“Let me see it again,” he said.
She took the worn sheet of paper from her purse and gave it to him, and he held it up to read it by the light from inside the room.
Dear Joss,
I know you will be surprised to hear from me now, but I had no heart to write when I could only make excuses which you wouldn’t believe. You were quite right to divorce me. But now I have found the pearls I came for. I can pay everyone back, and perhaps make everything all right with you too.
The only thing is, it may be delicate to handle. Say nothing to anyone, but send somebody you can trust who knows pearls and doesn’t mind taking a chance. Or come yourself. Whoever comes, go to the “Cantina de las Flores” in La Paz and ask for Consuelo. She will bring him to me. I won’t let you down this time.
Always your
The writing was awkward and straggly, up hill and down dale, the long letters overlapping between lines.
“Is this his writing?” Simon asked.
“It wasn’t always that bad. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote it. Now that we’re here, I wonder why I came on this wild-goose chase.” She stared at the anæmic residue in her glass. “Fix me another slug, Saint.”
He went back into the room, fished melting ice cubes from the warming water in the pitcher, and poured Peter Dawson over them. That was how she took it, and it never seemed to affect her much. Another characteristic that was strictly from literature.
“That letter dated over five months ago,” he said. “Did it take all that time to reach you, or did you only just decide to do something about it?”
“Both,” she said. “I didn’t get it for a long time — I was moving around, and it was just lucky that people kept forwarding it. And when I got it, I didn’t know whether to believe it, or what to do. If I hadn’t met you, I mightn’t ever have done anything about it. But you know about jewels.”
“And I’m notorious for taking chances.”
“And I like you.”
He smiled into her slumbrous eyes, handing her the re-filled glass, and sat down again in the other chair stretching his long legs.
“You liked Ormond when you married him, I suppose,” he said. “What was the mistake in that?”
“He was a rich old man, but I thought he needed me. I found out that all he wanted was my body.”
“It sounds like a reasonable ambition.”
“But he wanted a bird in a gilded cage. To keep me in purdah, like a sultan. He didn’t want to go places and do things. He’d give me presents, but he wouldn’t let me have a penny of my own to spend.”
“An obvious square,” said the Saint. “But you fixed him. What about Ned?”
“I was very young then, just a small-town girl trying to crash Hollywood and making doughnut money as an extra. And it was during the war, and he was young too, and strong and healthy, and that Navy uniform did something for him. It happened to a lot of girls... And then the war was over, and I woke up, and he was just a working diver, a sort of submerged mechanic, earning a mechanic’s wages and going nowhere except under docks and bridges.”
Simon nodded, leaning back with his freebooter’s profile turned up impersonally to the stars. He had heard all this before, of course, but he wanted to hear it once again, to be sure he had heard it all.
“That’s all this Tiltman wanted,” she said. “A good working diver. Percival Tiltman — what a name! I should have known he was a phony, with that name, and his old-school-tie British accent. But he knew where the richest oyster bed of all was, and it was one that the Japs had missed somehow, and he had some real pearls to prove it... Of course, he needed money too — for equipment, and a boat, and bribes. Mostly for bribes. That should have been the tip-off, all by itself.”
“I don’t know,” said the Saint. “I can believe that the Mexican Government might take a dim view of foreigners coming down and walking off with their pearls.”
“Well, anyway, he got it.”
“It was about ten thousand dollars, wasn’t it?”
“Exactly eleven thousand. Most of it was from my friends — people I’d known in the studios. Ned’s best friend put some in. And twenty-five hundred was my own savings, from what Ned had sent me while he was overseas.”
“And Ned and Brother Tiltman took off with it all in cash?”
“All of it. And that’s the last anyone heard of them — until I got that letter.”
“How hard did you try to find him?”
“What could I do? I didn’t have an address. Ned was going to write to me when he got down here. He never did.”
“There’s an American vice-consul.”
“We tried that, after a while. He never heard of them.”
“How about the police?”
“I wrote to them. They took three weeks to answer, and then they just said they had no information. Perhaps some of the money was used for bribes, at that.”
“I mean the American police. Didn’t anyone make a complaint?”
“How could I? And make myself the wife of a runaway crook? Our friends were very nice about it. They were sorry for me. I’ve never felt so humiliated. But it was all too obvious. Ned and Tiltman had just taken our money and run off with it. It wasn’t even worth anybody’s while to come down here and try to trace them. They’d had too long a start. By the time we realized what they’d done, they could have been anywhere in South America — or anywhere in the world, for that matter. I just waited till Ned had been gone a year, and divorced him as quietly as I could, for desertion.”
“But,” said the Saint, “it looks now as if he’d been here all the time, after all.”
Mrs Ormond swished the Scotch around over the ice in her glass with a practised rotary motion, brooding over it sullenly.
“Perhaps he came back. Perhaps he spent all his share of the money, and now he thinks he can promote some more with the same gag. Who knows?”
“It was nearly ten years ago when he disappeared, wasn’t it?” said the Saint. “If he got half the loot, he’s lived on less than six hundred a year. That’s really making it last. If he was going to try for more, why would he leave it so long? And why did he disappear when he did, without any kind of word?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “You’re the detective. All I know is, there’s something fishy about it. That’s why I wouldn’t have come here alone. You’d better be careful. I hope you’re smarter than he is.”
Simon raised an eyebrow.
“When this started, you gave the impression that he was almost boringly simple.”
“That’s what everyone thought. But look what he did. He must have had us all fooled. You can’t believe anything he says.”
“I’m not exactly notorious for buying wooden nickels — or plasticine pearls. I’ll keep my guard up.”
“Do that in more ways than one. I told you, he was a very husky guy. And he could be plenty tough.”
“I can be tough too, sometimes.”
She eyed him long and appraisingly.
“Come here,” she said, in her throatiest voice.
He unfolded himself languidly and stood beside her.
“No, don’t tower over me. Come down to my level.”
He squatted good humouredly on his heels, close to her chair.
“You look strong,” she murmured, “in a lean leathery way. But I never found out how far it went. That’s why I like you. You’re different. Most men are in such a hurry to show me.”
Her hand felt his arm, sliding up under his short sleeve. Her eyes widened a little, and became soft and dreamy. The hand slid up to his shoulder, and the tip of her tongue touched her parted lips.