I said, “I’ve got a little errand to run in Nassau, Mr. Haseltine. I guess I can pick up what I need there. I’ve got most of it. I used to really do it for a living, you know.”
“Who’s sending you to Nassau, the man in Washington?” Haseltine’s brown eyes narrowed and looked kind of muddy and ugly for a moment. “The understanding was that you’d be on my business full time. Maybe I’d better get on the phone and straighten him out…”
“Relax, Mr. Haseltine,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s something related to your problem, just a hunch, he said, but I’d better check it out before I did anything else. I can’t tell you the details because it involves some people you’re not supposed to know about. After all, we’ve got to make some gestures toward security.”
“Yeah, sure.” He was still studying me suspiciously, as well he might, since I’d made up every word of what I’d said the instant before I’d said it, in the interest of millionaire diplomacy. Not that I knew that what I’d said was wrong, but I didn’t know it was right, either. Haseltine relaxed slowly. “Well, okay. If you want to play secret agent a bit, I guess it won’t hurt. We can get you from Nassau to wherever you need to go as soon as you’re ready, no sweat. And where the hell do you get this Mister-Haseltine routine, Matt?”
I grinned. “In this racket, we’re always respectful to the big brass, Bill. It makes them feel good, and it doesn’t make them a bit more bullet-proof if the time should ever come that we have to shoot them.”
He grinned back. We were pals—well, almost. “I wish I thought you were kidding,” he said. “I bet you would shoot me if I got in your way, you elongated bastard. Aren’t you going to ask what it is I want you to look for?”
“Out in that Sea of Missing Ships?” I shrugged. “Well, if you want to tell me, okay. But after the build-up you just gave me, I figure the name is Phipps, Wellington Phipps. At least he’s the only person to go missing out there in a boat recently that I’ve heard of; and now I remember there was some mention of this Terrible Triangle legend at the time. A wealthy contractor type from the West Coast who’d brought his sailing yacht east for a season of racing. The Ametta Too, whatever that may mean. Vanished a while back sailing from Bermuda to Palm Beach; I saw it reported on TV. A typical disappearance like you described: no survivors, no life preservers, no wreckage at all. Bermuda to Palm Beach, that course would pass just north of the Bahamas, wouldn’t it?”
He nodded slowly, unsmiling. “Okay, so you’re real bright, just like your boss said. But you’ve got one thing wrong. I don’t give a good goddamn what happened to old Buster Phipps. I mean, Buster’s okay, but if it was just him and his boat, to hell with them. Only, he had his wife and daughter along. They’d flown out to job him in Bermuda after the big race. Amanda and Loretta; that’s where he got Ametta from. Second boat of the name, Ametta Too. They’re real cute out there in sunny California.”
“Cute,” I agreed. “But he could have called the second one Loranda, just for variety.”
“I was going to marry the girl,” said Haseltine. “I still am. She’s alive, somewhere. I know it. Find her for me, Helm.”
4
The commercial flight back across the Gulf Stream the following morning gave me time to think things over from the perspective of a new day. A jet would barely have got off the ground before dipping down for the landing, but this particular Fort Lauderdale-Nassau run—continuing on to Governor’s Harbor in Eleuthera, wherever that might be—was made by a lazy old twin-motor prop plane that loafed through the sky at a reasonable altitude, giving a good view of the watery scenery below. I decided that being pulled through the air by a fan had certain advantages over being booted in the tail by a firecracker; even more so since I’m under the illusion that I know more or less how a piston engine works, while I don’t kid myself I have any understanding of jets. I just hope somebody does.
