King Tide

by A. J. Stewart

  Shania said, “So now it’s Anton?”

  “Maybe. Anton was involved in the alleged affair. But he’s also a proud man. A man whose tennis career has hit a speed bump. And we all know what Carly Pastinak does when her charges start dropping down the rankings, don’t we? It happened to Sam. He got dumped, didn’t he? Maybe Carly was planning on dumping you, Anton.”

  Anton shrugged.

  “Maybe you figured she was going to dump you for someone better.” I looked at Shania. “Maybe that was too much for such a proud man.”

  Anton said nothing. He was unflappable. Lots of people pretend that they don’t care. They act cool, dispassionate. But Anton was the real deal. He genuinely didn’t give two figs about anything. But Shania did.

  “He wasn’t going backward. His ranking’s going to bounce back. Every player goes through a tough patch. And the way the rankings get calculated, if you don’t do well at a tournament where you’ve done well before, you get slugged. Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It meant something to Sam. He didn’t bounce back. He got dropped by Carly.”

  I noted that Shania said nothing. She said nothing because she knew what I had said was true, in a fashion, and anything she said in reply would be hollow or a lie. There was no doubt in my mind that she cared about Sam Venturi. She cared about Deshawn Maxwell. She loved Anton Ribaud. She was the kind of person you wanted on your side.

  Sam sunk into the side of his seat. Leon Lezac was sitting next to him and Leon suddenly looked like he was twice Sam’s size.

  “Isn’t that right, Sam? She dumped you when your career went into free fall.”

  “I wouldn’t call it free fall.” His voice wavered and even he didn’t buy it. But it was harsh. My career had stalled just short of the brass ring. I knew exactly where Sam was coming from. He had become a coach because the game was still in his blood, like a cancer. Maybe it was because I played a little longer, or maybe that had nothing to do with it, but when I hung up my cleats at the end of my second year in Port St. Lucie, I knew I was done. I didn’t want to coach, even though I thought I might be okay at it. I wanted to move on.

  “Carly was a painful memory for you, wasn’t she, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know she was coming this weekend, did you?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “And when you saw her, spoke with her, you tried to leave the island. With Detective Ronzoni.”

  “Yes. She wasn’t a nice person.”

  “She wasn’t a nice memory.”

  Sam frowned and stared off into the distance.

  Deshawn Maxwell was sitting in a group of chairs beyond Sam’s left shoulder. I glanced at him.

  “What about you, Deshawn? Friend of the bride. How did you feel about Carly?”

  “I didn’t know her at all.”

  “But you know Shania. The general consensus is that you’re like a guardian to her. And you grew up together. You knew her father, you told me.”

  “I did.”

  “You were like a son to him.”

  “You’d have to ask him about that.”

  “The feeling among the group was that Carly wanted to get Shania as a client. I wondered if maybe she knew something—perhaps something that could hurt Shania—and was going to use it as leverage against her.”

  Deshawn shifted in his seat but he said nothing. I left him thinking and turned my eye to the other side of Sam.

  “Or you, Leon. ”

  Leon raised an eyebrow, which was as close to a who me? expression as these French boys got.

  “You and Anton are like brothers. That was the word you used, wasn’t it? If Carly wanted to hurt him in some way, wouldn’t you stand up for your brother? Or maybe you had your own reasons.”

  Leon grunted. It may have been a French expletive, but I didn’t think so.

  “You organized this little sojourn, didn’t you? You chose this hotel. Was it because you knew you could do things here that you couldn’t do anywhere else?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You mentioned before that you knew Chef Dean. That was part of the reason you came here. Old friends from Paris, wasn’t that it?”

  Leon shrugged. He didn’t look toward Chef Dean, sitting at the bar.

  “But here’s a funny thing. We’ve been stuck in this hotel for the better part of a day and night, and I haven’t seen you chat to your old friend once. Not once. He’s been a max of fifty feet away in the kitchen the whole time. Almost everyone else has spoken to him. But not you.”

