Koski looked at the gunman’s hands. The man wore no gloves. Yet there were no smudges of oil or grease on palms or fingers.
“I could stand to know who cranked that flywheel for you, Eddie,” Steve Koski muttered.
He combed over the boat itself. In the stern locker, he found a jug half filled with muscatel, a burlap sack with a dozen bronze fittings — nearly new — cleats, swivel-hooks, turnbuckles. Under the bow thwart were a couple of lard cans containing brass grommets and faucets and some new copper wire. On the floorboards lay a dozen crumpled-up balls of sopping newspapers, four soaking-wet men’s socks with oyster shells in them, and more oyster shells between the boat’s ribs.
Oyster shells? In old socks? For what?
Even if somebody had opened up a few dozen oysters on a junk boat, they’d have thrown the shells over, wouldn’t they? Lieutenant Koski puzzled over it.
Mulcahey was using the megaphone to shout back to him over the roar of the exhaust. “Sounds like they got everything but the fire engines out, over there, Steve.” He was indicating the Fulton Market section.
Koski put the Army Colt in Eddie’s hat, went to the bow of the junk boat and hauled in on the tow line. “Coast her, Irish.”
The exhaust quieted. The wake subsided. Steve Koski dropped hat and gun into the cockpit.
“Heave that tarp, Sarge,” he called.
When Koski got it, he tossed the heavy canvas over the dead man, gave Mulcahey his hand and went up over the stern transom into the Vigilant’s cockpit.
With the big motor throttled down, Koski could hear the sirens on the Manhattan shore plainly. There was the rising wail of the patrol coops, the agonized screech of an ambulance, the clanging gong of the truck bringing reserve patrolmen.
“I’ve heard the band from P.S. Fifty-one sound just like that,” Mulcahey muttered, “rend’rin’ A Hot Time in the Ole Town, Tonight. That sounds now like the Commissioner was arrivin’, with all the cameramen lined up with the flash bulbs.”
“We have something for the pix boys, back there,” Koski said, the nod of his head indicating the junk boat. He watched the low roofs of the oyster sheds and fish houses emerge from the thinning fog that wreathed the tall light-spattered towers of the financial district. “We caught a pretty big mackerel, ourselves, Irish,” he went on. “But I don’t think we’ll let the lens-men snap him, the way he is now.”
Mulcahey slowed the Vigilant, searching for a berth among the fleet of purse seiners, oyster dredges, halibut boats and Block Islanders that were crowding against the fish market wharves.
“You find out anything about him, Steve?” the sergeant asked.
“I remember him from a Kansas City flyer,” Koski answered. “His name is Eddie-the-Switch. And a bad boy with a trigger he was. We were lucky somebody else had pretty well taken care of him before we ran him aground.”
The sergeant grunted. “I am not what you can call a careless man with a dollar, except maybe where chicks are concerned, but I will offer a chunk at six, two and even that when it comes out in the papers, the Commissioner himself personally directed the dragnet which cornered the internationally famous desperado.”
“There’s the ambulance,” Koski said. “Over by Shoalwater Seafoods. Run in alongside that oyster dredge, the Mollie B.”
Sergeant Mulcahey maneuvered the black-hulled patrol boat against the battered rubrail of the dredge. Koski sprang to the foredeck.
“Get through to Pier One on the two-way,” he called back to the sergeant. “Ask them to look up the dope on 71J22RCH” He pointed to the crudely-lettered license number painted on the junk boat’s bows.
“Check,” Mulcahey said. “Give the Commissioner my love.”
Koski looped the bow line around the Mollie B’s starboard samson post, crossed the decks between yawning cargo hatches, went through a door on the water side of the pier and into the huge fish shed.
He was in the weigh office of the wholesale house. On the other side of the high wire screen, a group of men clustered around something on the floor of the office. Koski saw patrolmen in uniform, bristling precinct detectives, a couple of ambulance internes, a doctor, four or five high-booted men in white rubber aprons, a scattering of fishboat men in oilskins.
He pushed open a gate in the wire fence, went through. A patrolman blocked his way until Koski held out his cupped hand with the gold shield.
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” the patrolman apologized. “Couldn’t see you. Lights kind of blind you in here.”
“Sure. What happens?”
“Guy with a gun stuck up the kid who was lugging the day’s receipts out to the armored truck. Kid put up a battle, got killed. Gunman dropped one of the truck guards, too. They just got him into the ambulance a minute ago.”
“What about the holdup man?”
“He got away in the confusion, Lieutenant. Ran out to the street. They’re after him, out there, now.”
“Yuh?” Koski shoved through the group.
A boy of twenty or so — a nice-looking blonde youngster who looked as if he ought to be in a basketball uniform rather than in the dirty oyster-stained apron he wore — lay on the floor. He had his knees curled up under him and his hands were clasped around his middle so — for an instant — Koski had the illusion that he was only badly hurt.
A divisional detective captain caught sight of Koski. “Hello, Lieutenant. They call you in on this?”
“They hung out the lantern, yeah,” Koski said. “ ‘One if by land, two if by sea.’ And we were on the opposite shore. Took us a few minutes to get over here.”
The divisional detective captain wrinkled his nose at the strong fish smell — something Koski was so used to he never noticed it.
“Little delay doesn’t make any difference,” he told Koski. “Appreciate your help, but we’ve got the guy penned up, down the block.”
“You have?”
“They’re gettin’ ready to go in after him, now, with tear gas. Couple truck drivers saw him run in a clam shed, yuh.”
“Are you sure he’s the one?”
“Yuh, yuh.” The detective captain clapped Koski’s shoulder encouragingly. “We got him, all right. Without any help from the Marine Division. Some other time, Lieutenant. Some other time — and thanks.”
He walked away.
Chapter III
The Girl in the Case
A man seized Koski’s arm. “You an officer?”
Lieutenant Koski looked him over. The man was fiftyish, gray-haired, six feet and over, heavy built, big boned even to his weather-leathered face. The faded-blue fisherman’s eyes searched the lieutenant’s anxiously.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Can’t you do something about getting Bill’s body away from here, before his father sees him again — like this?”
“We have to leave him until the Homicide crew have shot their pictures,” the Harbor Squad detective explained. “Who’s his father?”
“Why, Cale is.” The big man seemed surprised. “Thought you knew. Caleb Telfer, my partner. I’m Win Negus, cap’n the Mollie B. Cale is head of Shoalwater Seafoods. We own the boats and the wholesale house together. He had Bill workin’ here, to learn the oyster business.”
“Was his father here when he got shot?”
“Hell’s bells a-booming — that’s what keeled Cale over! The boy died right at Cale’s feet. It knocked the old man out, colder’n a Newfoundland tunny. Doc’s in there now, tryin’ to bring Cale around.”
“You see the killing, yourself?”
“No.” Negus jerked a thumb gloomily toward the shellfish bins out by the open end of the shed. “I was over by the checker, talkin’ to our lobster buyer, when I heard the shots and the boys yellin’. By the time I’d turned around, it was all over — except for this fella scuttling away, there by the clam barrels.”