“You were taking a long chance.”
“It wasn’t quite that bad. They wouldn’t gang up on me; Ruiz isn’t that type of thug. I wasn’t sure whether I could handle Morrison or not, but it was worth the risk. After all, Ingram, I’m not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I’m thirty-four, and I’ve been married twice. If I lost the bet, I’d still survive.”
“Did Morrison finally pass out?”
“Yes. Around midnight, I think. By that time I’d used up all the other routines, and didn’t know any judo, so I pretended to be sick and locked myself in the biffy. I beg your pardon, what’s the word?”
Ingram grinned in the darkness. “The head.”
“The head. Anyway, when he quieted down, I came out, and he was asleep in the cockpit. But I wasn’t sure about Ruiz. When he came back from over here and pulled the raft up on deck, he took some bedding and went up forward, so I couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or not. I pretended to pass out on the other side of the cockpit and waited for over half an hour. Then I tiptoed up to where I could see him, and found he was asleep all right. I went below then, and started through the cabins.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“No. It wasn’t a real thorough search, because I was afraid to take very long or turn on too many lights, but I found three suitcases and went through them and there wasn’t anything that would identify Patrick Ives. Two of them belonged to Morrison and Ruiz, because their wallets were in them, but the third one—in one of those staterooms where the ammunition is—didn’t have anything except the usual clothing and shaving gear and so on. It could be his clothing—that is, I think it would fit him—but for some reason they must have thrown his wallet overboard.”
“Unless it was in his dungarees,” Ingram said. “I mean, there in the dinghy. Those two men in the Dorado could have taken it.”
“I thought of that, but somehow I don’t think they did. I talked to them, remember?”
“Do you have any idea why they’d destroy his identification?”
“Just a minute,” she said. “It won’t do to get too quiet too suddenly. So duck.” Her voice soared to a maudlin wail. “Oh, when Irish eyes are smiling, sure ‘tis like a morrrnnn in sprinnnnnggggg—” She chopped off suddenly, and said with amusement, “He’ll think I fell down, or you threw something at me.”
“It doesn’t matter now whether he thinks you’re drunk or not,” Ingram pointed out.
“But it does,” she said. She took a puff on her cigarette; the tip glowed, revealing for an instant the handsome face with its prodigious shiner. There was something undeniably raffish about it, and appealing, and as attractive as sin. Must be atavistic, he thought; the view just before the clinch, after a Stone Age courtship.
“What are you driving at?” he asked.
“I don’t want Ruiz to figure out I might have fooled him. He has a great deal of contempt for me, and I want to keep it alive.”
“Why?”
“I think our only chance is for one of us to surprise him while Morrison’s over here on the sand bar, and you’re never going to get behind him if you live to be a hundred. I watched him all day, and that boy’s cool.”
“Also too tough to be knocked off his feet by a woman,” Ingram said. “If he looks easy, it’s just because you’re seeing him alongside Morrison.”
“It wouldn’t have to be for more than three or four seconds, if we timed it right. However, we’ll table that for the moment, and get back to Patrick Ives. It doesn’t add up. He was aboard. They say he drowned.”
“Are you sure he was aboard?” Ingram asked quietly.
“Positive. I managed to get Morrison talking about him a little tonight. Hollister was Patrick Ives, and nobody else. He never actually told Morrison that was his name, but he practically admitted it wasn’t Hollister. And of course Morrison knew that Hollister-Dykes Laboratories thing was a lot of moonshine. He told Morrison he was an M.D. who’d got a bum deal from the ethics committee of some county medical association over a questionable abortion. That’s pure Ives.”
“Just a minute,” Ingram said. “Was he a drug addict?”
“You mean narcotics?” she asked, puzzled.
“Heroin.”
“No. He was a lot of other things, but not that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course. Unless he’s acquired the habit in the past four months, at the age of thirty-six, which would seem a little doubtful.”
“All right, one more question. Are you absolutely sure he was an aerial navigator during the war?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not just taking his word for it? I gather he was quite a liar.”
“He was, but this is from personal knowledge. I knew him during the war, when he was taking flight training. He didn’t make pilot, but he got his commission as a navigator and was assigned to a B-17 crew in England.”
Ingram took out one of his remaining two cigars and lighted it. The pieces were beginning to fit together now, and he was pretty sure he knew why Ruiz was going over the hill. A little shiver ran up his back, and he hunched his shoulders against the darkness behind him. He told her about Ruiz’ visit.
“Those boys are running from something really bad. I should have figured it out in the beginning, from the way Morrison acted. He’d rather risk anything than go back to Florida. But it was hard to see because as far as we know they hadn’t killed anybody, and hadn’t planned to. In fact, they’d gone to considerable trouble to get old Tango out of the way without hurting him—”
Rae Osborne broke in. “But somewhere along the line they did kill somebody.”
“They must have.”
“Patrick Ives,” she said excitedly. “Why didn’t we see it before? The body was here near the Dragoon, but the dinghy was picked up over twenty miles away, in deep water.”
“That’s perfectly natural,” Ingram pointed out. “The body was submerged—and probably on the bottom—a good part of the time, so it was acted on only by the tides. But the dinghy was carried off to the westward by the wind and the sea.”
“Yes, but look, Captain—Don’t you see? That’s the reason Morrison wouldn’t let anybody go out and get his body when Avery saw it from the plane and called us on the radio. We’d find out Ives hadn’t drowned at all, that he’d been killed.”
“No,” Ingram said. “If Morrison had had five years to work on it, he couldn’t have dreamed up a story that matched the evidence as perfectly as that did. I was already pretty sure the man had drowned, even before I got aboard the Dragoon, and I don’t have any doubt at all it happened exactly the way Morrison said it did. What he didn’t want us to find out was that the man wasn’t Ives.”
“What?”
“I don’t think Ives was even aboard when they left Florida.”
“But he had to be. The watch—”
“This other man, whoever he was, must have been wearing the watch. That’s all. I don’t know whether Ives is the one who’s been murdered, but somebody was, and it happened ashore where it can be proved, not out here where it could be covered up as an accidental drowning. Naturally, Morrison wasn’t going to tell us about it as long as he had a perfectly good ready-made explanation for Ives’ being missing. He was going to have his hands full as it was, forcing me to take them down there and watching us so we didn’t escape. If we knew the real story, we’d jump overboard and try to swim back to Miami.”
“He intends to kill us, then, when we get to this Bahia San Felipe?”
“I think so. And Ruiz can’t quite hold still for anything as cold-blooded as that, so he’s about made up his mind to pull out. If he can.”