Wreckers' Key (23 page)

I told her I wanted to speak to a Detective Collazo. She told me there were no detectives there.

“But you’re the police department,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s almost midnight.”

“Okay, but isn’t that when the bad guys usually come out?”

She sighed. “If this is not an emergency, you’ll need to call back during regular business hours.”

“But someone followed me home.”

“Are they still there?”

“No.”

“And you are inside your home?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to send a patrol car out to your residence?”

I was beginning to feel like some weenie whiner. I had no proof that anything had happened, and I didn’t know how I would explain to a police officer the fear I had felt running in the street earlier. Somebody came into my home and washed the dishes. Someone entered my friend’s room and left her a necklace. Everything I had to report went against what the cops would see as a usual crime. They didn’t vandalize, they cleaned. They didn’t steal, they brought jewelry. None of it made any sense. “No, I guess not. I’ll call back during regular hours tomorrow. Thanks.”

After I’d double-locked the front door, checked the closet and windows, and got ready for bed, I couldn’t get over a general creepy feeling. Was it just my memory of the fact that someone had been inside here, or had it happened again? When I climbed into bed, I patted the covers and let Abaco jump up on the bedspread, an unusual treat for her. Her warm body resting against mine, I turned out the light and lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling, scratching the scruff of her neck, my eyes wide open. I was tired, but I knew that sleep would not come. It was going to be another very long night.

XX

Abaco reminded me, as I was drinking my coffee out on the bench in front of my cottage on Tuesday morning, that I had promised her a dinghy ride and swim, and I had not yet lived up to my word. There are those who would call me crazy for thinking that my dog was giving me some kind of message, but anyone who was watching her run over to the dinghy davits, stick her rump up in the air and whine for my attention, then return and paw at my hands would have gotten the message as clearly as I did.

The rain and wind from the previous day had cleared out. Though there was a light five-knot breeze out of the west and the temperature was down in the fifties, this morning had cast off Florida’s notorious humidity and the air was so clear and freshly washed, even the blue roof of the Larsens’ new pagoda sparkled. Thoughts of random night visitors and dark threatening vehicles seemed to lose their weight in the bright sunlight.

After the dog had made her third hopeful trip over to the davits, I decided I could accomplish two things at once by taking her along on a dinghy trip to see the
NautiBoy
at Hillsboro Inlet.

I stood up and stretched. “Okay, girl, you talked me into it.”

She began leaping and gyrating and wagging her tail so violently, she made a truth out of that saying about the tail wagging the dog.

Inside the cottage, I heard my phone ringing, and I began the usual search to find the portable. This time it was under my sweatshirt on the couch.

“Hello. Sullivan Towing.”

“Miss Sullivan, this is Detective Lassiter from Key West.”

“Hey. I’m surprised to hear from you. What’s up?”
 

“I’m sorry to bother you like this, but I thought you’d want to know. I kept thinking about what she said, you know, Ms. Frias, and I decided to make a phone call or two. I learned something, and maybe you can pass the word on to her.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you, Detective.”

“The last time we talked, Ms. Frias told me to ask an expert. About the windsurfing thing. That kept bugging me. So I did it. I called a guy I used to do some off-duty work for, back when I was still on patrol. The guy’s got a place, a guest house, here on the island, but he used to do that windsurfing shit.”

“Okay. What did he tell you?”

“I’m getting to that. I called you. It’s my dime. He told me what he thought and he gave me the name of another guy who’s still doing it.
Both
of them said the same thing. Said it couldn’t happen that way. Said that if that rope was wrapped around his wrist that way, there’s no way he was flung into the mast. I even showed my buddy the pictures. He laughed.”

“That’s really interesting, Detective Lassiter, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
 

“Yeah, but see, now I know it, too.”

“Is it enough to get you to really investigate Nestor’s death as a homicide?”

“Officially? No. On the side? Yeah, I’m gonna be looking into it. I thought Ms. Frias would like to know.”
 

