King Tide

by A. J. Stewart

  “Of course, my fault. You know, Mr. Jones, you’ve given me an idea. Come with me, gentlemen.”

  We left the store and Emery locked up and led us farther down the corridor. When we reached the end she used a key card and inserted it into the lock on an unmarked door. We walked down a bland corridor of taupe and linoleum, clearly not for guest use, and then took a left, where she unlocked another unmarked door. I knew what this room was before she opened it .

  I could smell laundry. There wasn’t any being done but years of detergents and softeners and hot steam had perfumed the walls. Inside was an industrial-type space, somewhat like a hybrid between a dry cleaner and a laundromat. There were carts full of discarded bedsheets and tablecloths.

  Emery took us to a desk that looked like the checkout for the county lockup. There was a worn desk topped by a wire mesh grate. Emery bypassed the desk and unlocked a mesh door and led us in. She turned and waved her hand like a model on The Price Is Right , across a rack of clothing.

  “Lost and forgotten property,” she said. “We try to return it to our guests, of course, but they don’t always claim it.”

  “Is it clean?” asked Ronzoni.

  “Freshly laundered, Detective. If you’d both like to select something to tide you over, I can put your other clothes in a dryer.” She looked Ronzoni up and down. “Detective, your suit will of course need to be dry cleaned.”

  “Will it?” Ronzoni replied.

  The selection wasn’t great. Rich people seem to have universally bad taste. I’m not sure why that is. All I know is sequins belong on a Las Vegas nightclub act, not on a swimsuit. Ronzoni found a pair of trousers and a shirt that looked like it had been left behind by the Filipino president. I wasn’t so lucky. I was flicking through the rack like a bargain hunter at Kohl’s, when I noticed Emery looking me over. She wasn’t being shy about it. Her hands were on her hips and she was studying me hard. I stopped flicking past XXXL polo shirts and looked at her. She grinned.

  “I have the thing for you.” She turned and flicked her keys around and unlocked a large gunmetal gray cabinet. She opened it, rifled through for a moment, and then turned back with a flourish. She was holding a suit. It was cream-colored, and linen. It would have been perfect if I had a cruise planned down the River Nile. She stepped forward and held it against me.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “I’m not sure that’s me,” I said.

  “Of course it’s you.” She hung it on a rack by me and then left the cage and came back with two towels. “If you’re not above changing here, I’ll get your wet things in the dryer now. I’ll just be outside.”

  She stepped out of the cage but not out of the room and Ronzoni gave me a shrug. There wasn’t anything for it, so we stripped off and toweled down and then got dressed. Ronzoni didn’t look like Ronzoni without a suit. I could have passed him on the street without a look. I put on the trousers and the shirt, and then slipped on the linen jacket. Emery was right, they fit perfectly.

  “You look like Don Johnson,” said Ronzoni.

  “You look like Ferdinand Marcos.”

  Ronzoni frowned like he had no idea who I was talking about so I grabbed my wet shorts and shirt and stepped out of the cage.

  “Very nice,” Emery said. “Definitely a step up.” She took our wet gear and hung Ronzoni’s suit and tossed the rest in a huge dryer. “Detective, I’ll ask our maid to take care of your suit shortly.”

  “I’m not sure the maid’s going to be up for much work,” I said.

  “Of course, I forgot. Poor Rosaria. Never mind, I’ll come back and take care of it myself.”

  She led us out of the laundry and down the bland corridor and back into the lobby, where we ran into the manager, Neville. He had changed suits. I was guessing he didn’t get his from either the boutique or lost property. But his new suit looked just as immaculate as the last one. He had even combed the errant hair.

  “Miss Taylor, I have asked all the guests to convene in the lounge so we can go through procedures for the next twelve hours or so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Miss Rosaria is lying down in her room. Mr. Ribaud and Mr. Zidane are the only guests I am yet to locate. Could you undertake a quick search?”

  “Of course, sir.” Emery dashed away and Neville gave me cursory smile and looked me over.

  “Mr. Jones, excellent choice,” he said, referring to my clothing. “Very dapper.”

