Blues in the Night

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 Vannity, luggin’ a load like that, he’d most likely go down Buttermilk Channel, wouldn’t he, Steye?”

“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 Vannity had better than an hour’s head start. Number Nine might catch her before she got through the Narrows.

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 Vigilant lay over on her beam ends, pendulumed over to the opposite rail. Remsen sank to his knees in the cockpit, groaning.

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 Vannity, out of Sheepshead, last reported near Pier Nineteen, North River. Fifty-footer, pearl-gray, deckhouse forward, single mast aft the house. Hold and detain for investigation. Koski, Lieutenant. That is all.”

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 Vannity,” the big Irishman growled, “I’ll eat a bushel of beer caps. She must have bust down.”

“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 Vigilant’s searchlight. “Douse the beam. Get a gun.”

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 boom, there’s this thing smack in front of us. Chuck swings away, so’s we won’t crash head-on, then he yells to me to help hold her off. He comes out of the cabin there an’ runs to the rail with a boathook he grabs up. But we sock into that barge like a truck smackin’ a telegraph pole, an’ he goes over.”

“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 Vannity’s chart case, its flag cabinet, its red can of flares, its ship-to-shore set.

“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.”