Oddly, his surprise seemed as sincere as his anger. But there was no time to puzzle out nuances like that. The Saint said, “Drilling me won’t get you anywhere. And if you don’t know how Haskins got here, I don’t either.”
“Talk fast,” said Gallipolis, “and don’t lie. The sheriff never spotted this barge. Who tipped him off?”
“On my word of honour,” said the Saint steadily. “I wish I knew.”
Over the bar, Gallipolis gazed at him with relentless penetration. The slender fingers of his right hand twined with deceptive laxness about the pistol grip of his weapon. The liquid eyes roved through impenetrable fancies, as though he were working out lyrics for a ballad entitled “Death Comes to the Houseboat,” or something else equally delightful. But when he grinned again, he looked exactly the same as he had before.
“Look, master mind,” he said. “The sheriff is your problem. You brought Jennet here. Nobody can prove I ever saw him before. If this is a plant, it stinks. If it isn’t, you find a way out of it.”
“We can both find a way out of it, if you’ll give me a chance. But get rid of the typewriter, or you’re in deeper than anyone.”
Gallipolis digested the thought, and seemed to make his choice.
“This is a hell of a way to make a living,” he remarked, and gave a tired sigh. The hole in the floor under the bar was still exposed. He deposited the sub-machine-gun tenderly in it, and slid the bar back, and said, “I may be a sucker, but I just wish I knew when you were levelling. There’s something screwy going on, but I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I,” said the Saint, and his manner was almost friendly.
Gallipolis looked hopeful.
“If you want to scram now, you’ve still got time.”
“I think I’ll stay.”
“I was afraid so,” said Gallipolis sadly.
It was at that moment that another sound made itself heard.
It was a raucous and rasping sound, a primitive ululation that seemed to bear little relation to any vocal effort that might have been wrung from the diaphragm of an articulate human being. An experienced African hunter might have associated it with some of the more hideous rumblings of the wild such as the howl of an enraged rhinoceros, or the baffled bellow of a water-buffalo which has arrived at its favourite wallow only to find it parched and dry. This doughty hunter would have been pardonably deceived. The sound did have a human origin, if Mr Uniatz can be broadly classified as human. It was his rendition of a groan.
Simon turned and looked at him.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Mr Uniatz stood gazing at a bottle without making any attempt to assimilate its contents, gripped in a kind of horripilant torpor like a rabbit fascinated by a snake.
“What’s the matter?” Simon demanded with real alarm.
Mr Uniatz tried to speak, only to find himself impeded by the bulk of a painfully dust-caked tongue. Mutely he pointed with a trembling finger, which indicated the contents of the bottle better than words. In a shaft of afternoon sunlight through the gun port, the liquid gleamed with the translucent clarity of a draught from the backyard pump—refreshing, innocuous, unsullied, colourless, and clear. A shudder of abhorrence jarred his gargantuan frame. To one who in his opulent days had quaffed the finest and most potent liquors on the market, such an offering was an affront. To one who in less prosperous times had uncomplainingly got by with snacks of rubbing alcohol, lemon extract, Jamaica ginger, or bay rum, this disgusting fluid promised to titillate his palate about as much as a feather would tickle an armadillo.
“It’s a bottle of dat stinkin’ Florida water, boss,” Hoppy got out miserably. “I smelled dat stuff before. Dis ain’t no bar—it’s a washroom.”
Gallipolis turned insultedly from staring through the window.
“That’s the hottest water you ever tasted, big boy. It comes fresh from a local spring. Why don’t you try it?” He filled his own glass, grinned at Simon, and said, “Here’s to crime!”
The Saint sniffed his portion experimentally. It didn’t seem at first as if Hoppy could be entirely wrong. The bad-egg bouquet brought back memories of sulphur springs flowing through fetid swamps. But Hoppy had to be given a lesson in good manners.
Simon closed his eyes and drank the liquor down.
