ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON I WAS PEDALING toward the harbor with a package of stuff for Tom Morrison when I came up on Marina bent over her bicycle along the side of the road.
“What’s the matter?” I called out. When she pointed, I saw that her front tire was flat. It had picked up some kind of steel tack and the air was already all but gone out of it.
“Where’d this come from?” I said when I got over to her. I tried to pull the thing out, but it was stuck in too deep to get leverage on.
“Look,” she said, “they’re all over the place here.”
A great mass of tacks was lying along the roadside, and also on the other side of the road.
“I guess somebody knocked over a nail keg,” was the best I could come up with.
“Oh, it’s the rumrunners,” Marina said, shaking her head. “They let loose with these out the back of their trucks if the cops get too close. My dad’s always coming home with flat tires. Now what am I going to do?”
“Where were you going?” I asked.
“I was thinking of buying some fresh clams down at the docks, for chowder tonight. And taking a ride on a nice June day. I guess I’m headed back home, like it or not.”
There was a long silence after this while she leaned down and poked at the tire again, and I looked on, thinking about possible solutions to the problem that I would never dare to mention to Marina. She had on a blue sweater and a red bandana over her dark hair, which tumbled halfway down her back. I could’ve stood there all day looking at her, and very well might have if she hadn’t decided she’d waited long enough for me to come to my senses.
“You wouldn’t give me a ride down there, would you, Ruben?” she said, standing up. “I mean, unless you’re in a hurry, making a delivery for the store. I wouldn’t dream of holding you up.”
Something was wrong with me and I didn’t know what. A year or two before, the idea of riding Marina to the harbor wouldn’t have made me think twice. She would’ve climbed on board and we’d have been off in a minute. Now I felt as if I’d been hit over the head with a ton of bricks and received some serious brain damage.
“It isn’t,” I said.
“Isn’t what?” Marina asked.
“A delivery. I mean it is, but . . .”
“Oh, well, in that case . . .”
“No, really . . .”
“Definitely not. You’re on a job, I see that now.”
“No!”
“I know, but . . .”
“Ruben, no. You don’t have time.”
“Yes, I . . .”
“I’m just going to walk back and . . .”
“No, Marina. I can do it!” I was in a frantic state by this time.
“I’ve gotten you in a fizz by asking you to do something you can’t,” Marina said. She had that serious wrinkle between her eyes that always finished me.
“No!”
It was several minutes more before we worked things out, and she finally did sit herself down on my handlebars. This was such a nerve-racking pleasure that I couldn’t think of one thing to say. She tried out a comment now and then, otherwise we rode in silence.
“Where were you going, actually?” she asked me at last.
When I said it was just to Coulter’s Point to see Tom Morrison and bring him some coffee grinds, she insisted we stop by on the way back, after she’d bought the clams.
“Tom Morrison,” she said. “Is he still down there in that chicken coop? I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“He’s still there,” I said. “Jeddy and I went to visit him a while ago, and I’ve been going by since. He’s a grand old fellow. Do you really want to come? I might stay a few minutes.”
Marina said she’d be more than pleased. It would give her a look at the beach, which she hadn’t seen lately. So down we went, and we were quite a load on the bicycle with the addition of a couple of bushels of clams in a burlap sack and Marina laughing and balancing them on her knees.
“I’d offer you supper for all this trouble, but I guess you and Jeddy haven’t patched up yet,” she said. “What’s the matter, anyhow?”
I didn’t want to say that the real stumbling block was her own dad, so I shaded things a little.
“Jeddy wants to report everything to the police,” I told her. “What I think is, you’ve got to pick and choose.”
“Well, I’m not getting in the middle of that one.” She laughed. She thought a minute and added, “You know, it’s hard when your father works in law enforcement. It’s like a spotlight is shining on you and you’ve got to do everything by the book, whether you think it’s fair or not. Otherwise you’ll be going against him, out in public, for everyone to see. Give Jeddy some time. He’ll find a way back.”
“You think he will?” I felt a little hope spring up in me.
She smiled and nodded. “You’ve always been friends. You can’t just stop.”
By this time, we were near where the dirt road to Coulter’s ended and the dunes began. As we rounded a final bend, I saw that Tom Morrison had a visitor. A rowing dory was pulled up on the shore near the path that went in to his shack.
We dumped my bike. Marina put her sack of clams in a tidal pool between the rocks to keep them fresh, and we walked in through the dunes. I was jumpy about who we’d run into and kept a sharp eye out as we came up on Tom’s junk-strewn yard.
One thing I wasn’t expecting was a big white dog I’d never seen before that came charging toward us, barking like fury. While we were backing away, trying to talk some sense into the beast, the door of Tom’s house flew open and out came Billy Brady, an older kid I knew. He’d lived in town until his family had moved to Harveston a couple of years before. Marina knew him, too. He’d graduated from the regional high school the year before.
