Florida Is Murder (Due Justice and Surface Tension Mystery Double Feature) (Florida Mystery Double Feature)

by Diane Capri

  ***

  I didn’t see any suspicious dark-windowed cars parked along the road anywhere in my Rio Vista neighborhood. Nobody was following me, either. I drove around the block a few more times just to be sure. It felt a little odd driving barefoot, but I’d left my sneakers somewhere on the bottom of the Port Everglades inlet.

  Abaco was beside herself when I came through the gate. She jumped and whirled and yelped. I sat down on the grass and held her scratching her ears while she moaned and rolled her eyes back in pure canine bliss.

  I kept the dog inside the cottage with me when I got into the shower. It’s bad enough feeling like somebody’s out there gunning for you, but to have to climb into the shower after growing up watching Psycho on the late show was really nerve-wracking.

  Even the lousy pressure in my shower hurt as the jets of water hit my aching body. The barnacle scratches on my arms and belly stung as the salt washed off, and I could barely lift my left arm to lather my hair.

  I was wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around my head, and had just finished drying off my legs, when I remembered the book with the drawings in my backpack. I went out in the front room, pulled the stuff out of my slightly soggy backpack, and set the papers and photos out to dry on the bar. I was studying the photo of Neal and me in the Tortugas when I heard the knock at the front door. In an instant, my heart rate doubled. Abaco barked once, and then started whining. My great protector.

  I felt naked. I was naked. I wrapped my hair towel around me, sarong style, and looked around the living room. There was nothing remotely like a weapon anywhere in sight.

  Another knock. The dog should have been barking her head off, but she just sat there looking at the front door, smiling and panting. I picked up the cordless phone, ready to bean somebody over the head with it if necessary, and went to the door.

  “Who is it?” I asked, face to the crack in the door.

  “It’s B.J.”

  “Shit.” I twisted the dead bolt and swung open the door. “Sorry. I thought you were one of them.”

  He looked at my face, then at the phone gripped in my white knuckles, and then back at my face. “What were you going to do? Talk me to death?”

  “It’s not funny,” I said, motioning for him to follow me inside. “You don’t know what I’ve been through in the last few days.”

  “How’d you get that bruise?” He pointed to his own forehead.

  I fingered the spot I knew was purple. “This ... ow. Got hit with a fire extinguisher. That was before I was thrown overboard and nearly drowned.”

  “Seriously?”

  “What do you think, I’m doing a stand-up routine here?”

  “You sure don’t look good.”

  “Thanks. Just what a girl wants to hear. You have such a way with words, Mr. Moana.”

  As I was speaking, he went into my bedroom, pulled the quilt off the bed, and with a big flourish, spread it out on the living room floor.

  “Lie down.”

  “What?” I said clutching at my towel. “B.J., last night somebody tried to kill me. And they came damn close.”

  “Facedown.” He picked up a pillow off the couch and set it on the floor. “Put this under your neck and let your head hang off the other side.”

  “I don’t have time for this ...”

  He put his hands on my shoulders and pressed down. I resisted at first, but the weight of his hands suddenly felt overpowering, and I bent my knees and spread out on the quilt.

  “Take off the towel.”

  “Why?” I lifted my head and looked over my shoulder at him.

  A faint smile lit his eyes. “Just do it, Seychelle. Trust me.

  I hesitated only a fraction of a second after looking at the familiar planes and angles that made up his face. “Oh, B.J. I’m just so tired.” I unwrapped the towel, and he slid it down so that it was draped across my butt.

  “Shh. I know. Just try to empty your mind.” He knelt on top of my back with a knee on either side of my rib cage and began to knead the muscles in my shoulders. His hands dug deep into the fibers of that damaged left muscle, and it felt as though electricity coursed through his fingers. A very real and palpable heat penetrated from his skin deep into the pain-wracked tissue. It hurt, but there was an exquisite pleasure in the pain.