“Look, I helped race that damn boat from Newport to Bermuda,” Haseltine had said irritably when I asked him about the details. “She was new, she was sound, she was seaworthy as hell—actually a little too seaworthy for real racing. You’ve got to cut a few corners and take a few chances if you want to come home with the silver these days. The time when you could just buy a set of new sails for your family cruising sloop and hope to compete are gone forever. It’s a cutthroat business now, partner, don’t ever think otherwise. Business, hell! It’s a science. The Ametta was fast, all right, but she was no skinned-out, stripped-down racing machine. And Buster was a good seaman, but—well, again, maybe he was a little too seaworthy for racing. He didn’t really have the old win-or-die instinct, if you know what I mean. His boat and his crew came first. Oh, he’d drive us; he’d drive like hell; but if there was a question, he wouldn’t gamble. He’d do it the safe, seamanlike way, and worry about getting to the finish line afterwards. Hell, look what happened in that damned race.”
“What happened?” I asked.
He looked surprised. These sporting characters are all alike. They always expect everybody to know who caught the biggest fish, shot the biggest elephant, rode the fastest horse, and sailed the fastest boat.
“Well,” he said, “we were in a pretty good position as we neared Bermuda, damned good in fact considering our low handicap-rating; we were right in there on corrected time. But you know that lousy finish line. Trying to find it in broad daylight in clear weather and stay off the rocks is bad enough. This was in the middle of the night with a gale blowing. And the bastards who’d set it up had made all kinds of crazy rules about what navigational equipment could and could not be used. You’d think they actually wanted a few shipwrecks for excitement. So there we were, batting around in that goddamned storm off a lee shore, well up with the leaders, and the navigator kept saying we were right on course, right on course. We just hoped he knew what the hell he was talking about. You couldn’t find your fly in that weather to take a leak. Suddenly old Buster kind of wrinkled up his nose and turned to the guy, never mind his name, and told him to switch on the Omni, fast.”
“What’s an Omni?” I asked.
“Hell, don’t ask me,” the Texan said. “I was just along to pull the strings up forward when the man said pull. I get a kick out of sailing, but all that scientific crap bores hell out of me, or I’d have a boat of my own. It’s some kind of fancy navigating gadget like they use on planes, I think. The ordinary RDF wasn’t working worth a damn for some lousy electronic reason. The navigator objected that the Omni wasn’t allowed; and Buster said goddamn it something smelled wrong, and he wasn’t making a polite suggestion, he was giving a goddamned order: to hell with what was and wasn’t allowed; he wasn’t going to pile up his ship for anybody’s crummy rules; snap to it and come up with a position now. A minute or so later the navigator came boiling out of the hatch with his face so pale it kind of shone in the dark and yelled get us the hell out of here we’re right on the reef… Well, that was Buster Phipps, a real sailorman. Of course we were disqualified. That’s just the point. Nobody’s going to tell me old cautious, careful Buster could lose his boat in good weather between here and Bermuda without human intervention of some kind. Sure, he might have been run down some night by a big ship—it happens—but I’ve checked and double-checked every vessel that passed through the area during the time that counted. No bumps in the night, no scratches on the paint, and hell, if the Ametta had been sunk by a collision there’d have been some broken stuff floating around and we’d have found it. We searched every inch of ocean from the Bahamas clear up to Cape Hatteras, N.C., figuring the possible drift due to wind and current.” He grimaced. “Now it’s your baby. Here are some pictures.”
I’d looked at photographs of the boat, a handsome sixty-foot ketch, and of Wellington (Buster) Phipps, a handsome middle-aged gent with tightly curling gray hair. I’d looked at a picture of Mrs. Phipps who had once, Haseltine said, been a big movie star called Amanda Mayne. I’d never heard of her, but she was a good-looking woman, and a lot of those movie girls
become big stars kind of retroactively after they marry money. I didn’t hold it against her. She looked like an independent-minded lady who might be fun to talk with if you couldn’t do better, and she probably wouldn’t allow you to do better. Why should she? Phipps looked as if he was pretty adequate in all departments, not only the financial and nautical ones.
“And this is Loretta,” Haseltine had said, with a funny note in his voice that made me like him more. I mean, the girl really meant something to him.
