Midnight Sailing, page 8
“Very unfortunate,” agreed Captain Fujiwara soberly. His unblinking eyes did not leave Larkin’s face.
“But not nearly as unfortunate,” Larkin went on, “as if Federal agents in Hawaii should discover that some of your officers had been tacitly harboring a stowaway—a young American, let’s say, who had in a heedless moment absent-mindedly carried off some blueprints belonging to the United States Navy; or some equally unpatriotic and thoughtless act which might have caused a near relative to shoot himself from shame and disgrace. You and I, captain, of course understand the generous impulses of any of your officers who might want to help the young man get away somewhere where he could forget his peccadillos. But Federal agents are notorious for their lack of understanding in such matters. They might want to take your ship apart looking for blueprints that are probably non-existent. They would certainly subject you and your personnel to interminable questioning. I’m sure that you are anxious to get home with your cargo, captain, and would do anything within reason to avoid needless delay.…”
Larkin paused. He crossed his legs expectantly.
The captain cleared his throat and said, “I have difficulty following details of rather intricate story.”
“It is rather intricate,” Larkin agreed. “We’ll skip it. It’s pure fancy, anyhow, and unimportant. The only thing of importance to me right now is that I’m tired of exchanging anagrams with San Francisco at twenty-two cents a word. So I want you, captain, to use your influence to have the doctor give the chief operator a shot of adrenalin or a mild cathartic—so I can get an answer from San Francisco. It will save a lot of trouble all around.”
“You are making threats, Mr. Larkin?”
“No, no, certainly not. On the contrary, I’m laying all my cards on the table, with the aces showing. I’m telling you exactly what my plans are—so you can act accordingly.”
The captain nodded. He reached over and pushed a bell-button four times. He waited, then pushed it four times again. Larkin could hear the bell ringing somewhere beyond the bulkhead.
The captain took a red-lacquer box from a shelf above his berth and passed it to Larkin. “Cigarette?”
“Thanks,” said Larkin.
They were Jap cigarettes, one-third cardboard. Larkin took one end and extended his lighter to the captain. The captain held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, Jap fashion, with the long cardboard tip pointing to the palm of his hand. When he raised it to his mouth, the ends of his fingers touched his lips.
Larkin lit his own cigarette. At the first, puff, his memory harked back through the years to a summer evening in his childhood, when a livery stable had burned down in the next block. He coughed.
The door opened and Dr. Bioki ambled in, blinking sleepily and muttering, “Gomen-nasai.” A cotton crepe kimono with blue and white awning stripes gave the fat surgeon the general appearance of a fortune-teller’s tent at a church bazaar. Captain Fujiwara spoke to him for a moment in Japanese, and he replied in the same language.
“Doctor says,” interpreted the captain, “chief operator is much better; maybe fit for duty tonight.”
“Fine,” said Larkin. “Glad to hear it’s not typhoid after all. And how’s General Rodriguez getting on, by the way?”
“Also much besser,” said Dr. Bioki. “Tomorrow maybe to own cabin will ge-moving be. If to medicine smells hypersensitive, you also will cabins change maybe?”
“Maybe,” said Larkin. “Although right now I’m not allergic to anything but garbled radiograms. We’ll wait and see how the weather is tomorrow. And in the mean-time, I’ll thank you gentlemen, and bid you good night—or the Japanese equivalent.”
“O yasumi nasai” said Captain Fujiwara.
“Oh, yes, you mean ox-eye,” echoed Larkin, approximating the pronunciation as nearly as he could.
Captain Fujiwara and Dr. Bioki placed their ‘hands on their knees and bowed from the waist. Larkin did likewise. There was no mockery in his imitation; he was solemnly acknowledging a solemn lesson in Japanese politeness. And he decided, as he backed out the door, that there was a hostile chill in Oriental courtesy.
On deck, Larkin threw away the Jap cigarette and lit one of his own. The ship was scarcely rolling now, and the rain had changed to an atomized, fog-like drizzle. A long, hoarse bellow from the siren announced failing visibility on the bridge.
Larkin sauntered aft to the wireless cabin. Light filtered through the wooden shutters which were raised to within a few inches of the top. He stood on his toes, trying to peer in. As he did so, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned to recognize the white muffler and derby hat of William Cuttle disappearing into the mist.
