Masquerade (39 page)

Impatiently Remy threaded her way through the throng, trying to catch up to Cole. She barely glanced at the promenading drag queen in a gold-sequined body stocking complete with feathery tail plumes or at the couple in matching satin jackets with DETROIT AUTOMOTIVE
written on the back, who nudged each other and gawked at her-him-it, unaware that it was only the first of many elaborate and outrageous costumes they would see as Carnival turned the Quarter's narrow streets into a bizarre bazaar indeed. At this point, the families who had earlier lined the parade route were nowhere to be seen.

A one-man band worked the corner of Chartres and Conti, blowing, strumming, and drumming an unusual rendition of "Mardi Gras Mambo." Remy spotted Cole as he shouldered his way around the crowd that had gathered to watch because it seemed the thing to do. She shouted his name, but he didn't hear her. Finally the cross-flow of strolling people on Royal slowed him down long enough for her to close the distance between them.

"Cole, wait!" she called, and she saw him look back, his eyes locating and then narrowing on her. For an instant she thought he was going to keep going, but he stopped, letting the crowd break around him. She pushed her way to his side, murmuring hasty excuses as she went.

"What do you want?" he said, and brushed off a hawker selling an assortment of gorilla, Dracula, and plain or sequined Lone Ranger-style masks.

"To talk." She felt his impatience, his rigid anger, and wondered how she was going to reach him.

"If you've come to repeat the family position, I've already had a bellyful of it."

"You don't understand—"

"I understand better than you do," he snapped, and he swung away to plow his way through the living stream to the other side of the intersection.

Remy was right on his heels, following in his wake. There was a slight thinning of people on the side street, enough to allow her to draw level with him as she quickened her steps to a running walk to keep pace with his long strides.

"Cole, my family's only thinking of what's best for the company."

"Like hell they are." He kept walking.

Now angry herself, she grabbed at his arm, feeling the hard bunching of muscles beneath the bulky knit of the sleeve. "Dammit, Cole, will you stand still and listen to me?"

He halted so abruptly that she shot past him and had to swing back to face him. "Listen to what?" he demanded. "More phony declarations that they're only thinking about what's best for the company? They're only worried about mud getting thrown on the Jardin name—and maybe leaving a stain that won't wash out."

"That's not true. Once the insurance company goes through with its threat to file both civil and criminal suits, the Crescent Line will spend a fortune in attorneys' fees fighting it. All-they want to do is spend the money now to settle it before it gets to that stage. Big companies do it all the time. It isn't an admission of guilt on anyone's part. It's simply good business."

There was a sudden and sharp narrowing of his eyes. "
'Once
the insurance company goes through with its threat'? Why didn't you say
'if?
You're assuming that the claim was fraudulently collected. Why?"

"I don't know why I phrased it like that," she replied uneasily, aware that it had been an unconscious slip on her part, made because she believed she knew something.

"Don't you? What proof could there be?"

"You mentioned something about plastic explosives."

"Which doesn't mean anything unless the insurance company can find someone who can swear he saw them on board the tanker. And I was talking about the crude, not that. How could the
Dragon
have been empty when it went down?" he challenged, watching her closely. "I saw her being loaded at the docks. Roughly ten hours after she left the dock, she was at the sea buoy—that's within the normal range of trip time during low water. And the river pilots all swear the water was lapping at her Plimsoll line, indicating that the tanker was running fully loaded. Her course didn't take her close to any offshore oil rigs or drilling platforms. And the Coast Guard found her wreckage floating less than two miles from her anticipated course. How could she have been empty when she went down? What happened to the crude oil? Do you know?"

"Of course I don't." But the facts he'd set forth bothered her too. Everything seemed to indicate that it was impossible for the tanker to have been empty. It was what made her doubt the insurance company's accusations.

"Then why is your family so anxious to get rid of me? Why are they setting me up to take the fall for this?"

She looked at him, seeing the bitterness and anger in his harsh features. He sounded paranoid. She remembered how much he despised her family and all it stood for.
Uptown.
How many times had he thrown that word at her? Why? Because he felt insecure? Inferior? Or was he asking her all these questions to make himself appear innocent?

