Wreckers' Key (11 page)

We had ordered and were waiting for our clam chowder to arrive when I noticed Neville Pinder slide onto a stool at the bar. He was still wearing shorts, but he had put on a jacket and a baseball cap. His longish blond hair stuck out like tufts of grass around his ears.

“See that guy at the bar?” I said. “The big guy with the baseball cap?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know him?”

“I know who he is. Nearly everybody who lives in Key West does. Neville Pinder. He owns Ocean Towing. But if you mean, are we friends? No. I don’t remember ever having talked to the man.”

“Do you know much about him?”

“Just that he has a reputation for being a jerk.”

“So I’ve heard.”

I was watching Pinder at the bar. His voice carried across the open courtyard as he joked around with the charter captains and made himself the center of everyone’s attention.

“If I do wind up getting out of this business, it will be because of guys just like him.”

“I can’t imagine anything ever making you want to sell
Gorda
. That boat’s been in your family as long as I can remember.”

“That’s true. In lots of ways, she represents all I have left of Red.” I tilted up the plastic cup that had held my draft beer and pretended to examine the bottom. There it was, that stealth emotion that had a way of sneaking up my throat and making me cry when crying was the last thing I wanted to do.

“You were lucky. He was a good dad.”

Something in his voice made me look up at Ben’s face. I could see in the set of his chin that he was fighting his own unexpected emotion.

“Ben, you just said Pinder was a jerk, but he had nothing on your dad. If they gave prizes for being the biggest asshole on earth, your dad would win.”

He made a noise with his mouth closed, and it exited through his nose. It sounded like a vain attempt at a chuckle. “My dad,” he said, looking away, refusing to meet my eyes. “Good old Junior Baker. Owner of Baker Ford. Big man in Fort Lauderdale.”

That was part of what was making me feel so awkward around Ben. I realized that now. I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the memory, but at that moment I saw again in my mind’s eye that night Ben’s father had come to my house and taken his terrified son home. “I still remember, Ben. There’s a lot in my life I wish I had done differently. That night is one.”

When he turned to look at me, it was as though we’d stepped into a time machine. I wanted to say,
There you are. That’s the boy I knew.
It was in his eyes. That darkness, the loneliness that was so much a part of the young Ben I knew. He’d done a good job of burying it, but it wasn’t gone.

“Do you?” he asked. Then without waiting for me to answer, he put his hand on mine and gave me the saddest smile. “But we don’t really get do-overs in life, do we?”

I was looking for the words to answer him when another voice interrupted us.

“Hey, Ben, check this out.” The voice came from behind us, and Ben turned to greet a young man wearing shorts, Polo shirt, and rain jacket—the charter crewman’s uniform.

“I’ve got pictures my girlfriend took at the Wreckers’ Race yesterday. There’re some good ones of
Hawkeye
. ”
 

“Let’s see.”

The kid slid into one of the empty white plastic chairs, nodding at me. Ben said, “Seychelle, this is Jack. He crews on the
Western Union
.”

Jack spread out the photos on the table and pointed to the various shots of the schooners under way, heeled over, white water foaming at the bow. “It was awesome weather, wasn’t it? Most of the time when we race these big old boats, it’s a drifting match.”

“Yeah,” Ben said, “it takes a lot of wind to move our kind of tonnage.”

There were also several photos of the fleet anchored out off Sand Key Light, dinghies circling in the water, some pulled up onto the sand beach. My eyes scanned across the photos looking for Nestor. I wondered if he had made it out to the lighthouse as he’d told the kid at the rental shack he’d intended. I’d checked almost all the photos without seeing any sign of him when I stopped and went back to a photo I’d already examined. It wasn’t Nestor or a windsurfer that caught my eye. It was a white boat with a center console that was pulled up on the sand. A yacht tender. Written on the side was t/t
Power Play
.

I closed my eyes for a moment and replayed the scene in my head. There was no doubt about it. Ted Berger had told me he’d spent all afternoon fishing Bluefish Channel. That was in the opposite direction—nowhere near Sand Key. The question I now wanted answered was this: Why did he lie?

