Blues in the Night
On the pier, behind a stack of whisky cases, lay the corpse, a steel box-hook buried in his skull, and aboard Lt. Koski’s police boat was the sexy number who knew the answers — too many of them!
Chapter I
Corpse on Pier 19
The
The one in the cockpit called:
“Put the peek on Pier Nineteen, Sarge. Next to that Danish single stacker.” The officer who spoke wore a peajacket over dungarees. His long-nosed, weather-lined face with its cold blue eyes and lean, hard-bitten jaw, might have been the model for a banks fisherman.
His bulky-shouldered companion in the pilothouse rubbed mist off the window, peered toward the berthed liners and the shed-covered wharves.
“Prob’ly the watchman, Lieutenant. Gettin’ away from the stink of them green hides for a breath of air.”
“Since when did they start hiring dames as night watchmen?” Lieutenant Steve Koski flicked beads of moisture off his eyebrows, stepped up on the port waterway to get a better look. “Bear in a bit, Joe.”
“It could be a he, in one of them long overcoats.” Sergeant Joe Mulcahey angled the black snout of the patrol-boat toward the pierheads.
“You better lay off those pickled eels they serve at the Beacon Light, Sarge. They’re ruining your eyes. That’s a girl. And she
Mulcahey’s round, windburned Irish features in the dim glow spilling up from the binnacle were puckered with puzzlement.
“Not figuring this dock looting is the work of the shemale sex, are y’ now?” he asked Koski.
“No. I’m figuring any dame alone on a pierhead on a night like this is considering a dive. There. She’s climbed on the string-piece, see—” Koski shed his jacket quietly. “Fix your beam on her. It might stop her.”
The white spear of light reached over the dark tidestream like a chalk mark across a blackboard. It touched the hesitant figure poised on the lip of the pier. The startled girl threw up a hand to protect herself from the glare.
Then she plunged toward the water, flinging both arms about her face as she went under.
Mulcahey swore, gunning the motor. The
“Easy, Sarge. The less wake, the easier it’ll be to spot her. Bounce your beam off the water between us and the bulkhead. That’s the idea.” Koski straddled the gunwale, a boathook in his fist.
A tiny shoe bobbed to the surface a dozen yards upstream from where the girl had vanished. The lieutenant paid no attention to it. The shoe would have come off when she hit the river. Air in the toe would have brought it up, momentarily.
Something gray, which might have been a stick of driftwood, surfaced thirty feet beyond the shoe.
“There. Port a bit, Irish. Now. Come up. Steady...”
Koski leaned far out, lunged with the boathook. The point caught in the air-bulged skirt. He twisted. He pulled gently. The girl’s body came to the surface. The cloth ripped, tore loose.
“Line, Sarge.” Koski let go the wooden pole, went over feet first, reached the pole as its hook end was dipping beneath the surface.
He dived, felt a nylon leg, caught the ankle. There was no time for regulation rescue procedure with the swirling water only a degree above freezing.
As he came up, a lead line swished over his head, the weighted end plopping into the water twenty feet beyond him. He grabbed the line with his free hand.
Mulcahey hauled them in. When Koski got a grip on the
Koski waited for Mulcahey to give him a hand up to the cockpit. “Next time—” he spoke through his teeth to keep them from chattering — “some son-of-a-buck tells you what a swell job you got, getting paid for going motorboating every day, give him a free sock in the nose for me, will you!”
“Yeah, yeah.” Mulcahey looked down at the girl. “This babe woulda froze t’ death before she drowned. She’ll prob’ly get pneumonia, anyhow.”
“That’s right. Cheer her up.”
Koski dug a blanket out of the starboard locker in the pilot-house, came back to the cockpit. The girl followed his movements with frightened eyes. She breathed noisily with a quick, hoarse, panting sound, but said nothing.
Koski unlashed the throw-line from her shoulders. “Feel different now about doing a dive?”
She shook her head.
Koski guessed her to be about twenty-two. She had a slim, but sexy build that must have made the satin evening gown look all right on her before one shoulder-strap had broken and the skirt had ripped off at one side of her waist. He threw the blanket over her.
“Get out of that dress. Wrap that wool around you.”
“What’s the use?” she asked, in a voice not much above a whisper. “I’m going to do it again, the minute you take your eyes off me.”
The lieutenant wrung icy water out of the cuffs of his dungarees. “You might, at that.” He called to Mulcahey. “Toss me that jewelry, Sarge.”
The sergeant brought the outsize hand-cuffs. Koski clicked one on the girl’s left ankle, the other onto a ring-bolt on the motor housing. “Just to play safe, sister. You don’t look as if you could stand another polar bear bath.”
“What’s the difference?” She shrugged. “Is any one way worse than another?”
“Couldn’t tell you for sure,” Koski said easily. “No experience along that line. All seem hard to me. Now — what made you feel like making eel bait of yourself?”
“Just... blue,” she said tensely.
“Trouble with your boy friend, maybe?” A girl dressed as expensively as this one wouldn’t have been depressed because she was short of funds. Koski was fairly sure of that.
“That—” she admitted — “and other things.”
“What’s your name?”
“Alice — Alice Rorty.” A shade too much hesitation.
“How’d you happen to be on the pier?”
She looked down at the handcuff, felt her ankle to see how tightly it held her. “Just walked on.”
“Just like that? Watchman a friend of yours?”
“Sure.” The lieutenant shouldered into his dry pea-jacket. “That’s the way watchmen on these piers are, huh? Leave the door open so anybody can get in anytime.” He called. “Joe, take her in to Nineteen.”
The police boat circled, slid in under the shadow of the dock, nosed the pilings.
Koski went up on the foredeck, looped the bow-line over a bollard, pulled it tight. Mulcahey let the hundred and eighty horses idle, went aft for a stern line.
The lieutenant climbed to the roof of the pilothouse. “Going up to find out what makes, Irish.” he called. “She left her coat and handbag up there somewhere. They always do before they take the jump.”
The sergeant grunted. “I’ll stick a pot of java on the gas to thaw you out when your pants begin to freeze on you.”
Koski leaped to the stringpiece, swung his hand flash in concentric arcs. There was no sign of a handbag or a coat.
He called. “Hi.”
There was no answer. A hundred yards eastward there was the steady, surf-like hum of traffic on the express highway. From the upper harbor came the mournful hoots of ferry boats in the fog. That was all.
