Wreckers' Key (8 page)

I hardly thought of Arlen Sparks as
the workingman
. He was more like the mad scientist. When we were kids, sometimes we’d go out to his Florida room where he had all his ham radio gear set up, and we’d watch him tinker with his soldering iron and circuit boards. Being kids, we’d start asking questions about what he was doing and what he did in his job at Motowave. Mrs. Sparks would usually come scurrying out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel, and shoo us back into the kitchen. There, she’d sit on a red vinyl chair and, speaking in a hushed voice, tell us that we were not to bother Mr. Sparks as the work he was doing was top secret and he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. We believed it at first, but when we got to be teens we decided she’d been teasing us. Later I read in the paper that Motowave got many of its contracts from the Department of Defense, and I decided old Sparky might have been doing some 007 work after all.

When we parted, I promised him that I would drop in to visit them once I was back in Fort Lauderdale. I remembered all the times Mrs. Sparks had fed us sweets, listened to our problems, put Bactine and Band-Aids on skinned knees, and shared her love of books with us. Now she was back home gravely ill. We needed to step up, to return the gift of time and comfort. I wondered if Molly even knew—and she lived just down the street from them.

When I got to Fausto’s market halfway up the block, I paused to look back at Arlen, and I was surprised to see him open the green door and walk into the offices of Ocean Towing. What the hell would he be doing there? He had said that his house was on a canal, so I supposed it wasn’t such a stretch to assume he owned a boat here, too. I tried to picture him at the helm of a powerboat, his long strands of gray hair flying off his bald crown and trailing back in the wind. I shook my head. It was a ridiculous thought.

VIII

The cabdriver dropped me off at the entrance to Robbie’s boatyard, and as I walked the sandy track in the shadow of the rows of propped-up boats, I felt my pace slowing. I had to go see her. I couldn’t stay away no matter how much I wanted to. Part of my reluctance was the usual shying away from the reminder of my own mortality. We all feel it when we see someone close to us through age or circumstance die unexpectedly. Nestor was about my age and a part of my waterfront world. But he had been more than that to me—hell, I’d once lusted after the body that now lay cold in the morgue. And seeing her was a visceral reminder of that loss. He had been vigorously alive yesterday at this time, and even though I had seen his body I still found myself struggling with the how and the why. How could anyone feel safe in a world that let someone as strong and alive as Nestor die? He was such a good, decent human being. When there were so many scumbags who lived long lives, you couldn’t help but keep asking yourself why.

But I was also dreading this visit because I knew what she was likely to say. After last night, I knew it wasn’t the
why
that was driving Catalina. She would begin again trying to convince me that someone had murdered her husband and that I should help her find and punish the
who
.

Thanks, but no thanks. First off, I wasn’t convinced— as she was—that there was even anything to investigate. It seemed pretty clear to me that Nestor’s death came at the end of a bad string of accidents. Watching his career go into the toilet had upset him so that he probably wasn’t really paying proper attention on his windsurfer. I remembered how it had been blowing yesterday. Those big schooners had been charging through the water like ornery horses with the bit in their teeth, and it takes a fair amount of wind to get those big heavy boats moving like that. Out in the open ocean on a little sailboard, conditions would have been worse.

But she is alone now, I thought as I climbed the ladder to the
Power Play
's deck. She will have things to see to, arrangements to make, and I am the only friend she has here.

There was no sign of either Drew or Debbie, but the door to the main salon was wide open, so I went on in. Down in the captain’s cabin, I found Catalina lying on her bunk fully dressed, facing the bulkhead. I wondered if she was sleeping, but before I could cross the narrow cabin to check, she sat up and swung her feet off the bunk. I was amazed at her agility despite what looked like a basketball hanging on the front of her body. Her eyes were rimmed with red and her long black hair, which was usually tied back in a ponytail, now hung about her face like a frizzy halo.

“Hi,” she said. “Thanks for coming by.”

