by Lester Dent
Sarah’s head came up. Silence turned hard and rang in her ears.
“Ahoy!… Anybody home?”
A man’s voice, harsh, sand-throated. A man who knew boats, or he would not have hailed this way; landlubbers found something uncomfortable about using the term “Ahoy,” and if they did use it, there was usually telltale awkwardness with the word.
The stranger, who had approached silently on the dock, certainly was not Captain Most.
If he is not a policeman, he will go away, Sarah thought. The hope, once phrased, repeated like a wheel turning. If not a policeman, he’ll go away; if not a policeman, he’ll go away; if not a policeman—All of her body was taut and her nape muscles began to ache from holding her head half raised.
She noticed after a while the crisp click-click of little harbor waves on the hull beside her. And then she heard the shoes of the stranger scuff the dock planks unsurely. This was followed by the telltale squeak of a spring line and the vague sensation of the craft in motion. He was pulling the bugeye nearer the dock! He was coming aboard!
As the unknown landed on the bugeye deck, he caused the considerable thump of a heavy or awkward man. Afterward he did not move for a time. Sarah got an idea the man was listening, that he was cautious, furtive, that he had put earlier boldness away and was now in true and more sinister character.
The intruder’s feet slid across the teakwood, a few inches above her head. They went directly to the companionway. The feet experimented in the darkness with the steps. Then another pause. She could hear his heavy breathing—the sound was like some object being sandpapered.
A despair came to Sarah now, for the man’s slyness marked him as sinister. Sneak thief? Police officer? She did not know. She desperately needed a choice. If he was a prowler, any sound she made might drive him away. If he was an officer… Well, he was coming in anyway. So she turned deliberately on her side and pulled at the blankets, making sounds of occupancy.
The man clicked on the cabin lights instantly.
He was as swiftly at Sarah’s stateroom door.
Long eyes looked at her out of a pale angular face. “Oh, hello!” the stranger said.
Sarah regarded the man with cold wonder. He was no policeman. And somehow she did not believe that he was a thief.
He was both a heavy man and a tall one, with a pallid skin that looked as if it had never been in sunlight. She noticed his blue-milk coloring particularly, since it was unusual for anyone in Florida.
He added, “Didn’t know you were aboard, lady.”
“This is a private vessel,” Sarah said sharply.
“Uh-huh.” He shrugged. “I know that…. The skipper around?”
Testing him, Sarah asked, “Who do you mean?”
His eyes measured her with fishlike calm. Sarah was sure that he knew she had asked him that to test him.
Abruptly he said, “I mean Cap’n Most. He’s the owner here, ain’t he?”
“Are you a friend of his?”
He weighed that query also, then replied, “Sort of.”
“What is your name?”
“Ides.”
Sarah, neither liking him nor trusting him, said coldly, “I’ll tell Captain Most you called, Mr. Ides. He is not aboard. I don’t know when he will return.”
He was still looking at her, and Sarah noticed how knowingly he did it. She was instantly insulted. She heard him ask, “Mind if I wait around for him, baby?”
“I certainly do mind!” she snapped. “I have no idea when Captain Most will be back. And I’ve no desire for your company!”
He showed her long bone-colored teeth. “Private party, is it?”
Sarah gave back stony silence which the man accepted for what it was—dislike, utter and complete. He paid her back for it with a lewd sound from his lips. Then he turned and sauntered as far as the companionway, wheeled, flashed his teeth, and said, “I get it, all right.”
The fellow climbed the companion steps. He tramped heavily across the deck, vaulted onto the pier, and left. There was hardly a sound to the last part of his going.
Now Sarah was on the bunk, kneeling, watching through a porthole. When she could no longer see him, she sank back. For a while, sitting there, she tasted the sourness of shame. The fellow had shown clearly what he believed.
Chapter Nine
WHEN CAPTAIN MOST RETURNED to the bugeye he dropped aboard surely and strongly, and Sarah met him excitedly in the cabin. He did not smile, but his face was reassuring without it. He said, “You haven’t slept.”
