Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  So we went back to the Mariner’s Inn to kill time until the superintendent saw fit to show up at his office.

  We dropped by Abel Delgado’s room and knocked on the door. I was hoping the events of the previous evening might have humbled him, at least to the point that we could have a civil, sober conversation and I could convince him that his work for Mickey Ryser was done. I was thinking maybe I’d drop a little cash on him, just to help soothe any wounds and get him on his way back to Miami. He didn’t really deserve any more money, but the posters he’d put up had ultimately led us to Dailey’s boatyard and that was worth something.

  But Delgado didn’t answer the door. I went to the office and had the receptionist call his room, but he didn’t answer that either. I left a message asking Delgado to get in touch.

  We went to my room and sat around watching ESPN Sport Center. Fewer things are more pathetic than grown men sitting around watching taped highlights of games they don’t really care about. But it was either that or three channels of gospel music, the Home Shopping Network, or Nickelodeon. We were on the third loop of the Ducks besting the Coyotes one–zip in thrilling NHL action when my cell phone rang.

  “Zack-o!” Mickey Ryser greeted me. “She just called. I spoke with her. She’s on her way here.”

  “Jen called?”

  “Just got off the phone with her,” Mickey said. “She’s flying into George Town this afternoon. I’m sending someone to pick her up.”

  “Good news,” I said.

  “Damn straight it is.”

  “She mention anything about Chasin’ Molly?”

  “Just to say that everything’s alright. Nothing to worry about. Music to my ears,” Mickey said. “So you know what that means, Zack-o.”

  “What?”

  “You need to get off that sorry ass of yours and get down here with my boat.”

  29

  There were good reasons for me to stick around Marsh Harbour.

  I had unfinished business with the Daileys. I wanted to settle all accounts with Abel Delgado. And I wanted to make sure he was on his way home.

  But there were more prevailing reasons to get to Lady Cut Cay with Mickey Ryser’s boat.

  The fact that Jen Ryser had finally surfaced made finding Chasin’ Molly somewhat of a moot proposition. At least until she could shed further light on the subject.

  Mickey had sounded good on the phone. Full of vigor, anxious to see his daughter. A new lease on life, such as it was.

  The sooner I got his boat to him the better. And then I could go home.

  An easy decision.

  I put some money in an envelope along with a note to Delgado that read, “This will get you back to Miami. Thanks for your help.”

  I knocked on Delgado’s door again, but still no answer. So I left the envelope with the receptionist at the Mariner’s Inn and asked her to make sure Delgado got it.

  Then we checked out. We turned in our rental cars at the airport. And we hopped aboard Charlie’s plane for Nassau.

  On the thirty-minute flight south, I kept thinking about what Will Moody had said the night before. Maybe I had blown everything out of proportion.

  So what if Jen Ryser and her friends weren’t sticking to any particular schedule? So what if they hadn’t communicated regularly with those who might want to hear from them? They were adults. They were capable of making their way in the world without someone like me coming along to check on them. And even if they weren’t capable of it, they were entitled to screw up all on their own.

  Maybe I had imagined something bad where no bad existed. Maybe, as much as I was reluctant to admit it, I’d been wearing old-fogey goggles. Maybe I’d been viewing the innocent meanderings of six young people on a boat with the prudish disingenuousness of someone who was just a little envious—of their youth and everything that went with it. Untethered lives. Casual hookups with the opposite sex. Living in the moment.

  Ah, for the days, Chasteen.

  There is the tendency of one generation to run wild, break rules, enjoy itself, and then condemn those who come along next to give those indulgences a new spin. Especially when the youngsters seem to be having too damn much fun.

  “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly agin’…”

  Dylan sang the words before I was born, but they still resonated when I was growing up. I embraced them then, honored them as a personal anthem. It seemed hypocritical to discard and dishonor them now.

