by Diane Capri
He exhaled with a whoosh. “He said he was going to do a little diving out on a reef offshore, shoot some grouper maybe some summer crab.” Neal had always been guilty of taking lobster out of season. I could almost hear him bragging about it to Nestor.
“But why would he need another compressor? The Top Ten’s already got one below for filling tanks. Neal was always a tank diver.”
Nestor shrugged. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes stayed on the joint. “He just said he wanted to try diving with a hookah rig once. It was the boss’s money, he said. You know, he might as well experiment.”
A hookah rig was one where the diver was connected by a long hose to a compressor on the surface. Usually, though, they used small compressors that had been fitted inside a flotation device so that the compressor followed them around on the surface. I couldn’t imagine any reason why Neal would try out a hookah rig.
“Why, looky who’s here,” Perry Greene called out as he walked down the finger pier and prepared to climb aboard the schooner. “If it ain’t Miss Sullivan herself. Whooee, sure looks like somebody beat the crap outta you.”
“Hey, Perry, leave her alone,” Nestor said. “What’s up?”
Perry’s white-blond hair hung in his eyes as he ducked under the awning and dropped his butt onto the teak decks. The hair did not conceal the open greed in his eyes as he watched the two men smoke, nor did his cutoffs conceal much of anything, the way he was sitting on the deck. I turned my head aside in disgust.
“Hey, you guys wanna pass me a little of that?” He reached for the joint and sucked in smoke hungrily.
Raymond looked at me for several seconds before turning to Perry. “The captain is not hea.”
Perry exhaled loudly. “Shit, and here I thought we’d get some business done. Got some paperwork to take care of.” He grinned at me, waiting for me to ask.
I couldn’t believe it. He had to be talking about a job. They were headed upriver with the schooner for a haul-out, and they were going to be hiring Perry to help them make the trip? I caught Raymond’s eye, and he nodded at me, confirming it.
“So the Brit’s hiring you, is he?”
“Yes sirree, boy. What, they didn’t ask you, Seychelle? Now, what the hell do you make of that, huh?” He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Looks like nobody wants to hire a bitch to do a man’s job.”
“Perry,” Nestor said, “why don’t you just shut up? Even if having balls was all it took to be a good captain, you’d still have trouble meeting the criteria.”
“What’re you trying to say?”
“I tink he say it already, mon,” Raymond said, laughing. “Da captain be back later. You come back.”
Perry stood. “Don’t matter what you say, the word is out on Sullivan Towing.” He climbed down to the dock. “Seychelle, honey, you’re gonna be able to sit home and eat bonbons and watch the soaps every day.” He laughed his high-pitched hillbilly cackle, turned, and walked up the dock.
Nobody said anything for several minutes as the two men quietly smoked. Finally Nestor tossed the last of the joint overboard, and it sizzled as it hit the water. Neither man would look at me.
“It must be pretty bad, what they’re saying about me,” I finally ventured.
“Seychelle, I haven’t believed it, especially not now that I see you and talk to you. People are saying you’ve had some kind of a nervous breakdown, that you’re acting erratic, that you can’t be trusted. It’ll pass. You know how rumors fly around the docks.”
“But you also know what it’s like to have boat payments to make. Nestor I can’t sit around and wait for my reputation to clear. It’s all tied to this Top Ten business, I know it is. Is there anything else you guys can think of that was weird about Neal or the boat that day?”
“Well, there is one thing. The only other guy living on board the Top Ten was the engineer, Matt. You knew him, didn’t you, Sey?”
“Yeah, he came on board just before Neal and I split up.”
“Well, he told the cops that Neal had given him the day off, but he told me that morning, right after the Top Ten left the dock, that Neal had just fired him. Said he wouldn’t be needing him anymore. You know as well as I do that you couldn’t find a better engineer.”
“Where is Matt? I need to talk to him.”
“That’s the other thing. He’s gone. Left town awful fast. Said he was headed up to Newport to find a job up there.”
“Man … that is strange. Neal was a pretty decent mechanic, but he wasn’t good enough to keep the engine and generator running on the Top Ten. And owners of a boat like that surely wouldn’t cheap out on keeping an engineer.”
I turned to Raymond to see if he had anything else to offer. “Lady, I don’ like da people Neal was workin’ for.”
“Do you know anything about them? Who they are?”
“I don’ know dey names.” He pushed his shades down his nose and looked at me over the top of the dark glass. “But I see dey bad men. Be careful wit dem, lady.”
***
On my way back home, as I crossed over the Seventeenth Street Causeway, I noticed the soot-colored clouds building up out over the Everglades. It was still sunny here along the coast, but it wouldn’t be for much longer not once the dropping sun slid behind that dark wall. It was early in the year for that summer weather pattern.
My last stop was at Lauderdale Divers. When I pulled the Jeep into the parking space in front of their display window, I saw an example of a typical hookah rig in their window. It was a small compressor mounted inside an inner tube. It was similar to the compressor Red had on the Gorda, although ours was not portable or floatable. These little compressors didn’t have big accumulator tanks like the one on the Top Ten.