“How could I?” Sarah gasped. And at once asked, “What did you find out, Captain Most?”
After he had made, with the overturning of a hand before him, a regretful gesture, he explained. “Not too much that is good, I’m afraid. The Lineyacks do not have the boy back.”
Stunned, Sarah murmured, “They haven’t?”
“I’m afraid not.” Most was watching her attentively, bothered by her distress and no doubt wondering where a breaking point would be. Briskly, quite obviously wishing to distract her with a rapid fire of words, he added, “Sit down, Sarah. I’ll tell you what I have done.”
Sarah lowered to the little bench seat. She had been accused sometimes of being a woman who thought and acted like a man, and she wished violently that it were true, because she now had need for the stoicism that men have in an urgency, or seem to have, or can act as if they have.
“That man—the one who took me from the apartment!” Sarah said bitterly. “I’ll have to inform the police about him—he must have helped take Jonnie from my apartment.”
“The police already know,” Most told her.
Sarah stared at him in wonder. “But how—”
“I got it to them.”
“Oh! You did! But how… how could you do that without the police asking you questions?”
Most leaned back and crossed his legs deliberately, and she supposed that he was loath to go into details, had not intended to do so. But he explained it. “I drove to Miami Beach,” he said, “to a night club where there was enough tumult to make it difficult for the police to find out who made a phone call, even if they traced it there. And I didn’t call the police direct. I called a newspaper, the night city editor, a man named Wilson. I asked if he knew the Lineyacks’ grandson had been spirited from the nursery by the child’s mother. Wilson wanted a name from me. I made one up—Cohen, a retired newspaperman, formerly of the Tulsa World, now a neighbor of the Lineyacks. Wilson then said the newspaper knew about the boy. I asked if there was anything to a rumor that the police already had found the boy. Wilson said no, nothing to that. I then asked him if it was known that a man decoyed you from the apartment and the child disappeared while you were gone. Wilson became excited. From then on he was a willing listener to a description of Yellow-shoes. He said he’d see the police got the information at once.”
“You were clever!” Sarah exclaimed.
Most winced. Apparently he did not consider it clever, but rather futile. A man who prefers direct action, she thought, he does not feel that merely prompting the police was adequate. Most hadn’t done enough to meet his inner need for accomplishment, and he was dissatisfied. That is a good thing to see in him, she thought.
“Wilson—the newspaperman—are you sure—will he tell the police about that man?”
Most nodded. “Oh yes. The newspapers work that way.”
“Then if the police don’t get the idea—”
Sarah hesitated. She had been about to say that if only the police would not get the notion that a crank had called the newspaper.
“They’ll act,” he said. “You see, the newspapers aren’t out yet with the story. So the call I made had to come from someone who knew what he was talking about. No, the tip won’t be ignored. The newspaper will see to that. It’s an exclusive angle for them, and they will play it up. The police can’t very well, even if they wished—and they probably wouldn’t wish—pay no attention to the tip.”
Rising, Most prowled to the small galley which occupied a corner of the cabin, lifted a glass from a white rack that held several, and pumped and drank two glassfuls of water. He took the water with large swallows that were an answer to a thirst that must be in him now, the aftereffect of his earlier solitary drinking.
Sarah’s thoughts whipped to the visitor she’d had.
“Captain Most, I’m afraid I’ve blackened your reputation,” she said.
Most rinsed the glass and toweled it and replaced it in the rack in the fashion of one who lived alone and preferred neatness.
He said, “That sort of soot will brush off, probably.”
“You don’t understand. I had a visitor while you were gone.”
Most wheeled. “Visitor?”
“Ides.”
All the planes of Most’s angular face suddenly became flat ones and he said, “Ides?”
“He came aboard and turned on the lights,” Sarah explained. “I was scared stiff. But he didn’t do anything except ask if you were aboard. Then he went away.”
Most came a step toward her and demanded, “What did the fellow look like?”
