“I’m not sure I can,” Ruth said, “but Carrier could. I understand they designed them, though that was a long time ago.”
“Emeralds and diamonds and platinum, you said,” Lynch continued. “A necklace, brooch, and bracelet. Any idea about their value?”
“I think Oliver said they were insured for two hundred thousand.”
Lynch pursed his lips but his whistle was silent as he glanced at McCarthy. “You couldn’t have picked a better time to walk in with those keys,” he said dryly. “Tell us again how you happened to have them.”
This was the part MacLaren had rehearsed. He knew the question would eventually be asked, and he thought he had come up with a reasonable answer. Now, mentally crossing his fingers, he waited to see how the girl would handle the situation.
“Well,” she said, “we started out for dinner, and we were driving this way and we got to talking about my husband’s death. I don’t know how I happened to mention the jewelry but I did. Donald”—she glanced at MacLaren—“asked if there was a safe here. I said there was, and he said was there any way we could open it to see if the jewelry was still there.”
It was time for MacLaren now, and he said: “Maybe it was a crazy idea but I thought maybe it could be important if we had a look. If it was gone, the police ought to know about it.”
“You knew the combination, Mrs. Kingsley,” McCarthy said. “Do you think anybody else knew it?”
The girl thought it over. She flexed her lips, straightened them. “I think his secretary, Carla Lewis, might have known it. And his lawyer, Neil Ackerman. It didn’t mean anything, actually, because Oliver was the only one who had the keys.”
“And you knew where these keys were?” McCarthy said.
“I knew he used to keep them in his dressing-room. In the top left-hand drawer of the highboy. I didn’t know if they were still there, but that’s what we came here to find out.”
It was not the best story in the world, but at the moment it was impossible to refute, and MacLaren was proud of Ruth’s poise and composure. This was not something she had wanted to do, but having agreed to play along, she had acquitted herself convincingly.
Lynch took out a pack of cigarettes which he offered around. The girl refused, but MacLaren accepted and extended a light. When he had inhaled, Lynch turned to his companion.
“Maybe we should check with the Connecticut people,” he said, and when McCarthy nodded his silent assent, Lynch asked if there was another telephone available.
“In the drawing-room,” the girl said. “The room at the rear on this floor.”
Lynch went away and McCarthy leaned forward, sliding his forearms across the desk top. “Your husband was killed last night or early this morning,” he said. “What gets me is why the bank people and the lawyers didn’t come here today and check the safe out.”
“There isn’t any bank in the picture,” MacLaren said. “Neil Ackerman, who is Kingsley’s personal lawyer, is co-executor of the will along with Kingsley’s sister, and she’s in Italy. Maybe Ackerman was here earlier for all I know.”
“What good would it do him?”
“How do you mean?” MacLaren said.
“He didn’t have the keys, did he?”
MacLaren had not thought of this and there was nothing he could say now. McCarthy was still watching him but he let the silence build until Lynch came back.
“They’re a little burned up there about you taking this trip,” he said to MacLaren.
“We weren’t running away,” MacLaren said. “Maybe we got a little curious, but if it hadn’t been for this we would have been nearly back by now.”
“I told them I thought you were coming back tonight,” Lynch said. “They said if I thought so, all right; if not, they’d send for you.”
McCarthy had been making some notes while he sat at the desk, and now he stood up. “We don’t want to touch the safe,” he said, “until the lab men have a chance to work it over, but while you’re here maybe we had better go over the contents. It shouldn’t take too long.”
He walked over to the safe, and Ruth left her chair to join him. “We’ll give you a receipt,” McCarthy said, “and you’d better leave the keys here too.”
For MacLaren, the ride back to Surrey was anticlimactic and depressing. His conversational gambits brought only perfunctory replies, and his offer to stop somewhere and get a drink was declined. He did not think she was angry with him, neither was she sulking, and so he respected her desire to be alone with her thoughts until they were a few miles from the village.
“I’ve been thinking about that stock your husband gave you,” he said. “Sort of a funny wedding present, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She let the silence build again and finally broke it. “Yes, I suppose it was. I know I was surprised when he gave it to me. He said it wasn’t to take the place of an allowance or anything like that. It was just a little something that would give me an income of my own.”
“What stock is it?”
“National Aluminum. Four hundred shares. I thought I might as well take it tonight while I could.”
MacLaren did not know what the going quotation for National Aluminum was and he did not ask. Instead he thought of something else.
“Did you know Carla also had some stock your husband had given her?”
“I knew she had some, but I am not sure what it is worth.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Just another of his idiosyncrasies, I guess. I know he gave it to her long before I knew him, and I think the idea was that the income from the stock would take the place of a salary. He wasn’t sure that a salary for someone like Carla would be fully deductible on his income tax, so he let her have the income from the stock instead.”
MacLaren was about to comment on the endorsement on the certificates, but she brought up the point before he could speak.
“Of course, the shares weren’t actually hers. They were registered in her name on the company books so that she could get the income, but he kept the certificates and he made her endorse them.”
“In other words,” MacLaren said, “if he ever got sore at her or wanted to cut off her income, all he had to do was turn the certificates over to his broker for sale.”