The way she said it sounded as though she hadn’t expected me, and that made me feel like a real louse. Had I given her reason to have such low expectations of me? Probably. On the very day she lost her husband, I hadn’t believed her.

I didn’t want to ask her how she was. It would be a stupid question under the circumstances. But as I leaned against the door frame, I didn’t know what else to say to her.

“Have you eaten anything today?”

“No,” she said, stretching her arms wide and yawning. “I’m just not hungry. Besides, there is not much to eat on the boat. They cannot run the refrigeration when the boat is hauled out.”

“Then let’s go to town.”

She reached for a slip of paper on the table next to the bunk. “Debbie brought this to me earlier. She said the police want to talk to me.”

“That’s normal.”

“Debbie thinks I should get a lawyer, but I cannot afford one. I have not worked in several months, and we can only just pay our expenses with Nestor’s paychecks. I don’t even know how long I will be allowed to stay here on this boat. But I cannot take the bus back to Fort Lauderdale until I have taken care of my husband.” She closed her eyes and turned her head to one side. I could see from the tension in her neck that she was fighting against her need to weep.

“Look, Cat, let’s take things one at a time. You will be allowed to stay aboard this boat until we get back to Fort Lauderdale. I made sure of that. I talked to Berger.”

At the sound of his name, the corners of her mouth dropped and she set her chin forward. I tried to ignore her reaction.

“As far as the cops go, I don’t think you need a lawyer. They just want to talk to you. I’ll go with you—but only if you promise we can stop for something to eat first. I’m starving.”

She pushed herself up off the bunk. Her movements were graceful as a dancer’s, but cautious, as though she thought her body might break if she moved too quickly. The child she carried was now the only tangible remains she had of her husband. She stroked her belly, smoothing the print blouse over the bulge.

“She has been kicking today. It is as though she is upset, like she knows something terrible happened.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d never felt a baby kick. There had been a time when I felt a life within me— and I’d worked hard to ignore it. But that was different and in another time that I now did my best to forget. Anytime something happened that caused that memory to poke its little head out, I changed the subject and stuffed it back into the darkness of lost memories.

Catalina took the two steps to the head. With the door open, she quickly splashed water on her face.

“Do you know for sure it’s a girl?” I asked.

“No, we decided to wait and be surprised.” She paused, the hairbrush in midair, and stared at her own reflection. “Now ...” She let her voice trail off, and I could see the muscles and bones of her jaw working under the skin. She smoothed the hair back and restrained it with a black clip. Her usually lush lips were stretched flat. Stepping back out into the cabin, she reached for a sweater that was hanging on a bulkhead hook. “Seychelle, I know you don’t want me to talk about Nestor, about what I believe happened to him.” She swung the sweater over her shoulders, the sleeves hanging down in front, and I noticed again just how lovely she was with her smooth brown skin. When she turned to look at me, her eyes were wet and glistening and there were dark red spots coloring her cheeks. “But right now, the only thing keeping me from breaking into pieces is the rage I feel at whoever killed my husband. I will find who did this to him,” she said. “I will.”

As we walked through the boatyard parking lot, a small, mousy-looking woman climbed out of an older, dusty Toyota Corolla and walked toward us.

“Catalina Frias?” she asked.

“Yes, that is me,” Cat said.

The woman had an oversize fabric shoulder bag bulging with its unseen contents, and she carried a notebook in her hand. She extended her hand and said, “My name is Theresa Banks. I write for the
Key West Citizen
. Could I speak to you for a minute?”

I did my best to steer Cat away from the reporter, but she shook her arm loose from my grip. “Yes, I will speak to you. This is about Nestor, correct?”

“Yes. My sympathies, ma’am, but I’m writing a story on the accident, and I wanted to get a little more background material on your husband.”

“This was no accident,” she said. “Nestor was a champion windsurfer in the Dominican Republic. He was too skilled for such an accident.”

I stepped between them. “Listen, Cat, right now Ted Berger is going to let you stay on the boat until we get you back to Lauderdale, but if you go talking to the papers like this—”

“Mrs. Frias, if you don’t think it was an accident, what do you think happened out there?”

