Gulf Coast Girl

Ten

The moment for explosion had passed and he sat in the breeze-swept darkness. She heeled down a little and water hissed along the hull. I gave Barclay the corrected course, and he let her fall off another point.

“Now,” he said, off to my left, the faint glow of the binnacle light on his slender, handsome face, “watches. Have you ever handled a sailboat, George?”

“No,” Barfield replied, across from me. “But if your nipple-headed friend can do it, anybody can.”

“Well, it won’t be necessary, actually,” Barclay said. “Manning and I can take it watch-and-watch, but you’ll have to be on deck when he has it and I’m asleep. Mrs. Macaulay can have the forward part of the cabin; you, I, and Manning can get a little sleep in the two bunks in the after part from time to time, except that obviously he can’t go down there when one of us is asleep.”

He was utterly calm and matter-of-fact, as if he were discussing the seating arrangement at a dinner party rather than trying to work out a deathwatch over a condemned man they had to live with and keep prisoner until the hour came to kill him.

“It’s a little after twelve now,” he went on. “You’d best go below, George, and catch up on your sleep. Manning can stretch out here in the cockpit and I’ll take the first watch, until six. When Manning relieves me, you’ll have to come on deck.”

Barfield grunted something and went below, carrying the satchel.

When he had gone, Barclay said, “I’d advise you to be chary of provoking him, Manning. He’s quite dangerous.”

I sat down, as near him as I dared, and lit a cigarette. “It would be tragic, wouldn’t it?” I said. “I mean, if he blew his stack and killed me before I found your lousy plane for you and the two of you could take turns at it.”

“Why should we kill you?”

“Save it,” I said. “I knew all along you wouldn’t. But aren’t you going to give me a letter of recommendation? You know, something like: ‘This will introduce Mr. Manning, the only living witness to the fact that we killed Macaulay and that his widow is innocent—“

“Not necessarily,” he said. “You won’t go to the police. You can’t. You’re wanted for murder yourself.”

I wondered if he thought I would believe that. Certainly the chances were I wouldn’t go to them. I’d have everything to lose and nothing to gain. But if I were dead and lying on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico somewhere in two hundred fathoms of water, there was no chance at all. And .45 cartridges were cheap.

I moved a little nearer. Just a slight shift of the buttocks along the seat, almost imperceptible. I glanced at his face. It was calm and imperturbable in the faint glow from the binnacle. I stretched and slid another inch. I could almost reach him.

The eyes were suddenly full of a mocking humor. “Here,” he said. He took the .45 automatic out of the pocket of his jacket and held it out to me butt first. “Save scuffling for it. Undignified, what?”

My mouth dropped open. For a fraction of a second I was too startled to do anything. Then I recovered myself and grabbed it out of his hand.

“That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” he asked solicitously.

“Come about,” I said. “Take her back to the sea buoy.”

“I say, you are a theatrical devil, aren’t you?” His voice was amused.

“You don’t think I’d kill you?”

“Frankly, no.”

“So it’s not loaded?” Completely deflated, I took the gun in my left hand and pulled the slide back. I stared. It was loaded.

“You won’t pull the trigger,” he said, “for several reasons. You don’t want to go back to Sanport, because the police are searching for you. And in the second place I doubt very seriously that you are capable of shooting a man in cold blood. Requires a certain detachment you don’t have—”

“Go on,” I said.

“But, naturally, the principal reason is that Barfield is down there in the cabin with another gun, and he’s between here and Mrs. Macaulay. If you attempted anything, he has her. And he can be quite unpleasant if necessary. Has a knack for it.”

“I don’t give a damn what happens to Mrs. Macaulay,” I said.

He smiled. “You think you don’t, but that would change with the first scream. You don’t have the stomach for that, either.”

“I’m the original gutless wonder. Is that it?”

“No. You’re just vulnerable in a number of areas in which you can’t be in a business like this. I’ve made quite a study of you since that afternoon up there at the lake.”

“Then you knew what she was up to? That’s the reason you shoved off and left us?”

“Naturally. Also the reason we were a little rough with you, without actually hurting you, that night on the beach. We wanted you to hurry a bit and get this boat for them so we could find where Macaulay was hiding. Worked out quite well, too, except that he was in such a funk he forced us to kill him. However, that’s all in the past. Right now, would you mind giving my gun back if you’re finished examining it?”

