Florida Is Murder (Due Justice and Surface Tension Mystery Double Feature) (Florida Mystery Double Feature) (45 page)

“Hey, Perry, where’s Hightower? What’s going on?” Perry looked up and squinted through the smoke coming from the butt hanging between his thin lips. When he recognized me, he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and walked over to my side of the cockpit. He was wearing his trademark hole-ridden and paint-stained cutoff jeans and a too-tight faded Florida Marlins T-shirt.

“Hey, baby,” he said.

He was trying to irritate me, I knew. I was determined to remain professional, although I couldn’t repress a shudder. “What are you doing here, Perry?”

Dr. Hightower climbed out of the companionway at that point, glancing at his watch. He stood several inches taller than Perry. “You finally decided to get here, eh, Sullivan?”

“What’s going on here, Dr. Hightower? What’s he doing here?” I pointed toward Perry as I spoke. Perry leaned back out of the doctor’s peripheral vision and puckered up, making like he was kissing me as Hightower spoke.

“I tried to contact you all day yesterday, Seychelle, but no one answered your telephone. I sent you e-mails, but you never replied. I was afraid you would be late again, as usual, and this time I took precautions against such a problem.”

“Late? You’ve never said anything about having a problem with my being late. I tied up
Gorda
here at two minutes after eleven. The tide won’t shift until twelve-thirty. We’ve still got plenty of time.”

“I’m dealing with Mr. Greene now, Seychelle. I found his Web page when I was searching for your e-mail address, and it was very impressive.”

“Perry has a Web page?”

“You better believe it, baby,” Perry said. “That’s the way to go these days. You know, Seychelle, you can find
anything
your little heart desires on the Internet.”

“And when you’re looking, I’m sure that
desire
and
little
are the key words, Perry.”

“That’s enough, boys and girls. I’ve signed a contract with Mr. Greene. End of story.” He turned his back to me and busied himself at the helm in the wheelhouse.

I spread my hands wide. “Just like that? You’ve hired this redneck pervert and I’m fired?”

Hightower reached down and turned the key. The old boat’s diesel rumbled to life. He walked out and around the deckhouse and jumped to the dock. He looked like an idiot in his pale blue polyester slacks, white shirt with epaulettes, brand-new Top-Siders, and Greek fisherman’s cap.

“Miss Sullivan,” he said, raising himself up to his full six feet and trying to look down at me, “I made the effort to contact you after I spoke to your brother.”

“What do you mean, after you spoke to my brother?”

“I happened to see your brother at Gulf Stream yesterday.”

“Oh, great. My brother was at the track.”

He nodded. “We got into a casual conversation, and when I mentioned that you were going to be towing the
Ruby Yacht
today, he told me that you had been having financial difficulties. You hadn’t been meeting your responsibilities, he said, and I would be well advised to find myself another towing company. Well, I’ve done that, Miss Sullivan.”

“What? Maddy said what?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I blocked the finger pier, and Hightower couldn’t get past me to untie his bowlines.

“Move aside, Seychelle. This is business. If you can’t play with the big boys, then get out of the business.”

He started to brush me aside.

“Perry is one of the big boys? He’s nothing but a slimy—”

I was suddenly grabbed from behind. Perry had jumped off the bow, and he took me by the forearms and marched me off the finger pier. I looked down at the hands that held my arms. The thick, callused fingers were topped by half crescents of black grease.

“Now, be a good girl and go on home, honey pie.” He swatted me on the behind and cackled. “Perry’s in charge now.”

Collazo suspected I was capable of murder, and at that moment I realized I could kill. If I’d had any kind of weapon at hand, anything to wipe that goddam smirk off Perry’s face, I would have been seriously tempted to use it.

“This isn’t over, Perry.” I looked over his shoulder at Galen Hightower, standing with his hands on his hips, watching us with a look of disgust, as though we were a lower order of mammal. “Dr. Hightower, I would say what you’ve got here”—I jerked my head toward Perry— “is exactly what you deserve.”

I threw off the lines before I started the engine. The old cat purred to life when I turned the key, and I jockeyed her around in her own length, hotdogging it just a little to show Hightower that he had given up the better captain.