  Leon said nothing.

  “Mr. Neville told me he had hired Chef Dean because of a past working relationship, and Chef Dean told me Mr. Neville had worked with him in Paris.” I glanced at the chef. He was looking right at me. Chefs are often like that. They can be very direct. They are often not what you would call people people. Hiding away in kitchens creating food was a reflection of their personality. Chef Dean had skeletons in his closet. He hadn’t been keen to share them, but that’s why they were called skeletons. And I didn’t feel it relevant to lay his past out for all to see.

  “So it occurred to me. Chef Dean knows you, and he knows Mr. Neville, and you know Chef Dean, but you don’t speak to him. Is it possible you know Mr. Neville?”

  “What is your point, monsieur?” asked Leon.

  “My point? Sam here overhead Mr. Neville and Chef Dean arguing. Not long before we found Carly Pastinak’s body.” I glanced at Sam. “Isn’t that right, Sam?”

  Sam nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  I looked back at Leon. “Yes. Chef Dean told Mr. Neville that he needed to do the right thing, or his dirty French secret might get out.” I turned to Chef Dean. “Was that it, Chef? His dirty French secret?”

  Chef Dean shrugged. There was a lot of that going on. Perhaps it was a mannerism they all picked up in France.

  “I saw Mr. Neville directly after that, coming out of the kitchen. He looked shaken. And Mr. Neville is not a man who looks easily shaken.”

  Neville lifted his head and jutted out his chin. He looked stoic and defiant.

  “So I wondered, what is this thing that Chef holds over Mr. Neville, this French secret? So I wonder, does Carly Pastinak know this secret somehow? Does she plan to use it? Perhaps use Leon to get to his ‘brother’?”

  “No,” said Andrew Neville. And then I knew. I had suspected for some time, but then I knew. Neville’s mask dropped and I saw his face. The human beneath. He didn’t look at Chef Dean, his tormentor. He looked at Leon Lezac, for the briefest of moments. And the faces on both of them told me. I didn’t know the particulars. I didn’t want to. They weren’t relevant, not to this, not to me. They had known each other in Paris, in a more than professional context. Perhaps there were other parties involved—wives, husbands, whoever—that had led to Andrew Neville leaving Paris and coming to Palm Beach. Leaving behind Leon Lezac. But Chef Dean knew their secret. When his own fortunes took a turn for the worse he used his knowledge to garner himself new employment in faraway Palm Beach, Florida. If Chef Dean had turned up dead, I would be very much looking at Mr. Neville and Leon. But he was alive and tormenting them. And I didn’t feel the need to dig any further into their story. I had what I wanted.

  “No,” I said. “There was no reason why Carly Pastinak would know such a thing. But it did raise an interesting question. How it was that Sam Venturi came to know about it all.”

  Sam looked up at me, confused. “I told you. I heard them.”

  “You did. And I believed you. You were in the north exit corridor, just outside the kitchen, when you heard Mr. Neville and Chef Dean argue. But my question is, what were you doing there?”

  “I was—what?” he said.

  “Everyone here knows that you were dumped by Carly Pastinak, just before she took on Anton as a client. The rumor was that she had dropped you so she could snatch up Anton and get a gig with Global Sports Management, who also just happened to own Case Academy, where you all play
ed tennis. But that still isn’t completely accurate, is it Sam? Shania, Anton, they know how this works, but they consider you a friend so they did nothing to dispel the rumor you started. That she dumped you for Anton. One or the other. But I played pro sports, Sam. I knew plenty of agents, here and there. Never signed one up, never felt the need. But I knew plenty of guys who did. And guess what. It’s not a one-for-one deal. One agent, one client. Big companies like GSM have hundreds of agents, but they have thousands of clients. They push their agents to sign up as many clients as they can, often more than they can handle. The big ones, the stars, get all the time and attention, but an agent never dumps a client. Unless the client costs more than he earns them.”

  Sam frowned and wiggled on the love seat.