He realised the gravity of his error before the sabre-toothed distillation of pine knots and turpentine was half through making scar tissue of his tongue. But by that time it was far too late. He tried to gasp out “Water!” but the descending decoction had temporarily cauterised his throat in one clean searing tonsillectomy. Smouldering vocal cavities excavated into strange shapes by the toxic stream sent out the request in an impotent whisper. Tear ducts dilated in salty sympathy. He propped himself feebly against the bar, believing that the power of speech was lost to him for ever.
Through a watery haze he watched Hoppy Uniatz, reassured, lift up the bottle, tilt back his head to the position of a baying wolf, and lower the contents by three full inches before he straightened his neck again.
“Chees, boss…”
Mr Uniatz momentarily released his lips from the bottle with the partly satiated air of a suckling baby. He stared at it with a slightly blank expression. Then, as if to batter his incredulous senses into conviction, he raised the bottle a second time. The level had dropped another four inches when he set it down again, and even Lafe Jennet’s graven scowl softened in compulsive admiration.
“Chees, boss,” said Mr Uniatz, “if dat’s de local spring water I ain’t drinkin’ nut’n else from now on!”
The Saint wiped his scorched lips with his handkerchief, and looked at it as if he expected to find brown holes in the cloth. He was even incapable of paying much attention to the entrance of Sheriff Haskins into the bar. He breathed with his mouth open, ventilating his anguished mucous tissues, while Haskins draped himself against the door and said, “Hullo, son.”
“Hullo, Daddy.” The Saint valiantly tried to coax his voice back into operation. “It’s nice to see you again so soon. You know Mr Gallipolis?—Sheriff Haskins.”
“Shuah, I know him.” Haskins chewed ruminatively. “He’s a smart young feller. Runs a nice quiet juke we’ve knowed about for a yeah or more. I figgered to raid it one o’ these days, but I gave up the idea.” He nodded tolerantly towards the reddening Greek. “He ain’t big enough to use that much gas on. I’d have no time for anythin’ else if I started knockin’ off every ten-cent joint around Miami that runs a poker game an’ sells a bad brand o’ shine.”
Gallipolis leaned his elbows on the bar.
“Then what did you come for, Sheriff?”
“This.”
Haskins moved like a striking rattler, snatching off the dark glasses that Simon had bought for Jennet. Jennet snarled like a dog, and snatched at the bottle on the bar. It must always be in doubt whether Hoppy Uniatz’s even faster response was the automatic action of a co-operative citizen or the functioning of a no less reflex instinct to retain possession of his newly discovered elixir. But no matter what his motivation might have been, the result was adequate. One of his iron paws grabbed Jennet’s wrist, and the other wrenched the bottle away. There was a click of metal as Haskins deftly handcuffed the struggling convict.
“Thanks,” said the sheriff dryly, giving Hoppy the benefit of the doubt, and at the same time giving Mr Uniatz his first and only accolade from the Law. “You’re wanted up near Olustee, Lafe, to do some road work you ain’t never finished. Might think you were a tourist, the way you were ridin’ around town.”
“I was kidnapped,” Jennet whined. “Why don’t you arrest them, too?” His manacled hands indicated the Saint and Hoppy. “They drug me out here at the point of a gun.”
“Now, that’s right interestin’,” said Haskins.
He turned his back on Jennet and walked to a place beside Simon at the bar. He moved his left thumb, and Gallipolis produced another bottle of shine, Hoppy having cautiously taken the first bottle out of
range of further accidents. Haskins refilled the Saint’s glass and poured himself a liberal drink.
Simon Templar contemplated the repeat order of nectar unenthusiastically. The stuff had an inexhaustible range of effects. At the moment, the first dose was still with him: his throat was cooling a little, but his stomach now felt as if he had swallowed an ingot of molten lead. Besides which, he wanted to think quickly. If there were going to be a lot of questions to answer, he had to decide on his answering line. And disintegrating as the idea might seem, he simply couldn’t perceive any line more straightforward, more obvious, more foolproof, more unchallengeable, more secure against further complications, and more utterly disarming, than the strict and irrefutable truth—so far as it went. It was a strange conclusion to come to, but he knew that subterfuge was a burden that was only worth sustaining when its objective was clearly seen, and for the life of him he couldn’t see any objective now. So he watched in silent awe while the sheriff filtered his four ounces of sulphuretted hydrochloric acid past his uvula without disturbing his chew.
