Deep Rough

by A. J. Stewart

“No reason. Why did you decide to hold the event at the club?”

  “That’s what clubs are for, isn’t it? It’s a fine-looking golf course. Why not?”

  “Even though it was the week before the tournament?”

  “All the more reason. Hell, the hospitality tents were already there. So were the chairs and tables. And I didn’t become successful by throwing money away, you know.”

  I chimed in. “You’re a restaurateur, aren’t you, Mr. O’Neil?”

  He nodded. There was a good dose of pride in that nod. I was glad I went with restaurateur, because the truth was he owned a bar. But that didn’t sound quite as good. Not to anyone’s ear. And the fact was he didn’t own a bar—he owned lots of them. His premier chain of bars was imaginatively called O’Neil’s, and was, unsurprisingly, a chain of Irish pubs. These were the kinds of pubs that you found in the malls at Palm Beach Gardens, with a container’s worth of fake Irish memorabilia pinned to the walls. They served cold Guinness and pot pies and fish and chips. There was even one at Downtown Disney in Orlando. He had also more recently started an upscale chain of cigar clubs called Cigarro. He opened the first of the cigar places on the island in Palm Beach. The city of Palm Beach has a long-standing hatred of chain anything except high-end fashion stores. No McDonalds, no Burger King, no O’Neil’s pub. So O’Neil put his first Cigarro on the island before it became a chain, and the city had been majorly peeved ever since. Especially since O’Neil didn’t come from the island. He was the worst kind of interloper. Not from New York or Los Angeles or, God forbid, Georgia. No, he was from West Palm Beach, and that stung both ways.

  “You didn’t want the reception at one of your own establishments?” I asked.

  He turned his face from his daughter, and I moved down the side of his bed. “Of course. That would have cost me nothing. The whole thing would have been a tax write-off. But Sherri-Ann wanted an outdoor wedding, and the other side were pushing that damn Breakers place.”

  “The Breakers? Nice place for a wedding,” said Danielle before she could stop herself. O’Neil and I both looked her. Me with considered interest that this was the comment that had sprung involuntarily from her trained lips, and O’Neil like she had just walked raccoon poop across his living room.

  “Do you know what those thieves charge? It’s outrageous. The other side just wanted it on the damn island, that’s all. Wanted to rub it in our faces. But I’m the father of the bride, right? So I get a say.”

  “So you did it at the golf club,” I said.

  “The country club, yes.”

  “So what went down must have been a bit embarrassing.”

  His jaw clenched hard. “I’ll deal with that cook when the time comes.”

  “You mean Chef Lex?”

  O’Neil nodded and pushed his head back against his pillow like a petulant child signaling that he and Lex were not BFFs anymore.

  “You might be interested to know that the health department says the contamination didn’t come from the kitchen.”

  “Then how?”

  “Somehow it got onto surfaces at the dinner.”

  He shot forward and spat though clenched teeth. “I knew it. That no good, son of a—” He stopped himself and looked at his daughter, who was engrossed in a birdie putt on the television. “I knew it,” he repeated.

  “Knew what?”

  “He’s behind it.”

  “Who?”

  “The other side. Coligio.”

  I had to believe that there was a fair amount of bad karma hanging over the nuptials even before the ceremony, what with the bride’s father referring to his new in-laws as the other side. I couldn’t imagine it was all sweetness and light coming from the groom’s father either. It was personal. It was the Montagues and the Capulets all over again. And we know how that all turned out. The horrid events at the ceremony clearly weren’t the beginning of the bad blood, but they hadn’t united the families in grief either.

  “What makes you think the groom’s family is behind it?”

  “Not the family. The father. Look, the kid’s all right. I wouldn’t let my princess marry a complete dirtbag. He’s an okay kid. Got his father’s face, but it’s not his fault he got smashed by the ugly stick. And the wife, she’s as quiet as a church mouse. But the father . . .” He clenched his jaw again. He was going to lock that thing up and be eating through a straw before the day was out if he kept going like that.

  “What’s wrong with the father?”