A couple of cruise-ship-type tourists were browsing through the T-shirt display, but otherwise, the fellow at the back of the store was alone, immersed in an issue of Scuba Diver magazine.
“Hello?”
He dropped the magazine. “Hi, what can I do for you?” He was about fifty, with graying hair, and he had that grizzled, squinty-eyed, old-time diver look.
“I just want to ask you some questions about compressors.”
“Do you want to use it for tank fills or for hookah diving?”
“I don’t want to buy one. But I saw a compressor on a boat, and I’m trying to figure out what it might have been used for.” I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled out the info I had copied off the side of the compressor. I showed it to him.
“That’s not a dive compressor. See, right here it says ‘contractor.’ That unit would be used for running air tools. On a boat, you don’t need to keep the air like they do. We put it right into the scuba tanks, so we don’t use the big accumulators.”
“What kind of air tools?”
“Could be anything: air hammers, nailers, impact drivers. Mechanics use them a lot. You know, like the tools you’ve seen when they change your tires in a garage.”
I nodded. The older woman from the front of the store walked back carrying a Divers Do It Deeper T-shirt and asked if she could try it on. He pointed to the back of the store, then went back to his magazine.
“Do you have any idea what someone would use that compressor for on board a ninety-two-foot Broward?”
He raised his eyebrows and looked out the window across the parking lot. “Not a clue,” he said. “But he sure as hell wasn’t using it to breathe.” He went back to his magazine.
Neal had done enough work in boatyards over the years to know his way around tools. What was he planning? Was he going to build something? I wished I’d had more time to look around on the boat. Maybe the tools themselves would have told me what it was he had in mind.
I wandered over to the glass case the diver guy was leaning on and examined the books and charts on display there. One book, Diving Locations, particularly caught my eye.
“Could I see a copy of this?” I asked him.
He sighed, moved behind the
counter, and handed me the book. I flipped through the pages. It was a collection of all the coordinates of the major wrecks and reefs off the South Florida coast.
“They’re not all in there. That’s over a year old now. Been some sunk since then.”
“Some what?”
“Ships, barges, whatever. You know, artificial reefs.” His voice took on a different quality as he launched into this well-rehearsed explanation. “We have some coral off our coast here, but mostly it’s just a sand bottom. In order to have fish, there have to be places for the fish to hide. You take an old abandoned shipwreck, and after it’s been on the bottom awhile, it will be full of little fish—and where there are little fish, there will soon be big fish trying to eat them. Divers love to dive on shipwrecks, and since these days ships just don’t sink often enough, we make our own. They’re sinking new shit out there nearly every other month. Keeps me happy—more places to dive, more people will go diving. It’s good for business. You interested in going out for a dive?”
“No, just curious, that’s all.”
He tapped a newspaper clipping pinned to a bulletin board on the wall behind the counter. “You’d like this one here—she’s new, the Bahama Belle, a nice little freighter. She’s going to be real rich when she gets a little more growth on her. It takes a while, you know. They sink this stuff so the fish will have hiding places, but they also need the food source. Right now, there’s not enough coral or algae growth there to support much of a fish population.”
I squinted at the blurry black-and-white photo of a vessel surrounded by puffs of white smoke.
“So that’s all people are interested in, huh, fish? Do you think somebody could find anything of value on any of these wrecks?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? First of all, the Coasties have guys strip these ships clean of everything before they sink ’em. Then they blow holes in every single compartment to make sure that divers can’t get caught in any little holes. Then there’s hundreds of divers a week exploring all over these things. Honey, you couldn’t find diddly-squat on one of these wrecks.”
I handed him back his book. “Hmmm. Okay, well, thanks for all your help. See ya.”
I paused on the sidewalk outside the store and took a last look at the hookah equipment in the dive store window. The hand on my arm was totally unexpected because I had not heard the slightest sound of his approach.
“Hey, lady,” he said, and I jumped, yanked my arm from his grasp, and backed off, ready to run. James Long was staring at me, equally startled by my reaction. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He held his hands up in the air and I noticed he was wearing a white martial arts getup, and even that outfit was ironed, with sharp creases on the sleeves. “It seems every time I touch you, you bolt like a startled deer.”
I laughed. “Geez, James, I was a million miles away. I didn’t even hear you come up on me.” I didn’t go into the fact that somebody had tried to kill me last night, and that does tend to make one a little jumpy.
He looked at the name of the store written across the top of the window and raised one eyebrow. “So the lady captain is a diver, too?”
I tried, unsuccessfully, to raise one eyebrow as well. “And the gentleman executive is a kung fu artist?”
He flashed those incredibly white teeth of his at me again, and I felt like an idiot grinning back at him. “Tai chi, actually. I like the study of the Taoist philosophy, and it keeps me in shape, teaches me things about the body. I try to come for classes here several times a week.” He pointed a few doors down to a storefront with Chinese characters across the front window and the words Florida Kung Fu and Tai Chi Chuan. “Don’t suppose you’d be willing to join me for a late lunch?”
Truth be told, I was starving. My eating habits these last few days would have had Red steaming mad. He was always trying to get me to eat more regularly. He claimed I preferred to graze, eating only when I was hungry. The thing was, though, I needed to get back to the cottage and call Jeannie. I’d promised B.J.
