“I can do that. Give me a couple of hours, tops.”
XXIV
We decided to take Mike’s car to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, so after securing Gorda to my dock we took his dinghy back to his boat. As we pulled up to his dock, I noticed a small, domelike new antenna on the arch that held up his boom.
“Another toy, Mike?”
“Yup. A satellite phone. Now, I’ve got communication capability worldwide.”
“But you never go farther than ten miles offshore.”
“Yes, darling, but you never know when I might. And now, if I do, I can call you and leave a message on your goddamn cottage phone ’cause you don’t even own a cell phone.”
“Okay, already. I’ll get one. I will. I promise.” I just didn’t say when.
It turned out that having Mike along speeded up the process of getting into the inner recesses of the Fort Lauderdale police station, but once there, our progress toward Collazo’s desk slowed considerably. Mike knew everybody, and they all had to stop and shake his hand and ask him how he was doing while trying to hide their furtive glances down at his leg. I knew my way and got tired of waiting for Mr. Popularity, so I abandoned him in the corridor and made for the detectives’ bullpen where I found Collazo sitting, squinting at a screen, and doing two-fingered typing on a laptop.
My relationship with Detective Victor Collazo dated back a couple of years to the time my ex-boyfriend, lover, significant other—whatever you wanted to call Neal Garrett—had gotten himself involved with a Fort Lauderdale sleazebag who was trying to smuggle his ill-earned cash out of the States on rust-bucket freighters. When a stripper, Neal’s new girlfriend, ended up dead, Collazo had suspected me, so we hadn’t exactly started off as buddies. But we had achieved a state of grudging tolerance, and now especially, watching him struggle to type on the computer, I felt a kind of kinship. Pinder had called it: people like Collazo and me were Old School.
“Detective, how’s it going?” I reached out and shook his hand.
Collazo had more body hair than any other individual I’d ever met, and because of that he always wore long-sleeved shirts. He never rolled up his sleeves or unbuttoned his collar—which was unfortunate because he also had a tendency to sweat. When he reached out his arm, there were already big wet circles under his pits, and his hand felt damp in my grasp.
“I got a ride here with Mike Beesting, but he’s out there swapping lies with his old buddies.”
“You said you had information to add concerning the Hazell case.”
“Detective, don’t you ever ease up a little, take part in the social niceties of life? You know, like say hello to a person for example?”
“Hello, Miss Sullivan. You don’t think Hazell’s murder had anything to do with drugs.”
“Right. That’s why I came. Collazo, have you ever been to Key West?”
“I can’t see how that would pertain to this investigation.”
“Oh, it does. Did you know that Key West was built by the wrecking industry in the the nineteenth century?”
“This is going to get to Hazell, eventually.”
“Yes, just give me ten minutes to explain it to you.”
“Five minutes.”
“Okay. It’s economics, supply and demand. In my business, the marine salvage business, when a boat goes on the reef, the salvage company that gets her off more or less in one piece can make a claim, which translates to a percentage of the value of the boat. Here in Fort Lauderdale, fifty years ago, most boats or yachts were relatively small, both in size and value. Today, if your yacht is under a hundred feet or worth less than two million, you’re small potatoes. You know that even five percent of a million dollars is a nice piece of change. This has become a huge business, but as the yachts grew in size, more and more people jumped into the business. Then, with electronic navigation like GPS, not as many boats were having accidents. The end result is that today there are too many salvage boats and not enough wrecks, so somebody has decided to make wrecks happen, and I believe it’s such a lucrative business that they have now killed two people to keep their scam from being discovered. Quentin was number two. The first was Nestor Frias in Key West last week.”
“And you have proof of this.”
“Well—” I started, but I was interrupted by Mike’s arrival.
“Hey, Vic, old buddy, old pal, how’s it hanging?” He plopped down into a chair he pulled over from an empty desk.
Collazo merely looked at Mike and bounced his head in one curt nod. As a rule, everybody liked Mike. Collazo, however, wasn’t everybody.
Mike said, “And I’m just fine, thanks for asking, Vic.” He turned to me. “Seychelle, I see you’re getting the warm reception I predicted.”
“Mike, he’s listening to me. Right now that’s all I’m asking because he’s right, we don’t have any proof. It’s all just speculation.” I turned back to Collazo. “Quentin crewed for me on my tug on the trip I just made coming back up from Key West. We spent three days and two nights on my very small boat. He was never anything other than a good crew and complete gentleman. He was from a poor little island in the Caribbean, Dominica, but he had ambition. He was up here to make enough to go back home and buy his own boat. The man I knew wouldn’t have been over there making some drug deal, Detective, I’m sure of it. Not Quentin. But the person who did this doesn’t have a very high opinion of the Fort Lauderdale cops.”
When Collazo narrowed his eyes, Mike cut in. “Seychelle thinks that they killed him and then dumped him over there because the cops won’t pay much attention to another black dude getting his head bashed in along that stretch.”
