An Incident At Bloodtide

by George C. Chesbro

  I expected him to deny it, or at least to point out the obvious — that my version of something I claimed a chronic drunk had told me before he killed himself was totally worthless in court, and libelous if I repeated it in public. But he did neither. Instead, he winced and turned away slightly, as if I had struck him a physical blow. It seemed proof of what Chick Carver had done, or the bizarre circumstances under which I had obtained the captain's confession were irrelevant to this man, for Bennett Carver seemed to know — had always known — that his son was capable of doing the things I had described.

  "Charles no longer works for the company, Frederickson," he said in a very low, weak voice. "He's been sent off to a . . . place very far away, where he will stay until the day he dies if he ever hopes to see another penny of the trust fund he's been living on for twenty years, or of his final inheritance. Neither you nor I will ever see him again."

  "At the risk of sounding insensitive, I have to point out that his mother isn't going to care much for that arrangement."

  "Well, she's going to have to learn to live with it," he said in a stronger voice, lips pulled back from his teeth. "I carry much blame for what Charles has become, Frederickson, but I consider his mother responsible for what's happened here. Charles should never have been put in a position of power or responsibility over other people. And Roger Wellington is gone too. He'll never work in the shipping business again."

  "You seem to have a lot more say about what goes on in that company than you let on in our previous conversation."

  "What I have is a very large block of stock."

  "It's not enough, Mr. Carver."

  "You can't expect me to help in the destruction of my own son, Frederickson! I've sent him away! He'll never bother anyone from around here again!"

  "We'll see how far away he goes, and how long he stays. But I'm not talking just about what Charles did, nor about the immediate superior who let him loose. I'm talking about the company itself; it was company policy, finally, that was responsible for everything that happened. But companies can only be fined. The people who created or checked off on that policy must be held accountable, which in this case means a CEO and a board of directors. You and I both know there was no cabal of captains; they were following what they understood to be official orders. There are enough killer companies in the United States, and under this administration they're going to multiply like rabbits. I'd like to see the men responsible for turning Carver Shipping into a killer company buried; I want them exposed, removed from power, and punished."

  "You're crazy, Frederickson."

  "So I've been told on more than one occasion."

  "You can't touch them."

  "You're probably right."

  "You're willing to throw away your freedom to fight in a battle you can't possibly win? Why, for God's sake?"

  "Because the cost of agreeing to keep my mouth shut is too high. These are bad guys, Mr. Carver; they're a pack of gray-suited thieves and murderers who hide behind corporate bylaws. They're the same kind of bad guys as the gray suits who looted the savings and loan industry, the kinds of people who are the root cause of so much that's wrong with this country that you feel so strongly about. To you, it's important that the United States be honored by having its flag displayed on the altar of your church. I try to honor my country — and myself — in my own way, by making sure that a bunch of rich, greedy, corporate pricks don't get away with complicity in the murder of a very fine man who was working for all of us, and then be hailed as heroes by a spokesman for this administration. At least I try. It turns everything I believe in on its head. I know what makes you mad, Mr. Carver — somebody trying to remove the U.S. flag from your church altar. And now you know what makes me mad. So you go back to your people on the board and tell them to stick their deal up their collective corporate ass. Also, tell them I'll see them in court."

  Bennett Carver seemed stunned. He stared at me, blinking slowly and with his mouth slightly open, for some time. Finally he rose from the chair and, leaning heavily on his wife's cane, walked unsteadily to the door. But he did not signal for the guard.

  "Perhaps I was wrong for trying to bargain with you, Frederickson," he said in a thick voice, without turning around. "I think I knew — or should have known — what your reaction was going to be. I understand why you had to go on that ship, and I admire your courage. I know what you did next you did because you were fighting for your life. Perhaps it's true that Tom Blaine's life was taken from him, but I can't do anything about that beyond what I've already done. If I cooperate in the prosecution of my son, I will lose my wife. I do bear much blame for what Charles has become; I was not a good father. But you have also been wronged, and you're in danger of being ground up and spat out by the part of the system that you so reasonably deplore, and that I can do something about, and have. It was done before I came in here. Carver Shipping has agreed to drop all charges and suits against you, and influential people I know are, at this moment, pressing the Justice Department to do the same. I believe they'll succeed. I will be very much surprised if you're not a free man again before this day is out, Dr. Frederickson. I told you I admire you for your courage, but courage can only take a man so far. You've dodged a very big bullet. My advice to you is to put this matter behind you and get on with your work and your life."

  "Just a minute!" I said sharply as the old man raised his hand to knock at the door. He hesitated, then slowly lowered his hand and turned to look at me. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and walked across the room to stand in front of him. "There is more that you can do."

  "I've told you I can do nothing more regarding Charles."

  "I'm not talking about Charles. I want to get the men who wrote the stage directions. I'm thinking maybe you do too. I understand the CEO and the board have called for a shareholders' meeting in a few weeks to call for a vote of confidence. You be there. Use that big block of stock you own, and your influence, to at least get rid of those people. Take back control of the company they screwed up, for at least as long as it takes to get decent people to run it."

