Surface Tension (5 page)

I knew better than to share the couch with Jeannie. I’d made that mistake once before and had ended up perched on a forty-five-degree slope, trying to keep myself from tumbling downhill into Jeannie’s lap during the whole visit. I cleared a dining room chair, pulled it over by the couch, and sat.

“So, you must be in some kind of trouble again. I swear, girl, I never see you unless you need my help. Like that last time when you towed that Bertram charter boat, and it turned out the brokers had repoed the wrong boat, and everybody tried to hang it on you . . .” She chuckled.

Compared to the uncontested divorces, guardianship cases, and real estate closings that were her mainstay, Jeannie thought the work she did for me was interesting, and she loved to go back over the cases, gossiping about the “glamorous” world of yachts.

“You’re right, in a way.”

She grabbed a bag of blue com tortilla chips off the pile of paperwork on the coffee table, propped open the bag, and offered it to me.

I shook my head and offered a thin smile at another of her attempts to eat healthy. “I don’t know as I would call this trouble exactly, but I would like you to look into something for me.”

“Fire away.”

“I towed the
Top Ten
in this morning.”

“Ha! Neal run out of gas or something and have to beg you for a lift?”

When Jeannie saw I wasn’t smiling anymore, she dropped the joking tone and reached for my hand. I stared for several seconds at the wrinkles of fat around her wrist. Her small gold watch almost disappeared in a fold.

“Seychelle, just seeing that man again can make you go all droopy like this? Lord, I thought you were through with him.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“But I thought you said . . .”

“That’s just it.” I proceeded then to tell her the whole story, about the mayday call, and how I’d found the boat, and the girl, dead in the water.

“Oh, my God.” Jeannie shuddered. She heaved herself up in a big bounce to inch forward on the couch. “Was there much blood?”

I guess most attorneys really are ambulance chasers at heart, I thought.

“I did my best not to look.”

“And there was no sign of Neal?”

I shook my head, not trusting my voice to keep steady if we got off on that. Business, stick to business, I told myself. “Jeannie, the boat was sold shortly after Neal took over as captain, about a year ago. Neal said some big corporation owns her now. I don’t think he ever did tell me the name, or if he did I don’t remember but it shouldn’t be that hard to find out. That’s what I’m here for. I need you to find the owner and get him to sign a copy of Lloyd’s Open Form. Obviously, I am entitled to a salvage claim, and to own a yacht like that, there ought to be some deep pockets there.”

“The kind I like.”

“You find out who owns her and start the paperwork rolling. Since she was nearly aground when I got to her, I risked the safety of
Gorda
and myself . . . you know the line to take. Figuring possible replacement cost of
Gorda
, my livelihood that I risked, and my fair wages for the effort I put in, we ought to ask for fifty thousand and settle for around twenty-five.”

“Don’t get your heart set on numbers like those, girl. It’s not that easy.”

“And it’s not every day that you find a multimillion-dollar yacht floating around completely unmanned. Besides, I’ve got the best damned attorney in Fort Lauderdale.” I grinned.

“Ha, well, I always knew you were a smart kid.” She returned the smile. “Okay, tomorrow’s Friday. I’ll see what I can get started, but there won’t be too much I can do on the weekend.”

“I know. Just do what you can. Unfortunately, business hasn’t been great lately. I’m not desperate . . . yet. But faster is better.” I stood up and started to walk to the screen door. I stopped and turned. “There’s something else, Jeannie.” The boys’ voices drifted up to the outside porch. Their little-boy voices strained for deeper pitches as they threw around “avasts” and “ahoys” aplenty. “I had a message from Maddy on the machine when I got back to the cottage. He wants me to buy him out of his portion of
Gorda
. I don’t have that kind of money, and he knows it. So he wants me to sell the boat.”

“What? Did this just come out of the blue?”

“Yeah. I don’t really understand where it’s coming from. I have my suspicions, but I’m going to talk to him about it. Once he makes his mind up about something, though, he usually doesn’t change it. Anyway, this salvage claim is now doubly important.”

Jeannie got up and followed me to the door. When we stepped outside, she glanced toward her boys with unseeing eyes. Her mind was already at work, mapping out strategies. “What do the cops think happened to Neal?” she asked.