"They only threatened to remove you from office when you refused to cooperate."

"Is that why you're here—because their threats failed and now you hope to persuade me to accept the family line?"

"I'm trying to persuade you to be reasonable," she argued.

"No." He shook his head, disputing her claim. "You don't want me to be reasonable. You want me to be the patsy."
 

"That's not true."

But he wasn't listening. "I was a fool to believe I meant anything to you," he muttered thickly. "And I have the feeling you and your family played me for the fool all along. But not anymore, Remy. Not anymore."

When he walked away, Remy didn't go after him—but she wanted to. That was the crazy part. She ran a hand over her face, feeling confused, bewildered, understanding only a part of what was going on—the part that dealt with facts, not emotions, reactions, or relationships.

Was she overreacting? Was she seeing shadows that weren't there? What were the facts? A tanker had sunk in a storm, a tanker owned by her family's company. Had it been deliberate? Had it been loaded with crude oil when it went down? Or had the crude been off-loaded? Where? How?

Blindly she turned onto Bourbon at the corner and headed uptown, buffeted by the human current flowing in the opposite direction. Laughter, rebel yells, carefree voices swirled around her, occasionally competing with the wail of a jazz clarinet, the driving beat of a rhythm-and-blues tune, or the deep-voiced chanting from a group of rollicking college kids patiently urging a likely-looking wench at a gallery rail above them to "show us your tits," an echo of the very phrase scrawled across her T-shirt, offered all in good fun, if in questionable taste—proof that a trace of the pagan rites of spring lingered in the Vieux Carré during the ninety-six-hour day of Mardi Gras.

Remy walked around a barker posted in front of the open door to a topless bar, mechanically reeling off his spiel to the passersby. Heads turned to peer inside, but nearly everyone kept walking. On impulse Remy walked into the next bar she came to. Typical of most bars during Carnival, it was quiet, uncrowded. All the action was in the street, and bars were merely a place for revelers to buy another go-cup.

She went directly to the pay phone in a back hall by the restrooms. With a quarter in hand, she dug in her purse, found the number, and dialed it. There were too many answers she didn't have, too many questions that led her in circles, too many things that didn't make sense—especially Cole's part in all this. If there was a scam and he was involved in it, then why hadn't he immediately jumped on her family's recommendation to work out some kind of settlement with the insurance company—
before
their investigator came up with incriminating evidence? Why was he playing hardball?

"This is Remy Jardin," she said quickly, before she could question the wisdom of what she was doing. "I need to talk to you. Can you meet me in . . . twenty minutes at La Louisiane, in the lounge?"

The reply was affirmative.

In the quiet, softly lit lounge, Remy sipped at her whiskey-laced coffee and glanced over the rim of the cup at the burly man with the salt-and-pepper beard seated across from her, watching as he peeled off a ten-dollar bill and gave it to the bartender. When the bartender walked away, the insurance investigator lifted his Scotch and water in a toasting gesture.

"To surprise phone calls?" he suggested. Remy didn't respond. He noted her silence with another keen glance, then took a quick sip of his drink, barely moistening his lips. "You said you had some information for me."

"No. I said I wanted to talk to you." She set her cup down on the small cocktail table, keeping her voice calm and controlled. "I've come to the conclusion that the insurance company's charges of fraud are totally false."

"Is that right?"

"I think you know it too, Mr. Hanks. You must have learned that it takes roughly twenty-four hours to unload a tanker of the
Dragon's
capacity. Given the time it sailed from the Claymore dock, the distance it traveled, and the location where it went down, it was physically impossible for the shipment of crude to be unloaded anywhere en route. And you have to agree that there isn't any percentage in deliberately sinking a fully loaded ship simply to collect the insurance. Hence there's no scam, and no fraud. You're on a wild-goose chase."

"Am I?" He regarded her thoughtfully. "I'm afraid I don't see it that way."

"What other way is there to see it?" she retorted. "You can't change the facts or the laws of physics. That crude couldn't have been off-loaded into pipelines or onto barges, as you suggested. There wasn't time."

"I admit that's bothered me some."