  I tried to envision Shula, cutting her path in the world. She would settle into her own generational tribe, with its own music, mores, and politics; its own hairstyles, handshakes, and slang. All of it a natural product of time, place, and circumstance.

  Try as we might and even if we wanted to, Barbara and I would be unable to shape our daughter in our likenesses. All we could do was guide her and love her endlessly. Teach her the difference between right and wrong. To be comfortable in her skin. To think for herself. And then let her fly.

  Twenty or so years down the road, she would set out on an adventure of her own. At least, I hoped she would.

  And I’d be cool with it.

  I wouldn’t pass judgment. I wouldn’t cling. I wouldn’t meddle. I wouldn’t worry.

  The hell I wouldn’t.

  30

  Charlie delivered us straight to Dilly’s Marina, east of Paradise Island and not far from downtown Nassau. He put the seaplane down just outside the channel and motored us to the dock. The plan called for Boggy and me to take Mickey’s boat to Lady Cut Cay. Charlie would fly us back to Miami.

  “When do you think you’ll get to Mickey’s place?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m guessing if we make it out of here by dark, then we should arrive well before noon tomorrow. You flying straight there?”

  “Seeing as how I’ve got some lead time, I might take a little detour.”

  “Detour?”

  “Yeah, there’s this gal I know over on Andros. And I was thinking maybe…”

  “Don’t get tangled up too long.”

  “Kinda depends on if her husband’s around.”

  “And if he is?”

  “Then I’ll only be tangled up a little while.”

  As promised, the marina had Mickey’s boat ready to go. More accurately, Mickey’s boat was a motor yacht. And nothing could have adequately prepared me for the sight of it.

  Radiance it was called and the name fit. Sixty-eight feet of gleaming craftsmanship. Double-planked mahogany hull painted bright white with a varnished teak trim. Teak handrails with stanchions of bronze and stainless steel. The pilot house perched prettily atop the main deck with a V-grooved overhead of white oak and a four-seater bench behind the wheel. The aft deck held another expansive sitting area—a fine place for cocktails—its settees and chairs protected from the elements by canvas covers in a shade of beige that complemented the paint on the trim.

  It was a Trumpy, a lineage of yachts founded by John Trumpy, Sr., a German immigrant and naval architect who arrived in America in the early 1900s and designed yachts for all the big-deal tycoons of that era. The DuPonts, the Guggenheims, the Dodges, and the Chryslers, they all owned Trumpys, along with Howard Hughes. In 1925, Trumpy designed a 104-foot yacht called the The Sequoia for a Philadelphia businessman. Later bought by the federal government to intercept Prohibition smugglers, it eventually became the official presidential yacht and served every U.S. head of state from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford. Then Jimmy Carter came along and ordered it sold at auction in 1977 in a symbolic cost-cutting gesture. He would have been better off getting rid of the vice presidency instead.

  Only some 450 Trumpys were ever built. Radiance, circa 1971, was one of the last, launched shortly before Trumpy’s son, John Trumpy, Jr., closed the family’s iconic Annapolis shipyard. From the days of Cleopatra’s barge, yachts have always been floating egos, only nowadays they displace a whole lot more water than in year
s past. Mega-yachts they’re called. The largest ones, owned by assorted Middle Eastern sheikhs and sundry sultans of software, stretch more than five hundred feet, wretched excesses in fiberglass with all the soul of silicon semiconductors.

  Radiance packed more heart into her sixty-eight feet than any mega-yacht six times its length. From the moment I stepped aboard her I was smitten.

  The main salon was Jay Gatsby meets Rudyard Kipling with vintage rattan chairs and wicker settees and a coffee table that was once a Balinese temple door. A massive oil painting of a salt marsh—an Elizabeth Barr original—disappeared into a bulkhead at the press of a button to reveal a twenty-eight-inch plasma television. The galley ran almost the full beam of the boat with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer tucked under teak countertops and a full-size four-burner stove. A master stateroom with a queen-size bed and two guest staterooms, all with en suite heads. Crew quarters in the bow. The pilot house was elegant in its own fashion without being too damn fussy. You could ride out a big blow in it and rely on all the latest electronics, from the Standard Horizon depth sounder to the Simrad Radar/Chartplotter/GPS.

