An Incident At Bloodtide m-12

by George C. Chesbro

  Mary nodded. She hugged me hard, kissed me on the forehead, then started up to the house. I pulled the canoe back down to the water's edge, hopped in, and started paddling out toward the bobbing island of flashing lights.

  Chapter Five

  Blaine's funeral was on Saturday. Afterward, Jessica Blaine invited the mourners back to her home for coffee and cake. The small, wood-frame house was close on the river in the south of Cairn; it had a warm, lived-in feeling, and was filled with chintz, various marine bric-a-brac and photographs, and dozens of fine pieces of sun-bleached driftwood-the best examples of nature's art culled from a lifetime of living in close harmony with the river outside the back door. Walking into the house, one had the feeling of entering a safe harbor.

  According to the county medical examiner, enough pieces of the riverkeeper's body had been found to establish a fairly accurate cause and time of death. He had apparently died on Tuesday night, sometime between the hours of ten and midnight, while diving-presumably in the deep channel, since the tearing apart of his body had been caused by vortex and the knife-blade edges of spinning steel props on the engines of a very large tanker or tugboat. His boat had apparently slipped its anchor, for the trawler had been found on Thursday morning run aground in the salt marshes near Piermont. There had been no green plastic jugs found aboard; Garth and I had asked.

  Nobody had yet come up with a good explanation of just why Tom Blaine would have been diving at night, considering the fact that visibility in the Hudson is limited to a few inches at high noon on a cloudless day, or why he should have been diving so far out from shore, in the deep channel, where all evidence of pollution would normally be rapidly dissipated in the huge volume of water that surges in that dredged canyon in the riverbed, a river within a river. However, an explanation for what seemed an example of extraordinarily bad judgment was not deemed necessary; whatever his reasons for being out there, he had been run over by a passing tanker, super-tug, or barge whose captain would have had no chance to see him, and he had died horribly when he had been sucked up into the vessel's enormous spinning propeller blades. His death had officially been ruled an accident.

  Along with Garth and Mary, I'd been sitting on a worn sofa chatting with a small group of fishermen when I spotted Harry Tanner, whom I knew through Garth. The Cairn policeman was standing by himself over by a window that looked out on the river. I excused myself from the group, went over to him. He smiled warmly as I came up, extended his hand.

  "How you doing, Mongo?"

  "Okay, Harry, aside from the sadness of the occasion. Yourself?"

  "Fair to middling. A shame about Tom, huh?"

  "Yeah. You know he was after somebody, don't you?"

  The policeman with the handlebar moustache and deep-set hazel eyes nodded. "Garth told me about what happened last Sunday night when Tom towed you guys home-the green jugs and all that."

  "He said something about 'nailing the bastards.'"

  "Garth told me about that too."

  "And?"

  "And what, Mongo?"

  "I just wondered if the Cairn police were checking out the situation."

  "I'm not sure there's any situation to check out, Mongo. But even if there were, it's not our jurisdiction. Cairn's only one of a number of towns along the river, and we don't know where Tom was when he was killed."

  "Whose jurisdiction is it?"

  "Coast Guard."

  "Are they going to investigate? I mean, isn't it just a little bit suspicious that within forty-eight hours after he announces his intention to 'nail the bastards,' he winds up dead?"

  Harry Tanner shrugged, smoothed the ends of his moustache. He looked slightly uncomfortable. "That's hard to say, Mongo. I'm not speaking ill of Tom when I tell you that he took that job of his pretty seriously. A lot of people called him a zealot. He was always talking about nailing some bastard or another, and you qualified as one of those bastards even if all you did was take a piss in his river."

  "Maybe this time some bastard who was doing more than pissing in the river nailed him."

  Harry thought about it, shook his head. "I'm no more pleased about Tom's death than you are, Mongo," he said. "He was my friend. But I just think you're looking for something that isn't there. You think somebody's going to kill a man because he's been caught dumping something in the river?"