He strolled down the pier to the side door of the big shed covering the dock. The door was open. The interior of the pierhouse was a gloomy cavern smelling of pine boxes, burlap, sawdust, paint, whisky, damp wool. The only light came from a long blue-violet tube high in the roof, halfway to the truck gates.
He called again: “Hey! Watchman!”
Before his voice had stopped echoing in the high vault of the shed, he knew there would be no answer. Twenty feet inside the door, beside a stack of Scotch whisky cases, lay a shiny-visored cap. On the floor beyond the cap, partly hidden by the stack of pine cases, was a shock of white hair.
The watchman lay on his side, with his knees doubled up, his fingers half clenched, a heavy steel box-hook with its point still deep in the back of his skull.
On his mouth and beside it was something that looked like blood — but wasn’t.
It was lipstick.
Chapter II
Alice Ain’t
Koski knelt by the dead man. The wrinkled, winter-apple face, with its red-button nose, was still warm. The .38 was still in the watchman’s holster.
A couple of yards away, on a tier of three cases stenciled
Koski stalked to the pier door, called: “Sarge. Call in. A 37. Rush it.”
On the foredeck, Mulcahey paused long enough to ask, “What gives?”
“Ed Weltz. Remember Ed? Ran that tow-tug, hauling gravel, out of Clason Point.”
“Used to play the wheeze-box at those clam roasts. Many’s the time I — what’s he doin’ here?”
“Night watchman, he was. Now he’s taking a nap — with a crate hook in his skull. Get that shortwave going.” Koski looked down at the white, upturned face of the girl huddled in the blanket. “Just felt low in your mind, did you, kid? Can’t say I blame you.”
She made no answer, but he could see her shiver and hunch her shoulders against the night chill.
He went back in the shadowless half gloom of the huge shed. As he strode past squat bales of green cowhides crusty with coarse salt, great coffin-like boxes labeled
Always, in unloading cargo nets full of liquor, longshoremen managed to drop and smash a case enough for it to come under the “breakage in handling” clause in a shipping manifest. That might have happened here, with a ship in from Scotland with a few thousand cases of highland dew. On the other hand, a cargo like this was one of the favorite targets of the pier pirates who’d been getting away with everything but murder. And now...? He wondered.
Fifty yards from the truck gates which opened onto the cobbled street, Koski could see the thick, iron latch-bar wasn’t in its sockets at either side of the wide swinging doors. It wouldn’t make much difference whether the watchman’s cubby-hole office was guarded or not, as long as the street gates could be entered with a mere push.
Warm yellow light streamed out from the open office door — until Koski got within a dozen yards of it. Then it slammed shut.
He ran to it, twisting the knob, throwing his weight against the panel. It was locked.
Inside, a muffled voice cried, “One of ’em’s tryin’ to get in here, now!”
Koski went back two steps, came, booting hard. There was a flat, brittle cracking — a splintering of wood high up on the jamb. The guy inside was shooting at him through the door!
Koski’s hand went to the butt of his own pistol, then he decided against it. He picked up a wooden wedge used for blocking trailer tires, ran to the truck gate, pulled one side open, slipped out into the street.
Cafe signs made a mock rainbow in the mist. The street was empty. No trucks or cars. The watchman’s peephole window was dark. The man might have doused the office light before ducking out to the street himself. Koski crouched beneath the level of the peephole, hurled the wedge block.
Glass crashed. A gun answered. Koski didn’t see the muzzle flare. He crashed shoulder-first into the watchman’s street door. It banged back against the wall — and the Harbor Precinct’s trouble-shooter was in his own rough-and-tumble element.
The man fired again. The bullet hit the metal sign stating that the premises were protected by a nationally famous detective agency, whined into the ceiling.
Koski got fingers on the gun barrel. He could see it better than anything else in the murk. He got in a short, savage left, caught a knee in the groin, wrested the weapon away, clubbed it once, twice. The man in the dark fell against Ed Weltz’s single-legged stool.
Koski put the hand flash on him. He was a thin, wiry specimen with a high, narrow head and a bony face, twenty-eight or thirty, maybe. Balding forehead — which added to the bony impression. Thin, pinched-in lips. He couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and forty with rubber boots on. What he wore were thick longshore brogans, a pair of blue jeans and a turtle-neck sweater.
He was limp as an empty burlap bag when Koski clicked on the lone bulb and stretched him out on the floor. His pockets told only that he smoked a pipe, used
He tried to sit up as Koski was stuffing the wallet back in his jeans. The lieutenant put a foot on his chest.
“I can hear you okay when you’re flat on your back. What you doin’ in Weltz’s office?”
“Calling the cops.” Remsen glared. “What the hell
Koski took off his visored cap with the Marine Division insignia, held it where the other could see it. “I was answering your call. We don’t generally have this much trouble with people who holler for help, though.”
“I thought you were one them liquor thieves.” Remsen scowled at the cap, rubbed his mouth where the gun sight had lacerated it. “They killed Cap Weltz.”
“Did you see ’em do it?” Koski took his foot away.
“No. I was over at Gallattly’s, havin’ a san’wich an’ a cup of coffee. I’m head checker on this pier. I been puttin’ in overtime checkin’ out that Glascow cargo that come in this mornin’. The ship’s makin’ a quickie turnaround an’ starts loadin’ again in the mornin’. Well, when I got back from feedin’ my face, Cap wasn’t here, but the office door was open — so I smell a rat right off.”
“But you didn’t see any rats?” Koski hauled him to his feet.
“Wasn’t a soul in the shed, officer.” Remsen was sweating. “Thing I noticed first off, a couple hundred cases of whisky weren’t in the stacks where I’d checked ’em off. If there’d only been a few missing, I might not’ve noticed. But that many—”
“Yeah.” Koski locked the office door, unlocked the one to the pier. “So?” He pushed Remsen through into the dim-lit shed.
“I ran down to the end, yellin’ like crazy for Cap, knowin’ somethin’ must’ve happened to him, an’ I practically trip over him. He’s lyin’ back there with a grab-hook stuck in his head.”
Ordinarily, Steve Koski would have felt a little silly, striding along beside a skinny character like that while carrying a gun in each fist. But something about the sidelong glances Remsen sneaked at him while they trudged through the semi-darkness made the lieutenant wonder why the checker had been so quick on the trigger when he hadn’t even hollered to find out who was on the other side of that door.
