by Kin Platt
“Well, you guessed right on that one, too,” he said. “Frankie did owe the money to gamblers down in Miami and he was in hot water. Somehow he persuaded them he could get it from his mother’s savings. He remembered seeing a lot of silver around when he was young.
“The other fellow, the dark one, worked for the gamblers. He came along to keep Frankie in line. But somehow Frankie conned him into falling for the treasure talk and teaming up. They’re still a team. In jail.”
He dropped me off near the school and told me he’d pick me up after class. I was still in custody. That’s how Wednesday started out.
Mr. Snowden knew the answer to my disappearing ink. “Aqua Fortis. One part to three parts water. You can get the same effects with a solution of alum.” He knew the answer to what made messages invisible until you added heat, also. “Chloride of cobalt is one. Not entirely invisible but so pale you’d never notice it. When the paper is heated the letters appear. When it gets cold again the writing disappears. Oil of vitriol is another good one. So is onion juice. Those are called sympathetic inks.”
“Onion juice?” I said.
“It makes you cry,” he answered. “That’s sympathy.”
He knew I’d been up most of the night so he let me doze off for most of the period. He looked kind of knocked out himself.
Sheriff Landry kept his word and gave me a lift after class.
“Where are we going and did you hear from my folks yet?” I asked him when I got in.
“Second part first,” he said. “They’ll be home in a few hours. Barring your old man’s picking up any more citations for speeding.”
“Great,” I said. “Now, what about the first part?”
“To see a man,” he said. “A very expensive meeting for you.” He shook his head regretfully.
“How come? You mean he’s back?”
“I figure it’ll cost you a million dollars. Me, too.”
“Huh?” I said. “Why, you?”
“I nearly had a rich son-in-law. I could have retired an honest cop,” he said.
CHAPTER 50
Last Of The Pirates
He was a bigger man than I thought.
Sheriff Landry was tall. Mr. Pickering was tall. But he towered over them like a giant oak next to a pine.
His hair wasn’t black any more. It was snow white and so was his moustache. His big hooked nose flared out arrogantly and his black eyes and bushy brows still looked fierce. He might have been an old pirate but he was far from being a dead one.
Big Nick Murdock got up out of his chair to shake hands with me. It was the first time I had the feeling that I still had a lot of growing up to do. His hand was tan and strong, just like the rest of him. His eyes had a very intense look. I could understand right away what Mr. Bagler meant when he said Big Nick was one of those who could bend people, make them do anything.
I knew what his power was right away. He scared you and made you like him at the same time. Like Sinbad! The only difference was, Sinbad did it by being lovable. Big Nick Murdock did it by having such a lot of personality. He wasn’t anywhere near what I’d call lovable, or the Santa Claus type. It was just some secret force inside him operating at a hundred percent efficiency. You could almost expect to hear a dynamo humming inside him. And he was an old man now!
Mr. Pickering shook hands with me, too. He was just like he was the other time. An elderly perfect gentleman. Who believed there was always time for good manners, no matter what.
“My client is extremely grateful for your untiring efforts to clear his name,” he said, after Sheriff Landry introduced us.
“That’s okay,” I said. “The other fellow really did kill the mayor, didn’t he?”
Big Nick Murdock’s laugh had to be the booming kind.
“We’re not going to waste any time here, Gideon,” he said. Then, to me: “Yes. He acted in haste. He was frightened.”
“But he got it himself in 1930?” I said.
Big Nick nodded. “Are you wondering if I did that?”
“You might have,” I admitted. “But my real guess was the Jonah jaws.”
“Your real guess is correct,” he said and his big face relaxed into a broad smile. “Do you know how he was drowned?”
“I guess he couldn’t figure out the cipher,” I said.
Now he looked surprised that I had. I could tell he wasn’t putting me on.
“That reminds me,” I said. “I got this for you.”
This time he really nearly fell off the chair.
“The white square!” he said.
Puzzled, I turned to the Sheriff. “I thought that was the message that brought him back.”
“It might have done it,” said the Sheriff. “More important to Mr. Murdock was knowing he was no longer wanted for a crime he never committed. Even though it was down in the books as a suicide, he could never be sure.”
“I’m really very grateful for that,” Big Nick said. Then, turning the white square of paper over, “This, too, of course.”
“You’ve got to dampen it,” I told him. “It’s invisible writing.”
He nodded but didn’t make any move to wet it. He asked me where I found it and I told him, inside the silver head of the cane. He laughed and recited the riddle:
“Not in the Ground,
Not in the Air—”
He laughed again and threw the piece of paper across the desk to Mr. Pickering. “I’m glad you decided it was time for me to come home, Gideon,” he said.
“Do you know how long I’ve been looking for that confounded square? I’ll tell you. All my life.” He kept on laughing and finally had to mop his head with a big silk handkerchief.
“Which reminds me,” I said, “how come you put in that Federal door?”
He stopped laughing and looked at me closely, then at Pickering, then at the Sheriff. The Sheriff explained.
“If Steve didn’t know so much about old houses, you might still be in Italy.”
