There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, then Lonnie said, "Bad luck? I'm not sure I understand what you mean, Mongo."
"Well, take Tom Blaine as an example. He was almost certainly gathering evidence against Carver Shipping when he was sucked up into those propeller blades. Some people might call that bad luck. But I'm not necessarily talking about people dying; I'm looking for examples of anything unlucky happening to someone after they got on Carver Shipping's case in any way whatsoever. Does that make it clearer?"
"Yes, I think so. I'll make some calls."
"Good. But make sure you're discreet. Keep the conversations low-key, and just try to slide into the subject. Don't mention that you're making inquiries for me. I don't want any bad luck coming Lonnie Allen's way."
"I'll do it like you say, Mongo."
"Thanks, Lonnie. I appreciate it. I'll check back with you in a couple of days."
"Suicide by masturbation," Garth said drily. "Cute. But a bit sophomoric, don't you think?"
"It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not sure just what we're dealing with here, and I didn't want our boy Sacra Silver to know yet that I know who he really is. At the same time, it wouldn't bother me at all if he became the object of a little gossip and ridicule around the office. I was feeling a bit vicious."
"He dumps a boatload of needles and bloody bandages for my wife to walk on, and you pay him back by starting a gossip campaign. You call that vicious?"
"Cut me some slack, brother. I found out who he is, didn't I? Let him worry for a while about who made the call."
"He'll know it was you or me."
"Oh, I'm not so sure. I suspect our occultist bullshit artist has any number of enemies strewn over the countryside. That's why he's so leery of telling people his real name."
Garth grunted, sank back deeper into his canvas chair. We were sitting on his deck, drinking coffee and feasting our senses on the wide, sailboat-dotted expanse of river before us. After a week, we had ourselves quite a collection of photographs of Carver Shipping tankers going up and down the river. Every one of them rode as deep in the water heading seaward as they had been when they were heading upriver to make their deliveries; Carver Shipping certainly hadn't let Tom Blaine's death slow down their illicit sideline enterprise.
"So," Garth said, pointing to the stack of photographs on the glass-topped coffee table between us. "We've got lots of pretty pictures. Now what do we do?"
"I'm not sure."
"Turn these over to the Coast Guard? The CFA people? Or do we go diving now to get our own water samples?"
"Maybe, maybe, and maybe. But what would be the point? We've probably got the goods on them right now as far as taking on river water is concerned. We might even persuade the Coast Guard to make a call asking them to stop, assuming our friend Captain Marley was in a good mood. And they'd stop. If the Cairn Fishermen's Association decides they have enough evidence and witnesses now to take them to court, they'll stop. Then we'll be worse off than we are now, because we'll have tipped our hand. We didn't start this to prove Carver Shipping is polluting and stealing water; that's a sideshow. We want to find out if one of their captains is a killer."
"So what do we do next?"
"You must enjoy hearing me repeat myself. However, since you insist on probing the devious and resourceful mind of this master investigator, I might suggest we have another option besides turning over these photographs and putting everyone, including Julian Jefferson, on guard."
"What option would that be, O master investigator?"
"Work on our pal Chick Carver. He's a loose thread."
"Loose thread? He's a loose cannon."
"That too. But maybe we should pull on him for a while and see what unravels."
"You think he was involved in Tom's death?"
"I don't know. What we do know is that he works for Carver Shipping, as an assistant to the head of security. He sure as hell knows about the water-stealing scam; probably everyone in the company down to the shipping clerks knows. Whether he knows anything about Tom's death is something we may find out if we pull at him a bit."
"How?"
"Maybe he'll give us the answer to that question. He certainly is a persistent son-of-a-bitch, so I think it's safe to assume he'll make another pass at one or both of us. When he does, he may leave himself vulnerable in some way we can't know until he does it."
"It sounds to me like you want to keep playing with him, Mongo. The idea doesn't much appeal to me."
"I prefer my original metaphor of pulling on a loose thread," I replied a bit testily. "If you've got a better idea for forcing an investigation into your friend's death, please share it with me."
