Pontus Enterprises’ office was not very big, given the financial resources of the company and the fact that they owned the entire piece of property, motel and all. I’d heard that their plan was to raze everything on the site and start anew with a thirty-story condo/hotel, with shops and offices on the first floors, a multistory parking garage, and a nice new dock out front for the gambling boats. The homes in the Harbor Isles neighborhood behind the shopping center were mostly lush, upscale million-dollar homes with a smattering of little old Florida homes owned by folks who resisted the dollars of the tear-down entrepreneurs. Most of the locals who lived out on the barrier island were tired of the traffic and the tourists and the way the beach was changing into another South Florida condo canyon. Several dozen of them, a mixture of housewives, retirees, and hippies, were milling around in front of the Pontus offices carrying picket signs with sayings like SAY NO TO TROPITOWERS and NO DICE IN PARADISE when we drove up.
“Looks like your dad’s latest project isn’t all that popular,” B. J. said as he pulled the El Camino into a parking space directly in front of the Pontus office’s door.
“Yeah, I know.” There was something about the way Zale said it that made me think he might have had to spend a lot of his time defending his dad at places like the Lauderdale Yacht Club.
I gathered my shoulder bag and the envelope with my papers from the floor of the truck and prepared to walk through the crowd where the picketers had started eyeing us. I asked B. J., “You coming?”
“No, I think I’ll let the two of you handle this on your own.” There was a glint of light in B. J.’s eyes that told me he was going to enjoy watching me cross the picket line.
“Thanks,” I said, as I swung open the passenger-side door.
It was as though someone had run a current of electricity through the group of protesters. No sooner had Zale and I slid out of the car than we found ourselves surrounded by bobbing signs and angry faces. They were chanting slogans like “Hell no, Pontus must go” and “Plant flowers, not Towers.” I hoped no one in the crowd would recognize Zale.
Most of the protesters stepped aside as we passed through them, but right in front of the office door, an older woman held her ground. There was something about her pinned-up hair and white blouse that looked familiar but I couldn’t place where I’d seen her before.
“Excuse me,” I said. Her icy blue eyes locked on mine. I wanted to speak to her, to explain that I felt as she did. I didn’t want to see any more development on this beach, either. I hated the traffic and the high-rises. And the kind of people who were attracted to casino gambling boats weren’t always the kind I wanted driving through my neighborhood. I wanted to tell her that I considered this my neighborhood, too. But there was something unapproachable about her. More than unapproachable, she scared me. Her stare seemed to burn right through me. I couldn’t open my mouth to speak. Then, without a word, and without breaking her stare, she slowly stepped aside. I pushed the glass door open and hurried Zale into the office.
The woman sitting on the far side of the reception desk had brassy blond hair and glasses with bright red frames. It was clear from the splotches of color on her skin and the mascara on her cheeks that she had been crying, and as soon as she spotted Zale, she burst into fresh sobs and hurried off into a back room.
“That was Roma,” Zale said. “She’s worked for my dad since before he met mom.”
I put my arm around the boy’s shoulders. I was still feeling shaken up by that strange woman outside, but I willed myself to concentrate on the matter at hand. “I guess the news travels fast in this town.” Speaking softly, I said, “You’re going to be seeing a lot of that. Are you sure you’re okay with being here?”
He swallowed and bobbed his head up and down a couple of times.
I stepped over to a Plexiglas-covered box that sheltered a mock-up model of the proposed hotel, restaurant, and dock project. The paper taped to the inside of the glass read, “TropiTowers will offer the finest in luxurious hotel accommodations in these stylish twin thirty-story towers. The first two floors will feature retail shops, a day spa, and restaurants, all overlooking the docks and the thrilling views of Port Everglades.”
The model showed a pair of ultramodern towers, a pool deck between them, and, adjacent to them, a huge gray multistory parking garage with tennis courts on the roof. At thirty stories, they would tower over the seventeen-story Pier Sixty-six across the street. Not a piece of it belonged in this neighborhood.
