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Bell paced harder, boot heels ringing. “What about the black boat?”
“Yeah, well, the Coasties say they saw this black boat. No one else did.”
“Except maybe Mr. Van Dorn. Is he talking yet, Isaac?”
“Not as much as the first day,” Bell answered, adding, quietly, “In fact, not at all, for the moment.” His surgeons feared an infection had settled into his chest. Dorothy was beside herself, and even Captain Novicki was losing faith.
“Watermen,” said Bell. He turned to the barrel-chested, broad-bellied Ed Tobin. A brutal beating by the Gopher gang when Tobin was a Van Dorn apprentice had maimed his face with a crushed cheekbone and a drooping eyelid. “Ed, have none of the watermen seen it?”
“None that will talk to me.”
“Have you asked Uncle Darbee?” Donald Darbee, Tobin’s great-uncle, was a Staten Island coal pirate with sidelines in salvaging cargo that fell off the docks and ferrying fugitives from New York to New Jersey.
“I asked him first off. Uncle Donny’s never seen the black boat, never heard of it. Though he did like the idea, and he asked me could I find out whether it’s got Liberty motors and, if so, how many, and are they installed in-line or side by side.”
Knowing laughter rumbled about the bull pen, and when even Bell cracked a faint smile, Tobin said, “Can I ask you, Mr. Bell, how are you making out with the Coast Guard?”
Bell’s smile vanished like a shuttered signal lamp. “I will continue trying to interview the cutter crew.” He had had no luck so far. The Coast Guard was keeping CG-9 at sea. When Bell offered to fly out in his plane to interview the crew, his offer was refused.
“McKinney!” Bell turned to the new chief of the New York field office. Darren McKinney was built short, wiry, and supple as chain mail. “You reported that the cops caught a lighter in the East River that had off-loaded the sinking rummy. What sort of booze were they carrying?”
“Dewar’s blended Scotch whisky. The real McCoy.”
“From Arethusa?” Arethusa was the famous McCoy’s schooner that cruised international waters off the coast of Fire Island.
“McCoy just sailed up a shipload from Nassau. But the guys the cops arrested in the East River swear that they got the stuff from somewhere other than the shot-up rummy—understandable, considering the circumstances.”
“Did they or didn’t they?” Bell demanded.
“Harbor Squad claims they followed them from the sinking rummy. These guys saying otherwise are understandably reluctant to be linked to a shooting that might have ki—”
A flicker of violence in Isaac Bell’s eyes silenced the detective mid-word.
“—That is to say, led to the wounding of the proprietor of the Van Dorn Detective Agency.”
Bell said, “I want that reluctance felt by every bootlegger in this city. Find out if they knew the guys on the shot-up rummy.”
“The rummy guys are in jail.”
“No they’re not,” said a gang unit detective hurrying into the bull pen. “Someone bailed ’em out.”
“Now’s our chance to find out. Run them down.”
“Sorry, Isaac, that won’t be possible.”
“Why not?”
“They just got fished out of the river . . . That’s why I’m late.”
The Van Dorns met the news of slaughtered witnesses with stunned silence. Criminals fearing the electric chair killed accomplices, not ordinary rumrunners and bootleggers.
Bell turned to Detective Tobin. “Ed, get on a boat. Go out to Arethusa and ask McCoy who he sold to that day. If he didn’t sell it, he might have some idea who did.”
“I’m not so sure he’s interested in helping, Mr. Bell.”
Bell said, “If he insists on protecting the buyer, tell him we’ll buy him a Lewis machine gun—he’ll need one for protection, the way things are going. Tell him what Harry Warren just said, criminals are moving in on bootlegging. If that doesn’t change his mind, make it damned clear to him that I will make his life on Rum Row immensely unpleasant by persuading the Coast Guard to assign a cutter to circle his schooner day and night for a month.”
Tobin started for the door.
