Once we’d finished with the handshakes and introductions, he offered his condolences about Nestor. His eyebrows peaked and the skin pulled tight around his pale green eyes, but he looked more like he was trying not to laugh.
“So I take it you know why I’m here in Key West.” I wasn’t there for niceties and I wanted Pinder to know it.
He pointed to one of the two metal folding chairs and returned to the black leather office chair where he’d been sitting when I walked in. “Yeah, the recently departed Captain Frias convinced his boss he should get you to tow the yacht back up to Fort Lauderdale instead of me.”
I’d met white Bahamians before and always found their lilting accent disarming. With Pinder, though, it sounded overdone and pretentious.
“I take it you didn’t like Nestor. You sure don’t seem to show much respect.”
“Neither did he. Asshole come in here talking trash to me and my partner, even gone so far as saying that I might be in on something with his boss.”
I didn’t say anything for several seconds. “The man’s dead.”
“So? Just because he went out and got himself killed don’t change the fact that the man was bad-mouthing my business.” Pinder leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the corner of his desk. The flip-flops on his feet looked like somebody my size could use them as wakeboards.
I glanced around the office. For an operation that was making the big bucks on all these recent salvage claims, they weren’t spending it on office decor. The desk was made of gray metal that matched the folding chairs and the four-drawer file cabinet in the corner. The only other item in the room was a calendar on the wall that showed a Key West schooner sailing past a flaming sunset.
“Do you know why Nestor recommended me?”
“I know that Ted Berger now thinks I’m ripping him off when I’m only asking for the industry standard here.”
I had been prepared—after the stories Sam had told me and after seeing the flaky receptionist—for Pinder to be a total space cadet. I was surprised by his blunt reply. He knew something about salvage.
“Come on, if you’ve been in this business any amount of time, you know that’s not true. There’s no such thing as an industry standard in salvage. Sure, you can get an award of thirty to forty percent of the value of the small sailboat you keep from sinking, but with a multimillion-dollar yacht like this, you’re looking at a much smaller percentage. Not ten, maybe not even five.”
“There been salvage awards as high as six million,” he said as he reached for a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and shook one out.
“That was when a friggin’ oil tanker saved a fuel cylinder from the space shuttle, for Pete’s sake. The Power Play wasn’t even holed. You know, Pinder, it’s guys like you who don’t know what the hell they’re doing who are giving this business a bad name. Learn a little more about the law, look at history.”
He pawed through the papers on the desk until he found the lighter, then lit the cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke just to the left of my face. “I look at history every fuckin’ day when I walk to the office. I look at these fancy old Victorian houses ’round this town built by poor Bahamian suckers for the rich wreckers. Yes, indeed. I’ve given it quite a bit of thought, and I made my decision concerning which group I’m goin’ to belong to.”
I stepped out into the sunlight and pulled the door shut behind me with a bang. I wanted that barrier between Pinder and me. I had harbored a naive hope that somehow I would be able to put some sense into his head, get him to lower the amount he was asking for on the Power Play salvage. I had become a part of this job, and I didn’t like being associated with this deal he was pushing for, which would undoubtedly get written up in the papers and talked about in all the waterfront bars. It wasn’t as though Berger and his insurance company couldn’t afford a big salvage award, but it was bad for this business as a whole, this business I had made my life.
Jamming my hands into the pockets of my jeans, I took off walking back down Fleming Street. At the corner I looked up, trying to decide what to do next, and I recognized the gray-haired, stooped man coming toward me in the crosswalk.
“Hey, Arlen,” I called out, then waited for him to reach my side of the street. I embraced him with a swift air kiss past his cheek. “What are you doing here in Key West?”
Arlen Sparks had been a near neighbor of the house in which I grew up. As a kid, of course, I’d called him Mr. Sparks, but most of the adults, including my dad, had called him Sparky. I didn’t realize until much later that it had to do with his profession as an electrical engineer and his ham radio hobby. The Shady Banks neighborhood had been a close-knit community where all the adults looked after all the kids, and as often as not Molly, Pit, and I were in someone else’s yard or kitchen or garage. Sparks himself had been a crotchety fellow, balding and with a comb-over hairstyle that we kids found hysterical. He didn’t know much about kids since he and his wife had never had any of their own, and we did our best to stay out of his way. He worked at a local research and tech firm called Motowave, and he would scowl at us on our bikes as he left in his big white sedan for work.
After our brief embrace, he mumbled a soft hello and said, “Wife and I have a house on a canal here.”
Arlen’s wife had been the favorite of the whole neighborhood. She was the children’s librarian at the county facility just west of Shady Banks. On weekends, she’d invite us into her kitchen with offers of home-baked brownies and then let us look at her collection of signed first editions of children’s picture books from the 1930s and ’40s.
“Really? I had no idea.” I patted him on the shoulder. “You lucky dog. You must have bought it back when mere mortals could afford real estate in Key West.”
He nodded. I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since Red’s memorial service, and I was surprised to see him look so old and tired. His shoulders hunched, the waist of his pants seemed to cut across his lower chest, and his head bent forward, his eyes cast down.
