Palm Beach Bones

by Tom Turner

  Crawford parked, got out, walked up the path to number 23 Bellemead Court, and hit the doorbell. A woman in a pantsuit and short gray hair opened the door and welcomed Crawford in.

  A few minutes later, he was sitting in a club chair in Mrs. Meyer’s chintz-dominated living room with a cup of coffee and a saucer in his lap.

  “First, Mrs. Meyer, let me just say, I really appreciate you taking the time to meet me and let me ask you some questions about your husband’s death.”

  Shirley Meyer smiled and nodded. “You’re very welcome, Detective. It was a terrible time back then, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  Crawford nodded. “I certainly can,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind, can you tell me exactly how it happened?”

  She sighed then nodded back at him. “Sure. Richard and I were coming home from dinner at a restaurant with friends and he unlocked the front door, and as we walked in, I saw this person standing to the left of the foyer with a gun.”

  “Can you describe that person? Age? How he was dressed? Short? Tall? Average? As many details as possible would be helpful.”

  Shirley Meyer took a sip of her coffee. “As I told the detectives at the time, I was surprised by how short he was.”

  “So what would you say…five six or so?”

  “If that, maybe more like five four,” she said. “I couldn’t tell how old he was because he had this nylon stocking over his face. But if I had to guess, I’d say twenties or thirties. He was wearing this bulky jacket and black running shoes.”

  Crawford nodded as he wrote in his notebook.

  “So the man said, very calmly, ‘I want all your jewelry.’ He said it in this voice that seemed like he was trying to disguise his real voice. It was high and almost squeaky, more like a teenage boy’s voice.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, Richard said, ‘I’ve got a thousand dollars in cash and I’ll write you a check,’ because we both—me in particular—had some expensive jewelry in our walk-in.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He actually laughed and said, ‘So I cash your check and they just give me the money. Nobody arrests me?’ He was being sarcastic.”

  Crawford smiled. “I got that.”

  “Then Richard started to say something,” she put her hands over her eyes, “and the man shot him. Just like that. Then he ran out the door and didn’t take anything with him.”

  Shirley Meyer sagged in her seat and began sobbing. Crawford put the coffee cup and saucer down and reached across and patted her on the arm. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Meyer, for making you go through it again. Me and my partner are going to re-open the case, maybe we’ll have better luck this time around.”

  Shirley Meyer looked up at him, as tears ran down her cheeks. “I hope you do. It was so cold-blooded and, and…so unnecessary.”

  “I know what you mean,” Crawford said.

  She smiled, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m okay now,” she said. “I just had to get it out of my system.”

  Crawford didn’t want to press it too hard. “Would it be all right if I asked you just one or two more questions?”

  “Of course. I don’t have to leave for my bridge game for forty-five minutes.”

  “Thanks,” Crawford said, leaning back in his chair. “Could I ask you about the poker game your husband played in at Clyde Loadholt’s house?”

  She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh, God, poor Clyde, I saw what happened on the news last night—” then it hit her. “Are you thinking maybe it was the same person?”

  Crawford exhaled. “We really have no idea. It’s possible. But you know how it is. We have to pursue everything.”

  She nodded.

  “So tell me about the poker game, if you would. They played every week, correct?”

  She nodded, frowned, and then lowered her voice. “I didn’t approve of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, back about twenty years ago, I heard from one of the other wives that their games got pretty rowdy. Lots of drinking and carrying on.”

  “What do you mean, ‘carrying on’?”

  She shook her head slowly then sighed deeply. “I heard they once had a female stripper there.”

  Crawford sat back in his chair. “You mean a stripper came to Clyde Loadholt’s house?”

  She let out a long, slow sigh. “Yes, according to Joanna Mitchell. She’s the wife of Chuck Mitchell, who was one of the regulars.”

  “How did she find out?”

  “Chuck came home drunk, smelling of cheap perfume. She got it out of him. After that I told Richard I didn’t want him to go anymore.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He denied everything,” she said. “Told me that was crazy, there were no strippers. It was just a regular old poker game.”

