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.”