“Miss Sullivan, I need to speak to you. It concerns the Daggett girl. Please call me or beep me immediately.” The robot voice on the machine told me that his message had been recorded at eight-thirty in the morning. Neither B.J. nor I said anything for several long seconds. I just sat on my stool rubbing my hand across my lips and chin, staring at the machine.

B.J. was the first to break the silence. “Are you going to call him?”

“I don’t trust him, B.J. I think he’s just using Ely’s name to make me call. There were cops on the Top Ten when I came back by it this morning.”

“The police are not the bad guys, Seychelle.”

“They think I killed Neal and Patty. Pete says Collazo’s been poking around the Downtowner asking about me. He’s not even looking for other suspects. What’s he

going to think when they figure out it was me on the Top Ten last night?”

“You want me to drive you over to Jeannie’s? She’ll know what to do.”

“Yeah, but she’s not home, remember?”

“We’ll wait for her.”

“B.J., these guys scare me, but jail scares me even more. This guy Collazo, he’s just too focused on me. I didn’t do anything, but I’ve watched enough segments of 60 Minutes to know that innocent people do go to jail for crimes they didn’t commit—and it’s usually because of some pit bull type of cop who just won’t let go and makes the evidence fit the perp he wants it to fit. Naw, I’ve got to do this other thing first. I need to find out what the story is on that compressor on the boat. If I can figure out what Neal was doing out there that morning, then okay, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable talking to the cops. But not till then.”

He shook his head but smiled. “You are one stubborn, hardheaded woman.”

I grabbed my shoulder bag off the bar and rummaged around for the keys to Lightnin’. “I’ll be fine.” I lifted my arm and rotated my wrist. The pain was barely noticeable. “Thanks for everything, B.J.”

“Okay. But I’m going to be working around here the rest of the day. I’ll be inside the big house. If you need me, I’ll be here.”

XVIII

The Top Ten used to berth on B Pier, in Slip B37. It was third in from the end, so I walked out the length of the pier. Most of the bigger boats had changed since the days I used to visit Neal there. These megayachts usually stayed on the move in order to remain one step ahead of the tax man. Their transoms bore hailing ports such as George Town, Cayman Islands; Road Harbor B.V.I.; or Hamilton, Bermuda—all exotic ports with little in the way of industry for their people, so providing tax-dodge hailing ports kept the millionaires in town for a few days out of the year.

My Way was in her slip, but the boat was all locked up. I didn’t see Nestor around. The docks looked deserted. I thought I would at least find Raymond out here working on the deck of one of the big yachts. Raymond was from down island. He had come up to the states from the Caribbean as a crewman on board a big classic wood charter yacht and then had some kind of falling-out with the skipper in Lauderdale. That was about four years ago, and he had supposedly been working to make his fare home to Bequia ever since. He worked illegally, on a cash-only basis, but he could lay down a coat of varnish that looked like glass. His skin was nearly as black as the Ray-Ban shades he always wore, and his dreads were shoulder length. He always looked like he was just loafing around, but he got more work done than three average men, and the skippers fought to hire him. He rarely spoke, but he was always listening.

“Seychelle, ova hea.” The voice came from the foredeck of a hundred-foot-plus British flagged schooner.

I walked a bit out the finger pier. Under the low blue foredeck awning, Nestor and Raymond sat grinning and passing a joint back and forth.

“Come join the party, Seychelle,” Nestor said.

I grabbed the wire lifelines and climbed onto the high deck of the schooner. She was an old-timer dating back to the twenties, but she was in immaculate condition. I remembered her from a few years back when Red towed her up the New River. The captain was a British gentleman who had invited me below for a tour. She looked like she had been under Raymond’s care for several weeks. Her brightwork shone like blown glass.

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.