“Thanks, Detective. I’ll tell her. We’ll take whatever we can get at this point.”

After I hung up, I just sat on the couch. I supposed the thing I should have done was tell him some of the things I had learned, and some of what I was guessing. The problem was there was lots more guesswork than solid knowledge at this point. Maybe if I asked around, found a little more evidence to support what I thought Pinder was doing, I’d be able to take it all to Lassiter, turn it over to him, and go back to figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

Slipping on boat shoes and zipping up my sweatshirt, I grabbed my handheld VHF radio and then headed for the door. It wasn’t even eight a.m. yet, but I’d been up for a couple of hours after finally abandoning the tossing and turning that had plagued me through the night. As soon as the sky had shown a light gray through my window, I’d been up and trying to read, then trying to paint, successful at neither. I’d needed to do something, and now that I’d decided on a course, I quickly lowered the dinghy into the water and set off downriver.

Early as it was, I wondered if my grandmother, Faith, would be peering out from behind the blinds when I passed her house. As I rounded the corner, I saw the heart-shaped stern of the yawl
Annie
docked in front of her house, but there was no sign that anyone was up and about at that hour of the morning.

Hillsboro was about ten miles north on the Intracoastal waterway, and other than a small section of woods near the historic Bonnet House, the banks of the waterway were crowded over their entire distance with high-rise condos, a few older low-rise apartment buildings, restaurants, and private homes. Mile after mile I saw evidence of the older homes and buildings being torn down and gigantic replacements going up in their places. When a three-bedroom ranch-style home with generous yard sold, it was replaced with a three-story, six-bedroom, eight-thousand-square-foot home built right out to the property line. A small boutique hotel with shuffleboard court would get bulldozed in favor of a thirty-plus-story condo tower with parking and retail on the first several floors. At one point, I was able to see seven construction cranes at the same time. The new joke was they’d become the state bird of Florida.

The worst part of it all wasn’t that twenty years from now an airplane passenger looking down at this town wouldn’t see any grass or trees, only shoulder-to-shoulder red-tile roofs. The part that made me really sad was that they all looked so similar, and they were never going to be anyone’s home. The condo complexes, the McMansions, were all being built in a pseudo-Spanish style with arches and towers that made them all look alike so they could appeal to investors hoping to turn over the property to other investors. The old retiree apartment buildings with their slapping dominoes and leathery pool ladies or the quirky, individual homes with their pink lawn flamingos that once lined the streets and waterways of my hometown would all soon be gone in favor of these monstrosities that will sit empty most of the year as their owners jet off to Newport or Nice. Lauderdale would become a hollow town with empty stores and vacant schools. These developers think they’re just making money, but really they’re gutting the heart right out of my hometown.

I stopped briefly in Lake Santa Barbara after the sun had climbed higher and the air had warmed into the upper sixties. Retrieving an old ratty tennis ball out of the Whaler’s forward compartment, I cut the engine, let the dinghy drift, and threw the ball as far as I could for my quivering companion. She launched herself off the bow of the boat and happily swam off in search of her treasure. Each time she retrieved it, I pitched it back out across the blue water again until finally, I started to see her slow. I lifted her forepaws onto the bow and heaved at her collar. Then, once she was aboard, I tried to put at least five feet between us before she started her shaking.

“Now are you happy?” I asked out loud, watching her rub her wet face against the sweatshirt I’d discarded in the sun.

Out beyond the dog, I recognized the familiar yellow-green of an Ocean Towing boat that had been making its way southbound down the waterway, but had now diverted into Lake Santa Barbara and was heading directly at me. It looked like a boat of about thirty feet, and its semi-displacement hull was throwing up quite a wake at the speed it was traveling. I could see the outline of two men at the console, but I couldn’t make out anything more about them. There were a couple of seconds there when I started to get a little nervous with them heading straight for me, thinking about the dark vehicle of the night before and getting that
Oh shit, here we go again
feeling in my gut. I was about to turn the key in the Whaler and move the hell out of the way, but at the last minute he turned aside, his wash rocking and splashing into my boat.

