“You look well, Miss Sullivan,” he said.
Typical, I thought. Telling me, not asking. Collazo had a thing about questions. He never asked any.
He carried what looked like the exact same notebook, and I wanted to ask him if there were still notes in there from the first time we’d met, last March, when he’d suspected me of murdering my former boyfriend.
“Collazo, what do you say we dispense with any kind of pretense that we’re friends or that we like each other? I know you’re here to take my statement, and I’ve got to get back to work. I’ve got a tow waiting up in Hillsboro.”
“Very well.” He rifled through the jacket over his arm and found the gold pen in the inside breast pocket. “You found this boat offshore.”
“Yeah, I was up off that Hillsboro Inlet sinking, you know, the Haitian boat that went down night before last.” I ran through the rest of it for him, all of it, from getting Mike’s call to bringing in the tow to the dock here and calling the police. He wrote very quickly and in a remarkably neat hand. As I talked, I kept focusing on his fingers and noticing how fat they were, like plump, fuzzy caterpillars wrapped around his pen.
“You decided not to call the Coast Guard when you came upon this boat.”
“I don’t know that it was a conscious decision necessarily,” I said, knowing perfectly well that it was. “It was more like I was just too busy at the time.”
“Miss Sullivan, as a professional mariner, I’m sure you are aware of the required procedure. By not reporting the incident in a timely manner, you can jeopardize the investigation.”
“Detective Collazo, you don’t have to lecture me. So, I didn’t call it in right away. I just set about getting her to shore as fast as possible. I’m a certified EMT, so I could do just as much as the Hardy Boys over there,” I said, pointing to the Coast Guardsmen getting in the way of the police officers working the scene aft of Gorda. “I know my tug isn’t any speed demon, but I knew I could get her to port in the time it would take another boat to come out to meet us.”
He stared at me, waiting for me to continue, knowing that silence between us would make me uncomfortable. I hated when he did that. I tried to be strong, tried to stare right back at him, but every time a figure of authority looks at me like I am doing something bad, I feel guilty. It had been going on since Mrs. Laughlin’s first-grade class. I caved.
“It was the kid, Collazo. Did you see her? Skinny little thing? I was just trying to do what was best for her.”
“The child is Haitian.”
“Part, anyway. She said her dad is American, but yeah, she’s Haitian. Her name is Solange. She said the woman in the boat was named Erzulie or something like that. I didn’t get much of a chance to ask her anything else.”
“She spoke English.”
“Not much. She really didn’t say much at all. But her knowing some English jibes with her saying her father is American.”
“Miss Sullivan, you are aware that there is a great deal of difference between the way our government treats immigrants found at sea as opposed to those who make it to shore.”
“Oh yeah, the old wet-foot, dry-foot routine, only if you’re Haitian, they don’t give a damn about your foot. Collazo, I was only thinking about the kid. She needs medical attention, not a Coast Guard cutter ride back to Haiti.”
He stared at me, but this time I held firm, refusing to fill the silence.
“She told you how the woman died,” he said finally.
“No. It’s like I said, I hardly got a chance to speak to her. She was unconscious most of the trip into the harbor.”
Out in the waterway, an air horn sounded a long toot. I looked across Gorda's bow to see Little Bitt heading toward the dock with Mike Beesting’s big sailboat, Outta the Blue, on a short towline.
Mike shouted from up on the foredeck of his boat, “Is it okay if we raft up to you, Gorda?” while with one hand, he steadied himself on the rigging. As usual, he was not wearing his artificial leg, and his scarred stump protruded from his jeans shorts. He claimed the prosthesis slowed him down as he tried to maneuver around the tight spaces on a sailboat deck.
“Sure,” I called out, and jumped down onto Gorda's deck to take their lines.
Standing next to Mike on the foredeck of the Irwin-54 was a fellow with easily the best pair of legs I had ever seen on a man. Maybe it was just the perspective, my being on the low deck of the tug, and eyeball-to-kneecap with these muscular, suntanned legs, but it probably had as much to do with my recent decision to avoid men. He looked like a fit fifty-something, wearing a crisp white T-shirt that read “Hard Rock Cafe, Cayman Islands” across the front and was tucked into the trim waist of his khaki-colored cargo shorts. He knew enough about boats not to try to throw me the line from too far out as Perry was easing them in alongside with surprising precision. When only about four feet separated us, he tossed me the line and picked up a white fender to cushion the impact as the two boats came together.
Perry idled his boat off the bow of the sailboat and sauntered back to the stern to untie the towline. I hadn’t seen Perry in a couple of months, and he was now wearing his greasy hair in a shoulder-length mullet style, long in back, razed close on the sides. He pouched his lips out at me in an exaggerated kiss.
“Just say when, baby. You know you want me.” He cackled as he tossed the towline onto the deck of Mike’s boat.
“Yeah, like a dose, Perry. Which, given your personal hygiene, probably isn’t far from the truth.”
Once the sailboat was secure, Mike hopped back to the stem and handed me his shore power cord. That darned cord was nearly the diameter of a fire hose. “Plug that sucker in and we can fire up the AC and cool off that damn cabin down there. It’s hotter than a two-peckered goat out here.”
