The Saint in Miami s-22 Page 6

  The Saint grinned irreverently, "But it would make things so dull for us. I thought of a much more exciting way of invoking the Law. I called the Sheriff's office in the middle of the night and told them that they could find a dead body on the March Hare. I hope it gave Randy a lot of fast explaining to do."

  "I hope you've got plenty of fast explanations yourself," Peter said dampeningly, and pointed with one finger.

  Simon looked round towards the driveway.

  White dust swirled around the wheels of an approaching car. It disappeared behind the corner of the house. A minute later, Desdemona plodded heavily towards them across the patio. She came to anchor in front of the Saint, her brawny arms akimbo, and glared down at him with a face which intimated that she had found all her darkest forebodings justified.

  De she'iff man's hyah at de doah," she announced indig-nantly. "He wants to see you!"

  "I think," said Patricia, getting to her feet, "that Peter and I will let you amuse him while we have another swim." Simon waved them away.

  "If you see me being taken off in the wagon," he said, "don't bother to wait lunch."

  A couple of moments after they had gone, the official presence of Sheriff Newton Haskins cast its long shadow into the cheery courtyard.

  Seen in the bright light of day, the officer who had hailed them from the police boat appeared even thinner and more lugubrious than he had the night before. He was dressed in funereal black, defying the thermometer. His broadcloth coat was pushed open behind pocketed hands, disclosing a strip of spotless white shirt topped by a narrow and unfashionable black bow tie. He might very easily have been mistaken for an undertaker paying a business call on the bereaved-except for the width or the cartridge belt at his waist, which sagged to the right under the weight of a holstered gun.

  His approach was leisurely. Hands in pockets, he watched Patricia's and Peter's retreat to the beach, studied the flowers, and cast an appraising glance up at the cloudless sky. Only after he had apparently satisfied himself that the heavens were still in place did he condescend to notice the Saint.

  Extended backwards in his chair, with his ankles crossed on the table, Simon greeted him with a smile of carefree cordiality.

  "Well, well, well,-if it isn't our old friend Sheriff Haskins! Sit down, laddie. All my life I've heard of this southern hospitality, but I didn't think a busy officer like you" would have time to come and welcome a mere tourist like me."

  Hands still in his pockets, Newt Haskins seated himself slowly in a metal garden chair with an exhibition of perfect muscular control. He began a survey at the Saint's bare feet, enumerated his legs, reviewed his blue gabardine shorts and the rainbow pattern of his beach robe, and ended up gazing dispassionately into the Saint's mocking eyes.

  "You'd be surprised, son, how many crooks I've welcome to Miami in the past ten years."

  "Crooks, Sheriff?" Simon's brows lifted in faint inquiry. "Do I misunderstand you, or is that meant to refer to me?"

  Haskins' left hand crawled out of its pocket like a turtle, bearing with it a plug of black tobacco. His deep-set sharp grey eyes sank farther into his Indian brown face as he bit off a chew. Holding the remainder of the plug, his hand crawled back into its hole again. Watching the methodical working of the muscles along his lean jaws, Simon had an irresistible nostalgic memory of another officer of the Law with whose habits he was much more familiar-the gum-chewing Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal of Scotland Yard.

  "You, son? Now, there shuah ain't no use leapin' to conclusions thataway." Haskins' speech, when he was not shouting through a megaphone, lagged naturally into the native Floridian s drawl. "Actually, I come on a jaunt out heah to have a few words with Mr Gilbeck. Seein' he warn't around, I thought I might make myself sociable-like an' pass the time o' day."

  "A very noble impulse," said the Saint reservedly. "But you have an ambiguous line of conversational gambits."

  The Sheriffs otter-trap lips pursed themselves, and for one tense moment Simon feared that a stream of tobacco juice was destined to desecrate the virgin whiteness of the stucco wall. The crisis passed when Haskins swallowed, moving his larynx pensively up and down.

  'Listen, son," he said. "Every tout, grifter, dip, gambler, yegg, land shark, and mobster, from Al Capone down to any lush-rolling prostitute, hits this city sooner or later, and we find 'em sunnin' their bottoms along our shore."

