Death on the Waterfront

by Robert Archer

  Mrs. Cox, the Stevenson’s buxom “housekeeper, cook, and conscience,” as the doctor called her, answered Stern’s discreet ring and ushered him into the spacious front hall. Her brown face beamed with pleasure as she shook his extended hand.

  “You’re quite a stranger, Mr. Stern,” she said in her meticulous, slightly British West Indian speech. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  “I’ll say the same”—Stern grinned—“if you promise not to accuse me of having one of your dinners as an ulterior motive.”

  The Negro woman thanked him with a quiet dignity that did not quite hide the twinkle in her eye. As she turned to hang up his coat and hat Stern asked: “Where is everybody?”

  “Miss O’Callighan is downstairs in the game room. A gentleman by the name of Jackson is with her. Mr. Gordon, another visitor, is out on the back porch with Dr. Stevenson, helping the doctor look for his overshoes. Miss O’Callighan introduced the two young men as murder suspects.”

  “That’s exactly what they are,” said Stern solemnly.

  “Really.” Mrs. Cox made a small grimace. “I thought it was just one of Maeve’s unladylike jests.”

  Stern’s face showed only polite interest, but he chuckled inwardly at this remark. It was one of Mrs. Cox’s oft repeated complaints that, having come to the Stevenson household only ten years before, she had arrived too late to make a lady out of Maeve. This attitude was entirely sincere and without the slightest presumption, being the result of a bit of British priggishness that not even ten years’ association with Dr. Stevenson had been able to shake, coupled with deep affection for both the doctor and his niece. In the give-and-take of this unorthodox household the attitude had long since been accepted as a norm, and even Blackie had learned to take it in stride, though she was still susceptible to a little ribbing from that direction. Stern filed the remark away for reference as he followed Mrs. Cox down the hall.

  The thick carpet of the stairway leading down to the game room made Stern’s descent practically noiseless, and he paused on the bottom step and listened shamelessly to the conversation that came from an old sofa drawn up before the fireplace at the end of the room. From where he stood he could see Jackson’s head and broad shoulders and the sleek black of Maeve’s page-boy bob over the back of the sofa.

  “I wish I’d never seen you,” Jackson was saying ungallantly. “What good does that do?” objected Maeve. “You have, and I have, and here we are.”

  Jackson turned and looked down at her, and although Stern could not see the arm it was evident even from where he stood that it was paradoxically tightening about her waist. “But it’s impossible,” he said. “I’m a trade-union organizer and I’ve got to go on being one but I can’t ask you——”

  “Wait a minute.” Maeve put up a hand and touched his face.

  “If you’re going to tell me you can’t ask me to marry you, you better think again. You can’t love me and leave me, mister.”

  “Holy mackerel,” breathed Jackson. “All I did was kiss you.”

  “All! I like’ that. Anyway, you didn’t kiss me; I kissed you. Like this.” The hand that she had raised to his face slid around his neck and drew him down to her. Maeve demonstrated convincingly. At last she drew away and leaned forward, staring into the fire. She began whistling “The Boys of Wexford.”

  “Stop that,” said Jackson. “If there’s one thing I hate it’s a whistling woman.”

  Maeve interrupted her whistling long enough to say, “You’ll get used to it, darling. Now shut up. I’m trying to think.”

  Jackson made a move to rise from the sofa, but she caught him and pulled him down. “All right, dear, I won’t whistle if you don’t like it. I won’t even try to think. After all, what is there to think about? We might as well admit we’re stuck with each other.”

  “Do you know how much my job pays?”

  “I don’t and I don’t care. I’ve been educated to look after myself. I don’t want you to support me—only love me. And I know what I’m letting myself in for too. You’ll be beaten up and put in jail, and we’ll probably be run out of town now and then. So what? If it’s okay for you it’s okay for me, too, my sweet.” Jackson persisted half-heartedly. “What will your uncle say?”

  “Good riddance. And he’ll mean it too. He’ll probably feel sorry for you and try to warn you before it’s too late. Promise me you won’t listen to him, love.”

