After Midnight

by Nielsen, Helen

  The Profile was closed, but a party was in progress in the upstairs apartment. He rang the bell and asked for Mayerling and was greeted like a member of the club. Augie was out, he was told, but there was always room for one more. Augie had received a wire and rushed off to Aunt Charlotte in Santa Barbara.

  The incredibly handsome Adonis who relayed the information added:

  “Auntie’s ill and Augie’s gone to hold her hand, or some droll thing. What are you drinking?”

  “Ambrosia,” Simon said. “When did Augie leave?”

  “Directly after the wire arrived. About four p.m.”

  “What’s Auntie’s number in Santa Barbara?”

  The air chilled instantly. “I’m not sure that I know,” the Adonis said, tightly. “Now that I think of it, I’m not even sure you’re a friend of Augie’s.”

  There was a familiar, pungent scent in the air. Somebody was smoking pot, and this group would go no further. They were fortyish and getting a little tired of it all. It was the teen-agers who became junkies. It was nothing but a mild little tea party, and August Mayerling’s reaction was the normal flight pattern for his breed. Simon would have considered the visit a waste of time if Mayerling hadn’t been a photography bug and displayed his art in framed specimens on every convenient wall area. Simon ignored an unspoken invitation to leave the party and wandered from print to print looking for a familiar face until he found something much more exciting. It was a truly impressive shot of a docked freigher. What excited Simon was the name lettered on the hull: S.S. Dobson.

  “Are you a shutter bug, too?” the Adonis asked.

  His voice had taken on an icy quality.

  “No,” Simon answered. “Only a devoted fan.”

  He left then, without waiting for the ambrosia, and drove to an all night coffee shop near the public beach. There, steaming cup in hand, he placed a call from the public booth to the berth of the line operating the Dobson. They could give no information on the membership of the crew, but he did learn that the ship was sailing within the hour for San Francisco and thence for the Orient. She carried accommodations for twelve passengers, all of which were sold, and the passenger gangplank would be removed in thirty minutes. It was all Simon needed to know.

  He drove fast, both hands on the steering wheel and the accelerator pressed to the floorboards. The wide lanes of the freeways laced and interlaced, arched and curved, and finally deposited the rented car, like something expelled from a pin-ball machine, into the suddenly darkened streets of the harbor area. The S.S. Dobson was docked at the far end of the approach, beyond the railroad tracks and behind a berth which now showed only a few widely spaced lights on the parking side and a blinding battery of lights on her superstructure. There were three passenger cars and a departing taxi in the parking lot. He braked to a stop alongside a conspicuously white compact and leaped out. The hood of the small car was still warm. He opened the door on the driver’s side and the dome light bathed the interior in brightness. The sedan was upholstered in white leather overlaid with an abstract pattern of blood.

  Simon didn’t waste time closing the door. He ran. He ran across the eighty or ninety feet separating him from the bow of the S.S. Dobson, and then he ran a few hundred feet further to where the dockhands were removing the gangplank. Someone shouted as he leaped onto it and sprinted toward the deck, and at the top of the plank an irate officer insisted he couldn’t board now because the “all ashore” bell had sounded.

  “I’m tone deaf,” Simon said. “Where’s the Captain?”

  Something huge in a dark uniform with braid on the sleeves loomed before him.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Simon Drake and I’m looking for a man named Samuel Olson,” Simon answered. “Is he on board?”

  “What do you want with him if he is?” the man asked.

  “I want to ask if he’s seen Frank Lodge. His car’s parked down below in the lot and it’s drenched with his own blood. He’s been shot—”

  Simon got no farther. The man with the stripes on his sleeves suddenly grew taller and then lunged past Simon and galloped toward the gangplank. He was too late. The ground crew had their orders and no one had countermanded them. The gangplank was gone and the ship was slowly pulling away from the dock. A blast from the boat whistle vibrated through the night air and the diesels began to purr. Olson (he could be no other) posed like a ballet dancer at the edge of the railing and then, as the distance between the ship and the dock widened, deliberately leaped into the water.

