Down Among the Dead Men

VI

The luminous dial of the clock on the Vigilant’s instrument board said ten forty-five when Koski stepped ashore at the Battery Basin. It took him five minutes on the phone to the Oak Street station to locate the address of Wyatt, Ellen, artist, — because she wasn’t listed in the phone book; another five to drive the green-and-white coupe of the Harbor Precinct to 88B South Street.

88B didn’t look like a residence to Koski. It was a battered two-story frame structure; it had seen better days and many of them. The ground floor was occupied by H. Bloomfield, Ironmonger and Ships Chandler; a sign across the second floor proclaimed:

The cans of paint and putty, the hardware and ships’ lanterns in the ground-floor windows said that the chandler was still in business. But a sail-loft might be big enough for a sculptress’s studio...

A flight of unsteady stairs climbed up at one side of the building; the door at its foot was unlocked. He went up. Somewhere above he heard mustic — violins singing a melody he remembered but couldn’t recognize.

There was another door at the top of the stairs. He pushed it open, found himself in a great barren room, with piles of baled rope and long spars laid up on wooden horses. Dozens of ships’ blocks hung from hooks along one wall. A row of naked bulbs in a metal trough suspended from the ceiling threw a fierce illumination on the far end of the loft vault. There was no canvas; no sailmaker’s table; — only a scattering of wood and metal frames built up on boxlike pedestals, a few piles of fat sacks. A brick fireplace had been built against one wall; its hearth had been bricked-in, too, save for a small iron oven door halfway up the arch. An old potbellied stove with an isinglass front spilled wine-stained light over a cot, a chest of drawers, a plank table laid on wooden horses. The music came from a portable phonograph on the table. Stuck up on a round wooden platform a couple of feet from the floor, was a shapeless blob of clay that reminded Koski unpleasantly of the thing in the suitcase.

A girl in a smock and a red bandanna bound around her head stooped beside the pedestal. She seemed to be stirring with an iron slice-bar at an enormous mud pie on the floor.

Koski got halfway across the loft before she heard him, turned.

He touched the rim of his hat. “Miss Wyatt?”

She laughed, held up arms sticky to the elbows with clay. She had the light at her back; he couldn’t see her clearly. “I didn’t hear you on account of Peer Gynt.” She picked her way through a group of plaster busts to the phonograph, lifted the needle. “I’m sorry.”

Koski noticed that the portrait busts were all longshore types. “You’d have trouble hearing an air-raid siren, wouldn’t you?” He surveyed the windows that gave out onto the river; they were covered with old army blankets. “Merrill Ovett around?”

She went back to the clay, resumed her stirring. “He isn’t here. Are you a friend of Merrill’s?”

“I’m a cop. Koski. Lieutenant.” He sauntered over beside a lumpy figure shrouded with muslin; he could see her better, now. A small, oval face with too wide a mouth, too long a nose to be beautiful; a boyish figure in short skirts that showed trim legs, neat ankles. “I was told young Ovett might be here.”

“I have to keep working this clay now it’s started or I’ll lose the whole batch.” She eyed him steadily. “Barbara told you he’d be here. She thinks Merrill’s in love with me.”

“That’s right.” Koski decided she was on guard but not particularly alarmed. “Has he been here?”

“Not for a fortnight or so.”

“Haven’t seen him for a couple weeks.” He repeated it as if to remember what she had said. “He wasn’t around last night, then?”

“No.” She laid the slice-bar down carefully. “Are you looking for him on Barbara’s account?”

“I’m from the Marine Division, Miss Wyatt.” He admired a bronze bas-relief of dorymen hauling in a loaded trawl. “We’re busy enough these days. Without monkeying around keyholing. That’s for punks in the private agencies.”

“Then it’s something serious?” She picked up a handful of the wet clay, squeezed it through strong fingers to test its consistency.

