“Oh, that. Yes, well, you see, we found some stains on that handkerchief we took from your boat that weren’t blood. We’re checking them out.”
“Where’s the superintendent?”
“Having tea with the Commissioner at Government House.”
“Tea?” Sanford blurted, controlling his astonishment with some difficulty. “Well, look. I’m going out to the houseboat. I’ve run across a couple of little things—”
He paused while his mind reviewed the information that had come to him. There was a definite pattern shaping up now but as evidence of the kind that would be admissible in court, he had nothing. Hunches were no good to the police, whose conduct was governed by certain rules and regulations that could not be ignored. To go beyond mere conjeetures he needed confirmation on two or three points that seemed important to him, and the only way to be sure was to ask questions and hope he could force co-operation from those who could help.
“What I have in mind probably doesn’t amount to much,” he said, “but there are a couple of things I’d like to check out. When you see Kirby tell him maybe he ought to take a ride out to the houseboat, just in case.”
He hung up before a reply could be made and turned to Laura. “Do you think we might get a ride? How do we get in touch with Tom Silva?”
“He’s supposed to keep his eye on the hotel pier from time to time,” Laura said. “Why don’t we just walk down there? I don’t think it should be too long.”
18
Laura Maynard’s estimate of the time it might take to get a ride to the houseboat was a good one, and they had not been on the hotel pier more than three or four minutes when Tom Silva could be seen getting into the runabout. He opened up the engine as soon as he had pulled free and the bow lifted prettily as he pointed it shoreward. He cut the power at exactly the right time, came alongside the pier with his accustomed skill, offered a hand to the girl as she stepped aboard.
“Everyone out there?” Sanford asked.
“Yes sir. I just brought the maids ashore a few minutes ago.”
Sanford sat with Laura in the stern while Silva handled the wheel and controls, his mind busy again as he put together two or three facts he knew and wondered just what he could do with them. One of the important points he was considering had no corroboration and since it had come up in private conversation could easily be denied. But Willie’s story was something else again and now, as they came alongside the boarding ladder, he decided that to get anyone to talk he would have to start from this.
Pete Janovic was stretched out in a deck chair on the shady side, immersed in a paperback novel. His muscular figure was clad in his regular leisure uniform, of shorts and jersey, and when he saw them he stopped reading long enough to give them a halfhearted wave. Howard Aldington and George Breck were talking on one of the divans as Sanford and Laura entered the main room, and off to one side Cushman and Blanche Hubbard were playing some two-handed card game.
The conversation on the divan was suspended as Sanford and Laura came to a stop, and the card players looked up from their game. Laura glanced at Sanford, who was again wondering where to start, and when he did not speak she could contain herself no longer.
“We found someone who knows what happened last night,” she said, a certain breathlessness in her voice. “Aren’t you going to tell them, Barry?”
That was enough to get everyone’s attention and the first one to question the announcement was Aldington.
“I doubt it,” he said. “I doubt it very much. If anyone knew what happened, the police would have made an arrest.”
Sanford did not argue with the statement. “You’re right on that point. This man doesn’t know. It’s what he saw that’s important. By the process of elimination—”
“Who’s the guy?” Breck interrupted, coming to his feet and turning toward the side-bar near the study door.
“The only name I know is Willie,” Sanford said and told who Willie was, what he did, and where he had been the night before. “He saw Hubbard,” he added. “He didn’t know who or what it was because he’d never seen anyone in a frogman’s suit. He thought at first it might be a porpoise until he realized they never came up the river that far. All he knew was that something black and shiny and very strange was swimming in the river, and he watched it head for my ketch. He was already interested because before that he had seen someone rowing up the river in a dinghy. From his description it could be the one that’s tied up outside.”
He hesitated and said: “He didn’t see where the dinghy came from; he didn’t notice it until it was almost opposite the customs house. He says it stayed on the other side of the river and moved up in the shadows of the wall over there. He lost sight of it for a while. Then Hubbard came swimming along and Willie saw him climb aboard the ketch—”
“I doubt that too,” Aldington said curtly. “I know where the customs house is and I know where you keep your ketch. It was night and there was very little moon. With Hubbard in that black rubber suit, I don’t think your friend Willie’s eyes were good enough to see him do much of anything.”
Such reasoning was hard to deny and Sanford did not try. “That could be right. But Willie was watching the ketch and he could see the spar against the sky. He saw the spar swing like a pendulum and there was no boat passing to make a swell so Willie figured the only way the spar could move like that was because somebody put some weight on one rail, like a man climbing aboard.”
This time there was no rebuttal and he said: “Right after that Willie saw the dinghy again. It was coming across the river. It was white and he could see it. He says it came alongside the ketch. A few seconds later there was some light in the cabin. He thought maybe someone had struck a match. He was still wondering about it when he saw the dinghy push off. It came down midstream and this time he watched it. He says it circled round the lighthouse and headed right for the houseboat. He couldn’t see who was rowing. It was too dark for him to be sure. But”—Sanford hesitated and decided a small lie would do no harm—“he’s sure it was a man who was doing the rowing; a white man and on the big side.”
