The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  He took pains to stamp his feet while he walked away. By the time Sail got the effects of the flashlight out of his eyes, the officer was out of sight.

  Sail held his hands close to his chest, fingers spread, palms in. There was barely enough breeze to make coolness against one side of his face. The music on the moonlit sailboat stopped. The barker was silent. Over in the Bayfront Park outdoor auditorium a political speaker was viewing something with alarm. After he had felt his hands tremble for a while, Sail went to his boat.

  The boat, Sail, rode spring lines at the dock end. She had a thirty-four-foot waterline. Twelve-foot beam, two-foot draft with centerboard up, seven with it down. She was rigged to be sailed by one man, all lines coming aft.

  The interior was teak, with inset panels of red sanders, fustic and green ebony, all hand-carved by a man who had died in 1811. How Samuel McIntire panels came to be in the bugeye, Sail did not know, but he had been offered a thousand dollars for each year of age for the boat and was hungry broke when he turned it down. It was not a money matter. Some men love dogs.

  Sail slapped the fish into a kettle in the galley and, hurrying, put most of his right arm through a porthole, grasped a line, took half hitches off a cleat, and let the line go. The line snaked quietly down into the water, following a sinking live-box and its contents of live fish and crawfish.

  Sail looked out of the hatch.

  The young policeman had come quietly back to where the fish had bled and was using his flashlight. He squatted. After a while, he approached the dock end, moseying. Too carefully. When his flashlight brightened the bugeye’s black masts and black sail covers, Sail was in the galley, making enough noise cutting up the fish to let the cop know where he was and what he was doing.

  Sail waited four or five minutes before putting his head out of the hatch. The cop had gone somewhere silently.

  Sail was still looking and listening for the policeman when he heard the man’s curse and the woman’s cry, short, sharp. The man’s curse was something of a bray of surprise. The sounds came out of Bayfront Park, between the waterfront yacht basin and Biscayne Boulevard. Sail, not stirring, but watching the park, saw a man running among the palms. Then the young policeman and his flashlight were also moving among the palms.

  During the next five minutes, the policeman and his flash were not still long enough for him to have found anything.

  Sail stripped naked, working fast once more. His body was rounding, the hair on it golden and long, but not thick. He looked at his belly as if he didn’t like it, slapped it and sucked it in. The act was more a habit than a thought. He put on black jersey swim trunks.

  Standing in the companion looking around, Sail scratched his chest and tugged the hair on it. His fingers twisted a little rattail of the chest hair. No one was in sight. He got over the side without being too conspicuous about it.

  The water had odor and the usual things floated in it. He swam under the dock, searching. The tide was high slack, almost, but still coming in just a little, so things in the water were not moving away.

  The pier had been built stout because of the hurricanes. There was a net of cross timbers underneath, and anything falling off the south side of the dock would drift against them. Sail found what he was seeking on the third dive.

  He kept in the dark places as he swam away with it.

  The little island—artificial, put there when they dredged the harbor—was darkly silent when Sail swam laboriously toward it. Pine trees on the island had been bent by the hurricanes, and some torn up. The weeds did not seem to have been affected.

  Sail tried not to splash as he shoved through the shallows to the sand beach. He towed the Greek underwater. Half a dozen crabs and some seaweed clung to the Greek when Sail carried him into the pines and weeds. The knife sticking in the Greek, and what it had done, did not help. The pines scratched and the weeds crunched under the Greek when Sail laid him down. It was very dark.

  Pulpy skins in a billfold were probably greenbacks, and stiffer, smaller rectangles, business cards. Silver coins, a pocketknife, two clips for an automatic. The automatic holster empty under the Greek’s left armpit. From inside the Greek’s coat lining, another rectangle, four inches wide, five times as long, a quarter of an inch thick. It felt like hardwood. The Greek’s wristwatch still ticked.

  Sail put the business cards and the object from the coat lining inside his swim trunks, and was down on his knees cleaning his hands in the sand when the situation got the best of him. By the time he finished being sick, he had sweated profusely.