“All right,” I said, tapping my fingers on the Plexiglas. “I guess we find our own way to this Leon Quinn, then. Lead on, buddy.”
Zale threaded his way through a couple of empty desks, and I followed. He stopped in front of a closed door at the end of a long hallway. The brass plate on the door read LEON QUINN, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT. I lifted my hand to knock, but Zale grabbed the doorknob and swung the door open.
The man sitting behind the desk would have looked equally at home on a cafe terrace overlooking the Aegean as he did sitting amidst the trappings of a power office. His thick, dark hair and full moustache framed deep-set eyes, and as he stood, I saw that he moved with the grace of a man who knew the effect his Mediterranean looks had on women.
“Uncle Leo, I want to introduce you . . .” Zale started, but before he could get any further, Leon Quinn bounded around the desk and embraced Zale in a hug that literally lifted the boy off his feet.
“Son,” he said in his deep, accented voice, “I am so sorry about your father.” When he set Zale down again, he took the youngster’s face between his hands, kissed him by each ear, then patted his cheek. “Such a terrible thing. How could they do this to him? Russian bastards. How is your mother taking it?”
“She’s okay, Uncle Leo. She’s pretty sad, but she’s gonna be okay, I think.”
“You gotta step up now, Zale. You gotta be a man for your mother. She’s gonna need you. A lot’s gonna fall on your shoulders, son. And you know, you need anything,” he said as he patted the boy’s cheek again, “anything, you just come ask your Uncle Leo.”
Quinn’s face was very animated as he spoke, and I found myself staring at the moustache as it jerked and danced on his face.
“Uncle Leo,” Zale said, turning and twisting his face out of the older man’s grasp. “This is Seychelle Sullivan. She’s a friend of Mom’s, and she’s the one who was there this morning. She saw—”
I stepped forward with my hand outstretched so Zale wouldn’t have to finish the sentence. “Mr. Quinn, I run the salvage tug Gorda, and I towed the Mykonos up to River Bend Boatyard this morning. I’m here to inform you of my intent to file a salvage claim against the vessel.” I slid the papers out of the envelope and handed him the open form documents. “I’d also like to express my condolences. I understand you and Nick were close.”
“Salvage claim?” His eyes bounced back and forth as he read through the document. He looked up at Zale. “What the hell? This is a lot of money.”
“Mr. Quinn, please look over the documents. I have proposed a fee for my services there, but that is open to negotiation. I’m sure the insurance company will take care of this. I don’t know anything about Mr. Pontus’s estate, or whether the Mykonos was owned by him personally or by the company, but I was told you are his personal attorney, so I am bringing these documents to you. You’ll find the numbers listed there for my attorney, as well as my home phone. If you have any questions, give us a call.”
I turned and reached for the office door, but Quinn stepped over to me and put his hand on my arm.
“Miss Sullivan, I apologize for my lack of manners. Please, sit down for a few minutes before you have to go back outside and face those terrible people.” He steered me to an antique chair on the opposite side of his heavy wood desk. Zale sat in the chair’s twin, and Leon Quinn settled himself behind his desk.
“Zale said you are a friend of his mother’s?”
I didn’t see any sense in trying to explain the real
state of our relationship. Not even Zale would fully understand that. “Yes, we grew up together.”
“Ah, friendship that stands the test of time. That is real friendship.”
I forced a smile at Quinn and nodded, then diverted my eyes so as not to have to meet his. I was certain he would see what a liar I was. On the shelves behind his desk were half a dozen framed snapshots of Nick and him catching a marlin onboard a sport fisherman, wearing yellow construction hats at a groundbreaking ceremony, slapping each other on the back while wearing identical tuxedos, that sort of thing.
Quinn followed my eyes to the photos. “Nick Pontus was an extraordinary man.” His voice cracked and he paused, cleared his throat, then continued. “I was more than fifteen years his senior, but I was one of the first people he hired when he started his TropiSubs down on Hollywood Beach. I was struggling to pay my way through law school, and I worked nights and weekends for Nick. He was just this brash kid determined to make a place for himself in this country. I guess you could say we grew up together, too.”
