Baja Florida (15 page)

Charlie delivered us straight to Dilly's Marina, east of Paradise Island and not far from downtown Nassau. He put the seaplane down just outside the channel and motored us to the dock. The plan called for Boggy and me to take Mickey's boat to Lady Cut Cay. Charlie would fly us back to Miami.

“When do you think you'll get to Mickey's place?” Charlie asked.

“I'm guessing if we make it out of here by dark, then we should arrive well before noon tomorrow. You flying straight there?”

“Seeing as how I've got some lead time, I might take a little detour.”

“Detour?”

“Yeah, there's this gal I know over on Andros. And I was thinking maybe…”

“Don't get tangled up too long.”

“Kinda depends on if her husband's around.”

“And if he is?”

“Then I'll only be tangled up a little while.”

 

As promised, the marina had Mickey's boat ready to go. More accurately, Mickey's boat was a motor yacht. And nothing could have adequately prepared me for the sight of it.

Radiance
it was called and the name fit. Sixty-eight feet of gleaming craftsmanship. Double-planked mahogany hull painted bright white with a varnished teak trim. Teak handrails with stanchions of bronze and stainless steel. The pilot house perched prettily atop the main deck with a V-grooved overhead of white oak and a four-seater bench behind the wheel. The aft deck held another expansive sitting area—a fine place for cocktails—its settees and chairs protected from the elements by canvas covers in a shade of beige that complemented the paint on the trim.

It was a Trumpy, a lineage of yachts founded by John Trumpy, Sr., a German immigrant and naval architect who arrived in America in the early 1900s and designed yachts for all the big-deal tycoons of that era. The DuPonts, the Guggenheims, the Dodges, and the Chryslers, they all owned Trumpys, along with Howard Hughes. In 1925, Trumpy designed a 104-foot yacht called the
The Sequoia
for a Philadelphia businessman. Later bought by the federal government to intercept Prohibition smugglers, it eventually became the official presidential yacht and served every U.S. head of state from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford. Then Jimmy Carter came along and ordered it sold at auction in 1977 in a symbolic cost-cutting gesture. He would have been better off getting rid of the vice presidency instead.

Only some 450 Trumpys were ever built.
Radiance,
circa 1971, was one of the last, launched shortly before Trumpy's son, John Trumpy, Jr., closed the family's iconic Annapolis shipyard. From the days of Cleopatra's barge, yachts have always been floating egos, only nowadays they displace a whole lot more water than in years past. Mega-yachts they're called. The largest ones, owned by assorted Middle Eastern sheikhs and sundry sultans of software, stretch more than five hundred feet, wretched excesses in fiberglass with all the soul of silicon semiconductors.

Radiance
packed more heart into her sixty-eight feet than any mega-yacht six times its length. From the moment I stepped aboard her I was smitten.

The main salon was Jay Gatsby meets Rudyard Kipling with vintage rattan chairs and wicker settees and a coffee table that was once a Balinese temple door. A massive oil painting of a salt marsh—an Elizabeth Barr original—disappeared into a bulkhead at the press of a button to reveal a twenty-eight-inch plasma television. The galley ran almost the full beam of the boat with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer tucked under teak countertops and a full-size four-burner stove. A master stateroom with a queen-size bed and two guest staterooms, all with en suite heads. Crew quarters in the bow. The pilot house was elegant in its own fashion without being too damn fussy. You could ride out a big blow in it and rely on all the latest electronics, from the Standard Horizon depth sounder to the Simrad Radar/Chartplotter/GPS.

The marina's boatyard manager spent a couple of hours giving Boggy and me an exhaustive tour of
Radiance
and sharing her various quirks—how she ran best at a notch or two back from full throttle and how she favored port slightly in following seas. While we were waiting for the dockhands to finish gassing her up—two diesel tanks, each holding 440 gallons, glad it was on Mickey's tab—I made some phone calls from the pilot house.

Barbara didn't pick up, but I left her a gushy message and finished it off with kisses for Shula.

Helen Miller answered on the second ring. I told her she could pull the plug on her end of things since Jen Ryser had finally surfaced.

“You want to hear what I found out anyway?”

“You going to charge me for it?”

“Damn right I am.”

“Then lay it on me.”

Helen Miller had followed up on my suggestion to check further into the backgrounds of Will Moody and Pete Crumrine. Both came from well-to-do-families. Moody's father was partner in an Atlanta pediatric practice. Crumrine's mom ran an advertising company in Nashville and his dad was a dentist there. Neither family had heard from their sons. And both were concerned about it.

