I wanted to jump in Ron’s car, but I had given him back his keys. I figured the truck had too much of a head start anyway, so I stood there in the bright sunshine and watched it drive away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  After the chaos of the afternoon, the rear courtyard at Longboard Kelly’s was pure serenity. The sun was sinking into the horizon, and a handful of streaky clouds had wafted across to give it a canvas on which to paint its pink and purple hues. The party lights were on, offering a colorful glow across the tables, their umbrellas closed up for another day.

  Ron and I walked to the outside bar and saw that our favorite stools were taken. Normally this would be cause to speak with the management, but when they were occupied by our favorite people in the world, it was nothing but a source of joy.

  Ron’s wife, the Lady Cassandra, was wearing a long blue dress with a white cardigan, a casual look yet sophisticated enough for any of the fine restaurants in Palm Beach. She had come from money, I think, but had certainly married into it with her first husband. After his passing, she had settled into the single life of a lady of a certain age. Then she had the good luck to meet Ron.

  I had all the time in the world for the Lady Cassandra. It would be enough that she made Ron infinitely happy, but there was more to her than that. One of those people who was equally comfortable in her finest pearls at the opera or playing pool at the local dive bar, she seemed to have the capacity to talk to anyone about anything and be genuinely interested in what they had to say, regardless of their so-called station in life. It had become my learned opinion that too many people were narrowing down the choices of who fit as their kind of people. Cassandra wasn’t like that at all. She didn’t tend toward pigeonholing anyone, taking each human as she found them and drawing out their positive traits as she went. It spoke of a level of character that I wasn’t sure I possessed.

  On my stool sat someone equally classy, although less likely to be found at the opera. Danielle was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and as I walked toward her, she offered me that half smile that turned my gut upside down.

  The ladies were drinking white wine, the provenance and variety of which was a mystery to mankind. Mick generally stocked three kinds: white, red, and something bubbly. Muriel didn’t reach for the wine bottle for us, instead pouring two cold beers as if we were the creatures of habit that, in fact, we were.

  Ron regaled Danielle and Cassandra with the goings-on of our latest case. He was a natural raconteur, the kind of guy who could describe a chess match in a way that made you want to cheer queen to rook five.

  “So who do you think is behind it?” asked Cassandra.

  “If you believe the facility manager, it’s a curse,” said Ron.

  “You running with that?” said Danielle.

  I took a sip of my beer and shook my head. “Curses don’t tend to cut cooling pipes with a hacksaw.”

  “So who’s on your list?”

  “It’s long, and getting longer. There’s the CEO, who seems more interested in the razzle and dazzle than the minutiae of actually running the place; the facility manager, who seems to be the one to have his finger on the pulse, until he got fired today. There’s also the county manager, who was more focused on covering her backside than acknowledging any problems, and then of course there is the team—the beneficiary of our client’s policy. But the unknown question is, who benefits? From what I can tell, no one. Given all that’s happened there’s only downside. The CEO looks incompetent, the facility manager has been fired, the county can’t really afford the bad press, and the team gets no more insurance money than they actually lose.”

  “Curse or not, you’re right,” said Danielle. “People don’t cut cooling pipes with a hacksaw for no reason.”

  “They used a hacksaw?” said Ron.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how they did it, but they did it.”

  “So who else is there?” asked Cassandra.

  “The league, maybe?” said Ron. “Rival teams?”

  “Maybe, but the thing is, I don’t see rival teams benefiting either. Generally games get rescheduled rather than forfeited. There’s usually too much TV money at stake to not play at all. And why would the league want to hurt one of its founding teams, in a brand-new marquee arena? Especially when the ownership seems to be shared across the venue, the team, and the league.” I shook my head and took another sip. I had a brain full of information but no way to make sense of it all.

  “I wonder if they got the basketball court laid in time,” said Ron.

  We had left with Monaro as he was escorted out, and his team had still been hard at work then. But they had just started the underlay, so they would cut it close either way.

  Ron put his beer on the bar and then went inside to the main bar, a part of Longboard Kelly’s we rarely frequented. The whole point of living in Florida was that you could spend time outside pretty much any day of the year. That wasn’t to say you didn’t get wet or cold, but being from New England, all things were relative.

  We watched Ron walk over to a flat-screen television.

  Mick walked out from the kitchen with a bowl of fish dip and crackers and stopped short when he saw Ron inside. He turned to me with a look of deep concern. “What the—?”

  Not for the first time that evening, I shrugged.

  The television was on some kind of talking-head news program that seemed rather pointless since the sound was muted and there were no closed captions. You couldn’t tell from looking at it what they were talking about, or which side of the fence they sat, but whatever their position was they were awfully serious about it.

  Ron flicked the channel over and over until he came to rest on one of those local stations that still broadcast in standard definition—the fuzziness of the picture made you feel like you’d forgotten to put your glasses on.