I watched as Andrew leaned far out on a branch and tried to impale his brother with his plastic sword. I remembered Neal’s smile: the white teeth set in a brown leathery face, the deep cleft in his chin, the intricate patterns of crisscrossing lines around the corners of his eyes. “The cops? They’re out there now with divers, helicopters, the works, searching for a body. That’s what they think.”

V

When I left Jeannie’s it was still too early to meet B.J. at the Downtowner, so I drove down Las Olas to the beach. As I crossed over the Intracoastal drawbridge, I could see a helicopter working a search pattern offshore.

I turned south at A1A and cruised slowly down the beachfront. The tourist season was nearly over, and the only people out at the beach midweek were the old and the unemployed. They walked A1A checking the trash for aluminum cans and rattling the coin returns at the pay phones. I supposed it was better than the days when I first started lifeguarding, and the spring-breakers came down from the north and tore up the town. Those were the days before the city commissioners decided, in all their wisdom, that no tourists were better than the drunken, debauching variety. They used the cops to drive away the spring-breakers, and with their business gone, slowly the small mom-and-pop motels closed, nailing plywood over the windows and putting up For Sale signs in the dry, unkempt grass. Corporate America went on a buying spree then, with the beach looking like a ghost town, and now the big chain hotels, franchise restaurants, and chic boutiques were popping up all along the newly redesigned beachfront. The Fort Lauderdale Strip would soon have as much character as any middle-America shopping mall.

When I was a teenager we used to come down to the Lauderdale Strip and cruise, six or seven kids packed into my brother Pit’s old Ford Galaxy with the surfboard rack on the roof. Pit would oblige us, though he wasn’t really into the hooting and hollering and acting crazy like the rest of us. He’d scrimped and saved to get his car so he could get to the beach to surf after school. That boy just lived to surf, and sometimes, when we were cruising like that, with the bright neon-lit crowds on one side of the street and the glowing, foaming surf on the other. I would watch my brother from the backseat, where I was wedged between pimply-faced boys. He would completely ignore the scantily clad crowds the other kids found so enticing. Instead, Pit’s eyes measured the breaking waves as he surfed down them in his mind, a half smile dancing around his lips. I remembered how I envied him his distance, his independence, and how I wanted to get to the point where I would not be hurt by every teasing remark about my height or the breadth of my shoulders.

I drove up Seventeenth toward U.S. 1 and passed the Top Ten Club, the flagship of Crystal’s fleet of strip joints. The club was sandwiched between a luxury auto rental store and a mirrored office building. From the outside, the place looked pretty posh with a modem, multilevel design, gold trim, and neon. The grounds were beautifully landscaped to fit right in with the yacht brokerages and the high-end restaurants elsewhere on the street. It was a case of sleaze trying to go classy. An innocent observer would never guess it was a girlie joint, that day and night they had ten women dancing nude. The club motto was “All our girls are tens on top.”

The Downtowner was the kind of place I knew wouldn’t be around much longer, given the way waterfront property values were mounting along the river, but I hoped it could somehow hold out against the twin demons of taxes and gentrification. Both a bar and a restaurant, the memorabilia that covered the walls was not fake junk collected by a professional decorator, but rather old life preservers with real boat names that the old-timers still remembered, street-name signs from the days when people earned a street instead of buying one, old dinghies and ancient outboards, black-and-white photos and stuffed fish and wild-pig heads with yellowed tusks, all collected during the past fifty years from river folk coming and going through the doors of this place. The dark varnished wood interior had been built by boat builders and still retained that well-fitted feeling in spite of years of abuse. Behind the bartender’s back, plate glass windows ran the length of the bar and provided a view of the constant parade of river traffic, an ever-changing tableau of motor yachts, shrimpers, sailboats, barges, dinghies, and water taxis.

When I arrived, the place was abuzz with the gossip of the murder or murders, and Jake, Nestor, Wally, and a bunch of the others crowded around me when I came in. I told them an abbreviated version of my part in the morning’s events so they would leave me alone. I told them nobody knew what had happened to Neal, but the Coasties and the cops seemed to think he was dead.

Nestor, another of the charter captains, said, “You know, Sey, I’m not surprised that something strange like this happened to Neal.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s just been acting weird lately.”

“That’s right, Sey,” Wally said. “He’s changed since he got that job on the
Top Ten
. He doesn’t much talk to his old pals anymore, keeps to himself more.”