I took the cord from him. “Mike, you have got to learn you live on a boat. Flattening your batteries like that should be embarrassing to you.”
“Hey, look, it wasn’t me, all right? It was Joe. Man, he had to bum every light in the goddam boat all night.” Mike waved to Collazo on the dock. “Hey, Vic. What’s up, man? Want to come aboard and have a piña colada? Gonna have that blender chugging any minute. What brings you guys down here, buddy?”
Vic? Buddy? Somehow I could never picture either term applying to the Detective Collazo I knew. I plugged in Mike’s power cord before one of the dock jocks could object. When I stood up, Collazo was right there, invading my space, breathing on me as he said, “Miss Sullivan. We haven’t concluded our conversation.” He wiped his brow with an already saturated handkerchief.
“I don’t know anything more to tell you, Collazo,” I said, taking a step back. “I don’t know how she got out there, where she came from, who the dead woman is, nothing.” I put my raised palms in the air. “What more can I tell you?”
“You can tell me the exact location where you found her.”
“That I can do.” I jumped back down onto the tug’s deck, grabbed the ship’s log from inside the wheelhouse, and read off the exact position. I stepped outside the wheelhouse and, looking up at the detective as he wrote in his notebook, described the way the boat had been filled with dirty water and how I pumped it out.
“There is one thing that’s a bit strange, Collazo. I don’t know how much you know about boats, but I can tell you this: There is no way they came from Haiti in that little boat. It’s barely possible a boat like that could make it from Cuba, but from Haiti? With no sails? That’s just not possible.”
Down the dock, the crowd around the fishing boat opened up and several officers hoisted a bulging white plastic bag up to the dock where a uniformed woman stood alongside another gurney. I climbed back up onto the dock. Mike and his buddy Joe followed me. Another uniformed officer split off from the crowd and came over to consult with Collazo. They stepped aside and murmured just softly enough that I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
When Mike got upright on the dock, he asked, “Who died?”
“How about a little courtesy?” I said. “Introductions, perhaps?” I turned to his friend with the great legs. “Hi, I’m Seychelle Sullivan, since it appears our friend is not going to introduce us.”
“Joe D’Angelo,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.” His hand felt rough and dry, his grip firm and confident. His eyes met mine with a directness, an openness, that I found appealing.
“So, you used to work with Mike?”
“Yeah, I was with the DEA. Retired now.” His dark hair had been “styled,” not just cut, and the only bit of gray was at his temples. He nodded his head toward the far end of the dock. “So, what’s going on?”
I shouldn’t have expected any different. One thing I’d learned about cops is that little social niceties often aren’t on their list of acquired skills.
“Yeah, Sey, that have anything to do with your emergency?” Mike asked.
“The boat I said I found?” I pointed toward the body bag. “That’s what was in it. That and a kid, a little girl about ten years old.”
Joe turned away from the scene and looked at me. His features were pinched with concern, and I could not help but notice how light his green eyes were. “The kid, she was alive?” he asked.
“Yeah, bad shape, though. Dehydration, sun. On her way to Broward General right now. Who knows how long she had been out there.”
Joe shook his head. “Poor kid. It always gets to me when there are kids involved.”
“You got kids?” I asked him.
“One. A grown daughter.” He paused and his eyes went unfocused, as though looking at something far away, before he turned to look across the Intracoastal. Without turning back to face me, he said, “I haven’t seen her in a long time. Too long, I guess.”
He stood there, his head turned away, and I didn’t know whether to speak or to wait or to walk away and leave him alone.
“This kid,” he said, turning to face me and coming back from wherever or whatever memory he had traveled to. “She able to tell you anything about what happened to her?”
“Nope. She could barely talk. She’s so thin, she looks like she’s been starved for months, not just days. Hopefully, she’ll be all right, but then, you know how it is.” I shrugged. “She’s Haitian, so as soon as she’s healthy ...” I motioned with my hand for them to fill in the blanks.
“Yeah. It doesn’t seem fair, does it,” Mike said.
“At least she’s lucky you found her,” Joe said, squeezing and then patting my upper arm. I smiled back at him and nodded, not sure whether or not he was flirting with me and not sure whether or not I liked it.
The officers pushing the gurney with the body bag passed within a few feet of us, and one of them nodded at Mike, left the group, and started toward us.
Mike shook hands with the first officer and several others who followed. Most were big men, either in uniform or plainclothes, and they greeted Mike, shook his hand, and patted him on the back. They gathered around their old friend, and the laughter erupted in sharp, loud bursts, but something about their camaraderie seemed forced. They all tried to look anywhere but at the missing leg.
“Hey, Mike,” I said, “some of us still have to work for a living. Think you could move your boat so I can get out?”
He looked up and our eyes met over the top of the heads around him. He didn’t say anything, but there was gratitude in his eyes. “Come on, Joe—” he clapped the other man on the shoulder—“let’s get ourselves some sea, sun, and rum.”
A voice right behind me made me spin around. “That could very well have been valuable evidence, the water you pumped out of that boat.” Collazo had walked up behind me, and he now stuck his face about six inches from mine.