“Sadie!” he shouted. “Hey, Sadie, stop that!”
This was to the dog, who looked to me like a white Labrador, an unusual sight around our parts. Anything purebred was. This being farm country, dogs mostly roamed free and far afield, where they met up with other dogs out of reach of human interference. All kinds of combinations of mutt would result, to the general improvement of the species, some would argue.
“Billy Brady, is this your pup?” Marina yelled over the racket.
“She is. Gives off a good alarm, doesn’t she?” he bellowed back.
He strode forward to capture Sadie and drag her away from us. He was a good-looking fellow with a rowdy head of black hair who’d filled out a lot since I’d last seen him. Behind him came Tom Morrison, grinning from ear to ear. I didn’t know if it was Billy or his dog that was responsible, but Tom looked the happiest I’d seen him since Viola.
Turned out it was both, and maybe Marina, too, because Tom hadn’t set eye recently on a “female biped,” as he was shortly to tell her. When Sadie quieted down, we made introductions, which weren’t really necessary because we all knew each other, only from different walks of life. I asked Billy how he’d come to be there.
“Just keeping up with this coot,” he said, jabbing a thumb in Tom’s direction. “I get by every once in a while.”
“Every once in a long while, you mean,” Tom teased him. “Been more’n a year, hasn’t it?”
Billy said it had, and he had plans to do better in the future. “My dad worked for Tom on his fishing schooner in the old days, till it got wrecked. They had some high times together from what I hear.”
“We did,” Tom said. “Otis Brady were one of the best. Could spot a school of blues a half mile off.”
“Did your dad pass on?” I asked Billy.
“Last summer,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”
“What happened?”
“Well, I guess you could say he ran into some lead. The Coast Guard aimed too high.”
Tom Morrison’s face darkened when he heard this. “I didn’t know he’d got shot,” he said. “I heard it was a boat explosion that brought him down.”
“That’s the story the Coast Guard’s been telling,” Billy said, a bitter tone in his voice. “I believe different. There was an explosion, all right, but it came after, when the boat went up on the rocks. My father was shot dead at the wheel. With a machine gun.”
“Was he smuggling?” Marina asked.
“Who wants to know?” Billy fired back. He knew full well who Marina’s dad was.
She fixed him with her straight-in-the-eye look and said, “Billy, you know I don’t work for the police.”
“How do I know when you live in the same house as them?”
“Because I just told you!” she exclaimed. “You can judge me how you want.”
He gazed back at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes. She’d outstared him the way she did anyone she came up against. Somehow, in the midst of his defeat, Billy Brady must’ve decided to trust her, because he went on to answer her question.
“My father had a couple of hundred cases on board, most of which went to the bottom when she blew up,” he said. “The Coast Guard came back and fished out what was left the next day, and took it away for themselves. What I believe is, it was a setup.”
“You mean the Coast Guard shot your dad for his load?” I couldn’t believe that.
“Not for the liquor. The Guard was after him, all right. But some of those officers are out of control. They’ve started taking the law into their own hands. There’s a big Boston gang that’s trying to muscle in around here, and what I believe is, they ratted on my dad to one of these maniac officers, tipped him off to my dad’s run that night, hoping he’d go in and shoot up the boat. Which he did. Officer Roger Campbell, if you want to know his name. He says he didn’t intend to hit anybody. Swears he was just giving ‘fair warning’ to stop. But everybody knows you don’t fire warning shots with a machine gun into a ship’s pilot house.”
“Is that what happened?” Marina asked.
“It is,” Billy said. “That’s according to all three men who were my dad’s crew that night. Somehow, those warning shots went astray. I won’t say any more.”
Tom looked grim. “Whether it’s from the Coast Guard or the gangsters, we’re losing some good men to the rum business,” he said. “And good dogs, too.”
Billy nodded and turned to me. “I heard about what happened to Viola. That’s one reason I’m here, to see if I can get an idea of who it was that shot her.”
“Who’s Viola?” Marina asked. Tom brightened up at this and invited her over to see Viola’s grave in the corner, where he proceeded to launch into the old dog’s remarkable aquatic history. Meanwhile, Billy and I had a short talk.
“Tom says you and Jeddy McKenzie were on the beach the day the thugs dropped in,” he said. “What’d they look like, if you don’t mind my asking. I’ve got friends in the business, local guys, you know, who might’ve come across them.”
I told him about the big mug in the wide-brimmed hat and his little narrow-eyed friend, about the machine guns they carried on their shoulders, and the speedboat with the real professional skipper at the wheel.
“They were looking for something they thought Tom had taken off a dead body that washed up. When they didn’t find it, they shot Viola.”
“The old buzzard didn’t tell me about any dead body,” Billy said. He glanced over fondly to where Tom was carrying on, at great length, to Marina. I saw his eye linger on her, too. “Any idea what they were after?”
“Tom said they kept talking about a ticket of some kind.”
