“Sure. They checked me in.”
“Did you go out again that night?”
I shook my head. “Not till about six-thirty the next morning, for breakfast.”
Willetts turned to Ramirez. “Okay, Joe.” The latter went out. “There’s no way in and out of the yard except past the watchman?” Willetts asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
Ramirez came back, carrying a sheet of paper. He handed it to Willetts. “That checks, all right.”
Willetts glanced at it thoughtfully and nodded. He spoke to me. “That boat locked?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“Give Joe the key. We want to look it over.”
I stared at him coldly. “What for?”
“This is a murder investigation, friend. But if you insist, we’ll get a warrant. And lock you up till we finish checking your story. Do it easy, do it hard—it’s up to you.”
I shrugged, and handed over the key. Ramirez nodded, pleasantly, nullifying some of the harshness of Willetts’ manner. He went out. Willetts studied the paper again, drumming his fingers on the table. Then he refolded it “Your story seems to tie in okay with this.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The autopsy report. I mean those two bites of hamburger he ate. It’s always hard to place the time of death this long afterward, especially if the body’s been in the water, so about all they had to go on was what was in his stomach. And that’s no help if you can’t find out when he ate last. But if that counterman at the Domino backs you up, we can peg it pretty well. Keefer was killed sometime between two and three a.m.”
‘It couldn’t have been much later than that,” I said. “They couldn’t dump him off a pier in broad daylight, and it’s dawn before five o’clock.”
“There’s no telling where he was thrown in,” Willetts said. “It was around seven-thirty this morning when they found him, so he’d have been in the water over twenty-four hours.”
I nodded. “With four changes of tide. As a matter of fact, you were probably lucky he came to the surface this soon.”
“Propellers, the Harbor Patrol said. Some tugs were docking a ship at Pier Seven and washed him to the surface and somebody saw him and called them.”
“Where did they find the car?”
“The three-hundred block on Armory. That’s a good mile from the waterfront, and about the same distance from the area that beer joint’s in. A patrol car spotted it at one-twenty-five Thursday morning. That’d be about an hour and a half after he left the joint, but there wasn’t anybody in sight, so they don’t know what time it happened. Could have been within a few minutes after you saw him. The car’d jumped the curb, sideswiped a fireplug, pulled back into the street again, and gone on another fifty yards before it jammed over against the curb once more and stopped. Might have been just a drunken accident, but I don’t quite buy it. I think he was forced to the curb by another car.”
“Teen-age hoodlums, maybe?”
Willetts shook his head. “Not that time of morning. Any ducktails blasting around in hot-rods after midnight get a fast shuffle around here. And there wasn’t a mark on his hands; he didn’t hit anybody. That sounds like professional muscle to me.”
“But why would they kill him?”
“You tell me.” Willetts stood up and reached for his hat “Let’s go in the office. Lieutenant Boyd wants to see you after a while.”
We went down the corridor to a doorway at the far end. Inside was a long room containing several desks and a battery of steel filing cabinets. The floor was of battered brown linoleum held down by strips of brass. Most of the rear wall was taken up with a duty roster and two bulletin boards festooned with typewritten notices and circulars. A pair of half-open windows on the right looked out over the street. At the far end of the room a frosted glass door apparently led to an inner office. One man in shirtsleeves was typing a report at a desk; he glanced up incuriously and went on with his work. Traffic noise filtered up from the street to mingle with the lifeless air and its stale smells of old dust and cigar smoke and sweaty authority accumulated over the years and a thousand past investigations. Willetts nodded to a chair before one of the vacant desks. I sat down, wondering impatiently how much longer it was going to take. I had plenty to do aboard the Topaz. Then I thought guiltily of Keefer’s savagely mutilated face down there under the sheet. You’re griping about your troubles?
Willetts lowered his bulk into a chair behind the desk, took some papers from a drawer, and studied them for a moment. “Did Keefer and Baxter know each other?” he asked. “I mean, before they shipped out with you?” “No,” I said.
“You sure of that?”
“I introduced them. So far as I know, they’d never seen each other before.”
“Which one did you hire first?”
“Keefer. I didn’t even meet Baxter until the night before we sailed. But what’s that got to do with Keefer’s being killed?”
“I don’t know.” Willetts returned to his study of the papers on his desk. Somewhere in the city a whistle sounded. It was noon. I lighted another cigarette, and resigned myself to waiting. Two detectives came in with a young girl who was crying. I could hear them questioning her at the other end of the room.
Willetts shoved the papers aside and leaned back in his chair. “I still don’t get this deal you couldn’t make it ashore with Baxter’s body. You were only four days out of the Canal.”
I sighed. Here was another Monday-morning quarterback. It wasn’t enough to have the Coast Guard looking down your throat; you had to be second-guessed by jokers who wouldn’t know a starboard tack from a reef point. It was simple, actually; all you had to be was a navigator, seaman, cardiologist, sailmaker, embalmer, and a magician’s mate first class who could pull a breeze out of his hat. Then I realized, for perhaps the twentieth time, that I was being too defensive and antagonistic about it. The memory rankled because I was constitutionally unable to bear the sensation of helplessness. And I had been helpless.
“The whole thing’s a matter of record,” I said wearily. “There was a hearing—” I broke off as the phone rang on an adjoining desk. Willetts reached for it.
“Homicide, Willetts. . . . Yeah. . . . Nothing at all? . . . Yeah. . . . Yeah. . . .” The conversation went on for two or three minutes. Then Willetts said, “Okay, Joe. You might as well come on in.”
He replaced the instrument, and swung back to me. “Before I forget it, the yard watchman’s got your key. Let’s go in and see Lieutenant Boyd.”
The room beyond the frosted glass door was smaller, and contained a single desk. The shirtsleeved man behind it was in his middle thirties, with massive shoulders, an air 0f tough assurance, and probing gray eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly.
“This is Rogers,” Willetts said.
Boyd stood up and held out his hand. “I’ve read about you,” he said briefly.
We sat down. Boyd lighted a cigarette and spoke to Willetts. “You come up with anything yet?”
“Positive identification by Rogers and the manager of the car-rental place. Also that bellhop from the Warwick. So Keefer’s all one man. But nobody’s got any idea where he found all that money. Rogers swears he couldn’t have had it when he left Panama.” He went on, repeating all I’d told him.
When he had finished, Boyd asked, “How does his story check out?”
“Seems to be okay. We haven’t located the girl yet, but the night bartender in that joint knows her, and remembers the three of ‘em. He’s certain Keefer left there about the time Rogers gave us; says Keefer got pretty foul-mouthed about not wanting the taxi Rogers was going to call, so he told him to shut up or get out. The watchman at the boatyard says Rogers was back there at five minutes past twelve, and didn’t go out again. That piece of hamburger jibes with the autopsy report, and puts the time he was killed between two and three in the morning.”