  The marina’s boatyard manager spent a couple of hours giving Boggy and me an exhaustive tour of Radiance and sharing her various quirks—how she ran best at a notch or two back from full throttle and how she favored port slightly in following seas. While we were waiting for the dockhands to finish gassing her up—two diesel tanks, each holding 440 gallons, glad it was on Mickey’s tab—I made some phone calls from the pilot house.

  Barbara didn’t pick up, but I left her a gushy message and finished it off with kisses for Shula.

  Helen Miller answered on the second ring. I told her she could pull the plug on her end of things since Jen Ryser had finally surfaced.

  “You want to hear what I found out anyway?”

  “You going to charge me for it?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  “Then lay it on me.”

  Helen Miller had followed up on my suggestion to check further into the backgrounds of Will Moody and Pete Crumrine. Both came from well-to-do-families. Moody’s father was partner in an Atlanta pediatric practice. Crumrine’s mom ran an advertising company in Nashville and his dad was a dentist there. Neither family had heard from their sons. And both were concerned about it.

  “Cute-looking guys, too. I found them on Facebook. Got a couple of photos. Blond surfer dudes. If I was only a few years younger…”

  “You said blond? You sure?”

  “Yeah, I printed out their photos for my file. Got ’em sitting right here in front of me. Pete Crumrine is curly blond, almost a mini ’fro. Will Moody, he’s got this kind of Tom Petty look. Hair’s almost white, long and straight. He’s real skinny.”

  Not the Will Moody I met.

  “Zack, are you there?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Right here.”

  “So anyway, I’ll call the parents back and let them know you crossed paths with Will Moody and that he said everything was fine. They’ll be relieved to hear it,” Miller said. “As for Justin Hatchitt and Torrey Kealing…are you sure you wrote down the right passport numbers?”

  “I’m sure. Why?”

  “I called in a favor with someone I know at the passport office in Charleston. Nothing clicks.”

  “What do you mean nothing clicks?”

  “I mean the numbers you gave me don’t correspond to any sequence of numbers in the system.”

  “So you’re telling me the passports are fake?”

  “Appears that way.”

  “But how do you fake a U.S. passport these days? I thought that was next to impossible, since 9/11 anyway.”

  “Same thing I asked my contact at the passport office. She said there can be a giant difference between the way a passport looks and the way it acts.”

  “The way it acts?”

  “Uh-huh. Meaning, it’s not all that hard for someone with even basic forgery skills to make a fake passport that looks like the real deal. It might work for some identification purposes, like cashing a check or using a credit card at a retail shop or something, but it will come up short when it gets plugged into the system.”

  “That’s when it has to act like a passport, with the computers and everything?”

  “Right,” Miller said. “And the system is fairly foolproof. The new passports, since 2004 anyway, all use biometrics. They’re encrypted and encoded with all kinds of identifiers. There’s still a significant gap, working the new ones into the system as the old ones expire, but even with the old ones there’s a long data trail, crosscheck upon crosscheck, and immigration agents are highly adept at spotting any fake passports used by people trying to get into the U.S. The airlines, too, they’re plugged into the system. If this Justin Hatchitt and Torrey Kealing had fake passports and they used them to try and buy a plane ticket out of the country it would have set off all kinds of bells and whistles.”

  “But since they left by boat…”

  “Since they left the country by private boat, they didn’t have to go through any TSA boarding procedures. They had to show their passports when they entered the Bahamas, but the Bahamas, like most Caribbe an countries, doesn’t have a customs and immigration computer system that links directly to U.S. Homeland Security.”

  I flashed on Mr. Bethel at Walker’s Cay, his entries going into a ledger book, not the computer. A forged passport, it would be easy enough to get it by him.

