Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  The dust cloud was thinning now. He could make out the dead campfire and the startled horses neighing and rearing at the new mountain of rubble that had poured from the sky. The red disk of morning sun had just topped the mountains.

  John Henry took a deep breath. As soon as Sin felt better, they’d climb down to the horses.

  They looked down into the depths of the canyon silently. Far below, nothing moved in the heap of broken timbers that had once been the Manila galleon.

  “Funny,” Sin said softly. “I feel sorrier for the Queen than I do for anybody.”

  “The poor old Queen” John Henry agreed. “It took a long time for the pirates to catch her. But, Sin, she put up a wonderful fight.”

  BIG TARGET

  Roger Fuller

  When a millionaire playboy disappears overboard from his yacht, it’s time to see just who slipped up—and where!

  “HOMICIDE,” I said, when I picked up the phone. “Sergeant Evans speaking.”

  There was a second’s hesitation and then a raspy, half-whispered voice came over the line. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell. The person talking didn’t want me to know, either; that was obvious.

  “I’m not giving my name,” the voice said, “but I think you might be interested in the Lance Hall case. It might look like an accident or suicide, but it’s not. It’s murder.”

  I blinked at that one. The last I’d heard, Lance Hall had been alive and almost disgustingly healthy. Hall was one of the biggest shots in our town, with plenty of bucks, a big yacht named the Serpentine and a curvaceous bit of fluff named Thyra Madison whom he was going to marry in the Fall.

  I pressed the button that signaled the Headquarters switchboard man to put a tracer on the incoming call, but I could have spared myself the effort. There was a click at the other end of the line and the wire went dead. A few years in police business—about fifteen—have taught me to save my breath instead of yelling into a dead phone, so I hung up. A couple of seconds later, my switchboard man called to tell me that the phone call I’d just had came from the Argonaut Yacht Club, Seaside 2-1337.

  I called back and listened to the bell signal drone in my ear for awhile. The voice that finally said hello was a heavy masculine one.

  “This is Homicide,” I said. “Did somebody there just phone Headquarters?”

  “There’s nobody here but me right now,” the heavy-set voice said. “I’m Andrew, the attendant here. I just walked in. Homicide? What’s happened?”

  “Is Mr. Hall about the club anywhere?” I asked, in turn. “Mr. Lance Hall?”

  “I—I just saw the Serpentine come in,” the other end said. “Mr. Hall’s been out on a trip. If you call the office, they could tell you better than I can whether Mr. Hall’s here. Seaside 2-1330.”

  I thanked the guy and dialed the new number. A girl’s voice answered as soon as the first buzz sounded. I told her who I was and asked for Mr. Hall.

  “Mr. Hall?” she asked, and she sounded scared. “Mr. Lance Hall?”

  “Please,” I told her.

  “He—he—wait a minute, please,” she gasped.

  I waited, checking the time with my wrist watch. It was seventeen minutes past ten, a.m. A man got on the wire after a couple of seconds’ delay. He sounded flustered, to say the least.

  “This is Commodore Atkins,” he said, without preliminaries. “You say this is Headquarters?”

  “Homicide,” I told him.

  “Maybe somebody from the police had better come down here,” the Commodore said. “There’s been a—an accident.”

  “Something happen to Mr. Hall?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Commodore said. “He—it sounds incredible, but Lance was swept overboard in last night’s storm. His yacht just came in. The Coast Guard is here, but I suppose it’s a police matter, too.”

  “I’ll be right down,” I told Commodore Atkins. “Please keep everybody who was aboard the yacht there until I talk to them.” When I hung up I found myself agreeing with the Commodore that Lance Hall’s falling overboard really did sound incredible. He’d spent all his life on boats, and unless he was fried, I couldn’t see him going into the drink in last night’s storm. It had been a fairly severe storm, all right, striking just about midnight, but it had been no hurricane. Lance Hall had been a Bermuda racer, he’d sailed to Hawaii and other distant points, before he gave up sail for power, and he’d run through some pretty heavy weather. But, at that, there’s always the first time a man makes a careless step, over-confident of his ability to walk a rail with half a load on.