  "You're a cop, Harry, so I don't have to tell you about the petty things that will drive some people to murder. Also, in this case it might depend on what was being dumped. Besides, what would he be doing diving in the deep channel, and at night, no less? The water must be thirty or forty feet deep out there, moving all the time. What could he hope to find? Even if he did find something, how could he hope to prove where it came from? Except for keeping an eye on sail- and powerboats to make sure they don't dump their waste-holding tanks in the river, all the action in pollution monitoring is along the shoreline, where you can tell where the stuff is coming from. Right?"

  "You're saying someone took Tom-or his corpse-out there and arranged for the body to be diced up by a tanker?"

  "I'm saying it seems surpassingly strange that anyone, much less an experienced diver like Tom Blaine, would have been diving in the deep channel of the Hudson River at night. Law enforcement agencies are supposed to investigate when people die under surpassingly strange circumstances."

  "I hear what you're saying, Mongo, and I understand where you're coming from, but you'd have had to know Tom to understand why the authorities aren't going to be as suspicious as you are. Like I said, he was a zealot, and he'd pretty much worn out the Coast Guard's patience. He'd sometimes work twenty hours at a stretch, and it wasn't at all unusual for him to be out on the river at night. He found you and Garth becalmed on your catamaran at night, didn't he? Maybe he saw something suspicious in the water out there and went in after it. He got careless, and he got sucked up into the props of a tanker that passed over his position. All of the people I've talked to, including the Coast Guard, think there's no question that Tom's death was accidental. I feel the same way. Aside from Tom's reason for being where he-was, everything seems pretty straightforward. I wouldn't worry about it, Mongo."

  I wasn't worried about it; I was curious about it. So was Garth. Most of the other mourners had left, but Garth, Mary, and I remained behind. We were sitting around the riverkeeper's widow, who was slowly rocking back and forth in a worn rocking chair, eyes half closed, adrift in sorrow and memory. Garth leaned forward in his chair and took the woman's hand. "What do you think could have happened, Jessica?" he asked quietly.

  Tears came to the woman's soft, gray eyes. She wiped them away, then wrapped both her hands around Garth's. "I can't imagine," she answered in a trembling voice, biting her lower lip. "It's so. . horrible. Tom was always so safety conscious; he was a certified diving instructor. He was always so careful around the boat, and with the materials he handled. I. . it's awfully hard for me to understand."

  "Jessica, do you have any idea why Tom would have been diving in the deep channel at night?"

  She shook her head, then closed her eyes as more tears welled up and ran down her cheeks.

  "Garth," Mary said with quiet alarm, "maybe you shouldn't pursue this right now."

  "It's all right, child," Jessica Blaine said to Mary. "I don't mind. I guess I want somebody to ask me questions; nobody else has. It's like the police just take it for granted that Tom was stupid enough to do something like that. It bothers me."

  Mary nodded, then rose and put her arm around the woman's shoulders. I moved my chair closer to the rocker. "Mrs. Blaine, the night Tom towed Garth and me back here to Cairn, he'd just come from someplace where he was investigating some kind of infraction; at least we assume that, because his diver's suit was still wet, and he mentioned that he was getting the goods on somebody. Do you have any idea what he might have been investigating, or who he could have been talking about?"

  Again, the woman shook her head. "Tom worked long hours, and he was usua
lly working on a number of cases at one time. We didn't see much of each other, and so we made it a practice never to talk about his work when he got home-it would get him too aggravated. I always tried to get him to think about other things and relax when he was home." Garth asked, "There wasn't one particular company he was more mad at than the others?"

  "He was mad at all the companies he caught dumping their dirt in the river. If he was particularly angry with one company, he didn't tell me."

  Garth turned to me. "I'm working on getting a list of all the companies with plants on the river in the area Tom patrolled. I should have it by Monday or Tuesday, and I'll fax you a copy at the office. It can't hurt to know the names of the outfits Tom monitored."

  "It would also help to know which of them are serviced by tankers or barges."

