He opened his speed again; ahead of them the flat side of a long, low barge suddenly appeared through the mist. Freight cars lined up in rows on its deck; they looked like toys in the swirling light. The boy nodded at this confirmation of his judgment and swung the wheel sharply, paralleling the large flatbottom boat; the speedboat edged toward the prow. Several workmen standing on the front portion of the deck were visible now; he opened his engines wider, moving ahead, and then suddenly cut them completely. Through the fog ahead of them the familiar sound of the other motorboat could be heard between the loud hoots from the barge at their side. The small boat’s engine sound grew louder; then it came into view through the swirling vapor.
“That’s Ann’s boat,” the boy said softly. “He isn’t looking. He’s going to get run down...” He sounded very young at the moment, not at all like a Vietnam veteran.
Reardon watched tautly; in the noise of the foghorns it was useless to shout, but still he found himself bending forward, yelling at the top of his voice. It seemed impossible that Crocker did not note the danger he was in. The figures on the railroad barge were bending over the side of the boat, obviously screaming. One had run back and was shouting up to the wheelhouse. Confused by the din from every direction, the man in the speedboat looked up. He hesitated a moment, half out from behind the wheel as if in preparation to jump, but it was too late. The barge had reversed its engines, churning water in a mad attempt to stop, but its impetus carried it inexorably forward. The flat curve of the prow climbed the small speedboat almost gently, apologetically, crushing it, thrusting it and its passenger beneath it and coasting ahead a bit before the straining engines had their effect and slowly drew it back from the scene of the crash. Reardon looked at the boy.
“Try to get closer.”
The boy obeyed without question, easing his craft amid the wreckage that was beginning to come to the surface and bob about on the dark water. Reardon tucked his gun back into its holster and leaned over the side of the boat, searching. For a moment he thought the body might have been entangled beneath the barge, but then it rose slowly to the surface, face downward, as if it were searching the depths for something it had lost, like life.
“There he is...”
The body rose and fell limply with the waves; it looked like an untidy bundle of clothing loosely tied in the middle and tossed into the bay to be gotten rid of.
“Closer,” Reardon said. The boy was pale. “Closer...”
The stocky detective leaned over the side, gripping the sodden jacket collar, lifting, straining. The body came part way over the side of the boat, tilting it; the neck canted at a drunken angle. Reardon thought of Bob Cooke’s body lying against the curb on Indiana; he put the thought away and tugged. The body hung there inertly a moment, rocking with the boat, and then tumbled in loosely, pushing against Reardon in comradely fashion. The boy stared away pointedly. Reardon made his voice expressionless.
“Can you find your way back to the marina from here?”
“Sure. The horns; the ones on land.” He tilted his head. “That’s North Point. I know them. It won’t be hard.”
“Let’s go, then.”
In the fog they had drifted out of sight of the barge and its crew; Reardon could picture the curiosity of the men on board at the appearance and subsequent disappearance of a speedboat picking up the body and taking it away. Well, he’d call the harbor police once they got back to the patrol car.
The boy pushed the throttles and the huge engines responded instantly, burbling the water behind them with its twin exhausts, tilting them backward as the boat increased speed. Crocker’s body lolled against Reardon in an attitude of affectionate idiocy; the young red-haired lieutenant eased it to the floor boards behind him, his face grim. He turned back, his jaw tight. Around them foghorns tooted and blared and squeaked and bawled with varying rhythms, echoing hollowly in the mist; before them the fog eddied mysteriously as the boy turned the boat and headed back toward shore.
Thursday — 2:45 P.M.
Assistant Chief Boynton kept his eyes moving from one to another of the three men in his office, evaluating, checking, adding or subtracting from the running performance list he automatically kept in his head on all of his staff. It was a habit from the earliest days of command, and one he was able to indulge in without fear of detection, since his eyes were the merest of slits, closed against the blue smoke curling lazily from the cigar in his mouth.
“So he murdered Cooke,” he said, speaking around the cigar effortlessly. “I’ll accept that; because he attacked Morrison, he ran from the police, and he fired on a patrol car.” He modified his statement slightly. “That is, I’ll accept it as a provisional theory. I’d like to hear what you consider proof, Lieutenant.”
“Well—” Reardon paused and then added, almost as an afterthought, “—sir; my first doubts were caused, subconsciously I admit, by the fact that he said he drove there directly from a restaurant and called us immediately after the accident happened. Now, his car had left an oil slick further up the street and I’d seen it and my mind registered the fact. It also registered an oil slick caused by the Buick standing in one place that appeared on the photographs the APB boys took of the skid marks. So my mind refused the time element that Crocker tried to feed us. And later, in checking, we found — that’s Sergeant Dondero and myself — that Crocker had faked at least a fifteen-minute alibi at the restaurant. Or, anyway,” he added, “he tried to.”
“And you can prove this?” The assistant chief’s voice was almost toneless. He looked on the verge of falling asleep, but every man in the room was well aware that he was probably the most alert of them all.
“Yes, sir. Definitely. The counterman’s testimony will prove it.” He took a breath and went on, wondering briefly if the counterman’s built-in sense of time would be enough proof for a jury, and then remembered that no jury would hear the case. “Then later, sir, in looking over the car, I noticed that the registration showed he’d bought the Buick only a week before. It struck me as odd. I—”
Boynton interrupted. He didn’t seem to shift his head at all but it was instantly apparent he was addressing Captain Clark.
“Was this fact noted in the technical report on the car?”
“Yes, sir.” Captain Clark couldn’t help sounding a bit smug. Getting by one of the assistant chief’s sudden questions was a bit like finding yourself in the quiet waters after a rough stretch of rapids. “All the information on the registration was duplicated in the report.”
“But you drew no inference from the registration date?”
Captain Clark wondered if perhaps the white water had been fully passed. “No, sir.”
“I see. All right, Lieutenant. Go ahead.”
“I hadn’t seen the technical report at that time, sir. I just read it a few minutes before this meeting. At any rate, it struck me as a coincidence that a man would get hold of what I would call the perfect car for killing someone, and a few days later actually happen to kill someone. I said in the beginning of this case that I’m leery of all automobile accidental deaths, as a matter of principle. A car is a deadly weapon that anyone can license and use at will. At any rate, we checked out the purchase of the Buick and found that Crocker had traded in a Volkswagen on it. Now, I don’t know what you know about vintage cars—”
“Quite a bit,” the assistant chief said quietly. “What’s your point?”
“Well, sir, then you know he certainly wasn’t a car fancier, because nobody who likes cars for the sake of cars drives a VW. They’re strictly a convenience job, easy to get through traffic with, easy to park, and relatively cheap. So his buying a monster of a car thirty years old didn’t make sense, unless you thought of his wanting to kill someone with it. It’s perfect for that, whereas the VW is too small and fragile to do the job without the man driving it taking the chance of getting killed himself in the accident.”