The Sweeney 02 Page 10

  He rowed and he thought more about it. A .44 Magnum could blow a sizable hole in the side of a wooden dinghy, wipe him out, and maybe drown the others. And he was somewhat noisily but effectively rowing into the range of a man with a gun who had forty feet of yacht to find cover on.

  “Wait,” Cassidy said, almost as if he’d been having the same thoughts as Regan. “Look,” he pointed.

  It was the fiber-glass outboard tender that the man in the raglan coat had ridden to the yacht on. He had presumably moored it to the yacht, but now the mooring rope had come undone, and the tender had drifted away and out to midstream where it was lazily circling in the current of the river. There was another ten-foot rubber dinghy tied astern of the yacht, but this had no outboard motor on it.

  “Circle around. We’ll look in the outboard tender.”

  Regan rowed the wooden boat alongside the white fiberglass boat. The fiber-glass boat was empty.

  “Haul it in, and hold it.” Cassidy was scrambling over Regan and half stepped, half fell, into the fiber-glass boat as Regan and Ciales struggled to hold it alongside.

  “Ramo, you know how to start this thing?”

  “Pull the cord handle; push open the lever on that handle.”

  “I know that. Is there an ignition switch?”

  “No.”

  Cassidy pulled on the recoil starter. The motor didn’t kick, and he cursed. Suddenly it burst into life and Cassidy was yelling at them. “You board at the stern; I’ll go around to the bow.”

  Ciales and Regan released the fiber-glass tender and Cassidy took off on the fifty-foot journey to the prow of the ship. Regan started to row.

  “Wait,” Ciales said. “Why d’you think Cassidy took off? So three of us don’t get hit.”

  “But if he gets shot?”

  “We retreat.”

  Regan accepted it and sat on his oars, his eyes straining to penetrate the darkness. They heard the bump as Cassidy’s tender hit the front of the yacht. They heard the engine cut. Then curses and the noises of Cassidy’s boots hitting the deck, then silence.

  “Go,” Ciales ordered.

  Regan bent himself again to the oars. It took him two minutes rowing against the current to cover the fifty feet to the yacht. Ciales grabbed hold of a rope trailing from the yacht scuppers and pulled them alongside. Seconds later they were up and over the side and crossing the deck to the center cabin. Cassidy had now lit a paraffin lamp inside the cabin. Holding his gun out in front of him, Ciales led the way down six steps and into the narrow cabin.

  Cassidy looked up and pointed to the open locker and the floor by it. “Gone.”

  “How?” Ciales looked stumped and angry.

  Regan had already got it. “Skin diver?”

  Cassidy nodded. “He came to the boat. He got into his wet suit and dropped back into the water and swam lazily away.” Cassidy held up the guy’s raglan coat and trousers. He’d been going through the pockets. Inside the locker the remnants of the rest of the skin-diving equipment: two empty oxygen bottles, spear gun, a broken face mask, snorkels.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ciales demanded. “He’s out there. How far has he got? Let’s get him. He’s not even armed.”

  Cassidy took the .44 Magnum and handed it back to Regan. He spoke to Ciales. “Do what you want. Call in the marines. Comb every yard of river. With searchlights and riverboats you still won’t find him in that pitch dark. He’s away.”

  “Jesus, Don, it’s worth a try.”

  “Sure. I agree with you. Go.”

  Ciales walked out.

  Cassidy didn’t look up from the job of checking through the man’s clothes, pockets, and wallet. “I’ve looked at the boat. There’s a big locker up front. Got a padlock on it. Toolbox.” He pointed out to Regan a blue metal box under a berth.

  Regan took up the box and, stooping, went through the saloon, through the wide teakwood cabin, to the prow compartment of the yacht.

  Cassidy had lit the paraffin lamp in this compartment.

  Regan examined the padlocked mahogany door of the locker. As he did so he heard the noise. It was an odd sound, like the droning of bees, a noise somehow out of place on a luxury yacht, but familiar in the nightmare of any child—the sound that rose when the foot stepped into a wasp’s nest. Regan opened the toolbox, pulled out a huge screwdriver which looked like a steel punch, inserted it under the flimsy brass padlock fittings, applied pressure, and levered the padlock off the door.

  He opened the door and the hailstorm of fly and bluebottle bodies flew out, hitting off his face, bombarding the walls of the small forward cabin, and diving at the paraffin lamp. Regan recoiled in horror from both the impact of the flies and the smell.

  The man who was crammed into the locker had died by drowning. Regan could tell that by his flaccid, blue-tinted skin and bleached white eyes and lips. The body had been dumped in the locker and then must have lain there for at least enough time to attract by its smell the myriad of flies entering the locker through the deck ventilator. The face had been badly distorted by the watery death and being preyed upon by flies. Nonetheless, Regan recognized the man. The first time he had met him was when he had arrested him in the lounge at the Aerial Hotel, London Airport. The name on his passport had been Angelo Galliano.