I forged ahead as though Mike had not spoken. “Quentin had just been hired by Ocean Towing. The company is owned by a guy named Neville Pinder whose main offices are in Key West, but he has branch offices all over. Including here. He’s from the Abacos, and the way I hear it, the Bahamas don’t want him back. Nobody knows where a guy like Pinder suddenly got the money to finance an operation like his.”
Collazo reached for the notebook on his desk and flipped to a new page. He wrote the name Neville Pinder.
“The guy in Key West who was killed was named Nestor Frias, and the Key West detective you should talk to about that is Lassiter.”
“I should talk to,” he said, repeating it just as I had, with no questioning inflection in his voice. Collazo never asked questions, he just made these maddening statements all the time.
“Detective, this is big. This is not just some guy getting mugged on Sistrunk. That guy, Nestor Frias, the one who died in Key West? He was the captain of Ted Berger’s yacht. I’m sure that’s a name you’ve heard of.” Collazo’s dark eyes met mine in a quick glance before he slowly wrote the name in his notebook.
“I’m not sure where Berger fits into this thing, or if he even does. But he was with me in Key West when we found the body down there. Anyway, Quentin knew that I suspected Ocean Towing of causing these wrecks, and he said he was going to look into it and see what information he could get for me. He must have found out something, or else he was about to, and whatever it was got him killed.”
The detective looked at his watch. “Your time is up, Miss Sullivan.”
There was more that I wanted to tell him, but I was afraid that if I brought up the black SUV in Key West and the idea that perhaps the same vehicle had been the one that followed me Monday night, it wouldn’t help swing his viewpoint on Quentin. I didn’t want him thinking I was just some crazy paranoid female.
Collazo set the notebook down on his desk and returned to his computer keyboard as though we weren’t still sitting there.
“I think we’ve been dismissed,” Mike said.
XXV
By the time Mike dropped me off back at my place, I barely had time to shower and change before heading down the street to try to reclaim Lightnin’ from where I’d left her. As I was about to fly out the door, though, I noticed the red light blinking on my answering ma
chine. The display told me I had two messages. I pressed the play button; the first message was from B.J.
“Seychelle, not only is it possible, but the technology was all developed at Motowave. I’m printing out all the information you’ll need. I’ll drop it off at your place later tonight.”
The voice on the second message was nearly as excited. “Seychelle, dahling,” George Rice began, “I know you said that you were only going to think about it, but I put out some feelers and got a strike right away. I have a buyer for you, cash in hand. This is a solid offer for the boat and the business.” He went on to tell me what the offer was, and I had to hit rewind and play it again to make sure I’d heard it right. With that kind of money, I could travel, buy my own home. Heck, I could even go to college, major in art, start a whole new life.
It took four tries this time, but the engine finally caught and I went roaring off toward US 1—but not without noticing another bright green pickup in my rearview mirror.
The house on the Colee Hammock side of the river looked a whole lot different than it had the first time B.J. and Molly’s Gramma Josie had dragged me over there. Back then, the place was unkempt and overgrown, but my brother Maddy had paid to have the whole house relandscaped. Now Faith had a service that came in twice a month to take care of the yard. They were working under her direction, and slowly the place was starting to look less like a suburban tract home’s lawn. She hadn’t wanted to hurt Maddy’s feelings, but straight-lined hedges and red-mulched flower beds were not her style. Now ninety-two years of age, our grandmother had first arrived in Fort Lauderdale when it was little more than a frontier town, and when she said she liked native plants, she was one of the few people left who really remembered what they looked like.
I let myself into the house as she’d told me I should. “Hello, Faith?”
“Out here, dear, in the kitchen,” she called.
The house was filled with the sweet aroma of baked ham, and when I found her in the kitchen, she was stirring a pot that held simmering candied yams. “Wow, it smells great.” I came up behind her and touched her on the shoulder. She turned and presented her cheek to be kissed. “How have you been this week?”
“Just fine,” she said. “The city tried to push through approval for another five hundred units downtown this week, though. I just don’t know where it’s going to end.”
“Did you go to the hearing?”
She reached into the freezer and dropped three ice cubes into her glass. “Of course.” For the last fifty years at least, my grandmother had been hounding the local government, attempting to keep them in line. Single-handedly, she had brought down various local politicians and tried valiantly to rein in their rampant development. “Help yourself to a beer. Let’s go outside.”
On her way outdoors, she stopped in the living room and made herself a gin and tonic. I followed her out onto the wooden deck that overlooked the river. This had become our routine: drinks until six, then dinner inside.
“I missed you last week, and we really didn’t get a chance to talk the other night. So tell me more about this trip to Key West.” We settled into the two weathered wooden chairs. The yawl Annie with her varnished spruce masts lay at the dock to our right, and we had a great view down the curving river to our left. Upriver, the sun was settling between the tall buildings; a crescent moon hung not far behind, ready to make her westerly descent.
“Oh boy, so much has happened. I feel like I’m a different person than I was a week ago. Guess what? I’m thinking of getting out of the salvage business. Someone has offered a lot of money to buy me out—and I’m thinking about taking it.”
“Why? I thought you loved working on your river.”
I leaned back in the chair and sighed. “Yeah, there have been some good times. But you know how much the town is changing. My business is changing, too.”
