“Off Greenwich.” Koski pointed to a red light beneath a white one, bobbing back and forth in short, irregular arcs a mile or so ahead. “There’s the Vigilant — and maybe your wrestler and his girl are aboard her with Cap Vaugh.”
Mulcahey tried to focus. “You been chasing a police boat in this old tub of a ketch?”
“Yair.”
“Are you daft? We couldn’t catch the old girl if she was running in reverse, Steve.”
“No. But she’s not running. She’s waiting for us.”
“You do these things with mirrors, perchance?”
“With a sock. And a handkerchief, Sarge. Stuffed into her water intake. Our hundred and eighty horses must have overheated slightly, I’m afraid. Maybe we’ll find cylinders frozen, so the repair boys at Randalls will have to do a little reaming on her. But that won’t be all we’ll find.”
Mulcahey breathed: “Ah, now, Steve. Does your magic wand routine include producing some weapons with which to pacify these dillies? Or do we go after them barehanded?”
Koski said tightly: “We’ll try dosing them with their own medicine, Joseph.” Finally, after a long chase, the Sea-Dog hauled up even with the Vigilant. Koski hailed her:
“Ahoy, police boat.”
Koski repeated the hail as the Sea-Dog slid slowly up to the Vigilant’s starboard quarter. Above the Vigilant’s coaming three heads watched the rubber-coated figure standing by the ketch’s wheel.
Captain Vaugh shouted: “Sheer off!”
The Sea-Dog closed in. Flame spat from the ketch’s rail.
A scream came from the figure at the wheel. The man toppled. Before he hit the deck, Mulcahey sprang from the shadow of the ketch’s forecastle hatch, landed in the patrol boat’s stem. At the same instant, Koski’s pistol spoke sharply — once, twice.
Vaugh’s head lolled over the coaming. The other two turned toward the sergeant. Koski took a flying leap from beside the body of Maury Perris, hit Sydna between the shoulders as she aimed her automatic at Mulcahey.
The sergeant took a full minute to subdue Ham Belton. The last forty seconds were not precisely necessary.
“Creep up on me from behind, would ye?” Mulcahey reverted to the Hibernian when in full cry of battle. “Leave me to drown, would ye?”
Sydna squirmed beneath Koski’s weight. He stamped on her wrist, got the automatic. She clawed at his eyes. He batted her on the ear with the forty-five. She spat in his face.
He called grimly, “Hustle that first aid kit, Sarge.”
Mulcahey’s voice was anxious: “Did that tommy get you, Steve?”
“No. It got Perris. I just want some tape to fix this hellcat’s wrists.”
Mulcahey tripped over Vaugh: “This one here — you’ll not be needing to tie him.”
“Maybe he got the best deal at that, Joe. All over, quick. These two will have a long time to think about what’s coming to them. For the steward’s murder. Cotlett’s and Perris’.”
Mulcahey brought the adhesive.
“Most likely a jury will take pity on the poor little girl who was misled into a life of sordid crime by her unscrupulous husband.”
Sydna snarled something no poor little girl should have uttered.
Koski slapped the first piece of tape across her mouth.
“My guess, Sarge, is that this unwholesome little witch was the core of the whole, rotten apple. The yacht was hers. Idea of making dough with it was probably hers, too. She hired the crew from around her home town. She most likely corrupted that engineer so he’d do anything she wanted. Likewise the steward. Chances are she had the Cuban connections to get the stuff, too.”
“What stuff?”
“Marihuana. What did you think those trips to Cuba were for? The Sea-Dog went down there, loaded up with a hundred pounds or so of raw weed, brought it to New York.”
“There is such h thing as customs inspection, is there not?” The sergeant opened the motor hatch, touched the hot metal.
“Yair. Easy for a yacht to skip it by sailing in from Block Island Sound instead of through the harbor. Illegal, of course, but the whole setup would have earned them pen-sentences, anyway.”
Mulcahey found the suitcase, opened it. “This is the junk they make muggles out of?”
“Muggles. And murderers. And stick-ups. Dozen kind of crimes. Yair. Also you can make a lot of moola out of that weed, if you don’t care how you make it. Sells for around a hundred bucks a pound, raw.”
“They were all In it, Steve? The crew, and all?”
“Doubt it. Vaugh was. Buzz was smoking the stuff, whether he was in on the whole smuggling deal or not. He was loaded to the gills when I ran into him in the Beacon tonight. This dame had to gun Cotlett, after conning him along into taking the ketch off the mooring. She was probably afraid of him while he was on the stuff, thinking he’d talk too much and give the game away. That’s the way she paid off all her crew — with lead.”
Mulcahey puffed out his cheeks, sagely.
“This floater up by the Causeway. You figure that he is Frank Kaalohti?”
“I figure Perris snapped the switch on the steward, soon’s he got on board. Likely Kaalohti was on a muggles-jag, too, and tried to interfere when Perris began to bawl out his wife for double-crossing him. It didn’t look right for him to have gone ashore leaving his bank deposit book. But the amounts he’d been sticking away in savings were too small for him to have been in on the Mary Warner smuggling. So they must have settled on knocking him off after he overheard Mrs. Perris toning down her husband.”
“I thought he half killed his wife,” Mulcahey protested.
“He might have meant to. He came on board with homicide in his heart, I suppose. Maybe he did beat up Belton. But she must have cooled down the late Mr. Perris by telling him she had left incriminating information ashore somewhere, covering their weed-running together. If he did anything to her, the evidence would come out. Then Perris would go to the clink, lose his business, so on.”
Mulcahey felt of the motor again. “This one is getting cooled off, too.”
“We’ll try turning her over in a minute and go after that ketch before she hits the rocks. That’s all there was to it, Joe, except that after she slowed Perris down, she and Belton jumped him. They tied him up and tried to get him to tell her where he’d stached the stuff they’d brought in on the last trip north. He must have kept that secret to himself.”
“Ah, ha! He knew if he told her, that would be curtains for him!”
“Sure. I’d say he stowed it in the lazarette, where they found it when they went to put you in there in place of Perris. But Perris must have known she meant to exit him anyway. Because after she got him where she wanted him, she took off his rings and his wrist-watch and all the stuff that would identify him, put ’em on the dead steward and dumped him overboard.”
“I take it back about the jury. If you go on the stand to tell ’em.”
“Yair. They probably let Kaalohti’s face get chewed up a little by the propeller, so he wouldn’t be recognizable. Then they ran him ashore in the dink, and punched it full of holes. Left it near the joint where Buzz usually went to lap up beer, so he’d get blamed — if it did come to a murder indictment.”
“All that mahuska about Perris tying Belton up and walloping his wife was just window-dressing they fixed up when they saw the Vigilant coming to investigate, huh?”
“Might say so, Irish. A dummy trick, all right. If a dame was really scared she was going to get her throat cut, I figured that she’d have something better than a pillow to defend herself with.”