“What are you talking about?”
“Collazo, back off,” Mike said. “You don’t need to pull that bullshit with her. She’s not going to hide anything from you.”
Collazo didn’t break eye contact with me when he said, “Mike, I know you’d never interfere with a police investigation.”
“Hey, Joe,” Mike said, “I think he’s showing off for us.” Both men laughed. “Collazo, remember Joe? He worked with us back around, what was it, eighty-two? On that Northwest Lauderdale Task Force? Oh, wait a minute, you were still on patrol then, right? I forgot. Didn’t recognize you without your radar gun.” Mike and his friend hooted, while Collazo ignored them.
“I had to pump it out,” I said, “or I wouldn’t have been able to tow it in.”
“That’s why you should have called the experts. The water you pumped out of that boat was probably discolored due to the blood from the woman’s body.”
“The water was . . . ,” I started to say. I’d wrung out Solange’s dress, her white First Communion dress, only it wasn’t white anymore. And how long had she been sitting in that bloody water?
“Perhaps there was blood there from her attacker as well,” he said.
“Her attacker?”
He nodded. “It won’t be official until the autopsy, but this wasn’t a drowning. She bled out from her wounds. It looks like that woman died from a blow to the head.”
V
It was almost three o’clock by the time I finished with Collazo and could get back to work. Mike got his engine started, and I threw off his lines. Joe stood at the wheel, handling the controls better than Mike ever did. Considering he had claimed on the radio that he had an urgent need to get back ashore, Joe certainly didn’t look like he was in any hurry now, with a rum and Coke in the cup holder by the helm and a contented smile on his face. I smiled back at him and waved as they pulled away. His need to get back probably had more to do with boredom than an appointment. Some guys just don’t have the patience or the temperament for the slow pace of sailing. Hell, I’d once had a sailor call for a tow because he had run out of ice.
I got Gorda under way and, once offshore, I poured on the speed to get back to Hillsboro. It took me an hour and a half to cover the ten or so miles up the coast. The Gulf Stream usually gave me a little more push than that, but it seemed the current was not running as strong as usual. While en route, I put Gorda on autopilot and pulled out the large-scale chart for the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola. The chart showed the Gulf Stream running at a speed of 2.6 to 3.3 knots at its axis. I thought about Solange and wondered what it was like being alone and adrift, in a boat with a dead woman. How long had she been out there? At the Gulf Stream’s usual rate of drift, they would have traveled seventy-five miles in twenty-four hours, and she looked like she’d been out there even longer than that. But there was just no way I would believe they had come from Haiti in that boat. There were times, like right now, when in certain places, the Stream didn’t always run at full strength. And close inshore there was frequently a countercurrent. My guess was that Solange had been on a larger boat before being set adrift somewhere to the south. Of course the Miss Agnes came to mind, but the timing was off—if she’d been set adrift from that boat, she should have been somewhere up off northern Palm Beach County. If I could find the exact time she got into the small boat, I could calculate the rate of drift and figure out where she started from.
B.J. looked happy to see me as he took my lines to tie Gorda back alongside the crane barge. He had been sitting cross-legged on the deck in the shade, his head bowed over a paperback book, when I pulled alongside. I wanted to freeze- frame the image of him sitting there smiling at me and put it away in a special keepsake box before I ruined it. I’d been doing a lot of that lately.
The Miss Agnes was afloat and nearly sitting on her lines, while the crane’s two huge pumps were spewing water out of her innards.
“So Seychelle Sullivan does it again,” B.J. shouted after I turned off Gorda's engine. The noise from the gasoline pumps still made conversation only marginally possible.
“What do you mean?”
“Out saving the world, rescuing small children, finding dead bodies. Everybody’s talking about it on the radio. Perry and Mike set off a regular gabfest on channe
l seventy-two.” He pointed to the workers sitting inside the deckhouse. “The guys and I were listening for over an hour while the pumps were working.”
The Bahamian cruiser looked even worse out of the water than it had sitting on the bottom. Peeling paint, soaked cardboard boxes, clothing, and garbage littered the decks and what I could see of the interior of the cabin through the fogged-up windows.
“I’ll tell you about it once we get under way. I’d like to get this boat into the yard before quitting time. Think we can get started and finish pumping her out on the way?”
“I think so. She’s still pretty tight, considering.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
B.J. and I worked well as a team. We always had and, fortunately, the emotional awkwardness of our current romantic separation didn’t extend onto the deck. We rigged my pumps on the cruiser’s deck, got a good towing bridle secured at her bow, said our good-byes to the Gilman crew, and took off back toward Port Everglades.
Even as late in the day as it was, the heat in the deckhouse was stifling. We set her on autopilot and went up on the bow to catch the breeze we made by traveling at six knots. If it wasn’t for our forward speed, there wouldn’t have been any breeze at all.
I kept seeing Solange’s face, those high cheekbones and big dark eyes—eyes that looked far too old for a child who had lived barely a decade. Though I’d had my share of pain in my childhood, compared to this kid I felt lucky. I could not imagine what her short life had been like.
“You’re different,” B.J. said, not looking at me but scanning the horizon for boat traffic.
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