He realized as he spoke that the guess he had made that afternoon in Carla Lewis’s room had been the right one and explained her hurried trip to New York. He also recalled the scene the night before when the shot had been fired and they had rushed up to find Carla and Neil Ackerman arguing about who had been in the room first, and who had opened Kingsley’s steel-lined drawer.
He was still speculating about this when he pulled up in front of the Surrey Inn. He went round to open the car door for her and then walked her to the entrance. It was a rather awkward moment for both of them when they said good night. She couldn’t say that she had had a wonderful evening, and he couldn’t tell her how much he had enjoyed the trip. He thought about shaking hands and decided against it. The best he could do was to say that she didn’t have to worry about what they had done. She said she hoped he was right, and then she had turned and was starting through the foyer.
It was the small glow of light from the curtained port of the Annabelle III that gave MacLaren the idea. It was not the sort of idea that bursts full grown in the mind, but took root slowly from the seeds of curiosity and retrospect.
He had parked his car and walked round the showroom to have a final cigarette on the dock when he noticed the light. Without actually wondering about it, his mind was instantly busy as he recalled the idea that had come to him that afternoon and the digression that had prevented him from following it up and taken him instead to the island for a talk with Lucille. There had been no one aboard the black-hulled craft then. At no time during the day had he laid eyes on the odd pair, but now, as his thoughts groped backwards, he remembered the bandaid he had put on the big man’s middle finger—
For another moment his thoughts hung there, and then, sud
denly, his mind began to race. At first he did not believe the conclusion that now came to him. He did not believe that coincidence had so long an arm, but the excitement was churning in him and he could not let go of the possibility.
For there were now two distinct pictures in his mind. He remembered the hoarse distinctive voice of the little man named Lew when he argued about going fishing with his companion the night before. He also remembered the low, hoarse, and rasping voice of the unseen man who had looted the Kingsley safe and had spoken but once.
There could be another gunman with a bandaid on his middle finger. But was it likely that two such individuals could be aboard the Annabelle III while two other identical individuals were robbing Kingsley’s safe?
He could find no conclusive answer to the unspoken question, but he knew what he ought to do. He also knew that it need not be coincidence that had brought the Annabelle III and its odd crew to this particular spot.
He was moving as these thoughts expanded, and when he had reached his second-floor apartment, he went directly to the telephone and put in a person-to-person call to New York. He mentioned the precinct number and said that he would speak to either Detective McCarthy or Detective Lynch. It took the operator a minute or so to make the connection and ask her questions. He heard her say: “Here’s your party.” Then a voice said: “Detective Lynch speaking.”
When MacLaren had identified himself, he said: “You said that if I remembered anything that might be helpful I was to let you know.”
“That’s right. What have you got?”
MacLaren told his story as best he could. It may have lacked unity and his progression may not have been exact, but he got the facts out and there was no interruption until he had finished.
“What you’re saying,” Lynch said with some skepticism, “is that the two guys on this cruiser might be the same two guys who pulled the job in Kingsley’s place.”
“I’m not saying they did,” MacLaren said. “Maybe that voice I heard was my imagination, but I know the man with the gun had a bandage of some kind on his middle finger. I also know that I put a bandaid on the middle finger of this fellow named Nick. I just thought I’d tell you,” he said. “I don’t care whether you check it out or not.”
“All right, all right. Keep your shirt on. What do these guys look like?”
“One is sort of small, wiry, mostly bald. He could be in his forties. The other one is bigger and younger. He’s got black curly hair and heavy brows.”
“Did you hear them use any other names?”
“Up here, yes. I think the little one’s name is Lew.”
“He’s the one with a rasping voice?”
“Yes.”
“All right, thanks. It might be something. Oh yeah—and what do you plan to do now?”
“I’m going to bed,” MacLaren said flatly.
“Good. And stay there, will you? If we’re going to do any checking we’d like to have it official, you know what I mean?”
13
MACLAREN AWAKENED early the next morning. There were no boatyard noises when he looked out the window, but fog had drifted in from the sound and the line of cruisers stretching toward the river was hazy and formless.
A glance at his watch told him it was ten minutes after seven, but he was wide awake now and so he went to the kitchen to put water on for coffee. Five minutes was his average allotment for a shower and shave, and by the time he had dressed and returned to the kitchen the water was boiling. He was putting the toaster on the table when he heard the muffled sound of motors, and as he glanced out of the window overlooking the parking-lot, he saw two cars slide out of the fog and stop.
From where he stood he could not identify them, but when the occupants got out and he saw the two broad-brimmed hats, he knew that at least two of the five men were from the state police.
To get a better look, he unlocked the back door and opened it. They were moving away as he glanced down, heading in the direction of the Annabelle III, and like that, it all came back to him.
He was dressed in slacks and shirt and slippers, and he detoured only long enough to substitute loafers for the slippers. Then he was going down the front stairs and across the showroom and unlocking the front door. It was as he opened it that he heard the two shots, the shouts of men’s voices, and then the splash of some unseen object striking the water in the inlet.