"I still say he's a fucking loose cannon."
"Then maybe he'll backfire."
"I want to be perfectly clear about something, Mongo," Garth said in a calm, casual tone of voice that, when combined with my brother's air of steely resolve, was always a powerful sign of danger. "I understand what you're saying. If it were only you and me Sacra Silver was playing with, your approach wouldn't bother me; I might even enjoy the game. But Silver sees Mary as the prize in this contest; he's playing with, and for, her. And that's where I have to draw the line. So you play with him; pull his chain all you want. But if I meet up with him face-to-face, I won't be playing any game."
I raised my coffee mug to him, nodded. "I think I get your drift, brother. Perchance you thought I'd forgotten the danger Carver poses to Mary?"
"I didn't say that, Mongo," Garth replied, uncharacteristically looking away. He picked up his binoculars from the coffee table and began scanning the river. "I just don't want you getting pissed off at me if your loose thread ends up with a broken back."
"We are in excellent communication, as usual."
"So we wait?"
"Wait, keep taking pictures, and see what happens with Mr. Chick Carver."
"Fine. Just so long as you remember what-" Garth suddenly stopped speaking, stiffened in his chair, then abruptly stood up and stepped to the railing of the deck. He was looking to the south through the binoculars.
"What is it, Garth?"
He motioned with his right hand for me to join him at the railing. I did, and he handed me the binoculars. Then he pointed downriver, toward an approaching tanker in the distance. "Check it out."
I peered through the binoculars, adjusting the focus. It was a big tanker, maybe seven hundred feet long, with a gray hull highlighted by red and yellow stripes along the waterline. As big as two football fields, the deck of the tanker was dotted with vent stacks, pallets of supplies, and large orange cranes on both its port and starboard sides. An enormous superstructure containing an elevated wheelhouse rose up into the sky at the stern end; painted white, the superstructure looked a bit like a three-tiered wedding cake. The tanker was negotiating its way between red and green buoys in an area where the deep channel crossed from one side of the river to the other, giving me a clear view of its length. The tanker's registration number was clearly visible on its stern end: 82Q510. Julian Jefferson was back in the neighborhood.
I said, "Son-of-a-bitch."
"Yeah," Garth replied softly. "That's what I was thinking."
I watched as the tanker made its turn, then continued to proceed north, toward us. Suddenly two medium-size tugs appeared in my field of vision, coming from the north. The water at the stern of the tanker began to churn even more as the captain reversed his engines. A half hour later, with the help of the two tugs, the tanker was securely anchored to a permanent mooring offshore from the tool and die manufacturing complex across the river, perhaps fifty yards from the end of the complex's steel and concrete dock. A half dozen crewmen appeared on deck, and we watched as the men went about their business opening valves and attaching enormous black hoses that would be connected to fittings on the dock.
"So near and yet so far," Garth continued quietly.
"Yeah."
"You want to go rent some diving equipmen
t?"
"I didn't think our mother raised any stupid children. When was the last time you were scuba diving, brother?"
Garth shrugged. "Seven, maybe eight years ago-in the Virgin Islands."
"You think you can find the underwater venting ports on that hull in total darkness, with a four-or-five-knot current nudging you in the ass?"
"You're saying we're not qualified?"
"I'm saying Mom wouldn't approve, and you remember, I'm sure, Dad's lectures on the difference between courage and stupidity."
"I seem to recall him lecturing you on the difference between courage and stupidity. The fact remains that we have the ship that probably killed Tom sitting over there right under our noses. We don't know how long it's going to stay there, and we don't know when it will be back. We've got to go for it now."
"Go for what?"
"I don't know. Maybe call the Coast Guard again. Something."
"It would be a waste of time to call the Coast Guard. All they're doing right now is unloading a cargo of fuel oil."
"Mongo-"
"Okay, let's go," I said, hanging the binoculars on a peg on the railing.
"Where?"
"To see if we can't rattle the captain's cage, and see what transpires."
Garth obviously liked the idea. He grunted his approval, then quickly fell into step beside me as I walked out of the house and headed down toward the beach. "I thought the master investigator didn't think we should tip our hand."
