“Neal and I lived together for a bit over a year. He moved out several months ago. We hadn’t seen much of each other lately.”

He wrote in his book. Then he watched me expectantly.

I tried hard not to volunteer anything more, but the silence was just so empty. “I heard he had a new girlfriend.” I pointed overhead with my index finger. “That may be her.”

“And you know who owns the vessel, then,” he said.

“Not really. I used to know who the old owner was, but the boat was sold last summer. Neal said it was some corporation that bought it. It used to belong to the guy that owns those topless clubs, you know, the ones with the Top Ten Girls. That’s how the boat got its name.”

He looked up at me. “Benjamin Crystal.”

“Yeah, that guy.”

“You know him.”

“Not really. I know of him. You’d just about have to be living in a hut out in the Everglades to not hear about him. He’s always on TV or in the newspapers in some exposé about this poor guy from the Dominican Republic who struck it rich building his strip joints. Anyway, he sold the boat. It was right after that that he got arrested.”

Whenever I get the feeling that someone doesn’t believe me, I start feeling guilty even though I know I’m telling the truth. I kept seeing that flash of red fingernail and those porcelain-smooth buttocks. I glanced at Collazo, certain I must have looked guilty as hell.

“You seem to know a great deal about Crystal.”

“Neal talked about him. It was like he was fascinated with his boss.”

Then he asked me again if I knew where Neal might be.

“I can guarantee you Neal would never have let that girl take the boat out by herself. I doubt she even could. He had to have been on board. Now, maybe somebody held a gun to his head and made him do something he didn’t want to do, maybe there was another boat involved, maybe he went overboard, I don’t know. None of it makes any sense at this point.”

I wasn’t sure anymore what to call the feelings I had for Neal. But the thought of his ending up like the girl on the bridge made my throat start closing involuntarily.

“I don’t know where he is now,” I said, “but you could check that he was aboard the boat this morning. Just call over to Pier 66 and ask some of the guys around there.”

Collazo nodded at a plainclothes policewoman who had been standing nearby throughout most of the questioning. She disappeared through the side door of the main salon.

Collazo stood. “Come with me.”

We climbed up the interior stairs leading to the bridge. I’d been up those stairs dozens of times, but they seemed shorter this time—we got there too fast. There were two men working the crime scene, one examining bullet holes, the other doing something to the bloodstains on the teak doorframe. The body was still there, but covered.

“Look around, Miss Sullivan. You know boats. Everything here looks normal to you, as it should on this ship.”

The last time I’d been up here, a few hours earlier it had been as though I had tunnel vision, noticing little other than a dead woman and a gun. I forced myself to ignore both those now, and, starting from the port side, I scanned the bridge, looking for something out of place. From the high-tech electronics instrument panel that looked more like it belonged in a jet than a boat to the small charting and plotting area and over to the helm, everything looked as it should to me.

“Other than a dead body and a bullet hole, it looks pretty normal to me.” I tried smiling at Collazo, but he didn’t smile back.

I pointed to the copy of Bowditch’s Practical Navigator. “That book, it belongs to me. I loaned it to Neal. Don’t suppose I could take it back, could I?”

“It’s evidence now, miss. But as soon as we’re finished, I’ll see to it you get it back.”

Then he thanked me for my time and took down my address and phone number.

“Go to the station downtown, and they will take your formal statement,” he said, standing and heading toward the door. I followed after him. I couldn’t wait to get out into the fresh air.

Collazo accompanied me to the top of the gangway. We met the policewoman coming up. She looked questioningly at me, and he nodded.

“The dockmaster at Pier 66”—she looked down at her notebook—“Bill Heller, helped them get the boat out when they left the slip at approximately seven-thirty A.M. He says Garrett was definitely aboard when they left the dock, but it was just the two of them, Garrett and the girl.”

The detective nodded, took hold of my elbow, and steered me down to the dock. At the base of the gangway, he turned seaward, the direction where it all had happened.

“They are out there searching for him, aren’t they?” I said.

Collazo nodded. My eyes met his, and I didn’t like the way he was staring at me.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

He shook his head and handed me his card, looking at me as though he just knew I was lying about everything I’d said.

“Call me if there’s anything more you want to tell me,” he said.

IV

By the time I tied Gorda to the seawall back at the estate, and Abaco leaped off and ran into the bushes to pee, it was almost two o’clock. All the way back up the river I had tried to put things together. I refused to consider the possibility that Neal was dead. As I’d untied Gorda down at the Coast Guard dock, I overheard the police discussing the search that was taking place offshore; as far as they were concerned, it was a search for another dead body. But it simply couldn’t be, no way, not Neal. Not that former Seal trained in self-defense, trained to kill. Not the man who had once lain next to me on the foredeck of his sailboat and pointed out Orion’s Belt and Ursa Minor and tried to educate me, the celestial illiterate. I knew it didn’t make any sense, but he just seemed too alive to be dead.

But if he wasn’t dead, then what had happened out there this morning? Where was he? Was he capable of doing that to that girl? I knew the answer to that question, and I didn’t want to think about it.

I walked the brick path to my cottage, and even after the events of the morning, I felt some of the tension leave me. It had been almost two years since I first moved into the old boathouse on the Larsen estate, and I still marveled at how lucky I was to have found the place. The location, in the Rio Vista section of Lauderdale, was convenient for me, because it was close to both the inlet and downtown. The main house was a big two-story Moorish mansion originally built in the 1930s, with multiple turrets and towers, all topped by red barrel tile, and it was set about sixty feet back from the New River. My cottage, on the other hand, had the best river view. The tiny wood-frame structure had once been a boathouse, a storage outbuilding for some past owner’s collection of sailing dinghies and sculls. At some time in the sixties the place had been refurbished as a guest house and was now topped with a matching barrel-tile roof and divided inside into a small bedroom, with a combined living area and kitchen all built over varnished Dade County pine floors. The Larsens gave me a break on the rent because I kept an eye on the house, the grounds, and their toys, like the garaged Jaguar and the Jet Ski they kept on the dock. There had been a number of break-ins in this neighborhood of snowbird owners these past few years, and my comings and goings made the big house look lived in as well. What made the place perfect for me was that I could sleep just a few steps away from where I kept Gorda tied up.