The Intimidators (4 page)

“What’s an Omni?” I asked.

“Hell, don’t ask me,” the Texan said. “I was just along to pull the strings up forward when the man said pull. I get a kick out of sailing, but all that scientific crap bores hell out of me, or I’d have a boat of my own. It’s some kind of fancy navigating gadget like they use on planes, I think. The ordinary RDF wasn’t working worth a damn for some lousy electronic reason. The navigator objected that the Omni wasn’t allowed; and Buster said goddamn it something smelled wrong, and he wasn’t making a polite suggestion, he was giving a goddamned order: to hell with what was and wasn’t allowed; he wasn’t going to pile up his ship for anybody’s crummy rules; snap to it and come up with a position
now.
A minute or so later the navigator came boiling out of the hatch with his face so pale it kind of shone in the dark and yelled get us the hell out of here we’re right on the reef.... Well, that was Buster Phipps, a real sailorman. Of course we were disqualified. That’s just the point. Nobody’s going to tell me old cautious, careful Buster could lose his boat in good weather between here and Bermuda without human intervention of some kind. Sure, he might have been run down some night by a big ship—it happens—but I’ve checked and doublechecked every vessel that passed through the area during the time that counted. No bumps in the night, no scratches on the paint, and hell, if the
Ametta
had been sunk by a collision there’d have been some broken stuff floating around and we’d have found it. We searched every inch of ocean from the Bahamas clear up to Cape Hatteras, N.C., figuring the possible drift due to wind and current.” He grimaced. “Now it’s your baby. Here are some pictures.”

I’d looked at photographs of the boat, a handsome sixty-foot ketch, and of Wellington (Buster) Phipps, a handsome middle-aged gent with tightly curling gray hair. I’d looked at a picture of Mrs. Phipps who had once, Haseltine said, been a big movie star called Amanda Mayne. I’d never heard of her, but she was a good-looking woman, and a lot of those movie girls become big stars kind of retroactively after they marry money. I didn’t hold it against her. She looked like an independent-minded lady who might be fun to talk with if you couldn’t do better, and she probably wouldn’t allow you to do better. Why should she? Phipps looked as if he was pretty adequate in all departments, not only the financial and nautical ones.

“And this is Loretta,” Haseltine had said, with a funny note in his voice that made me like him more. I mean, the girl really meant something to him.

She’d never mean anything to me. I could see that, even from a picture. She was young and blond and beautiful, and she’d obviously never had a thought in her life except how young and blond and beautiful she was. She couldn’t even smile for a family snapshot without striking a glamor-pose with a lock of shining blond hair falling over one eye just so.

“They weren’t handling that big sailboat by themselves, were they?” I asked.

“No, they had their paid hand, Leo, who acted as cook and steward besides making himself useful on deck when he was needed; and they had a couple of young fellows along, husky yachting characters who’d crewed in the race.”

“Names?”

“Buddy Jacobsen and Sam Eilender. Here’s what we’ve dug up on them so far.” He handed me a thin carbon copy of some kind of a report. “Sam’s twice had his driver’s license suspended for speeding; he also tied one on in a Mexican port after one race and wound up in a local
juzgado.
Buddy got pulled in with a bunch of peace protesters a few years back. Not what you might call spectacular criminal records.”

I glanced at him. “But even after racing to Bermuda with them, you had them checked out.”

He grimaced. “Look, we took turns in those damn wet bunks; we. didn’t share them. Sure I checked them out. The fact that a man’s a good yachtsman doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to get rich. Hell, he might like to have a yacht all his own.”

“You’re thinking of kidnaping?”

“Never mind what I’m thinking,” he said. “All my thinking hasn’t produced any results; that’s why I got hold of you. Don’t let me put my ideas into your head. What I want to hear is your ideas.”

I shrugged. “What about this Leo?”

Leo Gonzales. Fifty-four, five-seven, a hundred and thirty. Dark complexion, dark hair, brown eyes. Lost a couple of fingers on his left hand—the last two—while acting as a mate on a sportfisherman before he signed on with Buster. I gather somebody was boating a big black marlin and Leo, handling the leader, got excited and took a couple of turns of the wire around his hand for a good grip, a real no-no. The fish took off, the wire came tight and, look Ma, no fingers. Must have been when he was young and dumb because he never pulled any goofs like that with Buster or he wouldn’t have lasted eleven years. A tough little bastard who could hold a course in bad weather and come up with a hot meal when the boat was sailing on her ear. Buster always figured he was lucky to find a boy as good as Leo to work on board.”

