Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 8, No. 7, July 1963

The Lure and the Clue by Edwin P. Hicks

Once a cop, always a cop, is a truism that may snap one out of the lethargy of retirement, and turn him into a conquering hero.

Turning my boat around to head out of the cove, I saw the other boat bearing down and headed straight for me. It came with a rush, under the full power of a 40-horse outboard motor and never slackened speed until at the last second the big guy in the stern cut the motor completely. The waves raced in great rolls, and Lucy, that’s the name of my boat, rocked wildly. If it had happened in the streets in the old days I’d have given the fellow a ticket for reckless driving.

It was my fishing cabin neighbor, Bill White, whom I’d met the day before, and two companions. White, who was around 60 and who claimed to be an Oklahoma City oil man, was dressed like a dandy — red coat, red cap, and khakis. The man in the bow, medium sized and roughly dressed, was about 45. He held a pair of field glasses and grinned insolently at me, getting a kick out of the way my boat was rocking. My ex-police sense told me this gentleman was a cop-hater and dangerous.

“Hi there, Joe Chaviski,” White greeted. “Meet my fishing partners, Frank Caprino and Jim Brown. Frank was watching you through the glasses and saw you pull out that big bass, and we thought we’d join you over here and see what you were using. Where is that bass? Let’s see how big he is.”

“Didn’t know you fellows wanted him,” I said. “I didn’t need him to eat, so I turned him loose.”

Brown swore. Caprino spat into the water.

“I don’t understand you damn fellows who drive miles to fish, then when you luck into a big one turn him loose again,” Caprino said with a sneer.

A policeman’s blood doesn’t boil easily. He’s used to men spouting off. I ignored Caprino and looked Brown over. Here was a youngster who would be tough handling. He was young — in his early twenties — and he was big, at least 230 pounds, and probably would stand six feet three or four inches tall. His shoulders were the shoulders of a heavyweight boxer, and his weight was sinewy bone and muscle. There was no fat on his entire frame. The boy was a perfect physical specimen.

Caprino was ready to kill at the drop of a hat, and you knew what to expect; but Brown was the one who could do the most damage, because you wouldn’t be sure what he would do. Brown’s face was sun-tanned, but his eyes were blue. He looked like a big, friendly, innocent kid — a bit too innocent. Through bitter experience I had a great deal of respect for baby-faced youngsters. You never knew what a friendly faced juvenile delinquent like Brown would do.

I spoke to White. “I was just getting ready to pull out of here. You can have the cove if you want it.”

Caprino chuckled as I started the motor. He dropped his field-glasses to the end of the leather thong about his neck and thrust his right hand beneath his coat, towards a bulge below his left shoulder. At that instant, White dropped a restraining hand on Caprino’s arm, just like a man steadying a vicious dog that was about to leap on a stranger.

I was glad to get away from there and scooted clear across the lake to a forest of dead tree tops sticking out of the water. Here I searched for a small buoy-marker, bobbing on the surface, among the tree tops. This marker, a slab of wood, anchored by wire to the bottom, marked a crappie bed.

Finding the marker, I tied up, unlimbered a couple of cane poles, lines and bobbers, baited with minnows, and began fishing for crappie. This was a lazy man’s way of fishing. I stayed over the crappie bed for hours, mainly dozing, enjoying the warm October sun. The crappie began hitting about one-thirty in the afternoon. I pulled out crappie until I got tired, keeping only a few of the big slabs. Then in an hour or so the flurry was over, and the crappie went back to sleep and so did I.

As I dozed there, half awake, I dreamed about the past. I was thinking of my wife Lucy, for whom my boat was named. Lucy had been dead more than five years now. And I thought of Johnson and Sauer, wild young buckaroos, whom I had made into plain-clothesmen, although the effort nearly killed me. And, with something akin to physical force, I pushed back into their graves, the 11 men I had killed during my 30 years on the police force. Then I thought of Billy Hearston. Billy was my good friend.

He had broken in with me as a rookie patrolman — in those dim, dead days of long ago. I had the First to the Main Hotel Alley beat, and Hearston had the Alley to Thirteenth Street. We worked seven nights a week, in 12 hour shifts. If a policeman made any arrests, he had to appear in Municipal Court next day to testify. A court appearance made one or two more hours in uniform, during the 24 hour day. Our pay was $80 a month, but $80 was good money in those days.

Day after day drunks had been wandering up on my beat. Day after day I walked them dutifully down the Main Hotel Alley and to the city jail — and appeared sleepy-eyed and red-faced next day in court.

