Big Thaw

  A Miami Jones Florida Mystery

  A.J. Stewart

  To Heather.

  There is but one adventure, and I’m lucky to share mine with you.

  Chapter One

  My body stiffened as the cutthroat razor made contact with my neck. I really only had myself to blame for the predicament I was in, and the grins on the faces of those watching did nothing for my mood. To top it all off, when the girl holding the blade saw the look in my eye, she gave me a wink.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Jones, I know what I’m doing.”

  I nodded using my eyelids. Motioning with my entire head felt a foolhardy thing to do given the sharpness of the blade beneath my chin.

  “If this doesn’t pan out, Miami, I’ve got dibs on your car,” said Ron.

  He was looking way too relaxed, leaning back in his stool at Longboard Kelly’s with a cold one in his hand. From the corner of my eye, I could see Muriel watching intently from behind the bar.

  I was in a chair previously unknown to me, one of the plastic numbers that sat under the beer-labeled umbrellas in the courtyard. My face was covered in white shaving foam, and the paving stones beneath my feet were littered with the offcuts of my formerly ragged hairdo.

  Keisha, the one holding the blade, began moving it smoothly along my skin, giving me a shave that was closer than normal and too close for comfort. She had recently finished a stint at the West Palm Beach School of Hairdressing and Cosmetology. Apparently that gave her the credentials to offer a haircut and a shave.

  I had met Keisha during a recent case. She was a kid who on the outside was nothing like me, but whose fears and desires I understood intimately. When we had come upon each other she had been standing at the fork in the road, not so much weighing one choice over the other, but rather being dragged down the potholed gravel track paved with poor choices and bad outcomes.

  I was familiar with the kinds of life choices being thrust upon her. But, unlike her, I was also familiar with the good luck associated with someone pointing me down a better path—in my case, Coach Dunbar, my high school football coach, and Lenny Cox, who had taught me everything outside baseball that every man needed to know. For reasons I was only just now beginning to understand, I had felt the need to point Keisha in such a way. While I knew I couldn’t make someone do something they didn’t want to do, and it wasn’t my place to try, sometimes you saw in another’s eyes the desire without the means.

  Keisha had helped me get to the bottom of a case, and I had given Keisha the means to attend hairdressing school—her goal—by providing a loan to cover the tuition that would have otherwise been beyond her. Now that she had graduated and found work in a salon in nearby Riviera Beach, she had begun to pay back the loan.

  In haircuts and shaves.

  She had already given Ron a little trim—anything more than that seemed sacrilegious to his fantastic silvery-gray mane. She had even taken care of Mick, the owner of Longboard Kelly’s, with a buzz cut that would have done the Marines proud.

  In my infinite wisdom I had agreed to the full two bits, and I could feel my balled fists cramping as she swept the sharp blade up along my throat and over my jawline. But the West Palm Beach School of Hairdressing and Cosmetology had taught her well, and not only did I come away with no nicks or cuts, but my haircut had elicited a positive comment from Muriel.

  “Looks good,” she said.

  “Too much?” I asked.

  Muriel smiled and passed a beer across the bar as I retook my stool.

  “Not at all,” she said. “You still look scruffy, but Danielle will approve.”

  I was about to make some witty retort about not needing my wife’s approval for my haircut, but I saw Ron’s subtle headshake just in time.

  We sat in the fall sunshine and watched the locals get cheap haircuts. Those weren’t on me. Once Keisha had covered her tuition payment by getting Ron and me spruced up, and she had covered her chair rental by shearing most of the hair clean off Mick’s head, she then settled in to make a little cash. I was fairly certain that the Department of Health would frown upon such a thing, but the Department of Health only made occasional rounds at Longboard Kelly’s. It wasn’t like the place was in poor shape. Anyone who knew Mick knew he ran a tight ship. It was more that the health inspectors liked to do regular passes at the places with better views and nicer-looking clientele.

  I was wiping the tiny hairs off the back of my neck when Ron’s phone went off. I figured if it was Lizzy calling in from the office to tell us our extended lunch break was over, then Ron would have quietly slipped the phone back in his pocket. Instead he quietly slipped from his barstool and wandered to the back of the courtyard, near where the surfboard with the shark bite out of it hung on the wall, where the cell phone reception was best. He paced back and forth, gently nodding, and I spun back to face Muriel and enjoy my beer.

  When Ron returned to the bar, he wore no expression on his face. It was as if the call had been neither good nor bad. The color beige came to mind. He sipped his beer before glancing at me.

  “That was about a job,” he said.

  Getting work was usually a good thing, so I suspected there was more.

  “An insurance client,” he said. “Here in West Palm.”

  Insurance clients were like yin and yang to me. I didn’t love the work—it was more often than not boring and vacuous—but it paid well, or at least it paid. But it still didn’t explain Ron’s face. He generally took on the insurance work, and claimed to not mind doing so. So I waited.

  Ron took another small sip of his beer. “They’d like a meeting this afternoon.”

