by Jerry eBooks
“What do you mean?” Thyra Madison asked wonderingly. She had stopped crying but her face was still a wreck. “What else could it be? Who in the world would want to kill Lance?”
There was a stunned silence after that question and the people in the group looked at one another with what seemed to be dawning suspicion. There was a tension that settled over that bunch like a stretched canvas. You could fairly feel the mistrust spreading among the group.
I noticed several exchanges of glances. There was the look that passed between Griff Benson and his wife Alice, and the one that Captain Allen gave Ann Turgeon. But the glaring look that Thyra Madison gave Crasby, the deck hand, was the most bitter of all.
“Okay,” I said, when that minute of silence stretched out into what seemed to be a long, long time. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you people to stay here at the Argonaut, while we do a little looking around. Strictly routine, you know, but it would be best to have you all together when we need you.”
There was quite a bit of protest over that. Griff Benson reminded me that he had a job that needed doing in town. Thyra Madison went into her sobbing act—if it was an act—again. Alice Benson was resigned but not too happy over the set-up. Allen and Crasby just shrugged and said okay, they’d live on the yacht, as they had been.
The Coast Guard found Lance Hall’s body late that afternoon, not far from Crimson Point. There was a lump on the back of his head that could have been the result of a fall on the wet deck of the Serpentine or it could have been something else.
“What was he wearing?” I asked, over the phone, when the Coast Guard base called me at the Argonaut Club.
“Rubber-soled tennis shoes,” they told me, “dark trousers, white shirt.”
“Uh-huh,” I told myself, “and that convinces me he didn’t slip. If he’d had on leather-soled shoes, he might have hit a skid on the wet deck, but never with tennis shoes. Not Lance Hall.”
So, in my own mind, I had a good hunch that this was murder. There was little or nothing to base it on outside of that phone call and my conviction that Lance was too good a yachtsman to go into the drink, unless, as Griff Benson had said, he was looped up.
Headquarters sent me a couple of men and we went to work in earnest. First thing, we found out that Seaside 2-1337 was the phone in the men’s locker room. That meant, almost certainly, that a man had made the call. A woman could have slipped into the place—Andrew, the attendant, said he’d just come on duty and the place ordinarily was pretty deserted at that time of day—but she’d be taking an awful chance. There was a phone in the ladies’ lounge, too, and I figured that a woman would have used that one. Unless, of course, some gal wanted me to think that it was a man and was willing to run the risk.
Police work, you know, is comprised ninety-five per cent of detail work, drudgery. In the Lance Hall case, we got our fill of that, all right. The records of all those people had to be checked to the most minute degree in our search for a possible motive.
If Lance Hall had been murdered—and I was pretty sure he had been—the question was why? I wasn’t convinced of Crasby’s sterling character, not by a long shot, but if he was telling the truth, the killer could have slugged Lance and tossed him overboard during the few minutes the deck hand was below looking for tools with which to fix the faulty running light.
During that time, everybody aboard the boat, with the exception of Allen, would have had an opportunity to do the job. And we couldn’t overlook Allen, for that matter. Alice Benson, who knew her boating, had said the Serpentine was rolling heavily, and it could very well have been if an unattended wheel let the yacht swing into the trough of the waves! If Allen had seen Lance on deck, skipped off the bridge by the outer companionway and slugged him, the yacht would have been almost sure to swing off course and wallow.
But the others had looked at Alice Benson in surprise when she had said the yacht was “rolling horribly.” Even Griff, I had noticed, seemed shocked by the girl’s announcement. There was something between the Bensons that wasn’t right. Both of them would bear watching. They had only each other to back up their alibis about going to their stateroom to pack.
Nobody had seen Thyra Madison go to her stateroom, either, ostensibly to change her dress. The Turgeon girl admitted, perhaps a little grudgingly, that Thyra had on a different outfit when she returned to the saloon, but it didn’t take very long to change a dress.