One night it appeared there were going to be no drunks, and I was looking forward to grabbing a bite to eat and then just dying in my bed. I was that tired. Five minutes before off-duty time, a wobbly soul met me at the Alley. I grabbed the poor fellow by the shoulders and shook him. “Tell me,” I bellowed, “why do you drunks always have to come on my beat?”

“Why—” said the intoxicated one, between hiccoughs, “that other cop down the street told me to come up here and report to you.”

A great light dawned on me then. Next afternoon, right after 5 o’clock, just after I had started on duty for the night, I met Billy Hearston at the Main Hotel Alley. Billy was every bit as big a man as I was — about 245, and six feet tall. I walked straight up to him. “You so-and-so!” I yelled in his face.

“Whatta you mean Joe?” Billy asked, grinning from ear to ear.

“Why the hell are you always sending your drunks over on my beat and making me lose two hours’ sleep every day?” I slapped Billy with my open hand across the cheek so hard it sounded like a whip cracking.

Holding his ground, Billy returned the slap. For five minutes we engaged in a face-slapping exercise — both of us as stubborn as two young bull-calves butting heads in the pasture. We were still at it when Chief Ingersoll appeared and grabbed each of us by the coat collar.

“What are you two pups doing? Trying to kill each other?”

The Chief took us both over to his office, gave us a sizzling lecture on the dignity of our uniforms, threatened to fine us a month’s salary, then sent us both back on the beat, grinning sheepishly.

It was a week later we learned that the Mayor, who lived in an apartment across the street, had seen the slapping incident and had called the police station: “Hurry over here Chief, before two of your policemen beat each other to death!”

Poor Billy had died of Japanese bullets on a South Pacific Island in 1944.

But all the time as I lazed away there in the autumn sunlight, drinking in its warmness and haunted with a loneliness for Lucy — the Oklahoma dandy, Bill White, killer-type Hank Caprino, and the baby-faced young giant, Jim Brown, were in the back of my mind.

There was something wrong with that trio. I felt it — I knew it, and yet I knew also that criminals, gangsters, hoodlums, do not fish and hunt, and they do not enjoy the outdoors. And then I said to myself— Oh hell, Joe Chaviski, you’re no longer a cop. But my mind was still a cop’s mind.

The sunset was a scarlet band above the pines as I nosed my boat back into the cove where I had taken the lunker at sunrise.

Hank Caprino had reached for a rod that morning, fisherman or no fisherman. I hadn’t seen the gun, but I had seen the movement, and I was just as sure as anything that he would have blasted me out of the boat if White hadn’t restrained him. And here I was, clear away from base, without a sign of a firearm. I had left everything that would remind me of police work back at home.

I cast a big red-head surface plug about the shallows of the point, without success and then headed back for the landing, my cabin, a quick meal, and a soft bed. A patch of light was showing beneath the drawn window shade in the cabin next to mine as I drove up, and the blare of a radio told me that White, Caprino, and Brown were at home. I hoped they would quickly knock it off and let me get some sleep.

But before I got inside, the baby-faced giant, Jim Brown, was there. “Mister Chaviski, come over and have a drink with us. A shot will do you good.”

“No thanks Brown, I’m all worn out. Think I’ll eat a bite and turn in.”

“Aw come on, Chaviski, we caught some fish. Want to show them to you.”

I followed the boy into the cabin. The place was thick with tobacco smoke, and the radio was loud enough to burst your ear drums. “Turn off that damn noise,” shouted White, who appeared to be the only man in the room not drinking. When nobody stirred, White turned it off himself.

“Look, Mr. Chaviski, we followed your system and caught some good ones today,” Brown said.

Caprino said something that was between a snarl and a laugh.

A fourth man came into the room from the kitchen. He was about 45, blond, six feet in height, even though caved in the chest, and his long jaw ended in an underthrust chin. His eyes were glazed and green, and through the thick tobacco smoke the newcomer looked like a walking cadaver. He had a heavy, black skillet in his hand, and the skillet was filled with smoking crappie. He piled the hot fish onto a platter on the table, and Caprino and Brown pounced on the fish with forks. The emaciated cook cackled: “Take more time. There’s another skillet full just like that one.”

“Sit down,” said White. “Sit down, Chaviski, and have supper with us.”

I sat down, and a plate of fish, surprisingly well cooked, was placed before me.

All five of us pitched in and ate the fish greedily. I was as hungry as a bear myself, and the others appeared just as hungry.

“I didn’t introduce you to our cook,” said White, when the thin fellow had cleared the table and returned to the kitchen. “He’s a sort of odd ball — not all here.” White tapped his forehead. “But he’s the best cook in seven states. Name’s Lenny Hamm. Got a machine gun bullet through his chest at Omaha Beach.”

