Surface Tension (26 page)

“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.”

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.

He exhaled with a whoosh. “He said he was going to do a little diving out on a reef offshore, shoot some grouper maybe some summer crab.” Neal had always been guilty of taking lobster out of season. I could almost hear him bragging about it to Nestor.

“But why would he need another compressor? The
Top Ten
’s already got one below for filling tanks. Neal was always a tank diver.”

Nestor shrugged. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes stayed on the joint. “He just said he wanted to try diving with a hookah rig once. It was the boss’s money, he said. You know, he might as well experiment.”

A hookah rig was one where the diver was connected by a long hose to a compressor on the surface. Usually, though, they used small compressors that had been fitted inside a flotation device so that the compressor followed them around on the surface. I couldn’t imagine any reason why Neal would try out a hookah rig.

“Why, looky who’s here,” Perry Greene called out as he walked down the finger pier and prepared to climb aboard the schooner. “If it ain’t Miss Sullivan herself. Whooee, sure looks like somebody beat the crap outta you.”

“Hey, Perry, leave her alone,” Nestor said. “What’s up?”

Perry’s white-blond hair hung in his eyes as he ducked under the awning and dropped his butt onto the teak decks. The hair did not conceal the open greed in his eyes as he watched the two men smoke, nor did his cutoffs conceal much of anything, the way he was sitting on the deck. I turned my head aside in disgust.

“Hey, you guys wanna pass me a little of that?” He reached for the joint and sucked in smoke hungrily.

Raymond looked at me for several seconds before turning to Perry. “The captain is not hea.”

Perry exhaled loudly. “Shit, and here I thought we’d get some business done. Got some paperwork to take care of.” He grinned at me, waiting for me to ask.

I couldn’t believe it. He had to be talking about a job. They were headed upriver with the schooner for a haul-out, and they were going to be hiring Perry to help them make the trip? I caught Raymond’s eye, and he nodded at me, confirming it.

“So the Brit’s hiring you, is he?”

“Yes sirree, boy. What, they didn’t ask you, Seychelle? Now, what the hell do you make of that, huh?” He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Looks like nobody wants to hire a bitch to do a man’s job.”

“Perry,” Nestor said, “why don’t you just shut up? Even if having balls was all it took to be a good captain, you’d still have trouble meeting the criteria.”

“What’re you trying to say?”

“I tink he say it already, mon,” Raymond said, laughing. “Da captain be back later. You come back.”

Perry stood. “Don’t matter what you say, the word is out on Sullivan Towing.” He climbed down to the dock. “Seychelle, honey, you’re gonna be able to sit home and eat bonbons and watch the soaps every day.” He laughed his high-pitched hillbilly cackle, turned, and walked up the dock.

Nobody said anything for several minutes as the two men quietly smoked. Finally Nestor tossed the last of the joint overboard, and it sizzled as it hit the water. Neither man would look at me.

“It must be pretty bad, what they’re saying about me,” I finally ventured.

“Seychelle, I haven’t believed it, especially not now that I see you and talk to you. People are saying you’ve had some kind of a nervous breakdown, that you’re acting erratic, that you can’t be trusted. It’ll pass. You know how rumors fly around the docks.”

“But you also know what it’s like to have boat payments to make. Nestor I can’t sit around and wait for my reputation to clear. It’s all tied to this
Top Ten
business, I know it is. Is there anything else you guys can think of that was weird about Neal or the boat that day?”

“Well, there is one thing. The only other guy living on board the
Top Ten
was the engineer, Matt. You knew him, didn’t you, Sey?”

“Yeah, he came on board just before Neal and I split up.”

“Well, he told the cops that Neal had given him the day off, but he told me that morning, right after the
Top Ten
left the dock, that Neal had just fired him. Said he wouldn’t be needing him anymore. You know as well as I do that you couldn’t find a better engineer.”

“Where is Matt? I need to talk to him.”