“I knew Nick over ten years ago, back when he and Molly first met. You’re certainly right when you describe him as brash.”
“Yeah, he did things his own way.” Quinn smiled. “Regardless. And that seemed to work okay for him until he met Ari Kagan and sold TropiCruz to him and his syndicate. Bastards. But I never thought it would come to this.”
“You seem certain that they’re responsible.”
“Who else?” He spread his big hands wide in front of him. Then his eyes lit on Zale. “Sorry, kid, but you’re gonna be hearing this all over town. These assholes killed your dad to screw him outta a few million bucks.” He shook his head and turned to me. “See, Nicky decided to sell the casino cruise line because he was getting into hotels in a big way. Besides, he was tired of it. He gets bored easy. But he retained ten percent of TropiCruz—like a silent partner, see? And the new resorts, like the one he’s building here, were going up just to service the gamblers coming here to Lauderdale to go out on the boats. That asswipe Kagan owed Nick millions from cash that was on the boats at the time of the sale and payments he stiffed us on. This is no secret. It’s been all over the papers. Nicky wasn’t letting Kagan get away with it. We just went to court last week to start the process to get the boats back.” He shook his head. “Fuckin’ Russians are animals.”
The secretary, Roma, appeared at the door, her face still blotchy and her chin quivering. “Mr. Quinn, pardon me, but there is a police detective on the line for you.”
“Look,” I said, rising out of the chair, “we’ve got to go. Thanks for your time, Mr. Quinn.”
He came around the desk once again and smothered Zale in another of those hugs. “Anything,” he said. “Remember, there is anything I can do, you call, right?” Zale nodded and backed away from him. As we headed back out toward the front door, I said in a low voice, “I think I’d rather face the protesters out there than get a hug from Uncle Leo.”
The corner of Zale’s mouth twitched a little, and I figured that a few hours after his dad’s death, that was about the best I should expect.
VI
The protesters chanted and waved their placards with renewed vigor the minute we exited the building, but I didn’t see the old woman. There were only about fifteen to twenty people in the crowd, and they closed in around us as we tried to make our way to the El Camino. I wanted another look at the woman, just to try to nudge the memory out, to figure out where I had seen her before, but she was gone.
B. J. leaned across the seat and opened the passenger-side door from the inside. Strains of airy flute music wafted out of the truck’s interior as I waved the protesters back so that I could open the door wide enough for Zale to get in.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We need to go pick up Gorda at River Bend.”
Zale slid into the middle, and once I’d squeezed in and slammed the door, B. J. sat a moment longer, listening to the final notes of the music, his eyes closed.
“What is that?” Zale asked when the song ended and B. J. switched on the ignition.
“James Galway on the flute. The song’s called ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ ”
Zale’s eyebrows drew together, wrinkling his forehead, and he stared at the CD player. When the next song started, and the simple, clear guitar notes floated out of the sound system, the boy looked up and nodded at B. J. “Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he said as he started bouncing his index finger on his jeans-covered leg. Then he lifted his hand and pointed at the CD player. “ ‘Under the Bridge,’ ” he said just before the vocals started.
B. J. nodded and the two of them sat there, eyes narrowed and heads barely bobbing as we drove the new high span over the Seventeenth Street Causeway that gave us a view of the growing high-rises over in the city’s center. I could count seven construction cranes on the horizon. The makeshift offices had been the first little boxes to go up on the construction sites behind the big signs, artists’ renderings of condos with a river view starting at $700,000.00. Where did they expect to find the people to fill these steel towers? I thought of the Pontus offices, their model tower project encased in Plexiglas, and the protesters down below us. Now with Nick gone, would the momentum still be there to add two more? The Chili Peppers sang of loneliness in the city, and I wondered if each of us was hearing a different song.