The secretary herself wasn’t too well protected by her story. Nobody had been with her in the galley when she was fixing that late snack.
CRASBY, of course, was out on the longest limb. He’d been the last man seen with Hall and he’d admitted that be thought Hall was “picking on him,” riding him. I’d never known Hall very well, personally, but I knew enough about him to know he was a big, bluff man, given to blunt words on occasion. Could be that he bawled out Crasby, up there on the rainswept, dark deck until the hand lost his temper and belted him one, then tossed him overboard in panic when he realized he’d hit Lance harder than he’d meant to. After all, we had only Crasby’s word that Lance had sent him below for tools.
I talked to this one and that one, totting up my bits of information, most of it worthless, and then I went aboard the Serpentine. Living space at the Argonaut Club, it had developed, was at a premium despite the club’s size—blame the housing shortage, I guess—and the Bensons, Thyra and Miss Turgeon had all decided to stay aboard the yacht rather than camp out in the club lounge. The yacht was completely stocked, and it certainly was no hardship for any of them to keep to their staterooms.
I went over the big boat inch by inch. The sun deck furniture that had taken Lance up on deck was neatly stacked and covered with tarpaulins now. The running lights worked perfectly.
“It was this wire here,” Crasby told me, pointing to the cable that led to the port running light. “The thing was frayed, but it wasn’t broken. Once in a while, when we hit a big one and pounded fairly hard, it would blink off for a second. It needed fixing, sure, but Captain Allen and I were going to wait till we came in to work on it.”
The patch the deck hand told me he’d made, and it was a fresh patch, was about amidships, behind the bridge and running along the outer bulkhead of the main saloon. It was a workmanlike piece of repairing, all right.
“What tools did you use?” I asked Crasby.
“Wire cutters, pliers, knife, tape,” he said. “Nothing to it. It wasn’t the job that made me sore, it was Hall calling me up on deck in that weather and not waiting for me to get my slicker. Besides, he’d been needling me right along.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How about the furniture on the aft sun deck?”
“I’m telling you the truth,” the deck hand said earnestly. “I stowed that stuff right after dinner, covered it and lashed down what needed lashing. When Hall brought me up on deck the stuff was all scattered around again. I think he did it himself, just to give him something more to gripe about.”
I couldn’t see that, although I didn’t say anything. Lance Hall might have been hard on his men, as Allen and Crasby seemed to think, but I couldn’t see him indulging in anything as petty as that. Either Crasby was lying about stowing the furniture, or somebody had deliberately disarranged the stuff to get Lance up on deck.
“Show me just where you and Hall were standing when he told you to get the tools,” I asked Crasby. He moved over to a position near the rail. “Now, how did you go down to where the tools are kept?”
I followed Crasby along the port side to a companionway near the stern. We went down to the lower deck, moved along a corridor, past the main saloon, past the master’s suite and then down another companionway to a locker near the big diesel that powered the boat.
The locker was filled with tools arranged neatly in rows, every tool in its place. I picked out the pliers, knife, tape and cutters that the deck hand said he had used. I cast an approving eye over the array of hammers, wrenches, drills and what-not. Hall might have grumbled about no
t being able to trust his crew to do their jobs right, but this tool locker certainly was shipshape.
I started to turn away and then I gave the lineup of tools another look.
“Lost a wrench?” I asked Crasby. I pointed to an empty space in the rack that held a fine set of graduated wrenches. The missing wrench had come from a space right next to the biggest one of the set, a ponderous affair.
Crasby stared and lost his youngster look for a second. “That wrench was there the last time I looked,” he said.
“Was it there last night?”
He stumbled around a while and then admitted that he couldn’t be sure. He’d been in a hurry to grab the tools he needed and get the wet job over with. Because everything was in its place, he’d been able to reach in and lay his hands on what he required without snapping on the locker light, depending only on the dim light of the companionway outside.
