The entire space had been home to a jai alai fronton back in the day. But, like so many things that were huge in the eighties, by the nineties the fronton had been boarded up and had fallen into disrepair. It would spend decades in that state, the parcel being bought and sold by various property developers with grand plans for housing and retail and all manner of other schemes that never saw the light of day. Eventually it found its way into the hands of a developer who juggled one too many plates at a time and ran afoul of the Internal Revenue Service. I hadn’t followed the politics of it all too closely, but my understanding was that the county had bought the land for a song, and then, in some kind of public–private partnership, developed the arena into what was supposed to be a new hub for sports and entertainment in the Palm Beaches.

  Ron pulled in past the gate and drove the long open expanse to the front of the arena. We got out and stood in the warm sunshine for a moment, taking in the monolith before us. The whole thing had been designed to within an inch of its life. The exterior was a mess of curves and sharp edges that pushed the limits of modern architecture and good taste. There was a spire of sorts that looked like a sliver of honeycomb spiked on top of a crème brûlée. I remember some politician on the six o’clock news telling me that the silhouette of the arena spire would become a Palm Beach icon. I didn’t see it myself—but then I would have said building a theme park in the baking pastures and swamps outside Orlando was a fool’s errand, so what did I know. After all, folks willingly flocked to Rosemary Square, seeing some kind of event destination where I saw a line of stores selling the kinds of things humanity would gladly leave behind when the apocalypse began.

  There were only a handful of cars parked in the lot, which told me there was no event happening that evening. We walked up the concrete steps toward the glass and marble frontage of the arena. Up close it looked like an Italian bank—very classy and utterly impenetrable.

  We followed the building around until we reached a series of ticket stalls, all shuttered and sleeping, beyond which we found a solitary open door.

  The security guy standing out front of the entrance gave every impression of competence: a sharply pressed uniform and a gun belt pinched tight around an athletic waist. He would have been an intimidating sight if not for the broad smile on his face.

  “Help you, gentlemen?”

  I could always tell a new transplant to Florida. Even one stacking the shelves in a grocery store or mopping the floors at a high school wore a look on their face that said why would you want to be anywhere else but here? Of course it wasn’t always about the job, but when you’re in a place that you really want to be in, and that place seemed to want you in return, then almost everything else was details.

  When I offered my hand to the security guard, he seemed somewhat taken aback but quickly recovered and shook it.

  “I’m Miami Jones,” I said, glancing at the nameplate on his uniform. “And you’re Devon?”

  “Yes sir, that’s me, Mr. Jones.”

  I jinked my head in Ron’s direction. “This is Ron Bennett. We have an appointment with Mr. Gelphert.”

  “Mr. Gelphert, yes, sirs. If I could have you jot your details down in the visitor log here,” he said, gesturing to a clipboard on a small table by the door.

  As usual, I let Ron take care of the paperwork. Devon wrote out a visitor name badge, slipped it into a plastic sleeve with a clip on it, and handed it to me. Mr. Jones, it said in black marker. I kept it in my hand rather than wearing it. It wasn’t that I thought the clip might damage my shirt—an old tollbooth worker’s shirt with pictures of beaches and sailfish and flamingos along with Florida destination names like Alligator Alley, Yee Haw Junction, and Florida’s Turnpike—I just preferred to fly as far under the radar as possible for as long as I could.

  Devon handed Ron his name tag. Ron clipped it to his shirt pocket, a plain blue Oxford. His tag simply said Ron, rather than Mr. Bennett. Devon had no idea how apt that was.

  He announced into his walkie-talkie that Mr. Gelphert’s visitors were at entry one. He got some kind of garbled response, then motioned toward a couple of the plastic chairs inside the dim concourse.

  “I prefer to wait out here in the sunshine, if it’s all the same with you, Devon,” I said.

  Once again he appeared somewhat taken aback by me. “Of course, sir. I prefer the sunshine myself.”