“Balls.”
George Breck had made his drink and now he came back to perch on the arm of the divan. His thin mouth shaped a small and twisted grin and he gave the word a profane and contemptuous connotation.
“Do you think I’m making this up?”
“Some of it,” Breck said. “What I mean is, I have to go along with Aldington. The police down here are not exactly stupes. If you know this guy Willie, so do they. They know who he is and where he works and what he does. I say they’ve already questioned Willie, and plenty. If he gave them the story you just told us they’d be here now.”
“Right,” Sanford said, “except for one thing. Willie has a grudge against the police. He didn’t tell us why but he gave the impression that they’ve given him some trouble in the past. To the police Willie was deaf, dumb, and blind. But the next time around he’ll talk because I asked him to and he’s a friend of mine.”
He looked at Fred Cushman, who had moved away from the card table and was making two drinks at the side-bar. As he started back to give one of the glasses to Blanche Hubbard, Sanford decided that the only way to get at the truth was to offer some accusations and see if he could make them stick. The logical point of attack seemed to be Cushman and when the man finally met his glance he delivered his opening thrust.
“It looks like you’re elected.”
There was no immediate reply as Cushman delivered Blanche’s drink, took time to sample his own, and then came back to a chair near the divan. He put the glass down on an end table and took a cigarette from a lacquered box, his broad face impassive and his amber eyes inscrutable behind the brown-rimmed spectacles. He got a light, inhaled, and blew smoke in a small thin stream.
“If what you say about your friend Willie is true,” he said finally, “how come you’re out here now instead of the police?”
“I telephoned the sup
erintendent before Laura and I came out here,” Sanford said. “But believe it or not he and the Commissioner are having tea at Government House. I have an idea he might be out later but I thought I’d like to get something straight in my own mind. After all, somebody left Hubbard’s body on my boat and his blood type says he was killed there. I’m not so sure I’m clean on this thing yet with the official minds. I’d like to get off the hook.”
“So what it comes down to,” Cushman said slowly, “is that it’s Willie’s word against mine.”
“Except that Willie has no axe to grind. Did you know what Hubbard had in mind and plan your little trip in the dinghy ahead of time, or did you just happen to see him in the frogman’s suit and figure it out for yourself?”
Again there was no reply and Sanford kept probing. “You may not have known what Hubbard tried to do to me in New York and Florida but you couldn’t have been as close to him as you are and not have a pretty good idea of why he made this trip to Belize, once you knew I was here. If you saw him in that frogman’s suit—and I say you did—you had to know what he had in mind. There’s just no other way to explain that trip you made in the dinghy … You must have hated him quite a while.”
“Yeah,” Cushman said quietly. “For a long time.”
“You had to resent the things he had done to you or you wouldn’t have tried to leave him. When you did try he framed you. He took your girl. You were in love with her, weren’t you? Maybe you still are. Maybe you couldn’t stand to see what Hubbard was doing to her any longer. Now she stands a chance of getting her share of twenty or thirty million bucks so maybe Aldington was right. Maybe Hubbard was getting ready to kiss her good-bye when he got back to New York and you decided now was the time to do something about it. Is that the way it was, Cushman?”
Cushman twisted his bulky torso in the chair, reached for his glass, and swallowed some of his drink. He put his cigarette out and looked across the room at Blanche Hubbard, who had forgotten her own glass and was now on her feet, a new paleness showing through the mottled skin of her face, the blue eyes wide and mirroring now a different kind of sickness.
“Fred,” she said, a quiet agony warping her words “Please, Fred. You don’t have to talk.”
“It’s all right, honey,” Cushman said. “Don’t worry about it. They’re not going to hang me yet”
He stood up and gave a hitch to his wrinkled cord trousers. He ran fingers through his sandy hair and apparently found it wet with perspiration because he took out a handkerchief and wiped his hand. He began to pace back and forth at that end of the room and now he looked again at Sanford.
“Blanche and King had gone upstairs last night,” he said. “I got my sandwich and took it up but I didn’t go to bed. I stepped out on the deck—the lights had gone off by then—and King didn’t see me when he came out of his room in that frogman’s suit. I knew who it was—this was just after Laura had gone back to the hotel in the outboard—because Blanche was never what you would call the aquatic type. I watched him move to the end of the boat and climb over the rail and let himself down to the deck below. And you’re right,” he added, and stopped pacing.
“I knew what he was up to—I couldn’t see any other Way to figure it—and it didn’t take me long to make up my mind. I remembered the dinghy and I knew I could row to your boat a lot quicker than he could swim it. As soon as he pushed off I hurried down and got into the dinghy and I didn’t worry about him catching sight of me because I knew he’d be too low in the water to see much of anything.”
He resumed his slow pacing and what he did then was so unexpected that no one made a move to stop him. In recalling the incident, Sanford realized that no one could have prevented the move because the distance between them was too great. But the amazing thing was the unhurried way Cushman stopped in front of the gun cabinet and, ignoring the rifles behind the glass door, reached down, opened a drawer, and took out a heavy-looking automatic pistol. Still not hurrying, he pulled back the slide enough to see that there was a shell in the chamber and then, not pointing it at anyone but holding it ready, he came back to his chair and perched on the arm.