“Do you know a girl, name of Alice Rorty, Remsen?”
“Rorty? Never heard of her.”
“Cap have any girl friend?”
“Nah. All he’s interested in, he’s got an a-cordeen, plays it sometimes nights when I’m workin’. It don’t sound had in a place big as this. I mean, it didn’t.”
“How long were you gone for eats?”
“Oh, you know. Half an hour. Maybe three-quarters. I signed out with Cap. I guess it’s on his hook when I left. Around ten o’clock, somewhere around that.”
Koski looked at his wrist watch. If the cold bath hadn’t slowed it, it was now five minutes past eleven. Still, even an hour was a short time to put the snatch on three hundred cases of Scotch worth close to fifteen thousand bucks.
When they came to the watchman’s body, Koski asked, “Did you move him, or touch him?”
“Cripes, no! I could see he was dead. I know better’n that. You ain’t suppose to move a murdered person.”
“That’s right. But somebody did. Maybe the killer. He fell on his face when that hook caught him. See that smudge on his nose and chin?”
“Yuh.” Remsen said nothing about the much more obvious smear of crimson lipstick by the dead man’s mouth.
“Then somebody rolled him over on his side.” Koski hooked an arm inside Remsen’s, led him to the little door opening onto the river.
Remsen seemed scared at the sight of the police-boat with its square green flag fluttering damply in the mist. But when he saw the girl in the cockpit, he cried out:
“Ellen!”
She seemed to shrivel up inside the cocoon of blanket. She turned her face away, began to cry noiselessly.
Koski said, “Thought you didn’t know her?”
The checker said fiercely, “Her name ain’t Rorty! And you’re damn right I know her!
Koski cocked his head at the sound of sirens in the street he’d just left. “You noticed the lipstick on Weltz’s face, didn’t you?”
Remsen ignored him, fell to his knees on the stringpiece, leaning over to get his face as close to his sister’s as possible. “Ellen!
She stared up dumbly, her eyes glassy with tears.
He clapped his hands to his head, swayed back and forth like a man in great pain. “Why’d you do it, Sis? Why’d you do it?”
She spoke then, thickly but distinctly, as a drunken person does when trying to enunciate clearly.
“You know why I did — what I had to, Hal.”
Chapter III
Two Plus Two
The checker stood up stiffly, his head bent forward as he kept his eyes on the girl. He held his arms out rigidly from his sides with the fingers extended.
“I give up,” he muttered.
Mulcahey growled, “Black shame on ye, killin’ an old codger like Ed.”
Koski touched Remsen on the shoulder. “That wasn’t a confession, was it?”
“Hell, no!” Remsen waggled his head in despair. “I only meant I can’t understand why my sister’d do a thing like that.” He stared at her, miserably. “If she
“Jump down.” Koski motioned. “Keep an eye on him, Joe.” He waited until Remsen had landed on the pilothouse roof and Mulcahey was helping him down to the foredeck. Then the lieutenant went back into the pierhouse.
He held his flash so the funnel of light lit up his head and cap. The two radio patrolmen, running toward him, slowed.
“What you got?” one of them called.
“Hijack?” asked the other.
Koski circled the beam on Ed Weltz. The uniformed men inspected the body with noncommittal grunts.
“Might be the same crew who’ve been hoisting stuff along the waterfront for weeks. Or could be some amateurs who figure the professional pirates’ll get blamed for whatever they do. Either way, there’s a couple hundred cases of Scotch missing and this watchman knocked off. But there’s a queer angle.”
“What’s that on his puss?” asked the older patrolman.
“Looks like lipstick,” his partner suggested.
“It is, too.” Koski explained about the girl’s suicide attempt. “Her brother’s head checker, here. He claims he was out grabbing a sandwich when all this happened, came back and heard me, put in a call for help.”
The younger officer looked skeptical. “Our shortwave reported the call was relayed from Launch Nine. Is that your boat?”
Koski nodded. “I’ve got the brother on board with her. She won’t admit swinging that crate hook — but she doesn’t deny it, either.”
The elder patrolman smiled cynically with one corner of his mouth. “She’ll prob’ly claim the old dodo was attacking her, and that she only bopped him in self-defense.”
“Maybe.” Koski didn’t seem concerned. “I’ll turn her over to you as a homicide suspect. I want to ask her brother a few things. He might give us a lead to these cargo thieves the commissioner’s getting so burned up about.”
The younger policeman squinted suspiciously. “We better take ’em both off your hands, Lieutenant. We got strict orders to bring everyone connected with these piracies straight to the Deputy Inspector.”
Koski regarded him dourly. “Think you’re in your own parish? You’re in the Harbor Precinct, now — even if there’s a yard of concrete between you and the river. You take orders from me. Understand?”
The senior patrolman apologized. “No harm meant, Lieutenant. It’s only the Inspector’s been needling us to get action on this business, an’ Frank’s kind of an eager beaver. We’ll wait for the Hommy Detail — an’ then book your cold-bath baby.”
“Ask your captain—” Koski wasn’t mollified — “to assign a spare man to fixed post here until morning. These snatch-boys have been known to strike twice in the same spot.”
He led the younger officer to the bollard where the
When Koski unlocked the ankle cuff, he told the girl, “It’ll make it a lot easier on yourself and on your brother if you tell us why you came to the pier tonight.”
She tried dejectedly to make a skirt out of the thick blanket. “I often come to see my brother. It’s the only chance I get — to talk to him.”
“Doesn’t he live at home? With you?” From the foredeck, Remsen snapped, “You don’t have to answer questions, Ellen. Wait until you get a lawyer. Don’t tell them a thing. I’ll get a lawyer for you. Just don’t say anything.”
Mulcahey grabbed the checker, muscled him against the visor of the pilothouse windows. “Just don’t
The girl put her hand gently on Koski’s sleeve. “I ought to be grateful to you. But I can’t tell you anything — nothing at all. You’ll have to believe I’m grateful, and let it go at that. I’m really not worth risking your life for, am I?”
He found a length of quarter-inch rope, helped her make it into a temporary belt to hitch the blanket around her slim waist. “I don’t know about that. Offhand, I’d say a girl who could commit a coldblooded murder wouldn’t be the sort to get remorseful enough to walk to the exit the way you did.”
She held her head high and looked over him at the bluecoat waiting on the pier above.
