All the way along the New England shore Dan pondered over the refusal of the various pieces of this jig saw puzzle to get into the right places.
In despair he went back to the alternative theory he had suggested to the chief of police of New Bedford, that Conlin might have killed the mysterious John Smith. Suppose he had had an intrigue with Mrs. Smith; suppose he and Mrs. Smith did the killing and fled together. That would account for the blond woman in New Bedford who had phoned to the Nantucket police the news of the murder.
But that presupposed that there actually had been a John Smith living in that house on the bluff, and all the circumstances united to make it exceedingly doubtful.
In the end Dan decided that he would have to do what many a criminal investigator has to do, lay aside his pet theory and watch and wait and poke about until he stumbled on something which would put him back on the trail again.
Chapter XV
Big Tim Moriaty
When the Nantucket steamer bearing the sorely perplexed Dan O’Hara moved across Nantucket Harbor the following forenoon she passed close to a motor yacht. It was a long, low, knife-bowed craft built with a streamline effect which was not broken by the rake of her two short masts and the broad, squat funnel amidships. She flew the flag of the New York Yacht Club and the pennant that indicated that her owner was on board. So perfectly proportioned was she that she gave the impression of being small and dainty despite the fact that she was a hundred and twenty feet on her waterline, had a beam of twenty feet and could cruise all over the seven seas as safely as a twenty-thousand ton ocean liner.
Nor would the average observer dream that this lovely craft could travel through the water with the speed of the fastest torpedo destroyer in any navy in the world. Her twin Diesel engines could drive her at thirty-five knots an hour and occasionally had been called upon to do so.
The name of this vessel was the Huelva and her owner was listed as J. Parsons Peabody, son of General Elisha Peabody, who at one time owned a large part of the public utilities of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As the Peabody fortune had dwindled to almost nothing during the depression New York society often wondered how J. Parsons was able to buy fuel for his million dollar speedster. There was a guest on board in Nantucket Harbor who could have explained all this, though it was his habit to explain nothing.
The guest was lounging in a huge chair under an awning at the stern sipping mineral water. J. Parsons was sleeping off a drunk in his cabin. Several of the young lady guests were also dead to the world this beautiful morning, and the young woman who was sitting at the stern with the drinker of mineral water didn’t feel so good.
As he never drank anything but mineral water, the guest was in fine shape. He wore a costume of white drill with gold buttons, a white yachting cap with a lot of gold braid on it, and on his feet were white shoes so large that he had to have them made to order. If Dan O’Hara, who gazed at the yacht lying at anchor a hundred yards from the course of the steamer, had been near enough to get a look at the face of the person in yachting costume he would have recognized him as Public Enemy number two, who had been promoted to Public Enemy number one since Al Capone was languishing in a Federal jail. And he would have understood why the gentleman was in Nantucket Harbor. Big Tim Moriaty was making a tour of inspection.
Fifteen years ago, Tim Moriaty had been a brawny young New York Irishman who earned a living on the docks of the North River by tossing bales of cotton and boxes of machinery around. He stood six feet two in his socks, he had a forty-eight inch chest and a forty inch waist; his biceps were bigger than those of Jack Dempsey, and he could carry a hogshead weighing three hundred pounds on his back. He earned an honest living by the sweat of his brow and he made about sixty or seventy dollars a week. Tim Moriaty had promised his old mother that he would never drink strong liquor, which had caused his father to die in his prime, and he had faithfully kept that promise. Unfortunately it had not occurred to his mother to make him promise not to rob, fight or kill because, being a good Christian woman, it never occurred to her that her big boy would be tempted to commit crimes.
In those days there were plenty of squabbles on the water front and Tim being barred from the harmless pleasure which comes from drinking beer and whiskey, got his fun in fighting. He was such a magnificent scrapper that he had an opportunity to join a little organization formed by two or three strong-armed and clear-headed stevedores who afterwards broke into fame as Public Enemies, the purpose of which was to protect shippers and slop shop men from — waterfront crooks, drunken mobs, strikes and that sort of thing. And along about that time prohibition came into being.
If it hadn’t been for prohibition, Tim Moriaty might have been a great heavyweight pugilist, but prohibition gave the Protective Association its great opportunity. During the next ten years Tim Moriaty and three or four of his fellow members of the Waterfront Protective Association gained fame and fortune. Thanks to them, New York was saved from going dry during the early and serious efforts to enforce prohibition.
From the small business of carrying bottles off the ocean liners to saloon keepers on the waterfront, Tim and his friends rose to cooperation with huge fleets of rum ships, and when the three-mile limit was extended by treaty with England to twelve miles, they chartered their own fleets of rum ships, met them with swift motor boats and sent huge caravans of trucks rumbling through the night from Long Island and New Jersey beaches.
Probably because Tim was a teetotaler and his associates drank too much of their own poison, he gradually won the leadership, and because he was by nature a monopolist, he realized that the retailers made a greater profit with less effort than the runners and wholesalers. So, he began opening night clubs where liquor which cost him seventy-five cents a quart at the ship was sold for eight and ten dollars a quart to society folks, and thus he secured the wholesalers, the jobbers, and the retailers’ profits.
By and by he had a string of night clubs where cover charges ranged as high as five dollars per person. He prided himself upon selling good liquor and he waged war upon those who sold poison and reduced the consuming population. Guns barked. Men were killed. Gangsters warred. The reign of terror was on.
Big Tim came through it all triumphant. He had millions in safe deposit vaults. Tribute came from a hundred quarters. His former associates were either his lieutenants or they were dead. He sat in his office and studied charts of the Atlantic coast and gave orders which moved rum ships here, there and everywhere. The whole Coast Guard was employed to interfere with Big Tim’s business and hardly a night went by when machine guns were not popping and men were dying. And yet Tim loved children and cats and was very good to little girls who worked in night clubs. And his word was his bond. He never double crossed anybody. He was a jolly, generous host and a big contributor to charity. As for his personal enemies, he never sent his gunmen after them. He put on his own gun and shot them himself. He had twice been tried for murder during his career and each time had been released because there was insufficient evidence.
His age was thirty-five. He had a big, broad, heavy face, a slow, rather agreeable grin and a natural sense of humor. He had learned to talk English without relapsing into “dese, dem and dose” and he could wear a dinner jacket, a boiled shirt and a high starched collar without causing too much suffering to his thick red neck.