"The master investigator has changed his mind; master investigators do that all the time, which is one reason why we're master investigators. I said we didn't want to tip our hand to the company.''''
"That's not what you said."
"This is-maybe-the captain who murdered Tom Blaine. If so, he may still be more than a bit edgy, and he might make a mistake. On the other hand, maybe what happened to Tom really was an accident, in which case Jefferson may not have any idea what happened. I just think it would be interesting to see how he reacts to us."
"You think he'll talk to us?"
"I guess we're about to find out, aren't we? It's risky, but we don't really know what we're going to do about Tom's death anyway, and we may never get another chance to get this close to the captain and ship that probably killed him."
"Agreed," Garth said, then slowed his pace. "I should probably leave a note for Mary."
"You do what you feel you need to do, but if the church meeting she's at lasts as long as usual, we'll probably be back before she is."
"You're right."
We went into the boathouse to retrieve a length of rope, as well as one of the green plastic jugs we had taken from Tom Blaine's basement office. We tied the jug to the lacing between the two halves of the catamaran's canvas trampoline, then dragged the cat down to the river's edge. Garth raised the sail, locked it into place. We pushed the cat into the water and hopped on, with Garth in the middle and me at the tiller, and we were off.
We were in no danger of being becalmed. It was, in fact, an ideal day for sailing, with white cream puffs of cloud high in an azure sky, a warm sun, and a steady twelve-to-fifteen knot wind from the southwest. The tide was going out, so I pointed a few degrees north of the tanker, on a starboard tack, and sheeted in the mainsail. The cat shot forward, its pontoons hissing, leaving nice rooster tails of surf in our wake. When I felt the pontoon beneath me begin to rise, I slipped both my feet beneath the hiking strap, let out the traveler to just past the three-quarters mark, and loosened the sheet a bit. It would have been great fun to fly a hull, but we were out on business, and I didn't want to take a chance on dumping. There was some swell, but Garth was expert at shifting his weight at the right moment to keep our center of gravity toward the rear to prevent us from accidentally pitchpoling.
Three quarters of the way across the river, and perhaps a quarter mile north of the tanker, I tacked, heading high into the wind, beating on a direct line toward the tanker's bow. A hundred yards away, I tacked again, heading directly into the wind and intentionally going into irons. I brought the traveler back to the center point and cinched down the boom to minimize luffing of the sail. While the wind was in our face and trying to push us back, our surface area was minimized; as I had hoped, the current caught us and carried us forward at one or two knots. Five minutes later we were drifting beneath the tanker's bow, looking up at two crewmen who had taken time off from their chores to watch us pass by. One of them, a dark-skinned man with a handlebar moustache and a puffy, black birthmark on his cheek, looked downright hostile; the other, a sallow-faced crewman wearing a rumpled seaman's cap low on his forehead, merely seemed curious. I waved to the curious-looking one, who waved back.
"Ahoy, there," I called. "How's it going?"
"No hablamos ingles," the gloomy-faced man called back. Then he looked at the other man, and they both laughed.
Garth shouted, "We want to talk to the captain!"
"No hablamos ingles," the crewman with the cap replied, and they both laughed again.
I untied the jug from the trampoline lacing, held it aloft. "Try speaking this, amigos! We want to speak to your captain about what's in this jug! Agua mala from this ship! It's important! He's going to want to talk to us! Tell him we want to come aboard! Go get him!"
The two men conferred as we continued to drift down the length of the massive tanker. Then, somewhat to my surprise, the glum-looking one with the birthmark saluted us, then turned away from the railing and disappeared from sight. The second crewman stayed where he was, staring after us with a somewhat amused expression on his face.