“I didn’t see him this morning,” I said.

“Oh we picked him up later after he had cleaned up the cabin. He’s not much of a fisherman, but he likes to go out on the lake now and then when he’s on a fishing trip.”

“Well, thanks for the supper. It sure saved me a lot of work. Where did you get those crappie?”

“Right off the point where we saw you this morning. We went back to the dock and bought some surface plugs like you were using.”

“You mean Luckies?”

“Yep. Same color, same size, and everything.”

“Well, sometimes they hit over there. You never can tell. I’d have thought you’d have got them on minnows though.”

“No, just what you were using this morning.”

Back in my own cabin I got up a real head of steam. You don’t catch crappie on big surface lures like a casting size Lucky and very seldom, on the surface at all. When crappie hit an artificial lure it is something that looks like a small minnow flashing through the water, and usually a few feet down. But then I started to get drowsy. I’d get the news and turn in.

I turned on the radio and got rock and roll music on three stations. It wasn’t time for the newscasts, I switched to the police calls — and instantly came alive. The Blakely City police and the Garland County Sheriff’s office were keeping the airwaves hot. The First National Bank at Blakely had been robbed at noon that day by four bandits who wore stocking cap masks. The four had gotten away cleanly with $45,000 in cash, in a red convertible bearing a Texas license plate. The convertible had been found an hour later in the woods near the intersection of U.S. Highway 270 and a National Forest road about 25 miles north west of Blakely City, and at the bottom of a ridge a quarter of a mile south of the southern edge of Pine Valley Lake.

A four state hunt for the bank robbers was under way, but so far the officers were following a cold trail. I listened to the physical descriptions of the four. There was one tall, big man, two of medium height, while the description of the fourth- varied. Some said he was tall, others said he was stooped. But black stocking cap masks had hidden the features of the bandits completely.

I turned off the radio, after a while, switched off the lights in the cabin, and walked back to the lodge dining room. A couple of fishermen and their wives were watching a fight on TV. Sam Willoughby, operator of the lodge, was tidying up behind the fountain. Jim Taylor, who was in charge of the dock, was at the end of the counter, eating a late dinner.

I moved over to the counter and chose a stool next to Taylor. I ordered a dish of vanilla ice cream. I love vanilla ice cream.

“The four fellows in the cabin next to mine, I was just wondering if they drove off anywhere in their car during the day?” I asked Sam, as I dug into the ice cream.

Sam wiped at the spot of water on the counter. “You too?” he said, low and under his breath.

“What do you mean?”

“Half a dozen law-men have been over here off and on since that bank robbery in Blakely City. They searched every cabin this afternoon, inside and underneath — yours included — and every car, and they found nothing.”

“No guns?”

“Nothing but a .22 rifle for shooting snakes and plinking around, like a lot of fishermen take with them. Your friends had a twenty-two.”

“What about their car, has it been anywhere today?”

“Not that I know of. Taylor says all four of them been out on the lake all day fishing, the same as everyone else. Isn’t that right, Jim?”

Taylor nodded. “They went out in two boats. First time they ever took two boats since they been here.”

“What I can’t understand,” I said, grinning, “is the way they catch crappie. They had me over to eat tonight, and they said they caught all their crappie on big top water lures — large size Luckies. Never heard of such a thing before.”

Taylor laughed. “Those poor devils. They have been here since the first of the week and haven’t caught fish one. So a fellow with more crappie than he could use give them a mess today, when they come in about the same time to the dock, about 4 p.m. It was that guy on the left over there watching the fights. He’ll tell you about it.”

“Now that’s more like it,” I said. “I knew good and well they hadn’t taken them the way they said. You mean they were out there all day today and didn’t catch a thing.”

“Never saw any harder fishermen in my life. Went out right after you did — the three of them in one boat. Come back in about three hours and rented another boat, like I said. Said they were going to take their cook out. In a few minutes he came down to the boat — a tall guy, bent over and sickly looking. They kidded a lot about what a fisherman he was, but he took it all right. He and the dark, mean looking guy got in one boat, and the big young fellow and the old duffer from Oklahoma City got in the other. Both boats headed back up the lake the way you went. Didn’t come off the lake until around four or a little after, like I said, and they were really riding the cook. They said they were transferring their ice box from one boat to the other, and the cook let it slip, and it sank 50 feet down in the water, beer and all.”

Taylor paid his bill, picked up a toothpick, and ambled out of the restaurant. “Something about those four neighbors of yours you don’t like, Joe?” Willoughby asked, low enough that Taylor couldn’t hear.

