by Diane Capri
“Did you recognize the victim?”
“No.”
“The captain wasn’t aboard when you arrived.”
His voice was a monotone, unaccented and almost without inflection, and he had this weird way of asking questions by making statements and then waiting for me to agree or disagree.
“No, I didn’t see him, and I never heard him on the radio on my way out there. Does anybody know if Neal was even aboard?”
Collazo gazed up at one of the uniformed officers searching the boat. He watched the man as he rifled through the drawer of CDs under the stereo system. Then he turned back to me, sizing me up. Given my height, I was used to it. I could tell he was trying to guess how tall I was. I’d been five foot ten ever since junior high school, and generally I could classify men into two categories: those who found it intimidating and those who didn’t. I figured Collazo fell in the latter category.
“You knew Neal Garrett.”
The way he said it, it sounded almost like an accusation.
“In my business, I know most of the professional captains.”
“You heard the mayday call.”
We’d been over this part already. It seemed like a detective should be better at asking questions and getting the story straight. I knew I didn’t want to stay in that heat any longer than necessary, so I told him the story exactly as it had happened. He nodded as I spoke, and sometimes wrote in a little notebook he had. His handwriting was small, neat, and precise. When I got to the part about the girl, he stopped writing and our eyes met. I explained about the knife, and I saw her all over again reflected in the detective’s dark eyes. Then when I’d finished, he had me go over several parts and repeat them.
“You started out there on your tugboat after the girl started calling for help.”
“That’s right.”
“And someone saw you leave your dock.”
“No, nobody was around. I tried to find my mechanic, BJ. Moana, to help me out, but I couldn’t locate him. Time was running out. The Seventeenth Street Bridge tender might remember me going through, though.”
He wrote in his book.
“You knew the captain”—he glanced down at his book—“Neal Garrett.”
I sighed. There probably wasn’t any way to avoid talking about it. He’d find out soon enough if he asked around.
When Neal and I had finally agreed that it was time for him to move his wet suits, weight belts, dive tanks, and precious few clothes out of my cottage, we had both grown tired of the yelling. It seemed we were arguing more often than not, and he accused me of ruining our relationship by “asking too many questions.” I’d watched him undergo a transformation in two years from a shaggy-haired boat bum (a refugee from a long stint as a Navy Seal) who wanted nothing more than to sail naked, dive for conch and lobster and make love under the forepeak hatch of his lovely H-28, Wind Dancer, to a driven, gold-epaulettes-type captain of a boat right out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. He began to forget that the boat he was driving wasn’t really his. He wanted me to give up my boat and the business I’d inherited from my dad so I could become his first mate and stewardess. We’d had some great times together, especially in bed, and I admit I was tempted briefly—long nights in that queen-size bed in the Top Ten’s master stateroom and no more struggling to pay bills. But Neal brought that same passion to our arguments, and there was no way I was ready to take orders from him. I knew we were finished the night his rage took over; he was totally out of control, screaming at me and cursing, and he lifted his arm, threatening to hit me. I stood up to him, staring silently into the eyes I no longer recognized, fighting hard inside not to let him see just how much those eyes frightened me. By the time he moved out, I didn’t think his leaving would matter much to me anymore. But two days later I was balled up in a soggy robe, clutching a bottle of Mount Gay, burying myself in the sofa behind closed drapes.
“Neal and I lived together for a bit over a year. He moved out several months ago. We hadn’t seen much of each other lately.”
He wrote in his book. Then he watched me expectantly.
I tried hard not to volunteer anything more, but the silence was just so empty. “I heard he had a new girlfriend.” I pointed overhead with my index finger. “That may be her.”
“And you know who owns the vessel, then,” he said.
“Not really. I used to know who the old owner was, but the boat was sold last summer. Neal said it was some corporation that bought it. It used to belong to the guy that owns those topless clubs, you know, the ones with the Top Ten Girls. That’s how the boat got its name.”
He looked up at me. “Benjamin Crystal.”
“Yeah, that guy.”
“You know him.”
“Not really. I know of him. You’d just about have to be living in a hut out in the Everglades to not hear about him. He’s always on TV or in the newspapers in some exposé about this poor guy from the Dominican Republic who struck it rich building his strip joints. Anyway, he sold the boat. It was right after that that he got arrested.”
Whenever I get the feeling that someone doesn’t believe me, I start feeling guilty even though I know I’m telling the truth. I kept seeing that flash of red fingernail and those porcelain-smooth buttocks. I glanced at Collazo, certain I must have looked guilty as hell.
“You seem to know a great deal about Crystal.”
“Neal talked about him. It was like he was fascinated with his boss.”
Then he asked me again if I knew where Neal might be.
“I can guarantee you Neal would never have let that girl take the boat out by herself. I doubt she even could. He had to have been on board. Now, maybe somebody held a gun to his head and made him do something he didn’t want to do, maybe there was another boat involved, maybe he went overboard, I don’t know. None of it makes any sense at this point.”
I wasn’t sure anymore what to call the feelings I had for Neal. But the thought of his ending up like the girl on the bridge made my throat start closing involuntarily.
