Wreckers' Key (7 page)

“I’ve read about that.”

“Lots of Pinders’ve come to Key West through the years. Probably six or eight families by that name here now, all with ties to the islands and none of ’em wanting to have much to do with our boy Neville. His family’s on Man O’ War Cay. Don’t think Neville’s been back to the islands in years now. They don’t want him back. Family more or less kicked him out.”

“Why’s that?”

“He always was a troublemaker. Petty stuff. Stealing, public drunkenness, vandalism, mischief. Lots of those islands are dry, you know. They’re religious people. They didn’t take to Neville thinking that anybody’s skiff should be his for a joyride just because he drank a few beers. That’s how he got those scars.”

“What scars?”

“On his right arm. He’s missing a couple of fingers, too. Actually, it’s kind of a funny story. Neville got drunk, stole this fella’s boat, and went fishing in the middle of the night all by hisself. Caught a good-size barracuda, then, trying to take the treble hook out, he snagged his own arm with the hook, and the fish bit down on his hand. He ended up with a couple of furrows plowed down the skin of his arm. Doc had to amputate two of his fingers when the infection got so bad it almost killed him.”

“So how does a guy like that end up head of a big company like Ocean Towing? I mean, hell, they’ve got boats and bases from Stuart to Key West.”

“That is the question, isn’t it? And you aren’t the first person to ask it. There are a few of us old-timers around here, still living aboard our wooden boats out in the anchorage. Not many, that’s for damn sure. Most cruisers now have mini Winnebago plastic boats with generators and microwaves and toaster ovens. But a few of us were around back in the ’60s and ’70s, and we remember when everybody knew everybody over in the islands and you couldn’t get away with much.”

“I know what you mean. I wasn’t around back then, but I heard about those days from my dad.”

“So somehow our friend Neville got himself some backing and now he’s fleecing the yachties and superyachts. The goddamn salvage people are even worse than the cruisers now. You get in trouble, you don’t dare take a line from anybody. They’re just out to steal your boat from you. Not everybody’s got insurance, you know.”
 

“What’s the name of your boat?”

“The
Osprey
. She’s a thirty-four-foot yawl.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for her.” I dug into my bag for a card. “I’m on the tug
Gorda
,” I added, handing him the card. “I’m one of the goddamn salvage people. Thanks for filling me in on Pinder.”

He stared down at my card for a few seconds, then the only thing that shifted in his face was his eyes. They slid from the card back to me. “Sorry if I got kind of carried away there,” he said.

I raised my hand to stop him from going further. “No apology necessary. Most of the time I refer to folks in my business the same way. Like you said—things are changing, and I don’t like the changes any more than you do.”

Down the bar the waitress hollered, “Sam, I got an order.”

“Excuse me,” he said and went down to mix her drinks. I drained the last of my beer and dug in my bag for money. When Sam came back, he waved my money aside.

“This one’s on me,” he said. “I enjoyed talking to you. You want to find Neville, he has an office over on Fleming Street. Just head up Duval to Fleming, turn left, and you can’t miss it. It’s past Fausto’s.”

“Thanks, Sam,” I said.

Sam had been right when he said I wouldn’t be able to miss the offices of Ocean Towing. They painted all the boats in their fleet the same bright yellow-green color that some local fire engines had now adopted. I supposed it was the latest color to signify emergency services of some sort. The little office that stood in a block of attached offices was the only one painted that same blinding shade.

The receptionist who sat behind the desk in the front office of Ocean Towing was a very buxom young woman wearing a tie-dyed, gauzy skirt and a white tank top. She was braless, and I could see the outline through the thin fabric of the metal stud that pierced one nipple. It made me shiver. She had been working on the
New York Times
crossword puzzle when I came in, and it looked like it was nearly complete.

“Hi there, can I help you?” she asked. She sounded like Elmer Fudd. I wasn’t sure why.

“Yeah, I’d like to speak to Mr. Pinder if he’s available.”
 

She frowned. “I don’t know if he’s available or not.”

I understood then why her speech had sounded so strange. Her tongue was pierced, and she was trying to avoid touching the stud to the roof of her mouth.