“Crasby,” I told the deck hand, “you’re in a spot. That wrench probably was what was used on Lance Hall last night. You admit you didn’t like him, thought he was riding you. You were alone with him. You had plenty of opportunity to kill him, and a wrench that the killer probably used was right here, where you could put your hand on it in the dark. You knew he was up on deck, in the dark, waiting for you to bring up those wire-mending tools. You could have gotten those tools, all right, and then reached for the big wrench. You could have—”
“Listen!” the deck hand broke in, “I’m not getting framed for this! I didn’t do it, I tell you!”
“Who did?” I snapped.
“I—I don’t know.”
“You made the phone call to Headquarters, didn’t you?” I rapped out. “You slipped into the locker room at the Club and called Homicide.”
“I—yes,” said Jupiter Crasby.
“Why?” I asked. “Why did you do that?”
“Because—because I was scared, that’s why,” the deck hand faltered. “I was plenty scared. I thought—maybe—well, I wanted the cops on this job, that’s all. I was afraid there was going to be another accident and this time it might happen to me.”
“You’d better talk, Crasby,” I told him. “You know who did the killing and you’re afraid the killer knows you know. The only way we can protect you now is to get the name of the person who knocked off Lance Hall!”
HE STOOD there, breathing heavily, perspiration running down his face. If he had ever entertained any ideas about a spot of blackmail after he got over his initial scare, I think he was losing them now.
“You can burn only once,” I reminded Crasby. “The killer won’t get anything worse by knocking you off, too.”
“Okay,” Crasby said, hoarsely. “Okay, I’ll tell you. It was—”
That’s when the light in the companionway behind us went out. It worked on a switch at the head of the ladder and this far down in the boat, with no portholes, it left the space as black as night when it went off.
There were two streaking flares of bright light at the head of the companionway and I could hear the slugs smack into the big body of the man beside me. He gave a grunt and turned toward me, clawing blindly, then dragged me down to the floor with him. Tangled in his arms, I didn’t have a chance to even get my gun out before running feet on the deck above us told me the killer had gotten away.
I shoved Crasby away, got to my feet and scrambled up the companionway to the corridor. There was nobody in sight, but I could hear loud voices forward, coming closer.
The first one to appear was Griff Benson, with his wife just behind him, looking wide-eyed past his arm. Then came Captain Allen, Thyra Madison and, last of all, the secretary, Ann Turgeon.
“What happened?” Griff yelled. “We heard shots.”
I didn’t say anything. I turned back and snapped on the light switch to the locker compartment below. When I got down to Crasby’s side again, I knew he would never tell me who had killed Lance Hall. Not in this world, he wouldn’t. A big target like Jupiter Crasby would be easy to hit, even for an amateur gunsel.
Yes sir, Crasby had made a big target. Lance Hall had made somebody a big target, too.
And I was due to catch merry hell from the Captain, the Commissioner and about everybody else at Headquarters, I knew. The tops don’t like to have witnesses knocked off that way, especially when said witnesses are standing next to Detective Sergeants who should be protecting them.
There was a lot of commotion, of course. Thyra Madison had hysterics. Alice Benson began doing a little screaming of her own when she looked down the companionway and saw Crasby’s body. Griff Benson tried to comfort his wife, but I was aware again of that strangeness between the two. Captain Allen began asking a lot of questions until I shut him up, but brusquely. I was sore, mad as a smoked hornet. I’d been made a monkey of by a killer I had right under my nose. Whoever knocked off Lance Hall had killed Jupiter Crasby and whoever that was was right on the yacht Serpentine.
The boat was crowded with cops after that, all hunting for the gun. It was a diver for the harbor police who finally found it close to the side of the yacht, and it didn’t do us any good at all. The serial numbers were filed away and there were no prints, of course. Later, the lab might bring out those serial numbers, but it was an old gun that looked as though it had changed hands plenty without benefit of registration. I didn’t put much faith in the gun.
