An Incident At Bloodtide m-12

by George C. Chesbro

  "I can give you the information you need," the woman said tersely as she rose, and walked to a filing cabinet set against the rear wall. She opened a drawer, took out a blue notebook, leafed through it until she found the page she wanted. She began to scan the page, then started slightly. "Oh, God," she said in a small voice.

  "What is it, Lonnie?" Garth asked.

  "I have the perfect candidate," she said, her tone now laced with disgust. "Except, according to our records, this ship was definitely at anchor. There would have been no-"

  "Tell us about that ship, Lonnie."

  The woman replaced the book in the file drawer where she had taken it from, then returned to her desk, slowly shaking her head. "Every three months we receive a listing of the command personnel assigned to tankers and barges; the companies themselves are usually pretty cooperative on this. On the night Tom was killed, there was an oil tanker at anchor almost directly across the river from here. High tide was around midnight, which means that if Tom was killed around that time, pieces of his body could have been carried upriver for a time, then caught in crosscurrents and swept over when the tide changed. There were five other big ships that came through that evening, but none of them fit as well into the framework of time, tide, and current you mentioned. It's an iffy proposition. Anyway, the registration number for that tanker is 82Q510. Its captain is a man by the name of Julian Jefferson. He's a drunk. Tankers he's captained have been involved in two oil spills and one running aground. We've been trying to get him off the river for years."

  "Who does he work for?" Garth asked.

  "Carver Shipping. But you have to understand that a ship at anchor would have no reason to start up its main engines."

  Garth grunted as he wrote down the number in a notebook. "The company, state, and Coast Guard allow a drunk to pilot an oil tanker up and down the Hudson?"

  She shrugged. "What can I tell you? His license has never been revoked. The rumors are that he has important family connections in the oil industry, and I guess that counts for a lot. According to the law, only foreign-registered vessels require a special pilot to take them up the Hudson; domestically registered ships can use just about anyone they want to. So Mr. Jefferson is still out there, another accident waiting to happen."

  It looked like one had already happened, I thought as Lonnie Allen wrote down the registration numbers and owners of the other big ships that had been on the river that night, and handed me the paper. Except it might not have been an accident. I said, "Thanks for the information."

  Garth asked, "When will you have a new riverkeeper?"

  The woman with the red hair and green eyes sighed. "It's hard to say. The job doesn't pay much, after all, and you need a special kind of person to do it. A month, maybe more. Listen, may I ask just what it is you're trying to do?"

  "Tom was a good friend of mine," Garth replied. "He was also a friend of the river I enjoy living on. From the way things look, he was working on an important case of pollution, and he felt he had to amass a mountain of evidence in order to get the authorities to pay attention. Now that he's dead, you say someone is going to have to start all over. Let's just say that Mongo and I are interested in keeping an eye on things until you can find somebody to take up where Tom left off."

  Now the woman looked slightly embarrassed. "We can't afford to pay you."

  I said, "This is on our own hook, Lonnie. We're doing it for our own reasons. But I'm sure Garth and I could develop a taste for shad, and I understand shad can be prepared in dozens of different ways."

  Lonnie Allen's face brightened. "Well, shad is one thing our members have plenty of, at least when it's in season. If you'll agree to take deferred payment, I'll even throw in a batch of recipes for those dozens of dishes."

  "Done," Garth said.

  While it was true that Garth and I were interested in seeing that Tom Blaine's efforts to build a case against Carver Shipping not go to waste, we were even more interested in seeing that his death was properly investigated. That, it seemed, was not going to be so easy. The two matters were tied together. To get the state police or Coast Guard to investigate the circumstances of the man's death, it looked like we were going to have to prove that somebody had a motive for killing him, namely to prevent him from blowing the whistle on Carver Shipping for stealing Hudson River water, and in the process poisoning the well they were illegally stealing from. Proving the second part seemed a straightforward enough, if time-consuming, task, assuming Carver Shipping hadn't stopped their practice of flushing tanks and taking on river water after Tom's death. We were just going to have to do the Coast Guard's job until the Coast Guard realized there was a job to do.