  Cassidy leaned against the ship’s rail and contemplated the Stygian waters as if he was impervious to the zero-degree wind hacking at both of them. Regan knew what he was working on, a synthesis involving the late dead Galliano, a skin diver, and a yacht. Somewhere the combination had to make sense. Meanwhile it seemed to be like a simultaneous equation on an exam paper that had a printing mistake.

  He turned to Regan. “We start here.” He banged the handrail. “The yacht.”

  Regan didn’t follow.

  “This yacht is called Jilly. The owners, like two-thirds of all boat owners, have failed to paint on its arse where it’s registered—like NYYC or Miami Yacht Club. I once spent six months trying to trace the owner of a yacht.”

  “So?”

  “You know one way we maybe find out the owner of this boat at one-thirty in the morning?”

  “How?”

  “The way we maybe find out the owner of this boat is we set it on fire. How do you like that for one idea?”

  Regan didn’t know. He couldn’t really guess what Cassidy was getting at. “You want to set this on fire? Why don’t we wait till we see whether Ciales and the river police get anything?”

  Ciales had gone ashore twenty minutes before to contact the river police and tell Christa to go back to New York. They hadn’t heard from him since.

  “Here’s another way. We don’t set fire to the yacht, we set fire to that inflatable tender,” Cassidy decided. “Jack, unhook the outboard from the fiber-glass tender, open the fuel tank, splash some gas over the inflatable tender, set it alight. I’m going below to check Galliano’s corpse.”

  It took Regan ten minutes to climb from the yacht into the fiber-glass tender, maneuver it, pull it along the side of the yacht by getting handholds on the yacht’s rubbing strake, then move it to the rear of the yacht where a black rubber inflatable tender bobbed on the water. He had problems unscrewing the two brass bolts that held the small, one-horsepower outboard to the transom of the fiber-glass boat. Eventually, after a sequence of breaking a nail and scoring a deepish graze on the back of his thumb, he succeeded in detaching the motor, opening its filler cap, and inclining the tank and motor over the inflatable so that fuel spilled over the rubber fabric of the craft. He left enough fuel in the tank to get Cassidy and him ashore. He put the motor back on the transom, secured the screws, moved it down the side of the yacht again, tied it, and climbed aboard. He went to the back of the yacht, took out a book of matches, pulled off a strip of half a dozen matches, struck them, and lobbed them into the rubber dinghy. The combination of gasoline and rubber detonated into a ten-foot-high blaze. Regan stood on the stern for a minute, warmed himself in the heat, then caught a lungf
ul of rubber smoke. The rubber was now exploding in high gushes of hot air, petroleum, and chemicals. The dinghy was deflating but would still take some time to burn out. Regan went below.

  “Sit down a minute, Jack,” Cassidy said. He had opened all the portholes in the forecabin and pulled Galliano’s body out of the locker, face down on the wooden floor. He’d found some aluminum foil and matches in the galley area. He’d torn off ten small pieces of foil and was now digging matches under the corpse’s nails, digging out the dirt, and wrapping matches and nail dirt in the aluminum foil, one per finger.

  Regan admired the stomach of the guy, to be able to work bent close over a corpse in bad shape and exuding a worse smell. Regan had sat himself by an open porthole eight feet away.

  “Now, Jack, I want every single word the guy said to you on your car ride.”

  Regan concentrated and began to talk. Roughly five minutes later he reckoned he’d covered all of it, from the references to the missing Arabic letter from the Tunis Hilton, to the Dibouti finance minister, to the killings that the man seemed so concerned about.

  By the time he finished, Cassidy had wound up his sample session on Galliano’s fingernails and was just sitting there, puzzle in his expression. There was silence for a moment except for the sputtering and hissing as the fire burned down to the inflatable’s waterline. Then Cassidy shrugged. “It figures. I’ve had a hunch about this case. I don’t think we’ve even identified yet what exactly we’re investigating. Let me put it this way.” Cassidy took out a cigarette, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a gold Dunhill lighter. “First I thought this was a Mafia caper, that some East Coast Mafia guys were the important element. Now it’s down to Africans with names like Awolwe. I mean, what the fuck is all this about?”

  Regan shrugged. He didn’t know.

  “Second, why did Seebohm involve me in this case? Was it because I was on temporary suspension waiting for a million-dollar black to croak or get his breath back? I mean, supposing I made headway in this investigation, just supposing. If certain official people wanted me taken off the job, it could be done in a second—I have no status in the police department since my suspension.”

  “What d’you mean ‘official people’? Regan asked.

  “Look, Ramo Ciales has a friend in the FBI in Washington. That friend could easily give him access to information on their central criminal records computer. Ramo asked for information on Galliano, Cohen, Senti, and Altbach. We were trying to find out who had leased the phony FBI offices. The FBI friend turned him down. Then last night we put a call on the collate vehicle index for details on the truck that ran us down. The information should’ve been available instantly. It took four hours. Why did it take four hours to get the owner schedule on the truck?”

  Regan was lost, simply not following. “What are you saying?”

