Surface Tension Read online

  “This girl, Mike, she was just a kid, a great kid. I’d seen Ely come through some really bad stuff, but she was a survivor. She was going to make it. I don’t understand what happened. Neal’s missing, Ely’s dead, and this cop thinks I’m involved.”

  “Give me a quick overview. What happened yesterday?”

  I told him about meeting Ely, walking on the beach, and all the rest of it, up to dropping her off. “Mike, this detective, he’s making me crazy with his weird questions that aren’t even questions. I don’t mean to tell him things, but then I do.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Collazo.”

  “Shit, Collazo’s on this case? You haven’t been talking to him without a lawyer, have you?”

  “I couldn’t reach my lawyer, and I’m trying to find out what’s going on, how an innocent girl who went home to bed could end up in the river the next morning.”

  “Listen to me, Seychelle. Never, and I mean never, talk to the cops without your lawyer. Especially to him. Man, he’s a bit of a strange one, I’ve heard, but good, damn good. He pounds a suspect with details, making it sound like the case is all but wrapped up, scaring ’em shitless, but actually he just throws out little bits and then goes all silent and just waits till they can’t take it anymore. They start to fill in the silence. Then he throws ’em off guard by coming at ’em from another direction.”

  “Exactly. God, he made me feel like such an idiot.”

  Mike shrugged. “It’s his job, and he’s good at it. Too good. They say he’s one of those overachievers who tracks down every little shred of evidence . . . even working on his time off sometimes. If he thinks you had something to do with any of this, you’re in deep shit. You’d better have a damn good lawyer.”

  “But I didn’t do anything, Mike.”

  “Seychelle, get real. Do you think that matters? Cops are too damn busy today to worry about whether they’ve got the right person for the crime. They just need a person. They need to make the arrest. If the evidence points to you right now, they don’t have the time to be out there looking for any other suspects. There’ll probably be another couple of murders tonight to add to Collazo’s caseload.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “What I found out about this Daggett girl scares me.”

  “You know something about Ely?”

  “Like I said, I made a few calls. Asked for a few favors. The whole thing was really stupid and sloppy. These guys were total fuck-ups when it came to trying to hide a body in the river. Stupid assholes like these scare me worse than smart ones.” He slapped his hand on the stub of leg that protruded from his cutoff jeans. “They’re unpredictable. Too often they just can’t control their impulses.”

  He stared at his leg for several seconds, then seemed to shake off the memory.

  “They’re pretty sure it was heroin. We’ll know for sure when the report comes in, and my friend’s gonna call me.”

  “Heroin? No way.”

  “The M.E. at the scene found the injection site.”

  “No way. She’d never do that. Even when Ely was on the streets, she wasn’t into anything that involved sticking needles in herself. If she could smoke it, yeah. Grass, crack. But injecting heroin? No way.”

  “That’s not all of it. She didn’t die of an overdose. It was strangulation . . . there were marks. It may not have been intentional.”

  “What the . . .” I struggled to comprehend what he was saying to me. “How do you strangle someone accidentally?”

  “She was probably so out of it from the drugs, they didn’t know she was dying. The people who are sexually stimulated by that sort of thing sometimes get carried away.”

  “Mike, what are you talking about?”

  “There was evidence of sexual activity, Sey. Nasty, rough, ritualistic stuff. There were rope marks on her wrists, and she was tore up pretty bad—inside and out. Probably gonna find semen from several partners. The people who enjoy bondage are like addicts. They need more and more. This time your friend’s extracurricular activities went too far.”

  “Elysia?” I knew she hadn’t had a boyfriend since she’d come off the streets and cleaned up her act. “No way. She’d never—”

  “My sources said she’d had one prior arrest for prostitution in ninety-seven.”

  “Yeah, but that was before she got cleaned up. Her life had changed. Totally. She had a job. She was clean.”

  Elysia into bondage? Tough as she was in other ways, the girl cried if she got a paper cut.

  “Mike, if what you’re saying is true, she didn’t do any of it voluntarily. I know that for sure. She was forced. Shot full of drugs like that, she probably didn’t know

  what the hell was happening. But why? And how did she get back out on the street without anybody over at Harbor House noticing anything?”

  “She couldn’t have. Not from how you describe their check-in procedures at Harbor House. Either you’re lying or they are. Simple as that. That’s how the cops see it. Question they’ll ask themselves is, which of you stands to gain by telling a lie? Which one of you is already under suspicion for another crime?”

  XI

  Everything kept coming back around to Harbor House. As I drove down Sunrise, headed for the beach, I told myself that my real reason for going over there was to find out what sort of funeral arrangements were being made for Ely. If nobody else was going to step forward, I’d figure out a way to take care of it somehow. At least that’s what I’d tell them over at Harbor House. But at the same time, I tried to remember exactly what Elysia had said about James Long. She’d said something about how Patty had fooled even James. What had she meant by that? I wanted to find out if he was the one doing the lying or if he was being lied to.

  The door buzzed when I was still several steps away, and I hustled to grab it. Inside the lobby area, I was struck by the similarities to the police station: the glass booth, reception desk, locked doors leading to the inner areas. I wondered, briefly, if they were trying to keep people out or in.

