“Positive.”
“Just this moonshine about being president of a drug firm? Well, it is in the pattern, at that.”
He began to have the feeling now that she wasn’t as drunk as she appeared. She was faking it. “What are you talking about?”
“Still that same old medical angle,” she mused, as if speaking to herself. “His mother must have been frightened by a pregnancy test.”
“You know him, don’t you?”
“Who says I do?”
“You spent over a thousand dollars today just to fly over the Dragoon with a pair of binoculars, looking for him.”
“Maybe I was trying to find out.”
“Who do you think he was?”
“It’s nothing to you.”
“No, but it might be to the police. Or had you thought of that?”
“Never mind the police. If I have to go out and recover my own boat, they can look after themselves. I tell you I don’t know, anyway. I’m just guessing.”
“Did he have a watch like that?”
“Yes,” she said. “But that’s no real proof. They’re not too common, but still there are others.”
“What about the description I gave you?”
“It could fit him. Along with a lot of other men. There’s another thing, though, that’s more important. You must have wondered why he wanted somebody else to survey the boat instead of going himself.”
“Sure.”
“He couldn’t have gone himself because Tango would know him. He’d been aboard the Dragoon before.”
He nodded. “That would make sense. But what would he want to steal it for?”
“I have no idea.”
“Who was he?”
“He’s just a man I used to know. His name’s Patrick Ives. That is, if all these guesses are right.”
“Did he know anything about sailing?”
“A little, I think. I know he’s sailed small boats.”
“Do you think he could have handled the Dragoon—with help, I mean? She’s a little out of the plaything class.”
“That I couldn’t judge; I don’t know enough about it myself. He did know navigation, though; he was a B-17 navigator during the Second World War.”
“He was just asking for trouble if he didn’t know how to handle a boat that size.”
“Well, he seems to have found it, judging from where the Dragoon is now. Do you really think he’s dead?”
Ingram nodded. “Naturally, there’s no way to be sure, but I think he drowned.”
She looked down at her glass. “I suppose so.”
“Was he a doctor?” he asked.
“No,” she said, without looking up. “He was a phony. He liked to pass himself off as a doctor when he was cashing rubber checks.”
He nodded. “That sounds like him. I’ve got one of his checks.”
“Well, it’s no collector’s item.”
“You don’t have any idea at all why he would steal the boat?”
“None whatever, as I told you once before. Would you like me to have that statement notarized, Captain?”
Well, Ingram reflected, he could tell her to take her schooner and go to hell—there was always the easy way out, if you wanted to quit. But it would be an admission of defeat in just as real a sense as any other failure to finish the job. And there was no use getting hacked at a drunk; that was stupid. If she is drunk, he thought. He’d given up trying to guess that one.
He went back to his room and lay staring up at the dark for a long time before he went to sleep. The whole thing was murkier than ever. Assuming she was correct, and Hollister’s real name was Patrick Ives, you still didn’t know anything. Why was she so concerned with catching up with him, and whether he was dead or not? And why in God’s name would a con man and rubber-check artist want to steal a schooner which was of utterly no value to him and which he probably couldn’t even sail in the first place? That was about as sensible as trying to carry off a paved street.
He awoke drenched with sweat and tangled in the sheet, with the feeling that he had cried out in his sleep. When he turned on the light and looked at his watch, it was a little after two. Well, he wasn’t dreaming about it as often now, and eventually the picture would fade; it wasn’t as if there were any feeling of guilt, as though he’d panicked and left Barney there to flame like a demented and screaming torch. He’d got him out and over the side of the shattered boat with his own clothes aflame and Barney’s flesh coming off on his gloves. It was too late, and Barney was already dead, but nobody could have saved him. It wasn’t that. It was horror. It was the fear afterward, and wondering if he would ever be able to smell gasoline in a boat again without being sick with it.
It wasn’t a very big boat that had killed Barney and burned the yard down back to the office and the gate. Her name was Nickels ‘n Dimes, and she was a beat-up old thirty-foot auxiliary sloop in for a number of minor jobs, including some engine overhaul and the installation of a new radiotelephone and a better ground plate on the outside of her hull. They had put on the copper strip when she was on the ways, and the bolt through the hull for the radio connection. She went back in the water Friday afternoon. The separate ingredients for disaster were a long week end, a slow leak somewhere in her fuel system, poor ventilation, and the fact that Barney—who had a poor nose anyway—had a cold on Monday morning. The catalyst was a torch. Barney had the radio ground cable connected to the through-bolt and was preparing to silver-solder it when Ingram came down the hatch and smelled the gas. He yelled, and at the same instant Barney struck the torch.
He’d left a call for four a.m. When the telephone rang, he was instantly awake. Opening the french windows, he stepped out onto the balcony facing the harbor channel and Hog Island. They were in luck; it was dead calm. The fronds of the coconut palms along Bay Street were motionless in the pre-dawn darkness that was beginning to show a faint wash of rose in the east. He called Mrs. Osborne, found she was already awake, and hurriedly dressed in khaki trousers, T-shirt, and sneakers. When he came out into the corridor, she was just emerging from her room. She was wearing white calypso pants and sandals and a blue pullover thing with short sleeves. Her legs were bare. She looked very cool and fresh and attractive, and if she had a hangover there was no visible trace of it. Must have a constitution like a horse, he thought. He took her suitcase and went out to signal one of the taxis across the street while she settled the bill. She was silent on the ride to the airport. There was no apology, or even any reference to her behavior of last night. Maybe she didn’t even remember it, he thought—not that it mattered. The airport restaurant was closed, but Avery had some coffee in the McAllister office. They drank a cup.
“We’ll just leave your bag here,” Ingram said. “I’ll take mine, since I’ll probably stay aboard. Even if we find we’re going to have to charter a tug to get her off, we can’t leave her abandoned out there.”
They went out and boarded the plane. The deflated life raft was bundled up in back of the seats in the after compartment. Ingram motioned for her to take the co-pilot’s seat, and strapped himself into one of those in back. Faint light was just breaking when they roared down the runway and took off. He lighted a cigar and settled back to wait. It would take over an hour.
Andros was a brooding dark mass below them, and then they were out over the vast distances of the Bank where the water lay hushed and flat in the pearly luminescence of dawn. The sun, peering over the curvature of the earth behind them, sprayed the underside of the wing with crimson and gold in momentary brilliance until Avery nosed down again and it was lost. After what seemed like hours, Ingram looked at his watch again. They should sight her in a few more minutes. He stepped through the narrow doorway and stood in back of Mrs. Osborne. She was staring out ahead. Two or three minutes later he tapped her lightly on the shoulder and pointed. “There she is.” She nodded, but made no reply.