  I closed my eyes and surrendered my consciousness to the world of sensation. Explosions of color lit up my inner eyelids. But before long, my memory kicked in and a montage of memories played in my mind without plot or destination, the way dreams sometimes jump from image to image with no discernible connection.

  Pit and I played dress-up next to the family’s Dodge Valiant, getting into Red’s navy footlocker, trying on his uniforms, the big brass latches on the locker gleaming in the late afternoon light, the garage filled with the odor of old motor oil and mothballs.

  Standing in front of an easel, my mother’s arms wrapped around me from behind, her warm bosom pressed against my back. She was steadying my right hand and the brush it held, whispering in my ear “Light strokes, yes, that’s it, lovely,” as I washed in the blue sky around the white clouds.

  All five of us were on board Gorda, probably the one and only time it ever happened. It was the Fourth of July and we were offshore waiting for the fireworks on the city barge. It was a night so dark and still, the sea looked like star-splattered black glass. Meanwhile, Maddy, the only one allowed to use the lighter lit Pit’s and my sparklers ever so slowly, and we were screaming at him to hurry up, to stop trying to be such a big shot. Red told us all to shut up. Mother went up to stand alone on the bow. He didn’t go after her.

  We were in the living room and Red was crying. I’d never seen my father cry. I hadn’t said a word to anybody all day. Not to the lifeguards. Not to the police officers. Not to my brothers. Not to my father. “Didn’t she say anything?” he kept asking. “I don’t understand. Why? Why did she do this? She must have said something.” I didn’t think I would ever talk again. . . .

  The summer burned up through my towel, sandwiching me between rays of the sun and the dry oven heat of the sand. On a radio, several blankets over Carole King was singing “Up on the Roof.” I was pretending to read the words of my book.

  “Seychelle,” my mother said.

  I didn’t answer her. I kept my eyes moving over the print on the page.

  “Honey.” I was still mad. I wanted to be back with Pit and Molly. “Try to understand. Sometimes it’s just too hard to do what we know is right.

  “Seychelle, will you ever forgive me?”

  I answered her.

  She stood up and walked down to the water.

  ***

  “Did you fall asleep?”

  B.J.’s voice brought me back. The pain was nearly gone. I felt rested and renewed.

  I sat up, shifting the towel around me, and rotated my arm and shoulder. There was a little remnant, sort of a phantom pain, but I had regained 90 percent of the movement in my wrist and shoulder.

  “That’s amazing, B.J. What did you do?”

  “Just a little shiatsu. It’s like acupuncture, only using massage instead of needles.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said, trying to stand gracefully without losing the towel. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged. “What are friends for?”

  I walked closer to him and watched his eyes. “You are my friend, aren’t you? I mean, after what happened the other night at your house ... I don’t know, I was kinda crazy.”

  “Always, Seychelle.”

  He was right. I could see it in there.

  “You wouldn’t believe what I had started thinking about you. People have been following me, spying on me, trying to hurt me, and I haven’t known who to trust.”

  “Trust your own instincts,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me.

  My own arms were crossed in front of my chest, clutching the towel, and I folded into his embrace feeling slight and fragile in the circle of his arms. It was rare and remarkably ple
asant for me to feel almost petite. I nuzzled my face into his chest, smelling him and feeling the thudding of my pulse deep in my tight throat. I wanted to say something, to explain that I’d never felt anything like his touch, but the words wouldn’t come. I pressed my body to his and was about to toss my towel and reach around those shoulders when he placed his hands on my arms and gently pushed me away.

  Our eyes locked. He brushed the backs of his fingers across my cheek. Smiling, I playfully bit his pinky.

  B.J. pushed out his lower lip in a playful pout and shook his head. “Seychelle.”

  I loved the sound of his voice speaking my name. “How do you do that? I was in so much pain, and you just made it all go away.”

  “No.” He sighed. “Not all of it.” He pressed his fingers against the tendons on the side of my neck, and I winced. “See that tightness? You are still holding on to something, something I can’t massage away. I don’t know what it is … maybe you don’t even know what it is. But until then”—he turned me around—“this is not the time,” and he pushed me through the bedroom door. He didn’t follow.

