He made the reservations and hung up.

“It’s all set,” he said. “Ill meet you at the Pan Am counter at the airport about three-quarters of an hour before flight time.”

“Good. Now about your pay—”

“There’s no charge,” he said.

She frowned. “What?”

“I helped them steal the boat, didn’t I? The least I can do is help you find it.”

“You can’t be serious.”

He stood up to leave. “Whether or not I did it with intent, as the police call it, doesn’t change the facts. I’m at least partly responsible for their getting away with it.”

“Well, you’re an odd one, I must say.” She regarded him for the first time with something approaching interest. “How old are you?”

“Forty-three.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Thanks,” he said. She didn’t bother to rise. He walked to the door, fighting the stiffness in his leg, but paused with his hand on the knob. “That dinghy—when they found it, were there any oars in it?”

“No,” she said. “Just the motor.”

“Was there any gasoline in it? Or did they look?”

She stared down at the glass in her hand. “They looked,” she said. “It was empty.”

He nodded. The silence lengthened. “See you in the morning,” he said, and went out.

3

It was a long time before he got to sleep. On the evidence, the theft of the Dragoon was no hare-brained, spur-of-the-moment stunt; it had been carefully thought out by men who knew what they were doing. Then by the same token they must have known they couldn’t enter any port in the western hemisphere without the necessary documentation—which they couldn’t possibly steal. So what had they planned to do? Stay at sea, or put her into orbit?

And how had they lost the dinghy? The police seemed to accept this as merely a routine incident—they’d been towing it, it came adrift, so what? But it wasn’t that simple. They wouldn’t have been towing it at sea; and certainly not with the motor and somebody’s clothes in it. It would have been aboard, lashed down on the deckhouse. So they had put it over the side for something. But for what? The watch and the clothes were easier to understand, at least up to a point. The man—whoever he was—had taken them off to go in the water for some reason. But what reason? You were stumped again.

And what about Mrs. Osborne—aside from the obvious things like the good looks and bad manners? Something didn’t quite ring true. The theft would have been reported to her as soon as the police learned of it themselves—last Friday, at the latest. That was four days ago. But she apparently hadn’t thought it necessary to come to Miami until this morning; and then presumably she’d grabbed the first available plane after the police called to tell her about the dinghy. Why? It wasn’t to identify the dinghy. She’d admitted over the phone she wasn’t familiar enough with the Dragoon’s gear to be sure.