Sweat broke out on my face. I lifted the gun, lined it up squarely between the mocking brown eyes, and flicked the safety off. My hand shook so badly it wobbled. I had only to squeeze the trigger, ever so gently, and there would be only one of them. He watched me coolly. I wondered if there was any fear in him at all. He couldn’t be human.

My finger tightened. I was taut as guitar strings all over and the muscles hurt in my arms. I didn’t care what happened to her, did I? I cursed her silently, bitterly, hating her for being alive, and hating her for being here.

“George,” Barclay said quietly.

I went limp. I handed the gun to him, feeling sick and weak all over.

“What is it?” Barfield’s voice asked from the companionway.

“Nothing,” Barclay said. “Sleep tight, old boy.”

I lit a cigarette. My hands shook.

“Charge it to clarification,” Barclay murmured.

He had wanted me to know it, wanted me to realize the futility of jumping one of them to get his gun as long as she was there where the other could get her. This way it hadn’t cost anything. I wondered what kind of mind I was dealing with. He knew things about me I didn’t know myself. I detested her. Maybe I even actively hated her. She and her lying had ruined everything for me, I was sick with contempt when I thought of her, and yet he’d known he could tie my hands completely by threatening her with violence.

Clarification, he called it. It was about as clear as the bottom of the Mississippi.

“I shouldn’t feel too badly about it,” Barclay said. “Exploitation of weakness is purely routine in war, chess, or tennis, and older than any of them. And she is admirably constituted to be a carrier. Rather delectable wench.”

“Carrier?”

“Typhoid Mary of vulnerability, to use a medical analogy, assuming any extension of the areas of potential hurt to be a pathological condition. Regard for another human being is an exposed nerve end, if you follow me. Imagine a surrealist football player trailing his solar plexus or testes after him like an eleven-foot bridal train. Unwieldy, what? And damned convenient for the opposition in case the score is close.”

“The hell with Mrs. Macaulay,” I said.

“Forgive me if I talk too much. Grow philosophical at sea, particularly under sail. Unpleasant habit.”

“What are you going to do with her after you find the plane?”

“Frankly, I haven’t given it any thought, old boy. And since neither of us gives a damn what happens to her, as you say, why waste time in speculation? Lovely night, isn’t it? Are you fond of Swinburne?”

“We were like that,” I said. “What did Macaulay do?”

“He tried to steal, or did steal, some three quarters of a million dollars worth of diamonds from us.”

The sum meant nothing to me. He could have said twenty dollars or a billion and it would have been the same as far as I was concerned. It was something they were after, and Macaulay had been after. I was just a pedestrian who had been shoved into the line of march and run over.

The breeze was almost directly abeam. We shipped some water amidships and a little spray blew into the cockpit. Barclay handled her well; he was a good helmsman. A clumsy one might have had the cockpit full by this time. I leaned down and cupped my hands to light another cigarette and looked around at him. The brown eyes gazed thoughtfully at the compass card. He was the most completely baffling human being I had ever run into, and I knew somehow that if we were to sail this boat around the world for the rest of our lives, just the two of us, I wouldn’t be any nearer to understanding him on the last day than the first. He was cold-blooded, entirely without conscience, and still you almost liked him. Why, I didn’t know.

“Since you were in the salvage business,” he went on, “you must be familiar with the Shetland Queen.”

I looked up suddenly. “Sure. I remember her.”

She had lost her rudder in a tropical disturbance last fall and hit a reef somewhere along the northern edge of the Campeche Bank. As I recalled the story she had gone on across it as the sea piled up, but there had been too much damage below water line and she had gone down a few hours later. The crew had got away all right. She was in about ten fathoms, and the underwriters had let a contract to salvage as much of the cargo as wasn’t ruined. They had saved some machinery and several thousand cases of whisky that somehow hadn’t been smashed.

“So that’s the first time your diamonds were dunked,” I said. “But where did Macaulay get into the act?”

As soon as I asked, I began to get the connection. Salvage—underwriters; so she had been telling the truth about part of it, anyway. The part about his being in the marine insurance business.

“That is correct,” he said. “They were aboard the Shetland Queen. But—” He looked up and smiled in the faint glow from the binnacle. “Through some oversight they didn’t appear on the cargo manifest or any of the customs lists. To be exact, they were in some cases of tinned cocoa which had been loaded in Holland and were consigned to a small importing firm in New Orleans. Quite an economical way to ship diamonds, if you follow me, except that it can be damned embarrassing if something happens to the ship, as in this case. The cocoa was insured, as I recall, for some two or three hundred dollars. And naturally we should have looked a little silly trying to explain to the underwriters at that stage of the game that we hadn’t really meant chocolate at all, but diamonds, and that they should pay us three quarters of a million when we’d paid a premium on a valuation of three hundred dollars. Hardly sporting, what? And one might anticipate a certain element of skepticism on their part. To say nothing of the embarrassment of attempting to explain a harmless prank like that to the customs chaps. Lacking in true appreciation of these little matters, the customs people.