  Stern had seen and heard more than enough, and he turned and tiptoed quietly up the stairs. He might have stamped his way up for all the two on the sofa would have heard—or cared, probably. It was funny—how long had these two known each other—self-sufficient, unsentimental Maeve and Jackson, the leader of tough realistic longshoremen? This was Saturday. They had met Thursday morning in an abandoned basement in the shadow of two brutal murders. Two days. Not once until today had they been alone together and yet here they were in another basement (strange, how basements and cellars had kept popping up these last two days) “stuck with each other,” as Maeve had expressed it, and planning to make the best of it. And he, Stern, had known Maeve ever since...

  The assistant D. A. with the brilliant future shook himself somewhat as a dog does upon emerging from water. Then, his face blank and his eyes expressionless behind their glasses, he stepped out of the little alcove in which the stairs were set and strolled toward the living room at the front of the house.

  Dr. Stevenson’s amazingly vibrant tones were coming from the living room, and Stern found the doctor delivering a lecture on liberalism with Whitey Gordon, an interested audience of one. The doctor’s goatee wagged violently, punctuating his remarks.

  “Most leadership uses liberalism only when it’s expedient, and most constituents, whether they’re the citizens generally or the rank and file, as you call them, understand neither the functions of intelligent leadership nor those of the rank and file. There’s too much talk of public servants and that sort of rot. A leader’s function is to lead, to take responsibility and make decisions, and the citizens’ task is to gauge the leader’s actions in the light of an intelligent awareness of the problems to be faced. There’s more discipline required in a democracy than there is in a dictatorship because there’s more freedom in a democracy. And that’s not a paradox, young man.”

  The speaker glanced up and saw Stern standing in the doorway. He hopped to his feet spryly and came forward with outstretched hand. “Come in, my boy, come in. I didn’t know you had gotten here yet. You’ll be interested in this discussion. Whitey, here, has been telling me some of the problems of his union.”

  “It sounded as though you were telling him,” said Stern slyly. “Well, perhaps, I was.” The doctor’s cheerful admission was accompanied by a twinkle that belied his humble tone. “Blackie keeps telling me that I’m like all reformers—I lecture instead of listen. Tell me, son”—he turned to Whitey—“have I been lecturing you?”

  “And how,” said Whitey. “But don’t get me wrong; I liked it.” They all laughed. Stern poured rye from a decanter on the table, without waiting to be asked. He felt as much at home in the doctor’s house as he did in his own apartment.

  “What a lawyer you would have made,” he said. “I wish I could hypnotize a juror like that.”

  “Listen and learn, I always say.” Whitey lifted his glass and drank unconcernedly. “What’s the news from the front, general?”

  “Of course!” exclaimed the doctor. “I had quite forgotten those murders. What are the latest developments? Have you caught the scoundrel yet? You know, my boy, I’ve been following the case very closely in the papers, and it seems to me that the police are being even more stupid than usual. Now I have a theory——”

  “Whoa!” laughed Stern. “What about your trade-union discussion, Doctor? I’m sure that would be more interesting. I’m a little fed up on murder myself.”

  “You should know better than to think you can put me off that way,” said Dr. Stevenson severely. “I’ve been waiting pa
tiently to discuss the case with you, and you’re not going to get out of it. First, suppose you tell us what you have discovered and whom you suspect, if anyone, and what you are doing about it.”

  Stern sat down and gave the doctor a wry grin. “That’s a pretty big order, isn’t it?” he temporized. “Especially with one of the prime suspects right here in the room.”

  “Who? Me?” Whitey turned wide, innocent eyes on the assistant D. A.

  Dr. Stevenson said: “Humph. Pay no attention to him, young man. He’s probably laboring under that asinine delusion fostered by amateur-fiction detectives that everyone from the detective himself to the parlormaid has to be viewed as possible murderers. He might as well have called me a suspect.”