  “You don’t know Dom Coligio?”

  I shook my head. “Not personally.” It was true, I didn’t know him. But I knew of him. And I knew the type. He was a property developer, that uniquely Floridian species of reptile.

  “Well, you should be thankful. He’s a snake in the grass. He’d sell his own mother for a nickel, then he’d swap out his mother for your mother and ship her off instead.”

  I nodded. “What has that got to do with the wedding?”

  “He didn’t want it at South Lakes. He’s all down in the mouth about coming onto the mainland, like the United States isn’t good enough for him. He was behind this, I can smell it.”

  I was there—I did smell it. And it didn’t smell good. But I didn’t see the link. “But Coligio got sick too.”

  “Did he? He’s not here. Not in this hospital.”

  I looked at Danielle and she spoke. “He’s not in the next room?”

  O’Neil shook his head.

  “But his wife,” I said. “She definitely got sick. I saw that happen.”

  “Maybe she did. Maybe he doesn’t care about that. Maybe she didn’t follow orders. Maybe she ate the shrimp.”

  “The shrimp?”

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “You think he’d poison his own wife to make you look bad?”

  “It’s the runs, not the plague. We’re all on fluids, not antibiotics for heaven’s sakes. And there’s more at stake than just making me look bad.”

  I raised my eyebrows and waited.

  “The marriage. He wants to kill the marriage. He thinks my little girl ain’t good enough for his fancy boy. I got news for him.”

  “That’s drastic.” It was, but I again thought of the houses of Montague and Capulet. Maybe a good dose of the runs wasn’t so over the top, considering what the alternatives might be.

  The nurse came back in and looked at O’Neil’s chart, and we all stood in reverent silence as she did.

  “Good news, Mr. O’Neil. You’ll be good to go home this afternoon. The doctor will be in later.”

  “About time. What about my daughter?”

  “I think another night,” she said matter-of-factly. “Her symptoms were severe and she lost a lot of fluid. We want to make sure there’s no kidney damage. And you may still be contagious, so stay at home for another day or two.”

  “Where’s your wife, Mr. O’Neil?” asked Danielle. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s right there, next to Sherri-Ann.”

  I glanced past the bride-who-wasn’t, at the woman next to her. They could have been sisters. I had figured her for a sick bridesmaid when I came into the room. There was a gaggle of them in there. But the mother of the bride was sleeping, blond hair falling over a face that couldn’t have seen more than twenty-five summers.

  Danielle and I looked at each other and then at O’Neil. We said nothing. There were no words. We thanked O’Neil for his time, and wished him well. He said he’d be fine once he got out of this hellhole. It really didn’t look like such a bad room to me. We considered chatting to the bride but she was fixated on the golf in a way that suggested catatonia, which might have been the result of medication, or just the natural effect of watching golf on television. Either way we left her to her business.

  We stopped outside at the nurses’ station and asked about the other room. The nurse told us that the mother of the groom was there, along with a selection of others from the groom’s side of the wedding party. The groom’s father and the gr
oom himself had been discharged that morning. Both were still ill but not dehydrated, so they were put in quarantine in their own home. She told us we could only talk with the groom’s mother briefly as she was still experiencing severe symptoms, which sounded like the kind of thing we wanted to avoid being a party to again, so we begged off. She directed us to a bathroom to discard our gloves and masks and wash our hands. We each took a fresh pair of gloves and a mask before we left. They felt like mandatory equipment where we were going.

  Chapter Ten

  The Coligios, aka family of the groom, lived in one of those estates on Palm Beach where you can drive by the gate but not see the house. The hedges were high and the driveway was long, and the intercom at the gate made it clear it didn’t want visitors, but acquiesced when Danielle pulled her sheriff’s deputy card.

  We drove up and parked as the front door opened. A lean black man in a suit stood waiting for us. He didn’t look like a Coligio. He looked like Uncle Ben. In a butler’s uniform. It felt very old-school and cliché and wrong in a lot of ways I could explain and some I couldn’t.