X

When I got to the boatyard the next morning, I was feeling just a little bit wobbly. Wine wasn’t my drink of choice, and I’d had too much of it the night before. Ben kept pouring and I kept drinking. Stupid. I was sort of hoping that we would get back around to talking about personal history again, but he steered the conversation toward the safe topic of boats. Something about the man fascinated me, but I knew we would never be able to move forward until we cleared the air about the stuff that had happened long ago.

When I’d gotten out to my boat around eight o’clock, Abaco was thrilled to see me after nearly twelve hours alone. I had taken her ashore in the dark, and as she romped around in the trees snuffling out night creatures in the underbrush, I walked the shoreline feeling a monster headache coming on, and wondering what had been going on in my friend’s home as he was growing up.

The
Power Play
was back in the water that morning, tied to the dock at Robbie’s Marina, and my headache hadn’t subsided yet. In the clear dry air after a cold front, anything white bounces that Florida sunlight right back into your eyes like lasers. The big slab sides of the yacht were making my teeth hurt.

“Hi, Seychelle.” The perky voice came from behind me, and my headache threatened to turn to nausea. I turned away from the brilliant yacht to find Debbie crossing the dirt yard waving at me. Her slender arms were tanned a nutmeg brown, and her short, shiny hair bounced as she arrived beside me and took my arm. “You don’t look too good. Are you feeling okay?”

I was only months on the far side of thirty and this little twenty-something was making me feel ancient. I shook my arm free of her grasp. “I’m fine. It’s just that
Gorda
isn’t really meant as a live-aboard boat. She’s a little river tug. My digs aren’t nearly as luxurious as yours.”
 

She giggled. “
Digs
. I never heard anybody say that before. Well, come on. Our new skipper, Jeremy, is up in the yard office with Mr. Berger. They want you to join them up there. That’s why they sent me out here.”
 

“Okay. I got that. I’m going.”

She fell in step beside me. “This new guy, Jeremy, he’s like really cute. Wait till you see him.”

“Oh, I already have.”

“Really? How? I thought he just got here.”

“Debbie, I’ve met lots of Jeremys. Trust me.”

“That’s weird, ’cause I’ve never met anybody named Jeremy before.”

The yard office was in a makeshift metal building, new quarters after the last hurricane season had driven them out of the old place, Debbie told me. She led me into the lobby and back into a private office, where two upholstered office chairs held Berger and a gentleman I assumed was the yard manager. A metal folding chair scraped back when Jeremy stood and extended his hand to me. His blond hair was perfectly coiffed, the epaulets on his white shirt starched and pressed, and the palm of his hand as baby-smooth as his hairless chin.

Berger pointed to the other metal chair. “Take a seat.” The yard manager introduced himself as Bob, and I took my spot next to the other hired hand. I looked at Berger’s profile as he continued the story he had been telling Bob when I walked in. It was something about the women on his female roller hockey team. He obviously felt no compunction about calling the women broads and bitches in my presence, especially to an appreciative audience like Jeremy who laughed too loudly at his jokes. But just because Berger was an ignorant Neanderthal, did it follow that he could commit murder?

Bob was a heavyset older man, and judging from the pictures on the shelf behind his desk, he was also the father of daughters. Berger’s language was making him squirm. As soon as he could interject, he changed the subject to what had brought us there. He explained what work had been done to the boat, and what still needed to be finished up before we could depart. The three of them began to discuss the trip north as though I weren’t even there. In a pinch, the yacht could probably run on one engine with her makeshift rudders, but they anticipated a very slow speed for her—and they talked as if they were expecting us to run straight up the coast without stopping.

“Can I interrupt a minute here? Gentlemen, I just came down the coast and there are about a million lobster pots in Hawk’s Channel between here and Miami this time of year. There’s no way we’re running at night.”

Berger started to complain that he needed to get the boat up to Fort Lauderdale as soon as possible.

