I entered the adjoining office without knocking. My mistake. Lou and Joy were locked in an embrace … kissing passionately.
“Can’t you do that at home?” I asked.
“We did,” Lou said, breaking away.
Joy looked like Lou with big boobs. They were made for each other.
I told Lou about the Kessler and Jimmy Hunter phone calls. “So much for a sneak attack,” I said.
“That’s okay,” Lou said. “I got Grover anyway, and I know about Big Game Hunter. He runs a feeder fund, and he’s a scumbag.”
“What’s a feeder fund?”
“He raises money for master funds that do the actual investing,” Lou explained. “Feeders are supposed to research masters and spread their clients’ money among the best of them to reduce risk. They’re also expected to closely monitor the accounts.”
“It sounds legit,” I said.
“In theory. In practice, it can be a license to steal.” Lou grabbed a stack of files on his desk, shuffled them, found the one he wanted, and handed it to me. “Research on Big Game Investments.”
I hefted the thick folder. “How about a summary?”
“Hunter invests 100 percent of his clients’ money in B.I.G.,” Lou said. “He’s selling access to Grover, who pays him huge commissions for the referrals.”
“Why does Grover pay huge commissions if he’s in such demand?”
“Investor’s don’t know. They think they’re getting into an exclusive club, but Grover needs new investors desperately. A Ponzi scheme doesn’t make real profits, so it needs new cash constantly. A good feeder can raise billions, and Grover needs those billions to survive. If new money stops flowing, the Ponzi pyramid collapses. Considering the magnitude of Grover’s fund, it would be a financial apocalypse.”
“You’re exaggerating?”
“Maybe a little,” Lou said. “But it will be the end of the road for a lot of people. Thousands of trust funds, charities, institutions, and individuals will be destroyed. Here, look at this list of investors just from Palm Beach County.”
Lou handed me a thick folder, and I didn’t bother to ask where he got it. I sifted through the pages, seeing a few names I recognized. “He has a lot of money from Jewish organizations and pension funds.”
“Keep going,” Lou said. “There’s plenty of individuals there, too. Maybe you’ll see some names you’ll recognize. He’s going to destroy them all.”
I continued reading, stunned by the number of individuals who had put their faith in B. I. Grover. I began focusing on Boca, looking for familiar names. “I do know some of these people,” I said to Lou sadly. I shifted my attention to Delray Beach and came across a name that stopped me. Delray Vista Investment Club 550, LLC.
“Damn,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Remember the case we had in Delray with a condo association?”
“The haunted-elevator case?”
I nodded.
“How could I forget?” Lou asked. “I was with you most of the time on that one.”
“Their investment club is on this list.”
“Oh, jeez. Do they list the names of the individuals?”
“There’s twelve units listed here,” I said. “That’s all of them. Can we do something?”
“Nothing. I’d got to jail just for hacking the list. We have to keep our mouths shut.”
“Remember the Paretsky kid?”
“Sure, Noah,” Lou said, “the kid who helped put a man on the moon but couldn’t control a two-story elevator.”
“He meant well though.”
“All those people meant well.”
“I hope you’re wrong about Grover,” I said.
“I’m not.” Lou took the folder away from me. “Don’t torture yourself. It’s better you don’t know.”
“Grover’s a piece of shit. I’ll tell Hunter you don’t want a meeting.”
“Of course I want a meeting,” Lou said, raising his voice. “Give me his phone number.”
What?
I handed him the number. He punched the buttons and put on his speakerphone. I got a bottle of water from the refrigerator and sat in front of his desk.
“Jimmy Hunter,” Big Game answered his private line.
“This is Lou Dewey,” Lou said gruffly. “I understand you want to meet.”
“Yes, I do, Mr. Dewey,” Hunter said politely. “May I call you Lou?”
“No.”
“All right,” Hunter said. “When can we meet?”
“Whenever Mr. Grover is available.”
I was in mid-sip and spewed water on the Big Game folder.
