Tears streamed down her face. “I didn’t mean to — didn’t want to — but—”
“Yair. This big creep had something on you. Or you thought he had. He raised a hand in the “Stop” gesture to keep her from saying anything. “I don’t want to know what it was — and where he’ll be going, nobody else will have a chance to find out. If you’d been cuddling up to him a little while your husband was overseas — if you were hoping to keep him from finding it out—”
“I told Ken.” The cry sounded as if it had been wrenched out of her by torture. “He knew. He hated Rikky because of it. But I didn’t want everybody to know what a mess I’d made of things. And Rikky said... he said—” She couldn’t finish.
“Yair. He would.” Koski stood up slowly. “Just the sort of lad to bully you into clearing him and laying the blame on the man he’d just murdered. Your husband didn’t have any intention of leaving you alone with the wolf practically on your doorstep. After he’d sent Pete over to bait the trap, he waited until Rikky slid out of the Anchor. The back way, eh, Rikky? Never mind, you got here. And Ken found you here. You fought. He got it.”
Rikky shook his head unhappily. “You got part of it right, copper. I didn’t come over to make a play for Marya at all. I came over because he had killed Pete.”
“See if you can sell it to the D.A. He buys those things once in a while. For my dough, you took the pipe away from him, hit him with it.”
“If that was all there was to it,” Rikky roared, “I could claim self defense and get away with it!” He stepped back to the foot of the companionway stairs, leaning against the gravity gas tank on the after bulkhead. “I was right here. He jumped me.”
Koski drew his gun, let it dangle at his side. “Don’t waste it on me. Your legal beagle will probably think it’s terrific. To me it’s a lot of mahaha. I’d say you slugged him up by that compass box. But I don’t care how you killed him — you did it. Then you threw the fear of God into this babe by threatening to expose your relationship with her or whatever. After you got that set, you carted the body overside. Down the ladder. That’s when the blood got on the curtain.”
Rikky put a cigarette between his lips, flipped open his lighter, watched the small blue flame with a sort of dejected intensity:
“Tell him, Marya. Give him the straight on it.”
“The straight,” Koski retorted, “is that Pete saw you lugging the corpse, got suspicious when he saw the blood on Ken and wanted to call the police. You beat him to the punch. You brained him, too — and dumped him off the float near Ken. Hoping somebody’d be dumb enough to think Ken had murdered Pete and then drowned himself.”
Rikky’s right hand stroked the slender copper tubing which curved from beneath the gas tank to the Urchin’s motor. He kept his eyes on the flickering flame of the light.
“If you won’t speak up, Marya, I’ll have to!”
He tugged ferociously at the macaronisized tubing. It came loose before Koski could raise his gun. Pink fluid spurted out. Rikky tossed the lighter at it.
There was a whoosh of blue incandescence and a sheet of vivid flame cut off the cabin from the cockpit.
Koski had time for one instantaneous snap shot before Rikky scrambled out of sight up the companionway. Then the lieutenant whirled, ducked into the “head” behind him, reached up, unhooked the hinged hatch over the toilet, banged it open.
He dived back into the cabin where Marya huddled, as if paralyzed, watching blazing rivulets trickle toward her.
He got his arms around her, tossed her up through the hatch on deck.
He put one more bullet through the companionway before he followed.
As he dropped the nearly unconscious girl to the ground, the rear of the cruiser opened up like the unfolding petals of a huge orange blossom...
The avenue was crowded with shiny red apparatus. The bloodshot eyes of motor pumpers and chemical trucks spilled claret over the canvas covered hulls in the Trident yard. The night was noisy with gongs, sirens, much shouting.
Mulcahey watched the cloud of steam rising from the charred ribs of the Urchin.
“I thought these guys weren’t allowed to keep their gas tanks filled while they are in yard storage, Steve.” He turned to Koski.
“Aren’t, Sarge. Ken was about ready to launch his boat, though. He’d been retiming his motor, thought he’d take a chance and test it out on dry land, I suppose. He had ten gallons put in yesterday. Rikky knew that, I guess.”
“You’ll never know for sure, then. He didn’t have an inch of skin left on him that wasn’t crisp as a piece of burnt bacon, when they dragged him out.”
“Eventually, why not now?” Koski murmured.
“Huh?”
“He’d have been burned anyway, sooner or later.”
“I see what you mean. What I do not see is this: how did you figure this Caton’s body was in the water, too, when you told me to have the boys grapple a second time?”
“The washroom. In his joint.”
“Is that supposed to clear it up for me?”
“It was locked, Irish. Joints like that, you have to keep the men’s room open. Rikky’d used it to clean off the blood on his clothes after the murder. Some of the clothes were still in there. He didn’t have time to dispose of ’em, and he didn’t want to be away from the bar too long and start suspicions...”
“Oh! Yuh. Simple! When you state it thus.”
“Well. Of course he gave his hand away when he tried to shut up dizzy Liz. If he’d just let her gabble on, I might not have given him a second s thought.”
“No?” The sergeant turned to gaze at the black hulls of the patrol boats — lightning-bugs, showing fitful lights around the float.
A distant hail went up. Searchlights dipped straight on the surface.
“They will have found Caton, Steve. Another of them post mortems you were talking about.”
“We’re improving, though, Irish.”
“Are we now? With three casket cases on our hands in one night?”
“I think so. Too little help, maybe. But not entirely too late.” Koski stared soberly at the internes standing by the blanketed figure of Marya Caton near the ambulance. “We were in time to save a little something out of the wreckage. Something worth saving, if you ask me.”
Never Come Mourning
Detective Book Magazine, Winter, Sept.-Nov. 1948
It seemed futile to hunt through that steaming jungle of twisted metal and charred wood. A screen of blackish water dripped from the warped girders above. A veil of smoke hung sluggishly over the smoldering wreckage. Searchlights, shooting up from the street, cast grotesque shadows through the gutted hotel.
As he followed the fat python of canvas which coiled up the staircase around the steel bones of the elevator shaft, he appeared to be methodically following another, more obscure, trail through the clutter. His eyes, reddened from too much exposure to acrid fumes, held the bleak bitterness of a boy helpless to prevent the agonies of a pet dog.
He moved, cautiously, focusing the cone of light here on a lump of fused glass, there on the drooping angle of a buckled pipe. The melted metal of electric fixtures held peculiar interest for him.
On the landing between the third and fourth floors, he flattened against wet brick to permit gangway for a helmeted pair clumping streetward with a limp burden. It didn’t seem to disturb them when the head of the sagging figure they were lugging banged against a beam.
The man with the flashlight asked: “Many more up there?”
“Plenty on nine and ten, Marshal.” One of the laddermen recognized him. “Ain’t any hurry about getting ’em out, now, though.”