Savannah Breeze (23 page)

When we were
two hours north of Ft. Lauderdale, I called Sabrina Berg's number again, and again got her answering machine.

Weezie and I had spent a frustrating ten minutes, the night before leaving, staring at the murky video she'd sent James of the mysterious Rodolfo Martinez.

“Is that him?” Weezie asked, squinting at the man in the video, who appeared to be busy opening cupboard doors in the master cabin, and pausing to admire himself, more than once, in a full-length mirror.

“I can't tell,” I said, pushing the pause button on the television's remote control. “The build is right, and the hairline looks the same as Reddy's, although this guy's hair is much darker, and longer. It's hard to tell with the dark glasses and the crappy lighting.”

“But you think it's him, right?” Weezie asked.

“Well, yeah. It's him. Probably.”

“Probably?” Weezie said, turning to look at me. “BeBe, probably isn't a good enough reason to go all the way to Fort Lauderdale.”

The shadowy figure in the video turned sideways to admire his physique in the mirror, and that's when I saw the glint on his wrist.

“Son of a bitch,” I exclaimed, hitting the pause button again, and crawling toward the television until I was directly in front of it.

“Son of a bitch!” I repeated. “It's him all right.”

“How do you know?” Weezie asked.

“Right there,” I said, jabbing the screen with my forefinger. “He's
wearing my daddy's watch. It's an antique twenty-two-carat gold Piaget. Mama gave it to Daddy for their twenty-fifth anniversary. It was in my jewelry box. That lying, low-down scumbag!”

“Ballsy,” Weezie said.

“He's going to pay,” I vowed. “Pay big-time.”

“At least he didn't sell it. Like he did your aunt's painting.”

“I'm going to rip his arm off and beat him to death with it,” I told her.

Now, after a bathroom break and a stop to pick up more Kit Kat bars and chocolate milk for my grandfather, we were only an hour north of Lauderdale, and I was getting anxious to make contact with the last known person to have had a Reddy sighting.

I dialed Sabrina Berg's number again. It rang five times, but she finally picked up.

“Sabrina?” I said quickly. “This is BeBe Loudermilk.”

“Hey there,” she said. She had a pronounced Southern accent. “I just talked to your lawyer. He told me you might be headed down this way. I take it you think Rodolfo Martinez is the man you're looking for?”

“It's him,” I said. “Positively. “Look. I'm about an hour away. I was wondering if you'd have time to chat with me?”

“Gee,” she said hesitantly. “When did you have in mind? Tomorrow I've got a nail appointment in the morning, and then a lunch date, and a tennis lesson at three…”

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was nearly three. It felt as if we'd been on the road for days.

“How about later this afternoon? I know it's short notice, and I hate to impose, but I really need to talk to you.”

“Yes, that would work. I'm having dinner with a friend at the marina at six.”

“The marina?” I said anxiously. “The same one where you keep your boat?”

“Kept. Past tense,” she corrected me. “I sold the
Pair-o'-Docs
. To
the lowest bidder.” She chuckled. “My ex nearly had a seizure when he found out the price. Now I'm shopping for a new boat. Something without any nasty memories attached to it.”

“Is there a place near the marina where we could meet for a drink and talk?”

“There's the Binnacle,” she said. “It's at Seventeenth Street, right there on the water. Do you know the place?”

“No, but if you give me directions, I'll find it,” I promised. “I'm a quick study.”

Although I was good at directions, Harry refused to believe I knew where we were going. An hour and ten minutes (and two wrong turns) later, Harry pulled up to the door of a large wooden structure that looked like a Disney version of a pirate's ship.

He hadn't even turned off the engine before a deeply tanned kid wearing a white shirt, khaki shorts, and a canvas pith helmet was pulling his door open.

“Welcome to the Binnacle,” the kid said. “Valet parking is seven dollars.”

“Christalmighty!” Granddaddy bellowed from the backseat. “We want to park the thing, not rent a room.”

Harry looked to me for guidance.

“Just let me out here,” I suggested. “See if you can find a reasonable motel nearby. I'll call you on your cell when I'm ready to be picked up.”