  “You’d make a honey if I could figure out a motive for you,” said Stern. “Let’s see now. How about this? We could say you killed Riorden under the mistaken impression that he was the stool pigeon; then you killed the dishonest employer and his equally dishonest secretary. The method used to dispose of your victims may have been a little messy, considering your age and fastidiousness, but the motive’s on the up-and-up. You took the law in your own hands in the interests of democracy and clean government, suffering, of course, under a temporary aberration brought on by too many gall-bladder operations. The worst you could get would be confinement in one of your own sanatoria.”

  The doctor smiled. “Hitler’s Gestapo never thought up a worse punishment,” he said ruefully. “I wish, my boy, that you’d be serious though. I really want to know what progress you’re making.”

  “I tried to be serious about Mr. Gordon here,” retorted Stern, “and see what it got me.” He sighed, took a sip of his drink, and leaned back in his chair. “But I’ll try again,” he said. “I might as well. I know I won’t get any peace until I give you a demonstration of my well-known powers of deduction. Incidentally, you must remember that my methods bear not the slightest resemblance to that of the famous Le Doc. They have in them nothing of the scientific assurance of the Police Judiciare or even of Scotland Yard and its bulldog meticulousness. They have been bred, if you will pardon the implied indelicacy, by Perry Mason out of Hildegarde Withers.”

  Dr. Stevenson could stand just so much and no more. “Out of Alice in Wonderland, you mean, you young idiot. I warn you, if you continue this sort of drooling there’ll be no dinner——”

  “Ha!” said Stern. “You overstep yourself, Doctor. I have friends and allies in this house. Mrs. Cox welcomed me with open arms.”

  “Would you care to put that alliance to the test?” asked the doctor, ominously advancing toward the hall door.

  Stern held up a hand as though to ward off a blow. “Please, if you insist on taking me seriously I’ll be serious. I promise.”

  The doctor’s expression was both amused and suspicious. “You,” he said, turning back from the door, “had better.”

  Whitey Gordon had listened to this exchange in silent but open-mouthed astonishment. Stern looked at him and laughed. “Brother Gordon thinks we’re nuts,” he said.

  “I don’t blame him.” The doctor sat down and continued to eye Stern severely. “Will you get down to cases?”

  “Not cases,” said Stern. “It’s really all one case, you know. The Case of the Longshoreman’s Hook, we call it in the department. The other murders—you have deduced, of course, my dear doctor, that Cosimo was murdered, despite the reticence of the newspapers—are merely outgrowths of the Riorden killing. The motive for all the murders remains the same, and the same person committed all three.”

  “How do you arrive at that?” asked the doctor.

  “By the simple necessity of having to arrive somewhere if we’re going to have any progress at all.” Stern warmed to his subject. “The trouble with these murders has been that there is no evidence in the ordinary sense and no clues that mean what they pretend to. All the clues in the first murder pointed to Jackson. But, by a simple process of logic, or perhaps I should say dialectics, those clues could be made to point in the opposite direction: away from Jackson toward Jackson’s opposition. Now Jackson’s opposition was the Weller-Murdock combine, but Murdock himself has been killed, and the methods of the murderer are psychologically incompatible with Weller—if methods can be incompatible. Anyway, you see what I mean.”

  “I don’t at all,” interrupted the doctor. “The theory of which I spoke to you a while ago accounts for that seeming incompatibility. I believe Murdock and Weller together planned Riorden’s murder. Obviously they used the longshoreman’s hook as a weapon to frame Jackson. Then, for some reason, they quarreled, and Weller or one of his henchmen killed Murdock. The woman Cosimo was killed because she had some knowledge of Weller’s guilt. I don’t see anything illogical about that theory.”

  “Very logical,” said Stern, “and I’d be inclined to agree with you if Murdock and Cosimo had been shot to death or beaten with a club or some other forthright method but I can’t see Weller or one of his morons strangling Murdock with his own curtain cord and devising the subtle method of Miss Cosimo’s demise. Their minds simply don’t work that way. If you’ll let me go on, Doctor——”

  The doctor nodded. “You haven’t disproved my theory,” he insisted, “but you know a lot more about the case than I do. You talk, and I’ll listen.”