  Simon ran to the rail. Olson’s cap had dropped on the deck. Now, in the churning waters below, a matted towhead bobbed into view and Olson treaded water until he could get his bearings.

  “Man overboard!” Simon yelled.

  The ship’s whistle came again. As the echoes died away, the shrill scream of a police car siren careened in from the blackness beyond the parking area and came to a stop a few feet from where the gangplank had been. The doors of the sedan burst open and Simon watched as Franzen and a uniformed officer scrambled out from the front seat. Then, surprisingly, he saw Commander Warren and his bodyguard, McKay, climb out of the rear.

  “In the water!” Simon yelled. “Olson’s in the water!”

  Franzen impaled the swimming sailor with the police car searchlight. Panicked, Olson turned and tried to swim toward the receding ship. A warning shot went over his head. He swam. A second shot came closer and he stopped. Then he turned about and swam meekly back to where a group of dockhands were waiting to pull him from the water. Only then did Simon realize the ship had changed course and was nosing back to the berth.

  Ten minutes later, Simon and Lieutenant Franzen found Frank Lodge in Olson’s bunk. He had been given a sedative to diminish the pain and was trying to stuff a towel in the hole in his stomach. He was in no condition to talk. Franzen called for an ambulance and Lodge was rushed to a hospital with a good blood bank, but long before he made the transfer Simon found the heroin in the suitcase. The motive for Roger Warren’s death was clear.

  Commander Warren stood by as Lodge was removed by stretcher from the cabin, and saw the package Simon recovered from the mattress relinquished first to Franzen and then to the federal agent attached to the post.

  “Franzen,” he demanded, “What’s going on here? Someone sent an idiot wire to my mate and I called Duane Thompson to have it traced. Suddenly I’m dragged pell-mell to the docks to watch you take pot shots at a sailor—”

  “Who is a smuggler,” Franzen said.

  The commander was no fool, but his mind was resisting what he didn’t want to know.

  “Olson? Was that man Olson?” he asked.

  “S. Olson—but he didn’t send the wire. Mr. Drake did that. How did you get onto the operation, Drake? You never saw the lab report on the carpet sweepings taken from the Warren house.”

  Franzen was beginning to feel quite comfortable in his new eyeglasses. He could see Simon’s surprise and enjoy it. It was all the satisfaction he would get from this case.

  “Yes, they found particles of heroin in the carpet,” Franzen said. “Lodge must have opened the package to make sure of the shipment and spilled some of it on the carpet. We didn’t know it was Lodge then. We didn’t even know it was an operation. We thought one or both of the Warrens might have been using the stuff.”

  “Roger—using dope!” the commander exploded.

  “It might have been better for him if he had,” Franzen answered, “instead of starting a two man operation in syndicate territory. That’s living a little too dangerously.”

  It was Lieutenant Franzen’s headache now. All Simon had to do was explain how he had traced Frank Lodge from a slamming door that couldn’t have been heard in the ocean-side bedroom of the house next door, to Olson’s cabin on board the Dobson. But he couldn’t do that, fully, until Olson told his story. Dried out and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he made the statement in the small hours of the mornin
g after the Dobson had been cleared and allowed to sail. He was a burly, semi-illiterate a few years older than Roger Warren and a world apart in background, but their paths had met one day on the docks when Roger drove his shutter-bug employer on an artistic safari to the waterfront. Olson had an eye for Roger’s Mercedes and Roger had an eye for Olson’s friends. One of them, who stood for beers at a nearby bar, had frequented Eddie Berman’s Mobile Club in Santa Monica. He was known to be a pusher with good connections, and Roger’s wits were sharpened by the high cost of living. Two days after the initial meeting he returned to the Dobson alone with a business proposition. Olson was smuggling heroin for the syndicate. By adding milk sugar to his ditty bag, he could cut the raw product for over the railing delivery to Roger and make up the weight discrepancy with minor dilution of the residue.

