by Janet Dailey
He darted a curious, bright-eyed glance at Remy, then averted his gaze to the man beside her. "What'd ya want, Mac?"
"This lady needs an escort back to her car."
"My pleasure."
Remy started to protest, then recognized that she'd only succeed in antagonizing Mac further. As stubborn as that man was, he'd probably have her bodily carried off the dock if she refused to leave voluntarily.
As the man walked off toward the tanker's gangway, Remy glanced at her escort. "I'm sorry about this, Mr.—"
"Just Charlie," he insisted, grinning. "Everybody calls me that. And don't mind him. He snaps at everybody when he's under the gun to get a ship out. At times like this, he's our version of a Big Mac Attack."
She smiled wryly. "I do feel like I've been pounced on and chewed a bit." She saw the tanker's captain step to the rail of the bridge deck. Mac cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled something at him. The captain responded with an acknowledging salute and went back inside. "What was that all about?" she asked, and reluctantly moved toward the ramp,
Charlie lifted his shoulders in a light shrug. "Mac was probably letting the captain know he could go ahead and call for a river pilot."
"A river pilot." She looked at him with quick interest.
"Yeah, all ships on the Mississippi have to carry a river pilot licensed by the state, someone who knows the river, the locations of its shoals, the tricks of its currents, everything. The ships have to give the Pilots' Association a three-hour advance notice of their departure. Which is about how long it's gonna take us to finish loading this tanker. By then, with luck, the crew will have reported for duty, the pilot'll be on board, and down the river she'll go."
"Then a river pilot takes a ship all the way to the mouth." Unconsciously, Remy slowed her steps, forcing Charlie to shorten his loping stride to stay abreast of her.
"There's always a pilot on board, but not the same one. A Baton Rouge pilot gets on here and takes her down to around Chalmette. A Crescent River pilot gets on board there and helps guide her to Pilot Town. Another pilot takes her from there out to the sea buoy. From this dock, a tanker like that's got about a hundred and forty miles of river to navigate before it reaches the open waters of the Gulf. Kinda amazing, isn't it?"
"I don't think I realized it was that far," Remy murmured, thinking as well that no matter where the Dragon had been loaded, it must have had well over a hundred miles of river to navigate. And somewhere along that hundred-plus-mile stretch, the bearded Mr. Hanks claimed, the tanker could have off-loaded its cargo of crude onto waiting barges. If it had, the river pilot would have known about it. "Charlie . . . how long does it take to unload a tanker like that one back there?"
"We can do it in less than twenty-four hours."
"It takes that long." Remy stopped in surprise, twenty feet short of the end of the ramp.
He chuckled. "It wasn't that many years ago when we thought we were doing good to turn a tanker around in three days."
"Would it change any if you were unloading onto barges instead of a pipeline?"
"Not really. Your rate of discharge is the same."
"What about these river pilots?" These river pilots who were bound to keep some kind of log on the ships they guided. These river pilots who obviously lived in the area, who could tell her where the Dragon had been docked and whether she'd made any stops in her journey downriver. "How would a person get hold of them?"
"You just call 'em up."
"You mean they're listed in the phone book?" She nearly smiled at the fact that the answer could be so simple as they made the turn off the ramp toward her car.
"Yep. All you gotta do is look in the Yellow Pages under the Pilots' Association, and the office numbers for all three of them are there."
"Which means I can let my 'fingers do the walking' instead of me," Remy murmured to herself, this time letting the smile come, aware that she was no longer faced with the daunting and time-consuming task of going to all the petroleum docks, trying to locate the tanker's last berth. A couple of phone calls should tell her that—and give her the names of the pilots who had been on board the Dragon on her downriver trip.
"Sorry—what'd you say? I couldn't hear," Charlie said, flicking a hand at a small Toyota pickup truck that was accelerating to make the sloping climb onto the levee road.
"Nothing." She paused in front of her car to let the pickup go by. As the small white truck drew level with her, it suddenly applied its brakes, the tires digging into the shelled surface and skidding to a stop a half a length behind her.
The passenger door immediately swung open, and a man dressed in a dark business suit and tie, wearing a pair of attractive gold-rimmed glasses, stepped out and turned his frowning look on her. Judging by the deep perpendicular creases between his eyebrows, Remy suspected that he frowned a lot more than he smiled. She mentally braced herself to receive another lecture about unauthorized visitors.
"Remy. I thought I recognized you. What are you doing here?"
My God, she thought, he knows me. She hadn't expected that, and made another quick study of him, trying to find something familiar. He looked to be somewhere in his late thirties or early forties. His hair was dark and combed straight back from his face—a sternly pragmatic face, with no particularly distinguishing features, unless it was the thinness of his lips.
"This is a surprise. I didn't expect to run into you here," she declared, pretending to know him—a decision she hadn't been conscious of making.
"And I didn't expect to see you. So what brings you here?" He tried to smile, but the expression was foreign to him. Remy briefly thought that it was a shame; he could have been a good-looking man if it weren't for the permanent scowl etched in his forehead.