Billy’s head jerked around. “A ticket?”
“That’s right. He didn’t know what they meant.”
Billy gave me a slow smile. “A ticket! Well, that’s their game then. Mystery solved.”
“What d’you mean? What is it?”
“A ticket’s what the boys call a document that proves you’ve got a paid contract for a shipment of liquor. Usually means a big shipment, one that’s arriving on a freighter. There’s a bunch of renegade operators out to hijack the cargo on these vessels whenever they can by pretending they’re runners for the buyer onshore. A ticket solves the problem. The runner gives it to the freighter’s captain to prove he’s the right guy. The man who was shot must’ve been carrying one. Who was it? Somebody from around here?”
“We never knew for sure because the body disappeared right after Jeddy and I reported it. We were the ones who found it. Chief McKenzie didn’t do much to follow up, but somebody told me later it might’ve been a man from New Bedford.” I was playing my cards close to my chest.
Billy gave me a glance. “Tony Mordello.”
I nodded. “That was the guy.”
“So that’s where Tony ended up. He was a big operator, too.” Billy shook his head.
“Did you know him?”
“By reputation. No more’n that. The rumor is that the College Boys of Boston took him out. They wanted in on some of Tony’s action and he wouldn’t go along with them. I guess they didn’t know about this other deal he’d done until after their hoodlums dumped him. Too late, they hear he’s carrying this ticket. They send out a couple of thugs to look for his body.”
I didn’t say anything. It was making me nervous that Billy Brady knew so much about Tony Mordello and the College Boys.
He cleared his throat and stepped up closer to me. “Now listen, Ruben. There wasn’t one of those documents on him, was there? When you and Jeddy found him, I mean. Nothing that would fit the description of a ticket? It could be a piece of paper, like a sales receipt, signed and dated. But a simpler thing they use is a dollar bill torn in half.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“He didn’t have one,” I said, quickly.
Billy gave me a sharp look. “You’re sure?”
I nodded.
“You could get yourself in trouble holding one of those things,” Billy said.
I kept my mouth shut. A gleam was in his eye that I didn’t trust.
Marina came back over with Tom then, and told me we should think about getting along if she was ever going to be home in time to cook up the clams she’d bought for supper.
“Clams!” Billy glanced at her. “You wouldn’t be making clam chowder, would you?”
“Thought I might,” Marina said, tossing her hair back from her face.
“How about some corn bread and a bit of bacon to go with it?”
“Could be done.” She gave him one of her appraising glances, which he met straight this time with the flash of a smile.
After that, she wasn’t in such a rush to get going and we stood awhile longer shooting the breeze. Sadie leaned up against first Billy and then Tom, asking for attention, which she got plenty of from both.
“Where’d you find this sweet lady?” Tom asked, ruffling her ears. He’d taken a shine to her.
“She was given me by a fellow in Harveston,” Billy said, “for a good turn I did him. She’s purebred white Labrador.”
“I was thinking she’s something special,” Tom said. “Can she swim?”
“Like a fish,” Billy said. “She’ll go off the high-diving rock down at Walter’s Point if you give her a good reason.”
Marina laughed at that. “What’s a good reason?” she asked.
“How about clam chowder for supper with corn bread and a ration of bacon on the side?” Billy said, giving her a wicked grin. They all broke up laughing, but I didn’t. I could see Billy Brady had taken an interest in Marina and, worse, that she didn’t mind.
Later, on our ride back down the main road toward home, I tried to make some bright conversation, but Marina wouldn’t bite. She was mulling over something, gazing at the fields we passed with an absent expression. I’d seen her in these quiet spells before and knew better than to interrupt. We came to her bike and she insisted on getting off and walking the rest of the way by herself.
“I could take the clams and drop them at your house,” I offered. “How are you going to carry them and wheel that busted bike at the same time?”
She told me no, she’d had enough free transportation for one afternoon. Then she warmed up again and thanked me for the favor I’d done carrying her to the harbor.
I said I was jealous of Jeddy for getting to have her clam chowder that night. Of all the things Marina cooked for us over the years, that was my number-one favorite.
“Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of other times,” she said. Then she paused, and I could see she was trying to decide whether to speak about something else.
“Ruben Hart, you’ll keep quiet about where we went this afternoon, won’t you?” she said at last.
I said I would.
“My father wouldn’t like to hear that I’ve been down at Tom Morrison’s talking with the likes of Billy Brady. His family’s been in the rum-running business since it began.”
“They might be thinking twice about staying in that business since Billy’s dad was shot,” I said.
Marina shook her head. “They’re not, I’m afraid. Or Billy hasn’t, anyway.”
“What d’you mean? Is he smuggling now?”
“More than that.” She leaned closer to me. “Can you keep a secret? Tom Morrison let it slip when we were talking back there. Billy’s skippering liquor runs on the Black Duck. He was there asking Tom if they could use his place for storage.”