Gulf Coast Girl

by Charles Williams

  “The hell with Mrs. Macaulay,” I said.

  “Forgive me if I talk too much. Grow philosophical at sea, particularly under sail. Unpleasant habit.”

  “What are you going to do with her after you find the plane?”

  “Frankly, I haven’t given it any thought, old boy. And since neither of us gives a damn what happens to her, as you say, why waste time in speculation? Lovely night, isn’t it? Are you fond of Swinburne?”

  “We were like that,” I said. “What did Macaulay do?”

  “He tried to steal, or did steal, some three quarters of a million dollars worth of diamonds from us.”

  The sum meant nothing to me. He could have said twenty dollars or a billion and it would have been the same as far as I was concerned. It was something they were after, and Macaulay had been after. I was just a pedestrian who had been shoved into the line of march and run over.

  The breeze was almost directly abeam. We shipped some water amidships and a little spray blew into the cockpit. Barclay handled her well; he was a good helmsman. A clumsy one might have had the cockpit full by this time. I leaned down and cupped my hands to light another cigarette and looked around at him. The brown eyes gazed thoughtfully at the compass card. He was the most completely baffling human being I had ever run into, and I knew somehow that if we were to sail this boat around the world for the rest of our lives, just the two of us, I wouldn’t be any nearer to understanding him on the last day than the first. He was cold-blooded, entirely without conscience, and still you almost liked him. Why, I didn’t know.

  “Since you were in the salvage business,” he went on, “you must be familiar with the Shetland Queen.”

  I looked up suddenly. “Sure. I remember her.”

  She had lost her rudder in a tropical disturbance last fall and hit a reef somewhere along the northern edge of the Campeche Bank. As I recalled the story she had gone on across it as the sea piled up, but there had been too much damage below water line and she had gone down a few hours later. The crew had got away all right. She was in about ten fathoms, and the underwriters had let a contract to salvage as much of the cargo as wasn’t ruined. They had saved some machinery and several thousand cases of whisky that somehow hadn’t been smashed.

  “So that’s the first time your diamonds were dunked,” I said. “But where did Macaulay get into the act?”

  As soon as I asked, I began to get the connection. Salvage—underwriters; so she had been telling the truth about part of it, anyway. The part about his being in the marine insurance business.

  “That is correct,” he said. “They were aboard the Shetland Queen. But—” He looked up and smiled in the faint glow from the binnacle. “Through some oversight they didn’t appear on the cargo manifest or any of the customs lists. To be exact, they were in some cases of tinned cocoa which had been loaded in Holland and were consigned to a small importing firm in New Orleans. Quite an economical way to ship diamonds, if you follow me, except that it can be damned embarrassing if something happens to the ship, as in this case. The cocoa was insured, as I recall, for some two or three hundred dollars. And naturally we should have looked a little silly trying to explain to the underwriters at that stage of the game that we hadn’t really meant chocolate at all, but diamonds, and that they should pay us three quarters of a million when we’d paid a premium on a valuation of three hundred dollars. Hardly sporting, what? And one might anticipate a certain element of skepticism on their part. To say nothing of the embarrassment of attempting to explain a harmless prank like that to the customs chaps. Lacking in true appreciation of these little matters, the customs people.

  “It was something of an impasse, as you may well imagine. Benson and Teen had paid off all claims, including ours, and were engaged in salvaging what they could, but naturally this didn’t mean they were going to waste any time and effort in bringing up insignificant items of general cargo such as a few dollars’ worth of tinned cocoa. They paid, and wrote it off. We made a few tentative feelers. Inasmuch as they were working inside the ship anyway, and inasmuch as the sea pressure at that depth probably hadn’t been sufficient to crush the tins, why didn’t they merely bring up our cocoa and let us withdraw our claim? They brushed this aside as ridiculous. They were working in the open sea, salvage operations are deucedly expensive, and they had no intention at all of trifling with such picayune items. We let the matter drop, knowing that any insistence would excite suspicion. We’d be forced to wait until they were finished with the wreck and then undertake a salvage operation of our own.

  “But, unfortunately, some—ah—competitors of ours began to suspect what was in the wind and also tried to purchase the cocoa from Benson and Teen. This proved to be a little too much for the gentleman who was in charge of the operation for them—the late Francis L. Macaulay. This obviously valuable chocolate began to intrigue him, so he sent a confidential emissary down to Mexico to go out to the scene of operations and look into it on the quiet. This chap asked to have the cocoa brought up, and since he was ostensibly acting for Benson and Teen through the person of Macaulay, they brought it up. It took him only a few minutes, of course, to determine what made it so valuable. He devalued it forthwith, saying nothing to anyone. As soon as he was back in the little Mexican port where the salvaged cargo was being landed, he called Macaulay by long-distance telephone.