“Gawd A’mighty,” Haskins exclaimed huskily, eyeing his glass in mild astonishment. “Must have squeezed that out of a panther. Did you come all the way out here to get a drink of that scorpion’s milk? Give me an answer, son.”
“I’m glad somebody else thinks it’s powerful,” said the Saint relievedly. “Actually, Sheriff, I came out here looking for a man.”
Haskins found a place between vest and pants, and scratched himself over the belt of his gun.
“I’ll feel a sight better, son, if you tell me more.”
“There’s nothing much to hide.” Simon felt even more certain of the rightness of his decision. “A few minutes after you left this morning, Jennet took a shot at me from the bushes. If you want to, we can drive back in and you can dig his mushroom bullet out of the Gilbeck’s wall.”
The sheriff pushed back his hat, found a wisp of hair, twisted it into a point, and said, “Well, now!”
“My friend Hoppy Uniatz—that’s him over there, under the bottle—caught Jennet. We also got a rifle with his fingerprints on it—it must have ’em, because he wasn’t wearing gloves. You can have that too, if you want to come back for it and prove that it fired the bullet in the wall.”
Haskins’s shrewd grey eyes stayed on the Saint’s face.
“Guess you wouldn’t be so keen for me to prove it, son, if it warn’t true,” he conceded. “So I’ll save myself the trouble. But it still don’t say what you’re doin’ with Lafe out here.”
“After we caught him,” said the Saint, “we worked on him a little. Nothing really rough, of course—he didn’t make us go that far. But we persuaded him to talk. I didn’t have the least idea why he or anybody else should be shooting at me. He told me he was forced to do it by a guy named Jesse Rogers who knew he was a lamster, and he said he met this Rogers out here. So we just naturally came out for a looksee.”
“That’s a lie,” said Gallipolis. “Jennet was just playing for time. He hasn’t been here since he was sent up, and you can’t prove anything else.”
“That was only what he told me,” Simon confessed.
Haskins replaced his corkscrewed forelock.
“I shuah am bein’ offered a lot of easy provin’ to do,” he observed morosely. “What I want is the things you-all ain’t so ready to show me. How about this guy Rogers?”
“He comes here,” said Gallipolis. “But he’s been coming on and off for two years.”
“Know anythin’ about him?”
“No more than anybody else who come here. I know what he looks like and how much he spends.”
The Greek’s limpid-eyed sincerity was as transparent as it had been when he told Simon quite a different story.
Haskins ambled over to a corner and ejected his chew with off-hand accuracy into a convenient cuspidor.
“This business is gettin’ so danged tangled up,” he announced as he came back, “it’s like watchin’ a snake eatin’ its own tail. If it keeps on long enough there won’t be nuth’n left at all.”
“Perhaps,” Simon advanced mildly, “you’d save yourself a Jot of headaches if you took Lafe back to your office and saw what you could get out of him there.”
The sheriff was troubled. He searched beyond the Saint’s serious tone for some justification of his feeling of being taken for a ride. It was difficult to define the glint in the Saint’s scapegrace blue eyes as one of open mockery, and yet…
“An’ where will you be,” he asked, “while that’s goin’ on?”
“I might see if I can get a line on this Rogers bird,” said the Saint. “But you know where to get in touch with me if you need me again.”
“Look, son.” Haskins’s long nose moved closer, backed by a narrowing stare. “Whether or not you know it, you’ve done me a right smart good turn today. Lafe’s meaner n’ gar broth, an’ wanted bad. I’ll be plenty happy to see him tucked away. But I don’t want no more trouble on account o’ you. Suppose now we all go back to town peaceable like, an’ you leave the findin’ of this Rogers to me.”
Simon took out a pack of cigarettes and meditatively selected one.
He felt even more uncannily as if he were a puppet that was being taken through some conspicuous but meaningless part of a complex choreography, while the real motif was still running in incomprehensible counterpoint. Too many people seemed to be too completely genuine to too little purpose.