“It’s serious I haven’t got a warrant in my pocket. Hasn’t been a presentment to the Grand Jury yet. Ovett’s only wanted for questioning, at this stage.” He dug at the bowl of his pipe with a jack-knife. “Been a man killed.”

“Who was he?” She pressed a spatula against the shapeless mass on the revolving platform.

“Hasn’t been identified, positively. But there’s an engineer missing from the Seavett. Name of Ansel Gjersten.”

The sculptress’s fingers swiftly molded the contour of a man’s shoulder. “I never heard of Gjersten. Are you trying to suggest Merrill murdered him, Lieutenant?”

“Trying to find out what happened on the yacht yesterday evening, when young Ovett came aboard. Nobody’s seen Gjersten since Ovett left. Some reason to think there might have been a quarrel. Part of a body was recovered from the East River tonight. Not enough to specify in the indictment. I’m the Inquiring Reporter, asking what it’s all about.”

Her hands shaped in the corded neck ligaments and straining pectoral muscles of a seaman pulling at a hawser. “I don’t believe it.”

“What? That Gjersten was corpsed?”

“That Merrill was mixed up in any murder.” She regarded him solemnly.

“That’s natural. He’s your friend.”

“He is. Not in the way you probably mean, though. But it’s more than that.” She kneaded clay off her fingers. “If he’d done... anything like that... he’d have realized the police must come here to the studio; Barbara would make sure of that. So he wouldn’t be coming here, would he?”

“What makes you think he is?” Koski rubbed his hand over the rough wood of a ship’s figurehead that was propped up against a pile of clay-sacks. “You hear from him?”

From beneath a cup and saucer on the table, she took a yellow telegraph form, held it out to him.

He read the pasted-on capitals:

The wire had been sent from the Fulton Street office of Western Union at 8:00 P.M. Monday, less than three hours before. Koski pointed his pipe-stem at the signature. “Private term of endearment?”

“Oh, no. Oblique sense of humor. He always signs letters to friends that way.”

“This doesn’t sound like a sailor. More like a code.”

“The message to Garcia part?” Ellen went back to the clay figure, picked up a spatula, began to smooth the throat. “That’s just his way of saying he intends to go through with what he started, even though this last attempt failed.”

“Um. What’d he fail at?”

“Going through with a convoy, I suppose. War supplies for Murmansk. That’s where he expected to go when he left, — but he couldn’t have made it over and back on a freighter in this time. I expect the convoy was sent somewhere else after it reached the assembly port, — and now he’s going to start all over again.”

“Happens once in a while. What was his ship?”

“He didn’t tell me; he wasn’t supposed to talk about it.” She bent her head, lifted one arm to brush a spattering of gray from her cheek. “Do you think a man who went to sea over the bitter objections of his family — because he thinks it is the one thing he can do best in the war — is the sort who’d be a murderer?”

Koski blew smoke at a stone statuette of a hip-booted clam-digger. “Maybe some of these psychiatric sharps could tell you who’s likely to be a killer. I can’t. Plenty of people who wind up behind a homicide eight-ball couldn’t be classed as criminals, — until after the fact.”

“I understand that.” Her face was impassive; only the speed with which her fingers patted the clay into shape showed the tension she was under. “If a man got angry suddenly—”

He shook his head, briefly. “This wasn’t one of those. Guy hotheaded enough to commit manslaughter offhand wouldn’t go to the trouble of dismembering his victim afterwards.”

Ellen laid the spatula carefully on an up-ended orange crate. “That’s what I meant Merrill couldn’t have done that.” She indicated the row of portrait busts. “It’s my business to know something about men, — what sort of human beings they are, underneath their habits, their prejudices, the masks they wear in front of people. Without that, it’s no good starting a sitting.”

He waited, worrying the pipe-stem between his teeth.

“I know Merrill. He could no more do a horrible thing like that than be one of Hitler’s storm-troopers.” She flipped the muslin drape back off the life-size figure. “See for yourself.”