Well, there was no use trying to rush matters now. The affair was in the lap of the gods—Captain Fujiwara’s gods. There was nothing to do except wait. Larkin retraced his steps to his stateroom, took off his shoes, took a book from a suitcase and stretched out on his berth. As he glimpsed unfamiliar Japan through the eyes of Lafcadio Hearn, the periodic bawling of the foghorn dinned in his ears.
Forty minutes later, there was a knock at his door. He glanced at his watch. It was after one. He sprang up to open. The steward handed him an envelope. He closed the door, sat down again, grinning to himself triumphantly. Beasley had come through at last—six pages of him. Larkin began to read the belated radiogram:
Larkin Steamship Kumomaru
received corrections overjoyed undrunk stop reply rebrother affirmative and how stop fired morgueboy who omitted clippings stop heres summary arthur gorham bonner born yokohama 1908 expelled harvard 1927 student lark hijacked beer truck wrecked same negotiating front steps president lowells mansion stop arrested 1928 forgery released after father cabled coverage exjapan stop arrested 1929 after auto crashed manhattan elpillar police finding acetylene torch burglar kit wrecked car explained en-route rob friends bank tengrand wager released suspended sentence reckless driving stop arrested 1930 drunken shooting juniper club fifty-second street speakeasy convicted manslaughter indeterminate sentence singsing paroled 1935 unnews since stop unlikely aboard because still on parole recheck file story soonest stop rodriguez biog later—beasley.
“Nice lad,” mused Larkin as he refolded the dispatch. “No wonder Dorothy denies him.”
He chuckled as he pictured the girl’s discomfiture when he confronted her with the facts in the morning. Or should he confront her with the facts? It might be better to confront her with Brother Arthur Gorham Bonner in person. The captain had promised to let Larkin go along on the official hunt for the stowaway next day. True, the captain’s cooperation might prove illusive, particularly in view of Larkin’s hunch that Bonner had come aboard with the connivance of some of the ship’s officers. Equally true, however, that the captain had responded promptly in the matter of the radio. Well, let the morning bring its own counsel; the night had proved eminently satisfactory.
Larkin fell asleep with his clothes on, the light burning, Beasley’s radiogram clutched in his hand, and the mournful sound of the fog siren in his ears.…
The deep-voiced blare was still with him when he awoke. He was surprised to see the light still on, because his porthole was already gray with dawn. He sat up suddenly, vaguely aware that he had been awakened by some unfamiliar sound. The foghorn bellowed again. It wasn’t that which had aroused him, certainly, because the warning blasts had been going on all night.… Then he heard the patter of running feet on the deck outside, and the shrill excitement of Japanese voices.
He jumped into his shoes, flung open the door. Winking the sleep from his eyes, he peered into the bleak, thick-veiled morning. The sea was lost in a shroud of fog. Even the bow of the ship was invisible, and the ghostly line of tall derricks marched toward it into gray nothingness. But close at hand, scarcely fifty feet from Larkin’s cabin, in fact, a dozen men clustered about a ventilator cowl. They were stocky Jap seamen with pants rolled up, kimono-clad crew members off watch, a uniformed deck officer. Larkin hurried toward them, pushed through the group. He stared down—and a lump of cold nausea rose against his diaphragm.
There would be no need to comb the ship this morning for the man who looked like Dorothy Bonner, no need to confront Dorothy with a renegade brother. The phantom stowaway had become a grim reality. The twisted, still figure of Arthur Gorham Bonner lay on the wet glistening deck, wedged in between the ventilator and a deck cleat.
Arthur Bonner was lying on his back. There was a long, dark welt along one cheek, a livid bruise that began at the frozen grimace of his lips and cut across his left temple. He stared back at. Larkin with wide-open eyes, glazed blue eyes with pupils that were fully dilated as if with horrid surprise.
Dr. Bioki came puffing through the little crowd, the hem of his striped kimono dangling from behind his hastily-donned trousers. But even before the ship’s surgeon knelt on the deck beside the supine body, Larkin knew that Arthur Bonner was dead.
