She stood quietly and made herself review every possible thing which might turn up in a painstaking search of the house. After putting the single shell in Olly’s little rifle, and hiding the rifle under the edge of decking where she could grasp it quickly enough, she had dropped the extra shells into the bay as she had sailed the Skatter down to the place where Olly was waiting for her in the dark in his car. The notes and plans had been burned in an ashtray and the ashes flushed down the toilet. He’d taken his other belongings home.
It was strange, she thought. You brace yourself for the police. You wait. You expect them to be narrow deadly people, and poisonously clever. But when they arrive, earlier than you had expected, it is just two placid dumpy apologetic men with mild heavy faces and an air of clumsy courtesy.
The car was delivered as they walked out. She had the man put it in the carport under the servant quarters. He brought her the key and the copy of the service charge. She put them in her purse and as he was unhooking his scooter from the rear bumper, she called to Francisca and told her she would be back in a couple of hours.
Kindler sat in the cage, and she sat up in front beside Scheff. Scheff drove very sedately. She directed him to a large shopping plaza. “It will just be a minute,” she said. “She works daytimes and sews at night. Don’t go away.” She left her white purse on the car seat. She went toward the shops and turned into a long arcade. When she was out of sight she quickened her pace. She went through the arcade and came out behind the buildings. Trucks were parked back there. Garbage cans were lined up behind a supermarket. She looked around. A man rolling a loaded dolly out of a big truck seemed oblivious of her. She plucked the top from a garbage can, dropped the package onto a viscid mass of brown lettuce and rotten fruit, picked up a stick from a shattered crate and pushed the bundle into the garbage and replaced the lid. Flies swarmed like small chars in an updraft, a blue-bellied buzzing audible in the sunlight. She re-entered the arcade.
When they were back on the highway, Scheff said, “That maid of yours a Cuban? Pretty little thing.”
“Francisca is very good natured. But she’s no mental giant. She tries to do what she’s told, but sometimes she doesn’t understand and other times she forgets. I’m losing her, darn it. You get them to where you can trust them to do things the way you want them done, and they take off. There ought to be a way to make them sign up for three years, like the army.”
At two o’clock on Monday afternoon, Sam Boylston sat in his poolside cabana with Raoul Kelly and Francisca. Her manner was constrained, puzzled, apprehensive.
“Promising for Wednesday,” she said. “I keep telling.”
“Miss Torcedo,” Sam said softly.
“Si?”
“Raoul and I must talk. If all your belongings are out there in his car, maybe you have a swim suit. It’s a very nice pool. I think a swim would be relaxing.”
She looked questioningly at Raoul. “Why don’t you, chica?” he said.
Raoul went out with her to unlock the car. They came back and she changed in Sam’s bathroom. She seemed happier. After she had gone out, with swim cap and towel, Sam said, “She’s a lovely one, friend. Congratulations.”
“You know, you’re very good with her, Sam. She has a good reaction to you. With a stranger she usually goes into her shell. On the way here I told her we can trust you. What was it when we came in? You were okay and then strange for a minute.”
Sam said, “Something that will keep happening to me, I guess. I don’t know how long. When she walked over and sat down — Leila had that same slimness, and she moved the way your girl does, handled her body the same way. And I knew I’d never see Leila again, see her cross a room like that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, cursed softly. He leaned back. “Take it from the top. God damn it! That sappy kid kills Staniker, then himself. They take her in. What are they trying to get her for? A morals charge?”
Raoul Kelly went through it all, pausing only to organize the material into as orderly a presentation as possible. And again he was aware of how totally and intently Sam Boylston could listen.
“So now I need advice, Lawyer,” Raoul said.
“From a lawyer who’s been up all night two nights in a row waiting for the little white car that wasn’t even there? I wondered about your car there, parked and locked, and I figured you’d tucked it out of sight and moved in with the girl. What’s the problem? I’ll try to think.”
“I want to get Francisca out of range of this whole mess. I was going to leave Thursday the ninth. Only a very few people know about me and Francisca. But that’s a few too many. I have to know how much trouble I can get into if I leave in the morning. The stuff in my room I was going to take to the paper, I can mail in. I could leave her here and go close out the bank account, pack what I need, get a friend to crate up the rest of my stuff, the files and research and so on and hold it all until I send a shipping address. I have to report out there on the nineteenth. A Monday. Those two cops were good guys. When they find out I’m gone, they’re going to be very, very unhappy. What can they do to me, to us? I don’t want to mess up the new job. I don’t want her extradited and brought back here by some damned matron. But I can’t let her get caught up in the kind of fantastic publicity mess there’s going to be. How should I handle it?”
Sam Boylston stood up and roamed the room, stopping to look at Francisca swimming quite prettily and gracefully. He turned and clapped his hands once. “Here it is, client. You are going to go pick up your money and your gear, mail your stuff, with a note of explanation that you are leaving a few days earlier than planned. Come back here and sign a statement that I am representing you and the girl. Then we’ll use my tape recorder and you can question her in Spanish. I’ll put the necessary identifications at the beginning. Take her through everything she knows they might use against the Harkinson woman. Set the background first. How long she worked for her and so on. We want to establish the relationship with Staniker, and the relationship with the boy. How late the boy was at the house, how often, the times she’d hear him drive out. And get in everything she remembers about that last day of March when Kayd visited Crissy Harkinson. Finally, go over the weekend, the locked gates, going to see if the boat was there, looking in at her, bringing her the cocoa.”
“How can you represent us if you aren’t...”
“You are going to leave when we have a good tape, Kelly. And you are going to drive right on through to Texas, and down to Harlingen. I’m going to give you the address of my house there, and by the time you get there, my wife will be expecting you and she’ll know what to do. I advise marriage as soon as my partner can get the usual restrictions bypassed. And if anybody gets ugly, I’ll see that there is a doctor and a judge who see eye to eye on the inadvisability of her being returned here. You sit tight. I can represent you. You’ll be in the state where I’m licensed. I can get a local man to work with me here if it comes to that. If it hasn’t blown over by the eighteenth, you leave your wife with my wife and fly out to California and report in, and we’ll get her out there to you as soon as it makes sense to do so.”
Raoul Kelly stared at him in a long silence and shook his head and said in Cuban Spanish, “You are a one! Truly.”
“El fantástico, seguro, hombre.”
“I should make big protests, Sam. Can’t impose. All that. But for her sake, if it would help her in any way, I’d go beg bread in the streets.”