Surface Tension

by Christine Kling

  “What? Maddy said what?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I blocked the finger pier, and Hightower couldn’t get past me to untie his bowlines.

  “Move aside, Seychelle. This is business. If you can’t play with the big boys, then get out of the business.”

  He started to brush me aside.

  “Perry is one of the big boys? He’s nothing but a slimy—”

  I was suddenly grabbed from behind. Perry had jumped off the bow, and he took me by the forearms and marched me off the finger pier. I looked down at the hands that held my arms. The thick, callused fingers were topped by half crescents of black grease.

  “Now, be a good girl and go on home, honey pie.” He swatted me on the behind and cackled. “Perry’s in charge now.”

  Collazo suspected I was capable of murder, and at that moment I realized I could kill. If I’d had any kind of weapon at hand, anything to wipe that goddam smirk off Perry’s face, I would have been seriously tempted to use it.

  “This isn’t over, Perry.” I looked over his shoulder at Galen Hightower, standing with his hands on his hips, watching us with a look of disgust, as though we were a lower order of mammal. “Dr. Hightower, I would say what you’ve got here”—I jerked my head toward Perry— “is exactly what you deserve.”

  I threw off the lines before I started the engine. The old cat purred to life when I turned the key, and I jockeyed her around in her own length, hotdogging it just a little to show Hightower that he had given up the better captain.

  As I headed back up the Intracoastal, just off the Fort Lauderdale Yacht Club, Nestor Frias pulled up alongside in the thirty-eight-foot Bertram sportfisherman My Way. Aside from casual hellos at the Downtowner I hadn’t seen Nestor very much since Neal and I had gone our separate ways. He ran the charter sportfisherman out of Pier 66, and he was looking to break into a job as captain of one of the big luxury yachts like the Top Ten. He was always hanging around Neal hoping for news of some big job.

  He waved me out of the wheelhouse. I throttled back and stepped out to the side decks.

  He shouted down at me from his flybridge. “Hey, Seychelle. Sorry about Neal.”

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds and nodded. “Thanks, Nestor.”

  “A bunch of us are going to have a little service at dawn tomorrow, just outside the inlet. You know.”

  “He’s missing, Nestor. Nobody knows what happened to him at this point.”

  “It’s been forty-eight hours, Seychelle. There’d be no reason for him to just disappear” I thought of Big Guy and Shorty on the beach and what happened to Ely. He could have very good reasons, and I was quickly learning that I didn’t know who to trust.

  “Neal’s never been very reasonable, you know,” I said.

  “I just thought maybe you would like to be there.” For the first time I found myself thinking about what people would see in my actions. If I didn’t show, would I look guilty? In my business, reputation was everything. “Yeah, okay, I guess I would.”

  He waved a hand in the air and pulled away from Gorda.

  I waved back. “Thanks, Nestor.”

  On the aft deck of his boat a couple sat together in the fighting chair, an older man with graying hair and a young, firm blonde in a thong bikini on his lap. She was probably five foot two and a size three. And definitely not his wife.

  "Outta the Blue, Outta the Blue, this is the Gorda.” When he didn’t answer, I hung the microphone back on the side of the VHF and pushed the throttle forward to prevent the boat from drifting onto the sandbar at the mouth of the river. Just when I was about to give up, figuring that either Mike didn’t have his radio on or else he wasn’t monitoring channel sixteen, I finally got an answer.

  “Gorda, Gorda, this is Outta the Blue. You want to switch to channel zero nine?”

  “Roger that, zero nine.”

  Mike Beesting was a former Fort Lauderdale cop who had quit the force four or five years before and now lived aboard and ran sunset charter cruises on his Irwin 54, Outta the Blue. I wasn’t sure of all the details, but I knew that back when he was on the force, he had heard a call for help and walked into a situation in progress where some disgruntled city maintenance worker had decided to use a shotgun to pay back his boss and coworkers for all his perceived ills. After it was over, two people were dead and Mike’s leg had to be amputated at the knee. He was feted as a hero for taking down the guy, but when they offered him a desk job, he said no thanks and walked away from the department for good.

