King Tide

by A. J. Stewart

  “Out again? How do you figure?”

  “He’s wet. From the hot tub and the storm. But the water in the corridor doesn’t go anywhere. No footprints up the stairs, not into the kitchen.”

  “So now he’s outside again? I don’t know, Jones.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “And what about the champagne? One glass?”

  “Maybe he takes his glass, to make it look like she’s drinking alone.”

  “Now it sounds premeditated.”

  “Maybe it was.”

  “So let’s say he took the glass. Where is it?” he asked.

  “There’s a rack of champagne glasses in the kitchen. Maybe he took it from there. Maybe he tried to replace it.”

  “Tried?”

  “Like I said, the wet footprints don’t go into the kitchen. ”

  “So now he’s outside with a champagne glass? You’ve got a hell of an imagination there, Jones.”

  “That might be true, but that doesn’t make me wrong.”

  Ronzoni said nothing. His mouth was full. At least his mother had taught him well.

  “I got an idea,” I said.

  “Another one.”

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  Ronzoni took another slider half-wrapped in foil to go. We walked past Rex Bonatelli, who was tapping his feet and starting to look like a caged lion. We slipped in through the kitchen. Chef Dean looked up, stirring his fish stew, but we didn’t stop to chat. Ronzoni paused at the door and glanced at the crate of glasses, and then at the floor. Not wet. He pushed through.

  The corridor was eerie. Emergency lighting is like that. Perhaps it makes people get out faster if it looks creepy. But the floor was wet. Ronzoni used Emery’s card and opened the door opposite, into the taupe service corridor. The floor wasn’t wet. Ronzoni stepped back out and made for the exit. He pushed the door open.

  The eye of the hurricane was probably somewhere to the north of us, hammering down on Fort Pierce if Mick was right. But it made no difference to us. The rain was still pounding but the walkway was under the cover of the hotel. The ocean was crashing over the seawall and pulsing in toward the boxwood hedge that lined the walkway. We were getting sprayed, but compared to what we’d been through we didn’t even notice.

  “Okay, now what, Jones?” Ronzoni said over the wind.

  “You’ve got a glass in your hand,” I said. “Do you keep it, hide it for later or throw it? ”

  I looked out at the pounding ocean. That was my choice. Toss something in there and it would probably wash up in Freeport, or maybe Cape Hatteras.

  Ronzoni didn’t agree. He didn’t have to. That’s what made rock, paper, scissors work. Different folks looked at the same exact scenario in their own way. Ronzoni reached into his pocket and pulled out a latex glove. He stretched it onto his fingers and pulled it down with a snap. Then he stepped forward to the hedge and reached inside it. Then he pulled out a long thin champagne glass.

  “You really were born with a rainbow up your butt, Jones.”

  I had absolutely no idea what that meant so I just grinned like an idiot. A lucky idiot.

  Ronzoni stood and directed me inside. Once in the corridor he held up the glass with his gloved hand.

  “Go to the kitchen,” he said. “Find the biggest plastic baggie you can find. A garbage bag if you have to. And ask Neville for some super glue. You got a Mr. Coffee machine in your room?”

  “I don’t think this is a Mr. Coffee kind of hotel. But it doesn’t matter. Power’s out, remember?”

  “See what you can find. Then come to Neville’s office.”

  I didn’t ask him what he was up to. I had a fair idea. I had never done it, but I’d seen it, so I nodded and Ronzoni slipped Emery’s card through the slot on the pad on the kitchen door and I pushed through. Ronzoni took off down the corridor.

  I asked Chef Dean for the largest baggie he had, and he handed me a bag large enough to brine a turkey. I asked him if he had some kind of portable coffee warmer. He went to a cupboard and pulled out a silver carafe, and then he pulled the base away from the carafe. The base was a round disk with an electrical cord, except where the plug should have been there was an adapter for a twelve volt plug, the kind that sticks into the cigarette lighter of a car.

  “Not sure I’m going to get near a car,” I said.