Chapter Twelve: FEAR IN. HER EYES
Larkin moved close behind Dr. Bioki. He was fascinated by the great circles of dim amazement that stared at him from the dead man’s eyes. It was with difficulty that he diverted his own gaze.
He noted that Bonner’s left sleeve had pulled back in his final fall—a slightly shiny blue-serge sleeve that had once belonged to an expensive suit—and that the chalky underside of the forearm was punctured by dozens of tiny scars, like pinpricks. He noted also that the dead man’s trousers pockets were turned inside out, and that the lining of his coat pockets, too, appeared to have been roughly handled.
Captain Fujiwara came on deck, followed by the purser. The two officers conversed with the ship’s surgeon in Japanese. While they were talking, the crowd around the corpse continued to grow. Among them Larkin recognized only two first-cabin passengers: The esthetic-looking Mr. Shima in a deep-blue dressing gown; and Mr. William Cuttle of New York. Mr. Cuttle was not only fully dressed, from pointed shoes to derby, but he had evidently been awake for some time; there was shaving soap behind his large ears.
“You know this man, Mr. Larkin?” Captain Fujiwara asked, as a seaman covered the body with a tarpaulin.
“No, I don’t,” Larkin replied.
“He is perhaps stowaway that interests you yesterday?”
“He’s the man I saw on deck last night and the night before,” said Larkin. “I don’t know whether he’s a stowaway or not. Ask the purser.”
“Purser says he is not passenger. You will identify him?”
“How should I identify him?” protested Larkin, after an instant of hesitation. “I never saw him before I came aboard this ship.”
“He has no passport, no papers,” said the captain. “If unidentified, body will be buried at sea.”
“But not, I take it, before an autopsy is performed,” Larkin said.
“Dr. Bioki has no facilities for autopsy on shipboard,” said the captain. “Besides, autopsy not necessary. Death was accident. Fractured skull, Dr. Bioki says.”
“Yah,” said Dr. Bioki. “In dark he has ge-fallen.”
“How long has he been dead, Doctor?”
“Two hours, maybe,” said the grizzled surgeon. “Deck is slipperish.”
“Slippery, my eye,” Larkin declared. “The man’s been murdered.”
There was a brief silence. Then a harsh, cackling laugh exploded behind Larkin, almost in his ear. He turned to scowl at the superior, thin-lipped smile of William Cuttle.
“Don’t be a dope,” said Cuttle smugly. “This guy wasn’t murdered. He fell down and cracked his conk, that’s all.”
There was a disagreeable quality in Cuttle’s voice that grated on Larkin. Categorical. Intolerant. Larkin decided he didn’t like the man. He said, “You seem pretty sure of yourself, Mr. Cuttle.”
“Sure I’m sure,” said Cuttle. “And why not? This is right up my alley, ain’t it?”
“Is it?”
“Sure. I’m a detective.”
“Well, well, fancy that!” said Larkin. “A dick! What kind, Mr. Cuttle?”
“There’s just two kinds of detectives,” said Cuttle. “I’m the right kind.”
“There are three kinds,” corrected Larkin. “Amateur, professional and private. A private dick misses one of the other classifications because he takes money. I suppose you work for pay, Mr. Cuttle?”
“Sure,” said William Cuttle. “Ever hear of the Inland and Oceanic Underwriters?”
“An insurance dick,” said Larkin. “No wonder you don’t recognize murder when you see it.”
“What’s all this murder bunk?” demanded Cuttle with loud indignation. “This is an open-and-shut case of accident. In the first place the guy was a hop-head. He took dope.”
“Marvelous,” said Larkin. “I suppose you deduced that from all those little scars on his left arm. And I thought they were just bruises he got when he fell.”
“Nope,” said Cuttle gravely. “They’re needle marks. Hop-heads have those when they use a hypodermic. Morphine, usually.”
“Very clever deduction,” Larkin commented.
“So it’s plain what happened,” Cuttle continued. “The mugg went for a walk, all groggy with hop, and keeled over. Or maybe stumbled. They can’t see good in the dark, when they’re hopped up. Anyhow he fell and conked himself on one of these iron gadgets.”
“Must have been quite a fall,” said Larkin.
“It killed him, didn’t it?”
“Not only killed him,” said Larkin, “but it knocked his pockets inside out.”
