There was nothing he could add. There was nothing else I could think to ask. I tried some pointless questions and he gave sullen direct answers. At last I left. As I climbed into my car at the curb, I looked back toward the porch. He was still in the chair, and he was smiling. I couldn’t read the smile.
Two days later I walked into a bar in Rochester, New York, and picked a spot at the end where I could lean my shoulder against the plaster wall.
I ordered a brandy and water, and when the thin pale bartender set it in front of me I said, “You’re Stan Benjamin, aren’t you? Cook on the Betsy when you were in Ceylon?”
The distant look faded, and he gave me a slow grin that turned him into a human being. “Yeah. But I don’t know you. Were you there?”
“No, but my best friend was. Captain Christoff.”
“Sure. I remember him. He was only with the boat a few days. Tough break for the guy. Did you look me up here?”
“If you can do it and still take care of the customers, I’d like to hear what happened.”
“It’s slow this time a day. I was sitting in on a poker game when your friend came aboard tight with a couple of guests, a thin British doll that he called Conny and a big red-faced guy named O’Dell. They come aboard by coming across the decks of some British boats that we were moored to. Quinn and Christoff had some kind of an argument that I didn’t hear, and then Quinn came down the ladder and told the guys to get to their stations, that we were taking a run. He was sore as hell.
“There wasn’t anything for me to do at first, and then Christoff and the two guests sat in the main cabin and they opened the door over the booth into the galley. Christoff slid a bottle of John Hague in and told me to fix up some drinks. That was against the rules too, but I got my orders so I did it. I took a little nip myself and fixed up three tall ones, using plain water. When I set them through the little door I could see that the babe and O’Dell were on one side of the booth and the captain was on the other side. He acted tight.”
“What did they talk about?”
“I couldn’t hear so good. They were talking about some club they’d just come from. Christoff had trouble talking straight. The other two didn’t seem so bad. They seemed a little tense about being out in Betsy. As soon as we got outside the harbor, the grounds well rocked us around. I made another round, and then the gal said that she’d like to go topside and get a look at the moon on the ocean. Only by that time there were clouds over it. They went on up.”
“Anything else?”
“You probably heard the rest. How we circled around for more than a half hour with the woman having hysterics. Couldn’t find the guy. When I went back down, I saw the big guy with the red face draining the last of the bottle. I stopped and looked at him. He set it down, empty, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and glared at me. I went back into the galley. Then we went in, and there were investigations that lasted for weeks. I understand Quinn was in for promotion, and that little tea party sort of screwed him out of it.”
He bought me my third brandy on the house and then I had the last one and bought him one. He ducked below the bar to polish it off. I liked the little guy. I made him take another one and he acted pretty jolly.
Then I said, “What’d you think of Stenwitz?”
“A moody jerk if there ever was one. Nobody liked him. He was the only guy on the weather deck when it happened. He didn’t see a thing. Used to get sore as hell when we asked him why not. Strange guy. Didn’t have a friend in the army. Not a one.”
While I was eating dinner at the hotel I checked Benjamin’s name off the list. Nothing yet. There didn’t seem to be much point in going on. Only three covered out of the seven left in the country. Four to go: Baker, Ruggerio, Janson, and Quinn.
Two weeks later I stopped in a gas station just outside of Seattle. Only one left: Quinn. Wilmert L. Quinn.
I paid for the gas and kept the gas pedal down near the floor until I got into town at four o’clock. I went to the address I had been given and found that the Quinns had moved. The woman didn’t know where they had moved to, but she thought that they were still in town. I stopped in a drugstore and tried the phone book. Then I called information and found that he had a new phone that had not been listed yet. She gave me the address. It was ten minutes to five when I pulled up in front of a new house on the edge of town. Standard stuff. White with a high peak to the roof. Green shutters and a tall red-brick chimney with a big Q in wrought iron fastened to it.
I rang the bell. A girl opened the door. She looked about eighteen. Average height, hair dyed the color of summer flax, wearing a cheap print dress that was too tight for her. Her mouth was moist and her eyes had the flat, automatic joy of a woman who steps out of a doorway at night on a dim street.