  The Dobson operated on a forty-two-day round trip schedule to the Orient. Once every six weeks, on Sunday, she passed within a few miles of The Cove boat landing. To avoid suspicion, Roger took up deep sea fishing—choosing one Sunday a month spaced at six-week intervals. He used the white boat because it was easily identifiable at sea and flew a special flag when approaching the point of contact. Olson used a matching flag to mark the floating capsule he tossed overboard.

  “Six-week intervals,” Simon reflected. “If only I had asked Charley Becker about the frequency of the rentals—But by the time I realized the visits to his father’s yacht were a red-herring operation, Becker was dead and the commander and Wanda were on the suspect list.”

  Olson suffered the interruption without comment. When Simon stopped talking, he resumed.

  “I don’t know nothing about red-herring operations,” he admitted “I only know what I did. The first time we tried the trick, I took out four ounces of pure H from the shipment. Warren wanted to start small so the pushers wouldn’t holler the product was weak. He sold it for two thousand bucks. We split my forty to his sixty. That was because he had to get rid of the stuff.”

  “To Mayerling and his friends,” Simon mused.

  “Who?” Franzen echoed.

  Simon didn’t feel generous. He decided to let Franzen do his own digging.

  “An old vaudeville act Hannah Lee knew,” he answered. “How many times did you deliver to Roger Warren?”

  “Three,” Olson said. “The first time he rented a boat it was a dry run. He wanted to get the feel of her and time his speed to the rendezvous area. The first delivery was in July. On the second, in August, I cut eight ounces out of the shipment. The third time I took twelve ounces.”

  “You must have thought you were in the clear to keep escalating that way,” Simon remarked.

  “Sure we did,” Olson replied. “In August, two weeks after the second delivery, I got word from Lodge to meet him at the City Motel in Marina Beach. I didn’t know any Frank Lodge and I was scared—but I went. It was nothing. He was a replacement for my old contact man and wanted to brief me on some minor changes in the operation.”

  “Why did he pick Marina Beach for the meeting if he wasn’t watching Roger Warren?” Franzen asked.

  “I asked him why we met at Marina,” Olson said. “He told me his front job was with a company that had clients in the town. He even showed me the sales catalog. It sounded OK, but after that meeting Warren wanted to pull out. Then he lost a roll on the horses and said we would pull it once more. Warren said three was his lucky number.”

  “What did you think when you heard he was dead?” Simon asked.

  Olson tried to grin. “I thought he couldn’t count. Anyway, I was glad it was over.”

  “And you didn’t wonder what happened to that last delivery?”

  “I didn’t care! Look, all I got out of the deal was the short cut on a price Warren probably lied about anyway. It wasn’t worth the risk. When Lodge came up that gangplank tonight with his guts shot out, I thought he was coming after me. It just wasn’t worth it!”

  “What was he coming after?”

  “A ride to Hong Kong—or anywhere. Don’t you get it, lawman? Frank Lodge goofed. On his job you don’t do that. I mean, you just don’t make mistakes. They take away your gold star if you do—and feed the sharks with what’s left…. Have you got a cigarette on you?”

  Simon didn’t but Franzen did. He handed Olson the package and the kid grabbed it with both hands. He lit up and leaned back in the straight-backed chair Franzen had found for him—exhausted and too scared to let down his guard. Outside the windows a moist dawn was stretching over the rooftops like a silver gray cat rousing from sleep, and the berth where the S.S. Dobson had been the theatre for violent action was deserted. The whole of the living world seemed contained in one small room.

  “Is that all there is to it?” Commander Warren demanded. “This seaman tells a story to save his own skin and my dead son’s branded a dope peddler?”

  “No, that’s not all,” Franzen said wryly. “There’s the package of heroin Frank Lodge took from your son’s house.”