As I headed back up the Intracoastal, just off the Fort Lauderdale Yacht Club, Nestor Frias pulled up alongside in the thirty-eight-foot Bertram sportfisherman My Way. Aside from casual hellos at the Downtowner I hadn’t seen Nestor very much since Neal and I had gone our separate ways. He ran the charter sportfisherman out of Pier 66, and he was looking to break into a job as captain of one of the big luxury yachts like the
Top Ten
. He was always hanging around Neal hoping for news of some big job.

He waved me out of the wheelhouse. I throttled back and stepped out to the side decks.

He shouted down at me from his flybridge. “Hey, Seychelle. Sorry about Neal.”

I closed my eyes for a few seconds and nodded. “Thanks, Nestor.”

“A bunch of us are going to have a little service at dawn tomorrow, just outside the inlet. You know.”

“He’s missing, Nestor. Nobody knows what happened to him at this point.”

“It’s been forty-eight hours, Seychelle. There’d be no reason for him to just disappear” I thought of Big Guy and Shorty on the beach and what happened to Ely. He could have very good reasons, and I was quickly learning that I didn’t know who to trust.

“Neal’s never been very reasonable, you know,” I said.

“I just thought maybe you would like to be there.” For the first time I found myself thinking about what people would see in my actions. If I didn’t show, would I look guilty? In my business, reputation was everything. “Yeah, okay, I guess I would.”

He waved a hand in the air and pulled away from
Gorda
.

I waved back. “Thanks, Nestor.”

On the aft deck of his boat a couple sat together in the fighting chair, an older man with graying hair and a young, firm blonde in a thong bikini on his lap. She was probably five foot two and a size three. And definitely not his wife.

***

“
Outta the Blue
,
Outta the Blue
, this is the
Gorda
.” When he didn’t answer, I hung the microphone back on the side of the VHF and pushed the throttle forward to prevent the boat from drifting onto the sandbar at the mouth of the river. Just when I was about to give up, figuring that either Mike didn’t have his radio on or else he wasn’t monitoring channel sixteen, I finally got an answer.

“
Gorda
,
Gorda
, this is
Outta the Blue
. You want to switch to channel zero nine?”

“Roger that, zero nine.”

Mike Beesting was a former Fort Lauderdale cop who had quit the force four or five years before and now lived aboard and ran sunset charter cruises on his Irwin 54,
Outta the Blue
. I wasn’t sure of all the details, but I knew that back when he was on the force, he had heard a call for help and walked into a situation in progress where some disgruntled city maintenance worker had decided to use a shotgun to pay back his boss and coworkers for all his perceived ills. After it was over, two people were dead and Mike’s leg had to be amputated at the knee. He was feted as a hero for taking down the guy, but when they offered him a desk job, he said no thanks and walked away from the department for good.

Mike knew nothing about boats at first, and especially about diesel mechanics, but he always attempted to work on his own engine. More often than not, he screwed things up and it ended up costing him more than if he had just called a mechanic in the first place. However his settlement with the city had been quite generous, allowing him to buy his sailboat outright and still have enough to feed his daily need for generous amounts of Pusser’s Rum. The net result was I’d towed him home more than a couple of times when his engine quit with guests aboard.

I punched the numbers onto the keypad of the VHF radio and changed channels. Mike was already there, and I just caught the tail end of his sentence.

“... thinking about you as I’ve been watching the TV. How are you holding up?”

“I’m managing, but I’ll be honest, things aren’t good. I need your help with something, over.”

“Sey, you know we are on an open channel here, over.”

“Roger that. A young girl, a friend of mine, drowned in the river last night. I’m really feeling lousy about it. Is it okay if I come over a little later? I sure could use a friend like you.”

“Say no more. I have a charter at four-thirty, but I’ll be here with shoulders to cry on until then, over.”

“Thanks, Mike. I’ll be seeing you. This is
Gorda
clear and going back to sixteen.”

Whether or not Mike understood what I was really asking of him remained to be seen.