  The Saint fluttered his eyelids and said: "But how poetical you are, daddy. Please tell sonny more."

  Haskins' face remained glum, except for a passing glint in the depths of his lethargic grey eyes which might equally well have come either from anger or amusement "Big and little, man and woman, killers an' punks," he said, "I've met 'em all. They don't none of 'em scare me."

  "That takes a great load off my mind," said the Saint, with the same dulcet challenge.

  "I thought it might do you good to know."

  "Well," drawled the Saint, with dangerous camaraderie. "Neighbour, that shuah is white of you. Ah ain't met sech a speerit o' kindheartedness sense mah ole gramppaw had his whiskers et plumb off by General Beauregard's horse in the Civil Wah."

  Haskins rounded out a cavernous cheek with his cud of tobacco.

  "Simon Templar," he said, without heat, "you may think that's a southern accent, but it stinks of Oxford to me." He leaned back in his chair and stared skyward. "Modern police methods are makin' it awful tough for the boys, son. I sent a cable to Scotland Yard last night, an' I got an answer just before I come out heah."

  "Give me one guess and I'll tell you who answered you." A joyful smile began to dawn on the Saint's face. "Is it possible - No, this is too good! . . . But is it possible that it could have been signed with the name of Teal?"

  The Sheriff crossed his legs and fanned the air with a number eleven toe.

  "I wonder if you'll be so infernally happy when you know what he had to say."

  "But I know what he had to say. That's what makes me so happy. If you'd only come to me in the first place, I could have saved you the cost of your wire. Let's see-it would have been something like this . . . He told you that I'd run the gamut of crime from burglarly to murder-he thinks. That I dine on blackmail and arson seasoned with assault and battery-he suspects. That every time a body is found under the Chief Commissioner's breakfast table, or somebody puts a home-made shilling into a cigarette machine, the whole CID spews itself into prowl cars and dashes off to arrest me-they hope. Was that it?"

  "It didn't have all those fancy touches," Haskins allowed, "but that's about how it read."

  Simon trickled blue smoke through insolent and delighted lips.

  "There's only one thing wrong with your reading," he murmured. "You must have got so excited over the first part that you didn't stop to read through to the end."

  "An" what might that have done for me?"

  "You might have found out that all the first part was really nothing but the foam on poor old Teal's fevered brain. You might have discovered that none of those things have ever been proved, that I've never been convicted of any of them or even brought to trial, that there isn't the single ghost of a charge he could bring against me today, and that I'm known to be getting pretty damn tired of having every dumb cop in creation ringing my doorbell and making me listen to a lot of addlepated blather that he can't prove."

  Haskins' left hand sought daylight again without the plug of tobacco, and its blunt thumbnail made a test for stubble around the deep cleft of his chin.

  "Son," he said, "I've been compared to everything from the disappearin' view of a racehorse at Tropical Park, to havin' my maw never find out what my paw's last name was. It ain't never got a rise out of me. I don't aim to change my tactics now. You and your friends are guests in a prominent citizen's home, an' I'm treatin' you as such. But as Sheriff of this county I've got a few questions to ask you, and I expect you to answer 'em."

  It was a rare event for Simon Templar to feel admiration for any professional enforcer of the La
w. But admiration for any cool unflustered opponent who could meet him in his own field and exchange parry and riposte without vindictiveness but with a blade sharp enough to match his own, was a tribute which none of his instincts could refuse. He drew at his cigarette again, and over his fingers his eyes twinkled calculatingly blue but with all malice wiped out of them.

  "I suppose that anything I say can be used as evidence against me," he remarked cheerfully.

  "If you're fool enough to tell me anything incriminatm'," said Haskins, "that's true. Don't blame me for it."

  "Shoot," said the Saint.

  Haskins considered him.

  "I saw you scootin' around in Gilbeck's speedboat last night, and I sort of wondered at the time why he wasn't along with you."

  "I sort of wondered myself. You see, we came here on a special invitation to visit him. And as you've already found out, he isn't here."

  Haskins took the rather long end of his nose between thumb and forefinger and wiggled it around.