“Cute-looking guys, too. I found them on Facebook. Got a couple of photos. Blond surfer dudes. If I was only a few years younger…”

“You said blond? You sure?”

“Yeah, I printed out their photos for my file. Got 'em sitting right here in front of me. Pete Crumrine is curly blond, almost a mini 'fro. Will Moody, he's got this kind of Tom Petty look. Hair's almost white, long and straight. He's real skinny.”

Not the Will Moody I met.

“Zack, are you there?”

“Yeah, sorry. Right here.”

“So anyway, I'll call the parents back and let them know you crossed paths with Will Moody and that he said everything was fine. They'll be relieved to hear it,” Miller said. “As for Justin Hatchitt and Torrey Kealing…are you sure you wrote down the right passport numbers?”

“I'm sure. Why?”

“I called in a favor with someone I know at the passport office in Charleston. Nothing clicks.”

“What do you mean nothing clicks?”

“I mean the numbers you gave me don't correspond to any sequence of numbers in the system.”

“So you're telling me the passports are fake?”

“Appears that way.”

“But how do you fake a U.S. passport these days? I thought that was next to impossible, since 9/11 anyway.”

“Same thing I asked my contact at the passport office. She said there can be a giant difference between the way a passport looks and the way it acts.”

“The way it acts?”

“Uh-huh. Meaning, it's not all that hard for someone with even basic forgery skills to make a fake passport that looks like the real deal. It might work for some identification purposes, like cashing a check or using a credit card at a retail shop or something, but it will come up short when it gets plugged into the system.”

“That's when it has to act like a passport, with the computers and everything?”

“Right,” Miller said. “And the system is fairly foolproof. The new passports, since 2004 anyway, all use biometrics. They're encrypted and encoded with all kinds of identifiers. There's still a significant gap, working the new ones into the system as the old ones expire, but even with the old ones there's a long data trail, crosscheck upon crosscheck, and immigration agents are highly adept at spotting any fake passports used by people trying to get into the U.S. The airlines, too, they're plugged into the system. If this Justin Hatchitt and Torrey Kealing had fake passports and they used them to try and buy a plane ticket out of the country it would have set off all kinds of bells and whistles.”

“But since they left by boat…”

“Since they left the country by private boat, they didn't have to go through any TSA boarding procedures. They had to show their passports when they entered the Bahamas, but the Bahamas, like most Caribbe an countries, doesn't have a customs and immigration computer system that links directly to U.S. Homeland Security.”

I flashed on Mr. Bethel at Walker's Cay, his entries going into a ledger book, not the computer. A forged passport, it would be easy enough to get it by him.

“Of course,” Miller said, “it would catch up with them when they tried to reenter the U.S.”

“
If
they tried to reenter the U.S.”

“Exactly. This Justin Hatchitt and Torrey Kealing, they could be running away from who knows what, with no intention of ever coming home.”

It was just shy of sunset and we were pulling away from East End Point, the Atlantis Resort's towering oddness at our back, when my cell phone rang. It was Lynfield Pederson.

“Where the hell are you?”

I told him I was about one mile off New Providence Island, heading south.

“What are you doing there?”

I told him Jen Ryser had finally shown up and that I was taking her father's yacht to Lady Cut Cay.

“You need to turn around, Zack. Get back to Nassau. I'll fly over from Harbour Island and meet you. Then I'll escort you to Marsh Harbour. It will be better that way.”

“Escort me? What are you talking about?”

“Jesus Christ, Zack. You got any idea what's going down?”

“Apparently not.”

“Got a dead guy at the Mariner's Inn. Name of Delgado. Know him?”

“Delgado's dead?”

“Police up that way, they think you might have had something to do with it.”

“Delgado and me, we had a little run-in at the hotel bar last night, but that's all there was to it.”

“Yeah, the police know about that. Got the story from the bartender and about a dozen other witnesses. They all say you beat him up pretty good.”

“Wasn't much of a fight. I spent most of it just stepping out of his way.”

“They say you knocked him out.”

“It was the alcohol more than anything I did. Delgado was in the bag when I got there. He'd been drinking all day.”

“But you and him, you got into some kind of argument and you had it out, right?”

“Wasn't much arguing to it. He said a few words. I said a few words. And he came at me. After it was over I helped carry Delgado back to his room and put him in his bed. He was sleeping like a baby when I left.”

“That's the thing, Zack. Some of those witnesses, they saw you carrying Delgado into his room. I spoke to the superintendent up there…”

“I tried to speak to him, too.”

