An Incident At Bloodtide

Chapter Six

I took the piece of paper from the slight Puerto Rican's hand and stared stupidly at the writing on it, trying to figure out just what it was I felt on hearing the news that my brother was dead. All I seemed able to identify were the things I didn't feel: I didn't feel the shock I thought I should be experiencing; I didn't feel ill; I didn't feel grief. I didn't even feel sad. I didn't feel anything at all, except stupid; suddenly I couldn't remember what day it was, or what I had been doing since I'd gotten up that morning. I couldn't even remember why I'd come into the office; I wondered if it might not be a good idea to go out and come back in again to see what would happen, as if this were a bad dream that might come out differently if I repeated some action. I busied myself with working at the details of the day and time, and why I'd asked Francisco to come in on a Saturday to help me with a backlog of paperwork, and where I'd been, and when I finally remembered it all, I found myself right back where I had been when I'd forgotten, standing beside my secretary's desk, staring vacantly at the number written on the piece of paper, my vision blurring.

Francisco tentatively reached out to touch me, then drew his hand back. "Mongo, I'm so sorry."

"Yeah," I replied in a perfectly normal tone of voice. "Me too."

"Are you all right?"

"I don't think so, Francisco. I don't think so."

"I. . Do you want me to make the call?"

"No, Francisco."

"Mongo?"

"Yes, Francisco?"

"I, uh. . You had four appointments on Monday morning, and you were due in court in the afternoon to testify in the Handley industrial espionage case. I've canceled the appointments, and the D.A. has agreed to reschedule your testimony. I was able to reach him at home."

"Thank you, Francisco."

"Sir, I … I don't know what to say."

"What's to say? You can take the rest of the day off."

"Sir?"

"You can go home now. Thanks for coming in."

"Mongo," Francisco stammered, "it's your brother. I want to help in some way."

"Thank you, Francisco. There's nothing to do. It's really not that big a deal. People die all the time. Living, you know, is a very risky business; like they say, nobody gets out of it alive anyway. Haven't you heard that? By rights, Garth and I should have been dead a long time ago. Hell, we've certainly been responsible for enough other people kicking off. Today was Garth's turn. No big deal."

"Mongo, you don't look or sound good at all. Please let me-"

"Please just let yourself go home, Francisco. I want to be alone, if that's all right with you. I don't need any help. I'm okay."

My secretary looked at me strangely for a few moments, then finally picked up his sports coat from the back of the chair and walked around me. I felt, rather than saw, him pause in the doorway.

I continued, "Just come in on Monday morning and run the office the way you usually do. I'll check in with you. Don't schedule anything until I give the okay. Have a nice day, Francisco."

When I heard the door close behind me, I sat down at the secretary's desk, rubbed my eyes and blew my nose, then looked again at the number he had written down on the slip of paper. Now I wished I'd had the presence of mind to ask Francisco who had called, and just what they'd said, but it was too late. It probably didn't make any difference. The number was in the 914 area code, Rockland County, but it wasn't a Cairn exchange, so it hadn't been Mary or the Cairn police who'd called. Whoever answered would undoubtedly tell me again that Garth was dead, and presumably tell me how he'd died.

Actually, it didn't-as far as I could tell-make much difference to me how he had died, only that he was dead. If Sacra Silver had killed Garth, I was going to kill Sacra Silver, but Garth would still be dead.

My hands were perfectly steady as I picked up the telephone receiver and dialed the number Francisco had written down. It was busy. For some reason that made me angrier than the news that Garth was dead or the possibility that Sacra Silver might have killed him; somebody had a lot of nerve tying up the phone line while I was trying to get through to get information about my brother's death. Some people had no manners at all.

It occurred to me that my emotional thermostat was slightly askew.

I punched the redial button. The line was still busy.

I started going over in my mind the things that would have to be done as soon as I got this stupid phone call out of the way. First, I would have to leave for Cairn as soon as possible to be with Mary and try to comfort her as best I could. Funeral arrangements would have to be made, our parents and other relatives would have to be notified. I would have to make arrangements for relatives around the country to come to the funeral, if they wished, and afterward I would have to arrange to have Garth's body shipped back to Nebraska for burial in the family plot. I would have to contact our lawyer and make arrangements for Garth's will to be read.

Dead brothers necessitate lots of arrangements.

Before I left for Cairn, I was going to have to make out a list of instructions for Francisco; there were clients to call, matters that had to be attended to; it would probably be a good idea to make arrangements for some of Frederickson and dead Frederickson's work load for the coming week or two to be farmed out to other agencies.

