The Saint in Miami (7 page)

“How nice,” Peter said glumly. “So instead of being bumped off without any mess, we can look forward to being tortured until they find out just where they do stand.”

Patricia straightened suddenly.

Simon looked at her, and saw that her cheeks had gone pale under the golden tan.

“Then,” she said slowly, “if Gilbeck and Justine haven’t been murdered-if they’ve only been kidnapped-“

“Go on,” said the Saint steadily.

She stared at him from a masklike face that mirrored unthinkable things.

“If you’re right about all these things you’ve guessed-if March really is up to the neck in dirty business, and he’s afraid of Gilbeck giving him away-” One distraught hand rumpled her corn-gold hair. “If Gilbeck and, Justine are prisoners somewhere, this gang will do anything to make them talk.”

“They wouldn’t need to do much,” said the Saint. “Gilbeck would have to talk, to save Justine.”

“After which jolly interlude,” Peter said woodenly, “he can allow himself to be slaughtered in ineffable peace, secure in the knowledge that March and Company have nothing but affection for his fatherless little girl.”

“But they’d never believe him now,” Patricia said, shakily. “When he says he doesn’t know anything about any such letter, they’ll think that that’s just what he would say. They’ll torture him horribly, perhaps Justine too. They’ll go on and on, trying to find out something he can’t possibly tell them!” The Saint shook his head. He stood up restlessly, but his face was quite calm.

“I think you’re both wrong,” he said quietly. “If Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine are still alive, I think that letter will be their insurance policy. While he believes in it March won’t dare have them killed. And he won’t need to torture them. Directly he asks about it … well, Gilbeck didn’t make all his money by being slow on the trigger. He’ll catch on to the possibilities at once. He’ll say, sure, he left a letter, and what are they going to do about it? Isn’t that what you’d do? And what are they going to do about it? There’s no use torturing anyone who’s ready to tell you anything you want to hear. Gilbeck hasn’t got any secret information that they want.”

“How do you know?” asked Peter.

“I don’t,” Simon admitted. “But it isn’t probable. My theory is perfectly straightforward. Gilbeck just went into March’s Foreign Investment Pool. He was ready to overlook a few minor irregularities, as a lot of big business men would be. You don’t make millions by splitting ethical hairs. Then Gilbeck got in deeper, and found that some of the irregularities weren’t so minor. He got cold feet, and wanted to back out. But he was in too deep by that time-they couldn’t let him go. Now, our strategy is that he knew there’d be trouble, so he left a protective letter. All right. So there’s a letter, and I’ve got it.”

Patricia kept looking down, moving one hand mechanically over the contour of her knee.

“If only you had got it,” she said.

“It might help us a lot. But as It is, the myth is a pretty useful substitute. Unwittingly, we’ve put Gilbeck in balk. March has got to believe in the letter. I was firing a lot of shots in the dark, but they hit things. He won’t be able to figure where I got all my information, unless it was out of this imaginary letter. Which means that he’s got to take care of me before he can touch Gilbeck. And he’s got to be awfully cautious about that, unless he’s quite sure what angles I’m playing.”

“I’ll have to order some wool,” said Peter. “It sounds like a winter of sitting around and knitting while March’s outfit are sinking ships and wondering about you in their spare time.”

Simon crushed out his cigarette and took another one from the packet on the table. He sat down again and put his feet up.

“I read the morning papers in bed,” he said. “They’ve picked up a few bodies from that tanker, but no live ones. The way it happened, it wasn’t likely that there’d be any. The cause of the explosion is still an official mystery. There was no mention of a submarine, or any other clues. So perhaps we gummed up the plot when we caught that lifebelt.”

“It’s not so easy now to believe that we really saw a submarine,” said Patricia. “If we told anyone else, they’d probably say we’d been drinking.”

“We had,” answered the Saint imperturbably. “But I don’t know that we want to tell anyone else-yet. I’d rather find the submarine first.”

Peter leaned against a pillar and massaged his toes.

“I see,” he soliloquised moodily. “Now I take up diving. I tramp all over the sea’s bottom with my head in a tin goldfish bowl, looking for a stray submarine. Probably I find Gilbeck and Justine as well, tucked into the torpedo tubes.”

“There are less unlikely things,” said the Saint. “The sub must have a base on shore, which has got to be well hidden. And if it’s so well hidden, that’s where we’d be likely to find prisoners.”

