Up on the foredeck, I ducked under the awning and joined the two guys. Nestor was wearing the usual hired captain’s uniform—blue cargo shorts, Top-Siders, and a white polo shirt with the name of his boat, My Way, embroidered over the breast pocket.
I perched on the edge of a skylight hatch. “I wanted to ask you guys a couple of questions.”
“You okay?” Raymond asked when he saw my cuts and bruises up close.
“Yeah, it was nothing. A long story.”
“You like some ganja, mon?” Nestor offered me the joint. His fake accent was pathetic, and he looked pretty stoned. As a third-generation Cuban American, there was very little Caribbean left in him.
“No, thanks.”
“What can we do for you, lady?” Raymond smiled his shy, uneven grin. The man could smoke dope all day and never get the least messed up. I’d seen him do it on the Top Ten.
“I’m trying to figure out what Neal was doing out there last Thursday. Did he say anything to anybody about what he was taking the boat out for?”
“Naw,” Nestor said. Raymond shook his head.
“Okay. Did you ever notice Neal loading a compressor onto the afterdeck of the boat?”
“Yeah.” Raymond nodded, his dreads bouncing. “He axed me to help him wit it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nestor said, “I remember that day.”
“Did he say what he wanted to use it for?”
“Yeah,” Nestor said, taking a deep drag and holding the smoke in his lungs. I waited for him to finish. And waited.
He exhaled with a whoosh. “He said he was going to do a little diving out on a reef offshore, shoot some grouper maybe some summer crab.” Neal had always been guilty of taking lobster out of season. I could almost hear him bragging about it to Nestor.
“But why would he need another compressor? The Top Ten’s already got one below for filling tanks. Neal was always a tank diver.”
Nestor shrugged. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes stayed on the joint. “He just said he wanted to try diving with a hookah rig once. It was the boss’s money, he said. You know, he might as well experiment.”
A hookah rig was one where the diver was connected by a long hose to a compressor on the surface. Usually, though, they used small compressors that had been fitted inside a flotation device so that the compressor followed them around on the surface. I couldn’t imagine any reason why Neal would try out a hookah rig.
“Why, looky who’s here,” Perry Greene called out as he walked down the finger pier and prepared to climb aboard the schooner. “If it ain’t Miss Sullivan herself. Whooee, sure looks like somebody beat the crap outta you.”
“Hey, Perry, leave her alone,” Nestor said. “What’s up?”
Perry’s white-blond hair hung in his eyes as he ducked under the awning and dropped his butt onto the teak decks. The hair did not conceal the open greed in his eyes as he watched the two men smoke, nor did his cutoffs conceal much of anything, the way he was sitting on the deck. I turned my head aside in disgust.
“Hey, you guys wanna pass me a little of that?” He reached for the joint and sucked in smoke hungrily.
Raymond looked at me for several seconds before turning to Perry. “The captain is not hea.”
Perry exhaled loudly. “Shit, and here I thought we’d get some business done. Got some paperwork to take care of.” He grinned at me, waiting for me to ask.
I couldn’t believe it. He had to be talking about a job. They were headed upriver with the schooner for a haul-out, and they were going to be hiring Perry to help them make the trip? I caught Raymond’s eye, and he nodded at me, confirming it.
“So the Brit’s hiring you, is he?”
“Yes sirree, boy. What, they didn’t ask you, Seychelle? Now, what the hell do you make of that, huh?” He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Looks like nobody wants to hire a bitch to do a man’s job.”
“Perry,” Nestor said, “why don’t you just shut up? Even if having balls was all it took to be a good captain, you’d still have trouble meeting the criteria.”
“What’re you trying to say?”
“I tink he say it already, mon,” Raymond said, laughing. “Da captain be back later. You come back.”
Perry stood. “Don’t matter what you say, the word is out on Sullivan Towing.” He climbed down to the dock. “Seychelle, honey, you’re gonna be able to sit home and eat bonbons and watch the soaps every day.” He laughed his high-pitched hillbilly cackle, turned, and walked up the dock.
Nobody said anything for several minutes as the two men quietly smoked. Finally Nestor tossed the last of the joint overboard, and it sizzled as it hit the water. Neither man would look at me.
“It must be pretty bad, what they’re saying about me,” I finally ventured.
“Seychelle, I haven’t believed it, especially not now that I see you and talk to you. People are saying you’ve had some kind of a nervous breakdown, that you’re acting erratic, that you can’t be trusted. It’ll pass. You know how rumors fly around the docks.”
“But you also know what it’s like to have boat payments to make. Nestor I can’t sit around and wait for my reputation to clear. It’s all tied to this Top Ten business, I know it is. Is there anything else you guys can think of that was weird about Neal or the boat that day?”
“Well, there is one thing. The only other guy living on board the Top Ten was the engineer, Matt. You knew him, didn’t you, Sey?”
“Yeah, he came on board just before Neal and I split up.”
“Well, he told the cops that Neal had given him the day off, but he told me that morning, right after the Top Ten left the dock, that Neal had just fired him. Said he wouldn’t be needing him anymore. You know as well as I do that you couldn’t find a better engineer.”
“Where is Matt? I need to talk to him.”
“That’s the other thing. He’s gone. Left town awful fast. Said he was headed up to Newport to find a job up there.”
“Man . . . that is strange. Neal was a pretty decent mechanic, but he wasn’t good enough to keep the engine and generator running on the Top Ten. And owners of a boat like that surely wouldn’t cheap out on keeping an engineer.”
I turned to Raymond to see if he had anything else to offer. “Lady, I don’ like da people Neal was workin’ for.”
“Do you know anything about them? Who they are?”
“I don’ know dey names.” He pushed his shades down his nose and looked at me over the top of the dark glass. “But I see dey bad men. Be careful wit dem, lady.”
On my way back home, as I crossed over the Seventeenth Street Causeway, I noticed the soot-colored clouds building up out over the Everglades. It was still sunny here along the coast, but it wouldn’t be for much longer not once the dropping sun slid behind that dark wall. It was early in the year for that summer weather pattern.
My last stop was at Lauderdale Divers. When I pulled the Jeep into the parking space in front of their display window, I saw an example of a typical hookah rig in their window. It was a small compressor mounted inside an inner tube. It was similar to the compressor Red had on the Gorda, although ours was not portable or floatable. These little compressors didn’t have big accumulator tanks like the one on the Top Ten.
A couple of cruise-ship-type tourists were browsing through the T-shirt display, but otherwise, the fellow at the back of the store was alone, immersed in an issue of Scuba Diver magazine.
“Hello?”
He dropped the magazine. “Hi, what can I do for you?” He was about fifty, with graying hair, and he had that grizzled, squinty-eyed, old-time diver look.