  “Thanks.” Stern finished his drink and lit a cigarette. “The elimination of Murdock and Weller as suspects left only one enemy of Jackson in the union—the mysterious stool pigeon—and the stool pigeon was, in all probability, one of the remaining six men on the Negotiating Committee. Here again you may demur because there was no proof that the stool pigeon was on the committee, but as Captain Nicholson would say, ‘You have to begin somewhere.’ So we began with those six men.”

  “Just a minute,” said the doctor. “I hate to keep interrupting, but there’s another possibility. Not that I think it merits much consideration, but how about the butler—Powers is his name, isn’t it?”

  “You’re right again,” said Stern. “Powers has to be taken into consideration, but it’s difficult to see where he had either motive or opportunity. The motive would have to be pretty far-fetched unless there’s something we haven’t uncovered at all, and Powers had an alibi for the first murder.”

  “You mean Weller,” said the doctor, pulling at his goatee, “but isn’t it conceivable that Weller would protect Powers? There may be some link between them beyond the fact that Powers was Murdock’s butler.”

  “It’s possible,” said Stern. “I never eliminated Powers and I can’t now, especially after what happened last night. I’ll say this much: either Powers lied to me last night, or the man he saw was the murderer. If Powers did lie, then he’s probably the murderer himself, and I’m the world’s prize sap. And I have to admit that everything depends on whether Powers lied or told the truth.”

  “But how could Powers have got into Cosimo’s house to turn off the gas?” asked Whitey. “Or how could anyone else for that matter? We were there all the time the dicks were off guard.”

  “You figured the gas was turned off, did you?” asked Stern. “That’s pretty smart, Whitey.”

  “Hell,” said Whitey. He looked at Dr. Stevenson and said, “I’m sorry; I forgot.”

  The doctor waved a thin white hand. “Don’t give it a thought, my boy.”

  “What I was going to say,” Whitey continued; “I noticed the meter was going when we were down in the basement. That meant the gas was on, so all somebody had to do was turn it off and then turn it on again after the flame was put out.”

  “Smart,” said Stern again, “very smart. But I’m not going to tell you how the murderer got into the house. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.” He paused and then turned back to Dr. Stevenson.

  “Admitting that Powers is a possible suspect,” he said, “doesn’t eliminate the others—the men on the committee. Any one of them could be the stool pigeon and therefore any one of them could have a motive. They all had alibis, w
hich in itself was a little suspicious. But there wasn’t any more evidence against one of them than there was against another, so the problem was to find out whose alibi was phony and whose was real.

  “Burke, however, seemed to be the only one placed at the scene of the second murder, so I started to find him. I was disappointed when I heard his story because I had hoped that he would have some more positive evidence as to who had killed Murdock. All Burke could do was to explain his presence at the Murdock house. His story sounded logical, and it could have been true, but I wasn’t sure until last night. Burke was in jail when Cosimo was killed, and that’s the best alibi I’ve heard yet. Even that’s not infallible if you want to indulge in mental gymnastics, but I’ll say right now that Burke’s the most unlikely suspect I’ve got.”

  “Who’s the most likely?” asked the old doctor shrewdly.

  Stern grinned. “Suppose I put it this way,” he said. “Up to last night there were five on my preferred list. Two of them were sort of second-class suspects—primarily, because I don’t believe Murdock would have picked a Negro or a little Italian who speaks broken English as a stool pigeon.”

  Whitey Gordon opened his mouth to speak, but Stern stopped him. “Don’t interrupt, Whitey,” he said. “I’m getting tired of talking and I want to finish up.”

  “I couldn’t discard the Negro or the Italian, however, because they were members of the union committee. I kept them in mind and concentrated on the other three.”

  “Three?” said Whitey.

  “I told you not to interrupt,” said Stern. “I said three and I mean three. I’ll explain in a minute.”

  Stern’s cigarette was still smoldering in the ash tray before him, and he leaned forward and tapped it out carefully with his thumb.