“Of course,” Nick Murdock said. “You want to know about the Federal door. You probably also want to know about the disappearance of the River Queen—”
I nodded yes to that.
“You seem to have solved most of the ciphers and the riddles,” he said. “How about the one on the tombstones?”
I repeated that one:
“Jonah Jaws
Bald with Claws
One From Two
Double Your Due”
I shook my head. “Not that one yet. And not the one on the portrait of Captain Billy. The code in the book.”
This seemed to surprise him. He looked over at the white square and picked it up again.
“But you have,” he said.
I didn’t know how, but I let it go.
“You can’t understand the tombstone riddle,” he said, “unless you understand the history of the Murdock family. You see, we’ve all been pirates.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said, glad to hear Captain Billy really was one, after all. I settled back to listen.
CHAPTER 51
The Trouble With The Defoes
Big Nick smoked an expensive cigar. I could tell that by its full rich aroma. It was a long slender dark one but it looked very fragile in his big hand.
“It all started with Captain Billy, of course. After the Revolutionary War he couldn’t settle down to a peaceful life—”
“You mean he fought in the Revolution?”
“Even before that. He won his epaulettes in the French and Indian War. He was in the fighting around Lake George and Champlain. In 1759 he fought with Amherst at Ticonderoga and Crown Point and was with him at the fall of Montreal. After the Battle of Lexington he fought in the Battle of Long Island and after the evacuation of New York he fought at Philadelphia. We’ve got a letter from General Washington thanking him for his bravery and skill in the fighting at Fox Point under Commander Esek Hopkins.”
“So when did he turn pirate?” I asked.
Big Nic
k smiled. “He got into that gradually. In 1775 he fitted out the first of the privateers to prey on British commerce. Like Admiral John Paul Jones. Jones worked the French ports and Captain Billy worked from here to the Bahamas. During the war a lot of his merchant vessels carried valuable cargoes. He lost most of them. He captured over fifty British and took over two thousand British prisoners. He sold the captured British cargoes and loaned Congress over $100,000.
“He loaned the government money?”
“Yes.” Big Nick said. “And that’s how he got started on piracy. They never paid him back. He went bankrupt. His creditors took everything. He had even pledged his own money for uniforms for his men. So—” Big Nick blew smoke toward the ceiling—” so he decided to go into business for himself.”
“I don’t blame him,” I said.
“He was summoned before Congress, refused to obey the summons and was dismissed from the service. Then he raided New Providence, the Bahama Islands, and from then on Captain Billy did all right for himself. By the time he died he was a rich man again.”
A few questions bothered me. “Is that why he built the inner cave and the secret passageway?”
Big Nick nodded. I asked if there was a secret storeroom there. He looked surprised that I hadn’t found it.
“What did he keep in there?” I asked. “I mean besides what he must have got raiding.”
“The articles of trade of the day,” Big Nick said. “Pepper, rum, gold, imported silks, and tiles. There was trade with China then and the African gold coast.”
“So who killed him? Was it Defoe?”
He shook his head. “No. Now I’ll tell you about Defoe. Thomas Defoe was a brilliant young engineer. He also served under Captain Billy as first mate. So he was in on everything, right from the start. After a while, you couldn’t blame him for thinking a lot of it belonged to him.”
“Did he help build the Jonah Jaws?”
“He built three tunnels,” Big Nick said. “Scuttle Point, Jonah jaws and the spillage tunnel that kept the balance for entrance into Captain Billy’s cave and the Jonah jaws.”
“Did he write the cipher, too?”
Here Big Nick roared. “No. That was Captain Billy’s. And, of course, that was really what started the whole feud.”
“You mean Defoe couldn’t solve the cipher?”
“That’s right. It nearly killed him. But it was just a little private joke on Captain Billy’s part. Because Defoe was responsible for everything the cipher said. The trouble was, Defoe didn’t know that.”
I could see where a guy like Defoe might blow his stack at that, over this little thing he couldn’t solve, after figuring out how to control the water in there at ebb and high tide.
A few things still puzzled me.
“It seems like the Defoes were always trying to get you Murdocks. How come you kept on being friends with them?”
“Perhaps you don’t know that Captain Billy had a younger sister.”
I said “Huh?” at this point. You can always depend on me to keep a conversation going.
“She married a man named Nathaniel Defoe.” I couldn’t remember any Nathaniel Defoe tombstone. Big Nick read my mind. “He died in France. Thomas Defoe was born there.”
“You mean you’re related?” I said, catching on fast.
“Blood is thicker than water,” he laughed.
I figured I might as well get the rest of it straight. “I had the idea it was a feud like the Hatfields and McCoys.”
“In many ways it was,” he said.
”Did you kill each other?” He shook his head no to that. “So how come all the Defoes lived exactly sixty years? How come they died forty years apart to you Murdocks’ thirty?”
He had a very simple answer. “Family weakness, I guess.”
When I asked him how come none of the Murdock or Defoe wives were buried with the men, he said they were there in a separate place. At the right of the cemetery. To the right of the Murdocks. Behind the Defoes. I guess I didn’t have time to see them because of Mrs. Teska coming and kum-clobbering me with the cane.