There was, of course, the girl Karen, who might be classed as an unknown quantity. But it was impossible to visualise the pickle-pussed Lafe Jennet, no matter what his status as a marksman might be, as an embryo Machiavelli. Gallipolis had displayed several paradoxical characteristics, but the Saint felt ridiculously and unreasonably certain that among all of them there was a perplexity which contradicted the part of a conspirator. And there could be no doubt at all about the sheriff. Newt Haskins might speak with a drawl and chew tobacco and move slothfully under the southern sun, but his slothfulness was that of a lizard which could wake into lightning swiftness. He had quite unmistakably the rare gem-like clarity of character of a man whom no fear or fortune could ever swerve from his arid conception of duty. And yet his arrival that afternoon had a timeliness which seemed to be an integral part of an elusive pattern.
No abstract extrapolation could ever make order out of it, Simon concluded. And so the only thing still was to find out—to let his own natural impulses take their course, and see where they led him.
“I just hate being shot at,” he said amicably, “especially by proxy. And I don’t think I’d be violating any law by looking for a guy named Rogers if I wanted to. Or would I?”
Haskins stared at him for the briefest part of a minute. His lean, weather-beaten face was as unemotional as a piece of old leather.
“No, son,” he said at last. “Just lookin’ for a guy named Rogers won’t be violatin’ no laws…” He turned abruptly, grasped Jennet by the collar, and propelled him towards the door. “Git goin’, Lafe.” He glanced back at the Saint once more, from the doorway. “I’ll be around,” he said, and went out.
Simon lounged languidly against the bar and tried to put a smoke-ring over the neck of a bottle.
Gallipolis used the peephole to assure himself that Haskins and Jennet had really gone. He turned his face back from the aperture with a discouraged air.
“The hell with it.” He waggled his curly head from side to side and looked at the Saint. “Are you going too, or have you got any more trouble?”
“You’ve still got my gun,” Simon reminded him.
The Greek seemed to brood about it. Then he slid back the bar and picked out the Luger from his cache. He handed it to Simon butt foremost.
“Okay,” he said. “Now what?”
Simon holstered the gun.
“Why didn’t you tell the sheriff what you told me about Rogers?”
“Hell,” said Gallipolis. “I should help him? I hope you find Rogers. He might have made tr
ouble for me here.”
“What else do you know?”
“Not a thing, friend.” Gallipolis replaced the bar with a movement of gentle finality. “I guess I better see what’s left of Frank. You wouldn’t want to take a job dealing stud for me?” Before Simon could think of a fitting way of declining the compliment, he answered his own question with a mournful “No,” and disappeared down the hall.
The Saint straightened himself with an infinitesimally preoccupied shrug.
“I guess we might as well blow, too, Hoppy,” he said. “But it all looks too damned easy.”
“Dat’s what I t’ought,” agreed Mr Uniatz complacently. For once it was Simon Templar who did the delayed take. He had reached the foot of the gangplank, busy with other thoughts, when it dawned abashingly on him that his low esteem for Hoppy’s mental alertness might after all have been unjust. He half stopped. “How did you work it out?”
Mr Uniatz removed the bottle neck from his lips with a noise like a dying drain.
“It’s easy, boss.” Mr Uniatz expanded with pleasure at being accepted, if only temporarily, into the usually closed councils of the Saint’s gigantic brain. “All we gotta do is find de Pool.”
A faint frown began to mar the Saint’s heartening attention. “What pool?”
“De Pool you talk to March about on de boat,” Hoppy explained darkly. “I got it all figured out. De Greek says it comes from a spring, but dat’s a stall. It comes from dis Foreign Pool we’re lookin’ for. Dat’s de racket. I got it all figgered out,” said Mr Uniatz, clinching his point with rhetorical simplicity.
3
Simon Templar had enjoyed a long drink which did not peel the last remaining membranes from his throat; he had told his inconclusive story to Peter and Patricia; he had showered refreshingly, and he had changed at leisure into dress trousers, soft shirt, and cummerbund. He was perfecting the set of a maroon bow tie when Desdemona knocked on his door and proclaimed disapprovingly, “Dey’s a lady to see you.”
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 11