“It was something of an impasse, as you may well imagine. Benson and Teen had paid off all claims, including ours, and were engaged in salvaging what they could, but naturally this didn’t mean they were going to waste any time and effort in bringing up insignificant items of general cargo such as a few dollars’ worth of tinned cocoa. They paid, and wrote it off. We made a few tentative feelers. Inasmuch as they were working inside the ship anyway, and inasmuch as the sea pressure at that depth probably hadn’t been sufficient to crush the tins, why didn’t they merely bring up our cocoa and let us withdraw our claim? They brushed this aside as ridiculous. They were working in the open sea, salvage operations are deucedly expensive, and they had no intention at all of trifling with such picayune items. We let the matter drop, knowing that any insistence would excite suspicion. We’d be forced to wait until they were finished with the wreck and then undertake a salvage operation of our own.

“But, unfortunately, some—ah—competitors of ours began to suspect what was in the wind and also tried to purchase the cocoa from Benson and Teen. This proved to be a little too much for the gentleman who was in charge of the operation for them—the late Francis L. Macaulay. This obviously valuable chocolate began to intrigue him, so he sent a confidential emissary down to Mexico to go out to the scene of operations and look into it on the quiet. This chap asked to have the cocoa brought up, and since he was ostensibly acting for Benson and Teen through the person of Macaulay, they brought it up. It took him only a few minutes, of course, to determine what made it so valuable. He devalued it forthwith, saying nothing to anyone. As soon as he was back in the little Mexican port where the salvaged cargo was being landed, he called Macaulay by long-distance telephone.

“They had two problems. The first was, of course, our original one—getting the stones into the United States without paying duty or having to answer any embarrassing questions as to where they had come from. The second was to keep us from recovering them. We had two men in the Mexican port keeping an eye on the cargo that was brought in. Macaulay solved both problems at once. He had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War, and held a pilot’s license. He came down to the Gulf Coast, chartered a big amphibian, and came after his colleague and the stones. They were to rendezvous in a laguna some ten or fifteen miles to the east of the Mexican port. They did, but our men were there, too, having become suspicious of Macaulay’s man and followed him in another motorboat. They lost him in the jungle, but saw the plane coming in and arrived at the spot just as the man was climbing aboard. Macaulay was helping him, and our chaps recognized him. They opened fire, killing the other man, but Macaulay got the plane off the water and escaped.”

“With your stupid diamonds,” I said.

He nodded. “So we thought. Macaulay never did go back to New York, suspecting that inasmuch as our men had recognized him as the pilot of the plane engaged in stealing three quarters of a million dollars from us we might feel ill-disposed toward him. His wife disappeared also. The firm said he had suffered a heart attack and resigned. He’d told them, originally, that he had to go to the Coast because of illness in the family, or some such story. We tried to trail him. He escaped us rather narrowly two or three times. But the strange part of it was that he apparently had never made any attempt to sell any of his loot. We began to understand then, just about the time we ran him down in Sanport. He hadn’t sold it, or tried to, because he didn’t have it.

“He escaped us in Sanport, taking off in another plane. We learned that another man had been with him, a man carrying an aqualung diving outfit. Macaulay, incidentally, couldn’t swim a stroke. As soon as we learned of the diver, of course, we knew what had happened. The metal box containing the diamonds had fallen into the laguna during those few hectic moments when Macaulay’s friend was killed.

“Our only hope lay in staying so close to Mrs. M. she’d have to lead us to him eventually. But just about that time we began to have a strong suspicion he was back in Sanport. Perhaps you missed the little item in the paper, but just about five days after Macaulay took off, a fishing boat docked with a castaway it had picked up in a rubber life raft on the Campeche Bank. This man, the captain said, gave them some vague story about being a pilot for some Mexican company and having crashed while en route from Tampico to Progreso alone in a seaplane. But he had, strangely, just vanished the minute the fishing boat docked.”

“I get it now,” I said. “As soon as she got in touch with me you knew the castaway was Macaulay. He’d gone back to the laguna with a diver to hunt for the box. But how do you know he found it, or even got there? Maybe he crashed on the way down.”