Koski helped her to the foredeck. “I wouldn’t know what you’re covering up, and you must think it’s damn bad or you wouldn’t have taken that dip. But keeping your mouth shut isn’t going to fix anything. You think about it. I’ll be around to see you in the morning.”
“Don’t bother,” she said bitterly. “I don’t know anything you couldn’t tell from what you found — in there.” She gestured toward the pier, held her hand up to the radio patrolman, was lifted up, disappeared into the great shed.
“Now then.” Mulcahey shoved Remsen toward the cockpit. “Shoot off your face. You want to so bad!”
The checker applied his handkerchief to the cut lip. “I’ll take my own advice and keep still. Anything I said, you’d twist it someway to go against my sister.”
Koski said, “You seem all-fired sure she killed him.”
Remsen studied the blood on his handkerchief.
“One thing
Remsen cried resentfully. “Look. I didn’t even know Ellen was down here, tonight. I thought she was working. I go out to get a bite, come back to find Ed stone dead and Ellen half drowned. That’s absolutely all I know and all I’m going to tell you.”
Koski grabbed a fistful of the turtle-neck sweater, pulled the checker toward him. “What’s given you ideas it’s smart to clam up on cops? Well, it’s dumb to be dumb. Sooner or later you’ll loosen up.” He slammed the checker back against the bulkhead so hard Remsen grunted like a boxer socked hard in the belly. “Where does your sister work, wearing a satin evening gown? She doesn’t look like a dance-hall dollie.”
“She’s a singer. Night club singer.”
“Where?”
“Tahiti Tavern.”
Mulcahey boomed, “Oh, ho.
Koski said, “Phil Vann’s place? Sheepshead Bay?”
“Yes.”
The Harbor Squad lieutenant considered: Tahiti Tavern. One of the biggest drink-dine-and-dance operations in the entire metropolitan area. Half a dozen dining rooms. Three bars and a cocktail lounge half the size of Grand Central. It served a couple of thousand people, weekend nights. Did a year-round business.
Phil Vann. The Seafood Sultan. Built his business on the slogan
“Let’s put it this way. Remsen. You work here at the pier. You know when a big shipment of whisky is due. You tell Ellen. She works for Vann. She tells him about the liquor. Then the next thing we know—”
“You’re putting it cockeyed,” Remsen said shakily. “First place, I don’t talk business, outside of business, to anybody. Including my sister. Second place, Phil Vann’s no crook. He’d no more have a part of pirating stuff off a dock than... than I would.”
The checker pulled his sweater down nervously.
“Now you’re beginning to spill.” Koski pushed the flat of his palm against the checker’s wishbone. “Keep pouring. Who does she know over there? Who owns a gray motor boat?”
Remsen looked sick. He gulped. “I suppose that won’t be any secret by tomorrow. Her husband.”
“Oh?”
“Chuck Matless. Charley Matless.”
“Who’s he?”
“Runs one of the party boats for Phil Vann.”
Mulcahey grunted. “Ahha! The
“That’s the one. He takes fishing parties out every morning, around five or six o’clock. Out around Ambrose Light. I went with him once.”
The sergeant pursed his lips. “A tall, homely scut? Built thin as a pelican, with a beak big as a pelican’s, too? A nose you could see miles on a clear day?”
“That’s Chuck. But—”
Koski threw off the bow-line. “Turn her over, Sarge. I’ll cast off.” He asked Remsen. “Has he ever had that barge over here at Pier Nineteen?”
“Not that I know of,” Remsen said, unhappily. “You don’t suppose that he might have—”
“After you been chasing junk-boats and fishing for floaters and grappling for suicides for ten years around this harbor, you don’t suppose anything.” Koski coiled the stern line neatly over the cleat. “But you get so you can figure a little. Any party boat that will carry sixty-five people could handle three hundred cases of liquor all right.”
Chapter IV
I Hate Your Guts
Mulcahey blew the compressed-air horn at a car-ferry. “If he’s tryin’ to make time with the
“Yeah.” Koski drank steaming coffee out of a thick handleless mug. “Close in, Irish. There’s a back eddy all along shore. It’d help him.”
He estimated the party boat’s top speed at twelve knots, loaded. The police launch could get up to thirty-five in a pinch. But you didn’t run Buttermilk at full throttle in a fog. Too much chance of running down a skiff. Still, unless the
He motioned toward the coffeepot. “Slug of that will warm you up, Remsen.”
“I couldn’t hold anything on my stomach.” the checker answered sullenly. “I’m sick already. Just bein’ on the water makes me sick.”
Koski grunted. The black hull of the police patrol was rolling a little as it furrowed the full tide, but it was no worse than the Staten Island ferry in choppy water. The pierman must be a sensitive sucker.
“Your sister mentioned some trouble with her boy friend. Her husband. I suppose she meant, huh?”
Remsen clutched the engine housing to steady himself. “Guess so,” he said shortly. “Chuck ain’t much of a husband. He ain’t home much, least not when she’s home. He hasta get up at three to get the party boat stocked for the trip, an’ sometimes Ellen ain’t even back from the Tavern by then. He don’t get back till late afternoon, an’ by then she’s ready to leave. Besides, he don’t make enough to keep a cat in scraps.”
“Doesn’t Vann come up with good pay?” Koski wondered whether the cut on three hundred cases of Scotch might not provide a few T-bones, as well as scraps.
“I don’t know. I guess so. He does all right by Ellen, what I hear.” Remsen didn’t want to discuss it. He didn’t want to talk at all.
Coming past the end of Governor’s Island, a diesel tug with three gravel barges in tow kicked up a swell. The
Koski finished his coffee, unracked the shortwave receiver, pushed the Talk button.
“Patrol Nine to Eee Pee Eee Eee... Okay?”
The metallic voice from the speaker answered instantly, “Come in, Nine.”
“Alert all boats for party boat
The hollow tones repeated the message and added, “Want the Brooklyn patrol cars notified. Steve?”
“Might ask one to check at the Vann wharf in Sheepshead. We’re on our way there.” He signed off again.
Mulcahey cut the wake of a Navy destroyer surging down the harbor so the police boat bucked like a rodeo bronc. The coffeepot banged against the guard-rail on the stove. Remsen swore feebly.