  A basketball game was in full swing. I didn’t know Mick had that channel or that Ron knew how to use the television. I didn’t know who the teams were, and I hadn’t realized that whatever competition they were part of got televised, but I knew where the game was being played. I recognized the arena logo on the floorboards. So it seemed that Monaro’s team had gotten the floor laid in the nick of time, and for at least one more evening, life as we knew it would go on.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Danielle and I stayed overnight with Ron and Cassandra. They had a number of spare bedrooms in their apartment—I wasn’t sure of the exact number—and always seemed excited by the notion of having guests. But I for one was starting to feel a little uneasy about the number of nights I was spending there. I still found my thoughts drifting around, like flotsam and jetsam, between the places where I was and the places where I wanted to be, between where I lived and where I should be living, and between waking up alone and waking up next to my wife.

  Today was a good day. I woke up next to Danielle, and I didn’t even groan when she suggested a quick run on the beach before breakfast.

  She took it easy on me, and I got back to the apartment in minimum discomfort. We came out to the kitchen after showering and found that Cassandra had laid out a breakfast buffet on the counter. There were cold meats, slices of cheese, a variety of pickled vegetables, and two or three kinds of bread. She had yogurt and granola and hard-boiled eggs. No bacon and not an omelet or a pancake to be seen. I offered a raised eyebrow to Ron and he simply replied, “European.”

  We ate on the balcony overlooking the water.

  “So how are you enjoying Miami?” Cassandra asked.

  She could have been a psychologist, the way she eked information out of people. She knew full well that neither of us really considered Miami home, that we were there because for now, that was where Danielle’s career had taken her. She knew that I had failed to put down roots there in the same kind of way that I had on the Palm Beaches.

  “We have a great view,” I said. It was true. A realtor friend had set us up with a phenomenal deal on an apartment on Grove Isle, with killer views over the marina in Coconut Grove.

  “Views are nice,” said Cassandra.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not everything, but nice.”

  “Yeah.” I shoved half a hard-boiled egg in my mouth before I said anything equally mundane.

  “And how’s your place on Singer Island doing?” she asked.

  I finished my egg and took a sip of orange juice. “It’s rented out right now, to some kind of healthcare executive, Penny tells me. Apparently he splits his time between West Palm Beach and Philadelphia. She says he prefers it to staying in hotels, and even a month’s rent is less than a couple of weeks in a hotel, so his company is happy to pay. She says those are the best kinds of tenants: the ones who pay up but aren’t around that much.”

  “That sounds just fine,” said Cassandra.

  “Yeah,” I said again. “It’s peachy.”

  I put some smoked ham on a piece of multigrain bread and folded it into a little sandwich. It was great ham, probably imported from Spain or somewhere else very far away. I chewed quietly, and Cassandra kept her eyes on me.

  When I finished my mouthful I said, “Would you ever give it up?”

  “Give up what?”

  “This,” I said with a nod toward South Ocean Boulevard and the Atlantic beyond. “The view, the island.”

  “The view, quite easily. The island, not so much.”

  “So if Ron had to go to Montana?”

  “Why on earth would I have to go to Montana?” he said.

  “I don’t know. For the restorative waters, or the fresh air. To cure your lumbago.”

  “My what?”

  “Just hypothetically,” I said.

  Cassandra put down her piece of toast and brushed her fingers with a napkin. “I’d go. No question. Just like you did. But that doesn’t mean it would be an easy choice.”

  “So you’d miss Palm Beach?”

  “Of course. But not the place. The place is just houses and hotels and stores, and a nice but rather unspectacular beach. It’s the people that I’d miss. The ones I love, even the ones I don’t care for so much. It’s a rich tapestry. Some of it’s fine art, and some of it’s pulled threads, but it’s my blanket, and, yes, I’d miss it.” She looked me in the eye with the wisdom of a thousand ages. “And that would be okay.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that, and I wasn’t sure whether taking it further would be picking a scab or planting a seed, so I left it be.

  She picked up her toast and took a bite then let her attention drift out onto the shining Atlantic Ocean. We followed her gaze and, for a brief moment, allowed the motion of the carpet of sea calm the chattering monkeys.

  As is often the case, modern life butted its head in—my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, and for a moment I considered not answering, but the noise had broken the spell. I stood from the breakfast table.

  “Miami Jones,” I said.

  “Mr. Jones,” said a woman. “This is Charita Jain.”

  I tried to place the name but failed. “Aha.”

  “We met the other day. Well, you met with my boss, Ms. Prior, at Palm Beach Events,” she said, jogging my memory.

  “Yes. I don’t think we were properly introduced.”

  “Um, no.” The way she said it implied she was often not properly introduced.

  “How can I help you, Ms. Jain?”

  “I was wondering if we could meet.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can come over to your office later this morning. You want to give me a time?”

  “Um, well, I wonder if it’s possible to meet somewhere else.”

  “You mean somewhere other than the government building?”

  “Yes.”

  When a person wanted to meet at a place other than their office, they often had something interesting to say.

  “No problem,” I said.