  The water felt cold as he swam back the way he had come—under the docks and close to the seawall—with the Greek.

  Sail clung to Sail’s chain bobstay until all the water had run off him that wanted to run off, then swung aboard and moved along the deck, keeping below the wharf level, and dropped down the hatch. He started to take the bathing suit off, and the girl said, “Puh-lease.”

  She swung her legs off the forward bunk. Light from the kerosene gimbal lamp did not reach all of her. The feet were small in dark blue sandals which showed red-enameled toenails. Her legs had not been shaved recently, but were nice.

  Pink starting on Sail’s chest and spreading made his tan look dark and uncomfortable, and he chewed an imaginary something between his large white front teeth as he squinted at the girl. He seemed about to say something two or three different times, but didn’t, and went into the stateroom and got out of the swim trunks. The shadow-wrapped rest of her did not look bad as he passed. He tied a fish sinker to the trunks and dropped them through a porthole into the bay, which was dredged three fathoms deep here. He put on his scrubbed black clothes.

  The girl had moved into the light. The rest of her was interesting.

  “You probably think I’m a tart,” she said. “I’m not, and I wish you’d let me stay here awhile longer. I have a good reason.”

  Sail scratched behind his right ear, raised and lowered his eyebrows at her, stalked self-consciously into the galley, pumped freshwater in a glass and threw it on the galley floor, then stepped in it. His feet now left wet tracks such as they had made when he came aboard. He seemed acutely conscious that his efforts to make this seem a perfectly sensible procedure were exaggerated. His hands upset a round bottle, but he caught it. He set it down, picked it up again, asked:

  “Drink?”

  She had crossed her legs. Her skirt was split. “That would be nice,” she said.

  Sail, his back to her, made more noise than necessary in rattling bottles and glasses and pinking an opener into a can of condensed milk. He mixed two parts of gin, one of crème de cacao, one of condensed milk. He put four drops from a small green bottle in one drink and gave that one to the girl, holding it out a full arm length, as if he didn’t feel well acquainted enough to get closer, or didn’t want to frighten her away.

  They sipped.

  She said, “It’s not bad without ice, really.”

  “I did have an electric ice box,” he told her, as if excusing the lack of ice. “But it and this salt air didn’t mix so well.”

  Her skirt matched her blue pumps, and her yellow jersey was a contrast. Her long hair was mahogany, and done in a bun over each ear, so that her long oval face had a pure, sweet look. She drank again. Her blue leather handbag started to slip out of the hollow of her crossed legs and she caught it quickly.

  Sail put his glass down and went around straightening things which really didn’t need it. He picked up the News off the engine box. It was in two parts. He handed one part to the girl. That seemed to press the button. She threw the paper down and grabbed her blue purse with both hands.

  “You don’t need to be so goddamn smart about it!” she said through her teeth.

  She started to get up, but her knee joints did not have strength, and she slid off the bench and sat hard on the black battleship linoleum. Sail moved fast and got his plump hands on the blue purse as she clawed it open. A small bright revolver fell out of the purs
e as they had a tug-of-war over it.

  “Blick!” the girl squealed.

  Blick and a revolver came out of the oilskin locker. The gun was a small bright twin to the girl’s. Blick’s Panama fell off slick mahogany hair, and disarranged oilskins fell down in the locker behind him. Blick had his lips rolled in until he seemed to have no lips. He looked about old enough to have fought in the last war.

  “Want it shot off?” he gritted.

  Sail jerked his hand away from the girl’s purse as if a bullet was already headed for it. He put his hands up as high as the cabin carlins and ceiling would allow. His mouth and eyes were round and uneasy, and the upper part of his stomach jumped a little with each beat of his heart, moving the polo shirt fabric.

  Blick gave Sail a quick search. He was rough. His lips were still rolled in, and a sleeve was still jammed up on one arm, above a drop of blood that was not yet dry.

  The girl started to get up, couldn’t. She said, “Blick!” weakly.

  Blick, watching Sail, threw at her, “You hadda be a sucker and drink with him!”