***

I cursed my brother, all the way back up the river. So he was back at the track again. That explained a lot. Not that I hadn’t expected as much. Maddy was a compulsive gambler and Jane had finally got him to agree to join Gamblers Anonymous a couple of years ago. They had started to work off all those credit card balances, and I thought he had overcome this handicap, so to speak. Obviously not. So Maddy needed money immediately, and he knew where to get it. There had been offers for
Gorda
in the past, and Maddy knew several people who would be happy to buy her if the price was right. I was tempted to drive right down to his place to have it out with him. How dare he sabotage my business to make sure that I wouldn’t be able to make my payments? Typical of my brother. He was going to get his way no matter what.

As I was ranting and raving out loud in the wheelhouse, I suddenly saw in my mind the image of Ely walking across the dining room at the Bahia Cabana, her green eyes flashing with recognition and joy. Things had finally been going right for her. Last night she’d told us she planned to go apartment hunting in the morning. Whoever had “dumped her,’’ as Collazo called it, was wrong. Somebody did miss her. Maddy would have to wait.

***

I had driven by the Fort Lauderdale Police Station hundreds, probably thousands of times, but I’d never been inside. I parked in a visitor’s spot and fed a handful of quarters and nickels into the meter: not a good spot to let your meter expire. At the pay phone in the parking lot, I dialed Jeannie’s number. She lived only a few blocks away, and I figured I’d go back, sit in the Jeep, and wait until she arrived so we could go in together. The phone continued to ring until finally her answering machine picked up.

“Great,” I said aloud as I replaced the receiver: I wasn’t willing to sit around waiting for Jeannie to get home. She would be furious with me, but I needed to talk to Collazo about this now.

Beyond the door, a receptionist sat inside a tinted glass booth and pointed to a telephone on the counter as I approached. I picked up the handset as she picked up hers. I told her I was there to make a statement about the murder of the Krix girl. She told me to have a seat, someone would be with me shortly.

Two young women wearing miniskirts and tube tops sat at the end of the row of red plastic chairs. I nodded to them, but they ignored me. They sat slack-jawed, bored, staring into space. They looked like extras for some Hollywood version of life on the streets. The smaller of the two, a Hispanic girl with black hair teased high on her head, walked over to the gumball machine and put a dime inside. She opened the little metal door.

“Aw, shit. I hate green ones.” She turned to her friend. “You want it?”

The other girl, a blonde with a serious case of crusty acne and extremely red, bloodshot eyes, took the gum and popped it into her mouth.

On her second try, the Hispanic girl got a red one, and for the next few minutes they sat there blowing little pink bubbles. In spite of the makeup and the clothes, I doubted either girl was over sixteen.

I thought about how easy it was to dislike girls like them, to turn away from them and not see them, and yet how similar they were to Ely in many ways. She could have been them at the same age.

“Do you girls go to school?” I asked.

“Nah,” said the blonde. “I quit when I had my baby. They acted all hinky ’bout it. Dumb-ass teachers. I didn’t need that shit.”

If one of them vanished tomorrow, would she be missed?

The other girl blew a huge bubble that popped all over her face. They both burst into giggles.

A woman came through the glass door at the far end of the lobby. “Seychelle Sullivan.”

“Here.” I got up and followed her through the door and into an office off the hallway just beyond. She was very friendly and efficient, and I was beginning to think better of the Lauderdale cops. She fired questions at me, typing the answers on her keyboard nearly as fast as I spoke them. We got the preliminary stuff out of the way first. Name, address, birth date.

“You’ve got a birthday coming soon, then,” she said.

“Yeah. The big three-oh.”

She smiled. “It’s not so bad.”

That was what everybody always said to me, but I didn’t believe them.

“Okay, just tell me, slowly, exactly what happened that day.” I had repeated the story so many times that the telling went quickly. I didn’t have to pause or search for words to describe the horror as I had the first time. Just as we were finishing up, the phone rang on the woman’s desk.

“That was Detective Collazo,” she said after hanging up. “He wants to speak to you. I’ll show you the way.” She led me upstairs to the homicide squad room. Collazo was the only one there, sitting at one of the desks back in the corner of the large room. The air-conditioning must have been set as cool as it would go. My hands felt icy, but I could see the sweat rings under the sleeves of Collazo’s neatly pressed white shirt.