I spun around to face the reporter. “Please, show a little respect. This woman just lost her husband. She is not going to talk to you today.”

I turned back to Catalina. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Cat reached past my body, snagged the woman’s offered business card, and stuffed it into her handbag.

We reached the street just as a city bus was passing in front of the yard, so we flagged it down and I tried to help Catalina aboard. She shooed my hands away and pulled herself up the steps with the handrails. I told the bus driver we were headed for the Key West police station and were looking for a good place to eat close by.

He dropped us off at Garrison Bight Marina with directions to Captain Runaground Harvey’s Floating Restaurant. We ate without much talk, and I was trying to figure out what I could do to break through the tension when Cat asked for the check and hustled us out. She said she was in a hurry to get to the police station to see what they had discovered.

Through the window, we told the officer behind a desk that we were there to see Detective Lassiter. He called another officer, who ushered us inside to a small waiting room with a table and about half a dozen chairs. When he came in, Lassiter didn’t seem any more comfortable in his coat and tie than he had the night before. He wore a look of perpetual irritation. Dropping the file folder onto the table, he sat down across from Catalina with a heavy sigh.

“Ms. Frias, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Cat nodded her acknowledgment of the detective’s statement, but her straight-backed posture seemed to indicate she didn’t quite believe it.

He folded his hands on the table in front of him. “The medical examiner has determined that the cause of death was an accidental drowning. The body can be released to you at any time now. By law, the hospital cannot keep the body there for longer than twenty-four hours, and we don’t have an official coroner’s morgue on the island. They are getting anxious to know what your plans are. Do you have a preference for the funeral home? Had Mr. Frias made any prior arrangements?” Catalina looked at the detective with her mouth sagging open, her eyes squinting.

He turned to me. “Does she speak English?”

I nodded. “Oh yeah.”

When he turned back to face Catalina, she said very softly, “That’s it? The police are not going to do anything more than that? You call my husband’s death an accident? You wash your hands and you think that makes you clean?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Ms. Frias.”

“Detective, my husband’s death was not an accident.” Frias held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Whoa, ma’am, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest—”
 

“What do you mean, no evidence? Sir, Nestor was a windsurfing national champion in the Dominican Republic. He has windsurfed in much stronger wind than what we saw here in Key West on Sunday.”

“Well, he might have been a champion, ma’am, but even champions—”

“No, you did not know my Nestor.”

The detective looked at me as if asking me to help him with this woman. I shrugged. “I’m staying out of this,” I said. “I just told her what I saw.”

Lassiter turned to Catalina and it was obvious that he saw her, really saw her, for the first time. He saw the determined chin held high, the rigid posture, the full lips, and something in his face softened. That was when I realized that Catalina had something of the same effect on men that B.J. had on women.

She reached for the folder on the table. “Do you have the pictures? Seychelle said the Coast Guard took pictures.”

Lassiter slapped his hand on the folder and drew it closer to him. “No. Bad idea. I don’t think you want to look at these pictures. Not in your condition and all.”
 

“Detective, I want to show you your evidence. Then you can check to see if the wound on his head fits with the mast on the sailboard.”

“Begging your pardon, Ms. Frias, but I think you’ve been watching too many of those TV cop shows. You are understandably upset. Your husband was a very young man. But this accident was a tragedy, and I don’t think you need to make more of it than it was.”

“Show me the photos.” Her voice was quiet, but firm, her eyes locked on his face.

Again the man turned to me with those sad brown eyes that made me feel sorry for him. He didn’t want to cause Catalina any more pain. He didn’t want to show her the photos. He was probably afraid of causing her to have a miscarriage or something, and he wanted me to help.

“Detective Lassiter. Catalina Frias is a very strong and determined woman. I don’t want to be here all afternoon, and I know she won’t leave until she sees those photos. I think you ought to just show them to her.”

Slowly, he opened the folder and extracted two eight-by-ten color glossies. He slid them across the table.