  “Where you from, Devon?” I asked.

  “Originally? Wilmington, Delaware. You?”

  I wasn’t sure that I still wore the glow of a recent transplant to Florida, but I hoped it was so. “New Haven, Connecticut.”

  Devon nodded and offered me what was becoming in my mind his trademark smile. “How long you been here?”

  “More or less since college,” I said.

  He looked me up and down. “So it don’t wear off?”

  I didn’t ask for clarification of what it was. Devon and I were decades apart in our discovery, but we had both arrived at the same conclusion.

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t wear off.”

  “Mr. Bennett, Mr. Jones.”

  The three of us turned at the sound of the voice coming from the doorway.

  A woman who couldn’t have been much north of five feet tall stepped out into the sunshine, shielding her eyes from the glare. She was probably in her early thirties, with short blond hair. She wore a tan skirt below a blue Oxford shirt that matched Ron’s, except for the arena logo embroidered on her chest.

  “That’s us,” said Ron.

  We introduced ourselves to her and with a firmer grip than I would have given her credit for, she told us that her name was Amanda Swaggert, VP of public relations and media for the arena.

  We said goodbye to Devon and followed Ms. Swaggert. On the inside, the arena looked like every other semimodern sports facility I’d ever been in. There was lots of concrete and wide-open spaces to move masses of people in and out as fast as possible. There were signs pointing us in all directions using a code of numbers and letters that seemed to be half modeled on a Broadway theater and half on the Dewey decimal system. We walked past concession stand after concession stand, all unlit and unstaffed. I was offered the concept of cold beers and hot dogs and nachos with cheese, and Polish sausages with onions, and churros and donuts and French fries. I resolved that there were few things sadder in life than the sight of an empty popcorn dispenser. As we walked by a dormant bar that proclaimed itself to be a microbrewery with twenty-seven different beers, our host gave us the abridged history of the arena.

  She restated that which we knew, about the jai alai, the long dormancy and fresh renewal, and the new hub of sports and entertainment. She told us about the state-of-the-art nature of the facility, how it was the greenest sports arena this side of the Mississippi, or south of the Mason-Dixon Line, or some such nonsense. I had switched off on the spiel as my attention drifted, inevitably, from the concourse to the bleachers.

  Without speaking I dropped off the back of our little group and wandered down the short corridor that led out into the stands, where I came to a stop.

  It truly was a new arena. The plastic seats, each with their own cupholder, still wore their factory shine, yet to be worn down by a thousand backsides rising and falling with the cheers of the baying crowd. A humongous screen hung from the rafters in the center, playing video of long golden beaches and rolling coils of foaming Atlantic Ocean. I’m not sure for whose benefit, but I took it as mine.

  Down on the floor a team of people worked like little ants moving things a hundred times their body weight, either pulling apart or putting together an ice rink. One half was white and the other black, as if there were no floor there at all. I took in a deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. The place even had that new arena smell.

  I sensed someone at my shoulder and turned to see Amanda Swaggert standing behind me, watching me like a proud parent.

  “The view’s even better from the CEO suite,” she said. “I’ll take you there now.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Swaggert,” I said.

  “It’s Amanda. And you’re quite welcome.”

  She took us across and used a magnetic key card clipped to her hip to summon the elevator. When we got out, it was like we had landed on a new planet. Gone were the concrete and neon and the merchandise stands. This level was all engineered wood flooring, freshly painted walls, and chandelier lighting.

  We followed Amanda past a series of doors marked as suites that bore the logos of companies that I assumed had rented the spaces out for the kinds of boondoggles that executives liked to call networking.

  Rather than slip into one of the suites, Amanda opened a door that seemed like it would lead out of the arena, three or four levels above the parking lot. Beyond it was like a secret staircase leading us up to a mezzanine area.

  Amanda said, “The executive level.”