  Danielle and I mounted the steps to the massive front door. The place looked like a Scottish castle, just less drafty. The man at the top of the stairs nodded. He wasn’t wearing any kind of mask or gloves.

  “Good afternoon, sir, madam. I am afraid that Mr. Coligio is currently incapacitated.”

  “Is he on the can?” I asked.

  “Not literally, sir, no.” The guy spoke like a schoolteacher and I wondered what the hell he was doing as a butler. Maybe it paid more than I thought.

  “Then we can chat.”

  I made a show of snapping on my gloves. The box at the hospital I had pilfered them from was labeled non-latex gloves, which meant I had no idea what they were made of. Rubber didn’t feel like the right word, but they snapped like rubber. I slipped the paper mask over my mouth and raised my eyebrows. The butler’s face gave nothing away. He might have thought I was a wise fellow for taking precautions, or he might have thought me the greatest fool he’d seen outside of a circus tent. I had no idea. He gave nothing away. I made a mental note not to play poker with the guy.

  He led us inside to a living room the size of a tennis court that looked out through French doors to a massive patio and a sparkling blue pool. There was no water view, but I would bet the Brooklyn Bridge that the view from upstairs was something to behold. The butler asked us to wait and then moved away, his footsteps making no sound on the Italian marble floor.

  We stood looking out the window at the pool for a few minutes. I noted that the house was not open concept. This was not a design flaw. Open concept houses were for people who wanted to see the living area from the kitchen while they prepared dinner for guests, or mac and cheese for the kids. That suggested a lot of time spent in the kitchen. Folks who owned Palm Beach mansions had people to work in the kitchen, and they didn’t care to look at them while they did it.

  “Can I help you?”

  We turned from the pool to find the groom himself standing in the room. He had also approached silently, and I wondered what kinds of shoes these people wore, and whether they might be useful in my line of work. The groom wore dark rings around his eyes, but otherwise he looked fit and vital. He wasn’t as well dressed as he had been the day before, but he still looked smart in pressed chinos and a crisp polo.

  “Nicholas Coligio?” asked Danielle, knowing full well who she was talking to.

  “Yes. Look, I know this is about yesterday, but I’m not sure we’re quite up for the third degree just yet.”

  “I understand,” Danielle said in her comforting voice. It made me feel good, and I was feeling pretty decent to begin with. “Is your father home?”

  “He’s recuperating.”

  I was pretty keen to see this recuperating. The father of the bride had piqued my interest in the notion that Coligio senior had somehow escaped the bug that had swept through the wedding party.

  “How are you?” asked Danielle.

  “How do you think I am? My wedding ceremony was a disaster, and everyone in my family and in my fiancée’s family is ill. I am supposed to be married and in Aruba right now.”

  I always wondered where Florida people went for vacations or things like honeymoons. Lots of people from other places come to Florida. Makes sense, with the weather and the beaches and the drinks with little umbrellas in them. But when you live in paradise, where do you go to get away? Danielle and I had recently been to Jamaica, and although I liked the people a lot, it didn’t feel a lot different. The palm trees were the same, and the sun was the same and the water was the same. The accents and the smell of jerk chicken were different, but I could find those down in Lauderhill if I wanted them. Perhaps I needed to take up snow skiing or something.

  “I’m sorry for that,” she said. “We’re just investigating the events. You know, to get to the bottom of it.”

  “That damned golf club was the bottom of it,” growled a voice from a darkened hallway. Dom Coligio stepped gingerly into the light. He was as Mr. O’Neil had said, an older version of his son. They both had thick black hair and eyebrows to match. And they were both in good condition. I had no doubt the younger version could bench-press more, but the old guy looked like he could do plenty. He was dressed similarly, chinos pressed right down each leg, but his shirt was a short-sleeve button-up. Plain blue, not palm prints like my beauty.

  “Mr. Coligio, how are you feeling?” Danielle was really laying on the voice thing. She sounded like Kathleen Turner, back when Kathleen Turner sounded like Kathleen Turner.

