Down Among the Dead Men

XXV

The mist had shut down again, a thick gauze that screened everything more than fifty feet from the pilot-house windows.

“The line the yacht’s patrolling runs from Stratford Light over to the reef, Sarge. We ought to be able to hit her.”

“We’ll be lucky if we hit nothing else in this murk. Why they call it pea-soup fog I do not know. Pea soup is at least warm!” Mulcahey stuck his head out of the port window to peer anxiously in search of the buoy off Execution Rock. “Are you positive we’re after the genuine culprit, now? I would hate to be looking for the wrong needle in a haystack as big as Long Island Sound.”

“Yair.” Koski glanced back at Ellen and Joslin, leaning against the cockpit gunwale. “I feel bad about smashing Gjersten’s skull, though.”

“For why, the scut?”

“He’d have pointed the finger at his partner, before the FBI boys got through with him. But maybe, — ” he felt gingerly of his neck, “maybe he could do that just as well, the way he is...”

The Vigilant hit something. The shock jarred both men off their feet; — the patrol-boat shuddered and plunged on into the circling haze. They looked aft but could see nothing.

Mulcahey wiped his forehead. “One more like that and I will be ready to draw my pension.”

“Didn’t you ever hear about Farragut, Irish? Damn the driftwood...”

“I am giving her as near full speed as I can without having heart failure. It strikes me a funeral pace would be more appropriate, anyhow.” The Sergeant groaned as a trawler materialized out of the fog, rushed past with a swirling wake. “I do not see why it could not have been this Gjersten who did the dirty job on young Ovett.”

“The colored housekeeper at Dommy’s saw two men in Room Five, Joe. One was Gjersten. Other was our friend with a bandage around his chops. It couldn’t have been young Ovett. He was dead then. Bandage Face was seen the next morning in the South Street dock.”

“True for you, Steve. He was.”

“Then Dommy’s housekeeper heard Bandage Face singing while he was sawing up Merrill’s body. The clerk at the drugstore saw him buy the suitcase. On the other hand, Ansel wasn’t at the Bar-Nothing the night of the murder, because Claire Purdo was looking for him and couldn’t find him, according to Schlauff. She might have gone up to Five looking for Ansel, heard Bandage Face singing, knocked on the door.”

“But if this Man-in-the-White-Mask had popped his head out to see who it was, he probably wouldn’t have had the bandage on at the time, skipper.”

“Maybe not, Irish. If he didn’t, that may have been a reason why he sent Ansel to rub her out. Or it could have been Ansel killed her on his own account.”

A horn blew with terrifying closeness; the sound seemed to come from every point of the compass at once. Mulcahey threw out the clutch. The Vigilant rocked violently on the afterwash of some unseen vessel. “I would sooner be piloting a plane blindfolded, so help me.” He got the boat under way again. “How did they identify young Ovett, now?”

“Collar bone broken in two places. He had it broken by a boom that jibed over on a sloop, few summers ago. Then the Wyatt girl had the measurements that wouldn’t be affected by loss of weight, — length of leg, size of foot, — the works.”

“A sin and a shame they had to see him like that. But this yacht captain, now. He was supposed to have seen young Ovett jump off the yacht.”

“He saw Gjersten, in Merrill’s suit.”

“They were not the same size, were they, skipper? The suit would have fitted this Gjersten a trifle late?”

“Yair. But it fitted Merrill the same way, he’d lost so much weight.”

“No one can blame you for misjudgment, there,” Mulcahey sighed, dismally. “They’re takin’ it chin up, aren’t they?”

“You sort of get hardened to the possibility of a guy’s demising when he’s in the merchant marine. It always was a possibility, but now—”

Mulcahey swerved the patrol-boat toward a bell moaning in its sleep; a red can-buoy bobbed its cylindrical body up and down in a tide-race; told him he was on the course.

“I cannot figure it, at all. The man could not have sent that Sinbad telegram, bein’ dead an’ lyin’ in the morgue.”

“Wasn’t any difficulty for the murderer, Sarge. Young Ovett probably had a letter from her,” he nodded his head toward the cockpit, “in his pocket. Addressed to ‘dearest Sinbad.’ It likely said something about looking forward to seeing him when he got to town. All the killer had to know was that the Ellen who signed it was Ellen Wyatt and where she lived.”

“It threw us well off the track, for a while.”

“Sure. It sounded on the level because it was worded so whacky. Just the sort of wire young Ovett might send. But hell. I should have reasoned the killer would know the sort of expressions Ovett used, anyway. And that the boy’d been expecting to go through with a convoy.”

“Why would the dirty murderer have mentioned the lad’s intending to call on her the next day?”

“To give Gjersten time to escape on the Pobrico. He’d probably have dived overboard somewhere off Ambrose, swum to one of the bell buoys. He could have signaled the sub with one of those Coston flares we found in his sea-bag, been picked up by the pig-boat.”

“That’s the way he’d have tipped them off to the convoy’s position. And another good ship gone wrong!”

“Maybe more than one.”

“There is no doubt whatever about this identification of Gjersten?”

“Not any, Joe. We pulled the tape off his arm. There’s tattooing under it. That four-bladed propeller Cardiff described. There probably was a swastika covered up by that propeller. The four blades would just about blot out one of those hooked crosses. And the numbers that Nazi naval ratings so often have tattooed on them for identification.”

Mulcahey looked hard at him. “If ever I am inclined to homicide, I would pick another man to be after me. That’s the truth. Submarines hunting in packs? Was that what Schlauff meant by wolves?”

“Part of it. Not all of it. The rest of it’s aboard the Seavett. That might be her; — that little loom, couple points to the north. Let her out to the last gap, Irish. We want to finish fast.”