Masquerade (42 page)

"Or maybe you were just getting close to the truth with your questions."

"But I haven't talked to that many people. I met with one of the river pilots who guided the
Dragon,
and I talked to Charlie—Charlie. I was supposed to call him last night," she remembered, reaching for the phone.

"Who's Charlie?" Nattie frowned.

"Charlie Aikens. He works on the dock where the tanker was loaded. He was going to find out who was working the night the shipment of crude was loaded—or at least try to." Unfortunately, his number was in her purse, which the hospital had locked away somewhere for safekeeping when she was admitted. She had to get his number through Information.

On the fourth ring, a woman answered; Remy hadn't expected that. Somehow she'd gotten the impression from Charlie that he lived alone. Of course, that didn't mean he couldn't have company.

"Is Charlie there?"

"No, he isn't."

She caught the stiff, almost defensive tone in the woman's voice. "I'm Remy Cooper, and Charlie was getting me some information on shipping for a friend of mine's book. Do you know when he'll be back?"

"He won't. . . not ever." There was the smallest break in the woman's voice. "Charlie's dead."

Remy froze, every muscle contracted in shock and alarm. "When? How?" They were the only words she could get out.

"Yesterday. They told me there was a section of the dock that had been damaged a while back, and he was checking to see if it'd gotten worse. They think he got dizzy or slipped. He fell in the river."

"Are you sure? Did anyone see it happen?" She felt sick, sick with fear and guilt. She didn't even look at Nattie when she took the coffee cup from her hand and set it on the end table.

"They heard him cry out when he fell, but there was nothing they could do. The current swept him away." The woman kept talking, as if she needed to say all these things to believe them herself, her voice flat and thin with grief. "Charlie's my brother, the only family I had left. They recovered his body this morning. The funeral home said I should bring them a suit to bury him in. I thought he had one. Why does Charlie have to be buried in a suit?" she protested in a sudden burst of anguish. "He hated them—called 'em 'monkey suits.' Momma always used to make him wear one to go to church, and he'd argue with her. 'God don't care if I'm wearing a suit,' he'd say. Do you think I have to get a suit for him?"

"No. No, I don't think so," Remy murmured. "I'm . . . I'm sorry." Numb, she hung up the phone and turned to Nattie. "That was Charlie's sister. She says he's dead. If that's true—" She stopped and fought off the sudden surge of panic. "Was there anything in the paper about a drowning yesterday?"

"I think there was something, but I didn't read it."

They both got down on the floor beside the chair and went through the newspaper, section by section, page by page. Remy found the paragraph-long write-up on a back page of the B section. It gave the same account Charlie's sister had, with the added detail that it had happened in the morning, and said the search was continuing for his body. Remy sat back on her heels and stared at the article.

"I know exactly what you're thinking," Nattie announced.

"What if it wasn't an accident?" Remy finally said it out loud. "What if he didn't fall into the river? What if he was pushed? He was asking questions for me, Nattie." Still holding the folded page with the article, she got to her feet and started to pace, automatically hugging an arm to her bandaged ribs. "I already know that the man who grabbed me that night on the dock was the same man who held me while his buddy hit me. I recognized his voice. He could have found out that Charlie was asking questions—and made sure I didn't find out his name." As another thought occurred to her, Remy stopped and swung back to face Nattie. "They had to know I'd find out about Charlie. Maybe they even wanted me to. Maybe they thought if the beating didn't scare me into shutting up, this would."

"It scares the hell out of me," Nattie said. "Just what could you have seen that night?"

"I don't know." Remy shook her head in frustration. "When I talked to Howard Hanks, the insurance investigator, yesterday afternoon, he had this theory that the tanker had never gone down at all—that it was an elaborate hoax to collect the insurance money. He thinks the
Dragon
is sailing around out there somewhere under another name. The debris the Coast Guard found, the crew in life-boats—that was simply to make it look like the tanker had sunk in the storm. Instead, another crew came on board and sailed off in it."

Nattie's mouth gaped open in shock as she sagged back against the chair. "The man's crazy."