“Be careful what you wish for, dear.”
“When Red died, I decided to take over Sullivan Towing and Salvage, in part because it was a way I could keep a part of him alive. But I also got into this because I wanted to help people. Now it’s all about the money.” I took a long deep drink, and the cold beer slid down my throat, chilling me from within. The air was cooling as the sun dropped lower in the sky, and I pulled up the zipper on my sweatshirt. “Grams, you remember the stories about the days when wrecking was a major business along this coast, don’t you?”
“Of course. When I was a child, I heard many adults lamenting that the wrecking business was fading into the past.”
“Well, I’m afraid somebody’s trying to resurrect it, and as a result two young men I knew well have died. Murdered— over money, I think. By somebody in my business. One of them left behind a widow eight months’ pregnant. You met her at my house the other night.”
“Men,” she said, and then she sniffed in disgust. “Even though I buried two good husbands, both of whom I still miss, I know that for them, sex, money, it’s all the same in the end. It’s about power.”
Despite her advanced years, Faith had not lost anything in the spit-and-vinegar department.
“Women,” she said, “are more decent. They care more about children and making a home.”
“I don’t know if I can agree with that, Faith. I never intend to have children and I like being in charge. And there are some vicious, money-hungry women.” I remembered the woman who had married Molly’s ex-husband. She also had him murdered.
“No babies, Seychelle? For heaven’s sake, why not?”
Why was everyone in my life so concerned about having babies all of a sudden? “That just isn’t meant to be for me, Grams.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Women are meant to have babies. All women.”
“Not me. I’m defective in that department.”
She placed her hand flat against her chest at the neckline of the simple cotton blouse she wore. “Oh dear, what’s the matter? Is it something physical? Did you have to have a procedure?”
I opened my mouth to make a wisecrack, something about still having all the equipment, but the only thing that came out was a strangled sob. Once again it had crept up on me, surprised me. It had been years since I’d felt the grief this fierce, this fresh. It was those words, a procedure, that brought it all back. That was what the nurse at the clinic had told me to do. To have a procedure done, to take care of the “problem.” The memories that I usually managed to push back into the darkness broke loose and a wave of black pain washed over me, nearly drowning me. I leaned forward with my teeth gritted, my chest silently heaving, my nostrils contracting as I struggled for air.
Grams slid her chair closer to mine and placed her veined hand on my knee. She didn’t try to stop my tears; she just stayed with me, and her presence helped me ride the storm in a way I never had before. When my sobs had quieted and I finally lifted my head to look at her, wondering what I was going to say, she was the first to speak.
“Was it a boy or a girl?” she asked, and with those words I almost went under again. She grasped my hand. “Hold on. You can get through this.” Her words were barely more than a whisper.
When I at last I was able to speak, I asked “How did you know?”
“Oh dear, you know your mother came to us late in life. I told you that. What I didn’t tell you about was the two miscarriages I had before her.”
“Two? Oh my God.”
Faith had taken the beer bottle from my hand when I’d collapsed. She handed it back to me. “Here, now, take a drink. So what happened, dear? Can you tell me?”
Could I? I wasn’t sure. I did as she asked, took a long swig. It helped. “I’ve never told anyone.”
“I think you’ll find it helps.”
I took a deep breath and tried to make my muscles relax. “I was twenty.” I gave a dry laugh. “That was over ten years ago but at moments like tonight, it seems so fresh, like it just happened. I only slept with him once—didn’t even know how to find him after. Not that it mattere
d. It wasn’t his problem.”
I stopped, not certain I could go on. To tell it would mean I would have to see it again. It would mean letting a little light shine on those images that most of the time I had successfully kept in the dark. Successfully? If that had been the case, then why did I still suffer from these crying jags?
“When I was late, I just figured I would go, have an abortion, no big deal. Only it was. A very big deal. When I went to the clinic and they started on about the procedure, I couldn’t stand the sound of that word. I left. Walked out to my Jeep and never went back. I intended to. I told myself I wasn’t going to keep it, no way, but I kept putting it off. My body was changing and even before it made any sense, I could feel the life in me.”
“I know what you mean. I always knew I was pregnant even before there were any real signs.”
I nodded. “I was working as a lifeguard on Fort Lauderdale Beach back then, and I worried that it might start to show. But it was winter and I wore my sweats to work most of the time. I could see my face and body softening, rounding out a bit, but no one else noticed. There never was anything bad—no morning sickness or anything. In fact, I felt great, you know, strong and healthy. There were weeks when I let myself forget all about it. I guess they’d call it denial.
“Then one morning I felt it move. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t been paying any attention to the time flying by and I was still not intending to carry this thing to term and then it moved inside me.
“It was that night I woke up around two in the morning in the worst pain I have ever felt. I lived in a little apartment then, over off Sunrise Boulevard. I had a phone on the nightstand and I called 911, but it took them forever to get there. When the paramedics arrived, I was on the floor in a pool of blood holding my dead baby. She was gray. She never took a breath. Tiny. Oh God, she was tiny, but she had all her fingers and toes.”
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