It occurred to me that a fifty-four-year-old member of a minority race—judging by the name—might get tired of being a good boy after eleven years; but as a transplanted Swede, by blood, I don’t pretend to be an expert on anything but Scandinavians, and even there I’m kind of shaky on Norwegians, Finns, and Danes. I started to ask another question, and stopped. Any black marks on Leo Gonzales’ record would be in the report I held; and the fact that Haseltine apparently didn’t like the man, and was nevertheless grimly listing his virtues, only emphasized what I’d already sensed, that there were things I wasn’t being told. Well, as an experienced undercover agent of a government often obsessed with security, that should make me feel right at home.

I said deliberately, “You know your girl is alive,
amigo
, but you keep referring to her daddy in the past tense. Explain that contradiction for me, please.”

Haseltine frowned, his eyes going narrow and muddy again. It occurred to me that millionaire Texans with strong Indian traits constituted another minority group I wasn’t really expert on.

“Don’t be too damn bright, partner,” the big man said coldly. Then he shrugged. “Okay. A man keeps hoping.”

I said, “Not really. The fact is that you really think they’re dead.”

His face was hard and ugly. All he needed was some war paint and a scalping knife. “Damn you—”

I said, “Cut it out, friend. We’re not the Federal Missing Persons Bureau, if there is any such thing, which there isn’t. You knew that when you came to us. You paid enough snoops to pick up enough information so you could find the office and talk to the man. There isn’t a chance in the world you didn’t at the same time learn what kind of orders emanate from that office. And they
don’t
concern rescuing beautiful maidens missing at sea.”

Haseltine drew a long breath. “Okay,” he said softly. “Okay, genius. They’re dead. After five weeks they’ve got to be dead. I try to kid myself, but I know it’s no damn good. Understand?”

“I understand that,” I said. “What I don’t understand is, if they’re dead, where the hell do I come in?”

“I’ve just told you,” he said angrily. “I’ve just explained, damn it! That boat didn’t go down of itself. Buster Phipps didn’t run his beloved
Ametta
on a reef with his cherished wife and daughter on board, no chance! He didn’t let her get caught in a sudden squall with all sail up and all ports and hatches open, don’t ever think so. He didn’t light a cigarette in the engine room over an open can of gasoline, and neither did anybody else on Buster Phipps’ boat—anyway, the bucket had a diesel auxiliary. There wasn’t any gas on board. Buster wouldn’t have it; too dangerous. If the
Ametta
sank, somebody sank her. If they’re dead, somebody killed them. Deliberately.”

“Sure. One of the sea monsters that inhabit the Lethal Triangle you just told me all about.”

Haseltine gave a short, harsh laugh, like a bark. “That’s a lot of bullshit,” he said.

“You don’t believe in that Hoodoo Ocean?”

“Do you?” He grimaced. “I bet you could take any other risky piece of water with a lot of air and sea traffic and if you started looking hard enough you could line up enough mysteries of the sea to make your hair curl. Hell, there were whole villages of Bahamians who used to make a living off wrecks less than a century ago. The old sailing ships used to pile up on those reefs like cordwood. I mean, that’s a tough sailing area, with sudden coral heads and unpredictable currents—the way the tide runs off and on those flats is tricky as hell. The Gulf Stream doesn’t help a bit, either. The sea that builds up when a cold norther blows against that north-running river of warm water is pure murder. Harry Conover, for instance, probably just tried to drive his
Revonoc
a little too hard, and she fell off one of those big, steep waves and split wide open. No, I don’t believe in any sea monsters, or any death-ray-equipped UFOs, either. But I’ll tell you what I do believe in.”

“What’s that?”

“I believe in a guy, somewhere, who read all that melodramatic bunk and decided it would make a perfect cover for putting the finger on one particular yacht in the area. He could count on nobody getting too worked up about it. Hell, it would be just another Triangle tragedy, wouldn’t it?”