"What brings me here?" she echoed his question, certain that she couldn't tell him the truth. If he knew her, he must know her family, and she couldn't have him telling them what she was doing. She had to come up with some other reason—something innocuous. "A friend of mine is writing a book, and I offered to help her with some of the research. One of her characters is in shipping, and she thought I'd know about it."
"A friend of yours? Which one?"
"I don't think you know her. She works at the museum."
"I see." Was he convinced? Remy couldn't tell as she tried to conceal how uncomfortable she felt under his penetrating study. "Did you get all the information you needed?" His glance flicked to Charlie, as if guessing that he'd provided it.
"I think so." She produced the car keys from her jacket pocket and glanced pointedly at the pickup, its motor idling. "I won't keep you. I know you have things to do, and I have a date with a horse to keep."
"See you around, Remy." He hesitated a moment longer, then turned and climbed back into the cab of the pickup.
Remy waited until the truck pulled away, then looked at Charlie. "I hate it when that happens."
"What do you mean?"
"My mind's an absolute blank. I know him, but I can't remember his name."
"Him? That's Carl Maitland."
"Of course." She pretended to recognize the name. In truth, it was vaguely familiar, but she couldn't remember why or how. She held out her hand. "Thanks for escorting me to my car, Charlie—and for your patience in answering all my questions."
"No problem." His calloused hand briefly gripped hers, then released it. "And if your friend needs any more help with her book, tell her to call me. I got some stories about things that have happened on the docks that she wouldn't believe. They'd make a good book."
"I'll tell her."
As she walked around the car to the driver's door, he called after her, "Last name's Aikens. I'm in the phone book."
"Got it," she said, and waved a final good-bye.
Leaving the tank terminal and the petroleum docks, Remy followed the River Road for a short distance, then turned off and made the jog to intersect with Airline Highway. She stopped at the first pay telephone booth she saw. In the directory,
just as Charlie Aikens had promised, were the numbers for all three river-pilot districts. She called the Baton Rouge district first and simply asked if someone could tell her which pilot had been aboard the tanker Crescent Dragon when it had left port in the early part of September last year. Within minutes a man came back on the line and said the pilot had been Pete Hoskins—no, he wasn't there right now. He was on a Russian grain ship and probably wouldn't be back for another five hours.
Her second call was more productive.
Thirty minutes later Remy was sitting in a booth in a Mid-City coffee shop with the Dragon's Crescent River pilot, Gus Trudeau, a tall man of imposing proportions with a full head of sandy hair tinged with gray. She watched him take a long drink of the scalding-hot coffee, secretly convinced he had an asbestos-lined mouth.
Amazingly, he didn't breathe out fire, smoke, or steam when he set his cup down on the Formica-topped table and looked her squarely in the eye. "So you're a writer, eh?"
"That's right. I'm writing a follow-up piece on the Crescent Dragon, a retrospective story from the viewpoint of various people like yourself who had some involvement with what turned out to be her last voyage." Remy thought the cover was a good one—one that would arouse the least possible amount of suspicion about her interest in the tanker. "So tell me, Mr. Trudeau, what do you remember of her? Were there any problems? Did anything unusual happen?"
"No, it was pretty routine. When I took over from Pete Hoskins, the Baton Rouge pilot, I remember he told me that she answered pretty sluggish, so I kept that in mind on the trip down to Pilot Town. And I talked briefly with the captain, too, about the storm brewing in the Gulf."
"Then there weren't any stops—any delays along the way?"
"None."
"That was almost six months ago, Mr. Trudeau." Remy eyed him curiously. "How can you be so sure about that?"
"Like I told those other two who came around asking—
"Other two?" She frowned. "What other two?"
"I don't remember their names, but one was a heavyset guy with a beard who came around asking questions about the tanker—musta been two weeks ago. Then a couple days before that, I talked to another guy. He was younger, probably in his thirties, tall, brown hair."
Gabe. She should have known her brother would do some checking of his own. "I'm sorry. I interrupted you. What was it that you told them?"
"Just that when a ship goes down in a storm three days after you've been on her, you remember that ship and that trip—well. You go over the trip in your mind, compare notes with the other pilots, and try to remember if there was something— anything—that might have indicated the vessel wasn't really seaworthy."
"And you did that. You talked with the other two pilots," Remy guessed.
"I did. And it was routine all the way."
"Did they have any stops or delays?"
"None. And I know that for a fact, because I saw copies of their log sheets."
She took a small sip of the still-hot coffee and wondered whether she should take his word for it or talk to the other pilots herself. "You don't happen to know where the tanker was docked, do you?" she asked curiously.
"Pete told me he picked her up at the old Claymore docks." He hesitated, then nodded. "That's right. She was berthed in the upper one. I remember Pete told me the current takes a funny twist there and can sometimes be a problem when you're pulling away from the dock. That's when he discovered how slow the tanker was to maneuver."
"Where are the Claymore docks?"
"Let's see." He leaned against the booth's red-vinyl back, a thoughtful, searching frown claiming his expression. "What mile marker are they located on?"
Remy immediately guessed that he was talking "river" miles. "No, I was wondering how I could reach them from land."