“James, I’m tempted, but I’ve really got to get back. If you’ve got a second, though, there is something I’d like to talk to you about.”
“Certainly, Seychelle. How can I help you?”
“I went by Harbor House yesterday.” I decided not to get into his little deception about Sunny/Sonya when I’d first met him on Saturday. “When I was leaving, I heard Minerva on the phone with somebody named Burns. Do you know Hamilton Burns, an attorney?”
“Of course. We’ve been involved in legal matters with Mr. Burns on several occasions. He is very well known in this town.”
“What kind of legal matters?”
“I’m sorry, Seychelle, I really can’t discuss that with you. You realize, of course, that there is a very sensitive side to what I do. Sometimes these runaways come from families that would rather not let it be known that their little darlings ended up on the streets. They want to make any criminal charges go away and whisk them back to their former lives. Burns helps them with that.”
“That’s not right.”
“It’s not a bad thing. What about the ones no one ever misses? Look, are you sure you won’t join me?” he went on. “We could continue this conversation over margaritas over at Carlos and Pepe’s?” He pointed to the restaurant across the parking lot.
I sighed and looked at him and came real close to giving in and going. James Long was damned likable. Some other day, when all this is over I thought, if we are both left standing when the dust clears, I would really like to get to know him better.
Chapter XIX
I was about to turn onto my street when I noticed the white unmarked car parked across and a few doors up from the Larsen place. The thunderheads had cast an early dusk over the street, but I could still make out two shadowy figures sitting in the front seat. I just kept driving right into the cul-de-sac, where the street dead-ended at the New River. I parked the Jeep and climbed over the wood fence around the Martinez place. The fences on these riverfront properties, when there were any, ran only to the seawall.
The Larsens’ yard was clear. I didn’t even see B.J. around. I had hoped he might be on the Gorda piecing that head back together, but no such luck. Once inside my cottage, I knew I had to do something about food. It was already past four and I hadn’t eaten a thing since the quick meal I’d grabbed from Burger King the night before. I rummaged through my cupboards, finally coming up with the last dented can of Campbell’s bean-with-bacon soup. While it cooked in the microwave, I tried Jeannie’s number again, and amazingly, she picked up on the second ring.
“Jeannie, it’s Seychelle.”
“Oh, thank God. I was just about ready to call the police and report you as a missing person. Honey, you’ve got to stop worrying me like this. You’ve got to check in more often. These are not nice people you’re playing around with.”
“This is not something you need to tell me, trust me, Jeannie. I’ll tell you all about that in a bit, but first, have you found out anything sure about the owners yet?”
“Okay, well, here’s the deal. Everywhere I turned, I kept getting the door slammed in my face. Finally, I decided the only way I was going to get through was to use a little deceit. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say I could get disbarred over this one. Anyway, I was right, it’s Benjamin Crystal still – he never really sold the boat. Well, I mean, he sold it, but he sold it to himself. The company that owns the boat is located in the Caymans and it goes through subsidiaries of larger corporations, but it all comes back to Mr. Benjamin Crystal.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“He is that.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant.” Neal had known all along. He had to have known, he was captain of the boat. All that bullshit he’d given me about how it would be different once the boat was sold. Lies. All lies. “What does this mean to us, Jeannie? To my salvage claim?”
“Well, it’s not going to be easy. I couldn’t exactly explain to a court of
law the way I found out. I think we should continue dealing with Burns. I’ll fire him another counteroffer and let’s keep our knowledge of the real owner as our trump card.”
“Okay, that sounds good.”
Suddenly someone started pounding on the front door. My heart felt like it was trying to leap out of my chest. Abaco began to bark.
“Seychelle, open the goddamn door.”
Abaco stopped barking, and she was wagging her tail. We both recognized that voice. “Honey,” Jeannie said, “what is going on over there?”
“I thought for a second it was the cops, but it’s my brother, Maddy. I’ve got to go, Jeannie. Call Burns and then call me back. Talk to you later.”
Maddy strode in with his face looking like a bruised, overripe peach. One eye was covered with gauze and bandages, his lip was swollen and split with black knotted thread holding the two halves together and the swellings on his cheek and forehead were that greenish purple color of day-old bruises and bottle flies. Metal splints like birdcages surrounded the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He headed straight for the fridge, opened the door, and helped himself to a beer. Popping the top one-handedly, he settled on the low couch with a loud exhale.
“We gotta talk.” He gulped the beer.
“You really look awful. What are you doing out of bed?”
“I’ve got a business to run. Family to support. You don’t look so good yourself.”
I rubbed the bruise on my temple. “Yeah, well, long story.”
“I need the money. Now, Seychelle.”
“Maddy, I’ve got the cops sitting out front watching for me—they’re probably on their way back here right now. I don’t have time for this. You’ve got to get out of here.” Standing over him, I tried to pull him up off the couch.
“I came here to say something and I’m gonna say it. Settle this salvage business and sell the boat. That’s it.”
“Maddy, what the hell is happening with you? You know I’ll fight you any way I can on this—that boat’s my life.”
He lowered his face into his hands. He was still for the longest time.