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe it’s because I can’t get out of the habit of thinking I’m still a policeman. You know you can’t shake off 30 years wearing a badge and gun in two months’ time.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Ever see these four fellows here before?”

“No.” Sam said, “never did.”

“When the law searched their cabin and car, you sure they didn’t find anything — anything at all?”

“They were clean,” said Willoughby, “except for that little .22 rifle, like I told you. Usually they took that with them in the boat, but they hadn’t today. There wasn’t a thing out of the way — nothing.”

I sidled over towards the crappie fisherman, who was watching the last round of a fight on television. The man looked up and nodded, but I waited for the round to end and the decision.

“What time did the crappie start hitting for you today?”

“About 11 o’clock — clear up until one-thirty or two, I would judge. Couple of fellows came by about noon. I asked them what time it was — always leave my watch in the cabin to keep from dunking it. They said it was 12 o’clock. The poor duffers hadn’t had a nibble all day — though the Lord knows why. Later I ran into them at the dock as they were coming in and gave them eight or ten nice crappie.”

It took me some time to go to sleep. The guys in the next cabin were hotter than a firecracker, it seemed to me, and yet they had established alibis all over the lake. They couldn’t have robbed the Blakely bank. When you are on the lake fishing, you aren’t robbing banks, and that definitely was where these four were.

Oh well, maybe I was getting old — brain softening up or something. Everything in me was screaming that I was sitting right on top of a bank robbery that I ought to blow wide open — and yet nothing in the whole business fit together. The four had been on the lake, same as I. They had been seen all over the lake, and their car hadn’t left the fishing camp all day. So I turned off my feeble mind and went to sleep.

The sun was already up when I hit the lake next morning. I had overslept an hour, and the old Navy wound in the left hip was paining me, and that was a sign that a spell of weather was on its way. The eastern sky was red too. “Red at morn, sailor’s warn— Red at night, sailor’s delight.” The bass had read the signs too, long before I had. They were still sulk-king, as they had been at sunset. Oh well, if the white caps started rising on the lake I would pull off and go to the cabin and get some sleep, or I’d go over to Blakely City and nose around the police station and see if they had any sign — any line on the bank robbers.

I used the paddle to edge silently into the cove, and then threw everything I had in the tackle box at the bass, but they wouldn’t hit. Then, throttle at a crawl, I started pulling out of the cove, changing to an eel and jig combination as I did so, intending to fish the deep water off the points. Something hit me right between the eyes — figuratively.

I yanked the boat around and sent it back towards the center of the cove. Yes, I hadn’t been seeing things. One hundred feet out from the shore line was a floating wooden marker — a fresh pine slab, about three feet long, with a bright copper wire attached and leading down into the depths!

Such a marker is frequently used by fishermen or lake-men for various reasons — to mark a good fishing spot, or to serve as a direction guide, or as a depth marker. Yesterday morning this marker hadn’t been there. It could have been there yesterday evening, because it was late when I passed that way, and I could have gone within a few feet of it without seeing it.

I edged the boat towards the marker and caught hold of the copper wire and began heaving on it. Something tremendously heavy was attached to it on the bottom. I put my back into the work, and the thing began to move. I began bringing it up slowly, while the boat careened over almost to the gunwale.

Hand over hand I brought up the length of bright copper wire, some 25 feet of it. Then, several feet down, I saw it — shining metal. It was a large fishing ice-box, with the lid pad-locked and attached to the ice box by wire was a rubberized bag!

Puffing arid grunting I got the whole into the boat, wire and all, and sat there panting like a porpoise. The whine of a speeding outboard came to me, from the center of the lake. I turned to see a boat headed directly towards me and cutting a great swath through the surface. It was time to get moving.

By the time I had the motor started and underway, the other boat was within two hundred yards. I headed up the shore line, throttle open, picking up speed and going hell for leather. The other boat came right after me, wide open, spray flying wide. Three of my cabin neighbors were in that boat, and they were after me and no question about it. By the time I was full speed, the other boat had cut the distance to 100 yards.

We went up the north shore line, with my 25 horse outboard now holding its own. White and Caprino were waving their hands and yelling. The roar of the motors made it impossible to hear what they said, but I knew damn well what they meant. If they caught me I’d wind up at the bottom of the lake, wire and icebox attached but no buoy to mark the spot where the body lay.

Something that wasn’t a bumble bee hit the top of the ice box and ricocheted in a screaming whine out over the lake. They were using that .22 rifle! I bent my 250 pound anatomy down as far as I could behind the motor and kept pouring on the coal, running towards a small island ahead. Passing the island, I made a 90 degree turn sharply to port, then reversed my course completely, ducking around the island and headed back towards the center of the lake.

