“What difference does it make?” Duryea asked as Gramps mumbled his mental computation of tide tables.
Gramps said, “I’m just tryin’ to find out which way she was pointed. A yacht’ll swing with the wind and tide. There wasn’t any wind Saturday afternoon, or Sunday morning, so she was swingin’ entirely with the tide.”
“Well?”
Gramps pushed the coal of tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe with a horny forefinger. “Well now,” he said, “the way I look at it, this here yacht’s over a hundred feet long. Now you take the moorin’ chain an’ figure the angle of that... You get it?”
Duryea got it. He stepped toward the group and said, “Wait a minute. Don’t have him come up yet. Have him go about a hundred and fifty feet toward shore.”
Lassen said, “There wouldn’t be anything in there, Frank.”
Duryea said, “Notice the way she’s swinging with the tide. She’s pointing toward the shore now, but, at various times since the murder, she must have been swung around toward land, with the bow pointing toward the ocean.”
The sheriff frowned. One of the newspaper reporters glanced quickly at Duryea and scribbled a note on the folded newsprint which he held in his hand. The string of air bubbles which marked the location of the diver hissed upward as the diver moved toward the shore.
There followed some two or three minutes of anxious silence. The sheriff said, “Ain’t no use...” and was interrupted by the excited voice of the man who was keeping in touch with the diver. “He’s found it!” he shouted. “Found a thirty-eight caliber revolver.”
“Wait a minute,” Duryea said, stepping forward. “We want to mark that place. Have him mark it with a float or some-thing.”
“You can send down a float and weight in this basket when we pick up the gun,” the man at the pump said to Bill Wiegart. “He’ll have to take the skiff and row over there. You can see where he is from the air bubbles.” Into the mouthpiece, he said, “We’ll be out with a skiff to pick up the gun. Mark exactly where you found it. They’re sending out a heavy weight and buoy.”
Duryea said, “Also have him go back to where he found the spectacles and mark that place with a buoy.”
Wiegart and another man tumbled into the skiff. One of the newspaper reporters tossed them the metal basket. There was a moment of confusion while they were looking for weights, then one of the men came up from the engine room carrying a peculiarly shaped wrench. “This all right to use?” he asked. One of the reporters answered the question. “It’s just an oil-well tool.” Lassen said, “Okay, boys, use that.”
It took a few moments to affix a fish line and a piece of wood, then Wiegart rowed the skiff out to a point nearly two hundred feet from the bow of the yacht. He lowered the basket, raised it with the gun inside, and a few minutes later, the bit of wood bobbing on the water marked the exact point where the gun had been found. The diver walked toward the yacht to mark the spot where he had found the spectacles.
Wiegart rowed back to the yacht, and the group crowded about a thirty-eight blued-steel revolver, in the cylinder of which were two discharged shells. Newspaper reporters brought out their cameras, and Pete Lassen stepped out to stand by himself at the rail of the yacht, holding the gun up in front of him. “Okay, boys,” he said. “Get your pictures.”
Gramps Wiggins drew Duryea off to one side. “You get it, son?” he asked, his manner excited.
Duryea laughed. “Of course, I get it. Everyone gets it. Pete Lassen is a nice chap, but he always tries to hog the limelight whenever there’s any publicity. Not that it makes a great deal of difference. He...”
“No, no,” Gramps interrupted, his voice becoming high-pitched with excitement. “To hell with that tub o’ lard. I’m talkin’ about the evidence.”
“What about it?”
“You been lookin’ up the tides?” Gramps asked.
Duryea shook his head.
“You’d oughta looked ’em up,” Gramps said reproachfully. “They’re the best clue in the whole dingbusted case.”
“What do you mean?”
Gramps said, “It was dead slack low-tide water at 5.06 P.M. Saturday afternoon. The next dead-low water was at 5.34 Sunday morning. She was high water at 11.55 Sunday morning, low water at 5.56 Sunday afternoon, and high water again at 11.48 Sunday night. Gee gosh, come on! Let’s get away from here. I got to be where I can get this pointed out to you. We got a clue, a humdinger of a clue, a geewhillikins of a clue!”
Duryea smiled indulgently at the little old man’s excitement. “Okay, Gramps,” he said, “let’s get going.”
Gramps started for the skiff, then suddenly turned and pointed a rigid finger at Duryea’s buttonhole. “Now you listen to me, son,” he said, jabbing away with his forefinger like a woodpecker pecking at a fence post, “no matter what else you do, you keep those buoys markin’ the place where they found those glasses an’ that gun, an’ have somebody from the county engineer’s office come out here an’ make a map o’ that harbor showin’ the moorin’ of the yacht, an’ the place where those things were found by the diver. You get me?”
“I get you,” Duryea said. “We’d probably do that anyway — although I don’t see why it’s so terribly important.”
Gramps dragged him by the coat sleeve. “You come along with me,” he said.
It wasn’t until Gramps had the district attorney in a secluded corner back of the yacht club that he felt free to expound his theory.
“Now you listen to me,” he said, pounding his right fist down on his left palm. “We got the very best clue, the best all-fired thing you could get anywhere. It...”
“All right, what is it?”
“There weren’t no wind on Saturday afternoon or Saturday night,” Gramps said. “Wind didn’t come up until late Sunday night. Even then it was just a breeze. Saturday night an’ Sunday was dead calm.”
“Well, what about it?”
“Don’t you see.” Gramps said, “we got a clock that was run by nature an’ tells us just exactly the whole dad blame story.”
“I don’t get it,” Duryea said.
“The way a yacht swings to its moorings,” Gramps pointed out impatiently. “Here, take a look at this.” He dropped down to sit on his heels while he traced a diagram on the cement with the tip of his forefinger. “You get me? Here’s a tide runnin’ out. What happens to a yacht that’s moored? It swings around on the moorin’, an’ the bow points toward shore. Doesn’t it?”
Duryea nodded, still deriving so much amusement from Gramps Wiggins’ excitement that he failed to pay much attention to the point the old man was trying to put across.
“All right,” Gramps went on, “the tide changes. There’s a period when the water is just slack, when there ain’t no cur-rents at all. Then the incomin’ tide starts movin’ in, slow at first, but gradually gatherin’ speed, an’ a yacht that’s moored by the bow starts swingin’ slowly around. After a while, when the tide’s runnin’ in good, the yacht’s swung around so the bow is pointin’ out to sea. Now you take a yacht that’s a hundred feet long, an’ then figure that the moorin’ cable stretches at an angle from the bottom up to the surface of the water, an’ between dead low tide and dead high tide there’s quite a bit o’ movement. The bow moves mebbe around a twenty-foot circle, but the stern swings way around. You get what I’m drivin’ at?”
Gramps looked up at the district attorney’s smiling face, jumped to his feet, and, fairly dancing in his excitement, said, “No, you don’t either. You ain’t gettin’ it at all. Here.” Gramps whipped off his glasses, and said, “How far could you throw these?”
“Not very far,” the district attorney admitted.
“That’s just it,” Gramps said, “an’ you wouldn’t try to throw ’em. There ain’t no reason for throwin’ glasses away, but if you was havin’ a fight with someone, you’d take off your glasses, wouldn’t you?”