“Collazo, what do you say we dispense with any kind of pretense that we’re friends or that we like each other? I know you’re here to take my statement, and I’ve got to get back to work. I’ve got a tow waiting up in Hillsboro.”
“Very well.” He rifled through the jacket over his arm and found the gold pen in the inside breast pocket. “You found this boat offshore.”
“Yeah, I was up off that Hillsboro Inlet sinking, you know, the Haitian boat that went down night before last.” I ran through the rest of it for him, all of it, from getting Mike’s call to bringing in the tow to the dock here and calling the police. He wrote very quickly and in a remarkably neat hand. As I talked, I kept focusing on his fingers and noticing how fat they were, like plump, fuzzy caterpillars wrapped around his pen.
“You decided not to call the Coast Guard when you came upon this boat.”
“I don’t know that it was a conscious decision necessarily,” I said, knowing perfectly well that it was. “It was more like I was just too busy at the time.”
“Miss Sullivan, as a professional mariner, I’m sure you are aware of the required procedure. By not reporting the incident in a timely manner, you can jeopardize the investigation.”
“Detective Collazo, you don’t have to lecture me. So, I didn’t call it in right away. I just set about getting her to shore as fast as possible. I’m a certified EMT, so I could do just as much as the Hardy Boys over there,” I said, pointing to the Coast Guardsmen getting in the way of the police officers working the scene aft of Gorda. “I know my tug isn’t any speed demon, but I knew I could get her to port in the time it would take another boat to come out to meet us.”
He stared at me, waiting for me to continue, knowing that silence between us would make me uncomfortable. I hated when he did that. I tried to be strong, tried to stare right back at him, but every time a figure of authority looks at me like I am doing something bad, I feel guilty. It had been going on since Mrs. Laughlin’s first-grade class. I caved.
“It was the kid, Collazo. Did you see her? Skinny little thing? I was just trying to do what was best for her.”
“The child is Haitian.”
“Part, anyway. She said her dad is American, but yeah, she’s Haitian. Her name is Solange. She said the woman in the boat was named Erzulie or something like that. I didn’t get much of a chance to ask her anything else.”
“She spoke English.”
“Not much. She really didn’t say much at all. But her knowing some English jibes with her saying her father is American.”
“Miss Sullivan, you are aware that there is a great deal of difference between the way our government treats immigrants found at sea as opposed to those who make it to shore.”
“Oh yeah, the old wet-foot, dry-foot routine, only if you’re Haitian, they don’t give a damn about your foot. Collazo, I was only thinking about the kid. She needs medical attention, not a Coast Guard cutter ride back to Haiti.”
He stared at me, but this time I held firm, refusing to fill the silence.
“She told you how the woman died,” he said finally.
“No. It’s like I said, I hardly got a chance to speak to her. She was unconscious most of the trip into the harbor.”
Out in the waterway, an air horn sounded a long toot. I looked across Gorda's bow to see Little Bitt heading toward the dock with Mike Beesting’s big sailboat, Outta the Blue, on a short towline.
Mike shouted from up on the foredeck of his boat, “Is it okay if we raft up to you, Gorda?” while with one hand, he steadied himself on the rigging. As usual, he was not wearing his artificial leg, and his scarred stump protruded from his jeans shorts. He claimed the prosthesis slowed him down as he tried to maneuver around the tight spaces on a sailboat deck.
“Sure,” I called out, and jumped down onto Gorda's deck to take their lines.
Standing next to Mike on the foredeck of the Irwin-54 was a fellow with easily the best pair of legs I had ever seen on a man. Maybe it was just the perspective, my being on the low deck of the tug, and eyeball-to-kneecap with these muscular, suntanned legs, but it probably had as much to do with my recent decision to avoid men. He looked like a fit fifty-something, wearing a crisp white T-shirt that read “Hard Rock Cafe, Cayman Islands” across the front and was tucked into the trim waist of his khaki-colored cargo shorts. He knew enough about boats not to try to throw me the line from too far out as Perry was easing them in alongside with surprising precision. When only about four feet separated us, he tossed me the line and picked up a white fender to cushion the impact as the two boats came together.
Perry idled his boat off the bow of the sailboat and sauntered back to the stern to untie the towline. I hadn’t seen Perry in a couple of months, and he was now wearing his greasy hair in a shoulder-length mullet style, long in back, razed close on the sides. He pouched his lips out at me in an exaggerated kiss.
“Just say when, baby. You know you want me.” He cackled as he tossed the towline onto the deck of Mike’s boat.
“Yeah, like a dose, Perry. Which, given your personal hygiene, probably isn’t far from the truth.”
Once the sailboat was secure, Mike hopped back to the stem and handed me his shore power cord. That darned cord was nearly the diameter of a fire hose. “Plug that sucker in and we can fire up the AC and cool off that damn cabin down there. It’s hotter than a two-peckered goat out here.”
I took the cord from him. “Mike, you have got to learn you live on a boat. Flattening your batteries like that should be embarrassing to you.”
“Hey, look, it wasn’t me, all right? It was Joe. Man, he had to bum every light in the goddam boat all night.” Mike waved to Collazo on the dock. “Hey, Vic. What’s up, man? Want to come aboard and have a piña colada? Gonna have that blender chugging any minute. What brings you guys down here, buddy?”
Vic? Buddy? Somehow I could never picture either term applying to the Detective Collazo I knew. I plugged in Mike’s power cord before one of the dock jocks could object. When I stood up, Collazo was right there, invading my space, breathing on me as he said, “Miss Sullivan. We haven’t concluded our conversation.” He wiped his brow with an already saturated handkerchief.
“I don’t know anything more to tell you, Collazo,” I said, taking a step back. “I don’t know how she got out there, where she came from, who the dead woman is, nothing.” I put my raised palms in the air. “What more can I tell you?”
“You can tell me the exact location where you found her.”
“That I can do.” I jumped back down onto the tug’s deck, grabbed the ship’s log from inside the wheelhouse, and read off the exact position. I stepped outside the wheelhouse and, looking up at the detective as he wrote in his notebook, described the way the boat had been filled with dirty water and how I pumped it out.
“There is one thing that’s a bit strange, Collazo. I don’t know how much you know about boats, but I can tell you this: There is no way they came from Haiti in that little boat. It’s barely possible a boat like that could make it from Cuba, but from Haiti? With no sails? That’s just not possible.”
Down the dock, the crowd around the fishing boat opened up and several officers hoisted a bulging white plastic bag up to the dock where a uniformed woman stood alongside another gurney. I climbed back up onto the dock. Mike and his buddy Joe followed me. Another uniformed officer split off from the crowd and came over to consult with Collazo. They stepped aside and murmured just softly enough that I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
When Mike got upright on the dock, he asked, “Who died?”
“How about a little courtesy?” I said. “Introductions, perhaps?” I turned to his friend with the great legs. “Hi, I’m Seychelle Sullivan, since it appears our friend is not going to introduce us.”