  After kicking the door closed, I flopped facedown on my bed, grabbed a pillow, pulled it tight over the back of my head, and screamed into the mattress. Pain? Yeah, I knew pain—the pain of rejection. The fabric around my face grew wet with spit. I didn’t care.

  When I finally got up, I took a few deep breaths and looked around my room. It was a mess, like my life. Why, oh why was I coming on to B.J. like this? I was behaving like an idiot. I sorted through several piles of wrinkled clothing before finally settling on a pair of jeans and a plain green T-shirt. When I walked out into the living room, still combing the snarls out of my hair B.J. was sitting on the couch drinking a glass of orange juice.

  His smiling eyes watched me cross the room. “Jeannie called me,” he said. “She was worried about you—sent me over here to find you. I guess she’s been leaving messages on your machine and trying to reach you for almost twenty-four hours.”

  I glanced at the machine. The red light was blinking.

  “Did she say what she wanted?”

  “Just that she’s pinned down the owner of the Top Ten. She said she needs to talk to you about it.”

  I dialed Jeannie’s number but just got her answering machine again. I left a brief message so she’d know I was alive, and told her I’d call back later.

  “Do you want to talk about what’s going on?” B.J. asked.

  I opened the fridge and searched fruitlessly for something edible. I reached for the orange juice and got a glass for company’s sake.

  Flopping down into my mamasan chair and tucking my feet under me, I considered how much to tell him. Not that I didn’t trust B.J., but I didn’t want to get him worried—or more worried.

  “As near as I can tell, Neal was after something when he went out there on the Top Ten. He was diving for something on the bottom. Remember those two guys I told you had hassled me and Elysia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yesterday, after I got back from the memorial service, I took the Whaler and went back out to try to find the same spot where I found the Top Ten, and those two guys were diving out there. They were checking out some artificial reef wrecks. Neal knew where it was— whatever it is—so that’s why they were trying to find Neal the night they jumped us. I have no idea what Elysia had to do with it, but I’m sure her death is connected.

  “So, anyway, last night I went aboard the Top Ten and got the last position out of the GPS. And it seems at least one of those guys had the same idea. While I was poking around the boat, I noticed something weird on the afterdeck. It was this big compressor. Maybe Neal was planning on using it as a hookah rig so he could stay down longer than he could on a tank. But I don’t know how deep you can go on a rig like that.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I thought maybe I would go over to Pier 66 and ask some questions, see if Neal had talked to anybody about it when he brought it aboard.”

  “I think you need to leave things alone, Seychelle. Let the police deal with this.”

  “Yeah, right. They wouldn’t even know the right questions to ask—that is, if they were even interested in asking them.” I punched the button on my answering machine to see if anyone had left messages besides Jeannie. As the third message started to play, I recognized Detective Collazo’s voice.

  “Miss Sullivan, I need to speak to you. It concerns the Daggett girl. Please call me or beep me immediately.” The robot voice on the machine told me that his message had been recorded at eight-thirty in the morning. Neither B.J. nor I said anything for several long seconds. I just sat on my stool rubbing my hand across my lips and chin, staring at the machine.

  B.J. was the first to break the silence. “Are you going to call him?”

  “I don’t trust him, B.J. I think he’s just using Ely’s name to make me call. There were cops on the Top Ten when I came back by it this morning.”

  “The police are not the bad guys, Seychelle.”

  “They think I killed Neal and Patty. Pete says Collazo’s been poking around the Downtowner asking about me. He’s not even looking for other suspects. What’s he going to think when they figure out it was me on the Top Ten last night?”

  “You want me to drive you over to Jeannie’s? She’ll know what to do.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not home, remember?”

  “We’ll wait for her.”

