Collection of Stories
- Автор: Стерлинг Стюарт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Collection of Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
He remembered how Bill had looked, there on the gravel.
Something prodded him between the shoulder blades. A finger.
“Holy cow! If it isn’t Young Sluefoot!”
It was O’Hare. Beside him, Wiley. Don closed his eyes, opened them again. It was no trick of his imagination. The officers were really there.
While they were smashing down the closet door, while a strangling coughing indicated that Larry, the Gong, was choking on his own powder fumes, Wiley bawled Don out:
“Just because you get some cute notion about where this dame—” the Lieutenant nodded at the willowy figure sitting up with her back against the end of the bed and her front covered with a blanket, “— hangs out—”
“I tried to tell you.” Don dabbed at claw marks on his cheek with his handkerchief. “Annalou remembered the dress this girl wore. She knew it must be brand new.”
“Murder wears the New Look,” O’Hare said, caustically.
“That’s right,” Don inspected his face in the mirror. “Annalou thought maybe the store that sold it would have a record of the customer, if there weren’t too many like it. It was unusual. Rhinestone embroidery gimmicks. So I went around and asked. There’d only been a couple sold, like the one this lady—” he considered a moment, changed it. “—this hellcat, wore last night. One was to a friend of the Mayor’s. The other was sold to Miss Tolman, of this address. So I came here.”
“Just like that,” Wiley said. “Singlehanded. You realize you might have scared them both away? That we might never have nabbed either of them?”
“Never thought about it.” Don admitted.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” O’Hare said. “If we hadn’t come along when we did, no telling who’d be spending that reward dough.”
Don turned. “Did you say — ‘reward’?”
“Five hundred fish,” Wiley said. “Gas companies offered it, tonight. Don’t you ever read the papers?”
“I will from now on,” Don promised. “Especially those furniture ads.”
He went out to call Annalou.
Gunmetal Finish
Popular Detective, September 1949
Chapter I
Junk Boat
Lieutenant Steve Koski leaned against the bulkhead of the pilothouse, motionless as a statue. In the faint glow from the binnacle bowl he looked like a statue, too. A rugged, weather-bronzed figure, Koski wore a melton jacket that was buttoned close around his neck. A beat-up felt, soggy with moisture, was pulled low over his ice-blue eyes that searched the pale opaqueness of the fog.
He didn’t move even when Sergeant Mulcahey spoke on a subject that touched a sore spot.
“I see by the mornin’ papers,” the sergeant said, putting the wheel down a spoke, “that Commissioner Andrews has finally succeeded in breakin’ up that ring of dock thieves which has been nibblin’ away at pier cargoes to the tune of sixty, seventy thousan’ a month. Commissioner, in a pig’s pazook! We know who rounded up them rats!”
“Sure.” Koski continued to squint into the curtain of mist blanketing the Brooklyn waterfront. “But what’s the use beefing, Irish? The Harbor Division’s always been the stepchild of the Police Department. It always will be.”
“It gripes my innards, though,” Mulcahey said. He swung the Vigilant’s bow a point toward the nun buoy at the head of Governor’s Island. “We stay out, twenty hours a stretch, sloppin’ around in freezin’ rain. We let them cargo snatchers use us for clay pipes in a shootin’ gallery. An’ then, when they’re in front of them floodlights in Headquarters’ lineup, some loud-mouth politician in a soft leather chair tells the taxpayers how he—”
“Clam!” Lieutenant Koski held up a palm for silence.
Against the jumble of harbor sounds — the mournful clanking of the bell at Buttermilk Channel, the deep hoarseness of a tramp steamer feeling her way through the shrouding fog like a blind man, the high, frantic toots of a tug — came the hollow turkey-turkey-turkey of a two-cycle motor, echoing flatly over the calm surface of the water.
Sergeant Mulcahey bent over the binnacle, peering forward, his plump, ruddy features burnished by the glow spilling up from the card.
“It’s a junkie,” he announced. “I can’t see him, though—”
“The sucker’s running without lights.” Koski picked up a lacquered megaphone, stepped back to the cockpit. “Cut her, Irish,” he said to the sergeant.
Mulcahey silenced his hundred and eighty horses. Koski put the mouthpiece of the megaphone to one ear and swept the wide end of the fibre funnel in a slow semicircle. At one spot, on the port quarter, the hollow turkey-turkey which had seemed to come from every point on the compass, sounded sharply louder. The lieutenant pointed.
“Sic ’em, Tige,” he said to Mulcahey. “He bit your father.”
The sergeant cut the motor in fast, angled the nose of the patrol boat around in a rush. He moved the throttle-bar forward. The Vigilant’s bow lifted. Water seethed past the gunnels, boiled astern.
Koski switched on the big searchlight. A probing finger of white poked through a hundred feet of milky murk — and touched something red.
“Right rudder,” Koski cautioned. “It’s a tramp. The junkie’s run in behind her.”
The police boat veered off, heeling over to its cockpit coaming. The rusty red hull of the tramp bulked darkly above them, its running lights vague in the mist. Shouts of alarm came down to the two officers as the Vigilant surged under the steamer’s counter, swung wide to avoid her threshing screw, and plunged like a rocking horse gone mad across the bobbling wake, after the junk boat.
“The junkie’s heading down Buttermilk.” Koski used the megaphone as a sound-tracer again.
Mulcahey spun the spokes. “Tell me now,” he complained, “why wouldn’t we run across this miscreant an hour ago, instead of when we’re headin’ for Pier One to sign off duty? An’ me, with a very tasty dish waitin’ my beck an’ call!”
“Your dame’ll wait.” Koski caught a low gray shadow in the blurred cone of the searchlight. The shadow slid around the tail barge of a long tow, which was headed toward the Narrows, and vanished. “Pour it on, Irish,” he said.
Sergeant Mulcahey fiddled with the controls. The motor’s roar lifted to a high, shrill pitch. The guns in the bulkhead racks began to chatter from the vibration.
“That junkie’s probably got a boatload of ol’ manila, Steve. He’ll claim he bought it. Nobody’ll be able to prove different an’—”
“I’ll be able to prove he’s forfeiting his license by running in a fog without lights,” Steve Koski retorted. “And don’t kid yourself. He’s not scooting away like that with any stolen rope. If that’s what it was, he’d have dumped it overboard long ago and waited for us to come up with him.”
The police boat closed the gap swiftly. The junk boat turned, twisted to evade the searchlight, then wheeled, at last, toward the deep shadows of shore.
“He’s makin’ for the Gowanus!” Mulcahey swore softly. If the junk boat should gain that narrow hulk-lined canal to find him would be like hunting a rat under a barn.
Steve Koski lifted the repeating rifle out of its brackets. The quarry was no more than two hundred yards ahead. Mulcahey kept the long finger of light on the hunched figure crouching beside the junk boat’s motor housing.
A stub-nosed diesel tug, with a beard of rope matting trailing over its bow, came chugging out of the mouth of the canal. The junk boatman headed right at the tug. Koski crawled up on the forward deck.