We had a pretty complete dossier on everybody aboard the Serpentine by that time. Griff Benson’s folder surprised me when I found it contained the notation that Griff wasn’t as heavy with money as I’d always thought him. He had plenty, it seemed, but it was all tied up in half a dozen different things that left him with only a small income. And Griff had borrowed heavily from Lance, both with and without collateral. They might have been the best of friends, but word had it that Lance nagged Griff recently for a return of some of that moolah.
Alice Benson had been one of the also-rans in the Lance Hall Matrimonial Sweepstakes before she married Griff. Some of Alice’s “dear friends” had volunteered the information that Alice never had been out of love with Lance, and that she’d married Griff on the rebound from Lance’s jilting. They said she had embarrassed Lance on more than one occasion by making it pretty obvious that whereas she wouldn’t dream of cheating at bridge, she might have a broader view of cheating in other directions.
Thyra Madison had come out of California some five years before. There wasn’t much known about her except that she was beautiful, well-bred and well-liked by everybody who knew her. She and Lance had been very much in love . . . And, it developed, she wouldn’t get a nickel’s worth of Lance Hall’s insurance!
There had been no quarrel between Lance and his fiancée during the trip that ended in murder. Thyra obviously knew how to handle the big man perfectly, toning down his fits of temper, acting as a buffer between his blunt ways and the sensitivities of those about him. And, if it meant anything, Thyra claimed to be a descendant of President Madison, which must have set all right with Lance, him being such a stickler for family.
Ann Turgeon admitted, tacitly, that she’d been in love with her boss, Hall, for years. She denied, however, that she’d ever entertained any hopes of marrying him and insisted that their relations had been purely Platonic. She kept pretty much to herself in private life, didn’t have many friends and didn’t go out much.
Captain Allen’s record wasn’t as good as it might have been. He’d lost a couple of good jobs through drinking and he’d wrecked one yacht in the Great Lakes while he was stiff, nearly losing his ticket on that account. He swore Lance knew about his record before hiring him and insisted, also, that he was off the booze and had been for several years. He was quitting Lance, he said, because Hall was too tough a man to work for, and because he had a better offer.
There wasn’t much we could find out about Jupiter Crasby. The fellow was a floater. He’d worked mostly on the water but he’d also been a miner of sorts, a gandy dancer and a taxi driver. He’d served a stretch in California wh
en he was picked up in a raid on a gambling barge where he was working as a strongarm man.
“AND there you are,” grunted Captain Logan of Homicide, when we went over the records. “You’ve got plenty of motives. Alice Benson—woman scorned. Griff Benson—dough, plus Hall’s pressure for repayment of the loan, plus the fact that he might have found out there was something going on between his wife and Lance. Miss Madison—I don’t see anything there, unless she thought she’d get that insurance money. Lance might have told her he was changing his policies and put it off. I don’t give that much weight, though. Why kill a guy when you can marry into the money in a couple of weeks and get it legal?”
“Allen,” somebody put in, “could be lying about Lance knowing about his record. Allen could have been scared that Hall would ruin whatever new reputation he had built up and put him back on the beach.”
“Could be,” Logan nodded, “but it’s weak. And as for Crasby—if that dope had just told us right off, he might be alive today and this thing would be all cleared up.”
I sat there, listening with half an ear, bothered by a couple of things that were buzzing through my brain. I couldn’t get them clear in my mind and somehow, they were awfully important. Something to do with tennis shoes and a pair of wide shoulders. And California.
Ever have a name on the tip of your tongue and can’t quite get it? That was the way it was with me and these ideas. I’d almost have something and then the thought would skip away and I’d have to start my brain crawling after it again.
“They were both big targets,” I said out loud. The other men in the room looked at me as though I’d gone nuts.
But I had it then, or a fingernail grip on it, anyway. I started to feel excitement rising inside me.
“Sure,” I said. “They were both big targets. How was Hall dressed when they picked him up? Tennis shoes, dark trousers, white shirt. How was Crasby dressed when you saw him? Tennis shoes, dungarees—dark—and a T-shirt that was white.”
