Chapter 31
AS STILWELL DROVE up Chimes Tower Road in the ATV, he could see the graffiti on the tower’s front wall, positioned to be visible from the harbor below.
Graffiti was generally not a problem on the island.
There was not a large population of young people and it just wasn’t the kind of place that overtowners, including gang members, came to leave their mark.
Stilwell thought before he even got there that he would be looking for a local and that the suspect would likely be found at the high school.
During his time in the homicide unit, Stilwell had learned to read graffiti.
That is, he had studied the various styles and code words contained in gang tags.
Often it led to clues, sometimes the identity of the gang responsible for the murder or even the killer himself.
He could tell that the mark on the tower was in what was known as the bubble style, big cartoonish letters meant to be seen from a distance.
The letters were blue, outlined in black.
When he got there, Bill Barnes was waiting with painting equipment at the ready.
He wanted the message—whatever FSID meant—to be gone as soon as possible.
Stilwell guessed that Barnes had taken the vandalism as a personal affront.
He was one of Avalon’s floaters—meaning he lived on a boat with a permanent mooring in the harbor.
Stilwell had heard two different stories about Barnes.
One was that he had been an attorney in Florida and moved to the island when he burned out on the law and wanted to get as far from the Sunshine State as he could.
The other story was that he had made so much money in a personal injury case that he retired early, bought a boat, and planned to travel the world’s oceans, fishing and exploring, but when he got to Catalina, he fell in love with the place and decided he need not go any further.
Either way, he had volunteered to take care of the tower as a means of fitting into Avalon’s established social structure and giving something back to his adopted home.
The chimes sang out across the harbor and town every fifteen minutes from eight a.m. to eight p.m. every day. They were custom-made tubular bells that William Wrigley had imported from Chicago. They were sacred to some, including Barnes. He was good and angry when Stilwell hopped out of the ATV.
“I hope you catch the little asshole who did this,” he said. “Gotta be some miscreant overtown gangbanger who can’t stand the thought of what we have out here.”
“Miscreant overtown gangbanger, huh?” Stilwell said. “That’s a profile. How do you know it’s a he? And that he’s from overtown and is a gangbanger?”
“The percentages. You think I’m wrong?”
“I think the first place I’m going to look is up at the school.”
“It would pain me to know it was one of our own.”
“Well, we’ll see. Any idea what it means?” Stilwell pointed to the tag.
“I know what the F stands for,” Barnes said. “After that, no.”
Stilwell pulled out his phone and took several photos from different angles.
“Okay,” he said when he was finished. “You can go ahead and paint.”
“I shouldn’t be the one doing this,” Barnes said. “It should be the prick who did it, but I can’t stand it being seen all over the harbor.”
Stilwell looked down. He saw the harbormaster’s tower at the end of the pier and imagined Tash in there watching over the water and all the boats.
“You saw it from the Bee?” he asked.
He had heard that Barnes bought the boat with the name Bimini Bee already registered. Bimini was an island off the coast of Florida. The boat was an old Carver that looked like it had plowed through too many waves. Based on that, Stilwell believed the first story about Barnes’s origins.
“I sure did,” Barnes said. “Made my coffee, took it up to the bridge to enjoy, and what do I see?”
He gestured to the tower’s lower wall. The tag was centered right below the arched window that revealed the hanging lines of tubular bells.
“Could read it plain as day,” he added. “Just like everybody getting off the Express boats. Not cool. Not cool at all.”
Barnes already had a one-gallon can of wall paint open. The color matched the tower wall’s off-white shade and had been used as part of his previous upkeep of the structure. He started pouring it into a roller pan, muttering about how many coats it would take to cover the blue letters.
Stilwell walked around the tower, looking in the brush that surrounded it for a can of spray paint, hoping that the graffiti culprit was dumb enough to toss his tagging weapon with his fingerprints on it.
There was no such luck. By the time Stilwell had circled the tower, Barnes had one coat of paint over the graffiti.
The blue letters were still visible. Maybe not to the boats in the harbor or the tourists on Crescent, but Barnes was right that the offending letters were going to take multiple coats of paint to obscure.
Before he could tell Barnes he was taking off to pursue the case, his phone buzzed and he saw that it was Mercy.
“There’s another one,” she said.
“Another what?” Stilwell asked.
“Graffiti. The same thing, F-S-I-D—whatever that means—on the casino on the sea-facing side.”
“Okay, I’m leaving here and I’ll go check it out. Who called it in?”
“My cousin.”
Her cousin was Jeff Danzy, the security and maintenance supervisor at the historic casino, the signature structure that graced every poster and postcard sold in the shops on Crescent.