  I checked with the Captain of the Bureau and told him about the phone call I’d had.

  “Take a look, Evans,” Captain Logan told me. “You know boats and that yachting crowd, though heaven knows how you do it on your pay. Let me know if you need anybody to help you.”

  I could see the big yacht, Serpentine, at her mooring when I drove down the twisting driveway that led to the Argonaut Club. She was an easy boat to identify, running between eighty and ninety feet. I’d passed her in the Bay a good many times, and even though I’m strictly a sail man, I’d have been less than human if I hadn’t felt a touch of envy for Hall.

  THE Captain’s crack about my knowing the yachting crowd wasn’t strictly the truth. I sail an Indian Landing, myself, and the little club I belong to is several hundred degrees removed from Argonaut. But there’s a camaraderie among boatmen that links us all together, no matter how loosely. With my club burgee flying, I could get mooring and hospitality from any yacht club in the country, whether the mighty Argonaut or the Canoe Club at Casey’s Creek.

  I walked into the main lounge of the Argonaut Club to find quite a group assembled. There was a young Coast Guard lieutenant and a C.P.O. taking notes from the men and women who were seated in a tight circle over near the windows. All around the wide, sprawling room there were club members who were trying very hard not to look as though they were trying to listen in, which they all were.

  I recognized most of the people in the circle. There was that beautiful bit of fluff I mentioned, Thyra Madison, but she wasn’t so beautiful right now. While I looked at her, walking toward the group, I saw her raise her face from the handkerchief she was holding to her eyes and it was distorted, swollen, twisted all out of shape by her tears.

  Cynical Sergeant Evans, they call me, and my first thought was that she had a right to be tearful. She’d been within a couple of months of being Mrs. Lance Hall, with all those millions, and now she was just Thyra Madison, a pretty girl, certainly, but without any dough, as far as I’d heard. Automatically, I wondered if Lance Hall had changed his insurance to provide for his fiancée, as he would have if he’d lived long enough to marry the gal. Police work gets you thinking like that after awhile.

  Sitting on the arm of Thyra’s chair, with her hand on the girl’s shoulder, was Mrs. Alice Benson. She looked taut and strained but she wasn’t crying. Griffin Benson, Alice’s husband, sat opposite Thyra. Griff Benson was Lance Hall’s best friend and I liked him. Griff went in for small boats, too, Comets and Stars, and we’d raced against each other from time to time. At a regatta he was just another guy, in spite of his money, which was almost as heavy as Hall’s.

  Sitting beside Griff was a girl I recognized as Lance Hall’s secretary. I’d seen her with Lance a good many times—you’d be surprised how a detective sergeant gets around at times—and I knew her name was Turgeon or Spurgeon or something like that. She was young and fairly pretty, in spite of her glasses, and I remembered there’d been a lot of talk, at one time, about the possibility of Lance marrying her, instead of one of the debs that were always throwing themselves at his head. But Lance had played the field, and quite an extensive field it was, until he had met Thyra and after that all other bets were off.

  Beyond the secretary were two men I didn’t know but who obviously were crewmen from the Serpentine. One was wearing a dark blue rayon gabardine uniform with braid on his sleeves and a yachting cap dangling from one h
and. He was a thin, hawk-nosed person with a tanned skin and eye wrinkles that showed he’d seen a lot of sun and wind. I tagged him as Hall’s skipper and I proved myself right a few minutes later.

  The other fellow had on dungarees and a T-shirt, both immaculate. He was a big guy, even sitting down, with a build like Lance Hall’s had been, wide in the shoulder and narrow in the hips. He was either a youngster or one of those guys who never look their age until they collapse with a roar. I pegged him as a deck hand aboard the yacht and I found out later that I was right again.

  I introduced myself to the Coast Guard lieutenant and drew him over to one side, along with the C.P.O. Both were nice chaps, up against something they’d never had to deal with before, probably, and glad to have a regular copper on the scene.

  “I don’t know who takes this over,” the lieutenant told me. “It happened in the Bay and that’s our territory, but there’s no body, yet, and this was his home port and—”

  “Sure;” I said. “We won’t have any trouble about jurisdiction. Can you give me the story?”