  The girl’s lips worked over some words before sounds started coming. “… was … I … know he … it doped.”

  Blick gritted at Sail, “Bud, she’s my sis, and if she don’t come out of that, I wouldn’t wanta be you. Help me get her goin’!”

  Blick dropped his sister’s purse and gun in his coat pocket, got his Panama, then took the girl’s right arm, letting Sail look into the little gun’s muzzle all the while. “Help me, bud!”

  Sail took his hands down. Sweat wetness was coming through his washed black polo shirt. He watched Blick’s eyes and face instead of watching the gun. They walked the girl up the companion and onto the dock. Blick put his hand and small revolver into a trouser pocket.

  “We’re tight. Stagger!”

  They staggered.

  The orchestra on the moonlit excursion boat was still trying to entice customers for the moonlight sail. Yacht sailors, some of them with a load, stood in a knot at the end of the lunch stand, and out of the knot came the chug of the slot machines. Blick was tall enough to glare over his sister’s head at Sail. His glare was not bright.

  “What’d you give her?”

  Sail wet his lips. The sweat had come out on his forehead enough to start running.

  “Truth serum.”

  “You louse!”

  Two sailors, one without his shirt, went past, headed for the slot machines.

  Blick said, “Bud, I think I got you figured. You’re a guy Andopolis rung in. He’d still try to get a boat and another guy.”

  Sail squinted out of one eye. Perspiration was stinging the other.

  “Andopolis was the one who didn’t digest the knife?”

  “You ain’t that dumb!”

  “Was he?”

  “You know that was Abel!”

  Sail said, “Believe it or not, I’m guessing right across the board. Abel was to do the dirty work while you and the girl hung around on shore. Abel tried to take something from Andopolis on the dock. Abel had something that had something to do with whatever he wanted. He tapped it inside his coat as he talked. Abel got knifed, let out a bellow, and went off the dock into the drink. Andopolis ran after he knifed Abel. You headed him off in the park. He got away and ran some more. You did a sneak to my hooker while the cop looked around.”

  “Did you guess all that?” Blick sneered.

  They were nearing Biscayne Boulevard and traffic. On the News building tower, the neon sign alternately spelled WIOD and NEWS. Sail took a deep breath and tried to watch Blick’s face.

  “I’d like to know what Abel wanted.”

  Blick said nothing. They scuffed over the sidewalk, and Blick, walking as if he did not feel as if he weighed much, seemed to think to a conclusion which pleased him.

  “Hell, Nola. Maybe Andopolis didn’t spill to our bud, here.”

  Nola did not answer. She seemed about asleep. Blick pinched her, slapped her, and that awakened her somewhat.

  A police radio car was parked at the corner of Biscayne and Blick did not see it in time. He said, as if he didn’t give a damn, “Stagger, bud! This should be good.”

  Sail shoved a little to steer the girl to the side of the walk farthest from the prowl car. Blick shoved back to straighten them up. The result was that they passed close enough to the police machine to reach it with one good jump. Sail shoved Blick and Nola as hard as he could, using the force of the shove to propel himself toward the car. He grabbed the spare tire at the back and used it to help himself around the machine to shelter.

  Blick’s revolver went off three times about as rapidly as a revolver could fire. Both cops in the car brayed, and fell out of the car onto Sail.

  Blick carried Nola to a taxicab forty feet down the street, and dumped her in. He stood beside the hack, aimed, and air began leaving the left front tire of the police car. The cops started shooting in a rattled way. Blick leaped into the taxi. An instant later, the hack driver fell out of his own machine, holding his head. The taxi took off. The two cops sprang up, and piled into their machine, one yelling:

  “What about this one in the street?”

  “Hell, he’s dead.”

  The cops drove after the taxi, one shooting, his partner having trouble steering with the flat tire.

  Sail, for a fat man, ran away from there very fast.

  Sail planted his heaving chest against the lunch stand counter, held on to the edge with both hands, and stood there a while, twice looking down at his knees and moving them experimentally, as if suspecting something was wrong with them. The young man, who looked as youths in lunch stands somehow always manage to look, came over and swiped the counter with his towel.