The sergeant echoed the curse. “Sure, maybe you had a thing there, about them pickled eels. Steve. I must be seein’ around corners, but ain’t that the blinker buoy off Gowanus? Holy hat, no! ’Tis some fathead on shore, usin’ a flash!”
“Slow her.” Koski took the night glasses out of their leather case, peered at the dim spark that winked on and off through the milky mist. A long blink, a short. A pause. A long and a short again and immediately repeated.
“Beam, Irish.”
The searchlight dazzled a pencil of illumination through the coiling vapor. A hundred yards inshore, the light was reflected from a hull that might have been white, or gray. It might have been a fifty-footer or a seventy. The boat wasn’t making headway.
“In, Sarge.” Koski lifted the sub-machine gun from its rack, checked the load, the safety. “Circle back. Come in to her bow.”
“If that ain’t the
“Run that beam along her cockpit. It’s it all right.” The lieutenant could see no stacked crates above the party boat’s coaming, but the customs lettering K2074 and the name VANNITY were plain enough now that the police boat had cut the gap between them to thirty yards. Also, there was a man on the low foredeck, hanging onto the deck house with one hand, waving a flashlight frantically with the other.
Mulcahey let the police boat coast, throttled the motor to a purr.
Koski cupped a hand. “What’s the trouble?”
The man on the party boat — a short, fattish individual in dark pants and a red mackinaw — hollered, “Ma-an... overboard!”
“Alongside, Irish.” Koski couldn’t see in the fishing boat’s deckhouse because of the glare reflected by the
The police patrol’s nose nuzzled the party boat’s starboard quarter. Mulcahey gave the wheel a half-spin to the right, kicked the propeller ahead a couple of seconds. The boats lay rail to rail.
“Catch.” Koski heaved a short line.
The man on deck grabbed at it, snubbed it around a deck cleat.
“Just keep her steady, Irish. And cover me.” The lieutenant stepped across to the party boat, the sub-machine cradled in his elbow. “Who’d you lose?”
“The cap’... Jeeps. I’m glad you guys got here. I been lookin’ for him, last half hour.” The man was breathless. “But I conkin’ go for help. One of the lines got wrapped around the screw when we hit that scow.”
“Who’re you?”
“Olsan. Bernt Olsan. I was helpin’ Chuck.”
“Helpin’ him what?” Koski felt a grittiness underfoot on the cockpit flooring, but saw no sign of any liquor cases on board.
“We was tryin’ out the new motor. Mister Vann — he owns the boat — he had a new motor put in, an’ Chuck — that’s Cap Matless — he didn’t want to gamble takin’ her offshore without givin’ the new engine a break-in.”
“Careful guy, hah? Not so careful you didn’t hit something in the fog?”
“Scow. Sand scow.” Unhappily, Olsan wiped his plump face on the inside of his mackinaw sleeve. “We was on our way back to Sheepshead, where we come from, an’ all of a sudden
“Boat hook and all?”
“Yep. I try to grab him, of course. But he must’ve gone under the scow because that’s the last I see of him. If I could’ve seen him, I’d’ve jumped in after him. All I could do was holler my head off to get somebody on the scow t’ help me, but it just keeps goin’ along.”
Koski stepped into the deckhouse. “What’d you do?”
“Tried t’ get the boat goin’ so’s I could chase after that scow an’ the tugboat towin’ her, but I don’t know nothin’ about motor boats.”
“No? Why’d Matless want you along on a trial run, then?”
Olsan held out his hands, palms up. “Guess I was the only guy around, an’ I could blow the fog horn, stuff like that. But I don’t know a damn thing about what to do when a line gets tangled in the propeller like it did. So I just shut off the motor an’ let her drift. Of course, I kept lookin’ for Chuck.”
“Why didn’t you reverse the motor, unwind the line from the shaft?”
“Never thought of it.” Olsan seemed genuinely surprised. “Jeeps, would that’ve freed it? Only shows a bartender ain’t got no business on a boat.”
“How’d you happen to think of using that flashlight?”
“Well, I been wavin’ it for pretty near half an hour. I was about give it up. Nobody except you paid any attention.”
Koski eyed the
“Trial run, hah? Go far up the river?”
Olsan grimaced. “How would I know. Even if we coulda seen anything, I wouldn’t’ve known where we was.”
“Didn’t put in anywhere?” Koski came out of the deckhouse, leaned out to look at the party boat’s hull.
“No, sir.”
“Well, let’s put in at Sheepshead now. I’ve had one cold bath tonight, or I’d go overside and free that screw. But we’ll give you a tow.” The lieutenant slipped the safety catch on the tommy gun. “Phil Vann know you were out on this joy ride?”
Olsan drew in his breath sharply. “I’ll say he didn’t. He’ll prob’ly fire me.”
“Yeah? Would he mind his captain taking out the boat that much?”
From the police boat’s cockpit, Remsen said savagely, “Mind? Vann hated Chuck’s guts. He wouldn’t have kept him as long as he has — except for Ellen.”
Chapter V
The Old Skipola
Sergeant Mulcahey took one step back out of the
“Stow that chatter, unless it’s a new set ’f teeth ye’re wantin’! Keep it stowed, understand?”
“I’ve said all I wanted to,” Remsen muttered. “It’s the God’s truth.”
On the party boat Koski paid out a two-inch anchor line to the towing bitts of the police launch.
“Know that lad, Olsan?” he asked.
“I’ve seen him,” Olsan answered. “At the Tavern. He’s Chuck’s brother-in-law. What’s he doing here?”
“Same thing we are. Hunting a couple hundred cases of Scotch. Any ideas about it?”
“Whisky? I could use a slug right now, that’s all.”
Koski gave the sergeant the take-it-away signal, crouched long enough over the blunt bow of the fishing boat to see the scarred paint where the
“Now if all that hodelyo about rubberhose work in the back room of police stations was on the up and up, it’d save a lot of time. Mister Olsan. I’d simply whale you over the kidneys until you said right out plain what you did with that liquor.”
“You could knock my brains out and I couldn’t tell you anything except what I did. You’re a hell of a cop, not even botherin’ to grapple for Chuck.”
“Don’t hand me any more of that guff, mister. Or I’ll forget my badge and go to work on you just on general principles. We know how Matless learned about the shipment of Scotch. There’s evidence at the pier to show this tub was tied up there tonight. It won’t be hard to tie you in with the murder charge.”