  Mike knew nothing about boats at first, and especially about diesel mechanics, but he always attempted to work on his own engine. More often than not, he screwed things up and it ended up costing him more than if he had just called a mechanic in the first place. However his settlement with the city had been quite generous, allowing him to buy his sailboat outright and still have enough to feed his daily need for generous amounts of Pusser’s Rum. The net result was I’d towed him home more than a couple of times when his engine quit with guests aboard.

  I punched the numbers onto the keypad of the VHF radio and changed channels. Mike was already there, and I just caught the tail end of his sentence.

  “... thinking about you as I’ve been watching the TV. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m managing, but I’ll be honest, things aren’t good. I need your help with something, over.”

  “Sey, you know we are on an open channel here, over.”

  “Roger that. A young girl, a friend of mine, drowned in the river last night. I’m really feeling lousy about it. Is it okay if I come over a little later? I sure could use a friend like you.”

  “Say no more. I have a charter at four-thirty, but I’ll be here with shoulders to cry on until then, over.”

  “Thanks, Mike. I’ll be seeing you. This is Gorda clear and going back to sixteen.”

  Whether or not Mike understood what I was really asking of him remained to be seen.

  I cursed my brother, all the way back up the river. So he was back at the track again. That explained a lot. Not that I hadn’t expected as much. Maddy was a compulsive gambler and Jane had finally got him to agree to join Gamblers Anonymous a couple of years ago. They

  had started to work off all those credit card balances, and I thought he had overcome this handicap, so to speak. Obviously not. So Maddy needed money immediately, and he knew where to get it. There had been offers for Gorda in the past, and Maddy knew several people who would be happy to buy her if the price was right. I was tempted to drive right down to his place to have it out with him. How dare he sabotage my business to make sure that I wouldn’t be able to make my payments? Typical of my brother. He was going to get his way no matter what.

  As I was ranting and raving out loud in the wheelhouse, I suddenly saw in my mind the image of Ely walking across the dining room at the Bahia Cabana, her green eyes flashing with recognition and joy. Things had finally been going right for her. Last night she’d told us she planned to go apartment hunting in the morning. Whoever had “dumped her,’’ as Collazo called it, was wrong. Somebody did miss her. Maddy would have to wait.

  I had driven by the Fort Lauderdale Police Station hundreds, probably thousands of times, but I’d never been inside. I parked in a visitor’s spot and fed a handful of quarters and nickels into the meter: not a good spot to let your meter expire. At the pay phone in the parking lot, I dialed Jeannie’s number. She lived only a few blocks away, and I figured I’d go back, sit in the Jeep, and wait until she arrived so we could go in together. The phone continued to ring until finally her answering machine picked up.

  “Great,” I said aloud as I replaced the receiver: I wasn’t willing to sit around waiting for Jeannie to get home. She would be furious with me, but I needed to talk to Collazo about this now.

  Beyond the door, a receptionist sat inside a tinted glass booth and pointed to a telephone on the counter as I approached. I picked up the handset as she picked up hers. I told her I was there to make a stat
ement about the murder of the Krix girl. She told me to have a seat, someone would be with me shortly.

  Two young women wearing miniskirts and tube tops sat at the end of the row of red plastic chairs. I nodded to them, but they ignored me. They sat slack-jawed, bored, staring into space. They looked like extras for some Hollywood version of life on the streets. The smaller of the two, a Hispanic girl with black hair teased high on her head, walked over to the gumball machine and put a dime inside. She opened the little metal door.

  “Aw, shit. I hate green ones.” She turned to her friend. “You want it?”

  The other girl, a blonde with a serious case of crusty acne and extremely red, bloodshot eyes, took the gum and popped it into her mouth.

  On her second try, the Hispanic girl got a red one, and for the next few minutes they sat there blowing little pink bubbles. In spite of the makeup and the clothes, I doubted either girl was over sixteen.