“Oh yeah? What about?”

“Tell me about Delgado first.”

“Superintendent and me, we aren't real close. He's kind of a prick…”

“Hmmm,” I said.

“But he knows you and me got a history. He was superintendent in Freeport a few years back when you got mixed up in that thing with Victor Ortiz and those Panamanian counterfeiters.”

“That thing put me in prison for almost two years.”

“Yeah, and the superintendent didn't like it how you got yourself cleared of all the charges. Blew back on him. Made him look bad. Else he thinks he could be the commissioner by now, sitting in a fancy Nassau office calling all the shots, instead of getting busted down to Marsh Harbour,” Pederson said. “So he was real anxious to reach out and let me know he's looking at a murder here.”

“Murder?”

“He thinks someone smothered Delgado. Still waiting on the coroner's report, but the superintendent saw what he saw. Bruising around the mouth and nose. Tongue all bit up and swollen. Bloodshot eyes…”

“He was drunk, Lynfield. Of course he had bloodshot eyes. I woke up this morning, my eyes were bloodshot.”

“Yeah, but I'm talking eyes shot full of blood, man. Veins popped, bulging out. Not a pretty sight. Plus, the house keeper she had to use her key to get in Delgado's room—it was about one o'clock this afternoon—and there he was on the bed. Pillow still over his face.”

I stepped away from the wheel and let Boggy take over. I tried to make sense out of everything Pederson had just told me.

“This morning, before I checked out of the Mariner's Inn, I left a message at the front desk for Delgado. I left an envelope for him, too.”

“Police know all about the message and the envelope. Envelope had five hundred dollars in it. Police have it now.”

“OK, that should prove I didn't kill Delgado. Else why would I leave that for him?” No sooner were the words out of my mouth than it hit me. “No way. No damn way. They think I left that envelope just to make it look like I didn't kill Delgado?”

“Be a clever thing to do.”

“But…”

“Turn the boat around, Zack. Don't get off it. Stay put. Wait for me at the marina. I can be there in under an hour.”

“I didn't kill Delgado.”

“There's more, Zack,” Pederson said. “You want to hear it?”

“It get any better?”

“Not really, but you need to know it,” Pederson said. “There's this boatyard out the other side of Crossing Place.”

“Dailey brothers.”

“That's them. Seems someone set fire to this dry dock facility of theirs last night. Burned it clear to the ground, including the twenty-seven boats they had inside. It's still burning, matter of fact. That whole end of the island, people got smoke stinging their eyes and stinking things up, like roasting fiberglass weenies at a cookout or something.”

I didn't say anything.

“The Dailey brothers they wrote out statements. Each one of them separately. And they all three of them told it the same. Said you and two other guys—I'm guessing that would be Boggy and Charlie Callahan—said they caught you sneaking around in the boatyard a little before midnight. Said the three of you attacked them, stuck one of the brothers with a knife, carried off another brother and tossed him out of a car on the main highway.”

“Didn't toss him out. Charlie stopped the car. I opened the door and let him out.”

“So you aren't denying you were out there?”

“We were out there. But we didn't set fire to anything. The Dailey brothers say we did?”

“What the Dailey brothers said was all of them were at the hospital getting the one of them stitched up when one of their wives woke up and saw the hangar in flames.”

“I didn't do it.”

“There's more,” Pederson said. “You know a young woman by the name of Karen Breakell? In her twenties, works on a charter boat out of Blue Sky Marina?”

I told him I knew her.

“She was leaving the marina late last night. Alone. Told a friend on the boat she was going into town and see if she could catch last call somewhere. She was walking across the marina parking lot when someone knocked her in the head. Knocked hell out of her. Might have done worse to her, but the security guard—he's this old fellow, can't hardly move—he hears her screaming and he hollers to see what's the matter. Time he gets to where she's at, she's lying in blood. They got her in the hospital.”

“She going to be OK?”

“Hasn't come around yet. Doctors say it could go either way. Soon as she's stable, if she's stable, they'll try to medevac her to Miami,” Pederson said. “Dockmaster at Blue Sky Marina told police that a guy matching your description came around there yesterday asking about Karen Breakell. Told him he was an old friend of the family. Had an Indian-looking fellow with him. Then one of the crew on her boat, young guy,  the first mate, he verified that someone like you and this same Indian-looking fellow were there on the Green Turtle dock when Karen Breakell came ashore to get groceries. He said she acted real upset after she'd spoken with you.”

“I didn't do it. I didn't do any of it.”