“Do you think you could find out?”

“Sure.” She got up and disappeared down the back hall.

The office had some threadbare chairs and a rack of brochures outlining the Ocean Towing fee-based towing plan, but little else. I grabbed one of the brochures, sat down on a worn chair, and had started to read when the girl reappeared.

“Sorry,” she said and it sounded more like
sowy
. “I forgot. What’s your name?”

“Seychelle Sullivan,” I said. “Of Sullivan Towing and Salvage.” I crossed the room and handed her a card.

She glanced at it, then spun and bounced back down the hall, swishing her skirt with her hand as she walked. From where I was now standing, I saw her enter the last door on the right. I didn’t even have time to retake my seat before she poked her head out the door and said, “Come on back,” waving her hand. I circled her desk and headed back to the door she held open for me.

Neville Pinder was seated behind his messy desk when I walked in, but he rose and came around it to shake my hand. To say he was a big man would have missed it by half. Pinder had to be about six-foot-five with the massive lumberjack-size hands and feet that would fit a man that tall. And he wasn’t fat, just big. I guessed he was in his mid-forties, and though his hair was shaggy blond, his sideburns and mustache were streaked with gray and his brown leathery face was covered with a web of fine lines. He was wearing shorts and a yellow-green Ocean Towing T-shirt that showed the deep brown skin on his legs and forearms. This was a man who had spent most of his life outdoors.

When he extended his right hand, I saw the raised pink scar tissue that ran down his forearm in twin parallel lines. The hand itself was missing the pinkie and ring finger, but because his fingers were so huge, his grasp felt more than ample.

Once we’d finished with the handshakes and introductions, he offered his condolences about Nestor. His eyebrows peaked and the skin pulled tight around his pale green eyes, but he looked more like he was trying not to laugh.

“So I take it you know why I’m here in Key West.” I wasn’t there for niceties and I wanted Pinder to know it.

He pointed to one of the two metal folding chairs and returned to the black leather office chair where he’d been sitting when I walked in. “Yeah, the recently departed Captain Frias convinced his boss he should get you to tow the yacht back up to Fort Lauderdale instead of me.”

I’d met white Bahamians before and always found their lilting accent disarming. With Pinder, though, it sounded overdone and pretentious.

“I take it you didn’t like Nestor. You sure don’t seem to show much respect.”

“Neither did he. Asshole come in here talking trash to me and my partner, even gone so far as saying that I might be in on something with his boss.”

I didn’t say anything for several seconds. “The man’s dead.”

“So? Just because he went out and got himself killed don’t change the fact that the man was bad-mouthing my business.” Pinder leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the corner of his desk. The flip-flops on his feet looked like somebody my size could use them as wakeboards.

I glanced around the office. For an operation that was making the big bucks on all these recent salvage claims, they weren’t spending it on office decor. The desk was made of gray metal that matched the folding chairs and the four-drawer file cabinet in the corner. The only other item in the room was a calendar on the wall that showed a Key West schooner sailing past a flaming sunset.

“Do you know why Nestor recommended me?”

“I know that Ted Berger now thinks I’m ripping him off when I’m only asking for the industry standard here.”

I had been prepared—after the stories Sam had told me and after seeing the flaky receptionist—for Pinder to be a total space cadet. I was surprised by his blunt reply. He knew
something
about salvage.

“Come on, if you’ve been in this business any amount of time, you know that’s not true. There’s no such thing as an industry standard in salvage. Sure, you can get an award of thirty to forty percent of the value of the small sailboat you keep from sinking, but with a multimillion-dollar yacht like this, you’re looking at a much smaller percentage. Not ten, maybe not even five.”

“There been salvage awards as high as six million,” he said as he reached for a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and shook one out.

“That was when a friggin’ oil tanker saved a fuel cylinder from the space shuttle, for Pete’s sake. The
Power Play
wasn’t even holed. You know, Pinder, it’s guys like you who don’t know what the hell they’re doing who are giving this business a bad name. Learn a little more about the law, look at history.”

