I said.
He nodded. “So we thought. Macaulay never did go back to New York, suspecting that inasmuch as our men had recognized him as the pilot of the plane engaged in stealing three quarters of a million dollars from us we might feel ill-disposed toward him. His wife disappeared also. The firm said he had suffered a heart attack and resigned. He’d told them, originally, that he had to go to the Coast because of illness in the family, or some such story. We tried to trail him. He escaped us rather narrowly two or three times. But the strange part of it was that he apparently had never made any attempt to sell any of his loot. We began to understand then, just about the time we ran him down in Sanport. He hadn’t sold it, or tried to, because he didn’t have it.
“He escaped us in Sanport, taking off in another plane. We learned that another man had been with him, a man carrying an aqualung diving outfit. Macaulay, incidentally, couldn’t swim a stroke. As soon as we learned of the diver, of course, we knew what had happened. The metal box containing the diamonds had fallen into the laguna during those few hectic moments when Macaulay’s friend was killed.
“Our only hope lay in staying so close to Mrs. M. she’d have to lead us to him eventually. But just about that time we began to have a strong suspicion he was back in Sanport. Perhaps you missed the little item in the paper, but just about five days after Macaulay took off, a fishing boat docked with a castaway it had picked up in a rubber life raft on the Campeche Bank. This man, the captain said, gave them some vague story about being a pilot for some Mexican company and having crashed while en route from Tampico to Progreso alone in a seaplane. But he had, strangely, just vanished the minute the fishing boat docked.”
“I get it now,” I said. “As soon as she got in touch with me you knew the castaway was Macaulay. He’d gone back to the laguna with a diver to hunt for the box. But how do you know he found it, or even got there? Maybe he crashed on the way down.”
“No. He crashed on the way back. So the box is in the plane.”
“I see. And from the fact that he was trying to hire me to do some more diving for him, you realized he knew where the plane was and could go back to it?”
Barclay nodded. “Correct. We also suspected he was right there in the house, but that taking him alive wasn’t going to be easy. He was armed, and very scared.”
“The thing that puzzles me,” I said, “is that you and your meat-headed thugs never did put the arm on her to find out where the plane was. You’re convinced now she knows where it is, but you let her come and go there for a week or more right under your noses.”
“We weren’t certain she knew then.”
“But you are now. Why?”
He hooked a leg over the tiller and used both hands to light a cigarette. The glow of Sanport’s lights was fading on the horizon.
“It’s really quite simple,” he explained, filling his lungs with smoke. “As a matter of fact, I’m a little ashamed I didn’t think of it before. I merely wrote Macaulay a letter two days ago and pointed out the advisability of telling her where it was.”
I shook my head. “Maybe you’d better run through that again. You wrote him a letter—where?”
“Addressed to his house, naturally. Even if he weren’t there she would get it to him.”
“And he’d be sure to tell her, just because you suggested it? Don’t be stupid. There’s no reason at all he’d do it.”
He smiled again. “I disagree, old boy. There was a very good reason he would tell her. Remember, Macaulay was in the insurance business. He didn’t sell life insurance, but he was familiar with the necessity for it as well as any married man and probably more so than most. I simply pointed out that inasmuch as there was always a chance something might happen to him, it behooved him to protect her.”
“By telling her where the plane was?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes,” he said.
“And wouldn’t that be wonderful?” I said. “That way he could guarantee she’d be kidnapped and beat up and put through the wringer by you and the rest of your