The Faces of Danger by Rufus King

Author:Rufus King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, detective, murder, florida, police
ISBN: 9781479405596
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE CAESAR COMPLEX

At first the case seemed simple. In fact, on its surface there appeared to be no case beyond making a conventional pass at legal formalities and then filing the fatality as an Act of God. A man had been struck by lightning while standing on the ocean shore and the man was dead.

But later, whenever referring to it, the chief criminal investigator for the Sheriff’s bureau, Stuff Driscoll, was to express a belief that the Caesar Case might find a niche among the better efforts on the part of self-deluded bright brains in the sphere of villainy to achieve the cliché of a perfect crime.

A Mr. Julius Caesar d’Este was the corpse.

The beach on which his body had been found at seven in the morning by his personal attendant Duke Heraclon was a private stretch of Atlantic Ocean sand that fronted the small deluxe hotel of which he was both proprietor and sole owner. It was named, with an engaging lack of modesty, the Hotel Caesar d’Este.

The fatality occurred during the autumn season of storms when fitful torrents lashed the Florida southeastern coast, while thunder crashed and lightning hurled its idiot bolts at a variety of senseless objectives. It was also the period when management of such establishments as remained open for the tourist trade on a year-round basis either stayed stoned on their favorite brand of sauce or irritably contemplated the less bothersome forms of suicide.

The Caesar d’Este was an exception to the prevailing gloom. It was above the seasons. It was solvent enough to ignore them. It stood serene in luxuriantly semitropical landscaped privacy on the beach at Halcyon, and the hotel was open and running at top form even though its present registration listed but six guests.

Mr. d’Este, known familiarly by his intimates as J.C. and, irreverently, by the hotel staff as the more Biblical designation of the initials, had bought the land comparatively cheaply a good many years back, when the now-named Gold Coast had been but sparsely settled, and when motorists could actually look at and admire the Atlantic Ocean instead of the present day fantasia of cheek-by-jowl motels and heaven knows what.

J.C. had always been rich, having emigrated to the States with an inherited fortune that his forbears had amassed in Italy through a judicious canning of ripe olives. So rich, in fact, that it had been no trouble at all for him to indulge his oddities to the hilt, and the Caesar d’Este might well be considered the sum total of them.

The hotel comprised a two-storied structure that a celebrated architect had designed with a cautious sideswipe toward the Emperor Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli (née Tibor). Its spacious, all but marbleized lobby could easily have been called an atrium, while its public rooms and apartments were of a detailed elegance that fringed perfection.

It was far from large, as Gold Coast hotels now go, and had but thirty suites. A single room-and-bath would have been considered by J.C. as an unthinkable and comic absurdity.

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