The bartender backed away. “Murder?” he whispered. “You’re kiddin’.” He gawked, open-mouthed. “You
Koski took out a brown-stained clay pipe, stuffed it with tobacco from an oilskin pouch. “Ed Weltz was killed during the commission of a robbery. Law says every person involved in that crime is guilty of murder, regardless of who it was killed him.”
Olsan tried to smile with assurance. “You could prob’ly scare the pants oil a lot of guys with that mahooly. But—”
“You’re shiverin’ in your shorts right now, then.” Koski used two matches, heads together, to light his pipe. “I wouldn’t say, offhand, you’ve got much sense. But I’ll give you credit for having enough to look ahead. A week for the Grand Jury to indict. Two weeks to set trial. A week for conviction. Three months for your lawyer’s appeal to be turned down. Say four months at the outside. Brings it up to the third or fourth Thursday in July. You can have any kind of ice cream you want for supper the night before. What kind of ice cream you like?”
“I didn’t even know there was a murder.” Olsan spoke so indistinctly he was barely audible. “They couldn’t send me to the chair, not even knowing—”
“The prosecutor sometimes makes a deal, mister, where it’ll get a conviction and save the state a lot of expense. I’ll make a deal — to save time and get a killer. But you’ll have to come up with the straight, and do it now.”
The bartender swallowed hard. He looked sicker than Remsen had. “I don’t know much.”
“How much?”
“Chuck did know about a big load of liquor. He asked me to go along to help load it, if we could get into the pier. He said it was a perfect night for it, so foggy an’ all. Only when we got there, somebody’d beat us to it.”
“Cleaned out the whole shipment, hah?” Koski showed his teeth, humorlessly.
“No. They’d taken some, but there was plenty left. Only when we tied up at the wharf, I stayed here on the
“Didn’t you hear any commotion up in the shed?”
“There wasn’t any. Chuck just cast off the lines an’ tumbled down on deck. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here’, he said. ‘Somebody’s been here before us. There was a truck just rollin’ out to the street. I don’t know but what they saw me, as it is. Anyhow, there’ll be an alarm out in no time’.
“So we ran the ol’ tub full speed to get as far away as we could, in case the boat’d been spotted. That’s why we hit that scow, runnin’ so fast in the fog.”
“You didn’t even go up on the pier at all?”
“Never left the
“Hm.” Koski went to the stern of the party boat. There was a bait tank just forward of the transom, and on either side of it foot-long wooden cleats for the stern lines. The starboard line was in place neatly coiled around the cleat. The port line hung over-side, taut as a bowstring from its spliced loop around the cleat to the propeller shaft a yard beneath the surface.
“Could Matless swim?”
“Dunno. Never saw him. Never asked him. Lot of these watermen can’t, I hear.”
“That’s one way of committing suicide.” The lieutenant went up to the bow. All along the floor boards on the port side, beneath the pipe rail over which hopeful fishermen had dangled so many lines, were grains of gritty yellow sand.
That checked with Olsan’s version of the collision. Those barges in tow were usually piled so full that any boat coming alongside might well get a shower of sand.
The boathook was missing, too. It could have happened the way the bartender told it.
The
When they pulled into the Vann wharf at Sheepshead, Koski made Olsan tie up the party boat, herded him onto the
“Call off that alert for the
Although it was midwinter, the Tahiti Tavern was doing a booming business. Elbow room was scarce at the bars. The cocktail lounge was jammed. A trio of Cuban singers, in white camisoles and strumming guitars, were entertaining the patrons. There was a miniature piano on wheels, but it wasn’t being used. Maybe, Koski thought, that might have been where Ellen Matless would have done her stuff.
He found Phil Vann in a large, dignified office on the second floor, above the main dining room. He proved to be a tall, spare, brown man — brown hair, spaniel eyes, a Miami winter tan — very spruce, very suave.
He denied knowing the
He was flabbergasted when Koski repeated Olsan’s story.
“I’ll kill the cruddy bum, if he tried to get me mixed up in any hijacking. I’m a business man, not a mucking gangster,” he said flatly. “As for that fattail Olsan, ask him to come in here to collect the pay that’s coming to him. Just ask him to do that. I’ll take care of
Koski said it had gotten beyond that. He didn’t mention the murder, merely inquired, “Did Matless ever use the
“I’d’ve fried his fuzzers if he’d tried it. No. Once in a while—” the dapper proprietor admitted — “he’d ask for a day off, generally when the weather was so bad we’d have to cancel the trip out to the fishing grounds, anyway. I believe he used to do extra work on a tug those days to earn a dollar, but I don’t know what tug or if that was just a line of chatter he put out.”
“A tug boat?” Koski nodded. “Funny how many things you miss — on a foggy night. Come along.”
They hurried back to the wharf, Vann getting angrier by the minute. Halfway to the
“See him, Steve?” Mulcahey asked Koski.
“Who?”
“That Remsen scut. He asked to go in the head for a minute. He was sick as hell. After a bit I peek in there. The hatch is open. He’s done a skipola!”
Chapter VI
An Inch from Hell
Running to the
The sergeant was reluctant. “He’ll not be far off, Steve.”
“Cut the gab. Clutch in. Quick.” Koski hastened to the stern line. “Climb aboard, Vann.”
The restaurant owner came to the police boat’s gunwale. “Where you going?”
“After that liquor.” Koski grabbed Vann’s arm. “That wasn’t an invitation, mister.” He hauled the tall man into the cockpit.
Olsan said, shamefaced, “We lost Chuck overboard, Mister Vann. We hit a barge.”
Vann snarled. “Hell with Chuck. I hope the crabs go to work on him!” He flopped on the engine housing as Mulcahey gunned the motor and the patrol boat lurched toward the black channel marker. “What’s with Hal Remsen, Officer?”
“Under arrest.” Koski was brusque. “Watchman was killed during that whisky heist. Remsen’s sister jumped in the river afterward.”
“Ellen?” Vann said sharply. “You talking about Ellen Matless?”
“Yeah. One who works for you.”
“What the hell was she doing at the pier?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Koski gave him a curt brushoff, went in the pilothouse. “Let her out all the way, Irish. And keep your whistle going.” He put the shortwave receiver to his ear. “Patrol Nine to Eee Pee Eee. Set?”
The mechanical voice said, “Come in, Nine.”