  "Just about all of them use tankers or barges in one way or another," Jessica Blaine said. "That's why they're located on the river. They use water transport for shipping goods or bringing in manufacturing supplies, and often both."

  I asked, "Mrs. Blaine, is there anyone else Tom might have talked to, anyone he might have confided in about some particularly urgent case he was investigating?"

  "I really don't know. He worked for the Cairn Fishermen's Association, of course, so someone there might know. But Tom was given free rein by the association, and he was pretty close-mouthed about current investigations. He liked to wait until he'd gathered his evidence. Then he'd go directly to the Coast Guard. If the Coast Guard didn't act, or if Tom felt they were dragging their heels, then Tom would take the evidence to the association, and they'd decide whether or not to go to court. Aside from that, there isn't much I can tell you. Most nights he'd come home and work in his office for an hour or two, then come up to be with me.

  Garth and I exchanged glances, then looked back at the woman. Garth asked, "Tom had an office, Jessica?"

  She nodded. "In the basement. That's where he kept his samples and his logs."

  "Would you mind if Mongo and I looked around down there?"

  Jessica Blaine slowly shook her head. "Not at all."

  Tom Blaine's widow led us into the kitchen, opened a door in the rear of a pantry area, then flipped a light switch on the wall. Garth and I descended a short flight of wobbly, oft-repaired, wooden steps into the basement. There was a dangling, naked light bulb at the foot of the stairs, and Garth pulled a string to turn it on. The stairs bisected the damp, stone basement; to our left was an oil-burning furnace, a washer and dryer, and a floor-to-ceiling Peg-Board filled with rusting tools that had obviously been used only on rare occasions. To the right was Tom Blaine's makeshift office. There was a scarred wooden desk with a green gooseneck lamp flanked by two battered metal filing cabinets. Secured to the concrete wall directly in front of the desk was a corkboard covered with Polaroid photographs of tankers heading up and down the river. Two walls were taken up with crude, handmade wood shelving on which sat an array of labeled coffee cans, jars, and bottles containing gooey materials of different colors, and in varying states of desiccation, and which I wasn't inclined to examine too closely. There were three rows of green plastic jugs similar to the ones we had seen on his boat the evening he had towed us back to Cairn.

  All of the labels on the cans, bottles, jars, and jugs were clearly marked with a date at the very top; the rest of the information on the labels was not so clear. Below the dates were a series of numbers and letters, presumably a code identifying the container's contents and where the sample had been taken. All of the containers were arranged on the shelves by date, in the order that they had been taken. Unlike the mudlike materials in most of the other containers, the contents of the green plastic jugs sloshed around when shaken. Unlike the labels on the other containers, which appeared to contain a good deal of information-including what might have been chemical formulas-the labels on the jugs carried only a date and a single letter and number code. The last three jugs on the shelf bore the dates of the preceding weekend, which meant they were probably the ones we had seen on the riverkeeper's boat. All bore an identical code: C-26Q431. The other dozen or so jugs on the shelves all bore codes preceded by the letter C, followed by a different arrangement of numbers and letters. Their dates covered the past six months.

  "Hey, Mongo," Garth said quietly, "take a look at these."

  I went over to where Garth was standing. He had removed three dust-covered, leather-bound ledgers from the file cabinet on the left and was looking through one of them. I picked up another from the desk, examined its cover. There was a label that gave the dates of March 1987 to June 1989; the label on the third ledger was dated even earlier. Each entry in the ledgers listed a date, a site, a suspected violator, the nature of the infraction, action taken, and final resolution-fines, cease-and-desist orders by some court, or whatever. The ledgers I was examining contained a detailed record of actions taken against polluters in Cairn and the surrounding region over a period of almost six years.

  There was nothing complicated about the entries, no codes and no key to codes. It seemed the enigmatic system Tom Blaine had used for labeling the containers had only been used for purposes of security and confidentiality until the samples had been tested in some lab and the matter resolved by the Coast Guard or in court. There was no way of telling what the liquids in the green plastic jugs were or where they came from.

