“What’s that?” I asked. We were wasting time, but it interested me.
“I wanted to buy a coconut farm,” he said simply.
“Coconut. . .?” I stared at him, and then I saw the dream. It was all over the round, lost, wistful face—the face of the world’s eternal patsy. He was like a child thinking about Christmas morning.
“On one of them islands,” he went on softly, not even looking at me. “Down south, you know. Just a one-island farm, but I would own the whole island and every single, blessed thing on it. I’d live on it, in a big house on top of a hill, and there’d be all these niggers. I’d wear boots, and one of them explorer’s hats, and I’d be good to ‘em. You know, things like doctoring them when they was sick, and holding trials when one of ‘em stole something from another one.
“There wouldn’t be any other white people except this store-keeper that I didn’t like and that I’d make him jump like Billy-be-damned when I said something to him, and then of course the straw-boss and his wife. The straw-boss, you understand, is the one that handles the niggers and that I give the orders to, and his wife would look just like Laura LaPlante. . . .”
He broke off, his face a picture of dreamy rapture. “You remember Laura LaPlante?
He had sixteen years on me. I shook my head. “No. But I know who you mean. nothing changes but the name.”
“Anyway,” he went on, not even hearing me, “this straw-boss’s wife would look exactly like her, and when he was off at the other end of the island seeing to the coconut trees and telling the niggers what to do she’d come in and sleep with me because she thought about me all the time, day and night. He’d know about it, of course, but there wasn’t anything he could do because I paid him so much he didn’t want to lose the job. . . .”
He sighed and shook his head. I wondered if it had ever occurred to him he could have shortened the dream considerably and got into the sack with her a lot faster by marrying the LaPlante type himself and by-passing the overseer. But maybe that wouldn’t work.
“Well, cheer up,” I said. “You might have got tired of her, and think of what a hell of a place that would have been to try to dodge a woman. Now, let’s go get it.”
“Sure,” he replied. “But first, would you tell me how you fellers found out I had it.”
“It wasn’t easy,” I said. “It took us a year and a half. And there’s a chance we never would have if you hadn’t spent some of the money we recognized. . .
“Them twenty-dollar bills,” he said. “I knowed it. I knowed it.”
You just knowed it too late, Bwana Sahib. “Why did you spend them, then?”
“I didn’t stop to think till I’d already passed three of ‘em. Then I noticed the numbers all run in order. So you traced em?
I shook my head. “No. We never did find out who spent them originally, but we did know they came from this area. So we went back to the other angle we were working on. Haig got away from that wreck, all right, and away from Sanport—we knew that. Nobody in Sanport would have hidden him; he was too hot. So the chances were that before the police arrived, he forced his way into a car that was passing and put a gun on the driver. That happens quite often. But the thing we never could understand was why the driver didn’t report it afterward. Even if Haig had killed him and stolen the car, the whole thing would have come out eventually. The car would have been found, or some friend or relative of the driver would have reported him missing. That was the thing that threw us, you see. Simply that the driver would have reported it if he were alive, or somebody would have reported the driver’s absence if he’d just disappeared.
“It took us a long time to see the answer, but we finally did, just about the time your twenty dollar-bill showed up. Suppose the driver died before he could tell us, all right, but in a perfectly routine manner that wasn’t suspicious at all? Routine, at least, in police work.
“We checked the Highway Patrol reports for that day, and we found it. Six hours and twenty minutes after Haig disappeared out his getaway car when it hit that truck, an elderly couple in a 1950 Plymouth sedan went off the road two miles from here just after dark in a downpour of rain and were instantly killed. They were on the wrong road, and they were driving faster than they normally did, even in good visibility on dry pavement. Haig, you see? He was in the car. He’d forced them to hide out somewhere until after dark.
“He was probably hurt, and maybe punchy with shock, so he didn’t know where he was going. The only thing he was sure of was that he had to stay off the highway. He could have left a trail of blood, but it washed right away. It was raining, you see. And when they picked up the old people, there was nothing in the car to indicate he’d ever been with them.
“It was easy from there. We just came out here, among other places, and searched your camp. We found what was left of his suitcase, and the rest of those twenties, plus those tens.”
When I finished, Cliffords didn’t say anything for a moment. He merely sighed and looked at me with that awe in his face. Then, finally, he said, “And I thought I could get away with it.”
“All right,” I said. I was tired of wasting time. “You ready to show me where it is?”
He stood up. “Sure,” he said. “There’s three more thousand of it under the house, on a sill. Unless you found that, too.”
That was wonderful, I thought swiftly. Add that to nearly a thousand there on the table. It was going to work out beautifully.
“And the rest of it?” I asked.
“Buried in three syrup buckets, under a down tree. About a mile up the lake.”
“How much?” I asked. “Do you know?”
He nodded. “I added up the little bands. It took me a long time. There’s a hundred and thirteen thousand of it.”
And it was so ridiculously easy. All I’d had to do was ask for it.
“Umh-umh,” I said thoughtfully. “That checks out pretty well with the bank’s figures. Well, let’s get on with it.”
Eleven
We picked up that under the house. It had been almost directly over my head when I’d peered under that other time, but I’d been looking for something much larger. It was all in tens, five hundred dollars to the bundle, wrapped in waxed paper and lying flat on top of the sill. We brought it inside and he watched while I gathered up and counted what was on the kitchen table.
“Altogether, three thousand eight hundred and forty,” I announced.
He found a paper bag for it. I put it all inside, folded it over carefully, and sealed it with some cellophane tape he had. I wrote the sum on it, and then the notation, “Recovered in vicinity of cabin.” He watched intently, very much impressed with all this police routine.
“We’ll have to come back by here so you can pack the clothes you want to take to jail with you,” I said. “So there’s no use carrying this around. We’ll pick it up on the way back. Let’s see. . . .”
I pulled a stack of magazines and comic books away from the wall and shoved the money behind it.
“Should be safe there,” I said.
He nodded. “Sure. Nobody ever comes here.”
“You say it’s about a mile?” I asked.
“Pretty near, I reckon.”
“I don’t see any sense wearing this hot jacket up there.” I said. I slipped it off. Removing his .38 from the pocket, I shoved it in the waistband of my trousers. Then I removed the fake warrant from the inside breast pocket, and when I slid it into the right hip pocket of my trousers I eased out the leather key case that was already there, holding it concealed in my hand for an instant while I was folding the jacket. I let it drop just as I tossed the jacket across the bed and turned toward the door.