Haseltine started to speak, maybe to remind me that he’d had all the Ametta’s crew checked out without finding anything really damaging. He stopped.
It was Harriet who asked: “What makes you so sure of that?”
“Sure?” I said. “Who’s sure? I’m just guessing wildly. Maybe we’re dealing with a homicidal seagoing maniac who’s got a murderous grudge against anybody with a bank account exceeding five figures. But if we’re not, if we’ve got a series of kidnappings to solve, then they’re most likely inside jobs because one involved a plane. And while taking over one boat from another on the high seas has been done since the ancient days of piracy, capturing one flying airplane from another isn’t really practical under most circumstances—at the best, it would involve a serious risk of alerting nearby ground stations with a lot of melodramatic radio chatter. Well, if the plane was an inside job, a hijacking carried out by somebody on board, it seems likely that the boat disappearances were, too. Certainly it’s the method involving least equipment. Instead of armed pirate ships and planes, all you need is a few enterprising individuals with guns. So we have to find a place to which all the hijackers could sail or fly fairly quickly, a place where they could hide a couple of big yachts and a sizable airplane. And considering how hard everybody seems to have looked everywhere else, it’s likely that spot is in Cuba, the one island within reach that nobody can search without becoming the target for a lot of Castro firepower…” I stopped, as the waitress approached the table. “Yes, Miss?”
“Are you Mr. Helm? There’s a phone call for you. Over there, sir.”
I went over there and talked a while with Mac, who, it seemed, had missed his flight to Washington or taken another back. I returned to the table.
“Your boys are going to be okay,” I said to Haseltine. “Everything seems to be under control, medically speaking. However, I’m afraid I’m going to have to split, as the cats say, and take Hattie with me. There’s a new lead we have to look into—”
“I’ll come with you.”
I looked at him wearily, reminding myself that he was after all a taxpayer, the man who paid my salary, such as it was.
“Don’t give me a hard time, Bill,” I said. “You got hold of me because I was supposed to know what I was doing, didn’t you? Well, just relax and let me do it. I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, as soon as you can, charter us a good-sized seagoing powerboat, something around thirty feet, say, that’ll really burn up the water, say thirty knots; the fastest thing you can lay your hands on large enough to carry a dozen people without getting low and slow in the water. Cruising radius, four or five hundred miles—”
“You’re dreaming, amigo,” Haseltine said. “There aren’t any fast thirty-footers around with that kind of range built in, unless you want to mess around with a lot of spare fuel-drums in the cockpit. You’ll have to get something bigger to go that far.”
I said, “Okay, you’re the expert. Pick what you figure we need and get it ready for a long haul. Your story, if anybody asks, is that you’re heading for the marlin grounds somewhere to do this hypothetical story of ours—”
“Off Yucatan, maybe? Cozumel? That’s better than a four-hundred-mile run from Key West. It would explain the extra fuel.” Now that he was being consulted, he was flattered and cooperative.
“Now you’re cooking,” I said, and we left him there.
Outside, I asked Harriet, “What the hell is a Cozumel?”
She laughed. “Like the man said, it’s off the south coast of Yucatan, over on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico. A Mexican resort island with a lot of fish around it… Matt?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t bring it up, but I do have a fairly fast cruising boat with plenty of range. I mean the Queenfisher, not the outboard. She won’t do thirty, but she’ll cruise all day at twenty, and hit twenty-five in a pinch.”
“Sure,” I said. “So let’s keep him busy and happy scrounging up another. He can afford it, and maybe it’ll keep him out of my hair. Besides, what the hell makes you think I’d trust any boat and crew of yours any farther than I have to? Incidentally, where is your crew? You can’t run both those boats yourself, and a mate was mentioned; but I haven’t seen anybody around.”
She glanced at me sharply as we stopped at the car. I thought she was about to make an angry retort, but she laughed softly instead.
“That’s better,” she murmured. “That’s much better! I thought you were being just a little too trusting and forgiving. Yes, I do have a captain and mate for the Queenfisher, but I let them take off for a couple of weeks. I didn’t want them hanging around just now, if you know what I mean. The outboard I handle myself when I’ve got a client for it.”
“I bet it’s fun, poling that big job across the flats. Well, get in. It makes me nervous as hell, standing around under these damn loaded palm trees.”
She was laughing again as I got in beside her. “You’re really something else, Matt, as they say nowadays. First you casually put two roughnecks into the hospital, and then you worry about getting conked by a stray coconut.” She hesitated. “Are you permitted to tell me what you learned over the phone, darling, or shouldn’t I ask?”
I grimaced. “Well, to be philosophical, it’s the great modern dilemma,” I said as I started the car and drove us out of there without a single heavy object bouncing off the roof. “It would be so simply marvelous if the human animal weren’t aggressive by nature, so a lot of people figure they can stop it from being so just by having everybody pretend it isn’t so. The only trouble is, they won’t sit down and calculate what’s going to happen if the prescription doesn’t work on everybody who takes it.”
“Yes, Professor,” Harriet said obligingly, “and what is going to happen, please?”