  "You mean they wam't here to welcome you, so you just thought you'd move in an' wait for 'em."

  Simon nodded.

  "Sort of noblesse oblige not to leave without seeing your hosts."

  The Sheriff took off his black hat and fanned himself thoughtfully.

  "Where did you go last night after I chased you away?"

  "We took a little spin. The moonlight kind of got me."

  "It used to do that to me when I was your age. So you took a little spin an' came back ashore."

  "That's right."

  "Here?"

  "But of course."

  "There was a lot of funny goin's-on around Miami last night," said Haskins, with an air of perplexity. "They don't make sense to me. Some time in the small hours of the mawnin', my office got a call that Randolph March was carryin' an unreported body around on his yacht. Silly sort of thing, warn't it?"

  "Was it?" Simon asked innocently.

  "Well, it turned out to be not so silly, at that." Haskins uncrossed his long legs languorously. "I took a jaunt out there, and it seems there was a body. The Captain said they'd been out that evening, an' the lad fell overboard an' drowned before they could find him again."

  "Who was he?"

  "One o' the crew. Some kid they picked up in Newport News. They didn't even know where his home was or if he had any family. Don't suppose nobody ever will There's lots of kids like that on the waterfronts . . . But the funny thing was, nobody on the March Hare had called me. They were just wonderin' whether they ought to when I got there."

  "It all sounds most mysterious," Simon agreed sympathetically.

  Haskins stood up and mopped his brow.

  "It shuah does. Heah's all hell apoppin' just a few hours after you land in town. You're known from heah to Shanghai as a .trouble maker, although I ain't sayin' you deserve it. But if you're as clever as they say you are you naturally wouldn't have any convictions-yet. But you can't blame me for wonderin' about you."

  "Brother," said the Saint, with the silkiest possible undertone of warning, "you're beginning to sound just a little too much like Chief Inspector Teal. You remember what I told you? Just because a few queer things happen here, and I'm in Miami at the time, you come charging after me-"

  "When I charge you, son, I'll have something." Haskins scuffed along the floor of the patio with a phlegmatic toe. "You look at: what's been bustin' loose. A tanker blows up, for no reason. I get a mysterious phone call that nobody can account for, about a body. An' then it seems Gilbeck an his daughter ain't heah, but you are, an' nobody knows where they've gone."

  "So," said the Saint, "I must be mixed up with sinking ships and kidnapping millionaires as well."

  Haskins' eyes were flinty mist.

  "Son," he said, "I don't know what you're mixed up with."

  His right hand snaked suddenly out of his pocket and flattened out in front of Simon Templar. The Saint gazed down at the oblong slip of paper held in its palm. Written on it in plain capitals were the words: LAWRENCE GILBECK: YOU CAN'T GET AWAY WITH IT ALL THE TIME. I'M COMING TO PUT AN END TO YOUR TROUBLES.

  The thin linear figure drawn as a signature at the lower right-hand corner wore a halo slighdy askew.

  Simon stared at it for just three seconds.

  And then, progressively, he began to laugh.

  It started as a tentative chuckle, grew up into a louder richness that became tinged with the overtones of hysteria, and ended in a culmination of wild hilarity that mere words could scarcely choke their way through. The whole rounded gorgeousness of the business was almost too shattering to endure.

  The full magnificence of it had to work itself into his system by degrees. The March Combine had taken the hurdle of the planted body neatly enough-he had realised that. But in their impromptu comeback they had unsuspectingly sown the seeds of a supernal fizzle of which history might never see the like again.

  "Of course," sobbed the Saint weakly. "Of course. I wrote ft. What about it?"

  The Sheriff scratched his long stringy neck.

  "That sort of note only means one sort of thing to me."

  "But you don't know the background." The Saint wiped his streaming eyes. "Justine Gilbeck wrote us weeks ago that Papa was behaving like a moulting rooster: he seemed to be in trouble of some sort, but he wouldn't tell her about it. She was worried stiff. She asked us to come here and try to find out what it was and help him. I can show you her letter. Let me get it for you."