  She gave me a time that was an hour away, which was expected, and a location, which was not.

  “Is that okay?” she asked.

  “That will do just fine. I’ll see you then.”

  Chapter Twenty

  I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of the Manatee Lagoon in Riviera Beach and parked just inside the gate, at the far corner of the lot from the museum. I liked to park away from my destination, even when the lot was empty. It was those little spurts of effort, like walking an extra hundred yards, that kept the beer from settling on my belly.

  I was a little early, so I wandered along the waterfront, around the large museum building that had been constructed to look like a plantation mansion, if plantation mansions were made of hurricane-proof concrete and were painted in pastel yellow.

  It had been built by Florida Power & Light next to a natural-gas power plant, which had a warm water outflow into a small inlet on Lake Worth Lagoon, and the local manatees had taken to visiting it every winter.

  Manatees were large aquatic mammals who didn’t get up to much—they were known as sea cows for good reason, sort of floating around like waterborne rhinoceroses, munching on seagrass and doing their best to avoid the blades of speedboat propellers. The gentle beasts liked the warm waters of Florida, but like most people who lived in the Sunshine State for any period of time, they had grown soft, so when the water dropped below sixty-eight degrees, they went looking for any source of warmth and found it in Manatee Lagoon.

  I leaned on the white barrier and watched a dozen or so manatees floating around in the outflow. They seemed content with their lot, as if they knew exactly where they belonged and didn’t stray too far from their path.

  The thought made me look across toward Singer Island on the other side of the intracoastal. I could see the tip of the island but not my house, the view of which was blocked by Peanut Island, sitting in the middle of the intracoastal. I didn’t really need to see the house to picture it in my mind, and I wondered about the lone guy who was living there and whether he felt like his soul had been split apart, as if the two halves of his life—Singer Island and Philadelphia—didn’t quite add up to a whole. I wondered if he saw my house as nothing more than a way station, a better alternative to a tiny hotel room, where he could leave a few fresh shirts and an unfinished six-pack for his next visit. I wondered if deep down he really wanted to be back in Pennsylvania, or if coming to Florida was an escape, a taste of something better.

  I heard a voice behind me: “Mr. Jones?”

  I turned and saw Charita Jain standing in the shadow of the Manatee Museum. She had forgone her gray uniform for an equally underplayed taupe.

  “Folks call me Miami.”

  “Charita Jain—Charita,” she said as we shook hands.

  We both leaned on the guardrail and watched the manatees for a while. It was peaceful, the water lapping gently and the breeze a good deal cooler coming off the water. But I could feel the buzz coming off Charita, like she had a lot to say but was still working on the will to do it.

  “The facility manager at the arena has been fired,” she finally said, quietly as if she was concerned about disturbing the manatees.

  “Francisco,” I said. “Yeah, I know. I was there.”

  Charita nodded but didn’t take her eyes off the manatees.

  “Was it your boss who confirmed his firing?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you guys really think all this stuff going on is the result of his mismanagement?”

  “It’s really hard to know from our position.”

  “I’ve been down there,” I said, “and I can tell you there’s a lot of strange stuff going on, and a fair bit of it is above and beyond simply not maintaining the place.”

  “Ms. Prior gets her information from Mr. Gelphert.”

  “Has she spoken to Francisco?”

  “No. She says it would be inappropriate. She says it’s not her job to manage the staff there.”

  “She worried about losing her job too?” I asked.

  “I think she’s more worried about her next job.”

  “What’s her next job?”

  Charita glanced at me. “You don’t know?”

  “Ms. Prior’s career hasn’t been that high on my priority list until now.”

  “You know there’s an election next Tuesday, right?”

  “I guess. I saw something about it on the television.”

  “You are registered to vote?”

  I nodded. I was, I just couldn’t remember where. “Is she running for something?”

  “Yes. She’s running for an open county supervisor seat. She really has designs on the state legislature, one day.”

  “So she wants to distance herself from trouble.”

  Charita sort of shrugged, although it was hard to tell. She was petite, with shoulders like a bird. Her eyes drifted back to the manatees. They were grand animals—their gentle nature could teach us a thing or two—but I was fairly certain that wasn’t the reason we were there.

  “So, I saw most of this for myself, and the rest I could learn online,” I said. “What can’t I learn online?”

  “I hear things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  Charita shifted her feet and took a deep breath as if the air coming in off the intracoastal was better than the air-conditioned stuff she normally breathed. I was certain that was true.

  “She thinks of me like a maid or a butler,” she said. “Ms. Prior, that is. As if I should be not seen and not heard, melt into the background until she needs something. I’m sure sometimes she forgets I’m even there.”

  I recalled our previous meeting and how Jessica Prior, with her strong personality and bright attire, drew the eye, while Charita did the exact opposite. I had to admit there was a point during our meeting that I had almost forgotten she was there. The notion didn’t sit well with me. “So what is it you hear?”

  “She’s having a lot of meetings that are not on her calendar.”

  “With who?”