  “And the tennis trophy,” Simon added. “I think Roger meant to wrap it in the bamboo paper and transfer the drug to his tackle box. He was running scared. He needed a decoy. But when he returned to the yacht and learned Wanda had gone ashore with some sailors, he forgot that detail. And so, hours later, he came home angry and drunk with the trophy still in the tackle box and the heroin still in the bamboo wrapper. Frank Lodge, with a pair of high powered binoculars in his hands, watched the arrival from the house next door. The quarrel made a perfect setup for murder. All he had to do was wait until the house was quiet and then carry out his assassination contract with a minimum of danger. But he overreached himself. He planted the knife on Wanda’s bed—the last place she would have put it. Then, like an ordinary good citizen, he reported what he had seen and heard to the police and testified at the preliminary hearing.”

  “Where did Nancy Armitage come in?” Franzen asked.

  “Sometime after Lodge took the house. She made a convenient companion on the Sundays he watched Roger go fishing off The Cove pier. A couple isn’t as conspicuous as one man alone. Lodge knew the Dobson’s schedule. He knew that Roger, if he was the man cutting in on a syndicate operation, wouldn’t return empty-handed on Sundays when the ship passed near the fishing waters. I imagine the first time the heroin was cut there was some doubt. It could have happened on the Asiatic side of the operation. Naturally, nothing was said to Olson at the July meeting. But by the time the second job was pulled, there was a leak. Roger drank. Being insecure, he probably dragged when he drank. Whatever it was, something sent Lodge to Marina Beach to rent the house next door to the Warrens. In order for an organization to function efficiently, it must be disciplined. Once Lodge had proof of Roger’s guilt, he could proceed with the discipline.”

  “But why did Armitage shoot Lodge?”

  Simon smiled blandly. “Who knows? If I were defending Miss Armitage in court, which I won’t, by the way, I’d say she shot him because she loved him. I’d probably be right. What I do know is that he was leaving her and she didn’t like being left.”

  “They’ll do it every time,” Franzen muttered. “Why did you send a wire to McKay?”

  “Because, until Nancy Armitage showed up in Lodge’s beach house, I wasn’t sure who she covered for when she refused to testify, and I wasn’t sure who tried to kill me—and Mrs. Warren—last night when we left the restaurant.”

  “Tried to kill you?” Commander Warren roared. “If somebody tried to kill you, Drake, it couldn’t have been my mate!”

  “But I didn’t know that,” Simon answered, “any more than you didn’t know Wanda could have killed your son. You should have used those Sundays she spent on the yacht getting closer to her instead of driving her away. You might have liked her. She could teach you to watusi and swim and possibly even to laugh once in a while. It’s good for high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries.

  “But that’s beside the point. Lodge tried to get Wanda convicted for Roger’s murder and fai
led. He should have left town—his job was finished. But Nancy Armitage told him I knew she was with a man the day of the murder and that frightened him. In Lodge’s business it’s fatal to leave tracks. I think he followed me the day I went to the yacht. Charley Becker recognized him and so Charley had to go before he could remember to tell me who kept company with the nurse who wouldn’t testify. Later he tried to kill me—or at least frighten me off the case.”

  “All for a few thousand dollars’ worth of narcotics,” the commander reflected.

  “You’ve missed the point,” Simon said. “The amount Roger skimmed off the Dobson shipment wasn’t important. The fact that he dared to do it was. Fools rush in where angels get their feathers singed. Look at Olson. He’s so glad to be alive even a police escort looks good to him.”

  Olson’s shaggy head came up from the cigarette he had smoked down to the filter. He stared at Simon and then at Franzen.

  “Do I have to sit here all night?” he asked.

  “Only until the federals decide who gets custody of the baby,” Franzen said. “S. Olson—merchant seaman. I found that registration card at City Motel, too, Drake. When Commander Warren came in with McKay’s wire we traced it to the office of origin and learned that you sent it. Then I remembered your interest in Frank Lodge and went back over his background. And guess what? We all met like a big family reunion on the docks at sailing time.”

  Somewhere down the hall a telephone was ringing, and a telephone in a near empty building just before dawn is a commanding sound. Franzen nodded and one of the plainclothesmen he’d brought along went to answer it. Nobody spoke until the officer returned with a message.

  “It was the hospital,” he reported. “They pumped blood into Lodge for an hour. He got scared that he wasn’t going to make it and made a full confession.”