Blues in the Night

Chapter V The Old Skipola

Sergeant Mulcahey took one step back out of the Vigilant’s pilot house, whacked a hand like a baseball glove on Remsen’s shoulder, hauled him back to the pilot house door.

“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 Vannity had hit something hard. He came back to the deck house, appraising the plump Olsan thoughtfully.

“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 ain’t kiddin’!”

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 Vannity while Chuck climbed up to force the door. He got in, was inside only a minute when he came tearing out again.”

“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 Vannity a minute.”

“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 Vigilant’s red running light showed ahead. She was swinging in past the necklace of lights on the deserted boardwalk at Coney. In the mist they were a hazy blur against the glow of the Island itself.

When they pulled into the Vann wharf at Sheepshead, Koski made Olsan tie up the party boat, herded him onto the Vigilant.

“Call off that alert for the Vannity, Irish. Send in an alarm for Charles Matless. You can describe him close enough. I’m going to see what cooks at the Tavern besides lobster and French fries.”

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 Vannity had been away from her wharf, denied giving anybody permission to take the boat out except for regular party trips.

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 that crumb.”

Koski said it had gotten beyond that. He didn’t mention the murder, merely inquired, “Did Matless ever use the Vannity for hauling stuff around the harbor before?”

“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 Vigilant, pounding feet raced toward them. It was the sergeant, with drawn pistol.

“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!”