“Exactly what has happened,” I said. “Bunches of arrogant thugs—like those college creeps who came for me—shoving people around, serenely confident that none of their brainwashed, nonviolent fellow-citizens will be willing to, or able to, lift a hand in effective self-defense. Once you start raising whole generations on the lovely, unrealistic principle that the use of force is always evil and unthinkable, that you should be willing to endure any indignity and pay any price rather than spill a little blood, why, you’ve set yourself right up for them, haven’t you?”
“For whom, darling?”
“For the intimidators,” I said. “For the people who haven’t the slightest qualms about using force or spilling blood. For the ones on whom the pretend-we’re-all-nice medicine didn’t work. All the bullies and dictators and little-league Caesars. And all the kidnapers and hijackers and political-action fanatics who’ve suddenly discovered the wonderful leverage we’ve given them by our terrified modern attitude toward violence. They’ve learned that the way to intimidate the whole tender-hearted world and make it do their bidding is just to wave a weapon at somebody, anybody. Just flourish a knife or a gun under the nose of one pretty airline stewardess and just like that you’ve got yourself a whole airplane and a million-dollar ransom…”
“I suppose there’s a point to all this,” Harriet said dryly.
I grinned. “I always say, there’s nothing like a woman making a man feel big by hanging breathlessly on his every word. Sure, there’s a point. That’s what this is all about, all these mysterious disappearances. To hell with the Voodoo Sea of Missing Ships. Just as we were guessing, it’s another lousy hostage-for-ransom deal; and why they spread the operation over a couple of months remains to be seen. I don’t know the details yet, or just what payment is being demanded or who’s demanding it, but there’s a man meeting us in my cabin who’ll brief us…”
15
It was a beautiful, cool, quiet, Florida fall evening with plenty of stars but no moon. That is, it was beautiful and quiet once we turned off the garish Keys highway and headed down past the Faro Blanco office along one of the treelined resort drives. My cabin was dark when we reached it. I kept on driving. Harriet stirred
beside me.
“I thought you had Number Twenty-six,” she said.
“I never told you that,” I said. “You’ve been snooping. If you know so much, maybe you can tell me why the light isn’t on.”
She laughed. “Don’t overdo the secret agent bit, darling.”
I said, “A gent named Ramsay Pendleton, a fine, up-standing British operative, was supposed to be waiting for us in my place, with the light on. My chief knows I don’t like meeting people in the dark when I don’t have to, even people I know; and there’s no reason for us to be mysterious tonight. Well, the light isn’t on. Can you offer an explanation?”
Now she was angry. “Damn it, of course I can’t, Matt. How the hell could I?”
“I don’t know; I was just asking,” I said mildly. “After all, I never did learn just how the Mickey got into that drink you served me all those years ago, either.” I pulled onto the grass at the side of the driveway and grinned at her in the darkness. “Relax, I was just needling you. But this is for serious: wait here. You’re not dressed for prowling through the bushes, and it isn’t safe. That cabin of mine seems to have a fascination for unsavory and unfriendly people tonight; I’ve already been jumped there once. Maybe I’m imagining things, but as far as I’m concerned, once I’m out there, anything that moves is hostile and I’m going to shoot hell out of it. I’ll be sorry if it turns out to be you, but my abject apologies won’t do you much good if you can’t hear them. So please don’t set foot outside this car until I get back. Okay?”
I took the short-barreled Smith and Wesson from under my belt; and slipped out of the car, eased the door closed, and made my way back through the maze of trees and cabins and little concrete walks. Out here I could hear the occasional sounds of voices and television sets, but the small, dark, white building in which I was interested was almost silent. The windows were all closed, as I’d left them. The air-conditioner was running, making a small whirring sound, that was all. I remembered turning it on earlier. Well, maybe Ramsay Pendleton hadn’t got here yet; the question was why. Mac’s scheduling usually works as planned; he’d have made a good train-dispatcher. Maybe our British associate had been here and left, and again the question was why.
There was no easy way of doing it. There was only one door. I had to pass through it. It took me longer than it normally takes a citizen to enter a room he’s rented for the night; but once I started to go, I went a lot lower and faster. On the floor inside, gun ready, I waited in the chilly, air-conditioned dark for greetings, hostile or friendly. None came.
I got up, switched on the light, brushed myself off, and checked the little kitchenette and bathroom at the rear of the place, feeling, as always after taking a lot of unnecessary precautions, like a melodramatic damned fool. Well, it’s a better feeling than dead, or so I’m told.
Harriet looked around quickly as I slid into the car once more. “Well?”
“Nothing,” I said. “No booby traps, no splintered furniture, no bullet-holes in doors or walls, no pools of coagulating gore. I think the resort office was closed when we drove by just now. Where’s another phone booth?”
“On the dock, right next to the Queenfisher,” she said.
I started the car. “Queenfisher. I’ve been wanting to ask: what kind of a name is that?”
“Well, if there’s a kingfisher, there ought to be a queenfisher, oughtn’t there? It’s only fair.” She hesitated. “You say this Pendleton person is a British agent?”