I jammed Granddaddy's floppy canvas golf hat on my head, and donned my own dark sunglasses, in the off chance Reddy might be lurking around the premises.

“Let's find some food,” Granddaddy told Harry. “And a liquor store. I think I might be dehydrated.”

Sabrina Berg had told me she'd be wearing a white pantsuit with an orange scarf, and that she'd be sitting at the bar. What she hadn't told me was that the pantsuit was Donna Karan, and that she was an African-American knockout.

“Sabrina?” I asked as she sipped from a long-stemmed martini glass. Her bare arm was circled with half a dozen gold bangle bracelets, and on the ring finger of her right hand she wore a huge headlight of a diamond solitaire, at least five carats.

“BeBe!” she said warmly. “You found me.” She patted the empty barstool beside her. “I was starting to worry that you'd gotten lost.”

“My friend took a couple of wrong turns,” I said. “Your directions were fine.”

A female bartender dressed in an abbreviated sailor's suit set a coaster down on the bar in front of me. “Something to drink?” she asked.

“They do a killer lemon martini,” Sabrina suggested.

“I'll try that,” I said.

Sabrina held up her half-empty glass. “Same thing.”

Sabrina Berg was in her mid-thirties, I guessed, with glossy hair that fell softly to her shoulders. Her skin was the color of caramel, and flawless. Everything about her said high cost, high maintenance.

“Now,” Sabrina said, when our drinks were placed in front of us. “What can I tell you about this Rodolfo Martinez person?”

“Everything you know,” I said, looking around the room. The far wall of the Binnacle was all glass, looking out on rows of slips with a forest of gleaming white yachts and sailboats. Although it was barely four-thirty, the place was crowded with a mix of young, hip, yachting types and older, well-dressed men and women in pricey resort wear.

“I told your lawyer most of it,” Sabrina said. “I got a call from this man. He said he'd seen the
Pair-o'-Docs
listing in BUC, and he was very interested in looking at it. We arranged to meet at the slip. He showed up right on time. Asked a lot of questions, and spent a lot of time in the engine room. I got the feeling he knew his way around boats.”

“I couldn't see his face very well in the video,” I said. “Did he ever remove the dark glasses?”

“No,” she said, her large hazel eyes widening. “And that made me
a little suspicious. This is South Florida, so everybody down here wears sunglasses. But his were these creepy mirrored kind. Like a redneck highway patrolman wears, you know?”

I nodded. “What else?”

She fidgeted with the catch of one of the bracelets. “I think his hair was dyed. Again, you see a lot of that down here.” She made a face. “Men who think if they put a little dark color in their hair, it makes them look like Enrique Iglesias. As if! I noticed the hair on his arms was sort of golden. It didn't match up. And I was wondering why he was dying it. Certainly not to cover gray. He isn't old enough, is he?”

Now I made a face. “I'm not certain how old he really is. Everything he told me turned out to be a big, fat lie.”

“Honey, I feel your pain. If I had a dollar for every lie my ex told me…” She laughed. “Hey! As it turns out, I do have a dollar for every lie he told. And that comes to a little over twelve million, so you know the kind of bastard he was.”

“My lawyer said you two had lunch together?” I prompted.

“Right here at the Binnacle,” Sabrina said. “It was his suggestion. Which isn't surprising. There are at least a half dozen marinas within a few miles of here. It's kind of a hangout for the yachting types. And not just the owners.” She gestured at a group of people milling around at the end of the bar. They were all in their twenties, sun browned, the women dressed in revealing little sundresses or T-shirts and midriff-baring shorts, the men in shorts and collared golf shirts. “Those kids are all probably crews from some of the bigger yachts. A lot of them live aboard, so this place is sort of a clubhouse for them when they're in town or in between jobs.”

“Hmm,” I said, glancing quickly around the room, halfway hoping I might spot Reddy.

“He's not here,” Sabrina assured me. “I would have called you on your cell phone if I'd seen him.”

“What did you talk about at lunch?” I asked.

“The boat. Maintenace records, specs, all of that. I had a folder
full of information, otherwise I couldn't have told him diddly about the
Pair-o'-Docs
.”

“You didn't spend much time on it?”