“You either do this my way, or you do it without me. If I’m the one running your towboat, we’ll stop the first night off Marathon, the second night off Rodriguez Key, and then we’ll run straight back, getting into Lauderdale late on the third night. While south of John Lloyd and the park waters, we only run during daylight hours. Once we’re clear of the pots, we head straight home. If it kicks up and gets nasty, weather-wise, we may have to dodge into Government Cut and go up the intracoastal between Miami and Lauderdale. You know how it is this time of year with these fronts. They come sliding down from the north as regular as fleas on a dog. If we’re lucky, the weather will hold, and if we get away Thursday morning, we’ll get in—” I paused and tried to see the calendar in my head. “—late Saturday night.”

Berger tried to argue with me, and Jeremy—as a good company man—stuck right behind the boss, but in the end I told them that it was a take-it-or-leave-it kind of deal. Especially now that I’d met Pinder, I knew more or less what Berger’s choices were, and I was confident he would give in. He did.

Once we had established that we would be leaving on Thursday morning, I stood to excuse myself from the group.

“Wait a minute,” Berger said. “Have you read the paper this morning?”

“No.”

“Your girlfriend has been talking to the press.” He held up the front page of the Key West Citizen. The headline read SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUND WINDSURFER DEATH.

“How do you know it was Catalina?”

“She’s quoted three times in the story, that’s how. She’s insinuating that Nestor’s death was no accident.”
 

“You’ve got to understand, she’s just lost her husband.”

“Bullshit. I don’t mind giving her a ride up to Lauderdale, but not if she’s making defamatory remarks about me to the press. Shut her up or she’s gone. You understand?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hear you.”

I was tempted to slam the door on my way out of the office. What was Cat thinking? She must have called that reporter yesterday after I’d sent her home in the cab. My first impulse was to be angry with her, but then I had to back off and realize that if it had been B.J., and I believed someone had killed him, I would be doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the question I should have been asking myself is why I didn’t feel the need to do this for Nestor.

I took off to find Catalina. She now had only a short time in which to take care of business in Key West, and she’d want to know we were leaving day after tomorrow. I’d do my best to avoid the topic of the newspaper. As I approached the dock, I saw her sitting at a table on the
Power Play
’s afterdeck, her head bowed over a book, a pen in her hand. It looked as if she was writing in some kind of journal.

I walked up to the edge of the sea wall and called out, “Permission to come aboard?”

She glanced up, appearing momentarily dazed, like she was trying to remember where she was. “Seychelle?”
 

“I’m over here,” I called out as I stepped through the gate in the bulwark and made my way aft. When I reached the deck, she closed the book and rested her pen on the table. “How are you feeling today?”

She placed a hand on her belly and slid it around in smooth circles. “She is resting now, but she was awake all night. It felt like she was dancing in there. I could not sleep, either, but it was not all her fault. Part of me is afraid to sleep. I am afraid I will have dreams and in my dreams Nestor will be alive. Then, when I awake, I will have to lose him all over again.”

“I can understand that,” I said, but I was thinking that every time I asked her how she was, she answered me in part with how the baby was. I wondered if my mother had felt so connected to me when I shared her womb. If so, was it just her illness that had changed her so, that had led her to leave me all alone on the beach that day?

“What were you writing?” I asked.

“Just my thoughts about what might have happened. Who might have done this to my husband. That woman at the newspaper asked me to.”

“Jesus, Catalina. Berger’s seen the article. He’s threatening to throw you off this boat.”

“I don’t need him. I’ll get my things and go.” She put her hands on the arms of her chair, ready to push her body to a stand.

“No. I don’t want you to do that. I understand that you want to find whoever you think did this, but I’m still not sure—I just want to get you home safe to Fort Lauderdale.”

I considered telling her then about the photo I had seen of Berger out at Sand Key Light and how he had lied to me about being there. I was afraid for her health and safety, though. I didn’t know what she was likely to try. At the moment, I just wanted to get her back to Fort Lauderdale and through this pregnancy.

“Speaking of that, Cat, I was up in the office talking to Mr. Berger and the new captain he hired.”

“A new captain already?”

“Yeah, he’s really anxious to get the boat back up to Fort Lauderdale so he can get it repaired. They want to leave Thursday morning.”