. . 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. I met him just twice.”

“How did you meet him?”

“I told you. He called me at the La Perla Hotel.”

“When?”

“A week ago last Saturday. He said he had a proposition that might interest me, and asked if I’d come over to Miami Beach and see him.”

“He just pulled your name out of a hat, is that it?”

“No. He said I’d been recommended to him by a couple of yacht brokers.”

“He mention any names?”

“No. It didn’t occur to me to ask, at the time. But there are any number of people around the Miami water front who could have told him about me. I’ve been in and out of here for years. Anyway, he seemed to know all about me, and wanted to know if I’d had any luck in finding a boat. I told him no.”

“This was over the phone?”

“Yes.”

“So you met him at the Eden Roc?”

“That’s right. In his suite, about two p.m. Saturday.