“Request Patrol Twelve, City Island, to intercept steam tug with three sand and gravel barges in tow. Probably bound to Throgs Neck. Warning. May be armed men aboard. Detain for investigation. Koski, Lieutenant.”
After the acknowledgment, Mulcahey asked, “Them babies that rolled us, are they comin’ through Buttermilk?”
“Scotch could have been transferred from the party boat to one of the barges while they were in tow. Sarge.”
“Holy hat! An’ we’ve been within anchor’s throw of ’em! But why you so sure they aren’t heading up the Hudson?”
“If that tug had been out of Bayonne or Perth Amboy or Staten Island, it’d have been on its way by eight o’clock to take advantage of the tide, Joe. You know that. Costs too much coal to drag those barges against the current when you can go with it. If they’d started four hours ago, they’d be past Yonkers by now. So — she’s on a short haul. Say, from Gowanus to, well, Throg’s Neck.”
“We’ll never catch them, Steve.”
“Might. Nova Scotia steamer and those Fall River freighters come in through Hell Gate around midnight. The two might have to crawl past Mill Rock waitin’ for the go-ahead from the bridge. Sock it to her.”
“Yeah. But this fog’s not thinnin’. If we hit a floatin’ railroad tie or somethin’—”
“The boys at Randalls’ll have some hull planking to fix, that’s all. You get every knot you can out of her.”
Mulcahey glanced at the whistling buoy off Coney. “We’re doing thirty-four in flat water. With the push the tide’s givin’ us, we’re doin’ close to thirty-eight.”
“Keep her kiting.” Koski returned to the cockpit.
Vann slumped straddle-legged on the housing, bent over with his face in his hands. “She was worth all the rest of this garbage, Lieutenant. Her ratty husband. Her prissy brother. This putzface here.” He indicated Olsan. “Her little finger was worth the whole lousy lot.”
“Kind of had a yen for her, didn’t you?”
“I’ll say I did.” Vann raised his head. “I’ve been trying for six months to get her to leave that stinkin’ Matless. She wouldn’t. She’d made her bargain. A rotten bargain. I might have known the only way she’d leave it was — the way she did.”
Koski didn’t enlighten him. He used the
He saw nothing until the police boat had roared under the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges, past Welfare Island, beneath the Fifty-ninth Street, the Triborough, the great arching span of Hell Gate itself.
Halfway to the powerful light on North Brother Island, Mulcahey shouted, “Barges ahead!”
Koski unracked the T-gun once more, climbed on the foredeck. The stern of a red scow, high-banked with yellow gravel, was only a couple of hundred yards distant.
“Come fight up astern, Irish,” Koski called to Mulcahey.
“Can do.”
The
No one was visible on the stern. A single yellow spark of light came from a kerosene riding light on that tail barge. Queer, there would be no one on that barge.
The police boat came within twenty yards. Ten. Five.
“Now!” Koski called. He jumped to the walk board beneath the gray tarpaulin.
Before his boots hit the planking, he saw the upswinging shovel. He couldn’t dodge or duck. He was bringing the T-gun level when the shovel edge slashed down on his head, knocking him to his knees.
Instantly wet arms encircled him, held him between the shovel-wielder and the
Matless yelled, “Sheer off, you! Don’t try any gun work either, unless you want a dead cop to go overboard.” He brandished a forty-five.
Koski grappled with the soaking figure at his back, wrestled with him, shouting, “Hell with him, Sarge!
Mulcahey came ahead.
As the police boat careened in against the stern of the scow, the shock of the smash brought sand avalanching down on the two men battling on the narrow walkway. It was at Koski’s knees when he heard the glass in the
Chuck screamed when the sliding sand pushed him off the walkway. He dropped his gun, clutched Koski’s leg in desperation.
His weight was too much for the bracing Koski could give himself. They went over, down and under the water. The Harbor Squad man brought his knee up to the pit of Chuck’s stomach. Then he let his muscles relax until the force of the downplunge had been spent. No sense burning up that oxygen.
Chuck kept fighting even under water. He clawed at Koski’s throat. The lieutenant made no attempt to break the grip. The party boat captain wouldn’t have enough breath to hang on long — unless they surfaced quicker than Koski thought they would.
He felt the current pull at his legs as they began to come up. Chuck used one hand to thresh the water. Koski’s head bumped hard into wood. The tide had swept them beneath the barge.
He had to grab Chuck then. The fool had gone panicky as soon as he realized they were trapped eight feet under water. He wrapped his arms around the lieutenant’s legs in a death grip. Koski was lucky to break it.
Koski took two precious seconds to put one hand up, feel the caulking between the scow’s bottom planks, to make sure he didn’t try to swim the length of the scow. Even then it was a long chance. He might have been swirled around so, under water, that he’d lost his sense of direction. But he had to make a choice. He chose the side where the
Chuck was dead weight when Koski felt the turn of the scow’s bilge above his hand. His own lungs were at the point of exploding. Streaking comets of light burst in front of his eyes. He did lose consciousness for the brief moment it took to bob to the surface.
But his lungs reacted with a reflex gasp. He gulped cold air that stung his lungs like hot needles, and was surprised to find his left hand in Chuck’s collar. His arm felt paralyzed.
He shifted his grip to the chin, got the beaklike nose above water. The man was out, so helpless he’d have sunk in no time if Koski let go.
That made it tough.
Chapter VII
Mop-Up
Fifty yards astern of the scow Mulcahey was sweeping the water with the beam. A light ring flared ten yards nearer the tow. The sarge would have hurled that preserver over to mark the spot where Koski’d gone under. If Chuck had been able to fend for himself, it would have been possible to swim back to that ring buoy, even exhausted as he was by that long immersion under the scow, dazed as he still was from that blow from the shovel. With Chuck to look out for, even sixty, seventy yards as it was now, with the tow drawing away for the
He overarmed back to the side of the scow, catching the rubrail a couple of feet above the loaded water line, with only a couple of yards to spare. While he rested there, hoping Chuck Matless would show signs of life, he watched the police boat’s emerald running light dwindle to a small green spark, the searching sweep of the beam diminish to the wavering antenna of a waterbug.
Sand sifted down on him. He looked up at the side of the scow, six feet above him. Not much chance of pulling himself up there. No cleated steps. No convenient ring bolts. Sand scows weren’t meant to be climbed on.
