“Just don’t go anywhere, Sullivan,” Skip said, turning and walking away. Over his shoulder he added, “You’re not off the hook yet.”
As I set about coiling the lines on deck and calling Summerfield Boatworks on the VHF to tell them why I’d been delayed, my brain kept playing short flashbacks from the good times, when we were kids, when Molly and I had lived inside that secret world of childhood best friends. We’d met in Ms. Winnick’s kindergarten class and discovered that we lived only one house apart. Her family had just moved in the week before school started. For the next twelve years, when it came to female friends, we were it for each other. Molly and I didn’t get along with most of the other girls—the giggly, silly ones who teased the quiet kids and always talked about clothes and TV and things that mattered little in our world. We were essentially both loners, a couple of the peculiar children who are always standing apart from the crowd, and we struck up a friendship out there on the perimeter.
By high school, we certainly made an odd couple when we hung out together. Molly, standing a petite five-foot-two, had flashing dark eyes and long ink-black hair inherited from her Seminole grandmother. She had her own artsy style of dress, and the boys were starting to take notice of her curvaceous shape, while at five-foot-ten, I was a giant gawky tomboy who kept my budding curves well hidden under my constant wardrobe of jeans and baggy T-shirts. She had her passion for drawing nature and always carried her sketchbook as I dragged her along to follow my enthusiasm for boats and the river.
It was in the fall of his senior year that my brother Pit, who had always been far more interested in surfing than girls, fell hard for Molly. As kids, the three of us had often played together, since Molly and I were only a year younger than Pit. He got along with us better than he did with my other older brother, Maddy. We’d be fishing off our seawall, taking the dinghy up Mosquito Creek, and playing pirates or catching pollywogs. It was my junior year when Pit and Molly started dating, and while at first I was a little jealous of the secrets they shared, eventually I realized they weren’t going to shut me out, and I could be happy for the two people I loved most in my teenage world.
Throughout the last thirteen years, ever since she’d dumped Pit just before his senior prom and run off and married Nick Pontus, Molly and I had not spoken a single word to each other. She disappeared from my life without a word, without even telling me that she was getting married or moving out of her parents’ home. We were supposed to be best friends, and one day she was there at school, talking about the big dance, then she was gone, married and living in a little Hollywood Beach apartment with her new husband, working behind the counter in his take-out joint. And my sweet brother Pit, the most gentle, sensitive one of us three kids, had his big heart ripped out. He didn’t talk to anybody for a week. Every day he’d head straight to the beach after school and surf until it was too dark to see. Then he’d come home, go into his room, and close the door quietly. He stayed behind that door the night of the prom, playing loud music full of crashing guitars. I waited for her to call me, to apologize, to explain how and why she could have done this to both me and Pit. But that call never came, and I promised myself I would never be the first to make a move.
Over the years, I’d seen her picture sometimes in the papers or on the news as her art career took off and Nick became first the town’s darling as a restaurant mogul, then the demon himself when he brought casino gambling boats to South Florida.
“Miss Sullivan?”
I’d been sitting on the bunk in the wheelhouse, daydreaming, purposely not watching what was going on around the Mykonos. I stepped out through the companionway door and checked out the fellow standing on the dock next to my boat. He was wearing a yellow knit sport shirt and light brown Polo chino slacks. He stood about five-foot-six and couldn’t have weighed more than 135 pounds. His hair was bleached white blond and stood up straight in a tall, flattop crew cut. His smile was so white for a man clearly in his forties, I wondered if his teeth had all been capped.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
He bent down and held out a card for me. “I’m Detective Rich Amoretti.” He flashed me that mouth full of Chiclets again. “Mind if I come aboard?”
I shrugged. “Be my guest.” I took his card as he climbed down onto the afterdeck, and I examined it. “This says Special Investigations Unit/Vice Squad.” I pointed toward the Mykonos. “Isn’t this a homicide?”