Sarah stared. “Ides? Why, he gave the impression he was a friend—”
“I know nobody by that name,” Most said. “What was he like?”
“You don’t know…” Sarah’s hands knotted tightly on her lap. She stared at them. And when she spoke, the words were fluttering and feathered with alarm. She told him about Ides.
Most asked a few direct questions when she finished. “You say he used the word ahoy naturally?”
“Yes. He’d been around boats,” Sarah said, nodding.
“You’d make a good detective, Sarah,” Most said approvingly. “And you say you didn’t have to give him my name first?”
“No, he already knew your name.”
Most shook his head, baffled. “That’s one for the book. He doesn’t even answer the description of anybody I know.”
Slowly the startledness left Most’s angular face, and mystification, while it was still with him, was covered and darkened by a different and more unpleasant emotion. He pulled out his pipe and rapped it several times on the table, then turned the pipe in his hands while looking at it sourly, and in the end he did not charge the pipe with tobacco but returned it to his pocket.
By this time Sarah understood what now troubled him—he was wondering if she thought he was lying about not being acquainted with Ides.
Startled, she did consider this, now that he’d given her the thought himself. She took it, weighed it, did not like it at all. Here was a bit of evil she wasn’t quite able to toss away. Not that she was ready to believe he knew Ides. But the possibility had dyed a tiny dirty spot in her mind, and this remained and probably would continue to remain until something came along to scrub it out.
“Maybe I should give myself up to the police,” Sarah said.
“That’s a hard one, Mrs. Lineyack,” Most said thoughtfully, and then he added, “However, nothing has happened yet to alter the possibility that you were prepared for the part of victim.”
“I don’t,” said Sarah, “want to be in jail, if that’s what you mean. But I want my little boy found.”
“Naturally.”
Her teeth took her lower lip and gripped it and then released it, and she added, “Would it help find my son?”
Most shook his head. “I doubt it would. The police are human. You would be their bird in hand, and probably worth two mysteries in the bush, the way they would figure. They’d also give you a rough time, that’s sure.”
Sarah murmured, “Rougher than I’m having now? I doubt it.”
He got out his pipe again. This time he filled and lighted the pipe, and when it was going strongly he strode to the companionway and mounted two of the steps. He watched the outer night and listened to it for a time, his elbows resting on the companion slide rails. Abruptly he drew back into the cabin.
He said, “We’d better get away from here.”
Alarm brought Sarah up. “Is someone watching?”
“No, it seems quiet outside,” Most admitted. Then, shaking his head, he added, “I don’t like the Ides thing. Probably he came for a reason. Maybe not a good one.”
Somewhere near in the water there was a series of three splashes accompanied by the blowing that a porpoise sometimes makes when it sports. The porpoise occasionally came this far inside, although they seemed to prefer the inlet entrances. Sarah turned her attention to Most and put him a statement.
“I’m going to talk to Mr. Arbogast,” she said. “He must know that I phoned him about Brill. I’ve got to know why he denied it.”
Most’s answer was to go forward and lock the forecastle hatch and the two skylights, then take a padlock from a lazaret. The padlock was for the companionway slide, and he clicked it open, took out the key and pocketed it. “We can take my car,” he said.
Sarah indicated the ship’s clock. “It’s late. After two-thirty. Mr. Arbogast may not be pleased about being routed out.”
“That would be too bad,” Most said grimly.
It was the first indication he had given that he had an adverse opinion of Mr. Arbogast.
It then came to Sarah that one had only to look about this sailing man’s vessel with its seamanlike touches to know that Most would speak pretty curtly about anyone who was not of sail. Mr. Arbogast was not of sail. Most would regard Mr. Arbogast as an outsider.
They went out on deck and Most prepared to give Sarah a hand up to the pier.
“Wait,” he said. He keyed the padlock open again and dropped back into the cabin. Reappearing in a moment, he bore two silly-looking paper carnival hats and a green-and-red wooden rattle. He did not explain what these were for.