  I thought about how easy it was to dislike girls like them, to turn away from them and not see them, and yet how similar they were to Ely in many ways. She could have been them at the same age.

  “Do you girls go to school?” I asked.

  “Nah,” said the blonde. “I quit when I had my baby. They acted all hinky ’bout it. Dumb-ass teachers. I didn’t need that shit.”

  If one of them vanished tomorrow, would she be missed?

  The other girl blew a huge bubble that popped all over her face. They both burst into giggles.

  A woman came through the glass door at the far end of the lobby. “Seychelle Sullivan.”

  “Here.” I got up and followed her through the door and into an office off the hallway just beyond. She was very friendly and efficient, and I was beginning to think better of the Lauderdale cops. She fired questions at me, typing the answers on her keyboard nearly as fast as I spoke them. We got the preliminary stuff out of the way first. Name, address, birth date.

  “You’ve got a birthday coming soon, then,” she said.

  “Yeah. The big three-oh.”

  She smiled. “It’s not so bad.”

  That was what everybody always said to me, but I didn’t believe them.

  “Okay, just tell me, slowly, exactly what happened that day.” I had repeated the story so many times that the telling went quickly. I didn’t have to pause or search for words to describe the horror as I had the first time. Just as we were finishing up, the phone rang on the woman’s desk.

  “That was Detective Collazo,” she said after hanging up. “He wants to speak to you. I’ll show you the way.” She led me upstairs to the homicide squad room. Collazo was the only one there, sitting at one of the desks back in the corner of the large room. The air-conditioning must have been set as cool as it would go. My hands felt icy, but I could see the sweat rings under the sleeves of Collazo’s neatly pressed white shirt.

  He looked up from the papers on his desk, nodded to me, and pointed to the chair opposite his desk. “Miss Sullivan, I wanted to talk to you about Elysia Daggett.”

  “Good, because I want to talk to you about her too. What happened?”

  “Miss Sullivan. Start with your version of what happened last night.”

  I told him the story then about my meeting Elysia at her work, walking on the beach, the two guys who jumped us, and the strange questions they were asking. He took notes and asked me to go over my descriptions of the two men several times. I once thought I was a fairly observant person, but I soon realized I wasn’t able to give lots of details, just more of an overall impression. It was what they were asking that had attracted my attention.

  “You see, Detective, they didn’t ask me if I knew anything about if or how Neal got off the boat. They just assumed he was still alive, and that I somehow knew where he was.”

  Collazo narrowed his eyes and stared at me, clearly thinking about what I’d said. His stare made me uncomfortable. Finally he lowered his eyes to the papers on his desk.

  “There are certain factors in common with this Daggett girl and the Krix girl. They both lived at Harbor House at some point, and they both were connected to you.”

  “Come on, I’d never met Patty Krix.”

  “I can’t verify that. You were there at, or around, the time the Krix girl was murdered, and you were with the Daggett girl just before she died.”

  His words should have made me nervous. He was telling me I was a suspect, but I couldn’t get past the questions in my mind. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would anybody want to kill Elysia? She made it home safely last night, I swear to God. How can she be dead?” I stared at Collazo, fighting the pressure that was building up in my throat again, wanting him to give me some understandable answer to this incomprehensible act.

  He was shaking his head. Now his eyes refused to meet mine. “It looks very probable, Miss Sullivan, that Garrett is also dead.” He flipped through the pages of his notebook and sucked on the end of his gold pen. “According to the forensics report, the blood on the deck matched the type listed in his military records.”

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “So where’s his body?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a big ocean. Sharks, currents, you name it. We don’t always find them all.”

  “Okay.” My other hand hurt. I forced myself to relax my grip on my shoulder bag. “Even if you assume he’s dead, it doesn’t tell us why, or what happened to Elysia.”

  “True. Nor does it tell us who fired the gun on the Top Ten. I thought perhaps you would enlighten me on that one, Miss Sullivan.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know. I feel like I’ve been over and over it so many times.” I ran my fingers back through my hair at my temples. I was developing one of those behind-the-eyeballs headaches. “Detective Collazo, please, just tell me what happened to my friend.”