“I don’t know where he is now,” I said, “but you could check that he was aboard the boat this morning. Just call over to Pier 66 and ask some of the guys around there.”
Collazo nodded at a plainclothes policewoman who had been standing nearby throughout most of the questioning. She disappeared through the side door of the main salon.
Collazo stood. “Come with me.”
We climbed up the interior stairs leading to the bridge. I’d been up those stairs dozens of times, but they seemed shorter this time—we got there too fast. There were two men working the crime scene, one examining bullet holes, the other doing something to the bloodstains on the teak doorframe. The body was still there, but covered.
“Look around, Miss Sullivan. You know boats. Everything here looks normal to you, as it should on this ship.”
The last time I’d been up here, a few hours earlier it had been as though I had tunnel vision, noticing little other than a dead woman and a gun. I forced myself to ignore both those now, and, starting from the port side, I scanned the bridge, looking for something out of place. From the high-tech electronics instrument panel that looked more like it belonged in a jet than a boat to the small charting and plotting area and over to the helm, everything looked as it should to me.
“Other than a dead body and a bullet hole, it looks pretty normal to me.” I tried smiling at Collazo, but he didn’t smile back.
I pointed to the copy of Bowditch’s Practical Navigator. “That book, it belongs to me. I loaned it to Neal. Don’t suppose I could take it back, could I?”
“It’s evidence now, miss. But as soon as we’re finished, I’ll see to it you get it back.”
Then he thanked me for my time and took down my address and phone number.
“Go to the station downtown, and they will take your formal statement,” he said, standing and heading toward the door. I followed after him. I couldn’t wait to get out into the fresh air.
“The dockmaster at Pier 66”—she looked down at her notebook—“Bill Heller, helped them get the boat out when they left the slip at approximately seven-thirty A.M. He says Garrett was definitely aboard when they left the dock, but it was just the two of them, Garrett and the girl.”
The detective nodded, took hold of my elbow, and steered me down to the dock. At the base of the gangway, he turned seaward, the direction where it all had happened.
“They are out there searching for him, aren’t they?” I said.
Collazo nodded. My eyes met his, and I didn’t like the way he was staring at me.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
He shook his head and handed me his card, looking at me as though he just knew I was lying about everything I’d said.
“Call me if there’s anything more you want to tell me,” he said.
Chapter IV
By the time I tied Gorda to the seawall back at the estate, and Abaco leaped off and ran into the bushes to pee, it was almost two o’clock. All the way back up the river I had tried to put things together. I refused to consider the possibility that Neal was dead. As I’d untied Gorda down at the Coast Guard dock, I overheard the police discussing the search that was taking place offshore; as far as they were concerned, it was a search for another dead body. But it simply couldn’t be, no way, not Neal. Not that former Seal trained in self-defense, trained to kill. Not the man who had once lain next to me on the foredeck of his sailboat and pointed out Orion’s Belt and Ursa Minor and tried to educate me, the celestial illiterate. I knew it didn’t make any sense, but he just seemed too alive to be dead.
But if he wasn’t dead, then what had happened out there this morning? Where was he? Was he capable of doing that to that girl? I knew the answer to that question, and I didn’t want to think about it.
I walked the brick path to my cottage, and even after the events of the morning, I felt some of the tension leave me. It had been almost two years since I first moved into the old boathouse on the Larsen estate, and I still marveled at how lucky I was to have found the place. The location, in the Rio Vista section of Lauderdale, was convenient for me, because it was close to both the inlet and downtown. The main house was a big two-story Moorish mansion originally built in the 1930s, with multiple turrets and towers, all topped by red barrel tile, and it was set about sixty feet back from the New River. My cottage, on the other hand, had the best river view. The tiny wood-frame structure had once been a boathouse, a storage outbuilding for some past owner’s collection of sailing dinghies and sculls. At some time in the sixties the place had been refurbished as a guest house and was now topped with a matching barrel-tile roof and divided inside into a small bedroom, with a combined living area and kitchen all built over varnished Dade County pine floors. The Larsens gave me a break on the rent because I kept an eye on the house, the grounds, and their toys, like the garaged Jaguar and the Jet Ski they kept on the dock. There had been a number of break-ins in this neighborhood of snowbird owners these past few years, and my comings and goings made the big house look lived in as well. What made the place perfect for me was that I could sleep just a few steps away from where I kept Gorda tied up.
When I unlocked the front door, I saw that the red light was blinking on my answering machine. I punched the button on my way to the fridge and listened while gulping straight from the jug of cold orange juice—just one of the benefits of living alone. It was Galen Hightower, the owner of the Ruby Yacht, a seventy-two-foot steel ketch, reminding me that I had to be at Pier 66 at “eleven on the dot” Saturday morning. He’d had this tow booked for weeks, but he was the nervous type who needed his hand held all the time.
The machine beeped and clicked to the next message. I immediately recognized the voice—my older brother, Maddy, who throughout my childhood had threatened to beat me up if I ever called him Madagascar in public.