The sand was spilling down from a trough of the tarpaulin which had been carried over the side a foot or so. If he could get hold of that — but he couldn’t. The other end probably wasn’t pinned under the boxes tightly enough to hold anyway. Still—
He maneuvered one of Chuck’s windbreaker sleeves oil, shoved his left arm through it, gripped the rub-rail with his left hand. One thing sure, if the party boat captain went under now, he wouldn’t go alone.
Then he stripped off Chuck’s belt. He lashed out with the belt buckle, managed to hit the tarp, but the buckle end was too light. It didn’t pull at the canvas enough. It wasn’t until the red flare of the Hunts Point light made the oily surface of the channel look like roiled-up blood that he managed to work one of Chuck’s shoes off, tie it clumsily to the buckle.
Even then, it took a long ten minutes, while the scow swam silently past the belching stacks of Port Morris and a trawler bound for Fulton Market, for Koski to whip at the canvas enough to get the eyelets tangled in a fold, pull the loose end down on him.
The testing was the dangerous part. If he trusted his weight, and Chuck’s, to that ten-foot strip of tarpaulin and it came loose, that would be it. He waited until the tow was only a hundred yards from an anchored power boat on the Bronx shore. Then he began the climb, inching up, avoiding a sudden pull, dragging Chuck along after him.
He’d just gotten one arm safely up over the edge of the walkway, when a familiar roaring grew louder in the mist. He elbowed himself up, lifted Chuck, let him flop lifelessly on the walkway. By the time the
Mulcahey was up on the walkway, scooping away sand to get a place to make the bow-line fast. Koski was down in the cockpit breaking open a case of I. MacLone’s Finest. The police boat was being towed along with the scow. Apparently the tug’s captain, up ahead, had noticed nothing in the fog.
Olsan pried off the top of the case. “We sure thought you was a dead duck, Lieutenant, goin’ down with Chuck hangin’ onto you.”
“Yeah.” Koski knocked the neck of the bottle off on the rail, poured half a coffee mug full, put it down the hatch. Maybe the whisky would warm him enough to start him shivering. Bad sign when you were so marrow-chilled you couldn’t even shiver.
Vann said tightly. “Chuck go down?”
Koski burbled more liquor in the mug. “I had enough trouble saving myself. Tide carried me under the scow.”
The restaurant man laughed harshly. “You don’t hear me moaning. One less murderer to worry about.”
“Will be,” Koski put the bottom up, “come July or so. Hah, Olsan?”
The bartender puckered his fat features. “But if it was Chuck — killed the watchman, I mean — while he was in the shed—”
“It wasn’t. It was you. You used that hook on Cap Weltz.”
“Hey, now!” the plump man protested. “You got no right or reason—”
“You killed him because he was in on the setup with you and you wanted to pocket the split he was supposed to get. So you waited until he’d helped you move the cases on a hand truck, until he’d unbarred the door so it would look as if somebody’d taken the stuff away on tires. Then you gave him his share — in steel.”
“There ain’t one word of truth in that.”
“Shut your flabby face.” Koski shoved him suddenly. Olsan fell down against the engine housing. “To make it look good, you’d probably have arranged with Weltz to have him tied up after the stuff was on board the party boat. That way he could holler ‘hijack’ and claim he’d been hound by the heisters. You did it quicker. Then you wanted to fix it to get Chuck’s share, too.”
Olsan whimpered, “You’re crucifying me when I didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
“For a second time, you waited until one of your partners helped move those three hundred cases. Then after Chuck got the last case on the scow here, and covered with that tarp, you clouted him with a boathook and hoped to God he’d never come up. But he did, and he got aboard the scow again, somehow. Maybe the stern line from the
Koski touched him with his toe. “I knew
“Nuts! Try and call me a murderer just because of that!”
“No. You even used the NCU call for help with your flashlight, before you thought. Many a boyscout would have known about the SOS, but only a waterman would know that NCU distress signal the Cee Gee boys use all the time.”
Olsan whimpered with fear.
Vann bent over him. “Did this crud make Ellen kill herself, Lieutenant? I’ll just save the state the trouble—”
“Sheer off, fella. Mrs. Matless is all right. She must have heard her husband, or maybe even futzface here, talking about the hijacking, decided to come to the pier herself to warn her brother about it. It happened Remsen was out when she got there, and so when she found Weltz dead, she thought her husband had done it.”
Vann swore with relief.
Koski went on, “So, probably being pretty fed up with him anyway, and not valuing the kind of life she was living very much, but not wanting Chuck electrocuted for murder, she tried to make it seem as if she’d done the killing herself. Left her lipstick on Weltz’s face, her coat and bag beside his body, then jumped into the river.”
Mulcahey called from the scow. “This guy ain’t hittin’ on all eight cylinders, Steve, but his motor’s turnin’ over. What you want me to do with him?”
“Keep him there until we get to Clason Point. He’ll be ready to give us all the corroboration we want on Olsan.”
The sergeant came up to the
“No.” Koski teeth began to chatter. Suddenly he felt very cold and tired. “He’ll probably be there waiting for the tow when we get in. I think he had it all figured out, except that he’d guessed his sister was in on the scheme, which she wasn’t.”
“He wasn’t runnin’ away, Steve?”
“Even money he’s rounded up a revolver and aims to blast Chuck. He didn’t seem to care a whole lot about his brother-in-law. And he’d have known Chuck used to come around to the pier with his sister once in a while. Must have met Cap Weltz one of those times. Chuck probably told Olsan about Weltz, and from the way that tug is nosing in now, I’d say one of the watchman’s old buddies is at the helm up there, and likely getting well paid not to notice anything.”
Mulcahey regarded his superior officer with a certain awe. “Did you figure all that out while you was under water, mayhap?”
“Didn’t have my bathproof pen with me, Sarge.”
“Want me to pick up Remsen, if he’s on shore?”
“Better. Otherwise you might have another lifesaving job on your hands when he sees Chuck. Myself, I’ve done my rescuing chores for the day, and I’m going to climb into a warm bed with a good book—”
“Or something.” The sergeant chuckled.
“Be your age, Sarge. I have a date with a dame, hut it’s in the morning. She’s the only one in this whole mess I’m really sorry for.”
“You might give a thought to yourself once in a dog’s age. You give me a bad hour, there, thinkin’ you were gone.”
“You ought to have known it’s hard to keep a good man down, Irish.”
The tug slacked on the towing hawser just then...