“I’m feelin’ sorry for myself. I lose my girl, my job an’ my partner all at once. I don’t care what happens. So I belt the bottle some — an’ I guess I doze off — because by-and-by I hear somebody yellin’ an’ I figure it’s Max comin’ back, so I up on my pins and start blasting. Only it’s not Max — it’s you cops. So I guess they’s not much doubt who done him in.”
“Don’t say that, Sundy! It’s a lie!” She ran toward him.
Koski stuck out a foot, tripped her. She tumbled with outflung arms toward the muzzle of Sundstrom’s gun.
He swung the revolver aside, to keep it away from her.
Koski stepped in, as the girl plunged against Sundstrom. “Hold the pose — look at the little birdie and don’t move!”
The girl and the bald man swivelled their heads around toward his .45.
“That’s it,” Koski said. “Now, Irish, if you’ll just snap the shutter — we’ll have the happy pair recorded for future generations.”
Mulcahey linked them with the cuffs.
The riding lights of the anchored fleet swayed like spectral metronomes in the wake of the Vigilant as she moved in to the municipal pier.
The sickly green of the police lights shed its sallow tinge over the black hull of the patrol boat. The amber fuzz that was the pier lights burned down feebly through the fog.
“You haven’t any right to arrest either of us,” Hannah snarled. “You can’t even prove Max is dead — without you find his body.”
“That’s right,” Koski said. “If we find your dink tied up here at the float and his car gone, I might have to turn you loose—”
Mulcahey nosed the Vigilant against the pier. The small-boat float was directly ahead and to port. Around it were tied a score of varnished skiffs, canvas wherries, plastic prams, flat-bottomed rowboats.
“See your dinghy there anywhere?” Koski moved up close behind the couple.
“No,” Sundy growled. “She’s not there.”
“He might have rowed in to one of the yacht club floats,” the girl cried. “There’s no proof—”
“Murf... hey, Murf—” Koski called.
The old watchman looped the patrol boat’s stern line over an iron bollard, ran nimbly to the stringpiece, peered down.
“Ay, cod, now! Trouble, eh?” he said.
Koski clambered to the foredeck. “You rowed a guy out to the Seabohemia earlier tonight, Murf.”
“I did so. ‘Twas not the first time, either. A fine gentleman and very generous—”
“Were you supposed to go out and fetch him ashore?” Koski hoisted himself to the pier.
“I was not. He tells me his friends aboard the houseboat, Mister Sundstrom and his wife now, they’d be bringing him back.” Murfree frowned. “But I’ve seen hair nor hide of him since. That’s his car a-standin’ there.” He jabbed a thumb at a new station wagon shiny with chrome and varnish. “He always parks it here so’s I can keep an eye on it.”
Koski took his arm. “We’ve reason to suspect dirty work at the crossroads, Murf.”
“The gentleman, himself?”
“Looks as if.”
“He told me he would be bringing some bundles ashore by-and-by — he’d be needin’ me to help carry them up to his car.” The watchman spat tobacco juice into the water. “Which one of them? Or was it the both, now?”
“They’ve both been telling stories fishier than Friday at Fulton Market.” Koski lowered his voice. “Which one of them did you see when you dropped your passenger off at the houseboat?” He drew the old man out of earshot of the couple, down the cleated ramp to the float.
“Neither,” Murf spat again. “I remember the radio was on — but nobody came out on the boat-deck when the gentleman climbed aboard.”
In a dark brown flat-bottomed boat, a pair of freshly painted oars glinted black under the green light. In daylight, those oars would be bright green.
“That the tub you rowed him out in, Murf?”
“Ay, cod, it is. The poor soul—”
“New oars, huh?”
“Old ones. Fresh painted.” The watchman turned to look at the couple standing by the coaming of the police boat. “Never would I have thought it of them, now.”
Koski looked at the short, frayed rope dangling inside the stern of the rowboat. “That’s what you used, eh, Murf?”
“How’s that?” Murf bent, squinted in the boat. “What?”
“Stone,” Koski said. “Used to have a boulder tied on the end of your bow rope, didn’t you? To use as an anchor?”
“Ay, cod! I did! Where is it now?”
Koski gripped his arm more tightly. “Right about where you got those oars, I’d say.”
The watchman recoiled. “Them are my oars, ay cod! an’ I can swear to it!”
“Be a help if you would, Murf. Because if you look real careful, you’ll see a little paint rubbed off the shaft of that one — that left one. It was where the oar clouted Sundstrom. Some of the paint is still on his bald—”
The old man stamped his heel on Koski’s foot. He spat in his face. He butted him in the chin.
Mulcahey came running.
“The old coot gone crazy, skipper?”
“If you said he went off his nut earlier this evening, Irish, when he decided it was foolish to pass up the money in Max’s wallet,” Koski drew a fat wad of bills from Murf’s pants pocket, “if you said he was crazy enough to think all he had to do was bang Max over the head with an oar and tie his anchor-rock to the body and dump it overside — if you said that, I doubt if anybody’d dispute you. Not Murf, anyway.”
Murf disputed it profanely...
The Vigilant moved slowly out past the point. The lights on the Seabohemia were brighter than anything in the fleet.
“Aren’t you afraid,” asked Mulcahey, “there’ll be another murder — leaving them two out there together on the houseboat, now?”
Koski grinned wearily. “They’ll patch it up, Irish. They’ll weld it with a license, all according to Hoyle. You’ll see. It’ll be Mr. and Mrs. Sundstrom testifying, when Murf goes on trial.”
“Each of ’em thought the other killed Max?”
“Yair. But the girl was lying all the way. And Sundstrom was telling the truth. The mixture made it kind of tough to figure what did happen.”
“Murf heard the fighting, in at the pier?”
“Sure. So he rowed out in his flat-bottom to see what was going on. What was going on was Max, paddling around in the dark and the mist, trying to find Hannah, calling her name.”
“But he was the one who’d knocked her into the water, Steve.”
“Oh, when Max and Baldy started slugging, she barged in and caught a stray punch. It knocked her overboard. After Max batted Sundstrom senseless with the oar handle, he went looking for her. Murf heard him...”
“Never in a thousand would I have believed that old dodo would do a thing like that.”
“Doubt if he meant to do it, Irish. But when he got out there and saw how easy it would be — anyone who suspected foul play would blame Sundstrom because of the noisy quarrel on the houseboat — why, Murf just up and banged Max with his oar.”
“Ah. That’s when Sundstrom heard Max yell out — ‘No, no’ and so forth!”
“Yair. Murf probably broke one of his oars over Max’s skull — he wouldn’t have swapped the green ones in Sundstrom’s dinghy for his own, otherwise.”
“But where,” the sergeant wanted to know, “is that dinghy!”
“One man’s guess, Irish. I’d say Murf knocked a hole in it and sank it, after he’d tied the anchor rock to Max and sunk him.”