Read Online The Saint in Miami by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online Page A

he won’t need to torture them. Directly he asks about it … well, Gilbeck didn’t make all his money by being slow on the trigger. He’ll catch on to the possibilities at once. He’ll say, sure, he left a letter, and what are they going to do about it? Isn’t that what you’d do? And what are they going to do about it? There’s no use torturing anyone who’s ready to tell you anything you want to hear. Gilbeck hasn’t got any secret information that they want.”
    “How do you know?” asked Peter.
    “I don’t,” Simon admitted. “But it isn’t probable. My theory is perfectly straightforward. Gilbeck just went into March’s Foreign Investment Pool. He was ready to overlook a few minor irregularities, as a lot of big business men would be. You don’t make millions by splitting ethical hairs. Then Gilbeck got in deeper, and found that some of the irregularities weren’t so minor. He got cold feet, and wanted to back out. But he was in too deep by that time-they couldn’t let him go. Now, our strategy is that he knew there’d be trouble, so he left a protective letter. All right. So there’s a letter, and I’ve got it.”
    Patricia kept looking down, moving one hand mechanically over the contour of her knee.
    “If only you had got it,” she said.
    “It might help us a lot. But as It is, the myth is a pretty useful substitute. Unwittingly, we’ve put Gilbeck in balk. March has got to believe in the letter. I was firing a lot of shots in the dark, but they hit things. He won’t be able to figure where I got all my information, unless it was out of this imaginary letter. Which means that he’s got to take care of me before he can touch Gilbeck. And he’s got to be awfully cautious about that, unless he’s quite sure what angles I’m playing.”
    “I’ll have to order some wool,” said Peter. “It sounds like a winter of sitting around and knitting while March’s outfit are sinking ships and wondering about you in their spare time.”
    Simon crushed out his cigarette and took another one from the packet on the table. He sat down again and put his feet up.
    “I read the morning papers in bed,” he said. “They’ve picked up a few bodies from that tanker, but no live ones. The way it happened, it wasn’t likely that there’d be any. The cause of the explosion is still an official mystery. There was no mention of a submarine, or any other clues. So perhaps we gummed up the plot when we caught that lifebelt.”
    “It’s not so easy now to believe that we really saw a submarine,” said Patricia. “If we told anyone else, they’d probably say we’d been drinking.”
    “We had,” answered the Saint imperturbably. “But I don’t know that we want to tell anyone else-yet. I’d rather find the submarine first.”
    Peter leaned against a pillar and massaged his toes.
    “I see,” he soliloquised moodily. “Now I take up diving. I tramp all over the sea’s bottom with my head in a tin goldfish bowl, looking for a stray submarine. Probably I find Gilbeck and Justine as well, tucked into the torpedo tubes.”
    “There are less unlikely things,” said the Saint. “The sub must have a base on shore, which has got to be well hidden. And if it’s so well hidden, that’s where we’d be likely to find prisoners.”
    “Which makes everything childishly easy,” Peter remarked. “There are approximately nine thousand, two hundred, and forty-seven unmapped islands in the Florida Keys, according to the guide-book, and they only stretch for about a hundred miles.”
    “They wouldn’t be any good. A good base wouldn’t be too easy to hide from the air, and the regular plane service to Havana flies over the Keys several times a day.”
    “Maybe it has a mother ship feeding it at sea,” Patricia ventured.
    Simon nodded.
    “Maybe. We’ll find out eventually.”
    “Maybe you’d better call in the Navy,” said Peter. “That’s what they’re for.”
    The Saint grinned