  Crawford stroked his chin, looked out the window then turned back to her. “Did you believe him?”

  She thought for a second. “Let’s just say, I half did.”

  “What do you mean by that exactly?”

  “That maybe they had a stripper one time, maybe more,” she said, “but Richard didn’t touch her. That’s what I hoped, anyway.”

  Crawford nodded, thinking there probably wasn’t any more he could get out of Shirley Meyer. But what she had told him was very useful. He asked her next for a list of the men who played in the game. He and Ott had gotten one from Susie Loadholt, but he figured she might have forgotten someone.

  He thanked her and stood up to go as she wrote out the list.

  As she walked him to the door, he thanked her and said, ‘have a nice card game,’ knowing it was going to be a whole lot tamer than the one her husband used to play in.

  Seven

  Using the pseudonym Libbie, she had hitchhiked up to Florida State Prison in Starke, Florida, fifteen years ago. She had twenty-six dollars and some change in the back pocket of her blue jeans and a backpack that contained the rest of her worldly goods. She had made up a pretty convincing story about how she was Aileen Wuornos’s step-sister, and Aileen either went along with it because she was desperate for a visitor or had no clue whether she had a step-sister or not.

  Nobody at Starke called her Aileen. She was, and had been from the first day she arrived shackled in chains, the Crazy Bitch. And, the fact was, she liked the nickname. Because if there was one thing Aileen Wuornos was, it was perverse.

  Through a two-inch, clear, plexiglass window at the prison, under the close scrutiny of a grim-faced, linebacker of a guard, the two talked through microphones. They had a long conversation and if the bitch wasn’t crazy she was at least disjointed and rambled all over the place in her endless monologues. At first she seemed to be saying that she was a victim, that she had been raped by all of the men she killed; then she said how she hated “human life” and if she ever got out of jail she’d do it all over again.

  Well, of course, there was no way in hell she was ever getting out of jail except in a body bag.

  Then the Crazy Bitch launched into her childhood and it was even worse than Libbie suspected. Her father and mother were truly a pair of five-star losers. Her mother was fourteen when she married her father, and two years later her mother filed for divorce. Shortly after that her father was sent to jail for, among other things, molesting a child, and ended up hanging himself there. Then the Crazy Bitch’s mother abandoned her and her brother, so they were dumped on their grandparents. Turned out, the grandparents were just as bad as the parents. Maybe worse.

  At the mention of her grandparents, Libbie was one hundred percent tuned in. Not only had the Crazy Bitch’s grandfather sexually assaulted her, according to her anyway, but so had her brother and a friend of her grandfather by whom she became pregnant at the age of fifteen. That was also the same year she got thrown out of the house by her grandparents and ended up camping out in the woods behind her house, turning tricks with neighborhood kids, supporting herself as a teenage hooker.

 
Libbie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her childhood had been pretty mild by comparison, even though there were more than a few parallels.

  The Crazy Bitch had stopped at one point and asked, “Why are you so interested in my pathetic, fucked-up life anyway?”

  Libbie mumbled an answer but the Crazy Bitch didn’t seem to be listening. Instead she just changed a few words and repeated the same question. “Why the hell do you care about me? Why are you here? Do you want to play me in another fuckin’ movie or something? Or write another book about me? I’m so sick of all that shit.”

  Libbie just laughed it off and explained that she was neither an actress nor a writer, just someone who was concerned and could relate to her life. Even though the Crazy Bitch’s life made hers look like the proverbial day at the beach.

  Then Aileen went into detail about the murders—all six of them. “Woulda been seven,” she said, laughing in her off-kilter way, “but they couldn’t find the bastard’s body.”

  “But I heard your lawyers were going to appeal,” Libbie said. “Try to get a new trial.”