Suddenly I found myself very conscious of the language they were using. They were talking about him in the present tense, and I was glad. “Why do you think he’s acting like that?”

“Some of the other guys think his head’s got as big as that boat he’s driving,” Nestor said, “but me, I think he’s into something, something he doesn’t want anybody to know about.”

“Like what, Nestor?”

“Last time I talked to him, I felt like Neal was hiding something. Kinda reminded me of how the guys used to act back in the eighties when pretty near every captain on the water was in the drug trade. People didn’t get real friendly with each other in those days. They kept their mouths shut.”

“Come on, Nestor, I can’t see Neal involved in drugs. How could he? I mean, the
Top Ten
almost never went out except for the occasional charter up and down the waterway or for a sunset cruise offshore.”

“I don’t know, Sey. I’m just saying it’s something he’s keeping a secret. I tell you, he’s been acting weird lately. That’s all. I guess the cops will figure it out.”

I told them then that I needed some time alone, so they bought me a draft and moved down to the far end of the bar. I figured they wanted to discuss what they thought really happened out there. The Lauderdale waterfront community was a tightly knit group that loved nothing more than gossip, intrigue, and conspiracy theories. I remembered one time a local captain had taken off to the Bahamas for a couple of weeks with a charter group, and gossip flew round the Downtowner that the captain had died of a heart attack as he took his first dive into the aqua Bahamian waters. A week later the same fellow came driving his sailboat up the New River past the Downtowner’s windows, and several of the regulars nearly had heart attacks, believing they’d seen a ghost. Turned out it was a charter guest who died, and the waterfront gossip machine had twisted the facts once again. By evening, they surely would have found Neal guilty of smuggling drugs, illegal aliens, exotic animals, or God knows what.

I’d been thinking ever since leaving Jeannie’s about how good a beer would taste, but now, somehow, I found it couldn’t wash away the bad taste in my mouth.

As soon as I emptied the first glass, Pete brought me a fresh one on the house. He leaned across the bar.

“She seemed like a nice girl,” he said.

“You knew her?” I asked.

“Yeah, she filled in here a couple of times when Lil’s kid was out sick.”

“Who was she? What was she like?”

“Patty Krix was her name. Pretty girl, too, though mighty headstrong. Once she set her sights on Neal, he didn’t have a chance.”

I smiled at him. I’d known Pete a long time. He was an ex-single-hander. On his way up from the Virgins, he’d gone to sleep one night on watch. His autopilot had driven his pretty little Swedish-built cutter right up on the beach in front of the Fountainbleu in Miami. The boat was holed, and he lost everything. He’d been tending bar in the Downtowner back in the days when Red used to bring me in for Shirley Temples and regale the other regulars with his stories about the great little boat handler his daughter was turning out to be.

“Don’t worry about trying to make me feel better Pete. I knew Neal had been seeing somebody else. He and I broke it off a while ago. He was free to do as he pleased.”

“It wasn’t that, Seychelle, honest. It just seemed kinda strange at the time. She came in here all alone one afternoon, about three weeks ago. I carded her, so I know for a fact she was just barely twenty-one, but she looked mighty at home in a bar. A bunch of the guys hit on her, and they all struck out. Then Neal came in and sat at the bar. He was thinking about something, keeping to himself, and didn’t hardly seem to notice her. She called me over and asked me his name. Then before I knew it, she was over there sitting by him, laughing at his jokes, staring up at him with those big blue eyes. Like I said, he didn’t have a chance.”

Another customer called Pete over, and I was left to wonder why such a gorgeous girl would have singled him out. Neal was an attractive guy, all right, but why would he have appealed to a girl like Patty Krix? Really beautiful people were a different breed, and they always made me slightly uncomfortable.

Hiking my purse onto my shoulder, I slid off my stool and walked back to the corridor where the bathroom was. The beer was making me sleepy. I splashed cold water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror. What a mess. I hadn’t changed clothes since I’d thrown on shorts and a worn T-shirt in order to work on the damn broken marine head. Loose, windblown hairs stood out around my head in a sort of sun-bleached halo. I pulled the rubber band out of my shoulder-length light brown hair, used my fingers to comb out the snarls, and decided to leave my hair down. Although I usually sport a fairly dark tan from working outdoors, my skin looked pale, as though it were drawn too tightly over my cheekbones. Evidently, discovering dead bodies is not a recommended beauty treatment.