“What would be his motive?”

“I don’t know.” Haseltine spread his hands dramatically. “I’ve spent thousands of bucks looking and I still don’t know. Buster Phipps had some people who didn’t like him—nobody makes money without that—but killing-enemies, no. And neither did the girls. I can’t give you a clue. You’ll have to work it out for yourself.”

Again I had the old familiar feeling that security was rearing its ugly head, and I wasn’t being told everything there was to know. Well, it was his problem. If it gave him a kick to have me solve it blindfolded—or fail to solve it—that was his choice.

“And if I find the motive, and the man?”

Haseltine leaned forward. “Don’t be stupid, partner. You know what you do, and I know what you do. That’s why I got you instead of some scared private eye with a tape recorder and a telescopic camera. Well, find whoever got the
Ametta Too
, and do it.”

I looked up. The stewardess was telling me to buckle my seatbelt. After obeying orders, I looked out the plane window. We were coming off the blue water over a green island. At least I assumed it was an island down there, although it went on farther than I could see. There was a city down there: Nassau, New Providence Island, B.W.I. Now all I had to do was learn enough about it to deal with one of the other team’s best men, quickly, so I could get to work on something truly important, like finding, or avenging, a misplaced blonde.

My initial impression of the British Colonial Hotel was that the inmates, staff and guests alike, were exclusively black. It was a great, conspicuous building on the waterfront in the crowded center of Nassau; a hotel built the nice, ornate, rambling way they used to build luxury hotels; and there didn’t seem to be, at first glance, a single paleface in the joint besides me. Please understand, I’m not making the observation in a spirit of criticism. People do come in varying colors, and I’ve never considered the differences of great importance. On the other hand, I’ll readily admit that I’m not accustomed to an environment in which my own particular chromatic variation is in the minority.

I told myself it was a valuable educational experience, which didn’t keep me from feeling slightly outnumbered, even when I realized that there were, actually, quite a number of white faces scattered -around the crowded lobby. Anyway, I hadn’t come to the Bahamas for valuable educational experiences. I just wanted to check in fast and take a preliminary look around the town, but this turned out to be easier to plan than to accomplish—checking in fast, I mean.

I’ve spent some time in the land of
mañana,
enough to get me used to—anyway, resigned to—the slower tempo of life in the semi-tropics; but at least my Latin friends were always cheerful and friendly when they kept me waiting. These hotel people seemed to resent me, which I put down to the racial difference, until I saw that they seemed to resent everybody, white or black. I suppose there’s something to be said for such even-handed lack of discrimination, but I’m not really impressed by folks who act too proud for their jobs, whatever those jobs might be. Hell, even in my business, we try to render cheerful and efficient service, as I hoped to demonstrate shortly to a gent named Pavel Minsk.

I was tempted not to tip the surly bellboy who finally condescended to drag my suitcase upstairs and drop it disdainfully inside my fifth-floor room, but there was no sense in starting a feud, so I gave him a fairly adequate gratuity, and saw that I hadn’t gained anything by the expenditure of government funds. I’ve met the same attitude in some European countries; if you’re stingy, you’re a rich American slob robbing the poor, proud, hardworking natives; and if you’re generous, you’re a rich American slob flaunting his ill-gotten wealth. To hell with all temperamental, chip-on-the-shoulder jerks, I reflected, black or white. I was tolerant. They could all proceed to the nether regions together, unsegregated, as far as I was concerned.

All the delays had brought the time well past noon, and I was hungry enough to put off my scouting expedition a little longer—quite a little longer, as it turned out. The lunch I got was not only slow, but fell considerably short of gastronomic perfection. The butter, sugar, and jam, were all served in those crummy little prepackaged, U.S.-type doses—I once had a friend who objected to this practice so strongly that he insisted on making the waitress rip open the sugar for his coffee and peel the butter for his bread, saying that he didn’t eat out just to wrestle with a lot of paper and plastic, and the least they could do was unwrap his food for him if they wanted his trade. It was disillusioning to come to what was supposed to be a fancy hotel in a glamorous foreign country and be presented with the same old prefabricated hash-house garbage. My opinion of Nassau, as a pleasant luxury resort, was dropping steadily. Well, I hadn’t come here for pleasant luxury.