  The C.P.O. looked down at his notes and began reciting. That chief certainly was an A-one note-taker. I thought at the time that the Department certainly could use a guy like that, considering some of the scrawls that patrolmen turned in as reports.

  “The yacht Serpentine,” he told me, “DeLancey Hall, master; James Allen, Captain, spoke Coast Guard Cutter YP-313, today at 0317. Position—”

  “Never mind the latitude and longitude, please,” I broke in. “About where was it?”

  “Off Crimson Point,” the lieutenant offered. I nodded and the C.P.O. started up again.

  “The yacht blinkered the cutter, asking assistance, and the cutter put over a small boat. On boarding the Serpentine it was learned that the master, DeLancey Hall, was missing, presumably swept overboard. Hall, according to information supplied by the persons aboard, was last seen at 2315—quarter past eleven—when he went on deck to make sure that certain fittings on the sun deck aft were secured against storm damage. He took with him the deck hand, Jupiter Crasby. The yacht was running short-handed, Captain Allen explained, because Mr. Hall preferred to do some of the work himself and his friend, Mr. Griffin Benson, also was a competent hand.”

  I knew that was Lance Hall’s habit, taking guests out on his big boat for weekend trips and then working them half to death. A big fellow himself, he could work the average man overboard and never get up a sweat. I guess he got a kick out of that, somehow.

  “Crasby says Hall sent him below for some gear with which to fix a running light that apparently had a loose connection. Crasby says that when he got back on deck, Hall was not there. It was raining hard by then and Crasby says he assumed the owner had gone below. Crasby says he repaired the running light and went below himself to his own quarters forward, using a forward hatch. Captain Allen was at the wheel, the others in the main saloon, playing cards.

  “When Hall failed to return to the saloon after about an hour, the other people aboard—Miss Thyra Madison, Mrs. Griffin Benson, Benson, and Miss Ann Turgeon—went to Hall’s stateroom, which was empty. The party then searched the yacht, splitting up for this purpose, and upon failing to find Hall, notified Captain Allen. Allen put the yacht about and conducted a search of the area but found no trace of the owner before contacting the cutter. That’s all we have, so far.”

  “A swell job,” I said. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll take over the questioning.”

  IT WAS okay with them, all right. I went back to the group huddled near the windows. I took Allen, the skipper, first.

  “Pretty rough out there, Captain?” I asked him.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Rough enough,” he said. “Nothing to worry about, with a craft like the Serpentine. She’s built for ocean travel and she had almost too much beam.”

  “Rolling much, were you?” I asked him. He started to shrug again when Alice Benson, Griff’s wife, broke into the conversation.

  “We were rolling horribly,” she said, with a little shudder. “It’s no wonder that poor Lance fell overboard.”

  There was something wrong right there. The Coast Guardsman’s report had said that the Serpentine had been heading for her home port, up the Bay, and that course would have taken her almost due northwest. The storm had come out of the southeast. That meant the yacht had a following sea and a craft the size of the Serpentine just doesn’t “roll horribly” in a following sea. She might lunge a little, but she wouldn’t roll unless she fell away so she’d be caught in the trough.

  Now, Alice Benson was no landlubber who’d call any motion of a boat “horrible.” She’d crewed for her husband, I knew, and in pretty brisk weather. I made a mental note and went on.

  This time I chose Griff Benson. Griff looked pretty well shaken up, which, I suppose, was natural, seeing he’d just lost his best friend. There was something else in his expression, though, a wariness, a caution, a weighing of my questions before he gave me my answers.

  Here’s his story:

  “We were all playing five-and-ten poker in the saloon when Lance felt the wind rising and said he was going out to check the aft sun deck and the running lights. He said he couldn’t depend on his crew to get things done right about the boat, but that was his way. He said a lot of things he didn’t mean in just the way they sounded.”

  I gave a hinge at Allen and Crasby. Both of them were scowling at Griff, and no wonder. No boatman likes to be called incompetent, even if the one who does the calling tries to take the edge off his remarks.