Now I was sorry I had sent Francisco home. I was suddenly hungry, with a ravenous craving for pizza. I could have sent Francisco out for pizza.

Damn Garth anyway for getting himself killed. It was all such a distraction, and there was so much to do.

But all I could do at the moment was sit and stare at the beige telephone and the number on the slip of paper in front of me. I'd already picked up the receiver and tried the number twice, so I couldn't understand why I couldn't do it again. But suddenly I felt frozen in place, paralyzed.

I was certain I would be all right if only I could eat two or three slices of pizza. Damn Francisco anyway for going home when I'd ordered him to. What kind of secretary was he? He should have known that I didn't really want him to go, that I needed help. It wasn't every day that your brother died.

I willed myself to move, to reach out for the telephone. But then I started to move too much; my hand had begun to shake uncontrollably, and I dropped it back into my lap, hunching over in an effort to keep it still.

Then the crushing weight of my grief settled over me like a black blanket of lead, and the tears came. With Garth gone, I felt less than half a person. He had carried me, both literally and figuratively, on his broad shoulders throughout a tormented childhood and had helped me to grow up reasonably whole. As things had turned out, much of my life had been defined by danger, both psychological and physical, perils I had undoubtedly, if not consciously, sought out to prove something to the world, or to myself. Always, Garth had been at my side, and he had saved my life on countless occasions. A half hour before, I'd been afraid of nothing; now it seemed I was afraid of everything, even to pick up a telephone and call a number to see what the person on the other end might have to say. Only now, with Garth dead, did I realize the extent to which my brother had been my courage, my heart, my spine.

I leaned forward on the desk, resting my head on my arms, and sobbed uncontrollably, letting the tears flow freely as my sorrow washed through me like some tidal wave of acid. When my tears were spent I didn't feel all that much better, but at least my hands had stopped shaking. I sighed, blew my nose, picked up the telephone receiver, and once again punched the redial button. The line was still busy. I redialed the number, just to make sure I had gotten it right. Busy.

I hung up the telephone and stared at it some more. When the line was still busy five minutes later, I got out my reverse directory for Rockland County and looked up the number. It was a pay phone in a shopping mall in Nanuet. Now I did what I should have done in the first place, what I probably would have done if I hadn't been just slightly unnerved. I picked up the receiver once again and called Garth and Mary's home. This line was busy also, but that didn't surprise me. I kept pushing the redial button until I finally got through.

"Hello," Garth said in a cracked voice.

I was certain there had been times in my life when I'd been happier, or felt more relieved, but at the moment I simply couldn't recall them. I closed my eyes, heaved a deep sigh. "It's Mongo, Garth."

There was silence at the other end of the line for a few seconds, then a tentative "Mongo?"

"Yep."

"Oh, Jesus, I thought you were-"

"Dead, yeah. You were out, and Mary took the message that I was dead, and you were to call a certain number to get the grisly details. The number's for a pay phone at the Nanuet Mall. The receiver must be off the hook."

"Jesus," he said again. "Just a minute. There's someone tearing at my sleeve here."

There was a brief pause, and then Mary came on the line. She was sobbing, but with joy. "Mongo! Is that really you?"

"In living color. I emphasize the word 'living.' "

"But I got a call from the police. ."

"It was just a misunderstanding that's been cleared up. I assure you the report of my death was highly exaggerated, and all that."

"But how could the police-?"

"Just a misunderstanding, babe, like I said. A case of mistaken identity. You know all dwarves look alike to you normal-size people."

"You know," she whispered hoarsely, "I really would miss you, Mongo."

"Yeah, I'd miss me too. Can you put Garth back on the line?"

"Sure. Love you, brother-in-law."

"Love you, sister-in-law."

"Yeah," Garth said in a low voice when he came back on the line. "A pay phone at the Nanuet Mall, huh?"

"That's right-but not for publication around there, because you-know-who has to be the one who pulled this little stunt. I don't think Mary should know. Can you talk?"

"No."

"All right, I'll talk. It looks like we've got a merry prankster on our hands."

"Now I'll kill the son-of-a-bitch," Garth said quietly in his casual, matter-of-fact tone of voice that was always a danger signal.

"Shhh. That's talking. You leave him to me; he's mine. I'll take care of Sacra Silver. Your job is to take care of Mary."

"What are you going to do?"

"For openers, find out who the fuck he really is."

"Maybe that is his real name," Garth said very softly. "Mary told me she never heard him call himself anything else."