  “Carly didn’t drop you because she wanted Anton. GSM would happily take you both. Except your career was done. Before it even began. You were good, but the other boys grew into men and became better. You were going to cost GSM money, not earn it. So they cut you loose. And you act all hurt by that, but you get it. You’ve been around tennis a long time. You know how that works. You weren’t upset that you got dropped as a client. You didn’t try to escape the island because an agent no longer wanted to represent you.”

  “What do you mean? I wanted to leave. You were there. We tried to get away.”

  “I don’t dispute that you wanted to leave. I’m talking about why. Not because Carly dropped you as a client. You wanted to leave because you were in love with her, and she had repeatedly, and once again yesterday, told you she wasn’t interested.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Really? You suggested to me the idea that Anton was having an affair with her. You planted the idea of that being her M.O. Like that was what she did to you. As if you had been lovers, as if that was how she got clients. She was a beautiful-looking woman. She slept her way into clients. That’s the story you were spreading. You implied that was why she couldn’t get Shania. But it was all a lie. You were never lovers. Carly never worked like that. Did she, Anton? ”

  Anton and Shania’s sofa was forward of Sam so Anton looked back over his shoulder at his old playing partner.

  “No,” he said.

  “Anton, that’s not true. I never said that. I wasn’t in love with Carly.”

  “I didn’t think so,” I said. “Until Lady Cassandra pointed it out. And I might think woman’s intuition is bunk, but I trust Cassandra’s intuition one hundred percent. You were in love with her, and you were shocked to find her here. So you tried to leave. But we missed our chance and you got stuck here with her.”

  “I really don’t know where you’re going with this.”

  “I’m going here: I was thinking about the big high school tournament final that you won. You, Shania and Anton. The end of the road for your time at Case, but the beginning of your careers. From that final, agents were circling. You got into Wimbledon juniors and won, and then got talked into going pro. It was all happening. And it all seemed to go back to that tournament.”

  I paused and ambled to the right of the room, gave a wink to Ron and then wandered back.

  “But that final held an ugly secret. I found out that someone had faked a drug test after the final. I wondered how that might affect all your careers if that came out, so I asked you about it. You put two and two together, didn’t you? You knew it wasn’t you, and you couldn’t believe it of Shania. So it had to be Anton who faked the test.”

  Anton shrugged.

  “But you saw an opportunity. You figured that Carly could use that information to blackmail Shania into becoming her client. You thought that would ingratiate you with Carly, get into her good books, maybe more. Maybe she’d fall for you the way you had for her.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It is. But the mind is often a ridiculous tool. I had also told you that Deshawn had mentioned that he was going to take a hot tub earlier, so I told Carly about it because she was feeling stressed. But I had no idea where the hot tub was. Neither did she.”

  “Neither did I,” said Sam.

  “But you found out. And you told Carly.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says you. As heard by Miss Rosaria here. She heard you call Carly from the house phone here behind the bar. You told her you knew something that was going to get her Shania as a client. You told her you knew where the hot tub was and you would take her there and share your plan. You told her to meet you at the south exit near the gym.”

  Sam had developed some color to his face for the first time.

  “So she went to the south exit. I saw her do it on the security video. But I didn’t see you.”

  “Because I wasn’t there.”

  “At the south exit, that’s true. You took a different route. You didn’t want to be seen, maybe because you didn’t want any of your friends trying to stop you from making a fool of yourself. Maybe for other reasons. But you played tennis and did Pilates yesterday morning, up at the ballroom. So you knew that there were staff stairs that could get you down to the north exit without being seen. On a normal day those corridors would be full of staff, but during a hurricane? No one was around.”

  “You’re way off the mark. I didn’t hurt Carly.”

  “I don’t know that you necessarily planned for it to go the way it did. But I know you went down the concourse walkway along the ocean side of the hotel and met Carly at the north exit. You took her across to the hot tub hut. You brought champagne to lighten the mood, maybe create a little. I’ve been in that hut, that lighting has the ambience of a prison cafeteria. So you were trying every trick in the book. But there was a problem. A flaw in your plan. She already knew about Anton. Am I right, Anton?”