She giggled before I could open my mouth. “Whatever you got to sell, brother, maybe I could buy some.”
“I’m not selling today. I want to see Mr. Quinn. You his wife?”
“Yeah. I’m a brand-new wife, practically a bride. Come on in.” She stood aside, and as I stepped past her she swung her body so that I had to brush against her. I smelled the raw liquor on her breath.
The living room was small and perfectly square. The furniture was bright and ugly, the colors too raw, the lines without grace. I stood in the doorway and she minced past me, swinging her hips. She sat down on a green couch and patted the cushion beside her. “He ain’t here yet. Tell me about it.”
I crossed the room and sat in a gray chair with crimson buttons on the cushions. She gave me a mock pout and said, “Unfriendly, huh? I won’t eat you, mister.”
“When does he get home? Maybe I ought to go and then come back.”
“Don’t rush off. He’ll be along in maybe a half hour. Want a drink?”
I nodded and she flounced out. She paused at the door and said, “Come and help me.” I got up and followed her out to a cluttered kitchen. There was a tray of melting ice cubes on the enameled top of the table, along with a half bottle of cheap rye and four or five small bottles of ginger ale.
She jumped up onto the sink shelf and swung her legs. “Make your own, mister.”
I stepped over to the table and mixed a light rye. I opened one of the bottles of ginger ale. It was warm. It foamed up over the top of the bottle. I stepped over to the sink and let it run down my hand. She slid over so that her knees were against my side. I looked up at her in protest just as she launched herself at me, both arms tight around my neck, her loose mouth clamped on mine.
I dropped the bottle into the sink and tried to pry her hands loose. She giggled through the kiss. She didn’t smell clean. I got hold of her wrists and pulled her arms loose. She slid down to the floor and twisted her wrists away from me. She swung and slapped me so hard on the ear that my head buzzed. She stepped back and said, “Just who the hell do you think you are? What makes you think you can come in here and paw me?”
A tired voice behind me said, “Shut up, Janice. I saw more of that than you thought I saw.”
I turned around. A middle-sized man with a tight, disciplined face stepped by me. He slapped her with the hard heel of his open hand. She slammed back into the door to the back hall. A trickle of blood ran down her chin.
“You got no right to hit me, Will,” she gasped.
“All the right there is, baby. That’s the last time I touch you. Pack your stuff and get out of here.”
She opened her mouth to object. He stood and looked at her. She dashed by him and ran out of the kitchen. I heard the quick stomp of her heels as she went to the stairs.
He turned to me. I could see that he was about thirty, even though he looked nearer forty. “I’m sorry, friend. Always thought she was like that, but never had the proof before. A little tough on you, though. What’d you come here for, anyway?”
“This is a hell of a time to bother you with it, Quinn, but I wanted to get your story on the Captain Christoff drowning. He was my friend.”
He looked hard at me, and I returned
the stare with as much candor as I could manage. “Sure you aren’t a slick customer trying to open it up again? I don’t want to do any more testifying. That business knocked me out of a promotion I could have used.”
“I understand it did. Sorry. But suppose I come back tomorrow when you aren’t all upset?”
“Never mind that. I’m okay. Who else have you talked to about this?”
I told him whom I had seen. He led me into the living room. I could hear a low wailing noise coming from upstairs. He seemed to ignore it.
“Then I should tell you what the others wouldn’t have had a chance to know, I suppose. Let’s see now. Best place to start is where he came aboard. I was sitting with my legs hanging over the side smoking a pipe. The harbor was quiet. I could hear a hot poker game belowdecks. There were footsteps behind me, and Captain Christoff walked up. I jumped up. I could see two people behind him.
“He introduced me. Miss Constance Severence and a Mr. O’Dell. The girl was in evening dress. O’Dell was in a white jacket with a maroon bow tie. A big guy. She looked slim and cool like most of those British babes do when they’re upper-class stuff.
“I knew that he wasn’t supposed to bring strangers on board. I told him that I had something to tell him in private. I thought maybe he didn’t know the rules. We went up forward, and the two visitors waited.