"Yeah, but he's a bullshit artist, and he's got things to hide. I've got a glass in my glove compartment with his prints on it, and I'm going to get out the old fingerprint kit as soon as I get off the line. He's close by you, maybe somewhere right in Cairn. This little prank took some careful timing to make it work. He not only knew when I left, and how long it would take me to get to New York, but also when you left the house. That was his window of opportunity, when he called Mary and Francisco to leave his message. He's watching your house-or was. The fact that he didn't just shoot us tells us something about him: he's an overgrown juvenile delinquent, probably fairly bright, who tries to get his way through bluff, intimidation, and manipulation. But he apparently doesn't have the guts to kill, not even from ambush."

"Maybe he's waiting for a better opportunity."

"I don't think so. It turns out our friend is a fucking practical jokester."

"I'll show him a practical joke."

"No, I'll show him a practical joke. You just keep your eyes open up there. And don't discuss any of this with Mary."

"Agreed. But what if he doesn't. . uh, show up anywhere?"

"What if he doesn't have a record?"

"Yeah."

"A dipshit like this has to have a record with somebody, somewhere, even if it's only for an arrest. If I can find out who he really is, then I'll be in a better position to take a run at him. Most of these people who are into the occult begin to believe their own bullshit, and that's a weakness. I'm going to show him a little sorcery. But you let me handle it. All right? Mary will get all wound up if she gets wind of this."

"I hear you."

"I'll be in touch. You keep your head low."

"Yeah. And before you tell me how low your head already is, let me tell you to keep it even lower."

"I'll talk to you, brother," I said, and hung up.

I went downstairs to the garage, took the plastic-wrapped tumbler out of the glove compartment of the Volkswagen Rabbit, brought it back up to my office. I retrieved an old fingerprint kit from the bottom of a filing cabinet and went to work dusting the glass, working carefully around the curved surface. There was, of course, no guarantee that the prints were going to be of any use at all, but, as I had told Garth, I had a strong feeling that Mr. Sacra Silver had been a bit too clever by half at least once in his life, had run afoul of the law, and that his prints would be on file somewhere.

I ended up with good prints of every finger on his right hand, including the thumb. I transferred the prints on the tumbler to plastic film, took the film to our photo lab in a back room.

There I set up our high-resolution Polaroid camera and shot the fingerprints with high-speed film against a soft gray background. When I had finished, I picked up the telephone and called a friend, a captain in the NYPD, who owed me a couple of favors.

"I don't know where you got this water, Mongo, but I don't see how it could have come out of the Hudson River."

I studied Frank Lemengello, the husky, bushy-haired chief chemist at the lab where I had brought the samples I had taken from Tom Blaine's basement. He was sitting on his desk, with the three green plastic jugs to his right. Beneath each jug was a computer printout of the chemical makeup of each sample.

"Actually, I didn't take the samples. They were collected by a man who's dead now, but he almost certainly did take them out of the Hudson. What's the problem with that?"

"The stuff in all three of these jugs is seawater."

"Seawater?"

"Yeah. You know, like from the ocean."

"The Hudson is an estuary, lower than sea level, all the way to Albany. It has tides, and the water in that part is saline."

"It may be saline, but it's not seawater." Frank paused, patted the jug closest to him. "This is seawater. Even at the mouth of New York Harbor you get a lot of mix with fresh water; you wouldn't have this concentration. But there's other stuff in there too."

"Like what?"

"Some heavy metals, and petrochemicals like ethyl benzene and toluene. It's all on the printout. Nasty stuff, by the way."

I thought about it, trying to figure out how a concentration of undiluted seawater laced with heavy metals and petrochemicals had found its way twenty-five miles up the Hudson River, and finally thought I had an answer. "A tanker," I said.

"Come again?"

"An oceangoing oil tanker flushing out its bilge, ballast, and holding tanks after making a delivery. That's how that stuff got in the river."

He gave me a nod, but it was tentative. "That could be the answer, I suppose; but to get these concentrations, you'd have to collect your samples right at the port virtually as a tank was being flushed, or you'd get more dilution with river water."

Which would explain why Tom Blaine had been diving at night, in the deep channel, beneath a tanker.

It didn't explain why Tom had died, but it hinted strongly at a grisly conclusion. If a tanker was in the process of flushing its tanks, it wasn't going anywhere at the moment. But in this case the main turbines had been turned on. It seemed inconceivable to me that a captain would choose to murder a man over some bilge water, but it was beginning to look as though that was exactly what had happened.

"Frank, you don't know anything about pollution laws, fines for dumping, that sort of thing, do you?"

The chemist shook his head. "Can't say that I do, Mongo."

"Well, then," I said, gathering up the jugs and printout sheets, "I guess I'll just have to go find somebody who does."