was a damn fool tick. You know better.”
“It shook her. But you put on your big act about trickery and so on and it gave her time to steady down.”
“I get paid to put on my acts.”
“Let me ask you this. In complete confidence. An opinion between friends. What if the Boylston girl had been found in time for us to grab Staniker alive? Now forget all this crap about jurisdiction. Pretend it happened in my back yard. I’ve put my cards face up for you. Kayd visited Crissy Harkinson. Staniker gets the captain job. The Boylston girl’s story verifies what her lawyer brother dug up about the money. Don’t you think, based on what we both know and can guess about Staniker, that he would sing it all loud and clear, and implicate Harkinson?”
“Why should I make guesses about something that didn’t happen?”
“Because if the timing was different, we could have nailed her to the wall.”
“If your aunt had balls she’d be your uncle, Johnny.”
“She is very good, this Crissy. And she’s running in enough luck to make it work out for her. Once the Muñeca took off, she recruited a patsy for what she had in mind. Not some smart-ass kid, but exactly the kind of dumb idealistic kid she could con into taking care of a little problem called Staniker. The size of the stink has startled her a little. She didn’t guess how much there’d be. All she has to do is ride the wave, keep her head down, and eventually she’s home free.”
“Which means, Johnny, you can’t build a solid file.”
“That’s my problem.”
“And that confrontation, that little masterpiece of Perry Mason drama, was bush-league desperation. You sweetened me into a little friendly cooperation, and then you pull that on my client.”
“The file isn’t solid. But there are some funny bits in it that don’t match up.”
“I bleed for you, Captain. You conned her into a hell of a lot of so-called voluntary interrogation before she had the representation she should have had from the start. That was your big chance, and I think she was a little too cute for you. You blew it.”
“Let me tell you something, Palmer Haas. Or ask you something. This file we’ve got. If she was pure dog, a dismal ugly woman, and if almost anybody in this area was representing her beside you, I think I’d take a chance and try to go with what we’ve got. But she’s got too much presence and looks and quickness of mind, and you’d use your challenges to set up a jury that would give her the most brownie points based on those assets.”
“And charge her with what, man?”
“Accessory. Murder one.”
“Come on! What do you take me for?”
“Palmy, do you remember how we got to know each other? Six years back, wasn’t it? That Todd couple. There were two places in the cross examination where you could have objected and didn’t.
Why?”
“Simple ignorance, Captain.”
“I contend that you knew they were guilty as hell and I contend you knew that was the only place where it could be opened up, and I contend that pair of butcher abortionists sickened you, just as that retired Atlanta whore sickens me. I further contend that in these past six years you’ve lowered your sights, Counsellor. You’re hooked on your batting average, and the better the average, the bigger the fees and the more of a celebrity you become.”
“Thanks for the lunch. I don’t have to take this crap from anybody. See you around.”
John Lobwohl found himself quite suddenly alone in the booth. You have to try. That’s the only constant. But, he thought, maybe the flaw is in trying harder when you can feel no pity, trying a little harder to nail the cold, clever, amoral ones, perhaps out of some pitiful compulsion to try to improve the world. The world penned up the sheep with the tigers, and nothing you could do until you could prove that was real lambs wool between the great white fangs.