a pig’s eye. You wouldn’t even know who the owner is.”

“Mrs. C. R. Osborne, of Houston, Texas. Her address is in that black notebook in my bag.”

Schmidt gave him a thoughtful glance, and removed the notebook. Quinn, however, smiled coldly, and said, “Funny she didn’t mention it. We talked to her about an hour ago and told her we were looking for a man named Ingram, but she’d never heard of you.”

“You mean she’s here in town?” he asked.

“Yes, she’s here,” Schmidt said. “She flew in this afternoon. When did you mail that letter?”

“Saturday morning, from Nassau,” he replied. “Maybe she left Houston before it was delivered.”

“We can find out. But what’d you say in it?”

“I made her an offer of forty-five thousand for the Dragoon, subject to the usual conditions of survey.”

“And payable how?”

“Cash.”

“All right,” Schmidt said crisply, “if you did write a letter, which I doubt, it has to be a bona-fide offer, or a phony—in which case it’s probably a deliberate alibi. You haven’t got forty-five thousand dollars. So what were you going to use for money? Put up or shut up.”

Ingram hesitated. Then he shrugged wearily, and said, “All right. I was acting for a third party.”

“Who?”

“His name’s Fredric Hollister, and he’s president of Hollister-Dykes Laboratories, Inc., of Cleveland, Ohio. They manufacture ethical drugs. He’s at the Eden Roc Hotel; go ahead and call him.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this in the first place?” Schmidt demanded.

“Partly, I suppose, because it was none of your damned business,” he said. “But principally because he didn’t want it known the buyer was a corporation until after the deal was set, because of the effect it might have on the price. I was to select the boat, subject to his final approval, and then take over as captain. We’d pretty well settled on the Dragoon after I gave him the report on it Sunday night, but decided to wait till I’d looked at the others in Tampa and Nassau before we committed ourselves. I’m supposed to call him this afternoon.”

Schmidt nodded. “Can I use your phone?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

The detective picked it up. “Get me the Eden Roc Hotel, in Miami Beach,” he said, and waited. The room was silent except for the faint humming of the air-conditioner. “Mr. Fredric Hollister, please . . . Oh? . . . Are you sure? . . . And when was this?”

Ingram stared at his face, conscious of a very cold feeling that was beginning to spread through his stomach. Schmidt hung up, and snapped, “Get your clothes on, fella.”

“What is it?”

“Hollister checked out of the Eden Roc a week ago. On Monday night.”

2

His leg hurt. He’d smoked the two cigars he had, and the cigarettes they gave him tasted like hay. They sent out for coffee. Quinn and Schmidt questioned him, moving like cats around the table where he was seated, and then Schmidt was gone and there was another man, named Brenner. There was one window in the bleak interrogation room, covered with heavy screen, but from where he sat he could see nothing but the sky. He thought it was still raining. It didn’t seem to matter. Quinn went out, and came back shepherding an old man with dirty white whiskers and sharp black eyes, an old man who clutched a comic book in one hand and a crumpled and strangely bottle-shaped paper bag in the other and pointed dramatically from the doorway like some ham in an amateur production of Medea or King Lear, and cackled, “That’s him! That’s him!” It was the watchman, the old shrimper who’d lived aboard the Dragoon.

“Hello, Tango,” Ingram said wearily, to which Tango made no reply other than to heighten the fine theatrical aspect of this confrontation by leaning further into his point and belching. “Ain’t nobody’d ever forget a big flat face like that,” he announced triumphantly, and was gone, presumably back to the bottle. The identification seemed rather pointless, since he admitted being aboard the Dragoon, but maybe it was something technical about preparing the case.

Schmidt came back, and Brenner left. Schmidt leaned on the other end of the table with an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, and said, “All right, let’s try again. Who’s Hollister?”

“All I know is what he told me,” Ingram replied.

“We just heard from Cleveland. There is no such outfit as Hollister-Dykes Laboratories—if that’s news to anybody. And he paid his hotel bill with a rubber check. How long have you known him?”

“I didn’t know him at all.