“Which makes everything childishly easy,” Peter remarked. “There are approximately nine thousand, two hundred, and forty-seven unmapped islands in the Florida Keys, according to the guide-book, and they only stretch for about a hundred miles.”

“They wouldn’t be any good. A good base wouldn’t be too easy to hide from the air, and the regular plane service to Havana flies over the Keys several times a day.”

“Maybe it has a mother ship feeding it at sea,” Patricia ventured.

Simon nodded.

“Maybe. We’ll find out eventually.”

“Maybe you’d better call in the Navy,” said Peter. “That’s what they’re for.”

The Saint grinned irreverently,
“But it would make things so dull for us. I thought of a much more exciting way of invoking the Law. I called the Sheriff’s office in the middle of the night and told them that they could find a dead body on the March Hare. I hope it gave Randy a lot of fast explaining to do.”

“I hope you’ve got plenty of fast explanations yourself,” Peter said dampeningly, and pointed with one finger.

Simon looked round towards the driveway.

White dust swirled around the wheels of an approaching car. It disappeared behind the corner of the house. A minute later, Desdemona plodded heavily towards them across the patio. She came to anchor in front of the Saint, her brawny arms akimbo, and glared down at him with a face which intimated that she had found all her darkest forebodings justified.

De she’iff man’s hyah at de doah,” she announced indig-nantly. “He wants to see you!”

4

“I think,” said Patricia, getting to her feet, “that Peter and I will let you amuse him while we have another swim.” Simon waved them away.

“If you see me being taken off in the wagon,” he said, “don’t bother to wait lunch.”

A couple of moments after they had gone, the official presence of Sheriff Newton Haskins cast its long shadow into the cheery courtyard.

Seen in the bright light of day, the officer who had hailed them from the police boat appeared even thinner and more lugubrious than he had the night before. He was dressed in funereal black, defying the thermometer. His broadcloth coat was pushed open behind pocketed hands, disclosing a strip of spotless white shirt topped by a narrow and unfashionable black bow tie. He might very easily have been mistaken for an undertaker paying a business call on the bereaved-except for the width or the cartridge belt at his waist, which sagged to the right under the weight of a holstered gun.

His approach was leisurely. Hands in pockets, he watched Patricia’s and Peter’s retreat to the beach, studied the flowers, and cast an appraising glance up at the cloudless sky. Only after he had apparently satisfied himself that the heavens were still in place did he condescend to notice the Saint.

Extended backwards in his chair, with his ankles crossed on the table, Simon greeted him with a smile of carefree cordiality.

“Well, well, well,-if it isn’t our old friend Sheriff Haskins! Sit down, laddie. All my life I’ve heard of this southern hospitality, but I didn’t think a busy officer like you” would have time to come and welcome a mere tourist like me.”

Hands still in his pockets, Newt Haskins seated himself slowly in a metal garden chair with an exhibition of perfect muscular control. He began a survey at the Saint’s bare feet, enumerated his legs, reviewed his blue gabardine shorts and the rainbow pattern of his beach robe, and ended up gazing dispassionately into the Saint’s mocking eyes.

“You’d be surprised, son, how many crooks I’ve welcome to Miami in the past ten years.”

“Crooks, Sheriff?” Simon’s brows lifted in faint inquiry. “Do I misunderstand you, or is that meant to refer to me?”

Haskins’ left hand crawled out of its pocket like a turtle, bearing with it a plug of black tobacco. His deep-set sharp grey eyes sank farther into his Indian brown face as he bit off a chew. Holding the remainder of the plug, his hand crawled back into its hole again. Watching the methodical working of the muscles along his lean jaws, Simon had an irresistible nostalgic memory of another officer of the Law with whose habits he was much more familiar-the gum-chewing Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal of Scotland Yard.

“You, son? Now, there shuah ain’t no use leapin’ to conclusions thataway.” Haskins’ speech, when he was not shouting through a megaphone, lagged naturally into the native Floridian s drawl. “Actually, I come on a jaunt out heah to have a few words with Mr Gilbeck. Seein’ he warn’t around, I thought I might make myself sociable-like an’ pass the time o’ day.”

“A very noble impulse,” said the Saint reservedly. “But you have an ambiguous line of conversational gambits.”