I said, “Don’t be snoopy. Just take what information comes your way and be grateful for it—or ask your friends; they can probably tell you more about my business than I can. Great international wheels are turning and we are all just helpless human cogs in the immense machinery. Here we are. Stay put again, cog.”
In the phone booth, I called the Miami number I’d already used once before tonight. The same man answered and said resignedly: “Oh, no, not again! Hell, the boys just scrubbed out that station wagon. How many this time?”
“You’re going to have to look for this one,” I said. “The allied troops didn’t make the rendezvous. Our friend hasn’t called in with excuses, has he? Maybe he couldn’t find his old school tie and didn’t feel like appearing in public improperly attired.”
“Just a minute, let me check.” There was a pause; then his voice came again. “Eric.”
“Right here.”
“I say, old fellow, shouldn’t be too hard on the foreign chap, don’t you know?” said my unseen contact slowly. “Particularly since he’s dead.”
I drew a long breath. “Details?”
“Hold on. Somebody wants to talk with you.” Then Mac’s voice came on the line. “Eric.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Report,”
“No light. No Pendleton. No signs of a struggle. Where was he found?”
“In his car, at the side of the highway some distance from your motel. The report just came in. Body warm. Car engine warm.”
“Well, they would be. Hell, even now, it hasn’t been three-quarters of an hour since you called me at dinner and sent me to meet him.”
Mac said, “I spoke with him an hour before that, by phone, asking him to drive over and brief you on the latest developments. He was in Islamorada at the time, with about thirty-five miles to go.”
“He must have run into something not too long after he hung up,” I said thoughtfully. “Maybe on the way, but that’s a crowded road to commit murder on. Most likely somebody was laying for him in my place when he got there. Or laying for me; and Pendleton bought the treatment instead. It would have to be that way. The air-conditioner was running.”
“Explain.”
I said, “I don’t know what kind of weather you’re having up in Miami, sir, but it’s a cool fall night down here. I forgot and left the machinery turned on when I went out to dinner. Things were pretty chilly by the time I got back. A legitimate visitor would have switched the gadget off before settling down to wait. Why freeze unnecessarily? A would-be murderer, on the other hand, would have resigned himself to shivering a bit rather than take a chance of warning me by changing anything in the place. So it looks as if Pendleton walked in on the killer rather than the other way around. Not that it really matters.” I hesitated, and said slowly, “He told me, the one time I really talked with him, that he used to be a good friend of Leslie Crowe-Barham—you remember the late Sir Leslie—but that he wasn’t holding any grudges on that old account, mainly because he admired the brave way I’d charged the Mink’s gun. They have some quaint, old-fashioned ideas over there, don’t they?”
“Yes, but it’s kind of irrelevant now, isn’t it, Eric?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Irrelevant.”
“I have to drive down into the Keys,” Mac said. “I have to make sure the case is handled discreetly by the local authorities in charge.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Discreetly.”
“Then I’ll come by and bring you up to date myself,” he said. “If the lady is available, keep her that way, please.”
“She hasn’t been out of my sight for three hours,” I said. “But I’ll hang onto her. Just knock before you enter, sir. No telling what I may have to do to keep her entertained until you arrive.”
Harriet had the radio on when I got back to the car. She switched it off as I got in beside her. “A girl hates to complain, but it’s not the most exciting evening I ever spent in my life,” she said dryly.
“It’s the most exciting evening Pendleton ever spent,” I said. “At least, he’ll never be able to top it.”
She was silent for a significant interval, while I got the motor started. “He’s dead?” she asked then.
“Apparently very.”
“How?”
“Somebody was waiting for him in my cabin, we figure. A pro. I never learned our British friend’s exact qualifications, but he’d been in the business at least long enough that it would need a real pro to take him without even mussing the rug.”
“I’m not a pro,” Harriet said quietly. “Not really. Not unless you’re talking about boats and fishing. Where killing is concerned, I’m just a lousy amateur, you said so yourself. Anyway, we’ve been together since seven-thirty. If that’s the way your mind is running.”
I grinned. “That’s the way a lot of minds are running. The last thing my chief said to me before I came down here to see you was that I should be careful because I was dealing with a very dangerous lady.”
“I didn’t murder your friend.”
“He wasn’t my friend, just a guy I knew slightly. And I know you didn’t kill him. As you point out, I’m your alibi. Very convenient, isn’t it?”
She shook her head quickly. “I didn’t have him killed, Matt.”
I shrugged. “Okay, so you never told anybody to go murder you a Pendleton. But you might have asked somebody to murder you a Helm. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time, or even the second.”
She drew a long breath. “No, it wouldn’t. And don’t think the thought never crossed my mind. But it happens that I didn’t do it. And now, unless I’m under arrest, I think since we’re here I’ll just say goodnight and go aboard my boat—”
I said, “I’ve got instructions to keep you available in my cabin until an important gent can join us, the same guy who thinks you’re a dangerous lady.”
She hesitated, and said in a tentative tone of voice, “I’ve got friends here, Matt.”
I grinned. “What are you planning to do, rip your blouse and scream rape? Sure, all those salty seagoing friends of yours will come running with those gaffs and billy clubs you mentioned earlier, and your picture will be in all the papers…”
The Intimidators Page 13