Hunter took a moment to reply. “I think we have a misunderstanding. I’m asking for this meeting, not Mr. Grover.”
“I understand perfectly,” Lou said. “You want to meet and bullshit me about your split-strike strategy and Grover’s uncanny genius in timing trades. You want to deny any dishonest front-running and show me the same flow charts and forecasts that baffled the SEC years ago. Forget it. I’m not interested.”
Hunter sounded shaky when he asked, “What are you interested in, Mr. Dewey?”
“The answer to one question.”
“What’s the question?”
“That’s between Mr. Grover and me,” Lou said. “But you can tell him I’ll stop my investigation if I receive an acceptable answer to that question.”
“I’ll have to call you back,” Hunter said and hung up.
“What question?” I asked Lou.
“I want to save it as a surprise. You’ll love it. Trust me.”
“I’d trust you with my life. But I don’t trust your judgment worth a damn sometimes. Why do we want a meeting with Grover?”
“I want the satisfaction of looking him in the eyes when I nail him,” Lou said.
“Let me remind you this is business, not personal.”
“It’s personal to me.”
“You’re never supposed to tell your enemy what you’re planning.”
“Duly noted,” Lou said, blowing me off.
Within a half hour, Hunter called back. “Mr. Grover agrees to a five-minute, one-question meeting,” Hunter said over the speaker. “You’re invited for cocktails at his Palm Beach home the day after tomorrow at seven fifteen. I’ll be there, too.”
“Why would you fly all the way from New York to attend a meeting that might only last five minutes?” Lou asked.
“It’s a good excuse to visit with Mr. Grover and spend some time in Palm Beach,” Hunter said. “I already reserved the penthouse suite at the Breakers facing the ocean. There are worse ways to spend my time.”
“Suit yourself,” Lou said and disconnected.
Lou stood up when the call ended and slapped his desk with the palm of his hand. “We got him!” he exclaimed.
I had an uncomfortable feeling Grover had us.
Herb Brown came to dinner that night and brought Claudette a box of chocolate. She liked him immediately. We made small talk until the subject became his deceased wife.
“She was the other half of me,” he said. “I haven’t felt whole since she died.”
“How long were you two married?” Claudette asked.
“Fifty-six years.”
“That qualifies you as an expert,” Claudette said.
“There are no marriage experts,” he said. “We all make mistakes.”
“What did you do wrong?”
“I overprotected her. I never talked about the war or the battles I fought in business. She never knew that the Providence Mafia came closer to killing me than the Japs. I shut her off from things she should have known. It wasn’t fair. If I could do it again, I’d tell her everything.”
“You could learn a lot from this man,” Claudette said to me.
We talked about his two sons. One was a confirmed bachelor and a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis. The other had been married three times and was currently single. Herb had no grandc
hildren.
“Do you have a close relationship with your sons?” I asked.
He smiled. “Let me put it this way: I saw a movie years ago where an actor, trying to explain his relationship with his sons, said, ‘One I put through college, and one I put through a wall.’ I think that sums up my relationship with my sons. Children aren’t easy.”
“So we’ve heard,” I said, which led us to a conversation of the advantages and disadvantages of having children. We didn’t arrive at a conclusion.
Claudette sent Herb and me to the balcony, where we drank coffee and talked about anything that came to mind. He told me about his war injury, and I declined his joking offer to show it to me. I told him I had followed his advice and was investigating Grover, and he seemed confident I would find something.
The conversation turned to sports, and I learned that Herb had boxed successfully in the Marines. “I knocked out a lot of guys,” he said. “I still like to watch the fights on television.”
I told him about PAL, and he seemed mildly interested. “I’d like to attend a show.”
“Would you like to help coach?” I asked.
“I’m too old.”
“No, you’re not. You’re in great shape.”
“I guess I must be,” he said. “I’ve outlived all my friends. The last friend I had here was a Tom Coates from Chicago. He owned a bar called Boca Magic. He was a marathon runner.”
“Sounds like an interesting guy.”