  “What I think I’m saying is very simple,” Cassidy returned. “I think this investigation is being obstructed by someone high up—by Captain Seebohm, or maybe a thousand other powerful people in this town whom we will have major difficulty in identifying. I have no idea why it’s being obstructed, none at all, but I do know that it all adds up to a bad scene.”

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  “We soldier on,” Cassidy replied. “Because I don’t take to people screwing me up or pushing me around. We started with one case; we now have three. Our first investigation is, who was behind the con FBI setup and why. The second, to follow up my hunch that the actual case involving this dead guy,” Cassidy patted Galliano on the head, “and the skin diver and the items he talked about in the car may be about something that we haven’t even guessed at yet. And third, we have to find out who inside or outside the police department is obstructing this case.”

  “Let’s take that last one first. How can we get anywhere if we’re being screwed by our own organization? Shouldn’t we take the obstruction problem first?”

  “Nope.” Cassidy’s voice was convincingly firm. “To find out who may be screwing us from within is the hardest one. Even when the case is laid we may have a hell of a problem—”

  Cassidy halted his speculation. There was a thump against the side of the yacht and the squeak and rattle of row-boat oars.

  Regan followed Cassidy down the narrow passage between cabin bulkheads and up the companionway to the deck. They ran onto the deck and halted, caught in the glare of a flashlight switched on. They looked into the double barrels of an over/under shotgun held by a wizened old man of about sixty. He was the first to speak. “Who are you?”

  “Police officers.” Cassidy slowly put a hand inside his raincoat and pulled out his police ID and held it up. The old man studied it in the light of the flashlight and the failing light from the burning inflatable.

  “So okay, so what are you doing here? This isn’t your yacht.”

  “We’re investigating an incendiary. You know what that is? It’s a guy who sets fire to things.”

  “I know, I know. J. Minshaw.” The old man introduced himself. “Just rowed out from Tarrytown. My daughter saw the fire, thought the whole goddamn yacht was in flames.”

  “This your yacht, Mr. Minshaw?” Cassidy asked.

  “No sir. This is sixty thousand bucks of ship, officer. And I don’t think I’ve earned that amount of money in my life.”

  “So why did you row out here, Mr. Minshaw?” Cassidy asked.

  “What’s the matter with you, officer?” the old man demanded. “My money’s earned looking after these boats.” His hand swept around the semicircle of the marina. “I look after ‘em, see they ain’t vandalized. A dinghy like that is two hundred bucks. So where’s the incendiary?”

  “He’s not far away,” Cassidy said. “The important question, Mr. Minshaw, is where is the owner of this boat—have you got a name and address for him?”

  “There ain’t an owner for this boat,” the old man said. And then he thought he should qualify the statement. “That is to say, it is not owned by a person.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “It is not owned by a person; it is owned by a bank.”

  “A bank?” said Cassidy.

  “D’you have the address of the bank, Mr. Minshaw?” Regan asked.

  It sat two storefronts in from the corner of East Forty-ninth Street and Lexington. Coming down Lexington a righthander into Forty-ninth had the Lexington Bank and Trust Company on the left. The police department was on good terms with a couple of realtors with property on the north side of the street. There was a choice for a surveillance aerie. One premises was on the seventh floor of the corner building on Lexington. The other was twenty yards down the street but on a second floor with a five-second sprint down to street level. Because the other property was seven floors up and depended on elevators, Cassidy, reinforced by Ciales’s and Regan’s opinions, buttonholed the second-floor premises. The offices, three large rooms and a toilet, were empty and smelled of new white paint.

  The meeting of the three cops with Captain Seebohm was at 9:00 a.m. and lasted an hour. Cassidy outlined everything that had happened, starting right at the beginning when Regan got off the plane, going over all the details once again, through the old man at the marina who identified the yacht as belonging to the Lexington Bank. Finally the 8:00 a.m. visit to East Forty-ninth Street, and the sighting of the bank and possible premises for surveillance.

  Seebohm listened to it all, then took charge. He made phone calls to realtors, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Federal Bank Guarantee Corporation, and some nonspecific inquiries to the FBI. He agreed with Cassidy that the FBI should not be told everything at the moment because there was nothing except some circumstantial garbage, and anyhow Cassidy, Ciales, and the Limey could sight a surveillance on a bank as efficiently as the Bureau.

  Cassidy got up. “Right, we can leave all these minor details to you.”

  A phone ringing interrupted more explosive words that would have followed the sudden expression of annoy
ance on Seebohm’s face. “Sit down, Cassidy! Did I tell you to go?” Seebohm picked up the phone. “Hold a moment,” Seebohm shouted into it. He barked at Cassidy. “Cassidy. Put your ass on that seat. I have not finished with you. I have not said you can leave.”

  “I’m going, Chief,” Cassidy said gently. “But here’s an order for you. Our surveillance offices have no furniture. We may be there days. I want the best of surveillance stuff, cameras, directional mikes, the best PD Leica equipment. I also want comfortable chairs, a bed, three changes of sheets. Get onto the City Works Department and rip that off—”

  “Get out!” Seebohm shouted. “Get out of here!”