The crunching sound of tires on stone woke me from a daydream. The three of us in B. J.’s truck had not spoken a word on the drive across town to River Bend Boatyard. I’d been thinking about the time I had tried to teach Molly how to row a dinghy. We were probably no more than seven years old, and we’d taken my dad’s pram out into the middle of the canal. I was crouched in the stern and Molly was on the seat at the oars, but she couldn’t get them both to bite at the same time and we were going in circles. I couldn’t help laughing, and she was getting furious with me. She splashed me with an oar, then I picked up the old milk-jug bailer and soaked her a good one in return. Soon we were giggling so hard Molly fell off the thwart seat, and we both kicked our feet up in the air. At that point Red looked out the window to check on us in the canal and saw a dinghy with two pairs of waggling legs. He came roaring out to see what all the foolishness was about, made us tie the dinghy up properly, and beached me for a week. That’s what he called it when I wasn’t allowed aboard any boats, and it was punishment in the extreme.
“Time to get to work,” B. J. said when he’d parked the El Camino in front of the boatyard office.
As we walked through the dozens of boats propped up in the yard, I hoped we could avoid seeing the Mykonos, but when Gorda came into view, right where I’d left her on the outside dock, I saw the fat stern of the Hatteras between us and her. Rather than move her around the basin to the other side where the long-term jobs were stored, they’d propped her up right outside the big work shed, between two large sailboats. I felt Zale stiffen beside me, and I knew he had seen her, too. Both props and shafts had already been removed. But even from this distance, I could see the dark shadow on the enclosure around the flybridge. No one had bothered to clean off the plastic—or maybe they weren’t allowed to go up on the bridge, as the boat and her decks were still draped with yellow crime scene tape.
I made a show of looking at my watch. “Hey, we’d better get a move on,” I said. “The tide’s turned, and I’d like to get this ketch downriver before dark. Come on, guys.”
Zale looked back over his shoulder once, just before climbing aboard Gorda. He was a smart kid. I figured he knew what he was looking at.
One of the things about B. J. and me is that we’ve worked together so long we hardly have to say anything on a job. Which is a good thing because on that chilly afternoon, none of us felt like talking. We ran Gorda across the river from one boatyard to the other and docked at Summerfield. I went up to the office to do the paperwork, and B. J. stayed back to rig the ketch and get her ready for the trip downriver. Once we got under way, Zale positioned himself up on th
e bow of the tug. B. J. was aboard our tow, and I was stuck in the wheelhouse. In the twisting confines of the New River, I couldn’t leave the helm for a minute.
The trip down the New River from Summerfield Boatworks to Bahia Mar Marina generally took less than an hour, but this afternoon it felt much longer. Though the day had grown warmer around midday, as the sun dipped low in the west at only 5:00 on this February afternoon, the wind blowing off the water seemed to bite right through our clothes.
Just past the high-rise condo canyon that downtown Fort Lauderdale had become, we entered the section of river with the really pricey waterfront homes. Many of the original homes had been built between 1920 and 1950, and they were small Florida bungalows with barrel-tile roofs and jalousie windows. In the past decade the nouveau riche stars and dot-commers had started buying them up, tearing them down, and building minimansions in their places, with faux Spanish styling or cheesy attempts at New England-style architecture complete with widow’s walks. Amid the new construction, you could still spot the well-maintained older homes nestled back amid oak trees older than the town, homes that maintained the old Florida charm with porches and little chimneys that often puffed wood smoke on cold winter days like this.
Just as interesting as the homes were the boats docked along the riverbanks. From hailing ports like Cannes, Grand Cayman, and Recife, most of the yachts were huge custom powerboats valued in the millions. One of my favorites, though, was a perfectly maintained 1920s yawl with a white trunk cabin and gleaming varnished masts. She was docked in front of a house of the same vintage. The boat’s name, Annie, my mother’s name, was stenciled in graceful black paint and gold leaf on her stern. I always admired it when I passed. Though the boat was in far better condition than the home, neither seemed to have been updated or changed from its original designs.
Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) Page 5