  “They had two problems. The first was, of course, our original one—getting the stones into the United States without paying duty or having to answer any embarrassing questions as to where they had come from. The second was to keep us from recovering them. We had two men in the Mexican port keeping an eye on the cargo that was brought in. Macaulay solved both problems at once. He had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War, and held a pilot’s license. He came down to the Gulf Coast, chartered a big amphibian, and came after his colleague and the stones. They were to rendezvous in a laguna some ten or fifteen miles to the east of the Mexican port. They did, but our men were there, too, having become suspicious of Macaulay’s man and followed him in another motorboat. They lost him in the jungle, but saw the plane coming in and arrived at the spot just as the man was climbing aboard. Macaulay was helping him, and our chaps recognized him. They opened fire, killing the other man, but Macaulay got the plane off the water and escaped.”

  “With your stupid diamonds,” I said.

  He nodded. “So we thought. Macaulay never did go back to New York, suspecting that inasmuch as our men had recognized him as the pilot of the plane engaged in stealing three quarters of a million dollars from us we might feel ill-disposed toward him. His wife disappeared also. The firm said he had suffered a heart attack and resigned. He’d told them, originally, that he had to go to the Coast because of illness in the family, or some such story. We tried to trail him. He escaped us rather narrowly two or three times. But the strange part of it was that he apparently had never made any attempt to sell any of his loot. We began to understand then, just about the time we ran him down in Sanport. He hadn’t sold it, or tried to, because he didn’t have it.

  “He escaped us in Sanport, taking off in another plane. We learned that another man had been with him, a man carrying an aqualung diving outfit. Macaulay, incidentally, couldn’t swim a stroke. As soon as we learned of the diver, of course, we knew what had happened. The metal box containing the diamonds had fallen into the laguna during those few hectic moments when Macaulay’s friend was killed.

  “Our only hope lay in staying so close to Mrs. M. she’d have to lead us to him eventually. But just about that time we began to have a strong suspicion he was back in Sanport. Perhaps you missed the little item in the paper, but just about five days after Macaulay took off, a fishing boat docked with a castaway it had picked up in a rubber life raft on the Campeche Bank. This man, the captain said, gave them some vague story about being a pilot for some Mexican company and having crashed while en route from Tampico to Progreso alone in a seaplane. But he had, strangely, just vanished the minu
te the fishing boat docked.”

  “I get it now,” I said. “As soon as she got in touch with me you knew the castaway was Macaulay. He’d gone back to the laguna with a diver to hunt for the box. But how do you know he found it, or even got there? Maybe he crashed on the way down.”

  “No. He crashed on the way back. So the box is in the plane.”

  “I see. And from the fact that he was trying to hire me to do some more diving for him, you realized he knew where the plane was and could go back to it?”

  Barclay nodded. “Correct. We also suspected he was right there in the house, but that taking him alive wasn’t going to be easy. He was armed, and very scared.”

  “The thing that puzzles me,” I said, “is that you and your meat-headed thugs never did put the arm on her to find out where the plane was. You’re convinced now she knows where it is, but you let her come and go there for a week or more right under your noses.”

  “We weren’t certain she knew then.”

  “But you are now. Why?”

  He hooked a leg over the tiller and used both hands to light a cigarette. The glow of Sanport’s lights was fading on the horizon.

  “It’s really quite simple,” he explained, filling his lungs with smoke. “As a matter of fact, I’m a little ashamed I didn’t think of it before. I merely wrote Macaulay a letter two days ago and pointed out the advisability of telling her where it was.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe you’d better run through that again. You wrote him a letter—where?”

  “Addressed to his house, naturally. Even if he weren’t there she would get it to him.”

  “And he’d be sure to tell her, just because you suggested it? Don’t be stupid. There’s no reason at all he’d do it.”

  He smiled again. “I disagree, old boy. There was a very good reason he would tell her. Remember, Macaulay was in the insurance business. He didn’t sell life insurance, but he was familiar with the necessity for it as well as any married man and probably more so than most. I simply pointed out that inasmuch as there was always a chance something might happen to him, it behooved him to protect her.”

  “By telling her where the plane was?” I asked incredulously.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And wouldn’t that be wonderful?” I said. “That way he could guarantee she’d be kidnapped and beat up and put through the wringer by you and the rest of your sadistic bastards—”

  He shook his head gently. “I’m afraid you still don’t see it, at least not from Macaulay’s point of view, old chap. There was no doubt as to her being interrogated; he knew that. But suppose she didn’t know where the plane was?”

  I turned and looked at him, and it took perhaps a full second for the slow horror of it to catch up with me. “Good God—”

  “Precisely, old boy. Life insurance, you see. He was leaving her the only thing that could stop the questions.”

  I saw then what Macaulay must have gone through in those last few hours. He couldn’t turn to the police because he had already left the protection of the law. There was a good chance he would be killed, and he was going to leave her right in their hands. He had to tell her.

  “Hostage to fortune, you see,” Barclay murmured. “The exposed nerve end again.”

  I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at him. “You dirty son—”

  I stopped. I’d forgotten him. A number of things were beginning to click in my mind, all at the same time. She’d told the truth about his job. She’d told the truth about their trying to get away to Central America. Barclay had sent that letter to Macaulay only two days ago. Macaulay had told one lie, to his company, about where he’d been going when he left New York. Maybe—

  No. He’d been on his way back when he crashed. She’d still been lying when she said he’d been trying to get to Central America. But I had to talk to her. I stood up.