  “B.J., these guys scare me, but jail scares me even more. This guy Collazo, he’s just too focused on me. I didn’t do anything, but I’ve watched enough segments of 60 Minutes to know that innocent people do go to jail for crimes they didn’t commit—and it’s usually because of some pit bull type of cop who just won’t let go and makes the evidence fit the perp he wants it to fit. Naw, I’ve got to do this other thing first. I need to find out what the story is on that compressor on the boat. If I can figure out what Neal was doing out there that morning, then okay, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable talking to the cops. But not till then.”

  He shook his head but smiled. “You are one stubborn, hardheaded woman.”

  I grabbed my shoulder bag off the bar and rummaged around for the keys to Lightnin’. “I’ll be fine.” I lifted my arm and rotated my wrist. The pain was barely noticeable. “Thanks for everything, B.J.”

  “Okay. But I’m going to be working around here the rest of the day. I’ll be inside the big house. If you need me, I’ll be here.”

  Chapter XVIII

  The Top Ten used to berth on B Pier, in Slip B37. It was third in from the end, so I walked out the length of the pier. Most of the bigger boats had changed since the days I used to visit Neal there. These megayachts usually stayed on the move in order to remain one step ahead of the tax man. Their transoms bore hailing ports such as George Town, Cayman Islands; Road Harbor B.V.I.; or Hamilton, Bermuda—all exotic ports with little in the way of industry for their people, so providing tax-dodge hailing ports kept the millionaires in town for a few days out of the year.

  My Way was in her slip, but the boat was all locked up. I didn’t see Nestor around. The docks looked deserted. I thought I would at least find Raymond out here working on the deck of one of the big yachts. Raymond was from down island. He had come up to the states from the Caribbean as a crewman on board a big classic wood charter yacht and then had some kind of falling-out with the skipper in Lauderdale. That was about four years ago, and he had supposedly been working to make his fare home to Bequia ever since. He worked illegally, on a cash-only basis, but he could lay down a coat of varnish that looked like glass. His skin was nearly as black as the Ray-Ban shades he always wore, and his dreads were shoulder length. He always looked like he was just loafing around, but he got more work done than three average men, and the skippers fought to hire him. He rarely spoke, but he was always listening.

  “Seychelle, ova hea.” The voice came from the foredeck of a hundred-foot-plus British flagged schooner.

  I walked a
bit out the finger pier. Under the low blue foredeck awning, Nestor and Raymond sat grinning and passing a joint back and forth.

  “Come join the party, Seychelle,” Nestor said.

  I grabbed the wire lifelines and climbed onto the high deck of the schooner. She was an old-timer dating back to the twenties, but she was in immaculate condition. I remembered her from a few years back when Red towed her up the New River. The captain was a British gentleman who had invited me below for a tour. She looked like she had been under Raymond’s care for several weeks. Her brightwork shone like blown glass.

  Up on the foredeck, I ducked under the awning and joined the two guys. Nestor was wearing the usual hired captain’s uniform—blue cargo shorts, Top-Siders, and a white polo shirt with the name of his boat, My Way, embroidered over the breast pocket.

  I perched on the edge of a skylight hatch. “I wanted to ask you guys a couple of questions.”

  “You okay?” Raymond asked when he saw my cuts and bruises up close.

  “Yeah, it was nothing. A long story.”

  “You like some ganja, mon?” Nestor offered me the joint. His fake accent was pathetic, and he looked pretty stoned. As a third-generation Cuban American, there was very little Caribbean left in him.

  “No, thanks.”

  “What can we do for you, lady?” Raymond smiled his shy, uneven grin. The man could smoke dope all day and never get the least messed up. I’d seen him do it on the Top Ten.

  “I’m trying to figure out what Neal was doing out there last Thursday. Did he say anything to anybody about what he was taking the boat out for?”

  “Naw,” Nestor said. Raymond shook his head.

  “Okay. Did you ever notice Neal loading a compressor onto the afterdeck of the boat?”

  “Yeah.” Raymond nodded, his dreads bouncing. “He axed me to help him wit it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Nestor said, “I remember that day.”

  “Did he say what he wanted to use it for?”

  “Yeah,” Nestor said, taking a deep drag and holding the smoke in his lungs. I waited for him to finish. And waited.