  “Of course,” Miller said, “it would catch up with them when they tried to reenter the U.S.”

  “If they tried to reenter the U.S.”

  “Exactly. This Justin Hatchitt and Torrey Kealing, they could be running away from who knows what, with no intention of ever coming home.”

  31

  It was just shy of sunset and we were pulling away from East End Point, the Atlantis Resort’s towering oddness at our back, when my cell phone rang. It was Lynfield Pederson.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  I told him I was about one mile off New Providence Island, heading south.

  “What are you doing there?”

  I told him Jen Ryser had finally shown up and that I was taking her father’s yacht to Lady Cut Cay.

  “You need to turn around, Zack. Get back to Nassau. I’ll fly over from Harbour Island and meet you. Then I’ll escort you to Marsh Harbour. It will be better that way.”

  “Escort me? What are you talking about?”

  “Jesus Christ, Zack. You got any idea what’s going down?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Got a dead guy at the Mariner’s Inn. Name of Delgado. Know him?”

  “Delgado’s dead?”

  “Police up that way, they think you might have had something to do with it.”

  “Delgado and me, we had a little run-in at the hotel bar last night, but that’s all there was to it.”

  “Yeah, the police know about that. Got the story from the bartender and about a dozen other witnesses. They all say you beat him up pretty good.”

  “Wasn’t much of a fight. I spent most of it just stepping out of his way.”

  “They say you knocked him out.”

  “It was the alcohol more than anything I did. Delgado was in the bag when I got there. He’d been drinking all day.”

  “But you and him, you got into some kind of argument and you had it out, right?”

  “Wasn’t much arguing to it. He said a few words. I said a few words. And he came at me. After it was over I helped carry Delgado back to his room and put him in his bed. He was sleeping like a baby when I left.”

  “That’s the thing, Zack. Some of those witnesses, they saw you carrying Delgado into his room. I spoke to the superintendent up there…”

  “I tried to speak to him, too.”

  “Oh yeah? What about?”

  “Tell me about Delgado first.”

  “Superintendent and me, we aren’t real close. He’s kind of a prick…”

  “Hmmm,” I said.
/>
  “But he knows you and me got a history. He was superintendent in Freeport a few years back when you got mixed up in that thing with Victor Ortiz and those Panamanian counterfeiters.”

  “That thing put me in prison for almost two years.”

  “Yeah, and the superintendent didn’t like it how you got yourself cleared of all the charges. Blew back on him. Made him look bad. Else he thinks he could be the commissioner by now, sitting in a fancy Nassau office calling all the shots, instead of getting busted down to Marsh Harbour,” Pederson said. “So he was real anxious to reach out and let me know he’s looking at a murder here.”

  “Murder?”

  “He thinks someone smothered Delgado. Still waiting on the coroner’s report, but the superintendent saw what he saw. Bruising around the mouth and nose. Tongue all bit up and swollen. Bloodshot eyes…”

  “He was drunk, Lynfield. Of course he had bloodshot eyes. I woke up this morning, my eyes were bloodshot.”

  “Yeah, but I’m talking eyes shot full of blood, man. Veins popped, bulging out. Not a pretty sight. Plus, the house keeper she had to use her key to get in Delgado’s room—it was about one o’clock this afternoon—and there he was on the bed. Pillow still over his face.”

  I stepped away from the wheel and let Boggy take over. I tried to make sense out of everything Pederson had just told me.

  “This morning, before I checked out of the Mariner’s Inn, I left a message at the front desk for Delgado. I left an envelope for him, too.”

  “Police know all about the message and the envelope. Envelope had five hundred dollars in it. Police have it now.”

  “OK, that should prove I didn’t kill Delgado. Else why would I leave that for him?” No sooner were the words out of my mouth than it hit me. “No way. No damn way. They think I left that envelope just to make it look like I didn’t kill Delgado?”