  “I feel like I’ve taken a year’s worth of dumps in a day.” He had a classy house and he dressed classy, but you know what they say about taking the boy from the farm. The metaphor wasn’t watertight, because he didn’t sound like he was from a farm, unless there were still farms hidden somewhere in the Bronx. He ambled to the sofa, took a long look at it and turned away in favor of a wing-backed lounge chair that didn’t look as comfortable but would be easier to get out of in an ablutionary emergency.

  He sat heavily and I noted he didn’t look so good. It made me revise Mr. O’Neil’s theory. You can fake a yawn, but you really can’t fake physical exhaustion. It shows in your skin. Coligio senior looked pale in the cheeks and dark in the eyes. Unlike his son, he had bags either side of his nose. The butler guy swept in with a tall glass of water, which Coligio gulped half down.

  “Mr. Coligio, we are investigating yesterday’s events,” Danielle repeated.

  “Good. Shut the damn place down. Bulldoze the whole lot, and build something useful, like some homes. Hell, build a Home Depot. It’d be more use to the world than that dump of a place.”

  “You blame the club for what happened?”

  “I blame the club, and I blame that knucklehead O’Neil for insisting we do it there.”

  “Dad,” said Coligio the younger.

  “I know, son, I know. I’m trying. But I should have put my foot down. This never would have happened if we had done things out here.”

  I felt like saying, because no one ever gets sick in Palm Beach. But then I thought of how many old people live there, and I decided to keep the comment to myself. Score one, Jones.

  “You might be interested to know that the health department doesn’t think the pathogen originated from the kitchen.”

  “Well, it sure as hell came from there somewhere.”

  “It may have been on surfaces touched by the wedding party. We’re investigating the possibility that it was put there intentionally.”

  “Intentionally?” said young Coligio. “You mean someone wanted to ruin my wedding?”

  “We have nothing to confirm that,” said Danielle. “These are preliminary inquiries.”

  “Who did this?” said Coligio senior. “Someone at the club?”

  “We don’t know. Did you get along with the bride’s family?”

  Senior gave junior a glance and then looked back to Danielle. He didn’t av
oid eye contact when he spoke to someone. He was laser-focused.

  “My son was the one getting married, not me.”

  “Am getting married, Dad.”

  “Right, that’s what I said. Officer, look around.”

  “It’s Deputy.”

  “Right. Look around. You can’t tell me that we are the same class as that bartender. You just can’t. And a father worries about such things. But my son is a grown man, and he makes his own choices. I don’t have to play golf with O’Neil. Hell, he couldn’t even afford the green fees out here.”

  “So you didn’t want to see the ceremony happen yesterday?”

  “In an ideal world . . . hold on, what are you suggesting? That I stopped it by making everyone sick?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, sir.”

  “Hell you’re not. So let me tell you, missy. I know the sheriff. I paid a lot of money to see him elected. So you’ll want to be damned careful about spreading that kind of crap—”

  Coligio stopped midsentence and frowned.

  “Sir, are you all right?” asked Danielle.

  He nodded, but it wasn’t convincing.

  “Dad?” said junior.

  Coligio senior let out a prayer to his savior and launched himself out of the chair. He chose his seat well, because the solid arms helped get him up and out quickly, and he dashed away stiff-legged, down the hall.

  We all watched him go, and then the younger man turned to Danielle. “My dad had nothing to do with what happened. Look at him. He’s as sick as anyone.”

  “I can assure you, there was no implication in my question,” said Danielle.

  “Except there was. You implied that someone intended to disrupt my wedding ceremony.”

  “That was just lucky timing,” I said. “Or unlucky, as the case may be.”

  “Why?”

  “The evidence suggests that the contamination took place at the rehearsal dinner. Everything happening the way it did, that was just bad luck. The virus might have incubated shorter, or it might have incubated longer. It was just unlucky it happened when it did.” I was talking but I was also thinking. Perhaps what I said should have remained internal dialogue, because I knew next to nothing about the incubation period other than what Connie Persil had told us.