Jeannie didn’t look like much; actually, at well over 250 pounds, she looked like too much, but she had served me well in the past. She’d been a lawyer on the fast track in a high-powered firm when her twin boys were born. She never even told her boyfriend, who she knew had no interest in fatherhood, that she was pregnant, believing she could handle it all herself. But single motherhood turned out to be far more difficult than law school. She eventually decided to quit the firm, stay at home with the twins, and work out of her own house. Though her office was no longer of the high-powered sort, any opponents who judged her to be soft in the courtroom soon learned not to evaluate her on her appearance.
I’d met Jeannie in Winn-Dixie in the frozen-food aisle when one of her boys pitched a box of frozen waffles at my backside as I bent down to reach for a can of orange juice. Jeannie was totally unfazed by the incident. She just flashed me a boys-will-be-boys smile and introduced herself. She gave me her card. Later, when Red died and I needed a lawyer, I gave her a call.
Jeannie lived in the neighborhood known as Sailboat Bend, an interesting blend of million-dollar waterfront homes right across the street from low-rent apartment
buildings. Thrown in among these were some of the oldest homes in Lauderdale, old Conch cottages built by Bahamian carpenters in the ’20s and ’30s. Jeannie’s place was in a ’50s-vintage two-story concrete block and stucco house that had been divided into two apartments. She lived in the upstairs half of the building, and when I drove into the dirt yard, Andrew and Adair were up in the branches of a live oak tree, complete with eye patches, bandanas, and clip-on gold hoop earrings. I waved at the boys and climbed the outside staircase to the porch in front of Jeannie’s apartment.
Peering through the screen, I called out, “Hello! Jeannie?”
The dark shadow of her bulky silhouette completely blocked out the light coming from the kitchen at the end of the hall.
“Seychelle!” she called out in her contralto voice as she burst through the screen door. Her bright tent-like muumuu surrounded me with folds of parrot-and-bamboo-print fabric. A squeeze from her arms threatened my air supply, and she smacked a wet kiss just in front of my right ear.
“It’s so good to see you. I take it you made it past the pirate patrol out there.”
I nodded and started to speak, but she held open the door and jerked her head in the direction of the interior. With a meaty hand in the small of my back, she propelled me into the small living room of her two-bedroom apartment.
There was always a homelike feeling to being with Jeannie. Although physically she was nothing like my mother, her housekeeping reminded me of my childhood. Every level surface in the room was covered with papers, files, and books, and the local public radio station played classical music in the background.
I knew better than to share the couch with Jeannie. I’d made that mistake once before and had ended up perched on a forty-five-degree slope, trying to keep myself from tumbling downhill into Jeannie’s lap during the whole visit. I cleared a dining room chair, pulled it over by the couch, and sat.
“So, you must be in some kind of trouble again. I swear, girl, I never see you unless you need my help. Like that last time when you towed that Bertram charter boat, and it turned out the brokers had repoed the wrong boat, and everybody tried to hang it on you . . .” She chuckled.
Compared to the uncontested divorces, guardianship cases, and real estate closings that were her mainstay, Jeannie thought the work she did for me was interesting, and she loved to go back over the cases, gossiping about the “glamorous” world of yachts.
“You’re right, in a way.”
She grabbed a bag of blue com tortilla chips off the pile of paperwork on the coffee table, propped open the bag, and offered it to me.
I shook my head and offered a thin smile at another of her attempts to eat healthy. “I don’t know as I would call this trouble exactly, but I would like you to look into something for me.”
“Fire away.”
“I towed the Top Ten in this morning.”
“Ha! Neal run out of gas or something and have to beg you for a lift?”
When Jeannie saw I wasn’t smiling anymore, she dropped the joking tone and reached for my hand. I stared for several seconds at the wrinkles of fat around her wrist. Her small gold watch almost disappeared in a fold.
“Seychelle, just seeing that man again can make you go all droopy like this? Lord, I thought you were through with him.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“But I thought you said . . .”
“That’s just it.” I proceeded then to tell her the whole story, about the mayday call, and how I’d found the boat, and the girl, dead in the water.
“Oh, my God.” Jeannie shuddered. She heaved herself up in a big bounce to inch forward on the couch. “Was there much blood?”
I guess most attorneys really are ambulance chasers at heart, I thought.
“I did my best not to look.”
“And there was no sign of Neal?”
I shook my head, not trusting my voice to keep steady if we got off on that. Business, stick to business, I told myself. “Jeannie, the boat was sold shortly after Neal took over as captain, about a year ago. Neal said some big corporation owns her now. I don’t think he ever did tell me the name, or if he did I don’t remember but it shouldn’t be that hard to find out. That’s what I’m here for. I need you to find the owner and get him to sign a copy of Lloyd’s Open Form. Obviously, I am entitled to a salvage claim, and to own a yacht like that, there ought to be some deep pockets there.”
“The kind I like.”
“You find out who owns her and start the paperwork rolling. Since she was nearly aground when I got to her, I risked the safety of Gorda and myself . . . you know the line to take. Figuring possible replacement cost of Gorda, my livelihood that I risked, and my fair wages for the effort I put in, we ought to ask for fifty thousand and settle for around twenty-five.”
“Don’t get your heart set on numbers like those, girl. It’s not that easy.”
“And it’s not every day that you find a multimillion-dollar yacht floating around completely unmanned. Besides, I’ve got the best damned attorney in Fort Lauderdale.” I grinned.
“Ha, well, I always knew you were a smart kid.” She returned the smile. “Okay, tomorrow’s Friday. I’ll see what I can get started, but there won’t be too much I can do on the weekend.”
“I know. Just do what you can. Unfortunately, business hasn’t been great lately. I’m not desperate . . . yet. But faster is better.” I stood up and started to walk to the screen door. I stopped and turned. “There’s something else, Jeannie.” The boys’ voices drifted up to the outside porch. Their little-boy voices strained for deeper pitches as they threw around “avasts” and “ahoys” aplenty. “I had a message from Maddy on the machine when I got back to the cottage. He wants me to buy him out of his portion of Gorda. I don’t have that kind of money, and he knows it. So he wants me to sell the boat.”
“What? Did this just come out of the blue?”
“Yeah. I don’t really understand where it’s coming from. I have my suspicions, but I’m going to talk to him about it. Once he makes his mind up about something, though, he usually doesn’t change it. Anyway, this salvage claim is now doubly important.”
Jeannie got up and followed me to the door. When we stepped outside, she glanced toward her boys with unseeing eyes. Her mind was already at work, mapping out strategies. “What do the cops think happened to Neal?” she asked.
I watched as Andrew leaned far out on a branch and tried to impale his brother with his plastic sword. I remembered Neal’s smile: the white teeth set in a brown leathery face, the deep cleft in his chin, the intricate patterns of crisscrossing lines around the corners of his eyes. “The cops? They’re out there now with divers, helicopters, the works, searching for a body. That’s what they think.”