Masquerade (36 page)

Was this the dock where the
Crescent Dragon
had taken on its last load of crude? Was this where she'd seen the tanker? She couldn't remember, and she'd found nothing in the company files that identified the location of the vessel's last berth— or, at least, if the information was there, she hadn't recognized it as such. And heaven knew, there were literally dozens of petroleum docks scattered along the Mississippi River, stretching all the way to Baton Rouge. Most of them, like this cluster, were located upriver or downriver from the city itself, away from thickly populated areas—or so the Port Authority had told her when she'd called them from a phone booth.

Unfortunately, that was about the only useful information she had been able to obtain from them. The man she'd spoken with had claimed he didn't know how to go about finding out where a specific vessel had been berthed more than five months before. He wasn't even sure the commission kept a record of such things, especially when there was no requirement for a vessel to notify them when it left port. He'd told her that the dock agent probably kept track of that type of information.

Which left her back at square one—which dock, and which dock agent?
 

With no crew available to question, the dock was her only starting point. If she'd been there when the
Dragon
was loaded, as she believed, she might have been seen by one of the dockworkers. If she could locate the men on duty that night, talk to them, maybe one of them could tell her what had happened, who'd been there, and what she might have seen.

It sounded possible . . . even logical. Remy smiled to herself, fully aware that it wasn't logic that had selected this particular petroleum dock as the place to begin asking her questions—it was simply the second one she'd come across. The entrance to the first had been locked up tight, with no one on duty at the gate, and she'd been forced to drive on. She tried not to think about how many more like that she might encounter, and concentrated instead on this one.

A ramp, wide enough to allow the passage of a motorized vehicle, led out to the middle quay. Ignoring the sign that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, Remy walked onto the ramp and continued past the NO TRESPASSING and NO SMOKING signs posted at frequent intervals along the entire length of it.

The reek of petroleum fumes grew stronger as she neared the tanker. Stout mooring lines ran from the vessel to the bollards on the concrete dock, securing the ship to its berth, and a gangway stretched from the dock to the ship's weather deck. There was no sign of activity on the tanker itself, except for the three chicks stands that connected the dockside pipelines to the ship's holding tanks.

Catching sight of two men on the dock, Remy angled toward them. For some reason she'd expected it to be busier than this, with more of the bustle she'd observed on the cargo wharves.

"Hey, lady!" a voice barked, directly behind her.

Remy stiffened, suddenly and unexpectedly feeling the cool breath of the river fog on her cheeks, smelling the dampness of the mist, and seeing darkness all around her—the darkness of night, that night. In that instant she knew she'd been surprised by someone that night—just like this.

She whirled around and stared at the bejowled bulldog of a man facing her. Not by him—she was oddly certain of that. He wore a plaid-lined jacket in a dark navy twill and a pair of pants in the same fabric that rode precariously low on his hips, the waistband dipping under his big beer-belly.

"What're you doing out here? Didn't you see the signs?" He jerked his thumb in the direction of the NO TRESPASSING placard behind him. "No one's allowed on this dock without authorization."

"I know. I was looking for someone who could give me permission. Can you?" She gave him her most winsome smile, but he didn't bat an eye.

"You'd have to see the director of operations, Tom Hayes, and he ain't here today."

"What about you? What do you do?"

"I'm in charge of loading and operations."
 

"Then maybe you can answer a few questions for me—"

"Look, lady. We don't give tours and we don't allow visitors. You'll have to leave now."

"At least you can tell me whether you're loading or unloading this ship," Remy persisted.

"Loading it," he said, and he pursed his lips and teeth to emit a loud, ear-splitting whistle. He followed it with a shout and motioning swing of his arm. "Charlie! Come over here!"

Both men on the dock turned at the sound of the shrill whistle, but it was the shorter of the two who broke away to answer the summons. As he trotted over, the jaunty tilt of his billed cap, the natural spring to his step, and the litheness of his build all gave a deceptive impression of youth. When he stopped in front of them, Remy noticed the deep lines that age and the elements had carved into his face, and she realized he was a great deal closer to sixty than to thirty.

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?"