  Behind the reception desk, a young woman sat in the chair and an older woman was looking over her shoulder at a paper.

  “Can I help you?” the older woman asked looking up at me.

  “Yes, I don’t know if you remember me, but I used to come here to visit Elysia Daggett, and I spoke to you several times about her. You are Minerva, right?”

  Her face took on a practiced expression of grief. “Oh, yes, I remember you. Yes. We’re just devastated here. Really, we’re so sorry, and we want you to know we share your grief. She had been doing so well. It’s doubly hard to lose them when they’ve been doing so well.”

  She wore her long, gray-streaked hair pulled back in a tight bun. She looked the epitome of the spinster schoolmarm, and I wondered how she could possibly strike up a rapport with these street-hardened girls. As she spoke, I made the appropriate nods and sad smiles, but her words didn’t convey any of the true heart-rending ache that I felt. There was a void in my life where Ely had been, but it was more than just emptiness. I couldn’t stop asking myself if I had done something wrong. Could I have visited her yesterday or taken her home with me last night? Could I have changed the course of events?

  “I was wondering if I could talk to the director about her. I’d like to know what arrangements are being made, and I have some questions about her actions last night.”

  “Well, Mr. Long is a very busy man. He’s in a staff meeting this afternoon.”

  “Minerva, this is very important to me.” I was not about to give up easily. “Ely was like a sister to me. She told me everything about her life.” I tried to look very knowing, though I hadn’t a clue what it was I was pretending to know. But someone in this place was lying and had made me look like both a fool and a liar. I was determined to find out why.

  “Well.” She sighed loudly. “I’ll see what I can do.” She picked up the phone and dialed an extension. I wandered across the lobby and gazed at the photos, pres
s clippings, and posters on the far wall. Across the lobby, Minerva turned her back to me and spoke in hushed tones. I couldn’t understand much, but I did hear Elysia’s name.

  There was a framed clipping on the wall from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel with the headline “Runaways Find a Safe Harbor.” A large color photo showed three girls clustered around a tall black man outside the building, standing next to a wood sign that read Harbor House. They were gazing up adoringly at him, and it was understandable; he had the high cheekbones, strong jaw, and cleft chin of a professional model.

  He appeared again in the next photo, a color glossy taken the night of a fund-raising ball. There were three couples in the picture, and it almost looked like a put-up job to demonstrate the multiethnic South Florida population: a black couple, a white couple, and a Hispanic couple. The handsome black man stood next to a woman with a gracefully long neck and big dark exotic eyes. The white couple looked like the typical old Florida monied socialites, big hair and a bad toupee, whose pictures always grace the society pages. The Hispanic man was just plain ugly. With a big nose, small eyes, and bad skin, he was several inches shorter than the brassily beautiful Cuban on his arm. The bronze plate at the bottom of the glass read Harbor House Gala 1997.

  At that moment, the door leading to the inner sanctum opened, and the tall black man I had been admiring in the photos walked through the door.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, extending his hand to shake mine. He bowed his head a bit to get his eyes closer to mine. I gauged his height at somewhere near six foot four. “My name is James Long.” His hair was cut very short, accentuating the shape of his head and his long jawline. In his left ear he wore a fine gold wire hoop, and his voice carried the musical lilt of Caribbean roots. As he spoke, his eyes darted down for an instant in an assessing glance.

  “Seychelle Sullivan.” He continued to hold my hand several seconds longer than was usual. Then he gave my hand an extra squeeze, and it felt almost as though electricity coursed up my arm and through my body. Whoa! Whatever it was this guy had, he had lots of it.

  “Let’s go find a more private place to talk.”

  He used a plastic card key to open the locked door. I followed him down a long hallway lined with closed doors. Tall and slender, he was wearing black pleated slacks and a coral-colored short-sleeved shirt that complemented his light brown skin. The legs in those soft black slacks seemed to go on forever. He was very high-waisted, and the view from behind as we walked down that corridor was memorable, to say the least.

  Halfway down the corridor, one of the side doors opened and a blond teenage girl flounced out and ran into Mr. Long. She was wearing little pink running shorts and a midriff-showing, spaghetti-strapped knit camisole that did little to contain her considerable bust. A huge grin spread over her face when she recognized James, and she looked like she was about to launch herself into his arms, “Ja—,” she started, then she looked up at his face. From behind, I couldn’t see his expression, but she immediately backed down and looked at me. She crossed her arms in front of her body and her eyes went blank.

  “Sunny, this is Ms. Sullivan. I’m giving her a tour of our facility.”

  She nodded at me, mumbled something that sounded like “Excuse me,” and disappeared back into the room.

  James turned to me. “Some of the girls here teeter on the edge of holding things together. They feel secure at Harbor House, but outsiders frighten them.”

  As we continued down the corridor, I thought about what Ely had been saying just before we got jumped. There were things going on here at Harbor House, things I wouldn’t understand.

  At the end of the hall we passed through a living room where a couple of girls sat watching Oprah. James pointed to a corridor leading off the far side of the TV room.

