“It was no picnic,” I said.
“You didn’t have a fight, or anything?”
“No. Oh, I chewed him out for splitting the mains’l, but you’d hardly call it a fight. He had it coming, and knew it.”
The car paused briefly for a traffic light, and turned, weaving through the downtown traffic. “What’s this about a sail?”
“It’s technical. Just say he goofed, and wrecked it. It was right after Baxter died, and I was jumpy anyway, so I barked at him.”
“You haven’t kept in touch with him since you got in?”
“No. I haven’t seen him since I paid him off, except for that few minutes night before last.”
The car slowed, and turned down a ramp into a cavernous basement garage in which several patrol cars and an ambulance were parked. We slid into a numbered stall and got out. Across the garage was an elevator, and to the left of it a dingy corridor. Willetts led the way down the corridor to a doorway on the right.
Inside was a bleak room of concrete and calcimine and unshaded light. On either side were the vaults that were the grisly filing cabinets of a city’s unclaimed and anonymous dead, and at the far end a stairway led up to the floor above. Near the stairway were two or three enameled metal tables on casters, and a desk at which sat an old man in a white coat. He got up and came toward us, carrying a clip board.
“Four,” Willetts said.
The old man pulled the drawer out on its rollers. The body was covered with a sheet. Ramirez took a corner of it in his hand, and glanced at me. “If you had any breakfast, better hang onto it.”
He pulled it back. In spite of myself, I sucked in my breath, the sound just audible in the stillness. He wasn’t pretty. I fought the revulsion inside me, and forced myself to look again. It was Blackie, all right; there was little doubt of it, in spite of the wreckage of his face. There was no blood, of course—it had long since been washed away by the water—but the absence of it did nothing to lessen the horror of the beating he had taken before he died.
“Well?” Willetts asked in his flat, unemotional voice. “That Keefer?”
I nodded. “How about the tattoo?”
Ramirez pulled the sheet back farther, exposing the nude body. On one forearm was the blue outline of a valentine heart with the name Darlene written slantingly across it in red script. That settled it. I turned away, remembering a heaving deck and wind-hurled rain, and holding Keefer by the front of his sodden shirt while I cursed him. I’m sorry, Blackie. I wish I hadn’t.
“There’s no doubt of it?” Willetts asked. “That’s the guy you brought up from Panama?”
“No doubt at all,” I replied. “It’s Keefer.”
“Okay. Let’s go upstairs.”
The room was on the third floor, an airless cubicle with one dirty window looking out over the sun-blasted gravel roof of an adjoining building. The only furnishings were some steel lockers, a table scarred with old cigarette burns, and several straight-backed chairs.
Willetts nodded to Ramirez. “Joe, tell the lieutenant we’re here.”
Ramirez went out. Willetts dropped his hat on the table, took off his coat, and loosened the collar of his shirt. After removing a pack of cigarettes from the coat, he draped it across the back of one of the chairs. “Sit down.”
I sat down at the table. The room was stifling, and I could feel sweat beading my face. I wished I could stop seeing Keefer. “Why in the name of God did they beat him that way? Is that what actually killed him?”
Willetts popped a match with his thumbnail, and exhaled smoke. “He was pistol-whipped. And killed by a blow on the back of his head. But suppose we ask the questions, huh? And don’t try to hold out on me, Rogers; we can make you wish you’d never been born.”
I felt a quick ruffling of anger, but kept it under control. “Why the hell would I hold out on you? If there’s any way I can help, I’ll be glad to. What do you want to know?”
“Who you are, to begin with. What you’re doing here.
And how you happened to be sailing that boat up from Panama.”
“I bought her in the Canal Zone,” I said. I took out my wallet and flipped identification onto the table—Florida driver’s license, FCC license verification card, and memberships in a Miami Beach sportsman’s club and the Miami Chamber of Commerce. Willetts made a note of the address. “I own the schooner Orion. She berths at the City Yacht Basin in Miami, and makes charter cruises through the Bahamas—”
“So why’d you buy another one?”
“I’m trying to tell you, if you’ll give me a chance. Summer’s the slow season, from now till the end of October, and the Orion’s tied up. I heard about this deal on the Topaz, through a yacht broker who’s a friend of mine. Some oil-rich kids from Oklahoma bought her a couple of months ago and took off for Tahiti without bothering to find out if they could sail a boat across Biscayne Bay. With a little luck, they managed to get as far as the Canal, but they’d had a belly-full of glamour and romance and being seasick twenty-four hours a day, so they left her there and flew back. I was familiar with her, and knew she’d bring twice the asking price back in the States, so I made arrangements with the bank for a loan, hopped the next Pan American flight down there, and looked her over and bought her.”
“Why’d you bring her over here, instead of Florida?”
“Better chance of a quick sale. Miami’s always flooded with boats.”
“And you hired Keefer, and this man Baxter, to help you?”
“That’s right. She’s a little too much boat for single-handed operation, and sailing alone’s just a stunt, anyway. But four days out of Cristobal, Baxter died of a heart attack—”
“I read the story in the paper,” Willetts said. He sat down and leaned his forearms on the table. “All right, let’s get to Keefer. And what I want to know is where he got all his money.”
I looked at him. “Money? He didn’t—”
“I know, I know!” Willetts cut me off. “That’s what you keep telling me. You picked him up off the beach in Panama with his tail hanging out. He didn’t have a nickel, no luggage, and no clothes except the ones he was wearing. And all you paid him was a hundred dollars. Right?”
“Yes.”
Willetts gestured with his cigarette. “Well, you better look again. We happen to know that when he came ashore off that boat he had somewhere between three and four thousand dollars.”
“Not a chance. We must be talking about two different people.”
“Listen, Rogers. When they pulled Keefer out of the bay, he was wearing a new suit that cost a hundred and seventy-five dollars. For the past four days he’s been driving a rented Thunderbird, and living at the Warwick Hotel, which is no skid-row flop, believe me. And he’s still the richest stiff in the icebox. They’re holding an envelope for him in the Warwick safe with twenty-eight hundred dollars in it. Now you tell me.”
2
I shook my head in bewilderment. “I don’t get it. Are you sure about all this?”
“Of course we’re sure. Where you think we first got a lead on the identification? We got a body, with no name. Traffic’s got a wrinkled Thunderbird with rental plates somebody walked off and abandoned after laying a block on a fire hydrant with it, and a complaint sworn out by the Willard Rental Agency. The Willard manager’s got a description, and a local address at the Warwick Hotel, and a name. Only this Francis Keefer they’re all trying to locate hasn’t been in his room since Thursday, and he sounds a lot like the stiff we’re trying to identify. He’d been tossing big tips around the Warwick, and told one of the bellhops he’d just sailed up from Panama in a private yacht, so then somebody remembered the story in Wednesday’s Telegram. So we look you up, among other things, and you give us this song and dance that Keefer was just a merchant seaman, and broke. Now. Keefer lied to you, or you’re trying to con me. And if you are, God help you.”