  We set up a Minolta 35mm camera with a zoom lens on a tripod in a sheltered area on Garth's deck, focusing on an area of the deep channel between us and a tool and die factory complex across the river-presumably the facility Julian Jefferson's tanker had been servicing at the time of Tom Blaine's death. The proper business of Frederickson and Frederickson, namely making some money, could not be postponed forever, which meant I was going to have to go back to the city. However, between Garth and Mary, and maybe one or two college students home for the summer and looking for easy work, we could make sure that somebody was always at the camera during daylight hours to take photographs of incoming and outgoing Carver tankers, and then note the date and time in a log. If Carver Shipping was still transporting water, we would have our own photographs and witnesses. It was a first step. If we could get proof of a company policy to flout the law, a conspiracy first uncovered by a man killed by a vessel that most likely belonged to that company, then we would see what we could make happen next. There were always the newspapers, and Garth and I had plenty of contacts in the media.

  Mary's strained voice came from the beach below the deck. "Garth? Mongo? Are you up there?"

  Garth and I looked at each other, and Garth called, "Yes. What is it?"

  "I think you two should come down here right away. There's something you should see."

  Alarmed by the tone of Mary's voice, we hurried out of the house and down the path leading to the beach. We came to an abrupt halt when we rounded a corner of the boathouse, startled by the sight in front of us.

  It was low tide, which meant that fifteen to twenty yards of beach were exposed. Left in the sand by the receding waters were what looked to be hundreds of hypodermic syringes littering the beach like some kind of malevolent glass and blue plastic sea creatures that had come ashore to spawn terror at the least, and maybe slow, agonizing death. Strewn among the needles like strands of poisonous afterbirth were long strips of bloody bandages. Mary, ashen-faced and with her arms wrapped around her, stood at the far end of the field of needles and bandages, which seemed to be confined pretty much to the area of beach around the boathouse.

  "Mary, you didn't touch any of that, did you?" Garth asked tersely.

  Mary slowly, almost solemnly, shook her head, then started walking toward us, giving the field of syringes and blood-soaked cloth a wide berth.

  "I'm going up to the house to call the health department and the neighbors," Garth continued, turning to start back up the path. "From the looks of things, most of that shit ended up on our property, but the other people around here should be warned."

  Garth hurried up to the house, and I took Mary's hand as she came up to me.

  "I didn't exactly tell Garth the truth," she whispered hoarsely.

  "What are you talking about?"

  In reply, she lifted her left foot to show me the sole. It was stained with blood. "I was just walking along, thinking about this new song I'm working on, not watching where I was going. I stepped on one of the needles that was sticking up out of the sand. I. . My first reaction was just not to frighten Garth." She paused, and the giggle that came out of her mouth was just a note or two short of hysteria. "Not telling him was certainly kind of silly, wasn't it? He's going to have to know sooner or later."

  I ran up the beach and into the
boathouse. With trembling hands I tore off a large strip from a roll of plastic sheeting we used to cover the catamaran in the winter. Then I hurried back out on the beach, carefully picked up three syringes and a strip of bloody bandage, rolled them up in the heavy plastic. "Come on, babe," I said, grabbing Mary's hand. "We're going to get Garth, and then we're taking you to the hospital."

  She staggered after me up the path, looking back over her shoulder at the ugly array of needles and bandages. "It's starting, just like I said it would," she said in a hollow voice. "Bad things;

  I told you Sacra makes bad things happen."

  The nurse in the emergency room at Cairn Hospital wasn't much impressed by the small puncture wound in the sole of Mary's foot; he, and the doctors on duty, were, though, appropriately shaken by the bundle of syringes and stained bandage I had brought with me. Dr. Angelo Franconi, a friend of Garth's, immediately took the package, told us he would see what he could determine about the contents from examining the debris under a microscope. The nurse disinfected and bandaged the wound in Mary's foot, and he gave her a pair of paper slippers to wear. Then we went downstairs to the coffee shop in the basement and waited nervously.