  “We take in boys as well as girls. The boys’ dorms are down that hall.”

  The girls ignored us as James slid open a glass door and led me out into the courtyard. He pulled out a white wrought-iron chair for me beneath the canopy of a large royal poinciana tree that was just beginning to bloom. James sat down on the opposite side and folded his hands on the table. His eyes slid all over me like little feathery flicks of a tongue. So this is what they mean when they talk about animal magnetism, I said to myself. I can’t say that it was all that unpleasant. My feminine ego had taken a bit of a blow at B.J.’s last night, and it was reassuring to know someone found me interesting.

  James squeezed his lips together and looked up at the lacy green overhead. “Elysia,” he said, then paused. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.” He shook his head.

  “I know.”

  “Did you know she’d lived here more than two years?”

  “Yeah.” I’d get into that later. “Have you tried to contact her family?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, and blew out his breath in an expression of disgust. “I called this morning. Do you know what her stepfather said? He said he didn’t have a daughter.”

  “You’re kidding. What about the mother?”

  “He wouldn’t let me talk to her.”

  “I’ve never understood how a woman could side with a man and decide to leave her own daughter out on the streets. Did you ask them about funeral arrangements?”

  “I didn’t have time to. The man hung up on me.” He flexed his fingers. “Normally, I don’t consider myself a combative person, but I would like just a few minutes alone with that man. For Ely’s sake.” He sat for several seconds staring at his fist, then suddenly looked up. “Anyway, if the family doesn’t claim the body, I think I could talk the board here into giving her a modest funeral.”

  “Let me know, please.” We sat in silence for several long minutes.

  The house and royal poinciana tree shaded the cool courtyard where we sat. It was obvious a great deal of money had been spent on the landscaping surrounding us. There were dozens of varieties of orchids, heliconias, bromeliads. So much effort to cultivate such a lovely appearance, such a genteel surface. It was amazing in this little jungly enclave to think of the traffic and the crime of the city just outside the walls.

  “I was the one who brought her here.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that,” he said. There was in his voice a quality that made you want to tell him more.

  “I’d heard about this place, but this is the first time I’ve been beyond the lobby. It’s lovely.” I waved my hand at our surroundings. “And you seem to do good things for the girls. She seemed to be happy here.”

  He smiled. “Oh, yes. She was one I often used as an example when I’d go out begging for money. You see, fund-raising’s my primary job around here. Minerva really runs the place. I don’t get to spend as much time here as I would like because trying to keep these doors open is a full-time job. Yes, Elysia Daggett. Our great success story.” He pressed his fist against his lips. I could certainly see how he could be very successful convincing rich widows to donate to the cause.

  “Are there many who don’t succeed?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes, there are. They come in here as runaways, and then they run away from here. They seem to be doing so well, and then poof—they just vanish.” He noticed a piece of lint on his slacks, and he picked it off and flicked it at the underbrush.

  “Had you seen any indication at all that Ely was back on drugs?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Nothing.” The denial was not as vehement as it should have been. He sat up straighter in his chair and rested his forearms on the table. “So you and Elysia were quite good friends.”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say that. She was younger by quite a bit, and she used to laughingly call me her guardian angel. You know, I tried to look out for her. In the end, I guess I didn’t do so well.”

  “I suppose she confided in you, then.”

  From every bit of body language James Long was giving off, one would assume this was still a casual conversation, but whether it was just my vivid imagination or not, I s
ensed we had suddenly moved onto slippery ground.

  “Yes, you could say that.” I flicked my eyes at him quickly, then away. My palms felt cold and damp. Even as my face began to feel flushed, I was determined not to let him be the one to gain the upper hand here. “Especially when we first met a couple of years ago. But you know how it is—when you don’t have much to complain about, there’s not much to say. Whatever you do here, it was working out for her.”

  He smiled. “Did she ever talk to you about what we do here?”

  I paused and made a showy pretense of trying to remember. “Let’s see. No, not really. Nothing specific.” I smiled at him. “Oh, sometimes she sort of complained about curfews and security measures around here. She was a teenager after all. But, you know, Mr. Long, there is something that doesn’t make any sense to me. I’ve dropped Ely off here lots of times before, and it’s always been the same. I wait until she gets buzzed in before I leave. I’ve always appreciated that part of your security. It was the same last night. My friend and I dropped her off right outside the front door at around eight o’clock, but this morning your people told the police that Ely never came home last night. I saw her go in. Something doesn’t fit.”

  His face registered surprise, the brown eyes wide, the eyebrows lifted. I watched closely for any signs that he was faking it. It was hard to tell. “I checked the logs myself,” he said. “She never signed in. We have residents who work the door at night, as a sort of job training. Sonya was on the door last night. She’s a friend of Elysia’s, as a matter of fact, so she would remember.”

  “Then how do you explain it? I know I saw her go inside.”

  He didn’t say anything for quite a long time. He just gazed into the distance with unfocused eyes. “Perhaps,” he said finally, “perhaps Sonya took a break. They do that sometimes and have a friend sit in for them for a few minutes. I’ll ask Sonya.”