Blues in the Night

Chapter I Corpse on Pier 19

The Vigilant ghosted silently past the Hudson wharves in a milk-thick February fog. The glow of brilliance from a docked Cunarder, the floodlights on a Norwegian freighter’s loading derrick, the pink-neon of the waterfront bars bathed the Manhattan pierheads in a strange opalescence which distorted all shoreward outlines to the two men on the police boat.

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 hasn’t any coat on. Stand by with that searchlight.”

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 Vigilant’s nose went up, her tail squatted, and she surged across the oily calm with a froth of foam at her stem.

“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 Vigilant’s guard-rail, he looped the throw-line under the girl’s armpits. The sarge hoisted her up to the coaming, down into the cockpit — a limp sogginess with a white face. Her hair was like wet copper wire in the luminous fog.

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?”

“No!” The terror in her voice was matched by that in her eyes. “I... I slipped in. Past him.”

“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.