He glanced over at the Hatteras and all the men and women working on and around the boat. “Yeah, you’re right.” He sat down on the aluminum bulwark around Gorda's stern and crossed his straight legs at the ankles. The contrast between his bleached hair and dark tan told me he’d spent some time this winter in a tanning booth. Nobody who was a permanent resident here looked that color from the sun in February. “But you see, Miss Sullivan, Nick Pontus and his casino gambling boats have been an interest of mine for over two years. I’ll be assisting the homicide detectives in coming up with a list of suspects.”
“A list of people who wanted to kill Nick? Seems to me that would be a mighty long list.”
He laughed, and then proceeded to grill me for details about the shooting, focusing especially on the glimpse I’d had of the black car. Because I was approaching the bridge, I told him, I really couldn’t see anything more than the top of the car. I had no idea what the make of the car might be. I advised him to talk to the bridge tender. I told Detective Amoretti that I suspected the shooter would have had to exit his vehicle to get that shot off, and even at that hour of the morning, someone must have seen something.
“We have officers interviewing the bridge tender and canvassing the area for any other witnesses. You do understand you’re going to have to come down to the station? It was a pretty stupid stunt you pulled this morning. You pissed off some people moving that boat like that.”
I lifted my shoulders. “Yeah, I guess I probably did. You know anything about the salvage business, Detective Amoretti?”
“Not a thing,” he said, crossing his arms and raising his almost invisible blond eyebrows.
“For starters, there are no set fees for services in this business. For towing, yes, but not for salvage. The marine salvage laws go back a couple hundred years, and they were meant to encourage good Samaritans to volunteer to help another vessel in peril rather than just pillage it. Today, we call this ‘no cure-no pay’ salvage. When it’s successful, the salver is rewarded a percentage of the value of the boat he saves. This morning, before the shooting, that three-year-old Hatteras over there was worth well over a million dollars. Now she’s busted up her screws, maybe ruined the engines when she nearly sank, definitely holed her hull, but she’s still gonna be worth a lot more than you or I make in a year. In addition, if she had sunk with full fuel tanks in the middle of the New River, it would have been an environmental disaster as well as a hazard to navigation. The owner and his insurance company could have been held responsible for all that. Eventually, if we can’t agree on a sum, it could go to arbitration, and they’ll figure how much I risked and then award me somewhere in the vicinity of ten to thirty percent of the value of that boat as she sits right now. Now, I ask you, Detective, would you have let her sink?”
He flashed me his too-perfect teeth. “I see your point.”
I rode over to the Fort Lauderdale police station with Detective Amoretti in his bright red Corvette. He had a tendency to speed, a habit I’d noticed most cops shared. I hung on to the armrest with both hands when he accelerated.
On the way, he told me something about Nick Pontus that I did not know. He said it had been reported widely in the news, but I hated to admit that, though I loved to read the newspapers when I had the time, there were days, sometimes weeks, when I rarely heard any news other than the fish or weather reports I caught on the VHF. He said that a little over six months before, Nick had sold his whole TropiCruz Casino Line to a group of partners headed up by some guy named Ari Kagan, but that the new guy had had a f
alling out with Nick. They had each accused the other of cheating, stealing, and lying, and it had got so bad, they each had a restraining order out on the other. Nick had been in the process of taking Kagan to court to get the business back.
“This guy Kagan is American, but he’s linked in business and social circles to some heavy Russian guys who don’t always play nice,” Amoretti said. “It looks like Nick may have gotten in over his head, messed with the wrong people.”
“Are you saying Nick was mixed up with the Russian mafia? That they killed him?” I’d heard scuttlebutt at the Downtowner about how the Russians were making big inroads into prostitution and the drug trade in South Florida. When I didn’t have time for the papers, the Downtowner was my other source of news and local gossip.
The detective smiled as he burned rubber on a turn into the residential neighborhood behind the police station. “I didn’t say that, now did I?”
