You can check with the Grayson Hotel there. Also with a Tampa yacht broker named Warren Crawford. I was in his office a couple of times, and aboard a ketch named the Susannah. If you’ll look in the breast pocket of my coat you’ll find the receipted hotel bill. And the stub of an airline ticket from Tampa to Nassau, Wednesday morning, and a receipted hotel bill from Nassau for Wednesday night to last night. Then there’s a Pan American Airways ticket stub for the flight from Nassau back to Miami. I landed here at three-forty this afternoon and came straight to the hotel. Anything else?”

Schmidt had already removed the receipts and ticket stubs from the coat and was riffling through them. “Seems to be right.”

“But he could still have cased the job,” Quinn insisted. “The whole thing’s too pat. And if he was just the finger man, he’d make sure he had an alibi.” He whirled on Ingram. “Let’s take another look at this pipe-dream you were going to buy the Dragoon. What’d you expect to do with it?”

“Sail it out to Honolulu. I’m thinking of going back in the charter business. That’s what I used to do, here and in Nassau.”

“You know the owner’s asking price?”

“Sure. Fifty-five thousand dollars.”

The detective surveyed the room with a contemptuous smile. “You must be one of those eccentric millionaires.”

Ingram felt his face redden. “What I pay for hotel rooms is my business.”

“Come off it, Ingram! You expect us to believe a man living in a fleabag like this really intended to buy a fifty-five-thousand-dollar yacht? How much money have you got?”

“That’s also my business.”

“Suit yourself. You can tell us, or sweat it out in jail while we find out ourselves. What bank’s your money in?”

“All right, all right. The Florida National.”

“How much?”

“About twelve thousand.”

“We can check that, you know. There’ll be somebody at the bank till five.”

Ingram gestured toward the telephone. “Go ahead.”

“So you expected to buy a fifty-five-thousand-dollar yacht with twelve thousand?”

It might have been more sensible to explain, but he was growing a little tired of Quinn’s attitude and he’d never been a man who took kindly to being pushed. He leaned forward in the chair and said, very softly, “And if I did? Quote me the law against it, by section and paragraph. And stop breathing in my face.”

“Come on, Ingram! Let’s have it. How many of you were there, and where’s the boat headed?”

“If you won’t take my word for it, call the owner. I wrote to her.”

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

“Mrs. C. R.