Twenty years ago, when I was only ten years old, I had thought the Sparkses were old. They’d probably been in their midforties then, which meant he was only in his sixties now. He looked at least ten years older.
“How’s your wife?”
When he looked up, I saw raw fear in his eyes. “She’s not good, I’m afraid. Sarah has been sick for a long time.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. I didn’t know. What is it? What’s wrong with her?”
“A few years back she found a lump,” he said, lifting a hand and touching the side of his chest, under his arm. “They operated and she did chemo and everything was looking fine. We thought she’d beat it. We were thinking about moving down here to Key West permanently once I retired.” As I’d noticed with many balding men, Arlen’s eyebrows seemed even bushier, composed of long errant white strands. They bounced up and down as he talked. “But then, I got laid off.” The eyebrows dropped down. “Last July.”
“You’re kidding. Just before you retired?”
He nodded. “And then in the fall, her cancer came back. I don’t know if she can take this again. She’s not strong. The doctors say they have this new treatment they want to try on her, but the benefits went with the job and we have no more supplemental insurance. Medicare won’t cover it because it’s experimental, and I can’t afford it. That’s what I’m doing here now. Going to put the house here on the market.”
“Arlen, how can they do that to you? I don’t understand. They can just drop you after you worked for them all those years?”
“It came as a surprise to me, too. Used to be you put in your time working for a big company like Motowave, and you retired with your pension and reasonable benefits for the rest of your life. Things have changed now. Big business doesn’t think it owes anything to the workingman.”
I hardly thought of Arlen Sparks as the workingman. He was more like the mad scientist. When we were kids, sometimes we’d go out to his Florida room where he had all hi
s ham radio gear set up, and we’d watch him tinker with his soldering iron and circuit boards. Being kids, we’d start asking questions about what he was doing and what he did in his job at Motowave. Mrs. Sparks would usually come scurrying out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel, and shoo us back into the kitchen. There, she’d sit on a red vinyl chair and, speaking in a hushed voice, tell us that we were not to bother Mr. Sparks as the work he was doing was top secret and he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. We believed it at first, but when we got to be teens we decided she’d been teasing us. Later I read in the paper that Motowave got many of its contracts from the Department of Defense, and I decided old Sparky might have been doing some 007 work after all.
When we parted, I promised him that I would drop in to visit them once I was back in Fort Lauderdale. I remembered all the times Mrs. Sparks had fed us sweets, listened to our problems, put Bactine and Band-Aids on skinned knees, and shared her love of books with us. Now she was back home gravely ill. We needed to step up, to return the gift of time and comfort. I wondered if Molly even knew—and she lived just down the street from them.
When I got to Fausto’s market halfway up the block, I paused to look back at Arlen, and I was surprised to see him open the green door and walk into the offices of Ocean Towing. What the hell would he be doing there? He had said that his house was on a canal, so I supposed it wasn’t such a stretch to assume he owned a boat here, too. I tried to picture him at the helm of a powerboat, his long strands of gray hair flying off his bald crown and trailing back in the wind. I shook my head. It was a ridiculous thought.
VIII
The cabdriver dropped me off at the entrance to Robbie’s boatyard, and as I walked the sandy track in the shadow of the rows of propped-up boats, I felt my pace slowing. I had to go see her. I couldn’t stay away no matter how much I wanted to. Part of my reluctance was the usual shying away from the reminder of my own mortality. We all feel it when we see someone close to us through age or circumstance die unexpectedly. Nestor was about my age and a part of my waterfront world. But he had been more than that to me—hell, I’d once lusted after the body that now lay cold in the morgue. And seeing her was a visceral reminder of that loss. He had been vigorously alive yesterday at this time, and even though I had seen his body I still found myself struggling with the how and the why. How could anyone feel safe in a world that let someone as strong and alive as Nestor die? He was such a good, decent human being. When there were so many scumbags who lived long lives, you couldn’t help but keep asking yourself why.
But I was also dreading this visit because I knew what she was likely to say. After last night, I knew it wasn’t the why that was driving Catalina. She would begin again trying to convince me that someone had murdered her husband and that I should help her find and punish the who.
Thanks, but no thanks. First off, I wasn’t convinced— as she was—that there was even anything to investigate. It seemed pretty clear to me that Nestor’s death came at the end of a bad string of accidents. Watching his career go into the toilet had upset him so that he probably wasn’t really paying proper attention on his windsurfer. I remembered how it had been blowing yesterday. Those big schooners had been charging through the water like ornery horses with the bit in their teeth, and it takes a fair amount of wind to get those big heavy boats moving like that. Out in the open ocean on a little sailboard, conditions would have been worse.
But she is alone now, I thought as I climbed the ladder to the Power Play's deck. She will have things to see to, arrangements to make, and I am the only friend she has here.
There was no sign of either Drew or Debbie, but the door to the main salon was wide open, so I went on in. Down in the captain’s cabin, I found Catalina lying on her bunk fully dressed, facing the bulkhead. I wondered if she was sleeping, but before I could cross the narrow cabin to check, she sat up and swung her feet off the bunk. I was amazed at her agility despite what looked like a basketball hanging on the front of her body. Her eyes were rimmed with red and her long black hair, which was usually tied back in a ponytail, now hung about her face like a frizzy halo.
