The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 7

  “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 addle-pated blather that he can’t prove.”

  Haskins’s 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 Law. 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 incriminatin’,” 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 warn’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, wasn’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 troublemaker, 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’s 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 slightly 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 it. 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.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR MADE A PLEASURE OF NECESSITY AND PATRICIA HOLM WAS NOT IMPRESSED

  1

  Sheriff Haskins’s 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 we 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 bull’s-eye 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, red-heads 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 flower-bed 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 rightness, 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.

  “The scarecrow in black’s the sheriff,” he said in urgent sotto-voce, and went on aloud: “This is wonderful! Why haven’t I seen you for so many years?”

  The first rigidity of her supple body gave him a bad moment. But he had to give her a clue, and this seemed to be the only way. If she still didn’t want to play, it was the will of Allah…He kept her in an embrace of iron, and kissed her again for luck.

  Her strength was pent up against him, and then suddenly it wasn’t. He loosed her, and she smiled, and he felt a breathlessness which could not be wholly put down to the suspense.

  “It’s lovely to see you, dear.” Her voice was cool and self-possessed. “I heard this morning that you were here, and I rushed right over.” She turned towards Haskins as he shuffled up. “Why, hullo, Sheriff. I didn’t expect to see you again today.”

  “It’s an unexpected pleasure for me, Miss Leith.”

  “The sheriff was out on Randy’s yacht last night, Simon,” she explained quickly. “Oh, I forgot—you don’t know Randy, do you? You must meet him. Randolph March. Anyway, he has this yacht, and we were out last night, and a poor boy fell overboard and got drowned, and the sheriff had to come out and see about it.”

  Haskins’s eyes had a birdlike brightness.

  “Why, miss,” he said, with an air of persuasive surprise, “wasn’t it Mr March who told you Mr Templar was heah?”

  “Oh, no! Mr March would be frightfully jealous if he knew I’d come here. You will be an old dear and not say a word about it, won’t you?” She took his enslavement for granted with a glance of saccharine seduction, and turned away again to twine fingers with the Saint. “Sally wrote me from New York.”

  “I hoped she would,” said the Saint happily.

  The shadow of great gloom fell back over Haskins’s face. The brightness went out of his eyes, to be replaced by a look of dour resignation. He said, “Well, folks, I don’t like to interrupt the meetin’ of old friends. I guess I’ll be moseyin’ along.”

  “Won’t you even stay for a drink?” Simon invited half-heartedly.

  “No, son.” Haskins raised his hat to the girl. “You’ll have lots of private things to talk about, I’m sure. I’ll be seein’ you both again ’fore long.”

  “Bring your bloodhounds,” said the Saint, as he escorted the funereal figure towards the house. “Maybe we can put something up a tree.”

  He watched the sheriff’s departure with mixed feelings. It was a remarkably difficult thing to divine exactly what Mr Haskins was thinking or believing at any given time. He had a disturbing faculty for shaping phrases that could hold as much or as little as the hearer’s conscience wanted to read into them.

  But there was a much more pleasant, if no less problematical, factor to be dealt with immediately, and Simon Templar temporarily dismissed the less alluring enigma with a shrug as he went back to the patio.

  She had sat down on the footrest of a deck chair, and she was using a mirror and lipstick to repair the damage he had done to her mouth. He wondered if she also had felt any of the unaccountable breathlessness which had caught him during the infliction of the damage, but if she had, she was a good dissembler. She made him wait until her full lips were again flawless enough for her satisfaction.

  Then she said calmly, “You like very direct methods, don’t you?”

  “It was the only thing I could think of,” he said, matching her for calm. “I didn’t know you’d met him, and I had to make sure you wouldn’t drop any bricks.”

  “What made you think I’d respond to your kind of hint?”

  “I just hoped.”

  “You don’t hate yourself very much.”

  “Anyone can hope. But I’m not asking you to excuse me. I’d do the same thing again, even if I knew it was hopele
ss. I found out it was worth it.”

  “I’m glad you were satisfied.”

  She was packing lipstick and mirror carefully back in her bag.

  He regarded her thoughtfully, digging a package of cigarettes out of the pocket of his robe.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s ask you why you came here.”

  “You told me to look you up if I wanted some fun,” she said innocently. “Well, I’ve always liked fun. But perhaps our ideas of fun aren’t quite the same.”

  “Did March send you?”

  “Did you think I was lying to that sheriff? March would be mad as hell if he knew I’d been here.”

  “You lied about that drowned boy.”

  Her eyes were big with ingenuous astonishment.

  “I only repeated what Randy told me. I suppose the boy just fell overboard and I didn’t notice it. Perhaps they didn’t want to tell me about it at the time because it would have spoiled the trip. And if it wasn’t true, how else could the body have got there?”

  Simon tightened his lips on an unlighted cigarette.

  “You lied about me.”

  Colour touched her cheeks.

  “Wasn’t that what you wanted me to do?”

  “Of course. But why did you do it?”

  “Because I like you.”

  “How much?”

  “Enough.”

  “So you liked Randy enough too, before I arrived. And when somebody better than me comes along, I can move back into the same museum. It must be a life full of variety.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her slim fingers drummed on her knee. “If you’d be more at home with a Bible Class, I can always go.”