  Bennett Carver slowly shook his head. "Even assuming I had the power to do that, and the physical strength to wage such a battle, I would still need some proof of serious malfeasance, or a criminal charge, to use against them. Pollution and illegal water hauling? That was a conspiracy of captains, remember? If they weren't already out from under that one, you wouldn't be walking out of here."

  "Then think of some other way."

  Again he shook his head, then turned back and knocked on the door to signal for the guard. "This business is finished, Frederickson. Get on with your life."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Damned if it didn't look like he was right.

  Just as a very wily and powerful Bennett Carver had predicted, all civil and criminal charges at both the state and federal levels were dropped, and before dinnertime I walked off Rikers Island a free man. I spent the next week and a half wasting a lot of time trying to track down Chick Carver and Roger Wellington, all to no avail. It appeared that Chick Carver had left the country, undoubtedly with a large amount of money his family had given him. Roger Wellington had been rewarded for past services with a solid-gold parachute as severance pay, and was rumored to be sailing somewhere off Tahiti. Carver tankers were delivering their shipments of oil, then obediently cruising back down the Hudson empty of everything but the bilge water and residual pollutants they had previously been flushing into the river. The Cairn Fishermen's Association was making plans for how to spend the hundred thousand dollars Carver Shipping had donated to them in memory of Tom Blaine.

  Neither Garth nor I had forgotten the murder, but there seemed to be nothing whatsoever we could do about it. With the suicide of Julian Jefferson, there seemed to be no way to pin anything on anyone, and with the disappearance of Chick Carver and Roger Wellington, there wasn't even anyone to pursue; the ruling echelon of the company appeared to be totally insulated. It w
ould be a waste of time, not to mention a threat to my credibility, to prattle on about a murder I couldn't prove to reporter friends who couldn't print anything I said, even if they wanted to, without having their newspaper sued for libel.

  And so, despite my best intentions, I found myself, by default, following Bennett Carver's advice, going back to my work and life. The burning rage that had propelled me onto a tanker in the middle of a storm was now only a memory, and even the smoldering outrage that had replaced it had gradually cooled to a kind of residual anger that came and went like a mild case of malaria. I had become resigned to the fact that I would probably never be able to avenge the riverkeeper's death or the assault on Garth and me. I tried to console myself with the thought that at least my work, now that I was back in the good graces of the state, consisted of something other than the equivalent of stamping out license plates.

  That was my general state of mind when Garth called me at six o'clock on a Thursday evening. I'd almost missed the call, as I was on my way out the door to pick up a gift for Harper, who was due back home from the Amazon in the morning; after some hesitation, I went back and picked up the receiver.

  "Frederickson and Frederickson."

  "Robby?"

  "Yeah."

  "It's Garth."

  "I know who it is. I'm listening."

  "Mary and I want you to come up for dinner. We miss you."

  "When?"

  "Right now."

  "I assume you want me to bring along some friends who might be feeling blue and need cheering up?"

  "No. Just bring yourself."

  "You sure? The company might do you both good."

  "No."

  I glanced out the window at the clotted traffic on West Fifty-sixth Street and gnawed at my lower lip, trying to think. It wouldn't be dark for almost three hours. "I'm with a client. I probably won't be out of here for another hour or so, and traffic looks bad. It could be two or three hours."

  "We'd really like you to come up right now, Robby."

  "I told you I can't. If you and Mary get hungry, go ahead and eat without me."

  "We'll wait. Get here as soon as you can."

  I hung up, walked quickly to the stairway leading up to my apartment on the fourth floor. Robby, indeed. Nobody but our mother and Harper ever called me Robby; that, along with the fact that Garth had not called on my private line, formed a clear warning signal.

  Upstairs, I took my Beretta and its shoulder holster out of the safe where I kept it these days, checked to make sure that it was clean, oiled, and loaded, and strapped it on; it had been sometime since I'd carried a gun, and it felt odd. For added measure, I took out my small Seecamp with its ankle holster, strapped that on. I went down to Garth's apartment on the third floor to pick up a souvenir from a case we'd handled many years before — a German-made sniper's rifle and a specially calibrated scope that went with it. Then I went down to the garage to get my car.

  * * *

  There was a tie-up on the George Washington Bridge, and I didn't arrive in Cairn until eight-fifteen, a half hour or so before sundown. I parked in the municipal lot beside the river to check out conditions on the water, center myself, and wait for dark. There was no wind, and the river was about as calm as it ever gets, virtually glassy. That was all to the good. I kept going over the brief conversation with Garth in my mind; I had clearly asked him if he wanted me to notify the police, or bring them along, and his answer had clearly been no. It meant not only that Sacra Silver was in complete control of the situation but that he was, in Garth's judgment, desperate enough to start killing people if he found himself trapped. I was on my own.

  The good news, if it could be called that, was that Chick Carver hadn't left the country after all; the definite bad news was that he was back in the faces of Garth and Mary, and was now presumably relying on more than his mouth to do harm. The self-styled ceremonial magician was going to require some smoking out, and I thought I had just the right smoker for the job.