Inside the station, Detective Amoretti left me with an efficient young woman who typed my statement into a computer as fast as I could tell it. After she’d printed it out and I’d signed it, I asked her if I could use her phone to call a friend for a ride back to the boatyard. I didn’t tell her that my friend is also my attorney. She agreed, but insisted on dialing the number herself.
“Hey, Jeannie, it’s me,” I said after the young woman handed me the receiver. “I’m at the Fort Lauderdale police station, and I need a ride.”
I braced myself for the harangue I knew was coming. Since I’d recently had some difficulties with the police, Jeannie insisted that she be present anytime I dealt with them. I’d already violated that rule.
“Seychelle Sullivan, what have you got yourself into this time?” she asked.
I told her about the shooting, and as soon as she heard Nick’s name, she turned very serious and told me not to say one more word. She was on her way.
Amoretti must have been hanging nearby, because as soon as I hung up the phone, he reappeared and took me upstairs to the detectives’ bull pen, a large space broken up by individual desks and office cubicles.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re taking me to Detective Collazo?”
“Vic? Nah, he works the four to midnight now. You won’t find him in here in the mornings.”
That threw me. I’d never thought about Collazo working a shift or adhering to hours. He was just always there. Much as he and I had banged heads in the past, Collazo was a known quantity. I knew where I stood with the man.
Amoretti led me over to a metal desk occupied by a large dark-haired man wearing a brown suit. As excessively polished, tanned, toothed, and coifed as Amoretti was, this man was the exact opposite. His suit, shirt, and tie looked as though they had been selected randomly, not taking into account color or print. A splotch of something that looked like dried egg was stuck on his paisley tie, and his multiple chins were darkened by a day’s growth of beard. Rose-colored pouches hung beneath his green eyes, and when he stood, smiled, and extended his hand, his belly hung over his belt, straining the buttons on his wrinkled shirt. Due to the nicotine stains on both his teeth and fingers, I kept the handshake brief.
“Detective Clayton Mabry,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
Ma’am? Seeing as it was less than a week until my thirtieth birthday, I was sensitive to things like that. It was the first time I remembered anyone calling me “Ma’am”—before that, I’d always been “Miss,” and somehow, hearing it in that good ol’ boy accent made it seem even worse. Hell, thirty wasn’t that old—was it?
Detective Mabry pointed to the chair on the opposite side of his desk and offered me the pink box of Good & Plenty he held in his hand.
“Want some?”
I held out my hand as he shook some candies out of the box, then I completely ignored Jeannie’s advice and began to talk to him. The thing was, you felt sorry for him. The man looked like such a mess, and he sounded like he was an oar short of a pair. I couldn’t imagine him ever solving a case, and I felt like any little bit I could do to help him out would be a kindness. Detective Amoretti slouched into a chair at an adjacent desk, pulled out his cell phone, and began playing with the numbers on the phone’s face.
Mabry interrupted my retelling of the morning events. “When you say Nick Pontus’s name, honey, you flinch. You got history with him?”
I exhaled loudly to buy some time. Maybe he was more perceptive than I thought. I really didn’t want to talk about this. “History. I guess that’s one way to put it.”
He extended the box with raised eyebrows and then poured a few more pink and white candies into my hand.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
I chewed the licorice-flavored candies slowly, trying to think of some way to get out of telling the whole story.
It was impossible. The way his eyes were fastened on my face, he wasn’t going to let me dance around. I swallowed and started. “Back when I was in high school, eleventh grade, Nick dated a friend of mine. My best friend, actually. He was older than her by about five years, which is a lot for kids that age, and even back then he was into flash. It was one of those whirlwind courtships they talk about. I tried to warn her off him, but she found something fascinating about him. Basically, he bought her affections, got her pregnant, then married her. She quit school. I haven’t spoken to either one of them since.”
“That’s it? You didn’t get an invite to the wedding so you dumped your best friend?”
I didn’t want to look away, but his eyes cut into me like serrated jade. “It’s complicated,” I said to the ceiling. “You wouldn’t understand.” I didn’t see how dredging up any of this would help them find Nick’s killer. I crossed my arms over my chest and slumped in my chair.