  I just nodded. I was fairly certain he didn’t know it had come from his lost and found. He glanced at Ronzoni.

  “Detective,” was all he offered. “If you gentlemen will join me in the lounge?”

  He pointed the way with a slight bow and we wandered into the lounge, which I would have called a bar. It was like a tearoom, with a large chandelier and floral print wallpaper. A little too pastel for my tastes. At one end was a bar backed with colored bottles of booze and toward the ocean side were sofas and lounge chairs set around even lower coffee tables.

  The sofas and lounge chairs were mostly taken by the few guests. There were three women and four men. I knew Ron and Cassandra. The athletic black guy from the gym was there. So was Sam, the guy who had attempted to get off the island with us. The fourth guy was new to me, as was a strongly built black woman and the young blond I had seen on my first visit to the lobby earlier that day. The attention of the group was on the hotel manager .

  “We are just waiting for two of your party,” he said, seemingly to the five people I didn’t know, although they weren’t seated together.

  Neville stood erect and quiet. He didn’t look at all uncomfortable staying silent before a crowd, which I guessed was some kind of skill worthy of a hospitality professional in a five-star hotel. As we waited one of the missing guests arrived. He was tall and strong in the chest but thin in the waist, and he wore a similar look of contempt that the muscle guy in the gym had worn. His hair was wet but combed neatly.

  “Mr. Ribaud,” said Neville.

  “What’s going on?” he said, and I picked up another French accent.

  “Just some routine announcements to ensure everyone’s safety during the storm.”

  I noted that Neville was avoiding the word hurricane .

  “Won’t you take a seat?”

  The guy called Ribaud loped by and sat next to the strong-looking woman on the sofa. Ronzoni grabbed a piece of wall to lean on, and I sat in a cluster of chairs with Ron and Cassandra and the blond woman who I had seen earlier outside the lounge. Up close she was attractive but in need of a decent feed.

  “Look at you,” said Ron, running his hand down the jacket I was wearing. “Very dapper.”

  “That’s what the manager said.”

  “He’s right,” said Cassandra. “You do freshen up very nicely, Miami.”

  “Thanks. Ronzoni thinks I look like Don Johnson.”

  “Oh, pish posh.” She waved the idea away. “You look very smart. Like you’re going to solve one of those Agatha Christie murders. ”

  Which was a hell of a thing to say, given the next thing we heard was the sound of a paint-peeling scream from the other end of the hotel.

  Chapter Seven

  I wasn’t closest to the door but I was first through it, and I sprinted across the lobby. The screams had given way to cries of help, and as I reached the corridor in the north wing I saw the assistant manager, Miss Taylor, step out of the gym and look down toward me. She was panting furiously, eyes stuck on the gym door that was closed in front of her. I touched her shoulder as I reached her and then pulled out the key card I still had and opened the door.

  The French muscleman was lying on his back on the weight bench, inside the power rack. The massive weights on either end of the barbell suggested he had loaded up something equivalent to a small Italian car. I couldn’t image someone lifting such a weight. Perhaps it couldn’t be done. The Frenchman certainly hadn’t done it, because the barbell lay across his throat, his arms fallen to the side.

&
nbsp; I thought to check his pulse but the barbell was right across where I would have put my fingers, so I stepped back as Ronzoni made it into the gym. He stopped short and took it in. He looked at the bench, and then glanced around at the twelve steel struts that made up the sides of the rack.

  “We need to get this off him,” he said as he stood .

  “Is he alive?” I asked.

  Ronzoni shrugged. It seemed unlikely. A crushed larynx is a tough one to come back from.

  “You think we can lift it?” he asked.

  I nodded. I had spent plenty of time in gyms. Not lately, but once upon a time. Few guys could bench what two guys couldn’t deadlift. I moved to one end of the barbell and Ronzoni to the other.

  “Use your knees,” I said. “Not your back.”

  We each took an end and with a collective grunt we lifted the weight off the Frenchman and up into the rack above. Then we both leaned in. His neck was a mess. The skin was purple already, from massive hemorrhaging inside the throat. It looked like someone had smashed a chicken carcass with a sledgehammer.