  “What’ve you got in cans?” Sail asked him, then stopped the answering recital on the third name. Beer suds overflowed the can before it hit the counter. Sail drank the first can and most of the next in big gulps, but slowed down on the third and seemed tied up in thought. He scraped at the tartar on a tooth with a fingernail, then started chewing the nail and got it down to the quick, then looked at it as if surprised. He absently put three dimes on the counter.

  “Forty-five,” the youth corrected.

  Sail added a half and said, “Some nickels out of that.”

  He carried the nickels over to the mob around the slot machines. He stood around with his hands in his pockets. He tried whistling, and on the second attempt got a good result, after which he looked more satisfied with himself. His mouth warped wryly as he watched the play at the two machines. He took his nickels out, looked at them, firmly put them back, but took them out a bit later. When there was a lull, he shoved up to the slot machines.

  The one-armed bandit gave him a lemon and two bars, with another bar just showing.

  “You almost made it,” someone said. “A little more and you’d have made the jackpot.”

  “Brother,” Sail said, “you must be a mind reader.”

  He backed up, waited, still giving some attention to his private thoughts, until he got a chance at the other machine. It showed a bar, a lemon, a bar. Sail rubbed his forearms, looked thoughtful and walked off.

  A telephone booth was housed at the end of Pier Four. Sail, when a nickel got a dial tone, dialed the 0, said, “Operator, I believe in giving all telephone operators possible employment, so I never dial a number. Give me police headquarters, please.” He waited for a while after the operator laughed, said, “I want to report an attempted robbery,” then told someone else, “This is Captain Sail of the yacht Sail. A few minutes ago, a man and a woman boarded my boat and marched me away at the point of a gun. I do not know why, except that the man was a drug user. I feel he intended to kill me. There was a police car parked at the corner of Biscayne, and when I broke away and got behind it, the man tried to shoot me, then drove off with the woman in a taxi, and two officers chased them. I want to know what to do now.”

  “It would help if you described the pair.”

&nbs
p; The man and woman Sail described would hardly be recognized as Blick and Nola.

  “Could you come up to headquarters and look over our gallery?” asked the voice.

  “Where is it?”

  “Turn left off Flagler just as you reach the railroad.”

  When Sail left the telephone booth, the youth with the hot-dog-stand look was jerking the handle of one slot machine, then the other, and swearing.

  “Funny both damn things blew up!” he complained.

  Sail walked off wearing a small secret grin.

  Two hours later, Sail pushed back a stack of gallery photographs in police headquarters and said in a tired, wondering voice, “There sure seem to be a lot of crooks in this world. But I don’t see my two.”

  The captain at his elbow said heartily, “You don’t, eh? That’s tough. One of the boys in the radio car got it in the leg. We found the taxi. And we’ll find them two. You can bet on that.” He was a big brown captain with the kind of jaw and eyes that went with his job. He had said his name was Rader.

  Sail rode back to the City Yacht Basin in a taxi, and looked around before he got out. He walked to Sail. While adjusting a spring line, he saw a head shape through the skylight. By craning, he saw the head shape was finished out by a police cap. Sail walked back and forth, changing the spring lines, which did not need changing, and otherwise putting off what might come. Finally, he pulled down his coat sleeves, put on an innocent look and went down.

  One policeman waiting in the cabin was using his tongue to lather a new cigar with saliva. The tongue was coated. He was shaking, not very much, but shaking. His face had some loose red skin on it, and his neck was wattled.

  The second policeman was the young bony cop with the warp in the end of his mouth. He still had his flashlight.

  The third man was putting bottles and test tubes in a scuffed brown leather bag which held more of the same stuff and a microscope off which some of the enamel was worn. He wore a fuzzy gray flannel suit, had rimless, hookless glasses pinched tight on his nose, and had chewed up about half of the cigar in his mouth without lighting it. The cigar was the same kind the other policeman was licking.