The Intimidators (17 page)

“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 busi

ness 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....”

She laughed softly. “Blackmail! Actually, I was bluffing, darling. I’m the only one who lives on board, until you get down the line to the private boats. There’s not much of anybody around Charter Row at this hour of the might. So I guess we’d better go up to your place and take a look at those charts you’ve been dragging around all evening. Unless, of course, you have something else in mind....”

Regardless of what I did or did not have in my lecherous mind, we were soon knee deep in maps and charts, spread out on the cabin floor. Some day somebody’s going to have to take me aside and whisper in my ear the facts of cartographic life like, for instance, what the hell is an oblique Mercator projection. The maps were more colorful than the charts; but the charts had more cute little numbers on them. Did you know that there’s a spot in the Caribbean south of Cuba that’s over four miles deep?

It was the north coast of the island that mainly concerned us, however. At least I had a hunch that was the most likely area, and Harriet agreed with me. Here there’s a sort of three-way watery crossroads between Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas—well, actually the Great Bahama Bank. The Old Bahama Channel cuts between these immense shallow flats and the north coast of Cuba; and then joins the Florida Straits carrying the Gulf Stream around the southern tip of the United States. Right at the intersection, like a safety island at the junction of two boulevards, is the small, triangular Cay Sal Bank, pronounced Key Sal Bank.

Kneeling on the rug, Harriet pointed out this and several other features, yanking her long skirt aside as she moved from chart to chart.

“You don’t know a hell of a lot about geography, do you?” she said. “Politics being what they are these days, I’d think Cuba would be a place you’d have learned something about, in your business.”

“I’ve been there,” I said. “A plane put a couple of us down in a hole in the jungle in the middle of the night, some characters with peculiar Spanish accents—the Cubans don’t seem to murder their Castilian quite the same way the Mexicans do—pointed us in the right direction and led us back again when we’d finished our job; and the plane came back for us, again at night. As a sightseeing jaunt, it was a bust.”

“I won’t ask what the job was,” she said. “Exactly where did you say all these boats and planes disappeared?”

“The last reported positions are all marked on the big| map over there.”

She shifted her anchorage a fathom to port. “Damn this skirt,” she said, rearranging it once more. Then she studied the map for a while, and went on: “It’s plausible. That ketch with the cutie name might have hit a few head winds steering that far south of her course; but I gather she was a fast, weatherly boat with good auxiliary power, so it shouldn’t have slowed her up much. She could have slipped through any of these passages below the Great Bahama Bank without being seen. Even if Haseltine was already searching for his blonde beauty by the time the boat got there, I gather it didn’t occur to him to look that far south that early in the game.”

“How did you know she’s blonde and beautiful?” I asked.

“All you have to do is look at the man and you know the kind he’d pick,” Harriet said calmly. “Anyway, there were more pictures of Loretta Phipps and her movie-star mother in the papers at the time, than of her rich and important father. As a matter of fact, as far as pictorial coverage was concerned, the poor man ran a bad fourth behind the boat, if I remember right.”

“What about that diesel yacht out of Puerto Rico?” I asked.

“Sir James, Marcus, you said his name was? He was the closest; he was practically there. The plane heading for Martinique is the big question. Even assuming it had enough gas....” She frowned at the brightly colored islands on the blue paper ocean. “Was it a seaplane or a landplane, darling?”

“Land,” I said.

“Of course, they could have ditched it in the water and had a boat standing by to take them off.” She shrugged. “That’s probably the way they did it. Landing strips still aren’t too common along that coast, I gather, particularly landing strips unknown to the local inhabitants and the Castro police.”

I said, “My hunch is that these people have an arrangement with the Castro police; they’d almost have to have one. That’s why I figure one of your politically oriented friends won’t have too much trouble getting the information for us. It should be available to anyone knowing the right people in Havana.” She didn’t say anything. I went on: “Now, where’s
your
harbor of refuge on this Communist shore?”

She glanced at me sharply. “You can’t expect me to tell you that, darling. I mean, maybe I’m willing to use my contacts to help you with this lousy job of yours, to save my own skin, but I’m not going to betray them to you.”

I said, “I don’t go around slapping down Reds just because they’re Red. Tolerant, that’s me.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I’m still not going to tell you. It’s not my secret; and it’s got nothing to do with your problem. There’s no airfield and no secret harbor to hide a couple of hijacked yachts. It’s just a little fishing village on the coast; and when the time comes, if it comes, I’ll run in there and ask somebody to take me to Señor Soandso; and somebody’ll bury the boat for me; and I’ll be safely on my way to the workers’ homeland. Ugh.”

“Tsk, tsk,” I said. “That’s a hell of a Marxist attitude.”

“They’ve used me and I’ve used them,” she said. “We have a working relationship, darling, but there never was a meeting of political minds, if you know what I mean. Why do you think I’m living here finding fish for people too stupid to find their own?”

“I was wondering about that,” I said.

“Because I’d rather do that than be part of their regimented paradise.” She grimaced. “Actually, I guess I’m kind of a nature girl at heart. I like working outdoors; I had a model dairy farm once, up in Maryland, remember?”

“I remember,” I said. “The government put a highway through the middle of it, and you declared war on the United States of America.”

She laughed. “Well, I lost, so let’s forget it. But the fact is I’d rather run my own boats and lie awake nights figuring out the weather and the tides and the fish, not to mention the clients, than be part of their society of the future with a bunch of their stupid bureaucrats telling me what to do. If it’s a choice between that and jail, I’ll go; but not until I have to. And don’t tell me I’m inconsistent. Who isn’t?”

There was a little silence. It was time to change the subject; and I looked down at the map.

“Just one more foolish question,” I said. “What are all those funny little blue and red arrows for?”

“They indicate prevailing winds and currents,” she said. “As you can see, heading from here south to Cuba you’d better bring plenty of gas because it’s all uphill; everything’s against you. On the other hand, the refugees from Castro’s Communism have it easy once they’re past the patrols; everything blows and drifts from Cuba toward the land of liberty, if you’ll pardon the term. That chief of yours is taking his time, isn’t he?
If
he’s coming here at all. I only have your word for that.”

I grinned. “Don’t go ingénue on me, Hattie. You’re a grownup girl and I’m sure you can take care of yourself, if you really want to.”

She sighed theatrically. “But that’s just the problem, darling. I can’t decide whether or not I really want to take care of myself, as you so delicately put it. After all, we do have some unfinished business between us.”

“That’s not my fault,” I said. “I was doing my best to finish it, as I recall, when your knockout drops took effect.... I sighed, and said more briskly, “Saved by the bell. Here he comes now.”

Having recognized the footsteps that preceded it, I wasn’t too careful about answering the knock on the door; and it was Mac all right. His appearance hadn’t changed greatly since I’d left him at the Miami airport that afternoon. I closed the door behind him.