  The Crazy Bitch shook her head so hard that tiny unidentifiable objects fell out of her hair. “Good fuckin’ luck.” Then she paused and spoke softly, “I’m not sure I want to live any longer in this fucked up world anyway. I been on death row for ten goddamn years now. Let’s get this shit over with, for chrissake.”

  She then swerved off on another tangent, which quickly turned into a rant. “Matron bitches here piss in my food, spit in it, throw dirt in it, trying to push me over the brink so I’ll wind up committing suicide before the execution. Put me through these nasty strip-searches, make my handcuffs so tight they cut off the circulation in my hands. No water pressure so I’m taking showers using the sink in my fuckin’ cell. Nobody treats a dog like that.” Then she detoured off onto what could best be described as the twilight zone, describing how her mind “was being tampered with and tortured at BCI and how her head was being crushed with sonic pressure.”

  Libbie listened patiently, but really wanted to go back to her tortured family life. The thing she could relate to the most.

  But when she asked her again about it and the Crazy Bitch didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She just dismissed it by saying, “Let me ask you this: how many teenage girls do you know who got raped by both her brother and grandfather and had their grandfather’s asshole buddy’s kid. All that while turning tricks in the woods behind the house they just got kicked out of?”

  Libbie thought about it for a second, but didn’t answer. She did know someone who half those things had happened to.

  Herself.

  Eight

  Crawford had just gotten off the phone with his brother, Bart. Bart was telling him how the craving for alcohol had subsided and how he really believed what he was learning at Clairmount was working. He added that he was going to the gym every day and was the reigning king on the tennis court.

  When Crawford had been up there the week before, he and Bart had had a rousing mixed doubles match with two of Bart’s friends from the Monopoly game. Clairmount had once been the forty-acre home of a New York industrialist and had an old clay tennis court, which had seen better days. But, despite a weed or two growing out of the clay, it was playable. Crawford’s partner had been a sixty-year-old woman who said she played a lot as a kid but didn’t remember how to keep score anymore. Bart’s partner was a young hard body who showed up in a crop top and gym shorts and insisted on shouting orders at him on every point.

  But Bart didn’t seem to mind that, or the fact that she played three-quarters of the court. A few patients, looking for a yuk or having nothing better to do, showed up to watch. Final score: Bart and his partner won in a tie-breaker, though Crawford’s partner accused Bart of calling a lot of shots out that were clearly in.

  Crawford left the next day after he and Bart had a long walk around the Clairmount grounds. Crawford was pretty convinced that Bart was going to make it. He had seemingly embraced everything he was learning at Clairmount and their success rate, Crawford had heard, was impressive.

  On the plane ride back to West Palm Beach, Crawford had thought about Bart the whole way. How was it possible, he wondered, that a guy as smart, successful, kind, humorous, and generous as his brother, had fallen to such depths? It wasn’t as though he had had a lousy childhood or any handicap to overcome. Bart basically, to use the cliché of the day, had been born on second base and had all the tools to get to home plate in a slow walk. But then Crawford remembered, that wasn’t exactly true, because even as a kid Bart was periodically stricken with crippling waves of depression. Where getting out of bed was a major effort, and lying awake in bed was a dark place to churn and spin things into a terrible thick stew of sadness, ennui, and anxiety. But anyone looking at Bart would think, Man, talk about a guy who’s got it made.

  The morning’s call from Bart confirmed the hope he’d felt on the plane ride home: Bart, he felt certain, would get out of Clairmount with the monkey off his back. Or at the very least, the monkey was going to weigh a hell of a lot less.

  The Loadholt case, however, was not going to solve itself. Crawford met Ott in his office at 10:00 a.m. to catch each other up on what they had learned the day before.

  First, Ott told him about having spoken to the lead Jupiter detective on Judge Meyer’s murder. They had spoken for about twenty minutes, but it could have been accomplished in ten seconds. Long story short, the Jupiter cops came up blank, not even one clue. It had been sitting in the cold case file for a long time now.

  Then Crawford told Ott about his conversation with Shirley Meyer.

