by Tom Turner
“Well . . . first, it was just me, then my girlfriend came along—”
“So . . . had yourselves a nice little ménage a . . . whatever?” Ott asked.
Crawford gave Ott his “back off” look.
“And where exactly did this take place?” Crawford asked.
“Started out in his indoor pool, sometimes the hot tub, ended up in a bedroom.”
“The master?”
“No, on this huge water bed upstairs.”
“Didn’t know they were still around,” Ott said.
“So it was the three of you?” Crawford asked.
Misty coughed nervously.
“Until one of those friends of Ward’s showed up,” she said.
“Guys, you mean?” Crawford asked.
“No, two women.”
“Who were they?” Ott asked.
“I don’t know . . . well-dressed, expensive jewelry, older.”
“How old?” Ott asked.
“One maybe twenty-five, the other . . . thirty, I guess.”
“They come together?” Ott asked, walking behind her.
“I don’t think so.”
“So, they got there . . . then what?” Ott had his hand on the back of her chair.
“We had some champagne, blew a few lines . . . then you know . . .”
“What?”
“Took our clothes off.”
She said it like it was the same as brushing her teeth.
“These two women,” Crawford asked, “what’d they look like?”
“Their bodies?”
Ott laughed.
“Faces,” Crawford said, “eyes, hair color, distinguishing features . . . you know?”
“Well, first one had kind of reddish hair. Lot of rings. Really pretty.”
She lit another cigarette. Crawford rolled his eyes, but let it go.
“The other one . . . even more.”
“Even more what?”
“Pretty . . . a blonde, awesome blue eyes, a few freckles here,” Misty said, touching below her eye.
“How long ago was this?” Crawford asked.
“Um, eight or nine months about.”
“Remember their names, Misty?” Crawford asked.
She bit the fingernail on her right index finger.
“Red-haired one was Nicole.”
“Any last name?” Crawford asked.
“No,” she said, looking at the tape recorder.
“And the other one?”
“She was only there twice, maybe three times.” Misty’s eyes scrunched up, “Kind of a funny name.”
“Think real hard,” Crawford said.
She put her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes.
“I remember now,” she said, smiling. “He called her Liliana. That was it, Liliana.”
NINE
Nick wished he had watered down the Bahama Blasts because Cynthia was getting less and less intelligible. She had just slurred her way through an explanation of how Spencer Robertson’s only living relative was a bad seed grandson named Avery Robertson, who she described as a kind of pudgy, shorter version of Nick. Then she started going on about how handsome Nick was. The Blasts clearly affected her vision. “Sexy” hair and “nice bone structure,” she was saying now. Not that he minded hearing it, but he wanted her to stick to the dysfunctional Robertson family. This was business after all.
Then she started blathering on about some incident that took place years before, when fifteen-year-old Avery Robertson showed up out of the blue at the Poinciana. Kid was on spring vacation from boarding school. He and three friends went there to play golf—and unbeknownst to his grandfather—went straight to the Poinciana pro shop and charged up four sets of top-of-the-line golf clubs, along with shirts, hats, sweaters, balls, the works. All totaled the tab was more than $5,000 including guest fees and a $250 lunch.
The shit hit the fan when Spencer Robertson’s conservator at J.P. Morgan, Paul Broberg, got the bill and in a rage called the club manager. The manager was no dope and deftly handed the ball off to Cynthia. She listened to a ten-minute harangue as the irate Broberg demanded to know why a fifteen-year-old kid was allowed to just walk into the Poinciana and charge up any damn thing he wanted. It was a very good question. Cynthia said how Broberg told Spencer Robertson all about it, and that Robertson was so furious he basically told the kid to stay away.
“When was this?” Nick asked her.
“What?”
He was ready to mainline espresso into her.
“The grandson incident, at the Poinciana?”
She yawned. “Umm, ten . . . twelve years ago.”
Avery Robertson would be about Nick’s age. The light bulb clicked on again.
Cynthia kept jabbering about how Paul Broberg got all wound up and launched into another tirade about “entitled brat” this and “little bastard” that. Cynthia said she felt like she was not only being blamed for the kid’s self-indulgent spending spree, but also his whole reckless, misspent youth. In the course of his diatribe, Broberg mentioned that Avery was an orphan. Something horrible had happened to his parents, Broberg intimated. Cynthia didn’t dare ask what.
Nick was hanging on to her every drunken word.
Cynthia’s story about Avery Robertson catapulted Nick back to his childhood in Mineola, New York, a downwardly mobile Long Island suburb of New York City. His childhood was a cliché in many ways. His father was an abusive bully who used to work for Grumman, then when it closed down, had a series of dead-end jobs. The one constant in Sid Gonczik’s life was his daily twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. It brought out the cruel tormentor in him, which was bad news for everyone in the immediate vicinity. That usually meant Nick and his mother. When Nick turned seventeen and got up to 185 pounds, he decided not to take it anymore. One day his father came at him and Nick beat him unconscious with a brass fire poker. He had to be restrained by his mother or he might have killed him.
