Free Voyage into Violence by Frances and Richard Lockridge Page B

the dispatch of radio photographs—but that was absurd. He nevertheless mentioned it to Captain Peter Cunningham. It was absurd. The Carib Queen was equipped for many things, some rather more complex than picture transmission. She could look through darkness, farther than the eye could reach. Electronically, when near the coast—as she was now—the Carib Queen could tell herself precisely where she was. But she could not dispatch the convoluted signature on note and check to Worcester, Massachusetts, where it would mean something.
    â€œFolsom’s merry men come from Worcester,” Cunningham said, and looked at Bill Weigand and said, “Sorry, old man. Realize you know that.”
    â€œRight,” Bill said. He put the contents of Marsh’s pockets into the attaché case. “It can be coincidence, of course.” He picked up the confirming note and gazed at it again. He handed it to Cunningham, who gazed at it, too—who held it under a lamp on the dressing table and gazed at it long, who handed it back and shook his head. “Could be damn’ near anything,” Cunningham said.
    Bill used the telephone again. There was, at any rate, that. He added a few points for Sergeant Stein, who had got things moving from a desk, its edges scarred with cigarette burns, in West Twentieth Street. Tomorrow—which unfortunately would be Sunday, when information is hard to come by—they might find out whether there was a Clover Club in Worcester, Massachusetts, and whether one of its members had a peculiarly meaningless signature. The following day, they might enquire, to the same effect, of the Bay State-Farmer’s Trust in Worcester.
    He didn’t, Stein said, without reproach, give them much to go on. A good many men hid their identity in their signatures. Bill realized that. He said, “It’s a sort of circular squiggle,” and listened to Stein and smiled, and said he realized it didn’t, but that there it was.
    â€œMarsh lived at the Buckminster,” Stein said. “Had for years. Highly valued guest and all that sort of thing. The boys are going through his room. It’ll be slow going about the rest. It’s the middle of the night, here. In fact, it’s Sunday, here.”
    â€œIt is here, too,” Bill told him. “Unless you get something hot—and you won’t—call me in the morning.”
    â€œO.K.,” Stein said. “I’ll get on with it.”
    Bill could see him, in the small, familiar, distant room, with a cigarette smouldering on the edge of the desk, reaching out for a telephone. He could see “the boys” going through Marsh’s room; checking out on the passenger list—if they had got hold of it, and they would have got hold of it. It was consolation, of sorts. It would have been more consolation to have Sergeant Aloysius Mullins aboard the Carib Queen . Bill picked up the attaché case and, since it no longer had a lock, put it under an arm.
    â€œThere’s nothing more to be done tonight,” Bill said, and Cunningham looked, momentarily, as if he had been expecting a rabbit from a hat, and was let down at seeing none. But he said, “Right you are,” and then, “anything I can do to help.” He looked at Marsh. “Aside,” he said, “from the matter of refrigeration.”
    â€œI don’t—” Bill said, and stopped. “It might,” he said, “be an idea to keep somebody in here after you’ve removed the body.” Cunningham raised eyebrows. “On the chance,” Bill said, “that somebody might want to tidy up.”
    Cunningham said, “Folsom? You think he’d—”
    Bill only shrugged. He started for the door, and stopped.
    â€œThe Norths,” he said, “have somehow—I’ve not always known quite how—been involved in several cases with me. Been—” He paused for the word. He chose