She’d never mean anything to me. I could see that, even from a picture. She was young and blond and beautiful, and she’d obviously never had a thought in her life except how young and blond and beautiful she was. She couldn’t even smile for a family snapshot without striking a glamor-pose with a lock of shining blond hair falling over one eye just so.
“They weren’t handling that big sailboat by themselves, were they?” I asked.
“No, they had their paid hand, Leo, who acted as cook and steward besides making himself useful on deck when he was needed; and they had a couple of young fellows along, husky yachting characters who’d crewed in the race.”
“Names?”
“Buddy Jacobsen and Sam Ellender. Here’s what we’ve dug up on them so far.” He handed me a thin carbon copy of some kind of a report. “Sam’s twice had his driver’s license suspended for speeding; he also tied one on in a Mexican port after one race and wound up in a local juzgado. Buddy got pulled in with a bunch of peace protesters a few years back. Not what you might call spectacular criminal records.”
I glanced at him. “But even after racing to Bermuda with them, you had them checked out.”
He grimaced. “Look, we took turns in those damn wet bunks; we didn’t share them. Sure I checked them out. The fact that a man’s a good yachtsman doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to get rich. Hell, he might like to have a yacht all his own.”
“You’re thinking of kidnaping?”
“Never mind what I’m thinking,” he said. “All my thinking hasn’t produced any results; that’s why I got hold of you. Don’t let me put my ideas into your head. What I want to hear is your ideas.”
I shrugged. “What about this Leo?”
“Leo Gonzales. Fifty-four, five-seven, a hundred and thirty. Dark complexion, dark hair, brown eyes. Lost a couple of fingers on his left hand—the last two—while acting as a mate on a sportfisherman before he signed on with Buster. I gather somebody was boating a big black marlin and Leo, handling the leader, got excited and took a couple of turns of the wire around his hand for a good grip, a real no-no. The fish took off, the wire came tight and, look Ma, no fingers. Must have been when he was young and dumb because he never pulled any goofs like that with Buster or he wouldn’t have lasted eleven years. A tough little bastard who could hold a course in bad weather and come up with a hot meal when the boat was sailing on her ear. Buster always figured he was lucky to find a boy as good as Leo to work on board.”
It occurred to me that a fifty-four-year-old member of a minority race—judging by the name—might get tired of being a good boy after eleven years; but as a transplanted Swede, by blood, I don’t pretend to be an expert on anything but Scandinavians, and even there I’m kind of shaky on Norwegians, Finns, and Danes. I started to ask another question, and stopped. Any black marks on Leo Gonzales’ record would be in the report I held; and the fact that Haseltine apparently didn’t like the man, and was nevertheless grimly listing his virtues, only emphasized what I’d already sensed, that there were things I wasn’t being told. Well, as an experienced undercover agent of a government often obsessed with security, that should make me feel right at home.
I said deliberately, “You know your girl is alive, amigo, but you keep referring to her daddy in the past tense. Explain that contradiction for me, please.”
Haseltine frowned, his eyes going narrow and muddy again. It occurred to me that millionaire Texans with strong Indian traits constituted another minority group I wasn’t really expert on.
“Don’t be too damn bright, partner,” the big man said coldly. Then he shrugged. “Okay. A man keeps hoping.”
I said, “Not really. The fact is that you really think they’re dead.”
His face was hard and ugly. All he needed was some war paint and a scalping knife. “Damn you—”
I said, “Cut it out, friend. We’re not the Federal Missing Persons Bureau, if there is any such thing, which there isn’t. You knew that when you came to us. You paid enough snoops to pick up enough information so you could find the office and talk to the man. There isn’t a chance in the world you didn’t at the same time learn what kind of orders emanate from that office. And they don’t concern rescuing beautiful maidens missing at sea.”
Haseltine drew a long breath. “Okay,” he said softly. “Okay, genius. They’re dead. After five weeks they’ve got to be dead. I try to kid myself, but I know it’s no damn good. Understand?”