We came abreast of the stern. It was evident that the ship had already begun to unload its cargo, for the thick top of the great steel rudder was just visible above the waterline. It was time to turn around. I waited until we were about fifteen yards astern of the tanker, then nodded to Garth. I pushed the tiller as far as it would go to the starboard side while Garth unlocked the sheet and pushed the boom as far out as he could in the same direction, causing us to backwind. A catamaran is very fast when sailing in a straight line, especially on a beam reach, but it's a pig in water when coming about; locked in irons, the wind constantly tends to suck the craft back into a line parallel with, and facing, the wind's direction. However, after three near misses, we finally managed to get the stern kicked around to a degree where we had a proper angle to the wind and could make headway. I pointed north, at a forty-five-degree angle away from the tanker. I sailed us in a broad semicircle, then repeated my original maneuver, sending us into irons near the bow of the ship, cinching down the boom, and letting the current carry us along the port side of the ship. The two crewmen we had originally spoken to had been joined by a third at the railing. This crewman was thickset, with very large black eyes. He wore a red bandana around his head, and, despite the heat of the summer day, a heavy black wool sweater. His expression was somber as he stared down at us.
"Yo!" I called to the man in the black sweater. "You Captain Jefferson?"
"No," he replied in a deep, rich baritone that carried clearly down to us. He had a pronounced Greek accent. "What do you want?"
"We'd like permission to come aboard. There's a big police and Coast Guard investigation going on concerning the man who died under your ship a few weeks ago. He was taking samples of the bad water you people were flushing out of your tanks, and they think somebody on board may have purposely turned on your ship's engines while he was under there. That would make it murder. All we want to do is get Captain Jefferson's side of the story before the police, Coast Guard, and newspaper people begin swarming around here and he gets too busy to talk to us. How about it? You got a rope ladder we can tie up to? We don't have that many questions, and we won't take up much of the captain's time."
"Who the hell are you people?"
We were drifting out of earshot, and since the English-speaking Greek did not seem inclined to follow us down the railing, it meant we would have to come about once again.
"We're inve
stigators working for your insurance company!" I shouted as I pushed the tiller hard to starboard to initiate the maneuver that would bring us around. "Just wait there! We'll be right back!"
"This is a waste of time, Mongo," Garth said evenly as he pushed on the boom, and I struggled to get us under sail. "Maybe worse than a waste of time."
"You could be right, but sitting around on your deck and watching the river flow was getting to be a waste of time too, wasn't it? You wanted to do something, remember? We're doing something. At the worst, we can always go to the Coast Guard with the photographs when we get back. The only way we can get a murder investigation started is to catch somebody else's interest. If we can't interest the police or Coast Guard, then we have to try to interest the captain-and hope he says or does something incriminating."
Garth merely shrugged. "I didn't say I disagreed with your reasoning, and I wanted to come out here even more than you did. We gave it a shot, but now I think we're wasting our time. I'd like to see Jefferson's reaction too, but we're not going to get on board."
"Ah, but we don't know yet how the powers that be on board that ship are reacting to my insurance investigator ploy. I say we make one more pass."
"Go for it."
We went around the horn again, with Garth making only an occasional disparaging remark about the believability of insurance investigators conducting official business on a fourteen-foot catamaran. The sallow-faced crewman with the rumpled cap had been left alone at the rail to chart our progress. However, after we'd gone into irons and once again begun to drift with the current alongside the ship, the Greek suddenly appeared at the railing.
"Go away!" he bellowed in his resonant baritone, gesturing angrily. He paused, glanced toward the south, then looked back at us. "You're crazy! Get out of here!"
I once again held up the green plastic jug. It was time to let out all the stops. "This jug contains samples of water flushed from this tanker into the river. It proves you've been polluting. We can also prove that you've been taking on river water, in violation of the law, shipping it somewhere else and selling it. This sample was collected by the man who was killed under your ship. Now, we're trying to be fair about this. This is absolutely the last chance your captain is going to have to tell his side of the story before his picture and the Coast Guard's version of what happened get splashed all over the newspapers. It's in his interest to talk to us. We won't take up much of his time." I paused, waiting to see if my words would have some effect. They didn't. The two men remained where they were at the rail, but they were no longer paying any attention to us; both crewmen were now looking to the south. And we were once again almost out of earshot. "At least bring him up on deck to talk to us!" I shouted. "He's being accused of murder! Let us-!"
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