  III How Simon Templar Made a Pleasure of Necessity, and Patricia Holm Was Not Impressed

  Sheriff Haskins' equine face seemed to grow longer and gloomier as he completed a patient reading of the letter. Then he referred again to the note signed with the Saint's emblem.

  "'You can't get away with it all the time'" he read off it "What would that mean?"

  "Oh, I was always kidding him that you can't make millions honestly," Simon replied easily. "I always told him that one day his sins would catch up with him and he'd go to jail. It was a standing rib. So of course when Justine said he was worried I had to make a crack like that."

  Haskins shifted his cud.

  "'I'm coming to put an end to your troubles' That would be sort of double meanin', hunh?"

  "Yes."

  "On account of what well call this fictitious reputation o' yours."

  "Naturally." The Saint was still a little shaky with laughter. "Now wouldn't it be fair to tell me where you got that note from?"

  "I dunno yet." Haskins gazed at it abstractedly for a moment longer, and put it back in his pocket He returned his attention to Justine Gilbeck's letter. He said, as if he were making a comment on the weather: "I guess there's plenty of this letterhead in the house."

  "And we're all master forgers," Simon assured him blandly. "Signatures are just baby stuff to us. We think nothing of four whole pages of handwriting."

  Haskins put the letter back in its envelope and studied the postmark. He tapped it on his front teeth.

  "Mind if I keep this a while?"

  "Not a bit," said the Saint. "There must be a bank in town that knows her writing, and they've probably got other friends here as well. Check up on it all you like. And then come back and apologise to me."

  Haskins put on his hat and turned his head in the manner of a buzzard seeking sustenance. Finding a spot which suited his fancy, he scored a nicotine bullseye at the roots of an unoffending lily, and said: "Maybe you better not leave town just yet, in case I might want to do that."

  A suitable remise was shaping itself on the Saint's tongue when it was abruptly cut off by the arrival of another car. It was a very different proposition from the Sheriff's well-worn but serviceable jalopy. This was an enormous cream-coloured custom-built Packard, which whirled into the driveway and whipped around the front of the house with an effortless speed that made Simon tip an imaginary hat to the skill of the driver. Above the side of the roadster he had time to catch a glimpse of a jacket of Lincoln green and a mane of tawny hair tossed in
the wind, and abruptly changed his mind about making a barbed retort.

  He made a starting movement towards the house.

  "All right," he said amiably. "I'll be expecting you."

  Haskins held his ground, absorbing the scenery with his seamed poker face.

  "I don't get much pleasure out of life, son," he explained, "and while I'm right respectably married, redheads have always been a weakness of mine. When I get a chance like this, I sorta hesitate to hurry off."

  "Then by all means don't hurry," said the Saint hospitably; but his brain tightened into preparedness, tinged with a certain malevolence of which Haskins was the sole beneficiary.

  It might well have suited the devious purposes of March and his captain to say nothing about his unconventional visit to the March Hare, but the girl's attitude was much less predictable. By trying to get rid of her during their exchange of backchat the night before, March had suggested that she wasn't entirely in his confidence; but Simon was not yet ready to attribute her prompt response to his invitation to nothing but the fascination which his beauty and charm had been able to exert on her during an interview in which his attention had been mostly elsewhere. She was a very uncertain quantity still, and the Saint wasn't anxious for Haskins to find out about that visit to the March Hare too soon. It was a situ­ation that demanded active management . . .

  Stimulated by the arrival of a lady, Haskins sought a nearby flowerbed and in more or less gentlemanly fashion disposed of his chew. Simon took advantage of the disgorgement to cross the patio alone and greet the girl as she came out.

  By night she had been beautiful; but so were many girls whose glamour vanished with the dawn. She was not one of them. Under the sunlight she took on a flaming vividness that matched the heady colours in the courtyard. The setting took her into its composition and framed her with perfect lightness, as if its exotic blooms took life from her and she from them . . . What the Saint had to do was an attractive task.

  "Karen darling!"

  His voice was warm and eager. And before she could speak, he had wrapped her in his arms, holding her tightly against him and covering her lips with his own.