3
He was breakfasting heartily on fried chicken and waffles served under the shade of a gaudily striped umbrella when Peter Quentin and Patricia joined him on the patio.
“You must have been tired,” Patricia slipped her bath robe back from her brown shoulders, and draped slender tanned legs and sandalled feet along the length of a cane chair. “Peter and I have been swimming for two hours. We thought you were going to sleep all day.”
“If we hadn’t heard you snoring,” said Peter, “we could have hoped you were dead.”
The Saint’s white teeth denuded a chicken bone.
“Early rising is the burden of the proletariat and the affectation of millionaires,” he said. “Being neither, I try to achieve a very happy mean.” Holding the bone in one hand, he used it as a pointer to indicate the retreating form of a billowy negress who was waddling away into the background with a tray. “Where did the Black Narcissus come from? She wasn’t here yesterday. She says her name’s Desdemona, and I find it hard to believe.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Patricia told him. “She showed up this morning with a coloured chauffeur named Eben. It was their day off yesterday.”
“That’s interesting.” Simon stirred his coffee. “And the Filipino houseboy was down town on some errand. So nobody actually saw how Gilbeck and Justine left.”
“They phoned,” she said, and he nodded.
“I’ve helped people to make phone calls myself, in my day.”
Peter Quentin hoisted his powerful trunk-clad form on to a sun-warmed coping, and swung his sandy feet.
“If the Gilbecks don’t show up today, skipper, do we just stick around?”
Simon leaned back and glanced around contentedly at the semi-tropical scene. The house sprawled out around him, cool and spacious under the roof of Cuban tile. A riot of poinsettias, hibiscus, and azaleas bordered the inner wall of the estate and overflowed into the patio. On the other side of the house, a palm-lined driveway swept in a horseshoe towards Collins Avenue. The heightened colours drawn in flashing sunwashed lines made a picture-book setting for the ocean’s incredible blue.
“I like the place,” said the Saint. “Gilbeck or no Gilbeck, I think I’ll stay. Even without the succulent Justine. Desdemona cooks with the thistledown touch of a fairy queen. It’s true that she sometimes looks at me with what a more sensitive man might think was black disapproval, but I feel I can win her. I’m sure that she’ll learn to love me before we part.”
“It’ll be one of your biggest and blackest failures if she doesn’t,” said Patricia.
Simon ignored her scathingly and lighted a cigarette.
“Here in the midst of this epicurean if somewhat decadent Paradise,” he said, “we can exist in sumptuous and sybaritic splendour at Comrade Gilbeck’s expense, even though we may have to deny ourselves such British luxuries as bubble-and-squeak and toad-in-the-hole. It’s a beautiful place to live. Also it’s full of fascinating people.”
“You haven’t tried the restaurant where I had dinner last night, when I was out sleuthing for you,” said Peter Quentin. “They served me a very fat pork chop fried in peanut oil, and coffee with canned milk which turned it a disappointed grey. There was also a plate of grass and other vegetable matter, garnished with a mayonnaise compounded of machine oil and soap flakes.”
“The fascinating people are the principal attraction,” Patricia explained. “Particularly the one with red hair.”
The Saint half closed his eyes.
“Darling, I’m afraid our one and only Hoppy must have been embroidering the story. I told you last night exactly what happened. The whole thing was most casual. Somehow she has fallen under the baleful spell of March’s Gastric Ambrosia, but naturally my superior beauty impressed her. I judged her to be a demure little thing, unversed in the ways of the world and unskilled in duplicity.”
“And shy,” said Patricia.
“Perhaps. But certainly not lacking—at least in several major points which a crude man might find attractive in that particular type of girl.”
“I suppose that’s why you offered to find some more fun for her.”
“So long as she has her fun,” Peter observed, “it can’t really matter if you get us all bumped off.”
Simon created a perfect smoke-ring.
“We don’t have to worry about that for the present. I think our murders will be temporarily postponed on account of the hitch which I contrived last night.”
“You mean that letter you invented?”
Simon refrained from answering while Desdemona hove alongside to collect the dishes. When the last of them was on the tray supported by her ample arm, she asked stoically,
“When is you-all goin’ away?”
The Saint flipped a half-dollar in the air, caught it, and placed it on the edge of the laden tray.
“That was one of the best breakfasts I ever ate, Desdemona,” he told her. “I think we’ll wait until Mr Gilbeck gets back.” He added deliberately, “Are you sure they didn’t give you any idea how long they’d be away?”
“’Deed they didn’t.” Desdemona’s eyes grew round as they moved from Simon to the shiny coin. “Sometimes they’s gone a week acruisin’. Sometimes ’tain’t moh than foh a day.”
She departed stolidly on that enlightening note, and Peter grinned.
“You’d better try some folding money next time,” he suggested. “She doesn’t seem to thaw for silver.”
“All artists are temperamental.” Simon stretched his legs and took up from where he had been interrupted. “Yes, I was talking about that letter which I was clever enough to invent.”
“What makes you think they believe in it any more?”
“Perhaps they don’t. But on the other hand, they don’t know for certain. That’s the catch. And even if they’ve decided that I really didn’t have a letter last night, the idea’s been put into their head. There might be a letter. I might even write one myself, having seen how they reacted to the idea. It’s a discouraging risk. So they won’t bump us off until they’re quite sure about it.”
“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 know at once that we’re on the job. 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, until 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 gold-fish-bowl, looking for a stray submarine. Probably I’ll 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 guidebook, 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 indignantly. “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 of 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 welcomed 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’s 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 that-away.” Haskins’s 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 sheriff’s otter-trap lips pursed themselves, and for one tense moment Simon feared that a stream of tobacco juice was desti
ned 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’s 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’ kind-heartedness sence 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 skywards. “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 it is 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 burglary 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?”
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 6