  Chef Dean grunted, or it might have been a word in a dialect I didn’t know. But he strode into a small storeroom off the kitchen, and returned with a portable battery pack, like the sort of thing someone might use to jump start the dead battery in their car. It had a slot just right for the adapter on the heating pad.

  “You moonlight for the AAA?”

  “We sometimes do breakfasts on the beach. Easier to use a portable battery than to run cables everywhere.”

  “Clever.”

  He nodded at me. “Fingerprints, eh?” he said.

  I gave him a nod in return. He had hidden depths.

  I walked out into the bar and asked Neville for some superglue. He suggested I look in the drawer in his office. I strode out to his office and found Ronzoni at the check-in desk. He was fanning the glass from the hedge with a yellow notepad. He had collected the champagne bottle and the other glass from the gym where he had housed the evidence. I rifled through the drawers in Neville’s office and found some superglue. Neville knew where his office supplies were.

  The light was better out at the desk, but it wasn’t good. Ronzoni had a camp light going. The emergency lighting near the front door of the hotel added ambience but not much more. Ronzoni made a small tray out of the foil from his slider. He put the foil on the heating pad of the carafe and then squeezed the tube of glue into the foil.

  Ronzoni placed the glass from the hedge next to the heating pad, took a Post-it and wrote the word hedge on it and stuck it on the desk in front of the glass. Then he took the champagne bottle and the glass we found by the hot tub out of their baggies and placed them on the other side of the heating pad. He took two more Post-its and wrote hot tub on both and stuck them in front of the bottle and the second glass. He took photos of his work. I figured he was concerned with the chain of the custody for the evidence. He had to worry about things like that.

  He plugged the heating pad into the battery pack and then pulled the marinating bag over the whole lot. He asked if I had any tape and I found some in Neville’s office, so Ronzoni taped the bag to the desk to make it air tight. Then he sat back and waited.

  “You seen this before?” he asked. He was looking for his moment in the spotlight. I had seen it, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred I wouldn’t spare the time to give Ronzoni’s ego a boost. He didn’t need it. He might start thinking and that could only mean trouble for me in the long run. But I must have been tired, or going soft, because I said no.

  “Superglue contains an ingredient called cyanoacrylate. When heated it creates fumes that adhere to the moisture in the latent print. Watch, it’s like magic.”

  I watched. The glue warmed up on the heating pad’s element and started fuming, and within a couple minutes it was done.

  Ronzoni said, “Stand back, these fumes can be a bit nasty.”

  I was already back. I had smelled superglue fumes before. Like I say, I learned a lot of stuff on field trips.

  He unplugged the heating pad and pulled the baggie off the machine carefully, and then picked up the bottle. It was covered in white powdery smudges.

  “Looks like this has been wiped.” He then picked up the glass from the hot tub. He carefully turned it around in his gloved fingers. I saw nothing on it .

  “Hard to see anything,” I said.

  “That’s the downside of fuming. The latent prints come up white. We could dust them, but . . .” He looked toward the front door. “There’s no prints on here anyway. It’s been wiped as well. Ronzoni put the glass down and picked up the one on the other side of the coffee machine. He rotated it around.

  “Huh,” he said, smiling.
“See.”

  “Is that something? It’s hard to see.”

  Ronzoni looked around the desk and found an advertising leaflet for the hotel. The back was black. He rolled it into a tube and slipped the tube inside the champagne glass. Then he held up the glass to show me the big fat white fingerprint against the black background. It was a nice full print.

  “Not bad, Ronzoni.”

  “Look, there’s two. Like it was picked up with two fingers and the side of a thumb.”

  “Was that glass wet? Why didn’t the glue fumes stick all over?”

  “They did really. But I fanned it dry enough, and the prints don’t come from water but oil in the skin, which won’t evaporate from a little fanning.”

  “So we can connect someone with Carly’s death.”

  “Not really,” said Ronzoni. “Circumstantial at best. This glass wasn’t at the scene. Defense would argue whoever owns the print dropped the glass in the hedge while enjoying the view.”