Remy laughed at that, sounding just a little brittle with nerves. "It should have bothered you more than 'some,' Mr. Hanks."

He looked at her, his mustache and beard moving near the corners of his mouth, obviously with a smile that she couldn't see for all the hairy growth. "You claim I'm on a wild-goose chase, Miss Jardin, but I think you're on a fishing expedition."

She hesitated a split second, then admitted, "I am. I honestly can't believe those charges are anything but false. Yet—you seem to believe otherwise. How can you, given the facts?"

"Have you ever seen a magician make an elephant disappear?"

Remy leaned back in her chair, impatient and a little irritated. "Please don't try to convince me it was all done with mirrors."

"Magic—it's all an illusion. The only time the hand is quicker than the eye is when you're watching the wrong hand. It's called misdirection. Football coaches design entire plays around that concept."

"I'm not in the mood for riddles." Especially when she was living one. "Say what you mean."

"I'm saying, what if it was all an elaborate hoax? What if that tanker never sank at all? What if the debris the Coast Guard found was nothing but a smoke screen? What if the
Crescent Dragon
is in some faraway port with a different name painted on her sides and fake registry?"

"But the crew abandoned ship," she protested in a stunned voice.

"Did
they abandon it? Or was that another smoke screen so a different crew could take their place and sail off in the tanker?" he countered. "While everyone's looking in one place, the tanker is really somewhere else."

Remy shook her head, bemused and skeptical. "It's a very interesting theory, but I think you're reaching. If that's all you have to go on—"

"It isn't," he said, and he reached inside his tweed jacket.

"Yes, I've heard about the receipt for plastic explosives," she said as he pulled a square of paper from his breast pocket. Then she noticed there was more than one item in his hand. "But a receipt doesn't prove the explosives were ever taken aboard the tanker."

"Do you recognize this man?" He placed a black-and-white photo on the cocktail table, facing her.

Remy drew the picture closer and studied the man with his wide, staring eyes and thick, bushy brows. He had dark, slick hair, a swarthy complexion, and a sweeping handlebar mustache waxed to points at the ends.

She shook her head, answering honestly, "I don't remember seeing him before."

"What about this one?" He laid a second photo down beside the first.

The man in the second picture laughed out at her, his strong white teeth gleaming in the center of a dark, closely trimmed full beard. His hair was dark too, a little on the long side, and definitely curly. Remy stared at his thick, full eyebrows, then looked again at the man in the first picture.

"I don't know him, either, though I can see a similarity between the two—the eyebrows, the forehead, the swarthy complexion. Are they related?"

"This"—he tapped the first picture—"is Keith Cummins, the first mate aboard the
Dragon.
And this is Kim Charles," he said, indicating the second photo. "A Eurasian and known demolitions expert with one conviction for arson. A handwriting expert has examined the signatures of both Keith Cummins and Kim Charles. He insists they were written by the same hand."

"I see," she murmured.

"We have our link between the explosives and the tanker, Miss Jardin," he said, sweeping up the photos and tucking them back into his breast pocket.

"And where is this . . . Mr. Charles?" "That's a curious thing about the
Dragon's
crew. After they were rescued and their statements were taken, they all—every last one of them— disappeared, vanished, poof . . . like magic," he added deliberately. "Another curious thing—the last time Kim Charles, alias Cummins, was seen was approximately a week ago ... in Marseilles, France. And who do you suppose was in Marseilles that same day?"

"Who?" Remy asked, even though she already knew the answer.

"Buchanan. He claims he was there on company business. The strange thing is that he arrived the night before, but didn't come into the branch office until late in the afternoon. And like our explosives man, he was seen on the waterfront in the morning. What do you suppose he was doing there? Meeting his cohort in crime, maybe?"

 

Why
had
Cole gone to Marseilles? The question was a hammer that kept pounding at Remy as she walked along Iberville, moving slowly but steadily away from the boisterous throngs that packed Bourbon and Royal streets. Until the bearded Mr. Hanks had tossed out those questions, she hadn't realized how desperately she had wanted to believe that Cole wasn't mixed up in this insurance fraud. She'd secretly been hoping that he'd say something different—something that wouldn't implicate Cole.