“I told him about the rule, and he said he wanted to take them out on a short trip. I told him that I was against it, and he said that I should trust him and take orders, that he knew what he was doing. I tried to argue, and after a while he made me stand at attention. Then he told me to shut up and prepare to cast off. There wasn’t a thing I could do. I did like he told me.”
“Did he act drunk?”
“Later, yes. Not when I talked to him.”
“What happened then?”
“They went below with a bottle. About six miles out, they came on deck and went forward. They sat on some life rafts that are strapped down there. I could see them by standing on my toes. I was at the wheel. It began to get rough. He’d told me to go out ten miles. At ten miles I made a sharp hundred and eighty to starboard and headed back. A couple of minutes later, O’Dell bellowed at me. I couldn’t catch it. He came up to the bridge and said that Christoff had gone overboard. I circled back, but we never found him.”
“Do you think there was anything fishy about it?”
He waited a few minutes before he answered. He stared down at the vile brown rug, his forehead wrinkled. “I’ve wondered and wondered about that. Of course, the turn could have caught him off guard. He wasn’t used to boats. I tried to tell the investigating officers that he didn’t act like a guy who was disobeying rules, but then I had only known him a few days. I guess it was just like they decided. He had too many strikes on him. Visitors, an unauthorized trip, and liquor on board. If he hadn’t drowned they’d have skinned him alive and broiled him.”
“Any of the other guys in the crew figure that something was fishy?”
“Not a one. If one of them had, maybe I’d have stuck to my guns a little longer.”
I waited, and he told the story again in more detail. But he kept glancing up at the ceiling as he spoke. When he started on it the third time, I interrupted him and told him that I had to be on my way, thank you very much, sorry about this trouble I caused, glad to hear your slant on it.…
He saw me to the door. I got into the car, and I had gone about eight or nine blocks when I remembered that I had wanted to ask about Stenwitz. No specific question. I had just wanted to start him talking about the kid. Something about Stenwitz had bothered me.
I turned around and headed back for his house. I parked in front and walked up onto the porch. I had my finger an inch from the bell when I heard it. A dull smacking sound, as though someone were beating a featherbed with a slat. Through the noise of pounding, I could hear tired screams of pain.
I turned around and walked back out to the car. Mrs. Quinn wouldn’t be leaving home. She’d never leave home. She’d just hang around and collect an occasional beating for the next thirty years. I grinned as I drove off, my question forgotten.
It was a long jaunt back to Chicago. I didn’t let myself think too much. I drove along with tires droning on the concrete, the motor singing heavily in my ears. Dan was dead and I had collected a blank. Not a complete blank, but so close to it that it might as well have been a blank. A little glimmer of doubt in Quinn’s mind. Unexplained resistance by Stenwitz. Those two things plus the fact that the behavior pattern didn’t sound like Dan Christoff. Not at all.
I drove straight to Chicago, barely stopping to eat and sleep a little. In Chicago I noticed a cheap hotel and took a bottle of brandy up to my room. I planned to sleep all day and get back to work the next morning. To be able to sleep after driving seven hundred miles at one stretch the last leg of my trip, I had to get a little tanked. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear and drank raw brandy out of the bathroom tumbler while I thought over the talks I had had with the crew members. I didn’t blame Dan’s parents and Dorothy for getting discouraged. I was discouraged. There didn’t seem to be any crack I could get my fingers into and widen into a definite clue. Something wasn’t right about it all. I shrugged and tossed off some more brandy. No skin off me. On the following day I could go back to work and forget it—or try to forget it.
I remembered the time that Dan and I had sat in a duck blind and ignored the ducks while we drank half the brandy in the world to keep off the chill. He had been a great guy. Suddenly I stopped moving, almost stopped breathing. I snapped my fingers softly.
I waited for about ten minutes after I placed the call to Dorothy. At last she came on the line, misty with sleep, a yawn in her voice.
“Hello, Howard. What’s the matter?”
“Just thinking, Dorothy. Maybe I got something. I want to know something. You see Dan tight very often?”
“Couple of times. Why? You sound tight yourself, Howard.”
