He turned to shake hands with Raoul, but received instead the gruffly sentimental abrazo of the semi-Americanized latino.
“I will tell Mrs. Boylston you are a remarkable man.”
They backed out. The girl waved. The car waited at the mouth of the drive until a traffic gap large enough to accommodate it came along. Moments later they were lost in the anonymous patterns of all the east-bound flow of red tail lights.
He stood in the night shadows watching the traffic. He had an awareness of all the weight of the night city around him, of all the animal tensions of this single moment in time in this place, a shrewd and tawdry city, shining like toyland between the swamps and the sea. The night was weighted with derelicts and dancers, terminal breathing in wards, clenched fists of women as they pushed each time the pains came, chips in perfect alignment on green felt as men thumbed up the corners of the hole cars just enough to read the news, giggling young men in a chickenwire apartment painting the body of one of their chums a lovely gold, ambulances and tow trucks moving away in separate directions with a load of torn flesh or a load of ripped metal, thousands and thousands of picture tubes all telling the same jokes at the same instant to a hundred thousand living rooms, frantic rumps ram-packing the beach sand under the spread toweling, the simultaneous squirts of red tomato and yellow mustard in a hundred different places to disguise the flannelly taste of fried meat, a thousand simultaneous sobbings, thrashings, swallowings, vomitings, ejaculations, coughings, scratchings, cursings, shy touchings, whisperings, kickings...
He had never considered himself particularly imaginative. Never before had he felt this way about a city, and he knew that it could only be possible in a strange city, and at a time when grief and uncertainty and introspection had sharpened and heightened awareness.
This great Gold Coast became a gigantic cruise ship moving through time rather than space, constantly assimilating the foods, the newborn, the gadgetry, spewing aft the unending tonnage of garbage and waste and dead bodies and broken toys, rolling imperceptibly in the slow tides of history, the passengers unaware that no city is forever, that it will end one day and the eternality of time will cover it in a silence of dust, sand and vines. Each passenger, whether first class or steerage, was compelled to accept the constants of pain and time, greed and need, joy and love, fear and lust, and the iron paradox of self-awareness.
Each passenger knew beyond doubt that he was the only one aboard who could truly experience the ultimates of love and loss, that he was the only one with a secret destiny which would be made manifest to him some day, and that on that day everyone would come to understand what should have been evident to them all along.
So I am an impertinence, he thought. The weight of the night city is the weight of indifference, because they are busy with their own changings of bandages, their own cautious reachings to find out if, after all, there is anyone near enough to touch.
And using my life to buy better accommodations aboard ship is only another way to keep from thinking too often how short the journey is for each passenger. Bix Kayd and Carolyn, Roger and Stella, Staniker and his wife, Leila and Oliver Akard, they are back there in the darkness left forever at that exact moment when they left the big cruise, and we go wallowing along toward one as yet unmarked minute in time, one for me, one for Lyd, one for Boy-Sam, one for Cristen Harkinson, one for Nurse Theyma Chappie, one for The Chunk.
There was a concept, a justification, almost within reach. It was like awakening in the night from a dream, knowing you have The Answer to Everything.
Like the old joke, he thought. Okay, so life isn’t a grain of rice. Get a box, lawyer. Go yell the word from a park somewhere. Become one of those incredible people who have one simplified credo and try to make it fit every wrong in the world. Organic food. Communist conspiracy. Early rising. Do unto others. THINK. Balanced diet. Zen tennis. Auto-hypnosis. Rosicrucianism. Fasting.
Step right up to the cave of mysteries and yell your solution at the audio-lock. Somebody is going to yell the right word some day, and when the door swings open and suddenly we all know the answer to that primary question — Why? — we may find it unendurable to live with that answer.
On Tuesday afternoon at four o’clock, June seventh, Sam Boylston sat across the steel desk from John Lobwohl. Kindler was over at the right, straight chair tilted back against the wall. The Staniker tape ended. Sam pushed rewind, and the little machine began to whirr the tape back onto the reel.
Lobwohl yawned. “You’re all we needed, Mr. Boylston. A Texas lawyer messing up the scene, making like spy movies. Okay, it was your sister who died with the Kayd family. But what’s the point in you trying to cover for Kelly and that maid?”
“I explained that. And Kelly explained it to Kindler and Scheff. I’m trying to make a point here. We’ll never get to it unless you let me go through it in my own way, and ask the questions later.”
“You’re in a pretty poor position to try to make any points, Boylston. But go ahead.”
“Would you say that those tapes give a fair basis for suspecting that accident was fishy, Captain?”
“How did you get those tapes anyway?”
“They can’t be used as evidence of anything, so that’s beside the point, isn’t it? I want to know how you’d interpret them.”
Kindler asked permission to speak. Lobwohl nodded. Kindler said, “It’s a set piece all right. Memorized. But what I wonder is this. Staniker had a week alone on that island over there. He lost a good boat and a lot of people. He was a hired captain. It was his livelihood. So I think all that week, he’d be going over and over it, how to say it, because he’d know there’d be a lot of questions if and when he was rescued. So it would sound like that, like it had been memorized. And we can’t exactly bring Staniker in and sweat it out of him, Mr. Boylston.”
“What can you nail Mrs. Harkinson with, Captain?”
“As far as I can see, absolutely nothing.”
“But you’d like to find something you could make stick?”
“So bad everybody around here can taste it,” Kindler said.
Lobwohl said, “We’ve got her stashed. Apartment hotel. Kind of a compromise deal with her lawyer, Palmer Haas. Sneaked her out at noon today. Two men outside her door at all times. Damn it, we have some blanks to fill in. We’ve got to have that maid of hers.”
“Let me ask a hypothetical question. Just imagine I happened to have a tape of the maid’s story, very detailed, covering everything of interest to you. In Spanish, because she has little English. I listened to the whole thing. I have enough Spanish to follow it. And suppose I made proper identifications as the tape starts.”
“As a lawyer, certainly you know that tape is not...”
“Captain, I’m not talking about admissibility. I’m talking about leads and angles for investigation. And suppose I could give you a very pertinent and substantial piece of information, one that might change your thinking on the whole matter. Would you then, if you think the information valuable enough, slack off on trying to bring Francisca back here?”
Lobwohl pondered the question, sighed and said, “You told me you do not handle criminal cases. Do you know anything about poroscopy?”
“Only that it takes a good man to get it across to a jury without confusing them.”
“Right. The sweat pores on the ridges of prints have as distinctive and unique a pattern as the prints themselves, and we use it when we have fragmentary prints.” He opened a large folder on his desk and said, “Come around here, Boylston. This is the palm print we found on the rim of the tub in that number ten cottage. Here is the palm print Mrs. Harkinson let the Lab take for comparison purposes. We have twelve characteristic points of similarity, making it a positive match. She explains plausibly how she happened to leave the print on the tub on Friday night when she went to see Staniker. Now look at this area here.” He pointed to the pad at the base of the thumb. “This next glossy is a blowup of that portion of the hand, using a waxy material to bring up the pore structure. Ink hides it. Here is an impression of that same area. It came off the barrel of the 22 rifle. Here is another taken from the aluminum tiller bar of the sailboat. All we can really nail down is four points of similarity on the gunbarrel impression, and five points on the tiller impression. No absolute value as evidence.”