He slowly shook his head as he wrote something down in his notebook. Then he asked, “You sure the shots came from up on the bridge?”
I bounced my shoulders once. I knew I was acting like a bratty kid, but I couldn’t help it. “Not really. I guess I just assumed that from the way the car peeled out, you know, made a U-tum and burned rubber.”
“Hmm. And you said you couldn’t see the driver at all.”
“I barely saw the roof of the car. What I could see of it was black, though, and shiny—not a convertible. There are low concrete barriers along the sides of the bridge. Come to think of it, I can see over those walls with no problem when I’m driving my Jeep, so I guess it must have been more like a sports car. Something fairly low.”
He wrote at length in his notebook, without looking up at me. I glanced over at Detective Amoretti. He still seemed engrossed in his cell phone.
“Detective Mabry,” I said, “do you think the killers were Russian mafia?”
“Whoa, darlin’.” He shot a quick look at Amoretti. “Don’t know where you got that idea.” He shook his head. “Fact is, most folks are murdered by somebody close—family members, upset lovers, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got to admit, this one does look like a professional hit.”
“Seychelle, that’s enough,” Jeannie said, sweeping into the room wearing one of her voluminous tropical print muumuus, flip-flops slapping the linoleum as she crossed the room. There were too many desks crammed into that office, and the space between them was scant. At nearly three hundred pounds, Jeannie was a substantial woman, and as she approached the chair where Amoretti slouched, he leaped to his feet and pushed the chair under the desk, clearing the way so she could pass. She produced business cards and handed them to both Mabry and Amoretti. “I’m Jeannie Black, Miss Sullivan’s attorney.”
Detective Rich Amoretti took her card, sucked his teeth, and rolled his eyes. My immediate reaction was pity. Not for Jeannie, mind you, but for Amoretti. As a vice cop, he undoubtedly spent lots of time dealing with hookers and strippers, and considered himself an expert on tough women.
Jeannie went easy on him and just cast him a withering look as she took my forearm. “Come on, Seychelle, we’r
e leaving.”
Amoretti stepped in front of her, resting his thumbs on the fabric belt that encircled his twenty-nine-inch waist.
“We aren’t finished questioning this witness,” he said, looking up at Jeannie.
Her laugh filled the room. “Honey, oh, yes you are.” She pulled me to my feet and turned back to Amoretti, looking him up and down. “They must have made you a detective because they don’t make patrol uniforms in boys’ sizes.”
For the first time, I saw the grin fade off Amoretti’s face. “Very funny,” he said.
“Detective, have you charged my client with a crime?” Not sure I wanted to hear the answer to that one, I glanced back at Mabry. He had rocked back, balancing his chair on two legs, his fingers laced across his belly and his eyes shining as he watched the exchange between Jeannie and the vice detective.
Amoretti started to speak. “No, but—”
“Then there is no reason for her to stay. I understand she has already voluntarily given and signed a statement downstairs. Good day, gentlemen.”
Detective Mabry pushed back his chair and stood up, nodding and grinning at Jeannie like a schoolboy with a crush. “Been a pleasure doing bidness with you, ladies. Hope to see you again real soon.”
Jeannie pushed me ahead of her and we walked out into the hall, turning toward the elevator. We didn’t say a word until we were in her van and pulling out of the police department parking lot.
“Just take me back to the River Bend Boatyard, okay? Gorda’s there, and I’ve got a job to do,” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
I turned to face her, surprised by her hard tone of voice. “Why not? Are the boys home?” Jeannie was the single mom of twin ten-year-old boys.
“No, they’d just left for the bus stop about the time you called. We’ve got to stop off and see a client of mine.”
I slumped in my seat. “Oh, geez.” Jeannie’s clients were usually women divorcing scumbag men, and they needed to vent at length about their soon-to-be-ex’s various affairs. “Jeannie, I’ve got to catch the tide.”
Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) Page 2