She hooted. “Yeah. On a deck chair. Honey, I am just a city girl from Atlanta, Georgia. The yacht was my husband's play toy. To tell you the truth, I get a little queasy when I get too far from land. I mean, I love to cruise around and all, but I am
not
somebody who wants to spend a week cooped up in that dinky little stateroom. I mean, if I want to travel, get me a room at the Ritz-Carlton or the Breakers, you know?”

“I hear you.”

“And that bitch Cissy Owens! They haven't made the yacht big enough for me to spend another minute with that horse-faced heifer. We took the boat over to Bimini one weekend with her and Chip, and that was enough for me. I told Adam, you two might be all buddy-buddy, but this is one partnership you can count me out of.”

“Chip Owens?” I said. “Is that the plastic surgeon who was the partner in the boat?”

“Ah-huh,” Sabrina said. “He's a boob man. That's all he does. And you ought to see the set he put on Cissy, that's the wife. Little tiny skinny-ass white girl like that and here she comes with a pair of double Ds. The child could hardly walk upright. And he had the nerve to tell Adam he could tweak me up to a C if I wanted. For an anniversary present! I told Adam, if you wanted big tits, you shoulda married Dolly Parton. Not Sabrina Daniels.”

The bartender flitted past and Sabrina held up her empty martini glass. “Again,” she said. “And for my friend too.”

I was beginning to like Sabrina Berg.

She picked up her handbag—it was from the new Kate Spade spring line; I may be poor, but I can still read
Elle
and
Vogue
—took out a gold compact, and touched up her apricot lipstick in the mirror.

“He's sorta cute, in a plastic kind of way,” she said, putting the compact away.

“Who?”

“Rodolfo, or whatever his name is. I can see how he hooked you. He's one of those men who just understand women. I mean, he actually noticed my shoes the day we had lunch. But he doesn't do it in a faggy kind of way, right?”

“Right,” I said ruefully.

“He loooved the
Pair-o'-Docs,
” Sabrina said. “Said he liked the classic lines, better than the latest models. He couldn't believe the price I was asking. I mean, he was amazed. I thought he was gonna write out a down payment right here on the bar.”

“What happened?” I asked. “If he was that crazy about it?”

The bartender came back with our new round of drinks and Sabrina took a big slurp of hers. Alcohol did good things for her. Her eyes sparkled, her face was animated. She exuded good times.

“He wanted to take it out for a shakedown,” she said. “Alone.”

“And you said no?”

“Oh hell yeah,” Sabrina said. I had noticed that the more she drank, the less cultured she sounded. “Some guy walks in off the street, thinks he can flash a little money at me and stroll away with a yacht like the
Pair-o'-Docs
? Uh-uh. I told him, ‘Have your mechanic look at it. I'll get my lawyer to put together a crew, and you-all can take it out for an hour or so, see how it runs. But no way are you stepping foot on my boat until I see a cashier's check for fifty thousand dollars in earnest money.'”

“How did he take that?” I asked.

“Said the money wouldn't be a problem. He needed to get with a guy he knew who could take a look at the electronics, and he'd call me back and set up a time.”

“But he didn't call back?”

“No,” she said. “The very next day after we had lunch, I showed the boat to a couple from Maine. They were wild for it. Didn't even want to check the mechanicals. They looked at it on a Thursday, left, and then called me on their cell phone to say they'd decided to take
it. We met at my lawyer's office the next day and finished the deal within an hour. All cash.”

“Lucky,” I said. “I'll bet Rodolfo was planning to scam you out of the boat.”

“Maybe,” she said. “He sure looked like he could afford it. I mean, aside from those wacky sunglasses, he looked like he was made of money. Nice clothes, driving a Jag, beautiful manners. Honey, he was wearing a gold watch, I swear, it looked like something Cary Grant would have worn in one of those old movies.”

I winced. “That was my daddy's watch. He stole it from me.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “He does need killin'.”

I took a sip of my martini, then pushed it away. It was lovely, but I needed to keep sober and pick every bit of Sabrina's brain before she got any more wasted.

“The phone number he gave you,” I said. “Do you still have it?”