Down Among the Dead Men

II

Koski snapped the metal catches, pressed the lock to one side. “It’s not much to go on, Inspector.” He lifted the lid of the suitcase.

“Ahrrr!” Deputy Inspector Nixon pressed his lips tightly; squinted as if his eyes hurt from the light funneling down out of the green conical shade over the table. “Don’t you ever get the jeebies, thinking about the floaters the Marine Division turns over to the Bureau?”

“This one’s no floater. Hadn’t been in the water long enough to bloat. Somebody packed him in the suitcase, just like this; dunked him in the East River. Barge-kid fishing for crabs hooked onto the handle, dredged it up.”

“First stiff I ever saw who really went to hell in a hand-basket.” Nixon ran fingers through graying hair, made a gargling noise in the back of his throat. “Where’s the rest of him?”

Koski spread his palms. “That’s all the murderer could get in one suitcase.”

“Just enough so the press boys can drag out those torso headlines. Holy Joe! Get busy with your grappling irons. Bring us something to work with. We can’t tell you anything from this.” Nixon jerked a thumb disgustedly toward the raw stump of flesh. “He was male, white and over twenty-one. He’d never had his appendix out. What more you expect?”

The man from the Harbor Squad pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Thought you Identification experts were supposed to have comparative tables on weights, heights, chest measurements...”

Nixon lit a cigarette, snorted twin jets of smoke from his nostrils. “Department of Miracles. Two doors on your left. If this damn corpse had even one arm—”

“Make a stab at it. How old was he? How much’d he weigh? How tall would he have been?”

Nixon tilted his head over on one side, assumed a fixed sweet smile. “You wouldn’t like to know his religion or how long had it been since he’d slept with his wife, would you?”

“Might help, at that.”

The Deputy Inspector groaned. “All right, all right. I’ll put somebody on it soon’s the Criminal Alien boys give us a breathing spell. They’ve got me dizzy.”

Koski tapped the damp metal of the suitcase, irritably. “Don’t stick it on your spile and forgetsis. It could be important. Somebody took a lot of trouble to see this lad wasn’t easy to identify.”

“He got away with it, too. If you only had something for us to work with...”

“There was a crystal.”

“My, my. Should have brought it along. Lieutenant. You always expect us to be clairvoyant—”

“You wouldn’t have made anything out of it,” Koski pushed his hat back on his forehead, stood with hands in his hip pockets. “It was probably dropped in the suitcase accidentally. I turned it over to the technical lab. Kind they use in, shortwave sets. Might have belonged to this guy. More likely to the murderer. I’m interested in any gent who runs around with spare short-wave parts, these days.”

“Well, listen! Don’t expect us to identify your suspects. Tough enough to trace the cadavers.”

“Then there was this.” Koski touched the sodden cloth. “Strips torn from a sheet. Old sheet. Part of a pillowslip.”

Nixon’s eyebrows went up. “Laundry mark?”

“Might be. Might have been the owner’s mark. Hotel, maybe.” Koski held up the segment that had been packed between the right arm-stump and the canvas lining of the case. “Three vertical lines and a cross-bar.”

“Not a hotel. Not one of the big ones, anyway. I’ll put Yulch on it; he’s got every cleaning plant from Washington east in that card index.” The Deputy Inspector rubbed the fabric tentatively between thumb and forefinger. “Cheap stuff. Sort they use in buck-a-night joints.”

“Likely. Shoot this over to the Examiner’s office soon’s you’re through with it, huh? They might find out what he had to eat for his last meal.”

“That’ll be a big help.”

“Give me a bell at Pier One when you’ve got something on him?”

“If we get anything.” Nixon grimaced at the contents of the suitcase, let the lid down gently. “Want a check on the luggage, too?”

Koski nodded. “Regular leather-goods store wouldn’t carry that kind of junk. Probably came from one of the gyp stores near the midtown hotels. If it didn’t come from out of town. Be a manufacturer’s lot number stamped on the inside of the frame, won’t there?”

“Sometimes is. Sometimes not. Only take two men the best part of a week to run that down.” The Deputy Inspector snapped out the light over the table. “Some day you’re going to bring in a nice clean suicide with his name and address on a label sewn inside his coat pocket. Then I’ll drop dead!”

“Don’t put that on the bulletin board. Somebody’d take you up on it.” Koski went out.

His heels clicked along the marble floor of the corridor as far as the dingy black lettering proclaiming Missing Persons Bureau.

There was one clerk in the office — a pudgy man of about thirty — picking feebly at a loose-jointed typewriter. He swung around, pushed the green visor of an eyeshade up on his forehead. “For the luva Pete, Lieutenant! Don’t tell me you’re in a swivet for some rush data. I got this report to get out...”

“Only take you a minute, Edgey.” Koski unlatched the rail-gate, stalked in.

“Yuh? Last time you told me that, I spent half the night—”

“Hoist your stern, fella. Lemme have your new cards. For, say, the last forty-eight hours.”