The maneuver, which caught White and company by surprise, gained a little distance, but not too much. The wind was freshening, and out in the middle of the lake tiny white-caps were showing. I aimed at a rocky point on the opposite shore, a mile and a half away, watching the surface ahead closely, and thanking the good Lord that I had filled the gasoline tank before starting out that morning.

A minute passed, and I sighted what I was looking for, another marker, a block of wood bobbing on the surface and attached to a wire. I made a turn to starboard around this marker, doubling as if I intended to reverse my. course again.

The pursuing boat turned instantly and cut across the arc of my course, thus gaining a full 50 yards on me. Two bullets whistled by my ear. Caprino was coming close!

And then it happened — what I had been praying for! The boat that was chasing me smashed into a low water rock bar with a resounding crash, and the three occupants went flying through the air. They came up one by one, sputtering and cursing, Caprino, Hamm, then White — to find themselves up to their waists in water, a good half mile from shore. Their boat with shattered bow had capsized, and the .22 rifle had been lost in the smash-up.

I cut my motor and circled back, to idle about 50 yards from the bedraggled trio. “Now, you’re marooned on a low-water bar, and I’d advise you to stay right where you are and not try moving around unless you’re darn good Channel swimmers. The water is 50 feet deep in every direction from where you are, and the white caps are rising. Stay right there and be good boys and maybe you can keep your noses above water.”

“But I can’t even swim!” bawled White. He looked really terrified.

“Now ain’t that just too bad!”

At the dock I got Jim Taylor to help lift the heavy ice box and the rubberized bag out of the boat and told him to keep watch over it.

At the lodge I put in a call to the Blakely City police department. “Yep, all of it!” I said. “They used boats instead of a get-away car, and they put the money in a rubberized sack inside a fishing ice-box. They put their tommy guns and their other heavy artillery in another rubber sack, attached everything to a floating surface marker by wire, and sank the whole business into the lake — to stay there until things cooled off. They probably dumped their masks and the clothes they used in the hold-up into the water too, weighted down with rocks — and had their fishing clothes on under what they took off.

“Yeah, Captain, they’re stranded out on a reef helpless as flies on fly-paper — three of them. Yeah, I’ll have the fourth one hog-tied and ready for special delivery when you get here. Take all the time you want.”

Sam Willoughby was goggle eyed. “The big guy is down at the cabin. I saw him just a few minutes ago.” Sam took a shotgun from under the counter and handed me a .45 automatic.

“Put those guns down,” I said. “Guns get people killed. You stay out of this Sam. Not a gun on the place in that cabin. You said so yourself. I think I’m still man enough to take him.”

“But you’re not as young as he is, and he’s as big as you are, Joe!”

“This will separate the men from the boys, Sam.”

I limped down to the cabin, trying to fit all the pieces together on the way. I’m not too fast with the think tank. Anything obvious takes me about 30 minutes to comprehend when my brain is working real good. But it came to me on the way. The cook, Lenny Hamm, who didn’t go out with the three of them the first time on the lake the day of the robbery, already was in Blakely City. It was he who stole the get-away car and he parked it in the woods over the ridge from the lake. Then, at the appointed time, he had met them on the lake shore, and they had taken him back to a point near their cabin. He had left the boat then, gone to the cabin, while the three others returned to the dock and rented another boat and motor. They waited at the dock, and Hamm came down to them after apparently just having finished his cabin chores.

The four then sped out across the lake in the two boats, heading for known fishing points, but once out of sight of the landing they had turned and headed for the south shore. There they beached the boats, picked up their artillery from some shore-line cache, made their way the quarter of a mile over the ridge to the hidden car — and had gone into Blakely right on schedule to rob the bank at 12, noon. They had then raced back with the bank loot, abandoned the car, climbed back over the hill, and soon were back in their boats. They then made it a point to be seen all over the lake, lying to the crappie fisherman that it was noon — the time of the bank robbery — when it was around 2 o’clock. The rest everybody knew.

I didn’t knock on my neighbor’s fishing cabin door — just turned the knob and walked right in. Maybe I couldn’t handle the youngster, but I wanted to try. Brown read my intentions and didn’t waste a word. He came off the cot like a charging bull, throwing a punch from right field that tickled my left ear as it just missed. I sank a right hook up to my wrist in his middle, judo-chopped him across the back of his neck with my left hand, and came up under his sagging chin with a knee. It was real pretty for an old man. Jim Brown wouldn’t think I was old at all. That is, he wouldn’t think so when he woke up and met all those Blakely cops.