“What did he walk away with?“

“Forty thousand minimum. These are important items, laddy boy. And he would wait so proof could be had they were not hot. Cash sets up a certain discount situation, of course, but he played one against another, and did well.”

“Could you do as well if you had the same kind of merchandise? Five per cent for your trouble?”

“You take my breath away. I might do even better. For ten.”

“If I had them, we could dicker.”

“You should not put such a strain on this ancient heart.”

“Harry, can you get me a big blue star sapphire, say as big as the average he peddled, a fake that would slow an expert down for a few seconds?”

“There are only two kinds of fakes in that area, laddy boy, the very bad ones and the very good ones, and the good ones come high.”

“How high?”

“Offhand, one large one.”

“Can you rent one or borrow one and airmail it to me?”

“Switching is very unhealthy.”

“It isn’t what I have in mind.”

“I might be able to arrange it.”

“That isn’t the question. I have faith in you. Can you arrange it today?”

“Dear boy!”

“I would hate to have to deal with anyone else, particularly if I get hold of anything genuine later on.”

“My arm is twisted.”

And then, with a thumb in the Yellow Pages, I began checking the marinas. All this great ever-increasing flood of bronze, brass, chrome. Fiberglas, lapstreak, teak, auto pilots, burgees, Power Squadron hats, nylon line, all this chugging winking blundering glitter of props, bilge pumps and self-importance needs dockside space. The optimum image is the teak cockpit loaded soft with brown dazed girls while the eagle-eyed skipper on his fly bridge chugs Baby Dear under a lift bridge to keep a hundred cars stalled waiting in the sun, their drivers staring malignantly at the slow passage of the lazy-day sex float and the jaunty brown muscles of the man at the helm. But the more frequent reality is a bust gasket, Baby Dear drifting in a horrid chop, girls sun-poisoned and whoopsing, hero skipper clenching the wrong size wrench in barked hands and raising a greasy scream to the salty demons who are flattening his purse and canceling his marine insurance.

But they have to park.

And while the outboarders have infinite choice, those that can house forty-footers are merely legion. I made over an hour of phone calls with the simple query, “Had the Play Pen in there lately, forty-foot Stadel custom?”

The assumption was he’d put the damned thing somewhere handy when he’d visited the Mile O’Beach, but that assumption began to grow wan under the negative chorus. So somewhere unhandy, and I began to get into the toll call area, questing up and down the Waterway.

Lois came back from the beach. I sat glowering at the phone. She came back pinked, sun-dazed and slow moving, with spumesalted hair and a sandy butt, displaying upon a narrow palm, with a child’s innocence, a small and perfect white shell, saying in a voice still drugged with sun and heat, “It’s like the first perfect thing I ever saw, or the first shell. It’s a little white suit of armor with the animal dead and gone. What does it mean when things look so clear and so meaningful? Silly little things.”

I sat on a low stool, hating the phone. “What’s wrong?” she said, and leaned a hip against my shoulder, a weight oddly warm and heavy and luxurious for such slenderness. It was an uncontrived gesture and in a moment she was aware of it and moved away quickly, startled by herself.

“Where did Junior Allen like to tie up?”

She moved uneasily away, sat on a curve of the couch. “Little places, mostly. Not the great big marinas. I think he liked places where his boat would be biggest. A hose connection and power outlet and fuel. That’s all he had to have. And privacy. He liked finger slips where he could tie up with the bow toward the main dock.”

“I’ve been trying the small ones too.”

“But after what he did to Mrs. Kerr, wouldn’t he go away?”

“I would think so. But where was he beforehand? He couldn’t have known that was going to happen. I’d assume he’d move along, thinking she would tell the police.”

“Back to the Bahamas?”

“Maybe. I thought I could find where he was, and ask around and get some idea where he was headed. Did he ever say anything about things he wanted to do, or places he wanted to go?”

“He said something one time about going around the Gulf Coast and over to Texas.”

“Oh, fine.”

“Trav, you know he could be tied up at some private place, like he was tied up at my dock.”

“That’s a lot of help too.”

“You asked me. I’m trying to help.”

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated peabrain lizards didn’t make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn’t seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her.

Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen is less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around.

“Find me that boat,” I told her.

“What do you mean?”

“What specific or general thing do I have to know that will enable me to locate it?”

She stood up slowly and thoughtfully and went off to take her shower. I knew it was an emotional strain for her. She was trying to wipe every memory of that period out of her mind. And now I was forcing her to remember. They would be tangled memories, filtered through alcohol.

Suddenly she came racing into the lounge. She wore one of my big blue towels in sarong fashion, and had a white towel wrapped around her head. Her face looked narrow and intent. Her features looked more pointed.

“That last trip,” she said. “I don’t know if it will help. We stopped at some sort of a boat yard in Miami. I can’t even remember the name. Something about a new generator. He kept complaining about the noise the generator made. They took up the hatches and got down in the bilge and did a lot of measuring. The man said it would take a long time to get the one Junior Allen wanted. It made him angry. But he ordered it anyway. He left a down payment on it. He ordered some kind of new model that had just been introduced.”

She sat beside me and we looked at the Yellow Pages. She ran a slender fingertip down the listings. She stopped. “That’s it. That’s the one.”

Robinson-Rand, down below Dinner Key, off the Ingraham Highway. Shipyard, storage, No job too large, no job too small.

“Maybe it hasn’t come in yet,” she said in a thin little voice. She shivered. “I’m scared, Trav. I hope it came in and he got it and went away. I hope you never find him.”

I had bought Lois a lunch and sent her back to the houseboat. I parked Miss Agnes in Robinson-Rand’s sizable lot. Even in the summer doldrums, it was a brisk place. Their storage areas looked full. They had long rows of covered slips, and two big in and out structures for small craft. The shop areas were in big steel buildings. Saws and welding torches and power tools were in operation, even on a Saturday afternoon, but I could guess it was only a skeleton crew working. They had a lot of big cradles and hoists, slips and ways. The office area was built against one end of one of the shop buildings, near a truck dock.

There was one girl working in the office, a plump, impersonal redhead with one eye aimed slightly off center.

“We’re not really open,” she said.