“Maybe I am, a little. Look, Dorothy, what happens to him when he gets tight? Physically, I mean. How does he react?”
“He never shows it—I mean showed it. Why do you have to use the present tense, Howard? It hurts.”
“How did he show it?”
“His legs just gave out on him. He’d sit looking as sober as a bishop, and the only thing would be that he couldn’t get up, couldn’t stand. Please tell me why you want to know.”
“Did that happen every time?”
“Every time I know of. Why can’t you forget it, Howard?”
“Not now, baby. I’ve got a lead and I’m going away and track it down, and look, Dorothy … uh”
“What is it?”
“Wish me luck.”
“Good luck, Howard.” Her voice was soft, and the phone clicked in my ear as she hung up. I drank the rest of the brandy and went to bed.
The passport problem was cleaned up in a week. I wired for reservations on the Siam Express from Los Angeles. She was due out in six days for a twenty-eight-day run to Rangoon. That gave me time to get out to L.A. and sell the heap for fifty bucks more than I paid for it.
I loaded a big suitcase with clothes, brandy, cigarettes, and paperbacks. I walked up the gangplank in the morning and found my tourist-class stateroom. I met my roommate, a sly citizen named Duckwood, who claimed he was going to Rangoon to head a sales agency for one of the big motion picture studios. He had peppery hair, wattles under his thin chin, and a violent case of halitosis. I decided to leave him strictly alone for the rest of the trip. I bought a chair, forward and starboard, and settled down for twenty-eight days of boredom.
We hauled out in the afternoon. It took three days to settle into the routine of eating, sleeping, reading, and exercising. I didn’t avoid people, but neither did I enter into any casual conversations of my own accord. Thus I was left pretty well alone. It was a good ship, with a slight tendency to corkscrew in choppy weather. The food was good, and I ate my share of it. There we
re four at my table, myself, Duckwood, and two well-stuffed schoolteachers from Kansas who had been penned up in the States for five years by the war. They were taking a year off. They both had the fetching trait of chewing with their mouths open. I loved them both, dearly. I never did catch their names.
At the end of ten days I was bored. At the end of twenty days I was too lethargic to even be bored. I tried to nap as much as possible.
On the twenty-fifth day, in the morning, I found that we were going to be late getting into Rangoon. We were going to make a stop at Trincomalee on the northeast shore of Ceylon. I went to see the purser. He was difficult. He said that it would be impossible.
I went to the cabin and packed my bag. At two in the afternoon we floated slowly into the great British naval base of Trincomalee. Wooded hills sloped steeply down to the blue harbor. A trail wound up from the dock buildings, and a dusty truck rocked down it. I carried my bag out onto the deck. I set it down near the passenger gangplank on B deck. The sailor manning the unlowered gangplank looked at me oddly. I carefully ignored him. I had to take a chance on their nuzzling the big ship up to a dock. They did.
When the gangplank was lowered, I brushed by the man on the deck and hurried down it. Men on the dock and on the ship stared at me stupidly. Someone shouted, “Stop that man!” I guessed that it was my friend, the purser.
I walked along the dock toward the shore. I heard steps hurrying along behind me. I stopped and turned. It was the purser and a fat sailor. They stopped, too.
“Now listen to me,” I said, “I’ve got a visa for Ceylon, and if either of you monkeys lays a hand on me I’ll sue the line for a hundred thousand and you’ll both be out of a job.”
I stepped onto land while the two of them were still screaming at each other. I looked back. The purser was waving his arm toward me and the sailor was waving his arm toward the ship. Their noses were a half inch apart.
There was no American consular representative in Trincomalee. I wired the notification of my presence on the island to the American consul in Colombo. The British were very pleasant about searching my baggage and changing some dollars into Ceylonese rupees. I thanked them and they thanked me and I thanked them again. Small bows and brief handshakes, All very pleasant. They smiled and asked me what I was doing on the island. I smiled and told them that I was a tourist who was thinking of writing a book. When they smiled and asked me the title, I smiled and said, “British Spheres of Influence, or, the Mailed Fist Around the World.” They stopped smiling and bowing and I left.
The Good Old Stuff Page 13