"I don't know if I can tell you how to get there by land," he said, absently scratching his head. "They're on the east bank, north of Kenner a ways. I'm sure you could get to 'em by the River Road."
She realized that she must have been close to them earlier that day. "How far are they from the tank farm and docks owned by Gulf Coast Petroleum?"
"Those are the old Claymore docks."
"What?"
"Those are the Claymore docks," he repeated.
She'd been there—at the very place where the Dragon had been berthed—and not known it, not recognized it, not remembered. "Wait. There are three docks there." And she'd been on the middle one. "Which one did you say the tanker was at?"
"The upper one."
She shook her head in confusion. "Which one's that?"
"The upriver one—that's why it's called the 'upper' dock."
She hadn't been on the right dock. Was that why nothing had seemed familiar to her? She didn't dare go back and risk running into that Carl Maitland again. And she doubted that "Bulldog" Mac would be any more cooperative the second time around. Then she remembered Charlie— dear, wonderful Charlie Aikens, so friendly and free with information. Was he one of the men who had loaded the Dragon? Had he seen her there that night? Wouldn't he have recognized her if he had? His number was in the phone book, he'd said. All she had to do was call and ask. And if he hadn't worked that shift, maybe she could persuade him to find out who had.
With an effort, she brought her attention back to the booth. "You said the trip downriver was routine, but—was there anything about the Dragon's voyage that raised questions in your mind? In other words, when it went down, was it way off course? Or had it not traveled as far as you thought it would? Anything like that?" Even though the pilot had eliminated the possibility of the tanker off-loading its shipment of crude oil onto river barges or a pipeline downstream, there was still a chance it had hooked onto an offshore pipeline.
"No. According to the Coast Guard report I read, it went down about where you'd expect, given its course and speed and the strength of the storm. It sunk just a mile or two off the sea-lane. Fortunately, it's a well-traveled route, and the crew was able to signal a passing ship. And before you ask, no, we didn't run into much barge traffic."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The bearded guy asked a lot of questions about the barges that ply the Delta waters south of the city. But like I told him, about the only barges you meet downriver are the ones hauling trash and garbage out into the ocean."
"I see," she said, and went back to something he'd said just before that. "The Coast Guard issued a report on the sinking?"
"Yes"
She wondered why she hadn't found a copy of it in the company files. Had it been there, and had she somehow overlooked it?
She was still bothered by the question when she arrived home. She walked into the house and immediately caught the distinctive aroma of bay leaves and spices stewing in a gumbo pot. Her father was in the entrance hall, holding the telephone receiver to his ear. He hung up when he saw her.
"I was just dialing the stables to see if you'd left."
Remy faltered an instant in midstride, then recovered and smiled at him in mock reproof, trying not to think how close she'd come to getting caught in a lie. "Why would you be doing that? I told you Pd be home in time for lunch, and here I am," she said, then chided him as she paused to pull off her gloves. "I have the distinct feeling you're keeping closer track of me now than you did when I was a teenager."
"That's not true."
"Isn't it?" she challenged lightly.
"If it is, it's only because it's natural for us to worry after the way you disappeared before."
"I promise I'm not going to disappear again, so stop worrying."
"Remy." Her mother came out of the dining room. "I thought I heard your voice. I was just telling Nattie I didn't think you were going to make it back for lunch. How was your ride?" She inspected her daughter's appearance with a slightly puzzled expression. "I expected you to come back chilled to the bone, with your nose and cheeks all rosy-pink from the cold, but you look . . . fine."
"The Jaguar does have a heater. I warmed up on
the way home." Remy glanced toward the dining room and deliberately sniffed the air. "Is that shrimp gumbo I smell?"
"Yes. I'll let Nattie know you're here. You'll want to change out of those riding clothes—"
"I'll do that later. Right now I'm starved."
Food was actually the furthest thing from her mind, but exercise was supposed to make a person hungry, and if she wanted to maintain the pretense that she'd spent the morning horseback riding, she had to feign an appetite.
An hour later, fresh from the shower, Remy sat in the middle of her bed, swathed in her satin robe, a towel wrapped turban-style around her wet head, and the folder containing copies of the documents from the company files lying open in front of her. Her first rifling search through the stack had failed to turn up a copy of the Coast Guard report. She started to go through the papers again, one at a time.
Two quick raps were the only warning she had. Frantically, she pulled the towel off her head and dropped it over the files to conceal them as the bedroom door swung open.
"Nattie," she declared in relief when the tall, spare black woman walked in. "You startled me." She laughed self-consciously and nervously combed her wet hair away from her forehead with her fingers.
"I knocked first."
"I know."
"Where're your boots?"
"In the closet. Why?" Frowning, Remy slid off the bed when Nattie immediately walked in that direction.
" 'Cause I'd better get 'em cleaned before they stink up the place," she said, opening the closet door and walking inside.
"You don't need to." Remy took a quick step after her, then stopped as Nattie emerged from the closet, boots in hand. Except for some white dust from the levee road's oyster-shell surface, the soles and heels of her riding boots were dry and unstained—as Nattie quickly saw. "I already cleaned them," Remy asserted.