Patrolman Edge eyed him suspiciously. “This is only the beginning, folks,” he intoned, hollowly. “Only the be-ginning.” He moved to a row of steel files, pulled out a drawer. “I been trying to get them closed cases typed out since I come on duty at six o’clock. Every time I get started some wise guy comes along—” He stacked a sheaf of 5x7 cards on top of the file. “Who you looking for? Some dame who did a Brody?”

Koski shuffled the cards. He wasn’t interested in Mrs. Leonie Amarifa’s daughter, Isabelle, aged fifteen, dark-eyed, brunette, last seen wearing a brown-and-green plaid coat and apple-green felt hat or in George Purman Bostock, aged seven, blond, blue eyes, last seen wearing a blue corduroy on playground of Public School Number One Twenty-two.

There were about twenty cards; he went over them carefully. The only one he came back to a second time described Ansel Gjersten, thirty, brown hair and black eyes, engineer, yacht “Seavett.” At the bottom of the card, on the line marked Person Reporting Disappearance, was a slanting scrawl: Zachariah Cardiff. Beneath, next the words Relationship to Missing Person, was written Employer.

Koski held up the card. “What’s about this one, Edgey?”

The clerk thrust his index finger into his right ear, rotated his fist vigorously. “Was a phone-in. That’s Sebe Levine’s writin’. Sebe’s on the day side. Why? Got a lead to this Guh-jersten?”

“Yersten,” Koski corrected. “The G is silent, as the p in psychoanalysis. Seems to be a Scandahoovian. I’ve got part of a guy who was hacked up and dropped in the East River. From what we’ve seen of him, he could be thirty as well as any other age. There isn’t enough of him to tell about the brown hair or black eyes.” He studied the card. “Last seen at Rodd’s Dock, Brooklyn, five-thirty Sunday, the eighteenth.”

“Yeah. And that’s peculiar.” Edge jabbed a thumbnail at the date. “We don’t generally get requests to snag after guys who have done a duck-out for anyhow two, three days after they do the vanishing act. With a kid, of course, his folks are liable to throw a hysteric half an hour after the little darling was last noticed talking to a swarthy-looking foreigner on the way home from the A and P. But with guys old enough to button their own pants, it’s usually a couple days, at least. But Z. Cardiff calls up at quarter past eight this ayem to notify us about his hired hand who only dropped out of the pitcher las’ night.”

“This Cardiff took his time, at that.” Koski scowled at the ink lines drawn through the blanks next the headings: FORMER RESIDENCE, PLACES FREQUENTED, RESIDENCES OF RELATIVES, ETC., and PERSONAL ASSOCIATES, FRIENDS OR RELATIVES MOST LIKELY TO KNOW OF MOVEMENTS OR WHEREABOUTS OF MISSING PERSON OR WITH WHOM HE WOULD BE LIKELY TO COMMUNICATE. “On a yacht, ‘missing’ most likely means ‘overboard.’ Twelve hours is a hell of a long time to be overboard, in March. Make a copy of this for me, Edgey.”

The clerk puffed out his cheeks, blew a long breath, reluctantly ripped the report blank out of his typewriter. “I’d give you six, two and even, this lug has joined the Navy an’ gone to see the Japs. You oughta see the list of able-bodied males who done a skipola from the boozum of their families in order to wear them bell-bottom pants. You want all this stuff on here?”

“Yair. Maybe this Gjersten wasn’t so able-bodied. Says there he wore glasses.”

“That’s a thing I never could unnerstand.” The clerk attacked the keys of his machine. “Can’t a lad who wears cheaters haul up an anchor or swab down a deck as good as one who can read all the fine type at the bottom of the card?” The keys clattered. “Anyway, this cluck might of been in the Navy before. Had tattooing on his left bicep.”

“I guess there’s a law says you have to be a gob before you let somebody stick a needleful of indelible ink in your epidermis! Snap it up, Superman.”

Half an hour later Koski marched down the ramp at the Battery Basin. A big fire-boat with its line of gunlike nozzles lay on the other side of the Basin; compared to her the chunky black hull of the police-boat with its tiny pilot-house was a marine midget. But there was a sturdiness about the way the Vigilant strained at her lines in the backwash from a fast-moving lighter that said the smaller craft could take care of herself when the going was rough. Something told Koski the going might be rough, right about now.

He vaulted over the Vigilant’s rail. Mulcahey reclined against a pile of tarpaulin in the corner of the cockpit. His mouth was open; his eyes closed. The Lieutenant bent down, smeared his hand over the boiled-ham countenance.

“Up an’ at ’em, Irish.”

“Steve?” The Sergeant blinked resentfully. “I would call it a dog’s life, working with you. Only now and again, a pooch gets some chance to sleep.”

“If you’d lay off some of those dizzy dames you go out with, you might not be dead on your feet at eight pee-em. Come out of your coma. Twist her tail.”

“I hope,” Mulcahey thumbed the starter, throttled the motor down to a steady grumble, “we are not about to grapple for any more of this piecemeal cadaver?”

