“What does she say?”
“What she says now is filtered through Palmer Haas. She says that as she was taking sailing lessons, it would not be surprising to have some sort of print on the tiller bar. She says also that Oliver brought the gun over because of the palm-tree rats. He shot five of them and buried them next to the roots of some kind of plant out there.”
“Scheff found them,” Kindler said.
“She says that she remembered the gun and before she took her sleeping pill, she took it down and put it in the boat so he wouldn’t have the excuse of coming back for it. Right now we are trying to locate any friend of the Akard boy who could have brought him around to get the sailboat out of her little boat basin Sunday evening.”
Lobwohl, yawning again, got up and went over to the chalk board on his office wall. Swiftly he drew a shoreline, a crude outline of the Harkinson house, a symbol for the sailboat, a box to show where the boy’s car was parked.
“Here is what we have to wonder about, Boylston. Was the palm print made Friday night or Sunday night. Lab found two blonde hairs in the cottage, and microscopic comparison of root structure and cross sections show they came from her head. Were they left there Friday or Sunday night? What would the scheduling be if they were left there Sunday night. The boy comes and gets the boat, because apparently she was still there when it was gone. He picks her up, sails down to where he left the car. They go see Staniker and kill him. Drive back in his car. The boy sails her back to her place and leaves her off. Then he can’t stand the thought of losing her forever and the idea of having helped kill somebody, so he knocks himself off. You see the hole in all that, of course.”
“Motive,” Sam Boylston said. “She would have a lot easier ways of shedding a boyfriend. What if I could give you all the motive you’d need?”
Lobwohl, teetering from heel to toe, regarded him somberly. “You wouldn’t get on my nerves so bad, Boylston. That’s all I can give you.”
Sam Boylston hesitated and then took the two tapes in their metal boxes out of his jacket pocket. “These are the Francisca Torcedo tapes. In Spanish, so you’ll need a transcript in English.”
Lobwohl held them out to Kindler. “Put Lopez on it.”
“Don’t say anything fascinating until I’m through in the kitchen,” Kindler said as he left.
“They goofed,” Lobwohl said. “Scheff and Kindler. When they couldn’t come up with the maid, they had to tell me how it happened. Telling it practically made their teeth ache. They’re the best I’ve got in homicide. Want to know a funny thing? If they hadn’t goofed, I wouldn’t still have the case. There are some people upstairs who like to reach down and take over the jazzy cases, if everything is going smooth. It is a celebrity angle. But if things are going a little sour, they’d rather have it stay down here where the pros are. No glory in having to make explanations.”
When Kindler came back he had Barney Scheff with him. Scheff was introduced. He did not seem entirely pleased to know Sam Boylston. They sat down.
When Lobwohl nodded at Sam, he said, “If you check it out you will find that Bixby Kayd and Ferris Fontaine were associated in some business ventures. You will find that the members of the inner circle sometimes held their conferences aboard the boat Fontaine gave his mistress. I can guess that Kayd was aboard that cruiser for one or more of those meetings. When you get the transcript of the Francisca tapes, you will find out that Bix Kayd visited Cristen Harkinson at her home on the last day of March, a little over two weeks before he arrived back in Miami and hired Staniker. He had a rental limousine and driver. You should be able to trace that. Questions?”
Lobwohl no longer looked tired enough to yawn. “Is this the implication? Kayd was trying to locate Staniker through Crissy Harkinson?”
“Because he could have heard and remembered that Staniker knew the Islands well. And because he would know Fontaine wouldn’t have used a hired captain who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about private affairs and business deals. This is speculation, of course.”
“And so?” the Captain asked.
“And so there happened to be eight hundred thousand dollars in cash aboard the Muñeca when that accident happened.”
The three police faces had the same listening look as, in the silence, they reshuffled the facts.
“Son of a bitch,” murmured Barney Scheff. “Why cash?”
“To swing a land deal, buy some votes on a Board.”
“Will we be able to prove that money was aboard?” Lobwohl asked.
“Not a chance. The people who can verify it would lie like hell to save their skins from the tax man.”
“Have you ever heard of withholding evidence?” Lobwohl asked with dangerous courtesy.
Sam Boylston looked hurt and astonished. “Without information about the money, I didn’t have a thing worth telling, Captain. I got a lead on the money this morning, from a friend of a friend, and here I am.”
“This gets out,” Scheff said, “and the news guys are going to fall on the floor and foam at the mouth and giggle themselves to death.”
Lobwohl hit his own forehead lightly with the heel of his right hand. “Friday she goes to see Staniker. He tells her where he cached the money. If she was sure he wasn’t lying, and the money was reasonably safe, the best thing for her would be Staniker dead.”
“And,” said Kindler with a certain note of awe, “he was the deadest looking dead I ever did see. He was a husk, like something shed him and crawled off.”
“Captain,” Sam said, “what is the time of death on Staniker?”
“Ten o’clock, plus or minus an hour.”
“When you get the transcript of the Francisca tape, you’ll see that it takes Mrs. Harkinson out of the picture. I could understand enough of it to realize Raoul Kelly was being very thorough about nailing down the exact times. Francisca looked in and saw Mrs. Harkinson asleep in her bed at quarter after nine. There was a night light on. Later, at quarter to midnight, Francisca and Kelly heard the pump running and knew Mrs. Harkinson was using water in the main house. At ten past midnight Mrs. Harkinson called Francisca on the intercom and asked for some cocoa and crackers. She said she had awakened and taken a shower to see if it would relax her enough to go back to sleep, but it hadn’t. With the gates locked and with no car available to her, I guess it would check out that she just wouldn’t have had time to sail two miles, drive with the boy to Coral Gables, drive back, sail back to her place. It could be done, I suppose, if Staniker was all ready to hop into the tub and hold his wrists out. But you say he took on a pretty fair load of alcohol and barbiturates. It would take time for that to work.”
“Assuming,” said Lobwohl, “that the maid wasn’t given a little present of money to establish those times, Mr. Boylston.”
“No. Not that one. Or Kelly.”
“So you’re a great judge of character, eh?” Scheff asked Sam.
“Knock it off,” Lobwohl ordered. “Let’s see where we are. You represent Kelly and the maid, Boylston. We’ve got tangible evidence that the Akard kid killed Staniker. If he’d cut one wrist and fixed the door so it would lock when he left, we might have bought it as suicide, at least until we got a look at what was in the kid’s wallet. Harv says with the kid it was definitely suicide. The arm was long enough and the barrel short enough, and the muzzle was right in his ear when he thumbed the trigger. And I don’t see how we’ve got a chance in the world of proving the Harkinson woman pressured the kid into killing Staniker. We keep the Harkinson woman on ice until the Grand Jury indicts Akard on a murder first charge, then takes up Akard as a new matter and accepts our file and calls it suicide. Now let me make a little prediction. The Harkinson woman will disappear. She’ll sell that house. And some day she’ll go pick up all that money. So I wonder a little about you, Boylston. You’re convinced she was the moving force behind Staniker’s killing the people, taking the money, and convincing a lot of people it was an accident. We have you and we have your sister’s boyfriend, that Jonathan Dye, to wonder about. You just don’t look like somebody who’s going to say it’s too bad, she got away with it, let’s go home and forget it. There’s something about you Texans. Maybe it’s a vigilante attitude. A sense of family. Blood for blood. You’re a lawyer. You should know better. But I wonder if you do.”