  “Lance,” Benson continued, “came back to the saloon a few minutes later. He was pretty sore. The sun deck furniture hadn’t been stowed, it seemed, and there was a faulty running light. I offered to help him fix the things but he said he’d be darned if he’d pay a crew to do things and then have to do them himself. He went to the bridge and came back through the saloon with Crasby. Er—remember I’m just telling this as I saw it, but Crasby seemed to be burned up about being called out of his quarters, into the rain.”

  “Not me,” the deck hand put in, quickly. “I wasn’t really sore. Maybe I was a little peeved because Mr. Hall wouldn’t let me get a slicker, but that’s all.”

  Griff hunched his shoulders. “Anyway,” he said, “the poker game more or less broke up. My wife and I went to our stateroom and the others wandered around the yacht for awhile. We started to play again, dealing Lance out, until Thyra—Miss Madison—got worried. Then we split up to search the yacht for Lance. When we couldn’t find him, we notified the skipper and you know the rest.”

  I thought over what he’d told me.

  “The way I get it,” I said, “after Hall went on deck with Crasby, you all left the saloon. Any of you go on deck?”

  There was a silence as one looked at the other. Everybody shook their heads.

  “Think hard,” I warned. “It might be important.”

  More head shakes.

  “What did each of you do when you left the saloon, just after Hall went above deck with Crasby?” I asked.

  Thyra Madison, it developed between sobs, had gone to her stateroom to change her dress. She had been wearing clothes suitable for a stiff breeze but with the battening of the portholes due to the storm, the saloon had become too hot for the dress she was wearing. She’d changed and come right back.

  Griff and Alice Benson had gone to their stateroom to do some packing, preparatory to docking at Argonaut late that night. Ann Turgeon had gone to the galley to start fixing a late snack for her boss’ guests.

  “I was on the bridge all the time,” Captain Allen said. He had a hard, steely voice. “And I might as well tell you, because you’d probably find out anyway. This was to be my last trip on the Serpentine. I told Mr. Hall last week that I was going to look for another berth. We didn’t get along too well, to be honest.”

  “That goes for me, too,” said Crasby, the deck hand. “Hall knew I was quitting and he was riding me and the skipper all through that t
rip. Those riding lights really didn’t need fixing right away, and I had secured that furniture right after dinner. He just called me out of my bunk for meanness.”

  “That’s not true!” the secretary, Miss Turgeon, flared. “Lance Hall never did a mean thing in his life!”

  “No?” asked Crasby with cool insolence. “Ask anybody that ever worked for him.”

  “I worked for him!” Ann Turgeon snapped.

  Crasby’s grin was insulting. “I mean a man,” he said deliberately.

  “Now, wait a minute!” Griff Benson said hotly. “You can’t—”

  “Take it easy, folks,” I broke in. “Crasby, you can keep your lip buttoned, and oblige me. We won’t get anywhere by throwing nasty cracks around.”

  “Why all this investigation, Sergeant?” Benson asked. “It’s obviously an out-and-out accident.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “We dumb coppers have to go into all the angles, even in the most open-and-shut cases. Besides, I’m puzzled at how Lance Hall, as good a boatman as he is, went overboard in a comparatively mild storm such as last night’s.”

  GRIFF looked down at his hands gripped tightly in his lap. “You’ve been around the water enough to know how things like that happen,” he said in a low voice. “A pitch of the boat at just the wrong time, a gust of wind, a slippery spot on the deck, one drink too many, perhaps.”

  “He’d been drinking pretty heavily, then?” I asked.

  Griff’s voice wasn’t much more than a mutter. “He was pretty well potted.”

  “That’s not true!” Ann Turgeon broke in again. “Lance had one cocktail before dinner. He passed up highballs that the others had during the poker game. How can you say he was intoxicated, Mr. Benson?” Benson’s eyes darted from the secretary, to the sobbing Thyra, to his wife.

  “He looked pretty tight to me,” he said sulkily. “Maybe he was sneaking drinks all along. He was in and out of the saloon enough, you know.”

  Ann’s voice trembled with anger. “No more than the rest of us were,” she said. “You know he wasn’t drunk. You—you seem awfully anxious to make sure the police think this was an accident. Maybe it was something else.”