Nick had no remorse. After that, his father kept his distance and never laid a hand on him or his mother either. Then later that year, October of Nick’s senior year in high school, Sid Gonczik went off to the hardware store one morning and never came back. Neither Nick nor his mother was heartbroken. In fact, they never even mentioned him again.
THE MORNING after Cynthia got close to setting the record for Bahama Blast consumption, Nick called her up. He pictured her with an ice bag on her head, sucking down glass after glass of Tropicana. He asked her what movie she wanted to see. Some really lame chick flick, of course.
He had spent several hours after he went home from Viggo’s that night, working on a plan about how to mine the Spencer Robertson mother lode. He rejected several ideas and finally came up with one that he thought had merit, though it was still a long way from being fully developed. At its most basic, it was simply to gain entry into Robertson’s house. Not to clean out the silverware or make off with a couple flat screens, but just to get the lay of the land. See if he could somehow figure out a way to separate a few million from the second richest man in Palm Beach. He knew there had to be a way, some angle to work, especially since the man was way down the Alzheimer’s highway. Surely, once he got inside, Nick could figure out how to divert a sizable chunk of Robertson cash into his pathetically anemic bank account. What made him practically salivate was the fact that, according to Cynthia, aside from some older guy who took care of Robertson and maybe a cook, nobody was minding the store.
Nick knew he’d have to keep an eye out for Paul Broberg, the old man’s executor, but except for him it seemed like the place would be easy pickings.
He had already forgotten what movie Cynthia said she wanted to see, and steered the conversation back to where he wanted it.
“You know, I got thinking last night,” Nick said. “I didn’t put it together, but Avery Robertson . . . he’d be about my age, right?”
Cynthia thought for a second.
“Yes, probably, around twenty-six, twenty-seven. Why?”
Nick laughed. “Because I knew a guy by that name up in New York. A real hell raiser, guy drank more than a whole goddamn fraternity.”
“Sounds like him.”
“Only thing is . . . I’m thinking the guy up there might have been Avery Rob-inson.”
“Well, the one here is definitely Rob-ertson.”
“Now you got me really curious, can you describe him again?”
“I can do better than that,” she said, talking very quietly as if she talked any louder it might shoot dagger-like splinters into her hung-over skull. “Actually I have a picture of him. You won’t believe why.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause Paul Broberg sent it to me. In case Avery ever showed up again at the Poinciana,” she said. “Guess I was supposed to tackle him or something, make sure he didn’t start charging up stuff.”
She guffawed like she had just delivered the world’s all-time funniest punch line.
“I’ll bring the picture, next time I come, you can see whether it’s the same guy you were thinking of. ’Course it is a few years old.”
“Thanks, that doesn’t matter. So this guy Avery doesn’t come around much anymore . . . ’cause of that golf thing?”
“ ‘Much?’ Are you kidding? Never. Impression I got was almost like the old man put guards at the bridges to make sure he never set foot in Palm Beach again. Word from my manager was if you crossed Spencer Robertson just once, it was the last time, including flesh and blood.”
Nick could barely restrain himself from cartwheeling across the room. He closed his eyes and did a fist pump. A game plan was taking shape.
“Weird thing is, Avery’s the old man’s primary beneficiary . . . least he was.”
Nick practically crushed the phone into his ear.
“He is? Why?” he asked, trying to tamp down his excitement.
“Broberg told me Robertson had a thing about charities. Didn’t trust ’em. Thought all the money went to administrative costs, none of it ever got to the actual cause.”
“So you’re saying he’d rather give his money to his grandson . . . even though he was a complete bum?”
“I guess. As long as he never came around.”
Nick did another fist pump.
TWO NIGHTS later, Cynthia came in with the picture of Avery. Nick could see “eager-to-please” written all over her.
“See the resemblance to you?”
He did. But the kid had big fleshy lips and a perfect aquiline nose. Blue eyes, too. Nick’s were green. But they did have the same hair. Similar facial structure, too.
Nick put the picture down on the bar.
“That’s not the guy I was thinking of, I’m pretty sure the one in New York was Avery Robinson.”
Cynthia powered through a few watered down Blasts and after her fourth one excused herself, garbling something about going to the “itta guls room.” Nick picked up the picture of Avery Robertson and stuffed it into his wallet.
As far as taking her to the movies on Thursday night, that was not going to happen. He had gotten all he needed out of her. He imagined her showing up at Viggo’s on Friday after being stood up the night before, loaded for bear, ready to rip him a new one.
When Cynthia came back from the bathroom, he made her the last Bahama Blast he’d ever make her. Because he had decided tonight was his last night at Viggo’s. He made it extra strong—three ounces of rum. Because at this point he didn’t much care whether she slammed into a big ficus, a twelve-inch wall or a concrete bridge abutment.
The drink, of course, was on the house. To ensure a big tip.
Even though Nick knew his days of counting on tips would soon be behind him.
TEN
Crawford was still reeling from Misty’s little shocker.