I was just trying to ride out the wake without putting the gunnels under when I recognized the dreadlocks and realized that one of the men was none other than Quentin Hazell. The other man was the guy he had referred to as Brian at the symposium the day before, and they were both wearing matching neon green shirts.

“Thanks, guys.”

“Sorry about that,” Quentin said.

“Yeah, you look really sorry.” They were both looking at me in my soaked jeans, and then turning their heads away and laughing. “This should be a no-wake zone. It’s manatee season.”

“We just wanted to say hello when I recognized you over here in your dinghy. I wanted to tell you my news,” Quentin said.

“It’s not exactly a secret considering you’re wearing one of their shirts. I take it you talked to Pinder and got the job?”

“Yes. Brian is going to be training me.”

“I’m happy for you,” I said. I looked at Brian watching us from his seat at the helm. I got the feeling—from the way he looked away and pretended he hadn’t been watching—that Brian wasn’t thrilled about Quentin being friendly with the competition. “Just remember that even though towing work might look easy, people do get hurt in this business. I want you to be careful, you hear?” I knew I sounded like his mother, but I hoped he was reading between the lines.

Quentin smiled and nodded, bouncing his dreads. “I hear you.”

“Hey, man,” Brian said. “We’ve got to get going. Boss doesn’t like us wasting time.”

Quentin handed me a slip of paper. “They gave me a cell phone so they can stay in touch with me. This is the number.”

“Thanks. I’ll see you soon?” I said, hoping to remind him of his commitment to work for me the next day.

Quentin winked at me, nodded once, and let go of my dinghy.

I pushed off and floated free of the blindingly green hull. “See ya,” I shouted again, but my words were drowned out by the roar of the engines as they took off across Lake Santa Barbara.

It wasn’t difficult to find the
NautiBoy
along the Intracoastal close to Hillsboro Inlet. There were no large marinas in the area, and knowing that the vessel was about seventy-five feet long narrowed the possibilities even further. As it turned out, she was on a side tie with her stern pointing south, and I recognized the name before I could assess the size of her. Just for politeness’ sake, I tried calling him on the handheld VHF first, but I wasn’t surprised when no one answered. They probably had cell phones, landlines, and satellite phones on board, so the VHF wouldn’t be on at the dock. I tied the Whaler off on the dock just astern of the yacht, told Abaco to stay in the dinghy, and walked down to their gangplank.

“Hello, anybody aboard?” I shouted.

A young man wearing the usual khakis and white Polo shirt appeared on the aft deck. “Can I help you?” he asked. He looked like he was barely out of his teens.

“I hope so. Are you the captain?” I expected him to say no and to offer to take me to the captain, but he surprised me.

“Yeah, that’s me. What can I do for you?”

If the captains in this industry got any younger, I thought, they would be boat drivers before they got their driver’s permits for cars.

I told him who I was, adding that I was in the towing and salvage business and wanted to talk to him. He replied that he had grown up in town and knew
Gorda
by sight. He invited me aboard. I was glad to get inside the boat and out of the wind with my wet pants. We settled on vinyl chairs in the galley after I told him that I didn’t want to get salt water on the fancy upholstery in the main salon.

“Can I get you something to drink? Coffee or water or anything?”

“No thanks. I just want to ask you a few questions about the incident last month when you went aground.
 
I hope you won’t think I’m prying,” I said, “but I’m trying to do some research into yacht groundings.”

“I don’t mind.” He reached into a big industrial-size refrigerator and took out a bottle of water. “Shoot.”

 
“Okay. Did you guys have a towing contract with Ocean Towing before the accident occurred?”

“Yeah, we did. Just signed it not too long before.”
 

“Did you go to them or did they come to you?”

“I just brought the boat down from Annapolis this winter for the first time. The owner flew in over Christmas for a couple of weeks, and one night he had some guy from Ocean Towing over for drinks. I guess he’d met him in a bar a couple of days before.”

“Was that guy Neville Pinder?”