“Even the way she’s acted through the whole thing, the moods your girl told you about — it all fits.”
“So let the police have it, Sam Boylston.”
“Isn’t that just what you don’t want?”
“Let me start west with ’Cisca. Then blow the whistle. They’ll have to prove the same things some other way. About Kayd seeing her. About her relationship with Staniker.”
“With what I’ve got, I don’t think you could get a Grand Jury to indict. There’s no way in the world I can prove that money was aboard. Who has the jurisdiction? If he was cleared at Nassau, are we into a double jeopardy problem? Could she ever be nailed as an accomplice? Not if she keeps her head, no matter what he says. No provable motive. No witnesses. If they could be indicted, and if it came to trial, any clown in town could get them off, and then no matter what came up later, they’d be in the clear forever.”
“Then let go of it, Sam. Go home.”
“Let go!”
“People like that find better ways of destroying themselves than you could ever dream up. Everybody dies, Sam. It all ends for everybody. So you are a clever man. And you are a hater. So suppose you get away with it. Will your sister know? Would you want to tell your wife or your boy?”
“I would know!”
“And you might have twenty years in Raiford Prison to think about how dead they would be. How come you appoint yourself the avenging angel? Maybe this is your chance to grow up, and all you have to do is recognize it.”
“I grew up early, Kelly. Very early.”
“Maybe that’s why you stopped a little short.”
“You don’t seem to realize they killed my sister!”
Raoul sat there, looking like a bland Buddha. “Keel my seestair. Sure nuff. We’re having some bad years for sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers and friends. The living are worth every final bit of love and energy you can toss into the kitty. The dead are worth tears. Trying to do more for the dead is self-love. It’s pride gone bad. It’s romantic nonsense.” He yawned. “I can see from your expression you don’t believe a word of it. Now you have to drive me all the way back down there to my car so I can go home and get, if I’m lucky, three hours sleep.”
“How does your face feel now?”
“Lumpy.”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“I’ll tell people I kept running into a door. It kept jumping in front of me.” He stood up. “I’ll follow the Captain. I’m no good with guns. But I follow people pretty good.”
Chapter Seventeen
Early on Tuesday afternoon, Leila Boylston asked Sergeant Corpo to help her climb the crude ladder once again, up to the platform he had built high in a huge old water oak. She told him to stay close behind her in case she got dizzy, but she made it without trouble.
She sat crosslegged on the platform, catching her breath. He smiled at her, only his head visible over the edge of the platform.
“Did purely fine, Missy. You sing out when you want to come on down.”
“Okay, Sarg.”
After he had started down she leaned over the edge and looked down at him. “You’ll be going over to the mainland tomorrow? It’s the first of the month.”
He stopped and craned his neck to look up at her. “Don’t you get too close to the edge there now. I might go in tomorrow. I might go in the next day or the day after. Depends.”
She pouted. “But you promised me things.”
“And I guess you’d want to write down what you need.”
“I told you three times I’ve got my list all ready!”
“Guess you did. No need to get cross about it, Missy.”
“But I need things. You want me to be happy here. You keep saying it, anyway. How can I be happy when I need things?”
“I might go in tomorrow. Depends,” he said, and went on down the ladder he had fashioned of boughs and wire.
She settled herself and, through the openings between the branches, looked wistfully out across the wide bay. She could see the bright tract houses rimming the nearest part of the mainland shore, not much over a mile and a half away, she estimated. The shoal water near the island kept the larger boats well clear of it. She could see an occasional glint of traffic moving along a road beyond the houses, and by straining her eyes she thought she could see the bright patterns of lawn sprinklers, and the racing dots of children at play.
Looking south she could see an industrial mistiness, a jumble of city buildings much more distant than the residential shore. To the north were some smaller mangrove islands, and to the west the markers of the Intercoastal Waterway and a navigable outlet to the deeper blue of the Atlantic, water breaking white against the protection of a long rock groin.
She tried to quell her terrible impatience. If he did not go tomorrow, he would at least be going in his skiff to Broward Beach very soon. And when he was out of sight, she would put on Stel’s swim suit and take one of the floating seat cushions from the Muñequita, and paddle down his channel and across the flats and over across the bay toward those little houses. If she could not hail a boat, she felt she could make it without too much trouble. She did not panic in the water. She could rest, supported by the cushion. She thought with a certain grimness she might well startle one of the housewives over there out of her wits. Skin and bones, and with a back that looked as if she’d been recently flayed, hair like a bird’s nest and eyes like an overworked haunt, one with too many castles to spook up.
She could feel the texture of a telephone, see her finger dipping into the O for operator, twirling the dial all the way around. Brrrrt brrrrt. “Operator?”
“I want to place a long distance collect call to Mr. Sam Boylston in Harlingen, Texas, please.”
Oh, Sam, gather up Jonathan and come on the run. Come quickly. Please. I don’t know what happened.
She stiffened as again some small and vivid pattern moved across the back of her mind and flickered out. She’d had but one small glimpse of it. A huge head, a man’s head, sunbrown and bald, resting face down in a plate of food, but nodding back and forth as if he were saying no to something, rolling his face in the food, saying no because he did not want to be there. And she seemed to be looking down at him through some kind of a window from a dark outside place, and he was in the light.
Mister Bix! But why him? The brown head of a large middle-aged man. Drunk, probably. Mister Bix did not get drunk. Perhaps it was from a movie, a color movie, a clever camera angle.
When she felt sleepy enough to take a nap she did not call the Sergeant, but went down all by herself very carefully. He had been banging away at something, beating on metal with a small sledge. He seemed to have a small-boy intensity about building things. He did not do things very well, but he seemed happy with the results. He was sweaty with the effort. He was indignant about her coming down the ladder without help.
“You could have fell! Fool thing to do.”
As she fell asleep, she could hear him working away.
That evening he opened the last two cans of beef stew, served it on mounds of rice. She knew she could not finish so much, and then to her surprise she reached the end of it. The breeze had stopped. The mosquitoes and gnats were bad. The sun was beginning to set. Her belly felt so full it made her think of the Thanksgiving dinners way back when they had been a family of four. Corpo had acted strangely shy and evasive during the evening meal. She insisted on helping him wash up.
At last, in too loud a voice, he made an announcement. “There’s something I got to mess with you ain’t going to care for one bit, Missy.”