“That’s the other thing. He’s gone. Left town awful fast. Said he was headed up to Newport to find a job up there.”

“Man . . . that is strange. Neal was a pretty decent mechanic, but he wasn’t good enough to keep the engine and generator running on the
Top Ten
. And owners of a boat like that surely wouldn’t cheap out on keeping an engineer.”

I turned to Raymond to see if he had anything else to offer. “Lady, I don’ like da people Neal was workin’ for.”

“Do you know anything about them? Who they are?”

“I don’ know dey names.” He pushed his shades down his nose and looked at me over the top of the dark glass. “But I see dey bad men. Be careful wit dem, lady.”

On my way back home, as I crossed over the Seventeenth Street Causeway, I noticed the soot-colored clouds building up out over the Everglades. It was still sunny here along the coast, but it wouldn’t be for much longer not once the dropping sun slid behind that dark wall. It was early in the year for that summer weather pattern.

My last stop was at Lauderdale Divers. When I pulled the Jeep into the parking space in front of their display window, I saw an example of a typical hookah rig in their window. It was a small compressor mounted inside an inner tube. It was similar to the compressor Red had on the
Gorda
, although ours was not portable or floatable. These little compressors didn’t have big accumulator tanks like the one on the
Top Ten
.

A couple of cruise-ship-type tourists were browsing through the T-shirt display, but otherwise, the fellow at the back of the store was alone, immersed in an issue of
Scuba Diver
magazine.

“Hello?”

He dropped the magazine. “Hi, what can I do for you?” He was about fifty, with graying hair, and he had that grizzled, squinty-eyed, old-time diver look.

“I just want to ask you some questions about compressors.”

“Do you want to use it for tank fills or for hookah diving?”

“I don’t want to buy one. But I saw a compressor on a boat, and I’m trying to figure out what it might have been used for.” I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled out the info I had copied off the side of the compressor. I showed it to him.

“That’s not a dive compressor. See, right here it says ‘contractor.’ That unit would be used for running air tools. On a boat, you don’t need to keep the air like they do. We put it right into the scuba tanks, so we don’t use the big accumulators.”

“What kind of air tools?”

“Could be anything: air hammers, nailers, impact drivers. Mechanics use them a lot. You know, like the tools you’ve seen when they change your tires in a garage.”

I nodded. The older woman from the front of the store walked back carrying a Divers Do It Deeper T-shirt and asked if she could try it on. He pointed to the back of the store, then went back to his magazine.

“Do you have any idea what someone would use that compressor for on board a ninety-two-foot Broward?”

He raised his eyebrows and looked out the window across the parking lot. “Not a clue,” he said. “But he sure as hell wasn’t using it to breathe.” He went back to his magazine.

Neal had done enough work in boatyards over the years to know his way around tools. What was he planning? Was he going to build something? I wished I’d had more time to look around on the boat. Maybe the tools themselves would have told me what it was he had in mind.

I wandered over to the glass case the diver guy was leaning on and examined the books and charts on display there. One book,
Diving Locations
, particularly caught my eye.

“Could I see a copy of this?” I asked him.

He sighed, moved behind the counter, and handed me the book. I flipped through the pages. It was a collection of all the coordinates of the major wrecks and reefs off the South Florida coast.

“They’re not all in there. That’s over a year old now. Been some sunk since then.”

“Some what?”

“Ships, barges, whatever. You know, artificial reefs.” His voice took on a different quality as he launched into this well-rehearsed explanation. “We have some coral off our coast here, but mostly it’s just a sand bottom. In order to have fish, there have to be places for the fish to hide. You take an old abandoned shipwreck, and after it’s been on the bottom awhile, it will be full of little fish—and where there are little fish, there will soon be big fish trying to eat them. Divers love to dive on shipwrecks, and since these days ships just don’t sink often enough, we make our own. They’re sinking new shit out there nearly every other month. Keeps me happy—more places to dive, more people will go diving. It’s good for business. You interested in going out for a dive?”