  The wall-to-wall carpet smelled like it had been laid that morning. There was an unstaffed reception desk and a series of doors that appeared to lead to spaces directly above the company suites below.

  Amanda rapped her knuckle on one of the doors, then opened it up and stuck her head in. I heard her say, “Mr. Bennett and Mr. Jones,” to whoever was inside, and she must have received an affirmative response because she stepped back and ushered us in with a sweep of her arm.

  There was nothing special about the office. It was a decent size, bigger than Peter Parker’s at Rosemary Square, large enough for a messy desk and a couple of small sofas around a coffee table in the corner, where Amanda gestured that we should take a seat.

  My eyes, however, were on the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the arena. The windows were designed in a way that gave the view a sort of fisheye effect, offering a panorama of the arena. In another context it might have been a bit creepy, the boss man with a view over his domain and all who worked below. But all I could think was that this guy had the best seat in the house. If he had a bar fridge and a john in here, he’d never have to leave.

  The guy behind the desk was on a call, so Ron and I sat on the sofas and Amanda stood at ease, hands behind her back, smile on her face. When he finished his call, he swung around his desk and clapped his hands as he came toward us.

  “Sorry about that, gentlemen,” he said.

  Having just sat, Ron and I stood up again. It felt like one of those quadricep workouts Danielle loved to have me do.

  “Con Gelphert,” he said offering his hand.

  We introduced ourselves as I looked him over. He was the kind of guy who would have been all that and more back in college. Broad shouldered and big chinned. He wore suit pants and a well-pressed button-up shirt but no jacket or tie. Florida business casual, or some such. I was glad I hadn’t worn shorts. As with Amanda, I pegged him in his early thirties, and the years since college hadn’t done him any harm. He had the kind of muscles pushing at the fabric of his shirt that suggested he was into CrossFit or some other similar crazy business.

  “Sit, sit,” said Gelphert. “Can I offer you a beverage?”

  I waited for Ron to say beer as a reflex, but instead he asked for water. Gelphert nodded and looked at me, and I returned his nod with another.

  Having deciphered the kind of code that couldn’t have been broken by the enigma machine, Amanda said, “Three ice waters coming up.”

  Gelphert did indeed have a bar fridge that I noted was stocked full of bottled water and Diet Coke. She cracked open three waters, poured half of each into a glass and then carried the entire arrangement back to us on a silver tray, which she placed on the coffee table. Then she stood back.

  “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it.”

  “Thank you, Amanda,” I said.

  “You’re very welcome,” she said, taking her smile out the door.

  I took a sip of my water and focused my attention back on Gelphert. His shave wasn’t as close as mine. Perhaps it had been a day since his last, or maybe he was one of those guys who got a five o’clock shadow at two in the afternoon.

  “So Spider-Man’s got his panties in a bunch,” said Gelphert with a wide toothsome smile.

  It was a bold opening gambit. Gelphert had no way of knowing if we were golfing buddies, best friends, or even blood brothers of the team’s insurance agent. But then I recalled that the big man on campus rarely played the percentages. He had one game. Full-on charm and over-the-top personality.

  “Spider-Man?” said Ron.

  “Yeah, Spider-Man,” said Gelphert. “Peter Parker, you get it? With great power comes great responsibility.” Gelphert slapped himself on the thigh, then picked up his water and took a long slug like he was Jerry Seinfeld doing a set in New York.

  Ron looked at me like he still didn’t get it, and my return glance told him I’d explain it later. I knew I wasn’t going to be telling him about the J. Jonah Jameson thing if he had trouble getting as far as Peter Parker. Perhaps he hadn’t been a comic kind of kid growing up. Perhaps they didn’t have cartoons on television when he was growing up in Jamaica. Perhaps he’d never seen a movie.

  “Mr. Parker has some concerns,” I said.

  “You know how it is,” said Gelphert, his arms open wide. “We’re a brand-new facility. There are always going to be teething problems. To be honest I’ve seen much worse. If he didn’t anticipate that sort of thing, he’s in the wrong business.”

