Free Dead in the Water by Ted Wood

gotten himself shot up, he'd have been a heel in this town. His father owned most of the shoreline, up until the Depression, when the bank got it. But the locals respect Murphy, he's one of their own."
    Fullwell strolled to the exit in the counter, swinging his legs the way patrol car coppers do after hours in the driver's seat. So how do I reach you again?"
    "I'll come back here later, say around six. We can compare notes then."
    He nodded and flicked the brim of his hat with one finger, the way they used to do in westerns. I could hardly keep from laughing.
    I phoned Murphy at home. His wife told me he was spraying his roses and I told her to wish him luck. If I needed him I'd give him a call later. A man deserved a lunch break, and if Murph went to an hour and a half, well, he made up for it with his twenty-four-hour care of the telephone and his long hours at the office when he was needed. At the moment I didn't see what else he could do. I assumed he'd already tried find out if anyone from New York was staying locally. If he had any information for me, he'd have passed it along. I whistled Sam and left, locked the office, then drove down to the marina.
    George, the Indian kid, was sitting in the sun in front of the gas pump. He had a book in front of him but wasn't reading. He was watching a blonde in a bikini sunning herself on the deck of one of the tied-up cruisers. I didn't blame him. She had it all over War and Peace like a tent. He jumped up when I came down the dock. "Those big feet, Reid, you'll never sneak up on an Indian."
    "Okay, Tonto. What can you show me in a power boat?"
    He grinned. "I heard some dude made off with yours."
    "He will live to regret it," I said.
    The blonde heard us talking and raised herself on one elbow. Her top had come undone and we had a micro-flash of wonderland before she subsided again and fiddled with the string, writhing like a landed muskie. George sighed.
    "It's about this boat," I reminded him.
    "Oh yeah." He walked with me to one of the marina's rental oats. It was the same age as the police boat but with a smaller motor, for trolling. "Help yourself."
    I got into it, calling Sam after me. He came and coiled down on the bottom, happy to be in the sunshine. I asked George, "Anything else going on I should know about?"
    He thought a moment. "Nope. Except some guy on a cruiser must have had a birthday."
    "Yeah, what happened?"
    George scrunched his face, remembering. "Well, he tipped Crazy Eddy Crowfoot ten bucks for carrying a few bags of groceries down from the store about an hour ago, more, maybe."
    I whistled. "He hasn't seen that much cash since they took the bounty off wolf tails."
    "Yeah, well he's up in the beverage room spending it and he went to the liquor store first," George said. "More work for you later." He was right, I thought. Eddie made an ugly drunk.
    "Which cruiser was it?"
    "The Mary Sue , big job, sleeps six. Out of Honey Harbour."
    I stored the name in my noggin. "Thanks, keep me posted."
    He waved and sloped back to the gas pump to get his old view of the blonde who seemed to be doing isometric exercises designed to pop his eyes out. I backed the boat out from the dock and started away upstream.
    I felt frustrated and a little foolish, following up nothing more solid than a hunch, backed up by the direction my boat had taken and a dim pencil cross on an old map. My mind was racing through all the things that might be done. I could be checking cottages to find if anyone knew of a connection between Murphy's Harbour and a chemical company five hundred miles away. Most police work is like that. You ask the same question a hundred times until someone gives you an inch, then you take in a mile of information. As it was, I was following a will-o'-the-wisp. But it was a fine blue-skyed day and the breeze of driving through the still warm air was cool and pleasant. I did what Confucius recommends in such cases, sat back and let it happen to me for a while.
    Just