  Fifty-five minutes later Angelo Franconi, looking both relieved and puzzled, joined us. He pulled a chair up to our table, laid a hand gently on Mary's forearm, spoke to my brother. "We can't tell for certain that the needles are clean until we try to grow a culture, which I've already ordered done. But, from examining them under a microscope, I'd say the chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that the needles were never used; one of them was still in its original plastic package. Somebody with a boat must have lost a lot of syringes overboard, and the carton broke up in the water somewhere very close to you. Wind and tide were just right to wash most of the stuff up on your beach. It certainly is a freakish kind of accident, but I don't think you have much to worry about."

  Garth asked, "What about the bloody bandages?"

  The dark-skinned doctor ran a hand back through his close-cropped black hair, shook his head. "Now, there's a real mystery. I can tell you the blood isn't infected with any pathogens you can see under a microscope. It isn't even human; it's chicken blood. I can't imagine where surgical bandages covered with chicken blood would come from, and it really is curious how that combination of garbage washed up on your property."

  I didn't think it was curious at all, and I didn't consider it much of a mystery. When I looked at Garth, I could see he felt the same way.

  "You said you wanted me to leave him to you, and I'm doing that," Garth whispered to me as we walked out of the hospital. "But you'd better be quick about it, because if I stumble across him before you do, I promise you his corpse will be the next piece of garbage that washes up on somebody's beach."

  Chapter Eight

  There were a number of messages waiting for me when I got back to New York, but there was one in which I was particularly interested. It was from Captain Perry Farmer of the NYPD, and he wanted me to get back to him as soon as possible. I picked up the phone, dialed his precinct station house, and asked for his extension.

  "The prints you gave me matched up, Mongo," Perry said after some preliminary chitchat. "Your guy's name is Charles 'Chick' Carver."

  Well, well. I cradled the receiver under my chin as I wrote it down, underlining the last name. "That's great news, Perry. What have you got on him?"

  "He spent five years in Greenhaven for-now get this, Mongo-aggravated malicious mischief. He'd gotten fines and short jail sentences a few times before for similar things, so the judge in the last case decided to throw the book at him. It seems that when Mr. Carver takes a dislike to somebody, he just can't leave it alone. He served three and a half months in a halfway house rehab program and got out on parole nine months ago.

  He also had an extensive juvenile record. Some of that is sealed, but from the kind of flag on the file, I'd say he may have been sent to a mental hospital, probably Rockland Children's Psychiatric Center up near where Garth lives now."

  "You got an address for him?"

  "Yeah; it's a walkup on the Lower East Side, but if s a phony. It's a real enough apartment, and the rent's paid up, but he hasn't been there in six months. I had one of my men talk to some of the neighbors. His probation officer isn't too happy about it, and he's going to have some explaining to do the next time he talks to her."

  "You've spoken to his probation officer?"

  "Yeah. I got kind of curious about what kind of guy can draw a five-year prison sentence for malicious mischief."

  "A very malicious guy. Hey, Perry, you're a prince for taking the time you have."

  "I haven't forgotten I owe you, Mongo."

  "What did his probation officer have to say about him?"

  "She says he can be a real charmer when he wants to be-like most sociopaths. He's pretty bright, but he has a real child's outlook on life. He wants to be a big man, but he doesn't have the patience or self-discipline needed to acquire the skills to become a big man. And so he's a schemer, a manipulator. He apparently has this witchcraft gig he likes to do on people he thinks will swallow it. Anyway, he may yet turn out to be a big man, because somebody arranged for him to get a job with the shipping company his family is connected with. It sounds to me like some strings were pulled."

  "Indeed," I said, drawing a circle around the last name I had already underlined.