  "What's the date on that ledger?" I asked.

  Garth closed the book, examined the cover. "It ends nine months ago."

  "We need the latest one."

  "Indeed."

  Garth began searching through the remaining drawers of the two filing cabinets while I checked out the desk drawers. There was nothing in the desk but yellowed copies of old legal transcripts, sundry office supplies, and an ancient pack of Juicy Fruit gum. We checked all the shelves and even looked on the floor under the desk and shelving, but found nothing but cobwebs and three dead spiders. If Tom Blaine had been keeping a detailed record of his activities for the past nine months-and there was no doubt in our minds that he had-the ledger recording that activity was not in his office, and it had not been on the boat, at least not when it was found.

  We turned at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, nodded as Jessica Blaine and Mary descended into the pool of light cast by the single overhead bulb at the foot of the stairway.

  "Tom spent so many hours down here," the black woman with the gray eyes and silver hair said wistfully, glancing around the dusty work space. "I'm sorry it's so dirty. Tom would never let me clean down here-he said there were too many toxic chemicals, and he didn't want me near any of them. Tom was really a very tidy man. I just don't want you to think. ."

  "There's no need to apologize, Jessica," Garth said. "Tom had a lot more important things on his mind than a few cobwebs in his office."

  "Is there something in particular you're looking for?"

  "As a matter of fact, there is: Tom's most recent ledger. It doesn't seem to be down here. Is it possible he could have left it around someplace upstairs, and you put it away?"

  The silver-haired woman shook her head. "He always kept everything down here, and he would usually take his new journal with him out on the boat. When he didn't, he always left it right there on top of his desk."

  Garth and I looked at each other, and my brother grimaced slightly. I knew what he was thinking. We had the jugs he had been carrying on his trawler Sunday night, but knowing what was in them, or even where they had come from, wouldn't necessarily be of any value. We had to know who he'd caught, or what the riverkeeper had been up to on Tuesday night, and that record-along with any samples he might have taken before he died-had disappeared from his boat before it ran aground in Piermont.

  "Mrs. Blaine," I said, "has anybody else been down here since Tom's death? The police, maybe?"

  She looked puzzled. "No. Why would the police want to come down here?"

  A good question. Harry Tanner had made it clear that the Cairn police considered the matter outside
their jurisdiction, the Coast Guard was showing no interest, the state police-assuming they were potential players-hadn't even put in an appearance, and Garth and I were the only ones who thought there might be something suspicious about Tom Blaine's death in the first place.

  "Mrs. Blaine, with your permission, I'd like to take the most recent samples Tom gathered, the contents of three of those green plastic jugs, back to the city to be analyzed."

  "Of course, if you want to," the woman replied, then frowned slightly. "But why? Do you think what happened to Tom could have been. . caused by somebody?"

  I wasn't sure how to reply. There seemed no reason whatsoever to flog the emotions of a grieving widow further with conjecture about the possibility that her husband had been murdered. On the other hand, by asking her questions and rummaging around in her husband's office, Garth and I were openly displaying our concern, if not outright skepticism, over the manner in which the incident was being treated by the authorities; the eerie circumstances of the man's death seemed to speak for themselves, even if no one but Garth and I seemed to be listening. But I had no business raising false expectations, or committing the time and resources of Frederickson and Frederickson to an investigation that should properly be handled by the police or Coast Guard. In short, I wasn't quite sure what I was doing or wanted to do;

  I didn't know how far I was willing to pursue the matter, and I didn't want to further upset Jessica Blaine.

  It was Garth who came up with the right reply. "Jessica, Tom devoted his life to cleaning up the Hudson and keeping it clean, for all of us. Mary and I live on the river, and the beauty she and I enjoy every day is in no small part due to Tom's efforts. He died in the line of duty. Mongo and I would just like to find out what he was working on at the end, so that maybe we can finish his final business for him."