“I’ve got a plan,” he said before anyone could recover enough to protest. “Nobody has to get hurt. But before I start working on it I want you all to understand why I wanted to kill King.” He rested the gun on one thigh and said: “I guess I’ve been a loser all my life, with no one to blame but myself. Lately”—he looked at the others—“I’ve been with a company of losers, and that goes for all of you. Sure there were times now and then when I wanted to kill him; probably would have if I had the guts and thought I could get away with it. That time he framed me was one. But mostly it was what he had done to Blanche that made me hate him. She never drank when I knew her. One cocktail. Maybe one highball—more to be a good sport than anything else—if we were out nightclubbing. But she was in love with King at first and she wanted to do everything she could to please him.
“He was the one who started her. He always was a steady drinker and he insisted that she keep up with him. She tried, and it might have been all right if he had loved her and shown her any kindness or consideration or understanding. Later I guess the drinking became a crutch and an antidote for her loneliness and unhappiness and the knowledge that there was no way to hurt him. King wasn’t the kind you could hurt. He could and did get violent now and then but you couldn’t hurt him in the sense that most of us can be hurt. You heard her say that she tried to kick the habit and twice went to a place in Westchester for two or three weeks. The other two times, when he wanted her out of the way for a while, he took her there himself.”
He took a long breath and let it out slowly. “It wasn’t money, Howard,” he said to Aldington. “Or any fear of Blanche’s being kicked out with a seventy-five-thousand dollar payment. It was worse than that … The night before last I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I went out on deck in my pajamas and robe and slippers. I found Blanche leaning over the rail at one end. King had taken on quite a package before we all went to bed and he had slapped Blanche around a bit and told her what the score was going to be. She was still crying and she finally told me about it.”
He took another breath and said: “He had no intention of getting rid of her. He still wanted that protection against other women you heard about. What he intended to do when we got back to New York, and he could have with the weight he carried, was to commit her again to some sanatorium and keep her there indefinitely. I could have killed him right then,” he added, an undertone of viciousness showing in his voice for the first time, “but it was the same old story with me. No guts. Then, last night when I saw him in that frogman’s suit, I knew I’d never get a better chance.”
Again there was a silence and this time Sanford was ready to believe everything he had heard. He understood this man a little bit better now. He thought he could appreciate the motivation behind the desire to kill. He glanced at the gun but somehow he was not too concerned about it and now he looked at Laura, who still stood beside him. He reached out to squeeze her arm.
“Why don’t you sit down?” he said and led her to the divan on the left. “I’ll see if I can get you a drink.”
“I don’t want a drink,” Laura said, but she sat down even as she refused his suggestion. Blanche was still standing, eyes fixed on Cushman, but when Sanford took her arm to bring her over next to Laura she did not protest. On the other divan George Breck cleared his throat.
“So what’s the gun for, Big Boy?” he asked sardonically.
“Just to make sure I get a head start,” Cushman said.
“Is that part of the plan you mentioned?” Aldington said.
“Yeah,” Cushman said. “It goes like this, Howard. The first thing,” he added as he backed past the open study door, “is to make sure you can’t get in touch with the police right off.” He stopped at the table holding the ship-to-shore radio, reached in back of the set, and tugged at something inside. When he finished he said: “That
ought to foul things up for a half hour or so.”
He came forward again, circling as he moved toward the main entrance. “Because I couldn’t be sure what might happen I did some checking on those two cruisers tied up here. Both of them have extra fuel tanks installed and the Rex I is not only carrying a full load but has some provisions and plenty of water on board.”
He stopped at one side of the doorway and now Sanford saw that a keyboard had been fastened there. There were several hooks on the wooden plaque and Cushman, still watching those in front of him, reached behind him and groped for two sets of keys that hung on a little chain together with a round identification disc.
“I can toss the keys to the outboard over the side when I leave,” he said. “I’ll take the keys to the Rex II with me. I don’t think there’s anything in these waters that can match those two cruisers for speed and by the time someone can row that dinghy ashore and the police can get their launch under way I’ll be long gone.”
“So where do you go from here?” Breck asked in the same sardonic tone.
“With the extra fuel I’ll have plenty of choice. Yucátan would be a cinch but I think I’ll head south for Guatemala. Maybe Santo Tomas or Puerto Barrios. I read somewhere that Guatemala has been feuding with England and the local government of British Honduras for a long time now. The Guatemalans think this colony should be theirs. What I mean is, the feeling isn’t too good. So I have an idea it will be one hell of a long time before anyone from here is going to extradite me once I pull into a Guatemalan port.”
Blanche Hubbard was on her feet again before he finished and now, looking very purposeful and glancing neither right nor left, she started for the staircase in the right corner of the room.
“Blanche!” Cushman called sharply. “Blanche!” he said again when she continued on her way. “What’s the idea? Where you going?”
She was halfway up the stairs by that time and now she turned and said: “I’ll be back, Fred. Wait for me. Don’t you dare move.”
With Intent to Kill Page 15
