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back.”
    Cat nodded. “Thanks.”
    “You feel up to a chat?”
    “Okay.” He pointed at the bed. “Can you crank this thing up?”
    The officer raised the bed until Cat was nearly sitting.
    “The boat?” Cat asked again. He wanted to ask about bodies.
    “My name is Lieutenant Frank Adams, call me Frank. I’m a military police officer. Is your name Wendell Catledge?”
    Cat nodded.
    Adams looked relieved. “I ran your fingerprints,” he said, “and we got the registration on your boat. You didn’t have any identification.”
    Cat lifted his left arm and looked at the wrist. “My name is engraved on the inside of my watch.” There was a white stripe against his yellowing tan.
    “You weren’t wearing a watch.”
    “I’m sure I had it on when they came,” Cat said. “It was a little before six in the morning. What about the boat and my wife and daughter.”
    Adams pulled up a chair and sat down. “A little after eight in the morning, Thursday, that’s two days ago, a Lufthansa flight from Bogotá to San Juan picked up the signal from your EPIRB. Less than an hour later, a Coast Guard helicopter found the boat and put two frogmen in the water. She was well down by the bows. You were in the cockpit. Your . . . the women were in the main cabin,both dead. Before the two men could even get you into the chopper, the boat stood on her nose and went straight down. You were in the water for a couple of minutes before they got you up. The bodies went down with the boat. There was nothing they could do.”
    Cat nodded, and his eyes filled with tears.
    “Your brother-in-law is here, staying in our bachelor officer quarters; I’ve sent for him. Do you think you can tell me about it now? I want to do everything I can, but I need the details.” Adams produced a small tape recorder.
    Cat got hold of himself and began at the beginning.
    •   •   •
    When Cat woke up again, Ben Nicholas, Katie’s brother and Cat’s business partner, was sitting next to the bed, his normally open, friendly face showing the shock. Before Cat could speak, Ben took his hand.
    “You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said with some difficulty. “Lieutenant Adams played the tape recording for me. He was very impressed with how thorough you were.”
    “Thank you, Ben,” Cat said. “How long have you been here?”
    “I got in last night. They flew me in a Navy plane from Miami. They’ve made me comfortable. Never thought I’d get to Cuba.”
    “Me, either. Does Dell know?”
    “The doctor says we can move you to Atlanta in a day or two. I’ve got an air ambulance standing by in Miami. They’ll hop over here when we get the word.”
    “Have you told Dell?”
    Ben shook his head. “I couldn’t find him, Cat. There was an answering machine on his phone; I didn’t want to tell him that way. I went around to his place, in that high rise;nobody answered the bell. Doorman said he hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Liz is calling him every hour. She wants you to stay with us until you’re better. She’d have been here herself, but her mother’s in the hospital again. The P.R. guy at the office has been dealing with the press. Some wire-service reporter got onto it, from the Coast Guard, I guess, then a business reporter at The New York Times recognized your name, then the Atlanta papers went with it, and . . . well, all hell broke loose. There wasn’t any way to avoid having the details made public. It was just too sensational a story—well-known businessman-inventor, all that.”
    Cat nodded. “Ben, it’s my fault; I did it to Katie and Jinx.”
    “No, no, Cat, you mustn’t think that. You didn’t deliberately put them in danger; you couldn’t have foreseen this.”
    “I took them into that place. Katie didn’t want to go, I talked her into it, I pushed her.”
    “Listen to me, Cat,” Ben said. “I know how much you loved Katie and Jinx. You just did what you thought was best, and it went