“You keep saying it…”

“I keep saying it because it's true. Dammit, Lynfield, you know me. It sound like something I would do?”

He took longer to answer than I would have liked.

“The fire maybe,” he said. “I've known you to light a fire.”

“Aw, come on, man. Setting a fire like that to get at someone, that's chickenshit. Smothering a man in his sleep. Attacking a woman in the dark. That isn't me either. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know it,” Pederson said. “But the superintendent up in Marsh Harbour, he doesn't know it. All he sees is these three separate things, a triangle like, and you're at all the points in the triangle and it's easy for him to connect the lines in between and you're walking them, too. Someone sure was busy last night, Zack. And everything's pointing in your direction.”

Pederson asked me why I had gone looking for Karen Breakell. I explained that she had jumped ship at Miner Cay and I was hoping maybe she could give me some insight on where to find Jen Ryser.

He asked me what I'd been doing out at the Dailey brothers' boatyard. I told him I'd received a tip that I'd find
Chasin' Molly
there. And I told him I'd gone to the police station and tried to report it, only the desk officer insisted I speak directly to the superintendent and the superintendent never showed.

“Of course,” I said, “they probably think it's a clever bit of subterfuge on my part to show up at the police station to report a missing boat when I'd already burned down the place where that boat was supposed to be.”

The cell phone signal was growing weaker the farther we pulled away from New Providence Island. I lost Pederson. He called me back.

“Those Daileys are a long line of no good,” he said. “Wouldn't surprise me if they were up to something. Still, Zack, that doesn't get you out of this. I have to ask you to turn yourself in.”

“And then what?”

“And then, like I said, I'll escort you up to Marsh Harbour and you can tell the police there what you told me.”

“And then they'll put me in jail.”

Pederson didn't say anything.

“That's what they'll do, Lynfield. I know it. You know it, too. What are we looking at here? Murder, trespass, assault, kidnapping, arson, another assault, maybe attempted murder. Am I leaving anything out?”

“You're in a fix, Zack. I'm not going to lie to you. But I'll do everything I can. You'll have the right to an attorney…”

“Right to an attorney? Hell, sounds like you're already reading me the Miranda Act. Only, oh yeah, you don't have the Miranda Act here in the Bahamas, do you? Police suspect someone of doing something and they can throw them right in jail, innocent people, and it can be months, years maybe, before they get out. I've been in jail, Lynfield. I'm not going there again.”

“You're putting me in a tough spot, Zack.”

“The police in Marsh Harbour, do they know I'm on a boat out of Nassau?”

“Don't think so,” Pederson said. “I didn't know it myself until I got you on the phone. All they've verified so far is that you left Marsh Harbour this morning on Charlie Callahan's seaplane.”

“So buy me some time.”

“Not like the buying-time store is open, Zack. And even it were open, it's not like I got much spending power. They're going to be looking for you all up and down these islands. Not much I can do to get in the way of that.”

“I just need a day or two. Tell them you couldn't find me. It's not a total lie. Because you haven't found me. Not really. We're just talking on the phone.”

“Aw hell, Zack, I don't know…”

The call broke off again. I waited for Pederson to call me back. While I was waiting, I tried to picture the triangle he had been talking about, tried to envision all the people at all the points. One face kept appearing.

When the phone rang, I answered it.

“Will Moody,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“A friend of Jen Ryser's. Will Moody. He was sitting at the bar with Delgado when I got there last night. He helped me carry Delgado to his room. I handed him Delgado's card key to open the door. I don't remember him returning it to me. He could easily have gone back in there and…”

“You're saying this guy killed Delgado, Zack? What's the motive?”

“I don't know. But Moody was also asking me about Karen Breakell. Where could he find her? How much he'd like to see her. I told him what boat she was on and when it would be getting back to Marsh Harbour. I set her up. I can't believe it. I set her up and he went there and beat hell out of her.”

“Again, Zack, I gotta ask: What was his motive? If Moody and Karen Breakell were friends, college classmates and everything, why would he…”

“But see, here's the thing,” I said. “Will Moody might not be Will Moody. The Will Moody I met doesn't match the description of the Will Moody on Facebook. The Will Moody I met was big, with dark curly hair and a beard. The real Will Moody, the one whose photo Helen Miller saw, he's…”

“Hold on, hold on. What do you mean Will Moody might not be Will Moody? Who's Helen Miller? What's this Facebook shit? Zack, I'm sorry, but you aren't making a bit of sense.”

The phone went dead. This time it didn't ring again.