"I thought it was farfetched, too."

"It's more than farfetched; it's downright stupid," she declared in disgust, and clambered to her feet. "Do you realize how many people it would take to pull off a stunt like that? I don't know how many are in a crew, but let's say there's fifteen. With two crews, that makes thirty people. And how did that second crew get on board the tanker? A helicopter wouldn't have flown them out there—not in a storm. Which means they'd have to have gone by boat, and now you got more people involved. What happens if one of the thirty-five or forty people decides he doesn't like the split he got? Do you realize how many chances you've got of being blackmailed? And believe me, silence is golden, especially if you're the one paying somebody to keep his mouth shut. No." She shook her head. "If you're going to commit a crime, the fewer people who know about it, the better."

"You're right," Remy murmured, faintly stunned by the logic of it.

"Of course I am." Nattie sat back down in the armchair and laid both arms on its curved armrests. "If there were any switches pulled, it had to be at the very beginning. That's what you must have seen. Exactly how much do you remember?"

"Almost nothing," she admitted in frustration. "I saw the tanker moored to the dock, and then a man grabbed me. That's it. That's all I've been able to remember."

"Didn't you say it was foggy that night?"

“Yes—”

Nattie held up her hand. "If you've overlooked that detail, what others have you omitted? Think about it, picture it in your mind, and describe every thing you can recollect."

She started to say it was a waste of time, but— what if it wasn't? "All right." She closed her eyes. "It was dark and very foggy. The
Dragon
was tied up to the dock. I remember seeing the mooring lines and the gangway. There were two men at the rail—"

"What'd they look like?"

"It was too dark. All I could see was their silhouettes. One of them had a cigarette—" She opened her eyes with a snap. "He was smoking. There're No Smoking signs all over the place."

"I don't imagine smoking is one of the smartest things to do when you're loading crude oil on a tanker," Nattie remarked drolly.

"Then why was he smoking?"

"Maybe the tanker was already loaded."

"But it would still be too dangerous to smoke on deck."

"We'll get back to that later. Tell me what else you can remember."

Remy tried, closing her eyes again, but all she could picture was the black shape of the tanker in the mist and the two men at the rail. "Nothing." She shook her head impatiently. "It was too dark."

"Dark?" Nattie frowned. "The ship was dark? Weren't there floodlights? Ships loading at night are usually lit up like Christmas trees."

"Not this ship," Remy stated. "It was mostly dark, except for a few lights on the bridge deck." She breathed in sharply, suddenly remembering more, and instantly grabbed at her ribs as pain shot from them, nearly doubling her over.

Nattie was immediately at her side, curving a supporting arm around her shoulders. "When are you gonna learn you can't be doing things like that? You better sit down." She helped her to the sofa.

Remy clutched at Nattie's hand, drawing her onto the hard sofa cushion beside her. "I remember Cole was standing on the bridge deck with Carl Maitland and a man with a handlebar mustache—the man Howard Hanks said was a demolitions expert." She stared at nothing, the memory of that night coming back in a jumbled rush. "I'm not sure what happened next—after I saw Cole. I think maybe ... I waved to him. That man grabbed me and said something like . . . 'Not so fast, little gal.' Then . . . something about snooping around. The walkie-talkie." She curled her fingers around Nattie's hand. "He had a walkie-talkie hooked to his belt. A voice came over it—a valve had broken, it said, and there was water all over the deck. Water, Nattie. That's it, isn't it?" Turning, she searched the woman's face—not with excitement or relief at remembering, but with a cold feeling. "That's the switch. The
Crescent Dragon
had no crude on board when it went down because its tanks had been filled with water." She laughed briefly, softly, in harsh remembrance. "And Maitland explained it away by convincing me they were loading fresh water for bathing and drinking. I believed him."

"You probably did that night," Nattie said. "More than likely you didn't recognize the significance of it until later—when the insurance company started making all that noise."

But it was the bitterness of that memory that she was tasting—the bitterness and the ache it caused, not its significance. "Cole was there. He was with Maitland, watching the tanks being filled with water. He was part of it."