“Hi,” she said. “Thanks for coming by.”
The way she said it sounded as though she hadn’t expected me, and that made me feel like a real louse. Had I given her reason to have such low expectations of me? Probably. On the very day she lost her husband, I hadn’t believed her.
I didn’t want to ask her how she was. It would be a stupid question under the circumstances. But as I leaned against the door frame, I didn’t know what else to say to her.
“Have you eaten anything today?”
“No,” she said, stretching her arms wide and yawning. “I’m just not hungry. Besides, there is not much to eat on the boat. They cannot run the refrigeration when the boat is hauled out.”
“Then let’s go to town.”
She reached for a slip of paper on the table next to the bunk. “Debbie brought this to me earlier. She said the police want to talk to me.”
“That’s normal.”
“Debbie thinks I should get a lawyer, but I cannot afford one. I have not worked in several months, and we can only just pay our expenses with Nestor’s paychecks. I don’t even know how long I will be allowed to stay here on this boat. But I cannot take the bus back to Fort Lauderdale until I have taken care of my husband.” She closed her eyes and turned her head to one side. I could see from the tension in her neck that she was fighting against her need to weep.
“Look, Cat, let’s take things one at a time. You will be allowed to stay aboard this boat until we get back to Fort Lauderdale. I made sure of that. I talked to Berger.”
At the sound of his name, the corners of her mouth dropped and she set her chin forward. I tried to ignore her reaction.
“As far as the cops go, I don’t think you need a lawyer. They just want to talk to you. I’ll go with you—but only if you promise we can stop for something to eat first. I’m starving.”
She pushed herself up off the bunk. Her movements were graceful as a dancer’s, but cautious, as though she thought her body might break if she moved too quickly. The child she carried was now the only tangible remains she had of her husband. She stroked her belly, smoothing the print blouse over the bulge.
“She has been kicking today. It is as though she is upset, like she knows something terrible happened.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d never felt a baby kick. There had been a time when I felt a life within me— and I’d worked hard to ignore it. But that was different and in another time that I now did my best to forget. Anytime something happened that caused that memory to poke its little head out, I changed the subject and stuffed it back into the darkness of lost memories.
Catalina took the two steps to the head. With the door open, she quickly splashed water on her face.
“Do you know for sure it’s a girl?” I asked.
“No, we decided to wait and be surprised.” She paused, the hairbrush in midair, and stared at her own reflection. “Now ...” She let her voice trail off, and I could see the muscles and bones of her jaw working under the skin. She smoothed the hair back and restrained it with a black clip. Her usually lush lips were stretched flat. Stepping back out into the cabin, she reached for a sweater that was hanging on a bulkhead hook. “Seychelle, I know you don’t want me to talk about Nestor, about what I believe happened to him.” She swung the sweater over her shoulders, the sleeves hanging down in front, and I noticed again just how lovely she was with her smooth brown skin. When she turned to look at me, her eyes were wet and glistening and there were dark red spots coloring her cheeks. “But right now, the only thing keeping me from breaking into pieces is the rage I feel at whoever killed my husband. I will find who did this to him,” she said. “I will.”
As we walked through the boatyard parking lot, a small, mousy-looking woman climbed out of an older, dusty Toyota Corolla and walked toward us.
“Catalina Frias?”
she asked.
“Yes, that is me,” Cat said.
The woman had an oversize fabric shoulder bag bulging with its unseen contents, and she carried a notebook in her hand. She extended her hand and said, “My name is Theresa Banks. I write for the Key West Citizen. Could I speak to you for a minute?”
I did my best to steer Cat away from the reporter, but she shook her arm loose from my grip. “Yes, I will speak to you. This is about Nestor, correct?”
“Yes. My sympathies, ma’am, but I’m writing a story on the accident, and I wanted to get a little more background material on your husband.”
“This was no accident,” she said. “Nestor was a champion windsurfer in the Dominican Republic. He was too skilled for such an accident.”
I stepped between them. “Listen, Cat, right now Ted Berger is going to let you stay on the boat until we get you back to Lauderdale, but if you go talking to the papers like this—”
“Mrs. Frias, if you don’t think it was an accident, what do you think happened out there?”
I spun around to face the reporter. “Please, show a little respect. This woman just lost her husband. She is not going to talk to you today.”
I turned back to Catalina. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Cat reached past my body, snagged the woman’s offered business card, and stuffed it into her handbag.
We reached the street just as a city bus was passing in front of the yard, so we flagged it down and I tried to help Catalina aboard. She shooed my hands away and pulled herself up the steps with the handrails. I told the bus driver we were headed for the Key West police station and were looking for a good place to eat close by.
He dropped us off at Garrison Bight Marina with directions to Captain Runaground Harvey’s Floating Restaurant. We ate without much talk, and I was trying to figure out what I could do to break through the tension when Cat asked for the check and hustled us out. She said she was in a hurry to get to the police station to see what they had discovered.
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