“No. He crashed on the way back. So the box is in the plane.”

“I see. And from the fact that he was trying to hire me to do some more diving for him, you realized he knew where the plane was and could go back to it?”

Barclay nodded. “Correct. We also suspected he was right there in the house, but that taking him alive wasn’t going to be easy. He was armed, and very scared.”

“The thing that puzzles me,” I said, “is that you and your meat-headed thugs never did put the arm on her to find out where the plane was. You’re convinced now she knows where it is, but you let her come and go there for a week or more right under your noses.”

“We weren’t certain she knew then.”

“But you are now. Why?”

He hooked a leg over the tiller and used both hands to light a cigarette. The glow of Sanport’s lights was fading on the horizon.

“It’s really quite simple,” he explained, filling his lungs with smoke. “As a matter of fact, I’m a little ashamed I didn’t think of it before. I merely wrote Macaulay a letter two days ago and pointed out the advisability of telling her where it was.”

I shook my head. “Maybe you’d better run through that again. You wrote him a letter—where?”

“Addressed to his house, naturally. Even if he weren’t there she would get it to him.”

“And he’d be sure to tell her, just because you suggested it? Don’t be stupid. There’s no reason at all he’d do it.”

He smiled again. “I disagree, old boy. There was a very good reason he would tell her. Remember, Macaulay was in the insurance business. He didn’t sell life insurance, but he was familiar with the necessity for it as well as any married man and probably more so than most. I simply pointed out that inasmuch as there was always a chance something might happen to him, it behooved him to protect her.”

“By telling her where the plane was?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” he said.

“And wouldn’t that be wonderful?” I said. “That way he could guarantee she’d be kidnapped and beat up and put through the wringer by you and the rest of your sadistic bastards—”

He shook his head gently. “I’m afraid you still don’t see it, at least not from Macaulay’s point of view, old chap. There was no doubt as to her being interrogated; he knew that. But suppose she didn’t know where the plane was?”

I turned and looked at him, and it took perhaps a full second for the slow horror of it to catch up with me. “Good God—”

“Precisely, old boy. Life insurance, you see. He was leaving her the only thing that could stop the questions.”

I saw then what Macaulay must have gone through in those last few hours. He couldn’t turn to the police because he had already left the protection of the law. There was a good chance he would be killed, and he was going to leave her right in their hands. He had to tell her.

“Hostage to fortune, you see,” Barclay murmured. “The exposed nerve end again.”

I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at him. “You dirty son—”

I stopped. I’d forgotten him. A number of things were beginning to click in my mind, all at the same time. She’d told the truth about his job. She’d told the truth about their trying to get away to Central America. Barclay had sent that letter to Macaulay only two days ago. Macaulay had told one lie, to his company, about where he’d been going when he left New York. Maybe—

No. He’d been on his way back when he crashed. She’d still been lying when she said he’d been trying to get to Central America. But I had to talk to her. I stood up.

“I’m going below,” I said.

“No.” Barclay shook his head. “George is asleep.”

I was tight with rage. “I said I was going below. Wake him up. Tell him to hold his goddamned gun with both hands. Tell him to sit on it. Tell him to come up here and jump overboard. I’m going down there.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I want to talk to Shannon Macaulay.”

I could see it in his face in the glow from the binnacle. He was smart. He had more pure intelligence than anybody I had ever known. He saw the possibilities of it and knew what I wanted to ask her. And not only that. He was already adding it up on his side of the ledger. He hadn’t wanted to prove she was lying, in the first place. Always increase the areas of vulnerability; don’t decrease them.

“George,” he called. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” came the weary answer from inside the cabin. “What’s biting our stupid friend now?”

I went below and switched on the chart lamp. He was lying in the starboard bunk smoking a cigarette with his jacket and tie off and his collar unbuttoned. The gun was in a shoulder holster under his left arm. He was big and tough, and his eyes blinked sourly at the light.

“Look, Snerd,” he said. “Why don’t you flake out somewhere and get off my back?”

I walked over and stood staring down at him. “Get out,” I said.

He started to rise to his elbows. “Why, you dimwit—”

“George, come here a moment,” Barclay called from the cockpit.

“Better run along, baby,” I said. “Your boss is whistling for you.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bunk and slowly sat up. The gray eyes looked hungrily at me for a moment, and then Barclay called out again.

“Just keep on asking for it, Snerd,” he said. He turned his back and went out.

I parted the curtains and went into the forward part of the cabin. She was lying on the starboard bunk with her face in her arms.