Before he could faint on me I belted him in the head with his gun and let him drop. The blood from the gash above his temple made a puddle on the floor. I stuck Ugo's.357 in my belt. Pat could do a ballistics check and maybe get some brownie points if it had been used at a crime scene earlier.
Downstairs, Ugo's Buick was back at the curb, and I looked at the license plate. The first three numbers were 411.
...
On the other side of the George Washington Bridge, Velda and I headed for Route 9W, the scenic trip along the Hudson River. When we passed through Newburgh I pinpointed the marina where Marcos Dooley had kept his boat. The marina was still there, dilapidated and overgrown with weeds, but it had a pier and docking facilities for half a dozen boats. Two well-used sailboats were still in the slips.
A sign outside a small house read JAMES BLEDSOE, PROP. The porch was apparently the office, and the living quarters were behind it. I knocked and waited patiently until an old guy munching on an apple came hobbling out, his knobby knees sticking out of stained khaki shorts. "You don't look like boat people," he said.
"We're not." It didn't surprise him at all. He sat down on a box and laced his fingers behind his head. "You don't want to rent a boat, do you?"
"Not today."
"Didn't think so."
"Mr. Bledsoe, did you know Marcos Dooley?"
His eyes brightened and he took his hands down, leaning on his knees. "Sure did. We had a lot of good times together. Haven't seen him for a few years."
"He's dead, Mr. Bledsoe."
"Damn," he said, frowning. "What happened?"
"He was murdered, but that's kind of an old story now. I understand he had a boat here."
"It's still here," he said. "She's all dried out and needs a lot of work on her, but if you got a few months and some money, it can be done."
"I'd just like to see it."
"Pretty dirty out there."
"That's OK."
And he was right. The old barn held three antique boats with open seams, glass falling out of the frames and rust stains leaking from all the exposed metal parts. Chocks held Dooley's boat upright, streamers of cobwebs and layers of dust making it look like the Flying Dutchman. The hatch cover was off and candy wrappers were scattered around.
"Kids," Bledsoe explained. "They come in and play. I can't keep them out."
I pointed to a ladder that ran up the side. "Mind if I look around?"
"Be my guest."
The ladder was handmade but sturdy enough. I went up slowly, threw a leg over the rail and got on the deck, brushing the cobwebs out of my face. The kids had broken into the small cabin and pulled out anything that would come loose. Light fixtures had been smashed, and dried turds made a mess in the ceramic head. The wheel in the cabin was intact, but behind it were only holes where instruments had been screwed into the mahogany. Old Dooley would have turned green if he could see his boat now.
I shook my head in disgust and looked over the mahogany dashboard where the kids had scratched their names. I had almost turned away when I saw something. Not a scrawl or a scratch, but eight numbers carefully inscribed with an awl so they couldn't be rubbed out.
They were the same eight numbers as on Dooley's urn, his serial number. Damn, those weren't ID digits, they were latitude and longitude markers.
I climbed down, brushed myself off and told Bledsoe there wasn't much we could do but we'd let him know.
When we got to Albany I stopped at a survey outfit.
The guy was young and friendly, glad to see somebody from the Big Apple. When I showed him the numbers he looked up something in a book, then waved us to a wall map. "That wasn't hard," he said.
"You know the place?"
"Sure. Everybody does. There was an old bootlegger ran an operation out there during Prohibition. Not much left up there now. The big house rotted out a long time ago and some old caretaker lives in an outbuilding. Once in a while he cuts some choice slate out of there. You looking to buy the place?"
"It's possible."
Driving there wasn't that simple. After four wrong turns we found the narrow, single-lane dirt road that twisted and turned through the trees toward the rise of the Catskills that marked the area.
We went around a turn and there were no more trees, just a big, empty field on the edge of an overpowering mountainside with three old buildings nestling in the shadows. Small mounds of gray slag dotted the acreage, insolently decorated with purple thistles. The single roadway branched out in five different directions, all but one in total disrepair, so I stayed on the passable road. It brought us to a weather-worn building that had been patched and repatched but still looked livable. There was a brick chimney running up the side, and a shimmer of heat distortion against the clouds, so I knew someone was there.
Rather than take a chance on stirring some irritable old mountaineer waving a shotgun, I beeped the horn and waited. The screen door with paint so thick you couldn't see through it whipped open and the mountaineer was there, all right, old, but not at all irritable. "Y'all step down and come right in," he yelled. His voice was crackly but happy. "Saw you comin' a mile away and put on coffee."
Velda slid out and introduced herself. "You sure a looker," the old man said. "I'm just Slateman. Got a real name, but nobody calls me that." He took my hand too, shook it and squinted up at me.
"What we want to do is see the old bootleg operation."
"Better get your cameras then."
For a minute I felt stupid, but Velda winked at me and went back to the car. She came back with a small 35mm Minolta with a flash attachment. Slateman got an oversize flashlight with a strap that slung over one shoulder, and he led us through the house to the back door.
We followed a path to a ridge of bushes, then around them to where the ground soared up like an overturned teacup and melted into the mountain behind it. When Slateman pointed, we saw the cleft in the side of the hill. He pulled a rack of bushes aside and there was an opening a man on horseback could go through. "Used to have a big, wooden barn door here," Slateman explained. "Couldn't see it, of course. Always kept it covered with real growth. A truck could go in and out easy."
He led the way, flicking on his torch, and we stayed close behind. It was a great natural cave, cool and dry. The dirt under our feet was packed. The cave was so big that we could see only one wall to our left.
Velda's voice had a quaver to it. "Any bats?"
"No bats," Slateman reassured her. "Some caves have 'em, but this one don't. Can't figure it out."
We walked until we reached the perimeter of the space and followed the curve of the walls around it. Even after all these years you could tell what had been there. Old tools and the remains of a truck seat were like artifacts in an antique shop. At the back side we had to circle around a heap of boulders Slateman said had come down from the wall and overhead years ago. He flashed the light above us to make sure we were still safe. Velda kept popping pictures until she ran out of film, but by then we had completed the tour and were back at the entrance.
"Too bad Prohibition went out of style," I remarked.
Slateman chuckled, and Velda and I looked at each other. It was just a big, empty cave of dust and memories and a little old guy glad to have some city slickers visit him. Velda reloaded the camera and shot some footage around the property. We told Slateman so long, and started down the single-lane road.
...
We turned south on the main highway and stopped at the first diner we came to, went in and ordered up sausages and pancakes with plenty of real maple syrup and mugs of steaming coffee.