“Look, uh, we gotta talk. I got some problems, money problems, and you still haven’t paid your February payment. It’s not working, Seychelle. Gorda’s gotta go. I want out, now … Call me.” The dial tone sounded. I jammed my index finger down on the stop button, rewound the machine, and listened to the message again.
“You bastard, Maddy,” I said out loud and rewound the machine one more time. I thought somehow if I kept on listening to it, maybe I’d hear something in his voice that indicated it was all some kind of a cruel joke.
It was skin cancer from all those years with the sun shining down on his fair freckled skin that had finally taken my dad. During the years that I was lifeguarding and taking a few classes at the local community college, when I’d moved out into my own apartment, leaving Red alone in the big house, the doctors kept cutting off big chunks of him. When I’d call him every few weeks, just to see how he was doing, I didn’t want to hear about his most recent trip to the doctors. Red and I never talked about the important things, not about Mother’s death, not about what his illness might mean. Toward the end, I moved back home, quit school, cut back on my hours lifeguarding. I did what I could, tried to make him comfortable, even though I didn’t want to remember him like that, but rather like the big barrel-chested man with the red suspenders, blazing beard, and mischievous grin I’d looked up to as a little girl.
Red’s will had left everything to the three of us equally. I was surprised he even had a will; as sick as he was at the end, he never let on that he considered his own death a possibility. The doctors’ bills and taxes ate up most of what we got out of the house. After Red’s funeral, my brothers and I sat down and tried to figure out what to do with the Gorda. Maddy already had his own boat business going, running a charter sportfisherman out of Haulover down in Miami. He’d developed a reputation as a fishing guide—he even gave the morning fishing report on a local AM sports radio station—and he wasn’t about to give up his charter business to go into towing and salvage work.
Pitcairn was the nomad in the family. Maddy and I couldn’t figure out how he supported himself, but he had fallen in love, first with surfing and then, when he grew taller, with windsurfing. We received his postcards from Maui, Costa Rica, the Columbia River Gorge, and when he came to Red’s funeral, it was the first time either of us had seen him in over three years. He said he didn’t care about the money, he’d leave any decisions to us. He just didn’t want to give up his life on the pro windsurfing circuit to settle in Lauderdale.
They both laughed when I said I’d like to take over Red’s business. Maddy said most of the yacht captains wouldn’t want to hire a woman, that I’d never make enough to pay the maintenance on the boat, much less support myself. But I was twenty-seven years old, and although I was still in good shape, I didn’t want to be a lifeguard in my thirties. I didn’t want to have to sit out there in a tank suit when the flesh started to sag and my reactions started to slow. I was ready for a career change.
Besides, most of the old-timers knew me, I’d argued. I practically grew up aboard Gorda, and I had worked for Red off and on ever since I was a kid. He was a great teacher, and he loved showing off how well his little girl could handle a boat. I’d spent so much more time on the boat than Maddy had. I knew I was the most experienced of the three of us, and probably the only one who could qualify for the commercial towing captain’s license. My brother Pit was all for me from the start, and finally Maddy relented. Although I ran the boat, we were still three-way partners in Sullivan Towing and Salvage.
I made mistakes at first, but eventually I got back most of Red’s river and waterway business. I hoped to be able to buy my brothers out in a few years’ time. I had a little nest egg—it wasn’t much, just a couple of thousand dollars, but it was my emergency money. I’d vowed not to touch it unless it was a serious emergency— something like a blown engine. It was my security fund, and I knew that once I started to dip into it to pay the bills
, those thousands would become hundreds in a flash. Neither of my brothers had seemed to be in any particular hurry to get their money out of the boat, and I paid them each a small percentage of the business every month. Sure, things had been a little slow lately, but it would pick up. That was the nature of the business. And now I had a salvage claim to pursue against a multimillion-dollar vessel.
I was about to shut the machine off when a familiar voice started speaking on the third message.
“Hey, Seychelle, I just heard about the Top Ten” B.J.’s voice sounded unusually subdued. “I stopped in down at Sailorman to buy a rebuild kit for that head of yours, and everybody’s talking about it.” He paused, and in my mind I could see the way his eyes must have wrinkled as he tried to figure out what to say next.
“Sey, I know it must have been pretty bad out there.” I blinked back the pictures. “If you want to talk, I’ll be at the Downtowner around six. We could grab a bite. Later.”
For some reason that did it, hearing the sympathy in his voice. He was the first person who seemed to realize that the events of that morning had hurt. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by memories of Neal, alive, there in my cottage, making love on the floor, sitting up in bed talking all night, drinking beer and eating pizza by the window over there, listening to him whistle in the shower. I remembered that night we had slept in a sleeping bag on a little sandy cay down in the Dry Tortugas, swimming in the phosphorescent water at midnight and making love as the velvety trade winds dried the seawater on our skin. When we woke at dawn, Neal held me and kissed me, his tongue tracing the shape of my lips. His blue eyes glistened with unshed tears when he told me I tasted like rain.
The pressure inside my chest was building to the breaking point, and sour-tasting muscles pulled at the corners of my mouth, the back of my throat. I forced it back inside and blinked away the blurriness. Picking up my keys, I headed out the door.