  “I’m not at liberty to share certain details with you.”

  “That’s bullshit. I’m the closest thing to family that girl had. I have a right to know what happened to her. She wouldn’t do drugs. What makes you think she was doing drugs?”

  He ignored my question and let the silence drag out. I refused to let him win this one. I wasn’t going to volunteer anything more until he asked.

  “These men who were questioning you, they left you alone finally.”

  I finished the story up to our dropping Elysia off at Harbor House, glad to be able to fill the uncomfortable silence.

  “Miss Sullivan, what you’re telling me is in direct conflict with what Mr. Long at Harbor House asserts.”

  “I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “That is precisely the problem.” He grasped the edge of his desk and leaned forward. “You are not telling me everything that happened.” Then he raised his voice, loud but not quite shouting, enunciating each word clearly and never taking his eyes off me. “You think you’re smart. You think I don’t know and I’ll never find out what went on out there, that I’ll never find your connection to all this. But I will, Miss Sullivan. You can count on it. I’ll be there watching your every move. There’s a great deal more to your story than what’s on the surface.”

  “I’ve been straight with you. I’ve told you what I know.” My voice sounded thin and whiny.

  “Right, Miss Sullivan,” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Sliding his chair back, he stood over me. “Long says the Daggett girl never arrived last night, that they have a curfew. She had never been late before, much less stayed out all night. He says he questioned all the staff and no one saw her. They have a sign-in log by the door and she never signed in.”

  “No way. I saw her walk in the door and there was a person sitting there at the desk. Someone over there’s lying.”

  “I quite agree with you,” he said, leaning over his desk, speaking in a hushed tone now and staring down at me, “that someone is not telling the truth.”

  As I drove up Federal Highway to Sunrise on my way to Mike’s dock, I went over in my mind all the things I wished I’d said, all the
clever comebacks, the questions that would have thrown Collazo off guard.

  “Goddammit!” I slammed my hand against the steering wheel. I hated the way I’d reacted to Collazo’s insinuations. The man’s eyes were like laser beams. Why did I get all whiny and act guilty as hell?

  I parked Lightnin’ in the half-empty lot of a pizza restaurant and crossed the street to the waterfront apartment building where Mike kept Outta the Blue. I passed through the first-floor parking garage and went out to the boat slips on the Middle River. The boat was all closed up, with the telltale water discharge indicating he had the air-conditioning running below. I pounded extra hard on the hull, and the main hatch slid open almost immediately.

  Mike’s salt-and-pepper hair and straggly beard were barely visible through the translucent plastic of the spray dodger. “Who’s there? Oh, hey, Seychelle, come on down.”

  After climbing through the gate in the lifelines and making my way around the bimini supports, I followed Mike down the companionway ladder closing the hatch behind me.

  “Have a seat.” He pointed to one of the two swivel captain’s chairs in the main salon. He hopped comfortably about without his prosthesis, his scarred stump protruding from his shorts. He hardly ever wore the artificial leg on board, claiming his balance wasn’t good enough yet with it on. “Would you like a piña colada?” He motioned toward the full blender on the galley counter.

  Down below, one could see that this boat was the home of a dock-bound bachelor who wasn’t really interested in any distance sailing. Judging from the nineteen-inch TV, VCR, CD player desktop computer, and humidor filled with cigars, I was surprised Mike hadn’t fried the wiring in the boat already.

  “No thanks, I don’t have much time. Mike, I don’t know if you understood what I wanted from you, but I hope you can help me with some information.”

  “Hey, look, I know I seem pretty stupid when it comes to boats, but there was a time folks thought I was a pretty smart cop. Still got lots of cop friends, too. I’ve already made a few phone calls.” He poured himself a coffee mug full of the yellow slush and hopped over to the other captain’s chair. “Hope you don’t mind. Cheers.” He took a long drink, then licked the ice off his mustache.