The statue was that of a sailor on lookout, one hand gripping the ship’s bulwark, the other shading his eyes. He wore cloth cap and pea-jacket; leaned into the wind, chin outthrust. It was a strong, hard, youthful face with boldness and perhaps a little bitterness stamped into the firm mouth and prominent nose.

Koski had known plenty of seamen like that; this had the flavor of salt spray in a force five breeze. “You’re good, Miss Wyatt.”

“If this is good, it’s because I’ve caught Merrill as he is. Perhaps not as some people know him, but the sort of individual that’s actually there.”

“Is it life-size?”

She held up a pair of huge calipers. “Every measurement is exact. It’s the only way I can work.”

“Probably a swell likeness. But I can’t carry it around in my pocket.”

She didn’t understand.

“You may be right about his not having anything to do with this dead man. But I have to make sure; I have to put him through a true-or-false. He might show up here, as per telegram, — but I can’t depend on that. So I have to send out an alarm. With a description. I doubt if the Commissioner would stand for the expense of running off a few hundred copies of your statue.”

“Oh, I see.” Ellen hesitated a moment, went behind the table, to a trunk. “Here are some stills from a sixteen-millimeter film a friend of ours took.” She handed over a half-dozen glossy miniatures. “Posture studies. Some of them don’t show his face.”

“These ought to do it. I won’t tell him I got them.”

She smiled. “I will. I’m not afraid he’s done anything so very wrong. So I don’t mind helping you to find him. But I expect — he’ll be here before you can get those reproduced...” Ellen stopped, listening to heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.

Koski wandered casually toward the door.

It banged back on its hinges. A blocky-shouldered man strode in, stopped short at sight of the detective.

Koski had the feeling he’d seen this man before; then he realized it had been in plaster; one of the portrait busts there on the floor had this same short-necked build, — compact as a truck motor. His leather jacket and deep-sea cap spotted him as a waterfront worker. He took off the cap; the strong light showed features reddened to the dull shade of old brick; a jagged purplish scar zigzagged down from one corner of his mouth across the jutting chin.

“Hi, Ellen.”

“Hello, Tim.”

“Am I comrade Buttinsky?”

“Not at all.” She gestured toward Koski. “A plainclothesman, inquiring about Merrill.”

Tim said “Oh” and “You came to the wrong place, cop.”

“Yair?”

“Yeah. We know from nothing about Señor Ovett.”

Ellen cut in quickly. “I do, Tim.” She fluttered the telegram. “Had a wire from him.”

The man bent his head as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “You did?”

“Isn’t it... odd?”

Koski said: “What’s odd about it?”

Tim took the telegram. “One thing... I didn’t know he was where he could send a wire.”

“Another thing,” Ellen put her hand on Tim’s sleeve. “Merrill knows how I feel about Tim. He must have something pretty... important... to say to me.”

Koski said: “Might be something about the killing”

“What killing?” Tim’s tone was hostile.

“Body was hauled up out of the East River tonight. Engineer on Ovett’s yacht is missing. I’m trying to add this and that together.”

Tim shrugged, disinterested. “You won’t get the right score if you add Merrill into a murder case. Did you try him at home?”

“His wife says he doesn’t use the Riverside Drive place much; the phone doesn’t answer, there.”

Tim made a slashing movement with the edge of his palm. “His father’s home. Harbor House. Up in the fancy Fifties. Merrill usually goes there sometime or other when he’s in town.”

“Thanks.” Koski drifted toward the door. “Don’t be surprised if there’s a couple of loungers hanging around your front door for a while, Miss Wyatt.”

“Detectives?” She laughed. “It’ll be the first time I’ve had any police protection since I’ve been on the waterfront.”

Tim spoke up. “Tell your sherlocks they better not try to strong-arm Merrill He’s a mean customer in a rough and tumble.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.” Koski went down to the street, stood for a moment gazing out over the line of barges nestling between the piers. On one of those dark hulks the Gurlid kids would be asleep, now...

He climbed back of the coupe’s wheel, made time over the cobbles toward the Battery.