As they walked toward shore Sarah grew aware of the shrill tapping of her own footsteps on the dock planks. The sounds made her feel furtive, hunted. She found that she was trying to tiptoe and only being awkward.
At the sweeping drive that separated City Yacht Basin from Bayfront Park, Most turned to the left. Sarah surmised that he had gotten his own car from wherever he kept it, and this proved correct. A station wagon, and it was by no means a late model. Most stuck one of the asinine paper hats on his head. He handed Sarah the other.
“People out this time of morning are mostly doing the night clubs,” he reminded her. “If you can wear that thing, it might fool a cop.”
She put the zany thing of paper on her head. He looked foolish in his, and she supposed she did in hers. But it was a good idea. It did give them the look of revelers. She shook the rattle and made the red wooden balls clack. Then the noise maker fell to her lap; she stared fixedly ahead. The silly sound had sickened her, her heart wanting Jonnie and her eyes wanting tears.
“You know Arbogast quite well?” Most asked as they drove.
“I designed Vameric for him,” Sarah replied. “He had suggestions. I discussed them with him frequently. Still, I suppose you wouldn’t call Mr. Arbogast’s ideas suggestions. Wishes, rather. Mostly they had to do with the accommodations aboard. He seemed astonished that sailboats were so functional.”
“Arbogast likes his comfort, I suspect,” Most replied. “Those fat little ones usually do. Always have overstuffed furniture in their houses.”
“You don’t like him, do you?” Sarah said.
He hesitated and then said, “Oh, I wouldn’t be that definite. He’s a landlubber. That probably gripes me. Not that I mind having a landlubber for an owner, if they show an interest in what sail really is. My soft little boss doesn’t…. By the way, would you care to hear how I happened to take the job with Arbogast?”
Sarah said she had wondered.
“Well, it was Mr. Collins’ fault,” he told Sarah. Mr. Collins, owner of the yard, had been Most’s friend for a long time. “Collins and I used to be partners, sort of,” Most said. “That was before the war. I sold out to Collins and entered service. The yard was small then and not too stable financially. When t
he war came Collins floated a loan through the government—the RFC—and built plenty of navy stuff. The RFC loan went through Arbogast, and that’s when Collins met him. All financial deals with the RFC in this district have to have Arbogast’s okay, as I understand it. Anyhow, when Arbogast found out that he would need a professional to handle a honey of a ship like Vameric, he asked Collins to recommend a man, and Collins nominated me.”
They were across the causeway now, and Most swung the station wagon sharply to the left. He added, “I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the berth. I’ve seen men before who bought too much vessel for their first boat—I try to avoid them.”
I was right, Sarah decided. Most was evaluating Arbogast on the basis of the chubby man’s seamanship. Since Mr. Arbogast had had no experience with sail, the yardstick Most was applying to him was hardly just.
Most grimaced. “Oh, I’m going to give him a chance to get salty…. But a man should start young and start small, if he’s going to fool with sail. If he doesn’t have the money when he’s young, or can’t get at the sea, he can at least have it in his heart. But he should start young with it in his heart. If he doesn’t, when he gets older and has a potful of money and buys a vessel, he’d better stick to a cabin cruiser and be a piazza sailor and cross the bar only when the sun is shining.”
He said this last with a casual contempt that was in character. Sail men invariably held powerboat men to be an inferior caste. Sarah was silent. This was not taking any of the anxiety about Jonnie from her mind.
“Anyway—” Most started to resume, and then he broke off. Something had happened.
Surprise whipped through Most, made him seem to grow at least an inch taller. A stop light, directly ahead, had turned yellow. But that, Sarah thought wildly, didn’t explain the change in Most. And then she clutched at the seat, for Most had stamped the accelerator hard. Then he said, “Damn,” and stopped for the traffic light that had turned from yellow to red, and she quickly learned the cause of his horror.
A police prowl car came from behind them and stopped alongside. And Sarah, whipped with terror, cried, “Oh!” The officers, two of them, turned their heads to look, and not casually, full at her face.