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legs languorously. "I took a jaunt out there, and it seems there was a body.
The Captain said they'd been out that evening, an' the lad fell overboard an'
drowned before they could find him again."
"Who was he?"
"One o' the crew. Some kid they picked up in Newport News. They didn't even
know where his home was or if he had any family. Don't suppose nobody ever
will There's lots of kids like that on the waterfronts . . . But the funny
thing was, nobody on the March Hare had called me. They were just wonderin'
whether they ought to when I got there."
"It all sounds most mysterious," Simon agreed sympathetically.
Haskins stood up and mopped his brow.
"It shuah does. Heah's all hell apoppin' just a few hours after you land in
town. You're known from heah to Shanghai as a .trouble maker, although I ain't
sayin' you deserve it. But if you're as clever as they say you are you
naturally wouldn't have any convictions-yet. But you can't blame me for
wonderin' about you."
"Brother," said the Saint, with the silkiest possible undertone of warning,
"you're beginning to sound just a little too much like Chief Inspector Teal.
You remember what I told you? Just because a few queer things happen here, and
I'm in Miami at the time, you come charging after me-"
"When I charge you, son, I'll have something." Haskins scuffed along the
floor of the patio with a phlegmatic toe. "You look at: what's been bustin'
loose. A tanker blows up, for no reason. I get a mysterious phone call that
nobody can account for, about a body. An' then it seems Gilbeck an his
daughter ain't heah, but you are, an' nobody knows where they've gone."
"So," said the Saint, "I must be mixed up with sinking ships and kidnapping
millionaires as well."
Haskins' eyes were flinty mist.
"Son," he said, "I don't know what you're mixed up with."
His right hand snaked suddenly out of his pocket and flattened out in front
of Simon Templar. The Saint gazed down at the oblong slip of paper held in its
palm. Written on it in plain capitals were the words:
LAWRENCE GILBECK:
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YOU CAN'T GET AWAY WITH IT ALL THE TIME. I'M COMING TO PUT AN END TO YOUR
TROUBLES.
The thin linear figure drawn as a signature at the lower right-hand corner
wore a halo slighdy askew.
Simon stared at it for just three seconds.
And then, progressively, he began to laugh.
It started as a tentative chuckle, grew up into a louder richness that became
tinged with the overtones of hysteria, and ended in a culmination of wild
hilarity that mere words could scarcely choke their way through. The whole
rounded gorgeousness of the business was almost too shattering to endure.
The full magnificence of it had to work itself into his system by degrees.
The March Combine had taken the hurdle of the planted body neatly enough-he
had realised that. But in their impromptu comeback they had unsuspectingly
sown the seeds of a supernal fizzle of which history might never see the like
again.
"Of course," sobbed the Saint weakly. "Of course. I wrote ft. What about it?"
The Sheriff scratched his long stringy neck.
"That sort of note only means one sort of thing to me."
"But you don't know the background." The Saint wiped his streaming eyes.
"Justine Gilbeck wrote us weeks ago that Papa was behaving like a moulting
rooster: he seemed to be in trouble of some sort, but he wouldn't tell her
about it. She was worried stiff. She asked us to come here and try to find out
what it was and help him. I can show you her letter. Let me get it for you."
III
How Simon Templar Made a
Pleasure of Necessity, and Patricia Holm Was Not Impressed
Sheriff Haskins' equine face seemed to grow longer and gloomier as he
completed a patient reading of the letter. Then he referred again to the note
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signed with the Saint's emblem.
"'You can't get away with it all the time'" he read off it "What would that
mean?"
"Oh, I was always kidding him that you can't make millions honestly," Simon
replied easily. "I always told him that one day his sins would catch up with
him and he'd go to jail. It was a standing rib. So of course when Justine said
he was worried I had to make a crack like that."
Haskins shifted his cud.
"'I'm coming to put an end to your troubles' That would be sort of double
meanin', hunh?"
"Yes."
"On account of what well call this fictitious reputation o' yours."
"Naturally." The Saint was still a little shaky with laughter. "Now wouldn't
it be fair to tell me where you got that note from?"
"I dunno yet." Haskins gazed at it abstractedly for a moment longer, and put
it back in his pocket He returned his attention to Justine Gilbeck's letter.
He said, as if he were making a comment on the weather: "I guess there's
plenty of this letterhead in the house."
"And we're all master forgers," Simon assured him blandly. "Signatures are
just baby stuff to us. We think nothing of four whole pages of handwriting."
Haskins put the letter back in its envelope and studied the postmark. He
tapped it on his front teeth.
"Mind if I keep this a while?"
"Not a bit," said the Saint. "There must be a bank in town that knows her
writing, and they've probably got other friends here as well. Check up on it
all you like. And then come back and apologise to me."
Haskins put on his hat and turned his head in the manner of a buzzard seeking
sustenance. Finding a spot which suited his fancy, he scored a nicotine
bullseye at the roots of an unoffending lily, and said: "Maybe you better not
leave town just yet, in case I might want to do that."
A suitable remise was shaping itself on the Saint's tongue when it was
abruptly cut off by the arrival of another car. It was a very different
proposition from the Sheriff's well-worn but serviceable jalopy. This was an
enormous cream-coloured custom-built Packard, which whirled into the driveway
and whipped around the front of the house with an effortless speed that made
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