“What kind of shenanigans is this?”
Sail showed him a license to operate in Florida.
“One of them private detectives, huh?” the old man said, impressed.
Sail put a ten-dollar bill on the counter.
“That one’s got twins. How about it?”
“Mister, if you’ll just describe your parties. That’s all!”
Sail made a word picture of Blick and Nola, putting the salient points down on a piece of paper. He added a telephone number.
“The phone’s a booth in a cigar store on the corner. I’ll be there. How far is this Hopkins Carter?”
“Two blocks.”
“I’ll probably be there for the next ten minutes.”
Sail, walking off, was not as pale as he had been on the boat. He had put on a serge suit more black than blue and a new black polo. When he was standing in front of the elevator, taking a pull at a flat amber bottle which had a crown and a figure 5 on the label, the old man yelled.
“Hey, mister!”
Sail lowered the bottle, started coughing, and called between coughs, “Now” — cough — “what?”
“Lemme look at this again and see if you said anything about the way he talked.”
Sail moved back to where he could see the old man peering at the paper which held the descriptions. The old man took his pipe out of his teeth.
“Mister, what does that feller talk like?”
“Well, about like the rest of these crackers. No, wait. He’ll call you bud two or three times.”
The old man pointed his pipe at the floor. “I already sold that man a twelve-fifty. ’Bout half hour ago.”
Sail pumped air out of his lungs in a short laugh which had no sound except the sound made by the air passing his teeth and nostrils. He said, “That’s swell. They would probably want a late chart for their X-marks-the-spot. And so they’ve got it, and they’re off to the wars, and me, I’m out ten percent on better than a hundred thousand.”
He had taken two slow steps toward the elevator when the old man said, “The chart was delivered.”
Sail came around. “Eh?”
“He ordered it over the telephone. We delivered. I got the address somewhere.” He thumbed an order book. “Whileaway. A houseboat on the river below the Twelfth Street causeway.”
Sail put a ten on the counter. “The brother.”
He was a fat man trying to hide a big face behind two hands, a match and a cigar. He said, “Oof!” and his dropping hands dragged cigar ashes down his vest when Sail prodded him in the upper belly with a fingertip.
Sail said, “I just didn’t want you to think you were getting away with it.”
The fat man turned his cigar down at an injured angle. “With what?”
“Whatever you call what you’ve been doing.”
“There must be some mistake, brother.”
“There’s been several. It’ll be another if you keep on trying to tail me.”
“Me, tailing you! Why should I do that?”
“Because you’re a cop. You’ve got it all over you. And probably because Captain Chris ordered me trailed.”
The plainclothesman sent his cigar between two pedestrians, across the sidewalk and into the gutter. “Mind telling me what you can do about it?”
Sail had started away. He came back, pounding his heels. “What was that?”
“I’ve heard all about you, small-fat-and-tough. You’re due to learn that with the Miami Police Department, you can’t horse—”
Sail put his hand on the fat man’s face. The fingers were spread, and against the hand’s two longest fingers, the fat man’s eyeballs felt wet. Sail shoved out and up a little. The cop did not yell or curse. He swung a vicious uppercut. He kicked with his right foot, then his left. The kicks would have lifted a hound dog over a roof. He held his eyes. The third kick upset a stack of gallon cans of paint.
Sail got out of there. He changed cabs four times as rapidly as one cab could find another.
Whileaway was built for rivers, and not very wide rivers. She was a hooker that couldn’t take a sea. A houseboat about sixty feet waterline, she had three decks that put her up like a skyscraper. She should never have been built. She was white, or had been.
Scattered onshore near the houseboat was a gravel pile, two trucks with nobody near them, a shed, junk left by the hurricane, a trailer with both tires flat, windows broken, and two rowboats in as bad shape as the trailer. Sail was behind most of them at one time or another on his way to the riverbank. There was a concrete seawall. Between Sail and the houseboat, two gigs, a yawl, a cruiser and another houseboat were tied to dolphins along the concrete river bulkhead. Nobody seemed to be on any of the boats.
Sail wore dark blue silk underwear shorts. He hid everything else under the hurricane junk. The water had a little more smell and floating things than in the harbor. He kept behind the moored boats after he got over the seawall, and let the tide carry him. He was just coming under the Whileaway bow when one of the square window ports opened almost overhead.
Sail sank. He thought somebody was going to shoot or use a harpoon.
Something large and heavy fell into the water and sank, colliding with him, pushing him out of the way and going on sinking. He had enough contact with it to tell the first part of it was a navy-type anchor. He swam down after it. The river had two fathoms here, and he found the anchor and what was tied to it. The tide stretched his legs out behind as he clung to what he had found.
Whoever had tied the knots was a sailor, and sailor knots, while they hold, are made to be easily untied. Sail got them loose.
It would have been better to swim under the houseboat and come up on the other side, away from the port from which the anchor and Nola had been thrown, but Sail didn’t feel equal to anything but straight up. His air capacity was low because of his near drowning earlier in the day.
He put his head out of the water with his eyes open and fixed in the direction of the square port. No head was sticking out of the port. No weapon appeared. The tide had taken Sail near the stern of the Whileaway and still carried him.
He got Nola’s head out. Water leaked from her nose and mouth. Sail got an arm up as high as he could, clutching. He missed the first sagging spring line, got the second. The rope with which the anchor had been attached to Nola still clung to her ankles. He tied one of her arms to the spring line so that her head was out.
Sail went up the spring line with his hands until one foot would reach the windowsills. From there to the first deck was simpler.
Nola began to gag and cough. It made a racket.
Sail opened his mouth to yell at her to be quiet. She couldn’t hear him yet, or understand. He wheeled and sloped into the houseboat cabin.
The furnishings might have been something once, but that had been fifteen years ago. Varnish everywhere had alligatored.
Sail angled into the galley when he saw it. He came out with a quart brass fire extinguisher which needed polishing, and a rusted ice pick. There had been nothing else in sight.
Nola got enough water out to start screeching.
Beyond the galley was a dining room. Sail had half crossed it when Captain Santorin Gura Andopolis came in the opposite door with a rusty butcher knife.
Andopolis was using a chair for a crutch, riding its bottom with the knee of the leg which Blick and Nola had put a bullet through. Around his eyes — on the lids more than elsewhere — were puffy gray blisters about a size which burning cigarettes would make. Three fingernails were off each hand. Red ran from the three mutilated tips on the right hand down over the rusty butcher knife.