  “Strippers, huh?” said Ott. “Closest my game comes to that is when Martha Boland passes a bowl of pretzels in a tank top. Ain’t pretty, let me tell ya.”

  Crawford laughed and leaned back in his chair. “Sounds like these guys hit the booze pretty hard,” Crawford said. “Hopefully we can see all the players today. I’ve got the dog-track guy at one. Other two haven’t called back yet.”

  The three regulars in Clyde Loadholt’s poker game were Chuck Mitchell, the lawyer, Rob Jaworski, who used to manage the dog track in West Palm, and Lem Richey, who owned a few local Jiffy Lubes.

  Crawford’s phone rang. He punched the green button. “Crawford.”

  “Hello, Detective, this is Chuck Mitchell, you called me?”

  “Yes, thanks for getting back to me, Mr. Mitchell. I’m one of the detectives on the murder of Clyde Loadholt. Me and my partner would like to meet with you, ask you some questions. Later this morning okay?”

  “Ah, sure,” said Mitchell. “Say eleven o’clock?”

  Crawford glanced over at Ott. “Eleven good?”

  Ott nodded.

  “We can come to you, if you give me your address,” Crawford said.

  “Sure,” Mitchell said and gave him the address of his office in West Palm Beach.

  Crawford and Ott were in a white Caprice. Ott was at the wheel going over the bridge to Chuck Mitchell’s office.

  “So I was listening to Steely Dan on the way in, that one called The Definitive Collection.” Ott said.

  Crawford nodded. “Yeah, great album, bullshit title, though.”

  Ott looked offended. “Whaddaya mean?”

  “I mean, ‘definitive collection’?” Crawford said. “Hey, it’s only rock n’ roll.”

  Ott smiled. “But I like it…as Mick would say.”

  “Yeah, but Definitive Collection oughta be for a wall full of Picasso’s or something.”

  Ott shook his head and shot Crawford a skeptical glance. “I think you’re overthinking it, Charlie.”

  “Maybe, but we are talking about Steely Dan here. Don’t get me wrong, good, but the Stones...now that’s a band with a definitive collection.”

  “Can’t argue there.”

  “Know what I’d put at the top of the list?”

  “Of what?”

  “Stones’ songs,” Crawford said. “‘Shattered,’
‘Emotional Rescue,’ ‘Dead Flowers’ and, of course, ‘Paint it Black.’”

  Ott stopped at a light and looked over. “Okay, all good, but what about ‘Street Fightin’ Man,’ ‘Play with Fire,’ and ‘Monkey Man’?”

  “‘Monkey Man’? You kiddin’? Not even top twenty,” Crawford said as his cell phone rang.

  He clicked it. “Hello.”

  “Hi, this is Lem Richey for Detective Crawford.”

  “Thanks for getting back to me, Mr. Richey,” Crawford said. “I’m one of the detectives on the Clyde Loadholt murder. My partner and I would like to sit down with you. You got time this afternoon?”

  “Sure. Whenever you say,” Richey said.

  “How about two?” Crawford said. “Know where the station house is on South County?”

  “Course I do,” Richey said. “Hey, I was a buddy of Clyde Loadholt, don’t forget.”

  “Of course,” Crawford said. “See you then.”

  “Jiffy Lube guy,” he told his partner.

  Ott drove them into an underground garage. “You s’pose these boys are gonna cop to the stripper visit?”

  Crawford chuckled. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Ott pulled into a spot on the second level of the underground garage. “I just don’t get how you’d be able to concentrate on cards if you got a stripper flashin’ her ta-ta’s in your face.”

  Crawford smiled and shook his head. “But you might be willing to give it a try, right?”

  Nine

  Chuck Mitchell’s law office had a second-rate reception area and was in a second-rate office building. Worst of all was the magazine selection: Readers Digest, Motor Trend, Bon Appetit, and the one Ott had just picked up.

  “Never even heard of this.” He held up a copy of Sport’s Illustrated Kids. “What’s it give you, junior high school soccer scores?”