“He was. Unfortunately, he dropped dead jogging in Sugar Sand Park.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“That’s life. After the war, I always wondered why I had lived when so many around me died. After I married Joan and had children, I told myself I was saved for them. Now she’s gone, the boys are on their own, my best friend died, and I’m still here wondering why. What’s my purpose now?”
“We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Lou spent the next two days reviewing his B.I.G. files while I worked on my other cases, which seemed to be going in circles. The DNA samples I took from the back stairs of St. Mary’s Church proved to be tainted by bleach and were useless. The two large Yankees fans Bailey had seen at the church did not reappear when I staked out the place. My surveillance at No Pain-U-Gain yielded nothing new, but Lou hacked into government files and found Dr. Venu Patel through his Social Security number. Lou got a complete history on Dr. Patel along with his picture and Fort Lauderdale address. Patel was a seventy-two-year-old widower who lived in a small, old house on A1A across the street from the beach. It didn’t look like much but, based on location, had to be worth a fortune. Lou’s computer search revealed that Patel had purchased the property at a reasonable price over twenty years ago when his wife was still alive and paid off the mortgage five years ago.
I chose a Monday morning to stake out Patel’s house, figuring that weekend parties would make a big dent in his customers’ inventory and business would be good. I brought a beach chair and watched the house from the vantage point of a tourist. I was there for three hours and saw several men enter and leave, each carrying a briefcase.
At noon, Patel appeared in the doorway and I folded my beach chair. I followed him at a professional distance while he walked two blocks south and one block west to the Roxie Diner. He sat at a table outside the restaurant; it looked as if it had been reserved for him. I went into the diner and sat at the counter where I could see him. Within an hour, six men separately, each carrying a briefcase, had approached him. Patel greeted each man with indifference, and he barely looked at the documents they presented. He scribbled on small notepads they handed him and slid them back across the table when he was done. He was handing out prescription slips like chewing gum. I was reminded of the slips that killed Shoshanna Hurwitz.
I estimated he signed at least fifty slips in an hour, casually dispensing death but not breaking Florida law. This had to stop, but it would have to wait until we had had our meeting with Benjamin Grover.
Lou and I drove to Palm Beach on I-95 North for our scheduled evening appointment with B. I. Grover. The last time I had driven on the interstate, I had gone south to Liberty City and met Mad Dog Walken.
Talk about different worlds.
Lou suggested we take my Mini. “Let them underestimate us,” he said.
We got off on Southern Boulevard so we could get a glimpse of Mar-a-Lago, the mansion built in 1927 for cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Lou and I had never been on Palm Beach Island before, and we gawked like tourists.
“There it is,” he shouted, pointing to the Mar-a-Lago tower as we crossed the Intracoastal bridge. We could see the rear of the mansion from the elevated Waterway. Lou opened a travel book and read to me: “‘Mar-a-Lago, built in 1927, 110,000 square feet, fifty-eight bedrooms, thirty-three bathrooms, twelve fireplaces, and three bomb shelters.’ That’s a lot of Cheerios.”
“Grape-Nuts,” I corrected him.
“Right … but why three bomb shelters?”
“Some people hate Grape-Nuts,” I guessed.
We turned north on South Ocean Boulevard in front of the pre-Post Toasties castle. To our right was the Atlantic Ocean.
“Amazing,” Lou commented. “Look at those giant hedges.”
“Yeah, they hide the houses.”
“And the people,” he said, pointing at an American flag flapping high above the hedges. “I read that Trump wants to replace that pole with one thirty-eight feet taller.”
“How high is that one?”
“Forty-two feet, the zoning limit,” Lou said. “Palm Beach is threatening an all-out war against Trump.”
“That would explain the three bomb shelters.”
We passed a sign for Worth Avenue, the exclusive retail area of Palm Beach.
“Wanna go shopping?” Lou asked.
“I can’t afford to feed the parking meters on Worth Ae.”
We glanced at Royal Palm Way, which was lined with regal royal palms.
“Awesome,” Lou said, and I couldn’t disagree.
