“On the La Paloma ?”
“ ‘The La’ is a lousy combination,” he said.
“Stop it. Be nice, Sam. Tell me.”
He set fire to his cigarette, pocketed his lighter, patted her shins, and said: “Yes, La Paloma . She got down there at a little after noon yesterday.” He pulled his brows down. “That means she went straight there after leaving the cab at the Ferry Building. It’s only a few piers away. The Captain wasn’t aboard. His name’s Jacobi and she asked for him by name. He was uptown on business. That would mean he didn’t expect her, or not at that time anyway. She waited there till he came back at four o’clock. They spent the time from then till mealtime in his cabin and she ate with him.”
He inhaled and exhaled smoke, turned his head aside to spit a yellow tobacco-flake off his lip, and went on: “After the meal Captain Jacobi had three more visitors. One of them was Gutman and one was Cairo and one was the kid who delivered Gutman’s message to you yesterday. Those three came together while Brigid was there and the five of them did a lot of talking in the Captain’s cabin. It’s hard to get anything out of the crew, but they had a row and somewhere around eleven o’clock that night a gun went off there, in the Captain’s cabin. The watchman beat it down there, but the Captain met him outside and told him everything was all right. There’s a fresh bullet-hole in one corner of the cabin, up high enough to make it likely that the bullet didn’t go through anybody to get there. As far as I could learn there was only the one shot. But as far as I could learn wasn’t very far.”
He scowled and inhaled smoke again. “Well, they left around midnight—the Captain and his four visitors all together—and all of them seem to have been walking all right. I got that from the watchman. I haven’t been able to get hold of the Customhouse-men who were on