A state trooper who turned out to be Sergeant Wyre, and a man in plain clothes who was Detective Lynch, came running along the bulkhead and wheeled toward the floating dock. By that time MacLaren was close, and Wyre saw him and yelled a request.
“The outboard, Mac! Can we use it?”
MacLaren beat them down the catwalk, and he had already torn off the plastic cover and was reaching for the starter rope when the two men piled in.
“We’ll take it,” Wyre said.
“Like hell,” MacLaren said.
He already had the toggle in his hand and he gave the rope a quick spin. The second yank fired the motor and he swung downstream at Wyre’s command.
A minute or so later they saw the swimmer, and MacLaren circled to approach from the front. Lynch, his service revolver in his hand, knelt in the bow. MacLaren shoved the motor in neutral, and as the skiff lost way, he saw the flailing arms and the bald head and knew that this was the man named Lew.
Lynch yelled a loud command and Lew must have heard him because he stopped swimming and his face came up. As his eyes focused, he found himself staring at the muzzle of a gun which was now pointed at his forehead and no more than a foot and a half away.
“All right,” he said, treading water and gasping for breath. “You win.”
“Back to the dock, Lew,” Lynch said. “We’ll be right behind you.”
The other state policeman was waiting on the floating dock as a reception committee and he helped pull Lew from the water. He made a bedraggled figure in his dripping pajamas, and he said nothing at all as Wyre and Lynch put away their guns and started marching the man back toward the Annabelle III. Sergeant Wyre called back over his shoulder to thank MacLaren for his help, and Lynch said something about seeing him later. Then the fog had swallowed them, and MacLaren was left to tie up the skiff and get back to the business of making his breakfast.
McCarthy and Lynch stopped in the office sometime after eight o’clock, after the state police had taken Nick and Lew away. They said they wanted to thank him for his tip, adding that it was lucky for them he had been so observing.
“Did they have the jewelry?” MacLaren asked.
“That they did,” said McCarthy.
“Well, that’s a help.” MacLaren looked from one to the other. “I wasn’t so sure you still didn’t think I had something to do with the job.”
“We weren’t so sure either.” Lynch took the three velvet-covered boxes from his pocket. “Thought you might like to see what they were after.”
MacLaren stared for quite a while at the necklace, the bracelet, and the brooch. Even here where the light was bad, the fire of the diamonds and the emeralds astonished him, and he knew that he had never seen three more perfectly matched pieces.
He voiced his approval with one word. “Wow!”
“Yeah.”
“What did they intend to do with them?”
“They’re not talking,” McCarthy said.
“But it’s not too hard to figure,” Lynch added. “They had a hell of an idea. We never would have started looking for them on a boat or around a boatyard in a million years.”
“They’ve both got records,” McCarthy said. “And normally after the safe-and-loft boys studied the job, they’d have started combing the city.”
“We’ve already checked out that boat,” Lynch said. “They hired it from a Long Island City yard for two weeks. They brought it up here where they could keep an eye on Kingsley and pick the right time to hit the safe. They probably had already cased that town house, and they knew what they were looking for.
“If
it hadn’t been for your tip they would have come back here and pushed off today or tomorrow for God knows where. They could’ve gone up into Narragansett Bay to Providence, or almost anywhere along the coast; probably had already made a date with a fence. When they collected, they’d have come back to Long Island City with the boat, and when we finally picked them up we’d have one hell of a time trying to pin that job on them.” He shook his head, a note of admiration in his voice. “Nobody would ever have thought of checking back to that Long Island City boatyard or any other boatyard for that matter.”
“Yesterday morning they found out about Kingsley being killed,” McCarthy said, “and they must’ve sweated it out all day with their fingers crossed, hoping that someone didn’t empty the safe before they could get to crack it. We figure they went down sometime yesterday morning and waited around until it was dark. They probably got the ten o’clock out of Grand Central and got off at Say-brook to get a taxi here.” He grunted softly. “They really had it figured,” he said. “It was damn neat.”
“What happens now?” MacLaren asked.
“They’ll be arraigned here,” Lynch said. “Then either they waive extradition or we extradite them. That’ll be no problem.”
“Well, thanks again for the tip,” McCarthy said, as he moved to the door.
“Yeah,” Lynch added. “If there’s anything we can do any time to—”
“There might be something,” MacLaren said as his mind went back and a new thought came to him. “The fellow named Lew was out in the dinghy fishing somewhere around the time Oliver Kingsley was killed. I don’t know where he was, but there’s just a chance he might have seen or heard something that could be important.”
He hesitated, and said: “Mrs. Kingsley and I are still in a spot. The local people think we may have had something to do with his death. It’ll probably stay like that, at least until they get a report on the autopsy. So—if you should find out anything from Lew that might help, I would appreciate it if you would let me know.”
They nodded. They said they would keep it in mind….
By ten thirty the sun had burned the fog away, the boatyard was humming, and MacLaren had discussed price with a potential client from Hartford who wanted a thirty-foot sloop built during the fall and winter. Now, moving out on the dock again after having walked to the car with his customer, MacLaren glanced across at the island.
Slack Tide Page 11