  Anton shrugged. “What is there to know?”

  “Exactly. Agents always know. That’s their job. I’ve known a lot of sports agents, and the good ones don’t just do the deals. They don’t just know folks at Nike and Under Armour. They look after their clients, keep their secrets hidden. The stuff that Nike and Under Armour don’t want the fans to know. So I’m betting Carly asked a lot of uncomfortable questions of Anton when she signed him, and I’m equally confident that Anton shared nothing. But Carly knew what she was doing. She went digging. And found out.”

  I looked at Sam. He wasn’t looking at me.

  “And that was the problem, wasn’t it, Sam? Carly didn’t go to the hot tub to learn something she could use against Shania or Anton, she went to find out what you knew and how you knew it, so she could shut it down.”

  Sam shook his head. More and more, side to side.

  “No, no, no!” he said to his feet.

  “So she’s not only not into your romantic scene, she’s on a completely different page. And if I had a Hong Kong dollar I’d bet that she didn’t just deflect your bombshell news, she turned it around. She told you that if you used it, she’d turn it back on you. Spread the word that it was you who faked the test and that’s why she dumped you as a client.”

  “No, you’re wrong! ”

  “Am I? Then I must be wrong about her telling you to keep your mouth shut. I must be wrong about how she told you she was leaving the hot tub and you should leave her the hell alone. Forever.”

  Now Sam looked at me. It wasn’t a friendly look. Through gritted teeth he repeated, “No.”

  “But you lost it, didn’t you, Sam? That was too much, too mean. You’re at opposite sides of the hot tub and you just leaned down and grabbed her feet and pulled her under.”

  He shook his head again, harder and harder.

  “Then you jumped on top of her, your knees on her arms and pinned her down. You were angry, weren’t you, Sam?”

  He was shaking his head side to side so hard I thought he might give himself a concussion.

  “So you held her there until she stopped thrashing. Until she was dead.”

  The head shaking slowed and he looked in my direction.

  “It was an accident,” he said to someone who lay i
n the ether between us.

  “But then you covered it up. You realized that she was dead. Did you fish her out to see, or did you just leave her there? Either way, you get out of there. You wipe down the champagne bottle and her glass and grab yours and run away. You run back across the pool deck and down the concourse, right? Back to the north exit. You plan to put the champagne glass back in the crate where you took it from and then sneak up the staff stairs. But you get into the corridor and you can’t go into the kitchen. Chef Dean and Mr. Neville are in there, arguing. That’s how you hear about the dirty French secret. And you try the staff corridor but there’s a key card lock on it, for staff only. You’re stuck in the corridor, leaving wet footprints that we can trace back to you. ”

  I didn’t know that last bit for sure, but I was confident it would be the case, and it made for good theater.

  “And then you hear us. All of us. Now we’ve found Carly and the news is spreading and you panic again. You go back out the only open door. You’re on the walkway outside. And you hide the glass in the hedge.”

  “That’s baloney, I was never there.” said Sam.

  “Sure you were. You ran back along the concourse to the southeast corner of the hotel, and you see people running out from the south exit toward the hut. Emery had spread the word in the hotel—that’s what you heard inside. But after her, Deshawn was first on the scene. I have to admit that made me suspicious of him. But you were second. I’m always more suspicious of the second guy. You saw Deshawn run across and you saw your chance. You ran over too, like you had been just behind him. Everyone was soaked through. The perfect cover. And then you made your run so you bumped into me and got knocked in the water. So now you’re really wet. Not someone who had been running around outside, but a guy who had been knocked into the pool.”

  “You’re out of your mind. You can’t prove any of this.”

  And then the room burst into light. It was like blazing sun, or dropping into hyperspace, or maybe being born. Darkness and then complete and consuming light. Bonetti had obviously gotten the generator fired up because the walls began to hum like hotel walls do, as AC and electrical and goodness knows what else came back to life.