  “So you’re not concerned about all the things going wrong?” asked Ron.

  “I’m concerned about anything less than perfection, Mr. Bennett, but I am also aware that facilities need to work out the kinks. People need to learn their roles. As long as the public is unaware and they enjoy the show, then we move on and the team learns from their mistakes.”

  I asked, “Who approved the changing of the locks on the storeroom yesterday?”

  Gelphert frowned. “How do you know about that?”

  “It’s our job to know things like that.”

  “That would be the facility manager. A miscommunication. It was worked out, and I’m confident that it won’t happen again.”

  It was a plausible story, as the best tall tales often are. I didn’t see anything so wrong here, but the view from the CEO suite was often different from that down in the trenches.

  “Perhaps we could take a little look around,” I said, “to settle Mr. Parker’s concerns.”

  “Of course,” said Gelphert, like he was a realtor agreeing to the showing of a listed home. “Although Parker’s policy is with our tenant, not with us, I’d hate for him to not sleep well at night. I’ll have the PR girl show you around.”

  Chapter Four

  Gelphert got up to call the PR girl, and I excused myself to make my own. I went back to the vacant reception area and called my office manager, Lizzy, to do some digging and put together a dossier on Gelphert, the arena ownership and management, and how all the pieces fit together.

  “A dossier?” she said.

  “Yeah. Isn’t that what you call it?”

  “If you’re a hit man or a spy. Neither of which you are.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “A file.”

  “That sounds like the same thing.”

  “It is. If you’re not a hit man or a spy.”

  Amanda and Ron found me sitting on the reception desk, staring at my phone, wondering what kind of bee had gotten into Lizzy’s bonnet. We took the stairs down to the suite level, and Amanda opened up one of the corporate boxes. It was a plush space, lots of blond wood and beige seating. A marble-topped serving area and glass-fronted refrigerators, all sadly empty. There was plenty of seating for guests to spend the evening ignoring whatever was going on out in the arena. I noted a framed print on the wall that read Feel the Chill, with the word chill stylized in the hockey team’s logo.

  “The suites have flatscreens with closed-circuit vision of all events, plus cable. Full-service food and beverage. The lighting is environmentally friendly LED, powered by our state-of-the-art solar panel array on the roof.”

  She led us toward the floor-to-ceiling glass. I could see the people working on the arena floor. It felt strange that it was only half finished. I would have thought the playing surface was one of the first things you’d get done in a new arena.

  When we were done, Amanda took us down in the elevator to the maintenance level, one below the public concourse. The concrete reappeared. There were the same wide spaces as in the public concourse but no natural light. Everything was lit by some modern version of a fluorescent tube, the new ones that made everything look blue. It served to make the space feel even colder than it was, and it was a good few degrees cooler than the level above.

  We walked past large doors with prosaic nameplates on them: Storage Room 6 or Machine Room 2. There was an electric golf cart parked to one side but no sign of its driver.

  Amanda talked the whole way about innovation and community, and she must have used the phrase state of the art at least half a dozen times. She stopped at one door and turned to look at us. “This is the bit most fans want to see but never get to.”

  She pushed the door open, and we stepped into an anteroom with a concrete floor and painted walls, and then through another wide door into a room the variety of which I was intimately familiar.

  It was a locker room. It looked like pretty much every other locker room I’d ever been in, in one way or another. Rows of lockers around the perimeter, each with a wooden door and a number printed on the front. Below was empty open shelving. A wooden bench ringed the room in front of the lockers. The space resembled the changing rooms at one of those national chain gyms rather than any baseball or football locker room I had used in my life. But there was also something different, something slightly off.

  I stood in the middle of the room and looked around. Amanda was watching me with a smile as if I was starstruck by getting to visit the sacred territory of a locker room. But I wasn’t starstruck at all. I was just trying to figure out what felt so wrong.