  “I’m going below,” I said.

  “No.” Barclay shook his head. “George is asleep.”

  I was tight with rage. “I said I was going below. Wake him up. Tell him to hold his goddamned gun with both hands. Tell him to sit on it. Tell him to come up here and jump overboard. I’m going down there.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I want to talk to Shannon Macaulay.”

  I could see it in his face in the glow from the binnacle. He was smart. He had more pure intelligence than anybody I had ever known. He saw the possibilities of it and knew what I wanted to ask her. And not only that. He was already adding it up on his side of the ledger. He hadn’t wanted to prove she was lying, in the first place. Always increase the areas of vulnerability; don’t decrease them.

  “George,” he called. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” came the weary answer from inside the cabin. “What’s biting our stupid friend now?”

  I went below and switched on the chart lamp. He was lying in the starboard bunk smoking a cigarette with his jacket and tie off and his collar unbuttoned. The gun was in a shoulder holster under his left arm. He was big and tough, and his eyes blinked sourly at the light.

  “Look, Snerd,” he said. “Why don’t you flake out somewhere and get off my back?”

  I walked over and stood staring down at him. “Get out,” I said.

  He started to rise to his elbows. “Why, you dimwit—”

  “George, come here a moment,” Barclay called from the cockpit.

  “Better run along, baby,” I said. “Your boss is whistling for you.”

  He swung his legs over the side of the bunk and slowly sat up. The gray eyes looked hungrily at me for a moment, and then Barclay called out again.

  “Just keep on asking for it, Snerd,” he said. He turned his back and went out.

  I parted the curtains and went into the forward part of the cabin. She was lying on the starboard bunk with her face in her arms.

  Eleven

  Shannon,” I said.

  “What, Bill?” Her voice was muffled.

  “How long have you known what these gorillas are after?”

  She turned slowly on her back and looked up at me. The gray eyes were dry now, but they were washed out and dead.

  “Since three o’clock this afternoon,” she said.

  I sighed, and felt suddenly weak with relief or joy, or both. I’d been right. All the cancerous growth of bitterness was gone and I wanted to kneel beside the bunk and take her in my arms. Instead I lit a cigarette and put it between her fingers. “I want to apologize,” I said.

  Her head moved almost imperceptibly. “Don’t. I sold you out, Bill.”

  “No,” I whispered. “You didn’t know. I thought you had lied, but you hadn’t. It doesn’t matter that he was lying to you.”

  “Don’t make it any worse, Bill. Don’t you see? I still betrayed you. I had six hours to call you, and you could have got away. I tried to, but I couldn’t. I thought I owed him that, in spite of what he did. Maybe I was wrong, but I think I’d still do it the same way. I don’t know how to explain—”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “You were telling the truth all the time. That’s the only thing that matters.”

  She stared up at me. “Why does it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I did know. It was the only thing I knew, or even had room for in my mind. I wanted to shout it out to her, or sing it, but I kept my face blank and lit a cigarette for myself.

  “I’m sorry about it,” I said gently.

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “It’s all right. He didn’t have a chance, anyway. I think they knew he was in the house, and anything we tried would have failed.”

  The ash was growing long on her cigarette. She glanced at it dully and cast her eyes about for a tray. There was one made of half a milk can in the rack on the bulkhead above the bunk. I reached it down and held it for her. She tried to smile. Just looking at her made my breath catch in my throat. I squatted on my heels with my back braced against the other bunk and my face on
a level with hers.

  “Why hadn’t he ever told you?” I asked.

  “Ashamed, I think. He wasn’t a criminal, Bill. He wasn’t even dishonest. There was just too much of it, and it was too easy, and no one would ever know.”

  “It’s too bad,” I said. “It’s a dirty shame.”

  She turned her face a little, and her eyes met mine squarely. “You know I must have suspected it, don’t you? Nobody could be stupid enough not to guess there must be more to it than he told me. I did suspect it. I can’t deny it. I was cheating when I told you what he told me, because I was afraid it wasn’t the truth, or not all the truth. But what could I do? Tell you I thought my husband was lying? Did I owe you more than I did him? Doesn’t eight years of time mean anything, or the fact he had never lied to me before, or that he’d always been wonderful to me? I’d do it again. You’ll just have to think what you will.”

  “If you’re selecting a jury,” I said, “I’ve already formed an opinion. I’ll tell you about it, some day.”

  What some day? We had about five left, if we were lucky.

  “Wait, Bill,” she whispered. “You don’t know all of it yet. When you do you’ll think I’m a fool. You see, he wasn’t on his way down there when he crashed. He was coming back.”

  I realized I’d forgotten that. “I know. To Sanport.”

  “Not to Sanport. To somewhere on the Florida coast, where he was going to destroy the plane and disappear. Don’t you see? He was leaving me.”

  I got it then. “And you’d have gone on to Honduras, thinking he would be there? And when he wasn’t, you’d have been certain he was dead? Down somewhere in the Gulf, or in the jungle?”

  “Yes,” she said. Then she smiled a little bitterly. “But I wasn’t the one he wanted to convince. He was just trading me, you see—”