The Sheriffs otter-trap lips pursed themselves, and for one tense moment Simon feared that a stream of tobacco juice was destined to desecrate the virgin whiteness of the stucco wall. The crisis passed when Haskins swallowed, moving his larynx pensively up and down.

‘Listen, son,” he said. “Every tout, grifter, dip, gambler, yegg, land shark, and mobster, from Al Capone down to any lush-rolling prostitute, hits this city sooner or later, and we find ‘em sunnin’ their bottoms along our shore.”

The Saint fluttered his eyelids and said: “But how poetical you are, daddy. Please tell sonny more.”

Haskins’ face remained glum, except for a passing glint in the depths of his lethargic grey eyes which might equally well have come either from anger or amusement
“Big and little, man and woman, killers an’ punks,” he said, “I’ve met ‘em all. They don’t none of ‘em scare me.”

“That takes a great load off my mind,” said the Saint, with the same dulcet challenge.

“I thought it might do you good to know.”

“Well,” drawled the Saint, with dangerous camaraderie. “Neighbour, that shuah is white of you. Ah ain’t met sech a speerit o’ kindheartedness sense mah ole gramppaw had his whiskers et plumb off by General Beauregard’s horse in the Civil Wah.”

Haskins rounded out a cavernous cheek with his cud of tobacco.

“Simon Templar,” he said, without heat, “you may think that’s a southern accent, but it stinks of Oxford to me.” He leaned back in his chair and stared skyward. “Modern police methods are makin’ it awful tough for the boys, son. I sent a cable to Scotland Yard last night, an’ I got an answer just before I come out heah.”

“Give me one guess and I’ll tell you who answered you.” A joyful smile began to dawn on the Saint’s face. “Is it possible - No, this is too good! … But is it possible that it could have been signed with the name of Teal?”

The Sheriff crossed his legs and fanned the air with a number eleven toe.

“I wonder if you’ll be so infernally happy when you know what he had to say.”

“But I know what he had to say. That’s what makes me so happy. If you’d only come to me in the first place, I could have saved you the cost of your wire. Let’s see-it would have been something like this … He told you that I’d run the gamut of crime from burglarly to murder-he thinks. That I dine on blackmail and arson seasoned with assault and battery-he suspects. That every time a body is found under the Chief Commissioner’s breakfast table, or somebody puts a home-made shilling into a cigarette machine, the whole CID spews itself into prowl cars and dashes off to arrest me-they hope. Was that it?”

“It didn’t have all those fancy touches,” Haskins allowed, “but that’s about how it read.”

Simon trickled blue smoke through insolent and delighted lips.

“There’s only one thing wrong with your reading,” he murmured. “You must have got so excited over the first part that you didn’t stop to read through to the end.”

“An” what might that have done for me?”

“You might have found out that all the first part was really nothing but the foam on poor old Teal’s fevered brain. You might have discovered that none of those things have ever been proved, that I’ve never been convicted of any of them or even brought to trial, that there isn’t the single ghost of a charge he could bring against me today, and that I’m known to be getting pretty damn tired of having every dumb cop in creation ringing my doorbell and making me listen to a lot of addlepated blather that he can’t prove.”

Haskins’ left hand sought daylight again without the plug of tobacco, and its blunt thumbnail made a test for stubble around the deep cleft of his chin.

“Son,” he said, “I’ve been compared to everything from the disappearin’ view of a racehorse at Tropical Park, to havin’ my maw never find out what my paw’s last name was. It ain’t never got a rise out of me. I don’t aim to change my tactics now. You and your friends are guests in a prominent citizen’s home, an’ I’m treatin’ you as such. But as Sheriff of this county I’ve got a few questions to ask you, and I expect you to answer ‘em.”

It was a rare event for Simon Templar to feel admiration for any professional enforcer of the Law. But admiration for any cool unflustered opponent who could meet him in his own field and exchange parry and riposte without vindictiveness but with a blade sharp enough to match his own, was a tribute which none of his instincts could refuse. He drew at his cigarette again, and over his fingers his eyes twinkled calculatingly blue but with all malice wiped out of them.

“I suppose that anything I say can be used as evidence against me,” he remarked cheerfully.

“If you’re fool enough to tell me anything incriminatm’,” said Haskins, “that’s true. Don’t blame me for it.”