  The Frenchman’s arms were hanging limply and one leg was off to the side of the bench, the other lay on the bench itself. Ronzoni took a wrist and felt for a pulse. He held it for longer than was necessary to confirm the obvious. Then he took out his phone and snapped pictures as the other guests opened the door. They jostled for position to see the body, so I pushed them back.

  “There’s been an accident,” I said. “Give us a minute.”

  I asked Ron to get everyone back to the lounge, and then I pushed the door closed and stepped closer to the body.

  Ronzoni took some close-up shots for the record while I just stood back. I felt something uneasy. It wasn’t guilt, but it wasn’t pleasant all the same. My brief interaction with the Frenchman had not been the friendly Florida welcome that the Chamber of Commerce liked us to give tourists. I may have been wet and cold and tired, and putting up storm shutters during a storm that was someone else’s responsibility, but a harsh critic might have argued that I had taunted the guy. The question was, did I taunt him into doing something that killed him?

  I must have been away in my thoughts because Ronzoni asked me if I was okay. I snapped back to find him looking at me.

  “Tell me what you know,” he said.

  “What I know?” I was sure what I knew, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to share half-baked thoughts with a cop who enjoyed running me off the island so much and so frequently.

  “You put the shutters up in here, right? Was this guy here?”

  I nodded. “He was. He was working out on that weight machine there.”

  Ronzoni glanced at the machine. “So when did he move over here?”

  “I don’t know. Later. He was on the machine when we came in, and still there when we left.”

  “You talk to him?”

  He asked me the question direct, so I gave him my answer the same way.

  “He complained that Ron and I were letting the rain in. I told him he could help, but he wasn’t crazy about that. When he complained a second time I might have suggested that real gym junkies don’t mess around with the fixed weight machines, they use free weights.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he did. He said he lifted heavy.” We both glanced at the crushing weight in the rack. “He said that he never did that without a spotter.”

  “A spotter?”

  Ronzoni wasn’t a gym guy. He had the kind of fingers that couldn’t crack a pencil in half. “A spotter. Someone who stands behind the bench to help lift the weight if it is too much, if the lift fails. ”

  “Okay. So the guy’s one of these macho gym dudes. He gets his nose out of joint about lifting the baby weights and tries for too much. Drops it on himself. Death by dumb. A Florida speciality.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? What’s that mean?”

  “I dunno. He just didn’t seem the type.”

  “Dumb?”

  “I can’t say one way or the other. But I don’t mean that. He was earnest, you know? One of those guys who takes what he does so seriously that he almost doesn’t see the world around him. Like he’d brush off a remark about the heavy weights as a character flaw on my part, like I couldn’t know that serious lifters use a spotter. Like a serious scuba diver might dive a reef alone but never a wreck. They always use a buddy.”

  “Do they?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t dive. It’s a simile, Ronzoni.”

  “Yeah, well, if there weren’t no one else here, then this guy dove a wreck alone.”

  I glanced at the elliptical machine and Ronzoni saw me.

  “Jones? Was there someone else here?”

  “No,” I said. “Not then. There was a guy working out on the elliptical, black guy, fit-looking. But he left before we did.”

  “So no one else here when you guys left.”

  “No. No one.”

  “So, like I said, death by dumb. I gotta call it in.”

  Ronzoni turned away and held his phone to his ear. I looked back down at the body, and decided to take a couple of shots of my own. Of the damaged neck, of the body on the bench, of the apparatus he lay inside, like a cube with edges but no sides .

  I had done plenty of benching in my day. It was one of those exercises that guys liked to brag about. What do you bench? These days all I heard on the beach was talk about a guy’s deadlift, but when I played ball, the bench was the thing.

  The bench press, otherwise known as the chest press. Designed to give a guy those big pecs that everyone loved so much. As a pitcher I preferred working on my shoulder muscles, but the chest was stronger, so the number a guy could lift was bigger. It was a vanity thing. And as I looked at the body lying on the bench I got the sense that he’d been doing it all wrong. Not just alone, but wrong.