  I needed a large, stable rowboat, and I thought I knew where to get one. As the sun dropped below the horizon, I started up the car. I drove north through town, cut west for two blocks to avoid driving in front of Garth and Mary's house, then headed back down toward the river and the huge mansion housing the Fellowship of Conciliation, the pacifist organization to which Mary had once belonged. The Fellowship had been an integral part of an investigation I'd conducted three years before, a case of murder and political intrigue that had brought me to Cairn in the first place and led to my brother meeting and marrying Mary Tree, the love of his life. The people in the mansion knew me; borrowing their rowboat would presumably present no problem. However, I was feeling increasing time pressure, and I didn't want to stand around in their lighted entranceway chatting them up or answering questions while holding a sniper's rifle in my hand. Consequently I parked out on the road, took the rifle and scope out of the trunk, and pushed my way through the hedge surrounding their property.

  I made my way through the moon shadows, around the mansion, and down a long, sloping lawn to the river. The Fellowship's sloop was moored out in the river. There was a rack holding the group's three canoes and a kayak, and there was a steel Grumman rowboat tied to the dock. I looked up toward the mansion to see if anyone might be at the window; there wasn't. I untied the Grumman, hopped in. I put the rifle and scope down on the floor, fitted the hickory oars into the oarlocks, and began rowing out onto the river. I went out a hundred yards or so, then pointed the bow south. The tide was going out, carrying me along with it. I rested the oars on the gunwales and allowed the boat to drift, using the time to fit the sniper scope to the barrel of the rifle.

  It took less than fifteen minutes to cover the distance to Garth and Mary's home, and from my position I had a partial view into the glass-enclosed music room that looked out over the river. I recognized the tall, slim figure of Chick Carver, backlit by the fluorescent lighting in the room. He had his back to me and was leaning against the windowsill. I couldn't see anyone else.

  I trained the rifle on him, then adjusted the scope until I had the back of his head in the cross hairs. But I didn't pull the trigger. I was going to need a very good excuse — not only for the police but for myself — before I blew off a man's head, and Chick Carver aka Sacra Silver, intellectual thug and accessory to murder, taking his leisure in my brother's home, wasn't it. He didn't appear to be holding a gun on anyone, and in fact seemed to have his long arms folded across his chest.

  Half a minute later, the tide and current had carried me out of viewing range. I put the rifle down, placed the oars back in the water, and rowed back upriver to a point where I could once again drift abreast of the house and try to appraise the situation further. A tug pulling a barge out in the deep channel would help some, since I knew that when the wake generated by the tug reached me, the rowboat would be raised two or three feet, giving me a better angle to see what was going on in the music room. I unscrewed the scope from its fitting on the rifle barrel, waited.

  The tug's bow wave arrived just as I was drifting in line with the house. As the rowboat rode up on the swell, I put the scope to my eye, sighted — and what I saw in the second or two before the boat dipped down in the wave's trough disturbed me very much indeed. Mary was sitting at her piano over by the recording console, and appeared to be playing. Garth was sitting very stiffly in a chair near the center of the room, the bright overhead lights glinting off what appeared to be a bare wire wrapped around his neck.

  While trying to decide whether Garth with a wire around his neck was sufficient reason to execute Carver, a second swell raised the rowboat back up. I sighted through the scope again as another person, a slight woman with silver-streaked, wheat-colored hair like my brother's, entered the room. I put the scope down. I would be doing no shooting from ambush. First of all, I could miss, and there would be no second chance; then there was no telling what Chick Carver would do with his hostages, including the littlest one. Even if I didn
't miss, the last thing in the world the littlest hostage needed to see was the image of a high-velocity, soft-nosed bullet exploding a man's skull. April Marlowe's presence in the house almost certainly meant that Vicky was there too. I might gamble with the lives of Garth and Mary, in an effort to save them, but not the child's; too many people she loved and had once trusted had already tried a similar trick, and had twisted her mind, and almost killed her, in the process.

  I had no Plan B, but it was time to put it into effect anyway. Whatever Plan B might turn out to be, it had to unfold inside the house, where I could further appraise and try to control the situation, minimizing any physical or further psychological harm to Vicky.

  I rowed the boat to shore, worried now that my tardiness in arriving at the house could suddenly trigger Chick Carver into a killing frenzy. I landed a hundred and fifty yards downriver, where the scraping of the boat as I pulled it up on the shore couldn't be heard in the house. I wrapped the painter attached to the bow around a rock, then hurried along the shoreline to the house. As I went up the path beneath the overhang, I inspected the underside of the house, near its foundation, on the off chance that Carver might have planted explosives. There didn't seem to be any — which didn't mean that explosives might not be planted at the front or sides, but I didn't have time to check out the entire structure.

  I took off my jacket, unstrapped my shoulder holster, and removed the Beretta. I shoved the gun into the waistband of my slacks, against my spine, then tossed the shoulder holster and harness off to the side. Then I took a deep breath, worked my face up into something I hoped resembled a smile, and pushed through the screen door. Mary was still playing the piano, and the decidedly incongruous music of Chopin drifted through the house.