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“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Bell’s hand strayed over the bill, covering it. “He might have called himself Dima Smirnov, spelled with a v.”
“Smirnoff never came on board. He switched places last minute with another passenger.”
“Is that allowed?”
“It’s allowed if the chief purser says it’s allowed. The new passenger made it worth my while. It didn’t matter. Nobody got cheated. The company got their money. I just changed the manifest.”
“Who was the new passenger?”
“A New York hard case. Charlie O’Neal.”
“What do you mean by a ‘hard case’? A gangster?”
“Something like that. He had a nickname. He called himself Trucks. Gangsters tend to do that, don’t they? Trucks O’Neal. Sounds like a gangster.”
“Could you describe Trucks?”
“Beefy bruiser, like the moniker implies. Quick-moving. Black hair, high widow’s peak. His nose had been mashed a couple of times.”
“How tall?”
“Six foot.”
“Eyes?”
“Tiny little eyes. Like a pig.”
“What color?”
“Pig color.”
“Pigs have pink eyes,” said Bell.
“No, I meant kind of brown, like the rest of the pig.” The purser ruminated a moment and added, “By the way, I don’t mean to speak against him. Trucks didn’t cause any trouble or anything. He just wanted to get home.”
Bell removed his hand from the hundred and took another from his wallet. “Do you recall where ‘home’ was?”
“I think I have it somewhere in my files.” He opened a drawer and thumbed over folders. “Reason I remember is there was some problem with customs. By the time they worked it out, O’Neal had gone on ahead. So we delivered his trunk. Here! Four-sixteen West 20th Street, across the river in New York.”
“Chelsea,” said Bell, rising quickly. “Good luck with the Shipping Board.”
“I’ll need it,” said the purser. But by then the tall detective was striding as fast as his legs would thrust him across the embarkation lobby and down the gangplank.
• • •
WEST 20TH STREET was a once elegant block of town houses that overlooked the gardens of an Episcopal seminary. Many of the homes had been subdivided into rooming houses for the longshoremen who worked on the Chelsea piers. Number 416 was one of these, a slapped-together warren of sagging stairs and tiny rooms that smelled of tobacco and sweat. Bell found the elfin, white-haired superintendent drinking bathtub gin in a back apartment carved out of the original house’s kitchen. A cat had passed out on his lap.
“Trucks?” the super echoed.
“Charlie ‘Trucks’ O’Neal. What floor does he live on?”
“He left in May.”
“Did he leave a forwarding address?”
The super took a long slug from his jelly jar of cloudy gin and looked up quizzically. “I wouldn’t know how Park Avenue swells do it, mister, but down here on the docks men who adopt nicknames like Trucks do not leave forwarding addresses.”