  And there it was. A gorgeous, sunny South Florida afternoon with no work on the books and nothing dragging us away from the bar at Longboard Kelly’s. Until now. I almost felt sorry for Ron. Almost.

  I nodded slowly, giving sufficient weight to the gravity of his situation. Ron liked fewer things worse than being dragged away from a half-finished beer. “I’ll keep the home fires burning here,” I said. “Perhaps you can drop by again later.”

  Ron shrugged and put his beer down. “I think you might want to be at this one.”

  I glanced around the courtyard and up into the clear blue sky. I couldn’t imagine wanting to trade that in for an insurance company boardroom. I was going to say so but felt a simple shake of the head conveyed the message just as well.

  “It’s about the new sports arena in Mangonia Park,” he said.

  I was sure that Ron was hoping the word sports would pique my interest, and to be fair it almost did. I hadn’t had a chance to visit the new arena, and Ron well knew of my somewhat unnatural attachment to sports arenas. Some people visited churches, and not just for service. For me there was no greater joy than the pulsing and heaving mass of a full sports arena. But there was also no greater peace to be found than in an empty one. Despite the fine afternoon, I could feel my better angels dragging me from my barstool. A paying job and a visit to a previously unseen cathedral of sports. There was no doubt in my mind that Ron was playing me, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that he was playing me well.

  “This afternoon?” I asked.

  “Half an hour,” he said. “If we’re available.”

  I looked at Muriel behind the bar, all tanned skin and strong arms. I’d never seen her do a workout, other than lifting heavy kegs of beer, but I knew she must have one heck of a routine. I gave her a look like I’d lost my puppy, and she simply answered with a lifting of the shoulders.

  “We’re here all week,” she said.

  Chapter Two

  The insurance company was located in one of the new office complexes in Rosemary Square. Being well acquainted with the joys of parking in that particular facility, Ron decided we should drive back to the office and make the rest of the journey on foot.

  As we walked along South Dixie Highway, he passed me a stick of gum. Despite my long history with baseball, I’d never become a fan of chewing gum. It seemed utterly pointless to me. It wasn’t a great look and it provided me no sustenance, but it would do the job of covering up any beer breath we might have from our respite at Longboards, and insurance guys could be sticklers for things like that.

  Rosemary Square was the kind of downtown area that liked to proclaim itself the heart of the city. It was originally known as CityPlace, but the name had changed during renovations, for reasons that eluded almost everyone. I had read that the architecture was considered Mediterranean or Venetian, but I was fairly confident that anyone from Venice who saw Rosemary Square would have called the design “American shopping mall.”

  It was a somewhat soulless place, but I had to admit, it was a decent step up from the desolate non-downtown hub of crime and decay it had replaced around the turn of the millennium. As was the case with so many cities and towns in South Florida, there had been no there there—no hub, no town square. In Europe a visitor might find a town square designed for public use where it was perfectly acceptable to go and do nothing more than people-watch. Rosemary Square, on the other hand, was available for people to visit but designed specifically for them to spend plenty of cash while there. And as I had learned in philosophy class back in college, being a good consumer was what life was all about.

  As we entered the office building, Ron took a tissue from his pocket and deposited his gum in it, then offere
d for me to do the same. By the time we reached the reception desk we were minty fresh.

  Ron told the young guy at the desk who we were, and who we were there to see. We didn’t even have time to take a seat on one of the flat, uncomfortable-looking sofas before our prospective client came out to greet us.

  He looked like a New York banker, with short, neat hair, graying at the temples, and an immaculate pinstripe suit that for reasons I couldn’t explain made me think of a penny-farthing bicycle. I noted that he was shaven as smooth as a baby’s cheeks, and I wondered, for the first time in my life, whether he had noticed that I was the same. I caught a whiff of orange blossom. He nodded quickly several times as he shook Ron’s hand, the serious expression on his face never wavering. He reminded me of J. Jonah Jameson, editor of the Daily Bugle in the Spider-Man comics.

  “Thank you for coming so promptly,” he said to Ron, then turned his stern face to me and pumped my hand with the same vigor.

  “I’m Peter Parker,” he said. “Let’s talk in my office.”

  He spun on his heel and led us into the throng of open-plan desks. I gave Ron a sideways glance, and he shook his head in return. There was no way he could have known that I had framed the guy as a comic book character in my head, but there was no doubt that he already knew the guy’s name was Peter Parker, and how much joy that would bring me.

  Parker’s office was planted in the center of the building. His only window gave us a great view of the desks. People seemed to be busy doing things that involved headsets and computer screens and the kinds of postures that kept chiropractors in Ferraris and Lamborghinis. His office was as neat and tidy as his haircut but littered with the usual tchotchkes of a white-collar executive: small plaques for achieving sales goals or teamwork objectives, family photos, and a framed picture of Parker with various semi-important people, including the city mayor twice removed.

  He pointed us to two chairs in front of his gleaming desk, and as he closed the office door behind us, the hubbub of clicking computer keys and whispers into headsets went silent. Parker rounded his desk and took a seat. He didn’t offer us coffee or water, but I wasn’t thirsty for either of those anyway.