No matter how many times she'd considered the possibility of his guilt, she'd resisted believing it. Now she couldn't any longer. The memory of Cole on the bridge, his faced bathed in full light, with Maitland at his side, was too vivid, too clear.

"I know it hurts." Nattie patted her hand in comfort. "Every woman wants to believe her man is good. They seldom are, but that never makes it any easier to accept."

"No." Had Cole been the man in Nice? He'd claimed he was in New Orleans at the time. But she only had his word on that. She'd never checked. She could imagine how upset she must have been when she realized what he'd done— how hurt, how angry, how disillusioned. She would have argued with him, lashed out with the hurt and confusion of betrayal—a betrayal of both her trust and her family's. But the men who'd beaten her up—she couldn't believe he'd sent them. "Maitland. He saw me at the docks the other day. He saw me with Charlie. He sent those men to give me this warning." She touched the bruises on her face, oddly relieved to be able to shift the blame for them away from Cole.

"It wouldn't surprise me a bit if he had," Nattie responded. "Whenever he came to the house for one of your momma's dinner parties, that Maitland always reminded me of a barracuda, lurking in some dark pool, looking all small and innocent until you saw his teeth."

"Wait a minute. This doesn't make sense." Remy painfully pushed herself off the sofa again. "It's obvious why Maitland did it. He could sell the same oil twice. But what would Cole get out of it? The Crescent Line paid for that crude in advance. I've seen a copy of the cashier's check."

"You certainly don't have a criminal mind, Remy," Nattie said with a shake of her gray head. "He got money from Maitland. They probably worked out some percentage deal to share in the proceeds of that second sale. More than likely he got his money right out of that cashier's check."

"More than likely," she agreed, then sighed tiredly. "But how do we go about proving that?"

"An audit of Maitland's books would probably turn up some sizable checks written to companies nobody's heard of. The money might even have passed through a couple of those dummy companies before it got to Cole's hands." Nattie paused, then asked gently, "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know." Remy walked over to a window and lifted the rayon sheer to look out at the quiet Sunday morning. "I'm not sure. First I want to find out whether Charlie's death was an accident. Tomorrow I can check with the coroner's office and see what they can tell me." A little black girl skipped along the banquette in front of Nattie's house. She was wearing a pink ruffled dress and a dainty hat that was perched atop her braided hair and tied to her chin with ribbons. Remy wanted to go outside, take her hand, skip down the street with her—and feel again that innocent and carefree. Sighing, she turned from the window and met Nattie's gaze. "I have to know if this has gone beyond fraud, to murder."

 

 

 

 

27

 

 

Silence echoed through the house, a silence that said no one was home. Remy blinked sleepily and glanced around the living room, then crossed to the doorway into the kitchen, Nattie's pink scuffs slapping at her heels with each step. More silence waited for her in there, as the cat clock on the wall, with its moving eyes and swishing tail, chided her for sleeping late. Ignoring the hands pointing to nine o'clock, Remy headed toward the coffee maker on the counter, fighting the grogginess that came from too little sleep too late. A note was propped against the glass carafe:

 

Remy,

Since you had to leave your purse at the hospital, I thought you might need some walking-around money.

Gone to work,

Nattie

 

Paper-clipped to the back of it was a twenty-dollar bill. Remy slipped the bill into the slash pocket of the velour robe, also loaned to her by Nattie—like the slippers on her feet, the cotton night-gown she wore, and the new pancake makeup and mascara waiting in the bedroom to cover up her bruises. She smiled to herself as she poured a much-needed cup of coffee, but the smile faded when she saw the newspaper on the counter, folded open on the obituary notices. The very first one was for "Aikens, Charles Leroy, age 57."

She sighed, not really needing to be reminded of the cause for this flat feeling she had. Absently she combed her tousled length of hair away from the side of her face and reached for the paper, only to be distracted by the sound of a car pulling into the drive. Frowning, Remy lifted her head. Nattie wouldn't be coming home at this hour. She must have been mistaken—the car must have actually pulled into a neighbor's driveway instead.