  “As opposed to the weather. So what now? Can you print the suspects?”

  Ronzoni shook his head. “Not right now. Tomorrow when the storm is done, and I can get some backup in. We don’t want to spook the horses.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Ronzoni photographed everything and then he rebagged the evidence and we took it back to the gym to lock up. Ronzoni told me to put my thinking cap on about things but I had no ideas left. I was confident in my theory of what happened and how, but the who was what needed proving. And on that count I had nothing but theory.

  We went back to the lounge. Most everyone was asleep. Shania was napping against Anton’s shoulder. Anton was sitting up, but I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping. Leon had made a bed on the floor at the rear of the room, cushions from a sofa and a blanket. Deshawn was in a club chair, his head resting against the side. Rosaria was in another club chair, curled up in a ball, feet tucked in, breathing softly. Neville was standing behind the bar, as still as a statue, eyes open but unmoving, a semi-awake state. I wondered if he’d ever done time in the military, maybe on sentry duty. Cassandra was asleep across a sofa, her head resting on Ron’s lap. Ron was sitting up but his head had fallen back and his mouth was open like a cave. It wasn’t glamorous but it was real. The wind hummed and the waves crashed outside. I wanted to sleep but didn’t think I could. The idea of a hotel blanket filled me with an unusual melancholy.

  Inevitably it made me think of Danielle, tucked up in a dorm room bed somewhere in Tallahassee. I felt the compulsion to call her despite the late hour. She wouldn’t mind. She was like that. But I knew there was no coverage to be had. Except on the roof. Where I recalled the bleep of a message coming in. I sighed and pulled out my phone.

  The message was from Danielle. That made me smile. Shania wouldn’t have understood if I told her that everything Danielle did made me smile, because Shania didn’t understand that even the things that Danielle did that drove me crazy still made me smile. I looked at her name on the screen and a picture formed in my head of a white t-shirt and denim jeans, her walking across the courtyard at Longboard Kelly’s, which morphed into her running in Lycra along City Beach, which became her in nothing but a Modesto Nuts t-shirt, lying on a lounger on the back patio of our home on Singer Island.

  I touched her name and the message came up. I read it. Then I read it again. And a third time. My mind flew back in time, trying to recall what I had seen and what I had not seen.

  I jumped up and turned to Ronzoni, who had taken the chair beside me.

  “Come on,” I said.

  He frowned but I didn’t wait. I turned and walked out of the lounge. I strode out to the lobby and turned back. Ronzoni wandered out to me.

  “What the hell?”

  I held the phone up to his face. He recoiled some from the bright screen and then he read the message.

  “Where are the safety bars?”

  “We need to go to the gym. ”

  I turned and walked down the corridor, snatching up a camp light off the check-in desk as I strode by.

  “What does that mean? Where are the safety bars? ”

  “I’ll show you.”

  We reached the gym door and Ronzoni dropped and unlocked it.

  “Who sent that?” he asked as he stood and pushed open the door.

  “Danielle.”

  “Deputy Castle?”

  “She’s not a deputy anymore, Ronzoni.”

  “Right, I heard. FDLE.”

  “Yep.”

  I held the camp light up over Paul Zidane’s body. He was covered in a sheet, and the light bounced off it.

  “Why is she sending you texts about this?”

  “I sent her some photos of the scene earlier.”

  “You had no right to do that.”

  “Ronzoni, you’re missing the point.”

  “No, I’m not. This is not an FDLE case. This is a Palm Beach matter.”

  “For crying out loud, Ronzoni, the FDLE don’t want to steal your damned collar. Something didn’t feel right so I played a hunch. Got a second opinion.”

  “You are the second opinion.”

  “Third opinion, then.”

  “Don’t do it again.”

  “Ronzoni, I will call or text or email or flipping FaceTime whoever I please whenever I please, whether you like it or not. Now do you want to know what this message means?”

  Ronzoni sulked for moment, and then he said, “Go on.”