  Ron took the lead. These were his people. Both in the sense that he himself had once worked in insurance but also because he was well-connected to the executive set in the Palm Beaches.

  “So, Mr. Parker, how can we help?”

  “You were recommended to me by John Kramer. You know John?”

  “I do,” said Ron. “We play golf occasionally.”

  “He said you were good with delicate insurance matters.”

  Ron was far too classy to say yes, we are, so he just gave a gentle nod. “What is the nature of your matter?”

  “It’s regarding a policy we’ve issued,” said Parker. He leaned forward as if we were about to share state secrets. “You know the new hockey team in town?”

  “Yes,” said Ron, without a great deal of confidence.

  “The West Palm Beach Chill,” I said.

  Parker shifted his eyes to me. “That’s right. We insure them. They’re playing out of the brand-new sports arena up on Forty-Fifth Street. You know the one?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Haven’t had the chance to visit yet though.”

  “But obviously you understand it’s a very new facility.”

  “I’m sure the paint is barely dry,” I said.

  “You could say that.” Parker pushed off his desk and leaned back in his chair. “See, we’ve written a policy to cover losses for the Chill.” He shook his head a little, as if the movement was involuntary, possibly reflecting his distaste for the name. It was clearly the work of a genius marketing department: juxtaposing the idea of chills and ice with the heat of South Florida. Like I said, pure genius.

  “What kind of losses?” asked Ron.

  “Losses not related to competition,” said Parker. He leaned forward onto his desk again, and I wondered if he had piles. “To give you an example, if the team doesn’t perform and is unable to build a following, and as a result, they lose ticket revenue—well, that would be competition related.” He wiped his pointer finger across his eyebrows as if the mild office was unbearably hot and causing him to sweat, and for a moment I was sure he was going to cross himself.

  “But, for example, if the arena burned down and they had to play somewhere else and incurred additional costs with that, or the alternate venue was unable to hold as many fans, we would cover those losses.”

  “Do they really think that’s likely to happen?” I asked.

  “No, but that’s the nature of insurance,” said Parker. “See, it’s like shorting a stock. When you buy stock in a company, you expect it to go up, but big investors, like mutual funds, want to cover the risk in case it doesn’t, in case it declines in value. In that instance they would short a stock future, meaning they’d purchase a contract to buy the stock at a lower price sometime in the future, an option they would only exercise if the price fell. It’s a form of insurance. A hockey team can’t short itself, so they take out insurance to cover things that might damage their brand or hurt their bottom line that they can’t otherwise control.”

  “You can insure for that?” I asked.

  “You can insure for anything. It’s all just a balance between risk and premium. Actuarial tables are simply probabilities—the likelihood of something happening during the term of the coverage. If something is more likely to happen, or more expensive to cover, then the premium is higher. If something is less likely to happen or costs much less to cover, then obviously the premium is lower.”

  “So has the arena burned down?” I asked.

  “No. But there are some strange things happening.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “The sorts of things that a policy like ours might have to pay out on. Computer glitches that affect the ticketing system. Scoreboard malfunctions that might have affected the result of a game, had they been during one. There was a gas leak only a couple of days ago, and then last night, when the basketball court had to be re-laid, the workers couldn’t access the floorboards because somebody had changed the locks to the storage area.”

  “Somebody changed the locks?” said Ron. “Surely that would have to be approved by someone.”

  “I’m sure it would,” said Parker. “I just don’t know who that someone was.”

  “It sounds a little weird, to be sure,” I said. “But like you say, it’s a new facility. You would expect hiccups, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t your actuarial tables account for that?”

  “We do account for things like that. And any one of those things might be written off, but all together? They seem beyond the likelihood of probability.”

  “So you’re saying it’s a math problem,” I said.

  Parker nodded. “In a manner of speaking, yes. It’s the math that drew our attention.”

  “I’m not sure math is our forte.”

  “I don’t want to hire you for your math skills, Mr. Jones. What I need is someone on the ground. Someone independent of the team and the facility. Someone who knows what questions to ask, and who to ask them of, and when to ask them in order to get the answers that we need. I need someone to find out if these things really are just random chance or if someone is throwing a deliberate monkey wrench in the works.”

  Now it was my turn to lean back in my chair. I glanced at Ron and let him move the discussion forward. Talking terms and contracts about jobs was his forte. My strengths lay elsewhere: in the knowing who to talk to, and when, and how, in order to find out who was doing what and to whom.

  And I knew a little bit about monkey wrenches—deliberate and otherwise—and how to find them, and how to use them too.

  Chapter Three

  So it was that Ron and I found ourselves cruising back up Route 1 in the general direction of Longboard Kelly’s, but sadly turning away on Forty-Fifth Street and heading around Lake Mangonia.

  Ron slowed as we came upon the new arena. The facility itself sat at the far rear of the property, backed up against the Mangonia Park train station. In the foreground was a massive parking lot laid in cracked, sun-bleached blacktop that, unlike the arena, was anything but new.