“None of the Defoes ever found the secret?”
“No,” he laughed. “But they were always trying.”
“They still are,” I said.
I told him about the midnight visitor on the captain’s walk and about the man in white from the Lucky Double O who redecorated the cipher in the cave.
“That’s probably part of the young one’s attempts to throw you off the scent,” he said. “Don’t you think so, Gideon?”
Mr. Pickering said he was inclined to think that was extremely likely.
“So what made you disappear?” I asked Big Nick.
“Full circle,” he said dreamily. “Full circle.” He jabbed his cigar in the air. “My partner was Charles Defoe. He was another good man but in the end he succumbed to the old Defoe weakness. Greed.
“He found ways of counterfeiting gold and silver coins, up to Eagles and Double Eagles. That’s why Sam Bagler was killed!
“Bagler found out about it. His good name was tied up with my gambling enterprise, the River Queen. He begged me to get out of it before the Treasury men caught up with us. But I couldn’t. Defoe wouldn’t let me.”
“How come?”
“I told you all the Murdocks were pirates. It’s true. A lot of my own fortune was founded on stolen money. He knew I operated with it. It’s pretty much the same thing as stealing in the eyes of the law. So when it came right down to it, it meant I had to destroy or get rid of about a million dollars.”
I wondered if any of that kind of money was in the Federal door.
“Defoe refused to break up what we had going. There was enough evidence to convict him, if the mayor pointed the finger. So he shot Sam Bagler and ran out. He was shrewd enough to know I’d protect him. I did that in two ways. By making it appear as a suicide. And by marrying Anna Myszka.”
“You mean you didn’t love her?” I asked.
“Of course I loved her,” he said stiffly. “But that had nothing to do with it. I’m a gambler and a gambler covers his bets every possible way.
“I waited a few nights to hear from Defoe. Then I got word he was coming back. That night I took as much off the River Queen as I could.”
“You put it in the Jonah jaws?”
He sighed. “I couldn’t. The tides were too low. It was running neap instead of spring. You know how it works.”
“So what did you do?” Then I knew. “You started the fire yourself.”
“Of course. Sailed her off and scuttled her. Time was running out. The fog that night gave me the chance I needed. To disappear at sea.”
“What did you do with all the money?”
“A lot of it went down with the Queen,” he said. “The rest I rowed over to Scuttle Point and buried. Later I got it out of there and—”
“Ordered the Federal door?”
“Yes. That way everything went together.”
“With a Georgian house?”
“With Federal money,” he said and laughed.
Suddenly I had a sick feeling. I remembered when the money spilled out. The 1804 silver dollar!
I went through my pocket like crazy, sweating till I found it slipped inside my old reliable memo book. I didn’t even remember putting it there. I guess when the Sheriff’s searchlight hit the room I got rattled and hid it.
“I forgot about this one,” I said, handling it to the Sheriff and looking up anxiously. He nodded. He knew how it could have happened.
Big Nick hardly glanced at it.
“No. It’s all right,” he said. “Keep it.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s not just an ordinary silver dollar. This one’s worth a lot.”
“How much?” he asked.
“Maybe thirty thousand dollars,” I said.
He balanced it on his fingers.
“Okay,” he said. “Call. I’ll flip you for it.”
CHAPTER 52
I thought he was kidding but he wasn’t.
“Call it,” he said, using the inner power he had for the first time. “Heads or tails!”
“Heads,” I said, obeying.
He flipped the coin and caught it neatly as it fell. He slapped it on the hairy back of his wrist then took his hand off. I gulped.
“Heads it is,” he laughed. And he gave it to me. He’d just tossed away thirty thousand dollars and he was laughing.
I was sitting dumbfounded but he had more surprises.
“I’ll take the box now, Gideon.”
Mr. Pickering took the cover off a large metal box on the desk. Big Nick went and leaned over it, then beckoned me with his finger. The ray was still on me. I went over.
The box was filled almost to the brim with money. Gold, silver, copper. Big coins. Small ones. Square ones. Round ones. Some even had holes in them. They glittered in the light and held me spellbound.
“I owe you an awful lot,” Nick Murdock was saying and his voice sounded far away. “More than I can pay. Why don’t you just reach in here with both hands and help yourself.”
It was certainly a big temptation. Like being at a party and trying to be polite. I had to push myself away from the table, though I admit my eyes were glazed.
“No, thanks,” I finally mumbled. “I got enough right here.” I held up the 1804 dollar he’d given me.
“You might as well,” he said roughly. “The government is only going to take it.”
“All of it?” I asked. “They still owe Captain Billy money!”
“Well, they’re going to take a good part of it, let’s say. Part of the family fortune, as I told you. They have to check on a lot of old business, losses in shipping and so forth. And of course, the phony ones.”
“You mean some of the coins are counterfeit?”
“Plenty of them,” he said. “I told you I had a lot of Defoe’s work mixed up with mine. I don’t have the time to weed them out. Besides the T-men do it faster and better. So you might as well –“