Koski made a neat coil of the bowline over left hand and elbow. “We’re about to locate the Seavett. Eighty-foot, bridge-deck, twin-screw job. Supposed to be over at Rodd’s, getting a propeller straightened.”

The Sergeant lifted the engine-box cover, tightened up the grease cup on the water pumps. “We could do with a short session at Randall’s Island for repairin’ the ravages of time an’ tide, ourselves.”

“A week from Tuesday. If not later. We got a job of work to do. It calls for overtime and hot-shot delivery, Joe.”

The hundred and eighty horses inside the engine-housing grumbled — began to roar. Koski switched on the running lights. The Vigilant thundered away from her berth. She shot out of the Basin, pitched violently in a ferry wash, angled over toward Buttermilk Channel. A gray silhouette with sharply raked funnels and hooded guns on the foredeck slid across the police-boat’s bow in the direction of the Navy Yard. Over by the tip of Governors Island, the red eye of a tug peered from beneath the black V of a derrick barge.

Mulcahey adjusted the timing lever; the motor raised its voice. The patrol-boat’s forefoot lifted slightly; her stern squatted in a white churning of froth. “Ordinarily I would not connect a piece of butcher-work like this mangled carcass with the kind of people who play around on a pleasure hull, Steve. It is more the Legs Diamond type treatment — the sort of bluggy operation Dutch Schultz might of thought up for one of his intimate pals.”

“Don’t go gangster-movie on me. We’re just checking. Captain of this Seavett notified Centre Street his engineer was A.W.O.L. Might not have any connection. No report of violence.”

“Who owns this rich man’s toy?”

“Lloyds says she was bought four years ago by Lawford Ovett.”

“Oh, oh! The shipping magnet? One who owns them banana boats?”

“Yair. I called up to see if the yacht was in commission. She is. But Ovett’s not aboard. Maid at his apartment says the old geezer’s just back from a meeting of the Shipping Council and has gone to bed and can’t be disturbed.” Koski fished a charred corn-cob from his pocket, fumbled with a red rubber pouch. “Trying to finagle some more vessels, probably. Tin fish have made quite a dent in the Ovett fleet. Their Santa Mercede was sunk only a couple weeks ago. Crew was just picked up off Charleston.”

“Twelve days in open lifeboats; I saw them in the newsreel. Like dead men, they looked.” Mulcahey slewed the Vigilant in toward the Brooklyn shore to avoid a hot-shot freight ferry.

“Some of them were dead, but those lads didn’t get their pictures taken. Not sixty fathoms down. One of the lifeboats didn’t show up.” Koski struck two matches, sucked their combined flame into the bowl of the corncob. “Wonder what you think about, waiting like that. You probably go nuts. Be the best thing.”

“I tell you something about them lugs who sail the seven seas, coach. I never give them much thought one way or the other before this fracas begins — except to fish a few of them out of the briny when they had too much of a load on. But you got to hand it to them for being the number one tough guys, now.”

“Yair. Takes guts.”

“Some of the lads been sunk six or seven times; keep going back for another dish of the same.”

“The odds are bad enough, bucking the swastikas, on the other side. But they’d be a hell of a lot worse if some heel on our side was stacking the cards against our own ships.” Koski smoked silently for a minute. “Run right up to the bulkhead if you don’t see the yacht. We’ll ask the watchman.”

The Vigilant skirted Red Hook, swung around the Erie Basin, nosed in toward the shipyard at the mouth of the Gowanus. Ranks of ships lay three-deep along the docks; rust-streaked freighters, mud-gray tankers, a knifelike subchaser, two snub-snouted minelayers. In the dry-dock a broken-down passenger liner was being converted into a transport. There was no sign of any yacht.

Mulcahey gave the clutch-lever a touch of reverse, braked the police-boat’s way. The black hull shouldered gently against the slimy-green planking between the piers.

“Hi!” Koski called up to a man with an electric lantern. “Seen anything of an eighty-footer? The Seavett?”

“Ain’t seen her since last night. She dropped hawsers along about suppertime.” The watchman spat down through the luminous green of the patrol-boat’s starboard running light. “She might as well of left. The Yard couldn’t get around to her for another six months, way work’s piling up around here.”

“Know where she headed?”

“City Island, think they said. She’s one them Cee Gee Volunteer Auxiliaries — doin’ patrol duty out on the Sound somewheres. What’s matter? Something wrong?”

“Looking for one of her crew. Much obliged.” For a long minute Koski stared across at a spark of light which showed from inside a tanker through a hole in the bent and twisted plates at its waterline. “Allez oop, Irish.”

Mulcahey grunted. “Course to City Island would take her right past the barge where the Gurlid kid was fishing. We might be getting hot, skipper.”

“Yair.” The spark flared up into a dazzling glare as an acetylene torch burst into action inside the damaged hull. “You mix up a short-wave crystal, a Coast Guard Auxiliary and a stiff like that — there could be something fricasseeing. The recipe calls for rapid stirring.”