He pawed through the papers on the desk until he found the lighter, then lit the cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke just to the left of my face. “I look at history every fuckin’ day when I walk to the office. I look at these fancy old Victorian houses ’round this town built by poor Bahamian suckers for the rich wreckers. Yes, indeed. I’ve given it quite a bit of thought, and I made my decision concerning which group I’m goin’ to belong to.”

I stepped out into the sunlight and pulled the door shut behind me with a bang. I wanted that barrier between Pinder and me. I had harbored a naive hope that somehow I would be able to put some sense into his head, get him to lower the amount he was asking for on the
Power Play
salvage. I had become a part of this job, and I didn’t like being associated with this deal he was pushing for, which would undoubtedly get written up in the papers and talked about in all the waterfront bars. It wasn’t as though Berger and his insurance company couldn’t afford a big salvage award, but it was bad for this business as a whole, this business I had made my life.

Jamming my hands into the pockets of my jeans, I took off walking back down Fleming Street. At the corner I looked up, trying to decide what to do next, and I recognized the gray-haired, stooped man coming toward me in the crosswalk.

“Hey, Arlen,” I called out, then waited for him to reach my side of the street. I embraced him with a swift air kiss past his cheek. “What are you doing here in Key West?”

Arlen Sparks had been a near neighbor of the house in which I grew up. As a kid, of course, I’d called him Mr. Sparks, but most of the adults, including my dad, had called him Sparky. I didn’t realize until much later that it had to do with his profession as an electrical engineer and his ham radio hobby. The Shady Banks neighborhood had been a close-knit community where all the adults looked after all the kids, and as often as not Molly, Pit, and I were in someone else’s yard or kitchen or garage. Sparks himself had been a crotchety fellow, balding and with a comb-over hairstyle that we kids found hysterical. He didn’t know much about kids since he and his wife had never had any of their own, and we did our best to stay out of his way. He worked at a local research and tech firm called Motowave, and he would scowl at us on our bikes as he left in his big white sedan for work.

After our brief embrace, he mumbled a soft hello and said, “Wife and I have a house on a canal here.”

Arlen’s wife had been the favorite of the whole neighborhood. She was the children’s librarian at the county facility just west of Shady Banks. On weekends, she’d invite us into her kitchen with offers of home-baked brownies and then let us look at her collection of signed first editions of children’s picture books from the 1930s and ’40s.

“Really? I had no idea.” I patted him on the shoulder. “You lucky dog. You must have bought it back when mere mortals could afford real estate in Key West.”

He nodded. I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since Red’s memorial service, and I was surprised to see him look so old and tired. His shoulders hunched, the waist of his pants seemed to cut across his lower chest, and his head bent forward, his eyes cast down.

Twenty years ago, when I was only ten years old, I had thought the Sparkses were old. They’d probably been in their midforties then, which meant he was only in his sixties now. He looked at least ten years older.

“How’s your wife?”

When he looked up, I saw raw fear in his eyes. “She’s not good, I’m afraid. Sarah has been sick for a long time.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that. I didn’t know. What is it? What’s wrong with her?”

“A few years back she found a lump,” he said, lifting a hand and touching the side of his chest, under his arm. “They operated and she did chemo and everything was looking fine. We thought she’d beat it. We were thinking about moving down here to Key West permanently once I retired.” As I’d noticed with many balding men, Arlen’s eyebrows seemed even bushier, composed of long errant white strands. They bounced up and down as he talked. “But then, I got laid off.” The eyebrows dropped down. “Last July.”

“You’re kidding. Just before you retired?”

He nodded. “And then in the fall, her cancer came back. I don’t know if she can take this again. She’s not strong. The doctors say they have this new treatment they want to try on her, but the benefits went with the job and we have no more supplemental insurance. Medicare won’t cover it because it’s experimental, and I can’t afford it. That’s what I’m doing here now. Going to put the house here on the market.”

“Arlen, how can they do that to you? I don’t understand. They can just drop you after you worked for them all those years?”

“It came as a surprise to me, too. Used to be you put in your time working for a big company like Motowave, and you retired with your pension and reasonable benefits for the rest of your life. Things have changed now. Big business doesn’t think it owes anything to the workingman.”