“The unexploded torpedo idea was about the, same. They sink, anyway, I understand. And besides, when the explosives experts came down to look at the pieces, they blew all these theories sky-high; They proved the explosion came from inside the boat. Something about pressures, and the direction some of the bottom planking had ruptured—what little they found.”
Griffin took another sip of his drink and grinned at them. “And then there was the theory I blew it up myself to collect the insurance. Of course, it would seem a little wasteful to blow up the men too, free, gratis, for nothing, because I didn’t have any insurance off them, but it’s easy to get around a little thing like that when you’re theory-hunting.
“Then there was the Max Easter school of thought. He used to be a powder monkey and is known to be a kind of virtuoso with high explosive. This brain storm did have a little more sense to it than most of the others, however, for they were having labor trouble up at Mid-Gulf and Easter’d been fired by them some years back. He’s kind of a professional sorehead. Anyway, somebody worked out this idea Easter might be mixed up in that wildcat strike, and that he and some more hotheads might have been trying to lay a mine in the channel for a Mid-Gulf tanker that came down that night. The only catch to this theory, of course, is the fact that Easter wasn’t in the boat. And if he’d hatched a deal like that he’d have been the one to do it.
“So you can see we’re not completely backward here. We can hatch as many theories as anybody. The only trouble is nobody’s ever found out yet just why the boat did blow up.”
Griffin stopped talking, and for a moment they were all silent. Another crazy thing that doesn’t make sense, Reno thought. Is that all they grow in this country? He looked across at Patricia Lasater. She was still strangely quiet and intent on her own thoughts, drawing aimless designs on the tablecloth with a spoon.
“Those men,” she said at last. “What I can’t get out of my mind is the fact that nobody ever missed them. Wasn’t there a car, or anything?”
“No,” Griffin said. “Nothing. The boat was gone, and that was all—” He broke off suddenly, looking at his watch. He whistled. “Girls, I’ve got to run. It’s H-hour, minus twenty minutes, and tonight’s dreamboat has been known to be ready on time.”
After he was gone the conversation lagged. There were long stretches of silence between them during dinner, and Reno sensed that she was deep in some not-too-happy preoccupation she could not throw off. He himself was conscious of an inability to get Griffin’s story out of his mind. There was something about it that kept bothering him. But how could there be any connection between it and the baffling set of puzzles he was already involved in? Counsel hadn’t come back until after the middle of July.
But that wasn’t quite right. Hadn’t he been through here sometime in May, when he arrived on the ship? Mrs. Conway had said it was in May they were married.
Explosives, Reno thought. That was what stuck in his mind. Counsel had been fascinated by explosives.
They walked back to the camp together in the warm velvet night. Outside her cabin they paused for a moment, and he was irritably conscious of some faint reluctance to leave her. Hell, he thought, let her go.
She said, “Goodnight. And thank you, Mr. Reno,” rather quietly, and turned to go inside.
A deep restlessness had hold of him and he knew he would not sleep if he went to bed. All the old unanswered questions would come back to tear at the edges of his mind the moment he lay down. He would go down to the float and smoke a cigarette. He had started in that direction when he remembered he should open the door and the windows in the cabin to freshen it.
He stepped up on the porch and was feeling for the lock with the key when he thought he heard a sound inside. It was not repeated, and he shrugged off the idea as he opened the door and stepped inside. He clicked on the light, and stood looking, around in amazement and growing anger.
The cabin had been ransacked—and either by a novice or by someone in too big a hurry to take any pains to cover it up. The big cowhide bag had been slit open and clothes were scattered over the floor. In the same sweeping glance, he saw that the door going out into the kitchen was partly open. Snatching the flashlight off the dresser, he crossed the room and pushed the door inward, ready to swing. The kitchen was empty.
He swung about. The bathroom, he thought swiftly. But before he could take a step he heard a faint thud outside, behind the cabin. Running across the room, he hit the light switch and plunged the place into darkness as he shot through the doorway and onto the porch. He switched on the flashlight and as he cut around the corner he probed the darkness along the bank, knowing he was courting a shot if the intruder had a gun. The light encountered nothing but trees and the backs of the other cabins.
Turning, he threw the light out across the bayou in a sweeping arc. There was no sign of a boat. I must have imagined it, he decided. This place is giving me the jumps. The guy who was in there may have been gone for an hour.
Disgustedly, he walked back to the porch and went in side. He reached out for the light switch again with his left hand, seeing nothing but the beam of the flashlight ahead of him, and felt his hand stop abruptly against the sweaty shirt and the chest of a man standing beside him in the darkness.
There was nothing he could do about it then. The night tilted up at him like an opening cellar door.
Ten
Why didn’t they take off his headgear and relieve the pressure? His whole head was an immense, throbbing receptacle of pain, which was going to burst like a soap bubble with the next breath he took. He tried to open his eyes and look up at the circle of anxious faces that would be leaning over him, the officials and his teammates, Then he remembered. . . .
He tried to sit up and it hit him again, the stab of pain at the back of his head. It was a long time before he could get to his feet, clinging weakly to the doorframe, and then the vertigo and nausea swept over him again. When he got the light on he staggered into the bathroom and turned on the shower, collapsing onto his knees with his head under it. This is a stupid thing to do, he thought. If I pass out again, I’ll drown. He let the water run, washing over him like a soothing spring rain.
When he got to his feet and turned off the water, the cut on his head was still bleeding a little, but he was able to feel it with his fingers and determine that it was not a bad one. Wrapping a towel about his head, he went into the other room.
Just how had it happened? The man had forced the bathroom window to get in—that much he knew, for the window was still open. And he had apparently ducked back into the bathroom when he heard the key in the lock. But what about the sound outside? Had he only imagined it, or had there been two of them?
He picked up the, flashlight and went back outside, walking unsteadily and feeling the pain like a pressure inside his skull. Because he had an idea what he was looking for now, he threw the light on the ground and found it almost immediately. It was the soap dish from the bathroom, lying near the bayou’s edge.
Suckered, he thought bitterly. By an old Indian trick like that. The man had been there in the bathroom all the time and, knowing he didn’t have a chance of getting back out the window in time, had sailed the dish out to create a diversion. A thing like that took cool nerves and a devilish intelligence.
Back inside the cabin, he looked grimly at his scattered belongings. The letter from the man in the FBI was still inside the pocket in the ripped suitcase. Had the prowler read it and put it back? As far as he could see, nothing had been stolen. Somebody was looking for information, he thought; and the sad part of it is I don’t know how much he got.