“Oh, that,” said Cuttle, waving aside the detail with a single disparaging gesture. “Some skibby came up out of steerage, saw the guy laying there, took him for a drunk, and gave him a cleaning. That’s all.”
“It couldn’t possibly have been someone who hit him on the head for the express purpose of going through his pockets, could it?”
Cuttle laughed sarcastically. “Don’t be a sap!” he said. “No gorilla could be that dumb. If you wanted to get rid of a guy on a boat, how would you do it? You’d push him overboard, wouldn’t you? Or if you had to conk him, you’d at least drag him to the rail afterward. You wouldn’t leave the corpus delicti laying right in plain view, would you? Not if you could drop it in the pond, you wouldn’t.”
“Not if I could drop it in the pond, no,” Larkin agreed. “But maybe I wouldn’t have time to drop it in the pond. Maybe while I was going through the man’s pockets, I heard someone walking along the deck—people do go walking along the deck rather late at night on this ship, Mr. Cuttle—and maybe I beat a hasty retreat so I wouldn’t be discovered in company with a dead man.”
“Horse-feathers!” said Cuttle. “What does a stumble bum like him have in his pockets that anybody wants bad enough to commit murder?”
“You ought to know. You’re a detective.”
“I guess the Inland and Oceanic Underwriters ain’t much interested in stowaways,” said Cuttle. “Not dead stowaways.”
“What about live stowaways?”
Cuttle did not answer. He lit a cigarette, flipped away the match with a disdainful thumb, thrust his hands into the pockets of his ultra-snug overcoat. The lines of his face tightened into their usual hard impassivity as he watched two sailors lift the body of Arthur Bonner on to a stretcher, start aft with it.
“Show’s over,” he said at last. “Guess I’ll go grab myself a seidel of java.”
He walked away from Larkin. The little crowd of morbid onlookers quickly dispersed. Larkin watched them, trailing after the stretcher-bearers. It wasn’t until the last of them had gone that he was aware of Dorothy Bonner’s presence.
Dorothy was standing against the bulkhead of the superstructure. She was huddled in a woolly white polo coat. The turned-up collar buried her chin. She looked very much like a stray lamb, shivering in the damp chill of dawn, yet Larkin was certain she was not cold. Her drawn, stunned expression told him that she was impervious not only to sensations of temperature but to all feeling. She was looking at him without seeing him, with the eyes of a sleepwalker. He went over to her. She continued to look at him—or through him. Her expression did not change.
“Good morning, Dorothy,” Larkin said.
“Morning.” Her voice came from far away, like the voice of a medium in a trance.
“Did you see him?”
She nodded, numbly.
“Too bad,” Larkin said. “He’s not a pretty sight.”
She said nothing. Her long eyelashes trembled.
“It was Arthur, wasn’t it?” Larkin was surprised at the sympathetic note that crept into his voice.
“Yes,” she said. She continued to stare at him with that shocked, dry-eyed expression.
“Cry, Dorothy,” Larkin said softly. “Cry. It will do you good.”
“I can’t cry, Glen.” She was still looking at him without seeing him. “I can’t cry. There’s nothing left to cry with. It’s all tight inside of me. Like a snarled knot.”
“I know. But try. Let yourself go. Use my shoulder. No one’s watching.”
Dorothy shook her head. Suddenly she seemed to arouse. There was fear in her eyes, the eyes of a child awakening from a nightmare. She reached out her hand, gripped Larkin’s arm. He could feel her fingernails bite into his flesh. “Glen! Let’s walk!”
“Walk?”
“Yes, walk. Anywhere. Far. And fast. Like we were going somewhere—going away from here.”
Larkin started forward. Dorothy’s fingers still clung desperately to his arm. She moved beside him with long, swinging strides. He let her lead the way. She walked forward, deep into the bow, as though she wanted to hurry on ahead of the plodding freighter.
When they had reached the eyes of the ship, she dropped his arm. She rested her elbows on the rail, lifted her chin from the collar of her coat, greedily inhaling the mist-laden wind, listening to the hiss of the sea under the bows. Larkin turned to face her. Over her shoulder he could see the rising sun breaking through the fog astern. The crimson light cleft the thick morning like the flaming rays of Japan’s war ensign.