“I understand that,” I said. “What I don’t understand is, if they’re dead, where the hell do I come in?”
“I’ve just told you,” he said angrily. “I’ve just explained, damn it! That boat didn’t go down of itself. Buster Phipps didn’t run his beloved Ametta on a reef with his cherished wife and daughter on board, no chance! He didn’t let her get caught in a sudden squall with all sail up and all ports and hatches open, don’t ever think so. He didn’t light a cigarette in the engine room over an open can of gasoline, and neither did anybody else on Buster Phipps’ boat—anyway, the bucket had a diesel auxiliary. There wasn’t any gas on board. Buster wouldn’t have it; too dangerous. If the Ametta sank, somebody sank her. If they’re dead, somebody killed them. Deliberately.”
“Sure. One of the sea monsters that inhabit the Lethal Triangle you just told me all about.”
Haseltine gave a short, harsh laugh, like a bark. “That’s a lot of bullshit,” he said.
“You don’t believe in that Hoodoo Ocean?”
“Do you?” He grimaced. “I bet you could take any other risky piece of water with a lot of air and sea traffic and if you started looking hard enough you could line up enough mysteries of the sea to make your hair curl. Hell, there were whole villages of Bahamians who used to make a living off wrecks less than a century ago. The old sailing ships used to pile up on those reefs like cordwood. I mean, that’s a tough sailing area, with sudden coral heads and unpredictable currents—the way the tide runs off and on those flats is tricky as hell. The Gulf Stream doesn’t help a bit, either. The sea that builds up when a cold norther blows against that north-running river of warm water is pure murder. Harry Conover, for instance, probably just tried to drive his Revonoc a little too hard, and she fell off one of those big, steep waves and split wide open. No, I don’t believe in any sea monsters, or any death-ray-equipped UFOs, either. But I’ll tell you what I do believe in.”
“What’s that?”
“I believe in a guy, somewhere, who read all that melodramatic bunk and decided it would make a perfect cover for putting the finger on one particular yacht in the area. He could count on nobody getting too worked up about it. Hell, it would be just another Triangle tragedy, wouldn’t it?”
“What would be his motive?”
“I don’t know.” Haseltine spread his hands dramatically. “I’ve spent thousands of bucks looking and I still don’t know. Buster Phipps had some people who didn’t like him—nobody makes money without that—but killing enemies, no. And neither did the girls. I can’t give you a clue. You’ll have to work it out for yourself.”
Again I had the old familiar feeling that security was rearing its ugly head, and I wasn’t being told everything there was to know. Well, it was his problem. If it gave him a kick to have me solve it blindfolded—or fail to solve it—that was his choice.
“And if I find the motive, and the man?”
Haseltine leaned forward. “Don’t be stupid, partner. You know what you do, and I know what you do. That’s why I got you instead of some sc
ared private eye with a tape recorder and a telescopic camera. Well, find whoever got the Ametta Too, and do it.”
I looked up. The stewardess was telling me to buckle my seatbelt. After obeying orders, I looked out the plane window. We were coming off the blue water over a green island. At least I assumed it was an island down there, although it went on farther than I could see. There was a city down there: Nassau, New Providence Island, B.W.I. Now all I had to do was learn enough about it to deal with one of the other team’s best men, quickly, so I could get to work on something truly important, like finding, or avenging, a misplaced blonde.
5
My initial impression of the British Colonial Hotel was that the inmates, staff and guests alike, were exclusively black. It was a great, conspicuous building on, the waterfront in the crowded center of Nassau; a hotel built the nice, ornate, rambling way they used to build luxury hotels; and there didn’t seem to be, at first glance, a single paleface in the joint besides me. Please understand, I’m not making the observation in a spirit of criticism. People do come in varying colors, and I’ve never considered the differences of great importance. On the other hand, I’ll readily admit that I’m not accustomed to an environment in which my own particular chromatic variation is in the minority.
The Intimidators Page 3