"Yeah."
"Just like that?"
"Yeah. We had a talk about how tacky and rude it was for him to show up after all these years and try to come between a husband and wife. He saw my point and left. He turns out to be quite a reasonable chap after all."
Mary wasn't buying it. "Sacra has been called a lot of things," she said, shaking her head, "but I've never heard anyone describe him as reasonable."
"Well, you know what a silver-tongued devil I can be."
"What on earth did you do to him, Mongo?"
"Well, I'll admit I had to act slightly out of character, forgoing my usual patience and diplomatic aplomb. The point is that he's gone. I don't believe he'll come back, but if he does, first call the police and then me. Your job is to keep remembering that you don't have to be afraid of him. Now, speaking of people to call, why don't you go call Garth? I assume the police and Coast Guard are going to want statements from both of us, but they can start with me. I'm going to paddle out there and check in. Why don't you go start taking care of business with your husband? The machine in his apartment is on, but I think he's home, and I suspect he'll pick up the phone if he hears your voice."
Mary nodded. She hugged me hard, kissed me on the forehead, then started up to the house. I pulled the canoe back down to the water's edge, hopped in, and started paddling out toward the bobbing island of flashing lights.
Chapter Five
Blaine's funeral was on Saturday. Afterward, Jessica Blaine invited the mourners back to her home for coffee and cake. The small, wood-frame house was close on the river in the south of Cairn; it had a warm, lived-in feeling, and was filled with chintz, various marine bric-a-brac and photographs, and dozens of fine pieces of sun-bleached driftwood-the best examples of nature's art culled from a lifetime of living in close harmony with the river outside the back door. Walking into the house, one had the feeling of entering a safe harbor.
According to the county medical examiner, enough pieces of the riverkeeper's body had been found to establish a fairly accurate cause and time of death. He had apparently died on Tuesday night, sometime between the hours of ten and midnight, while diving-presumably in the deep channel, since the tearing apart of his body had been caused by vortex and the knife-blade edges of spinning steel props on the engines of a very large tanker or tugboat. His boat had apparently slipped its anchor, for the trawler had been found on Thursday morning run aground in the salt marshes near Piermont. There had been no green plastic jugs found aboard; Garth and I had asked.
Nobody had yet come up with a good explanation of just why Tom Blaine would have been diving at night, considering the fact that visibility in the Hudson is limited to a few inches at high noon on a cloudless day, or why he should have been diving so far out from shore, in the deep channel, where all evidence of pollution would normally be rapidly dissipated in the huge volume of water that surges in that dredged canyon in the riverbed, a river within a river. However, an explanation for what seemed an example of extraordinarily bad judgment was not deemed necessary; whatever his reasons for being out there, he had been run over by a passing tanker, super-tug, or barge whose captain would have had no chance to see him, and he had died horribly when he had been sucked up into the vessel's enormous spinning propeller blades. His death had officially been ruled an accident.
Along with Garth and Mary, I'd been sitting on a worn sofa chatting with a small group of fishermen when I spotted Harry Tanner, whom I knew through Garth. The Cairn policeman was standing by himself over by a window that looked out on the river. I excused myself from the group, went over to him. He smiled warmly as I came up, extended his hand.
"How you doing, Mongo?"
"Okay, Harry, aside from the sadness of the occasion. Yourself?"
"Fair to middling. A shame about Tom, huh?"
"Yeah. You know he was after somebody, don't you?"
The policeman with the handlebar moustache and deep-set hazel eyes nodded. "Garth told me about what happened last Sunday night when Tom towed you guys home-the green jugs and all that."
"He said something about 'nailing the bastards.'"
"Garth told me about that too."
"And?"
"And what, Mongo?"
"I just wondered if the Cairn police were checking out the situation."
"I'm not sure there's any situation to check out, Mongo. But even if there were, it's not our jurisdiction. Cairn's only one of a number of towns along the river, and we don't know where Tom was when he was killed."
"Whose jurisdiction is it?"
"Coast Guard."
"Are they going to investigate? I mean, isn't it just a little bit suspicious that within forty-eight hours after he announces his intention to 'nail the bastards,' he winds up dead?"
Harry Tanner shrugged, smoothed the ends of his moustache. He looked slightly uncomfortable. "That's hard to say, Mongo. I'm not speaking ill of Tom when I tell you that he took that job of his pretty seriously. A lot of people called him a zealot. He was always talking about nailing some bastard or another, and you qualified as one of those bastards even if all you did was take a piss in his river."
"Maybe this time some bastard who was doing more than pissing in the river nailed him."
Harry thought about it, shook his head. "I'm no more pleased about Tom's death than you are, Mongo," he said. "He was my friend. But I just think you're looking for something that isn't there. You think somebody's going to kill a man because he's been caught dumping something in the river?"
"You're a cop, Harry, so I don't have to tell you about the petty things that will drive some people to murder. Also, in this case it might depend on what was being dumped. Besides, what would he be doing diving in the deep channel, and at night, no less? The water must be thirty or forty feet deep out there, moving all the time. What could he hope to find? Even if he did find something, how could he hope to prove where it came from? Except for keeping an eye on sail- and powerboats to make sure they don't dump their waste-holding tanks in the river, all the action in pollution monitoring is along the shoreline, where you can tell where the stuff is coming from. Right?"
"You're saying someone took Tom-or his corpse-out there and arranged for the body to be diced up by a tanker?"
"I'm saying it seems surpassingly strange that anyone, much less an experienced diver like Tom Blaine, would have been diving in the deep channel of the Hudson River at night. Law enforcement agencies are supposed to investigate when people die under surpassingly strange circumstances."
"I hear what you're saying, Mongo, and I understand where you're coming from, but you'd have had to know Tom to understand why the authorities aren't going to be as suspicious as you are. Like I said, he was a zealot, and he'd pretty much worn out the Coast Guard's patience. He'd sometimes work twenty hours at a stretch, and it wasn't at all unusual for him to be out on the river at night. He found you and Garth becalmed on your catamaran at night, didn't he? Maybe he saw something suspicious in the water out there and went in after it. He got careless, and he got sucked up into the props of a tanker that passed over his position. All of the people I've talked to, including the Coast Guard, think there's no question that Tom's death was accidental. I feel the same way. Aside from Tom's reason for being where he-was, everything seems pretty straightforward. I wouldn't worry about it, Mongo."
I wasn't worried about it; I was curious about it. So was Garth. Most of the other mourners had left, but Garth, Mary, and I remained behind. We were sitting around the riverkeeper's widow, who was slowly rocking back and forth in a worn rocking chair, eyes half closed, adrift in sorrow and memory. Garth leaned forward in his chair and took the woman's hand. "What do you think could have happened, Jessica?" he asked quietly.