The road jogged west on Barton Avenue and became South County Road. We saw the spectacular facade of the Breakers Hotel to the east at the end of a long private driveway.
“Let’s take a look,” I said turning the Mini onto the impressive approach.
“I bet they’ve never seen a car like this here before.”
“Let them eat their hearts out,” I said, looking at the imposing, twin-peaked hotel. I parked at the valet stand under a portico. I got out of the car and tossed my keys to an appalled valet.
“Be careful,” I told him. “It’s a collector’s item.”
“Yeah, a garbage collector,” Lou said and laughed.
As the valet lowered himself into the Mini, I told him we would only be a few minutes.
“The manager will be pleased to know that,” he said.
Cute.
Lou and I walked the red carpet into the hotel. He opened his tourist book again and read, “‘Built by Henry Flagler in 1896.’”
“That was the year my grandfather left Ukraine,” I said.
Lou flipped papers with his thumb. “It doesn’t mention him in the book… . ‘Originally built as an adjunct to the larger Royal Poinciana Hotel, the Palm Beach Inn was renamed The Breakers in 1901 because of its closer proximity to the ocean.’” His voice trailed off as he read to himself, moving his lips. “‘Burned down in 1903,’” he resumed reading aloud, “‘rebuilt and reopened a year later, burned down again in 1925, rebuilt and reopened in a year again. However, this time they used concrete instead of wood.’”
“A stroke of genius,” I said. “Now, let’s do this tour fast before they throw us out.”
“I’ve never been thrown out of a finer place.”
We scurried through the lobby, hurried past the Tapestry Bar and raced through the Circle restaurant. We walked carefully by the pool, sidestepping several drunks at happy hour, and caught a glimpse of the Atlantic.
Where a
re the breakers?
We were moving briskly through the lobby when I noticed that we didn’t look out of place after we got out of the Mini. I was neatly dressed in khaki Dockers and a white, fake Polo shirt. Lou wore his best 1950s, black Elvis ensemble. Our clothes were outdated but not outclassed. The people in the lobby were dressed as if they woke up in the morning and asked themselves …
How can I look my worst today?
Let’s see.
I have a fat ass. I think I’ll wear stretch pants.
I have a scrawny ass, perfect for baggy jeans.
I have a grubby beard. I won’t shave.
I have a great beer belly to hang over a pair of skimpy shorts.
I like sandals with black socks.
Elegantly attired Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Morgans were gone forever, and the only Astors at the Breakers now were disasters. In olden days, the hotel guests dressed like kings and queens. Now they resembled court jesters. If Henry Flagler were alive, he’d drop dead.
We blended in at the valet stand until my Mini arrived alongside a $430,000 Maybach.
“How do you like the way she handles?” I asked the snotty valet as before as I handed him a dollar.
He looked at the wrinkled bill. “A whole buck, wow,” he said disdainfully.
“You’re right,” I said. “That tip is inappropriate.” I took back the dollar. “I should give you what you’re worth.”
I got in the Mini … gave the kid the finger … and drove away.
The entrance to Via Sonrisa was about two miles from the Breakers. Grover’s mansion was the last one on the right, sharing the same beachfront with the Breakers. I gave my name to an intercom box mounted on a pillar and watched the wrought-iron gate swing open majestically. A white coquina driveway meandered through beautiful flower gardens and trimmed tropical foliage. Uniformed gardeners were everywhere, clipping, snipping, planting, removing, improving, and scurrying. Some were riding lawn mowers more stylish than my Mini.
“Business must be good,” I said to Lou, who frowned.
“A widow from Scarsdale paid for that front gate,” he said cynically. “And a retired CEO from Detroit is paying for the gardeners. They just don’t know it yet.”
I parked my ride in the circular driveway and was immediately overwhelmed by the abundance of everything: flowers, mosaics, marble, miles of mulch, scurrying domestics, stately columns, and royal palms. A silver Rolls-Royce was being waxed by a muscular young man sporting a B.I.G. logo on his green pullover golf shirt.
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