  “Look at this structure. ”

  “The white thing?”

  “Yes, the white thing. It’s like a frame for a cage, right? Like the edges of a box without any sides.”

  “I’ve got eyes, Jones. What’s your point?”

  “You see how the steel edges at the top and bottom end of the bench have holes in them.”

  “I do.”

  “The barbell there, sits on racks, like big hooks, perpendicular to the person on the bench.”

  “Yes.”

  “But these holes are for something else. Something without which this whole rig is pointless.”

  “Safety bars.”

  “Right.”

  “Pretend I’m not an athlete, Jones. What are safety bars?”

  I pretended Ronzoni wasn’t an athlete. It wasn’t hard.

  “Safety bars are steel bars that slip into these holes. They go across here, parallel to the bench, on either side. You put them in at a height where if you are lying on the bench they are at chest level if your back is arched and your chest is high. So they don’t get in the way when you bring the barbell down.”

  “All right, so now I’m a world-class weight lifter. I still don’t see a point, Jones.”

  “If you drop the weight on yourself with the safety bars in place the barbell lands on the safety bars, not your chest, and sure as hell not your throat.”

  “But there are no bars.”

  “Exactly. If you’re not going to have safety bars then there’s no point having this power rack at all. Those safety bars are the reason for this rig. It’s expensive and it takes up a lot of space. Without safety bars you might as well just have a regular lifting bench. ”

  “So they’ve got a whatever this thing is called but no safety bars. Sue them.”

  “Exactly, Ronzoni! That’s what would happen. Hotels are always so conscious of liability. If they only had a bench, no power rack, and someone gets hurt the hotel could claim the guest used the equipment improperly—user error, not hotel liability. But if they have the rack and no safety bars, then the court would ask why the hotel didn’t have the correct equipment for the rack—now it’s hotel liability not user error.”

  “You’re saying the hotel would have everything in place or nothing. No in-between.”

  “Right. It’s stupid, but in my experience liability law has very little to do with common sense.”

  Ronzoni looked at the power rack and at Paul Zidane’s body under the sheet.

  “Were they here before?”

  “I th
ink so.”

  “You think so?”

  “I looked at the rig when I came in but I didn’t take an inventory. But I’ve worked out in plenty of gyms and seen plenty of these rigs, and I didn’t notice the bars missing.”

  “That’s not going to wash in court.”

  “It doesn’t have to. It doesn’t matter if I saw them. The question Danielle sent wasn’t are there safety bars? She wrote where are the safety bars? So . . .where are they?”

  Ronzoni shrugged. And then he set about looking. It wasn’t a big gym. There were only so many places a person could put long steel bars. That they were matte black made it harder work, using a camp light and a flashlight.

  But it didn’t take long .

  “Ronzoni,” I said, looking down behind a rack of dumbbells near the wall. I could see something that looked like black bars, but could have been shadows.

  Ronzoni took a look and then tried to move the rack of barbells. There must have been four hundred pounds on there so he didn’t get far. I took the dumbbells off the rack two by two, and then dragged the rack away from the wall enough so that Ronzoni could squeeze in.

  Ronzoni pulled on another pair of latex gloves. I wondered if he had a box of them in his pockets, or maybe he moonlighted as a magician. Then he bent down and pulled.

  “It’s heavy.”

  “Come on, Arnie, you can do it.”

  He did it. He dragged a steel bar up and out. It was colored in a black paint that didn’t reflect the camp light.

  “This what you’re looking for?”

  “That would be it.”

  “What do we do with it?” he asked. “I don’t want to disturb any prints.

  “Let’s put it in the rack.”

  Ronzoni took one end near Paul Zidane’s head and I took the other end near his feet and we slipped the bar into the holes on the port side of the rack at about waist height. Then Ronzoni dragged the second bar out and we repeated the effort on the starboard side. Ronzoni was huffing when we were done. He really needed to get out for a walk once in a while.

  “So, can you do your superglue thing again?” I asked him.