  Ronzoni ended his call and turned back to me. “They’re saying if he’s stiff they ain’t coming out until the storm passes. We should find a sheet or something to put over him.”

  He caught on that my attention was not with him. “What now, Jones? There’s a hurricane coming—don’t bust my chops.”

  “Do you know the bench press, Ronzoni? The idea is to lay on your back on the bench and lift the weight out of the rack, lower it down to your chest and then press back up. The barbell is held at chest level to work the chest muscles.”

  “Okay, Schwarzenegger, what’s your point?”

  “My point is, if the bar gets dropped, it would land on the chest. It would hurt like hell, maybe even do some serious damage, but it wouldn’t land on the throat. Not unless he was doing it all wrong.”

  “So he was doing it all wrong. Like I said, death by dumb.”

  “There’s one other thing.”

  “What now?”

  “He was French.”

  Ronzoni’s groan was audible. There was hierarchy when it came to bad news on the island. Death was up there. But death happened often in Palm Beach. A lot of old people lived in the town. The grim reaper had an apartment on Worth Avenue. And the death of a tourist was worse. The tourism guys hated any tourists dying on their patch, even of natural causes. But an American tourist would get a headline in their local rag, or on some website that led with the person’s detail. John Doe dies in fishing mishap . The Palm Beach connection would be in the lede, or better still buried in the article which almost no one would read. But a foreign tourist was another matter. Suddenly Jacques Doe would become a nameless national in a headline that read French athlete killed in Palm Beach . I imagined the Florida tourist geniuses had a hard enough time dragging the money away from the French Riviera without that kind of press. Ronzoni knew it too, and he answered to the guy who answered to the mayor, who answered to the tourism lobby.

  “Didn’t you say there were some foreigners in the bar earlier?” I reminded him. I wasn’t exactly enjoying the moment—there was a dead man in the room after all—but there was a certain satisfaction in Ronzoni’s squirming.r />
  “Yeah,” he said to himself more than me. “We’d better go tell them.”

  “Who’s this we ?” I asked as I flicked off the lights.

  Chapter Eight

  Ronzoni had the general manager, Mr. Neville, congregate all the guests in the bar. Ronzoni suggested we lock the gym down, so Neville gave me his keys and said there was a physical lock on the bottom of the door. I went via the laundry and collected a sheet to cover the body, and then I locked the gym door and returned to the bar. Neville was walking across the lobby with the blond guy, Sam Venturi. Venturi looked tired and his hair was messed up, but he didn’t look like he’d been sleeping. I handed the keys back to Neville and he gave me a solemn nod.

  Ronzoni took the floor. I leaned against the wall and looked at the folks in the room. Venturi took a seat in a cluster with Ron. Cassandra sat nearby with her arm around the assistant general manager, Miss Taylor, who had a balloon of brandy cupped in her hands. Rich folks always seemed to drink brandy in a crisis. Maybe there was something to it. I didn’t know. Brandy was above my pay grade.

  Next on a sofa was the athletic woman I had seen earlier. She had almost beaten me to the gym when we heard the scream, and given I had reacted faster, she was quick on her feet. Her face was stern, like her car had just broken down on the way to a very important meeting. Beside her sat the tall guy with the wet hair. He was athletic in a way that the dead guy in the gym wouldn’t have understood. Fast, but powerful. His lip was curled as if life itself disgusted him, and his skin was pasty-looking beside the black woman.

  Another cluster of chairs had been edged around to face Ronzoni. In them sat the young blond woman I had seen before, and a guy with a long face and angular nose who looked so French he could have appeared on a wine label. His mouth was turned down and I suspected he was the foreigner who knew the deceased. Next to him was the black guy who had been in the gym. He was still in workout gear, and I assumed he was one of those people who wore athletic wear all the time so you knew how athletic they really were. Behind him stood a guy dressed in a white smock and a short black cook’s cap. He wore an uneven stubble and was broodingly handsome either despite or because of it. I couldn’t decide which. He was sharpening a long knife with a steel, which felt like a strange thing to do, given the circumstances. Or any circumstances outside of a kitchen.