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couldn’t look at her and refuse her anything. “All right,” I said. “But I’d like to have until in the morning before making it definite. Suppose I call you?”

Three
    She sighed with relief and reached for the ignition key. We started back. I lit another cigarette and thought about it. I still wasn’t too sold on the thing. I was sold on owning that boat and I was practically panting to believe anything she said, but she hadn’t said enough.
    “Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to know where he is, or what’s in the plane, as long as it’s really his. We can skip that. But don’t you think you’re asking me to make up my mind with damn few facts to go on? It’s a queer-sounding deal. You’ll have to admit that yourself.”
    She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. I guess it is. And I can understand your wondering if it’s entirely aboveboard, without knowing any more than you do.
    “But maybe this will help. My husband’s full name is Francis L. Macaulay. He is—or was, rather—an executive in a firm of marine underwriters in New York. The name of the company is Benson and Teen. If you’ll call either them or the New York police they’ll assure you he isn’t in any kind of trouble with the law, and never has been. The only people he’s hiding from are gangsters. I’d rather not go into it any further than that, because it’s his business, and not mine. But that’s what you really wanted to know, wasn’t it? That this wasn’t something that might get you in trouble with the police?”
    “That’s what I wanted to know,” I said.
    Something still puzzled me a little, though. And that was the fact that hoodlums seldom bothered to hunt down and kill some perfectly innocent law-abiding John Citizen who was hardly aware they existed. As a rule you’d been connected with them in some way, been near enough to have a little of it rub off. But an executive in an insurance firm? That didn’t make sense at all.
    But where did the plane come in?
    “You’d better warn your husband that if he can’t pinpoint that plane crash within a mile he’s just going to be wasting his money,” I said. “It’ll be impossible to find it.”
    “That’s all right,” she said with assurance. “He knows right where it is.”
    “He’s sure, now?”
    “Yes,” she said. “It was right off the coast. And he was in it when it crashed.”
    “I see,” I said.
    But I didn’t see much.
    Where had he been going? What was in the plane? And how had he got back here, assuming he was here?
    I could tell, however, that she was reluctant to talk about it any more than she had to, so I quit asking questions. There’d be time enough for that when I gave her definite word I’d take it.
    But why was I holding back? It puzzled me. I’d have given my left arm for that auxiliary sloop Ballerina, and here it was being tossed in my lap. The job was easy, the pay was fantastic. I believed she was on the level. What did I want, anyway?
    Of course, I didn’t have any desire to look down the end of Barclay’s gun again, but that was calculated risk, and besides he probably wouldn’t have any reason to connect me with it until it was too late and we were already gone.
    Something kept bothering me, but that wasn’t it. I gave up.
    It was a little after five when we began to get back into the outskirts of the city. We hit the peak of the traffic rush right on the nose and crawled through the downtown district a slow light at a time. After a while she pulled into a parking lot and we walked up to the corner to a cocktail lounge for a drink. That was where the odd thing happened.
    It was one of those too-utterly-utter places I usually avoided, dimly lighted, with blue-leather-upholstered booths and a soulful type who needed a haircut playing Victor Herbert on an electric organ. We sat down in the last booth and ordered Scotch and water.
    After the drinks came she wrote down her telephone number for me. “You’re sure it’ll be all