It, too, had been built by Wrigley. Mercy and Jeff were part of a widespread family tree that included a former town mayor named Ruth Woods.
Though she was long gone, locals still spoke of her with reverence.
Affectionately known as “Mom Woods,” she was Mercy and Jeff’s grandmother and was said to have been a stern taskmaster who’d kept a tight grip on town patronage and politics for more than a decade, from the sixties into the seventies.
Among her many accomplishments, Mom Woods was said to have been the force behind the Wrigley family’s decision to turn over most of their land to the conservancy.
After disconnecting, Stilwell told Barnes that there was another tag with the same message on the casino. Barnes shook his head wearily in a What is this world coming to? way. Stilwell said he would be in touch and headed the ATV down the hill.
The tag on the exterior wall of the casino was located on the round building’s seaward side, so it could be seen by vessels approaching the harbor, including the cruise ships that anchored off Catalina four days a week and transferred their passengers to the island by water taxi.
The graffiti was in the same style and colors as the one on the chimes tower, and Stilwell figured it was probably painted by the same hand.
Danzy was waiting for him, just like Barnes had been, ready to paint over the blemish as soon as Stilwell gave the word.
But this act of vandalism was different. Here, there were cameras.
Stilwell took photos of the tag, then stepped back and looked up at the curving wall of the building.
The casino was built like a muffin. Three levels, with the top floor—the grand ballroom—cantilevered over the exterior walls.
He saw a camera anchored beneath the third level and asked Danzy to take him to the security office to look at the video.
“I need to paint first,” Danzy said. “Can’t leave this here.”
“Why?” Stilwell asked. “It shouldn’t take long. I need to investigate this thing.”
“Because the Princess is coming, man. We don’t want them to see this.”
The Princess was that day’s cruise ship. It would stay overnight, its passengers hopefully filling the town’s restaurants and shops.
Stilwell looked out across the water to the south. He could see the midsize cruise ship coming. He knew not to mess with the ebb and flow of the island’s fragile tourism industry.
“Okay, one coat,” Stilwell said. “It will dry while we look at video.”
Danzy went to work with a roller, carefully making small up-and-down strokes to get the paint into the plaster surface of the wall. Stilwell saw a second roller and joined in, following Danzy and making faster and longer strokes.
“You feel like Tom Sawyer, Jeff?” he asked.
“Who?” Danzy asked.
“You know, Mark Twain? Tom Sawyer tricks his buddies into painting a fence?”
Danzy looked puzzled.
“Never mind,” Stilwell said.
They finished the first coat quickly thanks to Stilwell’s help. But again, the ocean blue of the graffiti bled through the lighter paint. As with the chimes tower, it would take several coats to fully obliterate the tag.
“All right,” Stilwell said. “Let it dry while we look at video.”
The casino was not a gambling establishment and never had been.
It was built in 1929 to be the entertainment center of the island.
The first level contained a movie theater that Stilwell and Tash attended often, and the second floor was a theater for live performances.
The ballroom at the top included a large stage for a big band.
The security office was on the first floor near the movie theater’s projection booth.
Though in 1929 no thought had been given to camera surveillance, the office had room for a video console, and Danzy sat down there while Stilwell looked over his shoulder.
Danzy brought up the camera that had an angle on the graffiti and expanded it to full screen.
He reversed the playback at high speed and they watched until the graffiti tag disappeared from the wall.
He stopped the rewind and played the video forward in real time, beginning at 11:22 the night before.
They watched as a figure in dark pants and a hoodie pulled tight around his face came into the frame with aerosol cans in both hands.
He immediately went to work creating the FSID tag.
It took him four minutes to make the blue tag with his left hand and then switch to the other can to outline his work in black.
“Left-handed,” Stilwell said.
He leaned forward and took several photos of the screen with his phone, even though the painter had his head tilted down and away from the camera through the entire tagging process.
“He knows there’s a camera,” Stilwell said.
When the tag was finished, the painter backed up to appreciate his work for a moment, then turned and ran out of the frame in the opposite direction he’d come from, heading toward Descanso Beach, which was around the bend.
Descanso Beach was where some of the highest-value homes on the island were located.
It made Stilwell wonder whether the D in FSID stood for Descanso.
Stilwell and Danzy spent the next half hour looking at video from the other cameras surrounding the casino but didn’t catch a glimpse of the tagger in any of them.
Stilwell came away from the session with nothing approaching an identification of the vandal, but he did know that he moved like a young person and that he was left-handed, and Stilwell felt sure he was a local.