  "Incidentally, when I say he's pretty bright, I'm talking fluorescent. He's a member of Mensa, for what that's worth. His probation officer thinks that he really could amount to something if he ever did get some discipline and learn to channel his intelligence and energy, but she's not optimistic. She thinks he's dangerous, says she wouldn't be surprised if he ends up killing somebody one day."

  "Indeed."

  "It's like having a Rolls-Royce engine under the hood of a Yugo. Anyway, that's what I've got for you. Any help?"

  "Knowing who he is helps a lot. Now I want to find him."

  "I never did ask you where you got those prints. What's Carver done that makes you so interested in him?"

  "At the very least, more malicious mischief. But now I'm thinking it could be even more than that. I'll stay in touch. Thanks again, Perry."

  "Anytime, Mongo."

  I hung up, then got out my Manhattan directory and looked for Carver Shipping. There was no listing. There was also no listing in the Rockland directory, but I hit pay dirt when I checked the New Jersey directory. Carver Shipping's headquarters was in Jersey City. I dialed the number, and a pleasant woman's voice answered.

  "Carver Shipping. May I help you, please?"

  "I hope so. I'd like to speak with Mr. Carver."

  "Mr. Carver is retired, sir."

  It seemed Chick Carver had not quite yet achieved big-man status. "Not the founder. I mean the younger one, Charles."

  "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I just started this job yesterday. Just a moment, please. I'll look in the company directory." There was a pause for a few seconds, and then the woman came back on the line. "Sir?"

  "I'm still here."

  "There's a Charles Carver working in Security. I'll switch you over."

  "Thanks-oh! Who's the head of that department?"

  "Mr. Wellington, sir."

  "Would that be Frank Wellington?"

  "I believe his name is Roger, sir. Shall I switch you over?"

  "Please."

  There was some electronic whirring and clicking, and then another pleasant voice, this one a man's, said, "Mr. Wellington's office."

  "Mr. Carver, please."

  "Mr. Carver isn't at his desk at the moment."

  That didn't surprise me; I was pretty certain he was in Cairn.

  The big question was whether his business there was strictly personal or also corporate. "Can you tell me how I can reach him? This is the Esoteric Bookshop. Mr. Carver's order has come in. However, there seems to have been a mix-up concerning his current residential address and phone number. He did say he wanted the ma
terials as soon as they came in. Could you give me his address and phone number, please?"

  There was a short pause, then, "I'm afraid I can't give out that information over the phone, sir. Who did you say you represent?"

  "The Esoteric Bookshop. Well, just tell him that the books he ordered on coprophilia, necrophilia, pedophilia, bestiality, and suicide by masturbation have arrived, and he can pick them up at his convenience. Have you got that, or would you like me to repeat it?"

  "I will make sure he gets your message, sir," the young man replied after some hesitation. I thought I detected more than a hint of bewilderment, and I certainly hoped he would share this newly discovered information about Charles "Chick" Carver's reading habits with the rest of the office staff.

  "Thanks. Have a nice day."

  Next, I got my Rockland directory back out, called the Cairn Fishermen's Association. Lonnie Allen answered.

  "Lonnie?"

  "Yes. Who is this, please?"

  "This is Mongo Frederickson, Lonnie. I was in the office with Garth the other day."

  "Oh, Dr. Frederickson!" she said as if she were truly pleased to hear my voice. "I didn't know who you were when you were in here, but now I do. You're famous. I should have asked you for your autograph."

  "Anytime, Lonnie. Listen, I'd like you to do me a favor."

  "Of course, Dr. Frederickson. What can I do for you?"

  "My friends and beautiful women like yourself call me Mongo. I need some information, and I'm not sure how to get it. I was hoping CFA might be able to help."

  "What do you need, Mongo?"

  "I'd like you to do some checking for me with the members of your association, and anybody else who's in tune with things that happen on the river. I'm looking for hard facts, but would also like to hear any gossip or rumors you might pick up. Specifically what I'm looking for are examples of bad luck, anything harmful, that may have happened to anyone who may have filed a pollution complaint against, or had any kind of run-in with, Carver Shipping."