Стюарт Стерлинг - Down Among the Dead Men

“This is business, Sarge. You know what business comes before.”

The luminous dial of the clock on the Vigilant’s instrument board said ten forty-five when Koski stepped ashore at the Battery Basin. It took him five minutes on the phone to the Oak Street station to locate the address of Wyatt, Ellen, artist, — because she wasn’t listed in the phone book; another five to drive the green-and-white coupe of the Harbor Precinct to 88B South Street.

88B didn’t look like a residence to Koski. It was a battered two-story frame structure; it had seen better days and many of them. The ground floor was occupied by H. Bloomfield, Ironmonger and Ships Chandler; a sign across the second floor proclaimed:

The cans of paint and putty, the hardware and ships’ lanterns in the ground-floor windows said that the chandler was still in business. But a sail-loft might be big enough for a sculptress’s studio...

A flight of unsteady stairs climbed up at one side of the building; the door at its foot was unlocked. He went up. Somewhere above he heard mustic — violins singing a melody he remembered but couldn’t recognize.

There was another door at the top of the stairs. He pushed it open, found himself in a great barren room, with piles of baled rope and long spars laid up on wooden horses. Dozens of ships’ blocks hung from hooks along one wall. A row of naked bulbs in a metal trough suspended from the ceiling threw a fierce illumination on the far end of the loft vault. There was no canvas; no sailmaker’s table; — only a scattering of wood and metal frames built up on boxlike pedestals, a few piles of fat sacks. A brick fireplace had been built against one wall; its hearth had been bricked-in, too, save for a small iron oven door halfway up the arch. An old potbellied stove with an isinglass front spilled wine-stained light over a cot, a chest of drawers, a plank table laid on wooden horses. The music came from a portable phonograph on the table. Stuck up on a round wooden platform a couple of feet from the floor, was a shapeless blob of clay that reminded Koski unpleasantly of the thing in the suitcase.

A girl in a smock and a red bandanna bound around her head stooped beside the pedestal. She seemed to be stirring with an iron slice-bar at an enormous mud pie on the floor.

Koski got halfway across the loft before she heard him, turned.

He touched the rim of his hat. “Miss Wyatt?”

She laughed, held up arms sticky to the elbows with clay. She had the light at her back; he couldn’t see her clearly. “I didn’t hear you on account of Peer Gynt.” She picked her way through a group of plaster busts to the phonograph, lifted the needle. “I’m sorry.”

Koski noticed that the portrait busts were all longshore types. “You’d have trouble hearing an air-raid siren, wouldn’t you?” He surveyed the windows that gave out onto the river; they were covered with old army blankets. “Merrill Ovett around?”

She went back to the clay, resumed her stirring. “He isn’t here. Are you a friend of Merrill’s?”

“I’m a cop. Koski. Lieutenant.” He sauntered over beside a lumpy figure shrouded with muslin; he could see her better, now. A small, oval face with too wide a mouth, too long a nose to be beautiful; a boyish figure in short skirts that showed trim legs, neat ankles. “I was told young Ovett might be here.”

“I have to keep working this clay now it’s started or I’ll lose the whole batch.” She eyed him steadily. “Barbara told you he’d be here. She thinks Merrill’s in love with me.”

“That’s right.” Koski decided she was on guard but not particularly alarmed. “Has he been here?”

“Not for a fortnight or so.”

“Haven’t seen him for a couple weeks.” He repeated it as if to remember what she had said. “He wasn’t around last night, then?”

“No.” She laid the slice-bar down carefully. “Are you looking for him on Barbara’s account?”

“I’m from the Marine Division, Miss Wyatt.” He admired a bronze bas-relief of dorymen hauling in a loaded trawl. “We’re busy enough these days. Without monkeying around keyholing. That’s for punks in the private agencies.”

“Then it’s something serious?” She picked up a handful of the wet clay, squeezed it through strong fingers to test its consistency.

“It’s serious I haven’t got a warrant in my pocket. Hasn’t been a presentment to the Grand Jury yet. Ovett’s only wanted for questioning, at this stage.” He dug at the bowl of his pipe with a jack-knife. “Been a man killed.”

“Who was he?” She pressed a spatula against the shapeless mass on the revolving platform.

“Hasn’t been identified, positively. But there’s an engineer missing from the Seavett. Name of Ansel Gjersten.”

The sculptress’s fingers swiftly molded the contour of a man’s shoulder. “I never heard of Gjersten. Are you trying to suggest Merrill murdered him, Lieutenant?”

“Trying to find out what happened on the yacht yesterday evening, when young Ovett came aboard. Nobody’s seen Gjersten since Ovett left. Some reason to think there might have been a quarrel. Part of a body was recovered from the East River tonight. Not enough to specify in the indictment. I’m the Inquiring Reporter, asking what it’s all about.”

Her hands shaped in the corded neck ligaments and straining pectoral muscles of a seaman pulling at a hawser. “I don’t believe it.”

“What? That Gjersten was corpsed?”

“That Merrill was mixed up in any murder.” She regarded him solemnly.

“That’s natural. He’s your friend.”

“He is. Not in the way you probably mean, though. But it’s more than that.” She kneaded clay off her fingers. “If he’d done... anything like that... he’d have realized the police must come here to the studio; Barbara would make sure of that. So he wouldn’t be coming here, would he?”

“What makes you think he is?” Koski rubbed his hand over the rough wood of a ship’s figurehead that was propped up against a pile of clay-sacks. “You hear from him?”

From beneath a cup and saucer on the table, she took a yellow telegraph form, held it out to him.

He read the pasted-on capitals:

STILL TRYING TO CARRY THE MESSAGE TO GARCIA STOP SEE YOU TOMORROW BEFORE I TAKE OFF AGAIN

The wire had been sent from the Fulton Street office of Western Union at 8:00 P.M. Monday, less than three hours before. Koski pointed his pipe-stem at the signature. “Private term of endearment?”

“Oh, no. Oblique sense of humor. He always signs letters to friends that way.”

“This doesn’t sound like a sailor. More like a code.”

“The message to Garcia part?” Ellen went back to the clay figure, picked up a spatula, began to smooth the throat. “That’s just his way of saying he intends to go through with what he started, even though this last attempt failed.”

“Um. What’d he fail at?”

“Going through with a convoy, I suppose. War supplies for Murmansk. That’s where he expected to go when he left, — but he couldn’t have made it over and back on a freighter in this time. I expect the convoy was sent somewhere else after it reached the assembly port, — and now he’s going to start all over again.”

“Happens once in a while. What was his ship?”

“He didn’t tell me; he wasn’t supposed to talk about it.” She bent her head, lifted one arm to brush a spattering of gray from her cheek. “Do you think a man who went to sea over the bitter objections of his family — because he thinks it is the one thing he can do best in the war — is the sort who’d be a murderer?”