Ott had just left his office and Crawford was pretty sure, based on Ott’s lack of reaction, that he hadn’t picked up on Misty’s Liliana reference.
He had heard a few people call Lil “Liliana,” mainly people she didn’t know that well. He flashed back to what she told him late one night. How she had gone through a “bad patch” right before she met him. A nasty self-destructive run where she confessed to drinking way too much and hitting the drugs pretty hard. Coke, in particular. She had apparently left out a chapter or two.
She told him it got so bad that a bunch of her friends did an intervention on her one time. It got late—cocktail hour—and Lil’s friend, Mimi, whose house the intervention took place at, broke out a bottle of Santa Margherita. End of intervention.
Eventually, she got talked into going to one of those dry-out places in Minnesota, but only lasted a week there. She promised him she had cut out the drugs completely. Strictly a social drinker, now, she said.
Crawford couldn’t get the image out of his head. The big water bed, women—worse, young girls—coming and going. And Lil, right there in the middle of it, snorting coke and doing God knows what.
He remembered something else Lil told him. About her friend, Nicole—the name of the other woman at Ward Jaynes’s house according to Misty. Something about this group of women, who sounded like a collection of rich lost souls, who met a couple times a week to pray and gossip at the old Paramount theater on North County Road. Lil described it as a kind of born-again group that jumped from fad to fad—yoga to Pilates to Facebook to whatever. Lil referred to them as members of The Church of What’s Happening Now. The mainstay, apparently, was the socially prominent Nicole, a pharmaceutical heiress.
The common cause of the group seemed to be the pursuit of happiness, which, no one thought, was asking too much. But, thus far, that goal had proven elusive thanks in part to straying husbands, alcohol and drug problems, lack of purpose, or all of the above. As he remembered it, the point of the story was that one of the members was caught naked—legs to the sky—in the backseat of another member’s husband’s Bentley. Nicole had summarily banished the woman from the group, which seemed somewhat hypocritical, based on Nicole’s waterbed activities.
After a while, Crawford got out of his chair and started pacing around his office. He didn’t want to think about Lil anymore.
His mind jumped to Ward Jaynes. He didn’t want to let it get personal, but maybe he wouldn’t be able to help that.
In any case, it was time to have a little talk with the man.
He walked over to Ott’s cubicle and suggested they pay Jaynes a visit a little later. Ott jumped at it. Never interrogated a billionaire before, he said. Weren’t any up in Cleveland. Crawford told him to give him an hour. He needed to do what he always did. His Boy Scout routine. Be prepared. Research his subject. He went back to his office and dug up everything he could. He wanted to know Jaynes cold. He always started with Wikipedia, if his subject was a big fish, even though sometimes they got their facts a little screwed up.
Turned out Jaynes grew up in Plattsburgh, New York, went to Plattsburgh High, then Syracuse University. That threw Crawford a little, because Jaynes exuded all the characteristics of a bored, entitled patrician from some fancy place like Greenwich. The clothes, the hair, the attitude, you could tell a lot from a few pictures in the paper. In Jaynes’s case, his eyes said it all. It was like they telegraphed what was going through his head . . . the fools I have to suffer, they seemed to say. The morons I have to put up with.
After graduating from college, Jaynes worked for a year at Manufacturers Hanover bank, then jumped to Goldman Sachs for two years and after that went and got his MBA from Harvard Business School. At age twenty-seven he started Jaynes Funds. At thirty-six, he was a billionaire. Jaynes Funds mainly shorted stocks. So if a company tanked, he did well. Clearly smart, tough and shrewd—he was, now at forty-two, a multibillionaire and had weathered the 2007–08 crash like it was a mere speed bump.
Crawford Googled him next. The man had amassed more gigabytes than most presidents. He found out Jaynes had scores of lawsuits in the last five years, right up there with the cigarette companies. Crawford navigated his way around
and realized it would take weeks to read everything about the guy. Jaynes had some pretty nasty chapters in his life and, it seemed, way more enemies than most. The surprising thing was how many of them were women.
Crawford had seen pictures of Jaynes’s house—a word that hardly did it justice—in a Sunday Palm Beach Press profile. Crawford had heard that when Jaynes bought the place, it set the record for the highest selling price in Palm Beach. Fifty million. Then a few months ago, Trump sold his humongous beast to the Russian fertilizer king and . . . trumped it.
ELEVEN
Ott was driving them to Jaynes’s house. They were going down South Ocean Road.
“See that place,” Ott said, pointing to a big Mediterrean behind a high stucco wall, “that’s the house that Alex Cross built.”
“Who the hell’s Alex Cross?” Crawford asked.
“Christ, man, you illiterate or something?”
Crawford raised his hands. “Sorry, never heard of him. Who is he?”
“Only the most well-known James Patterson character there is.”
Crawford laughed. “Okay, got it, Patterson’s house.”
“Yeah . . . thanks to Alex Cross.”
Ott hung a left and drove the white Caprice down a long driveway.
Crawford was amazed they could just drive right in. Usually at a place like this there was some massive steel reinforced gate that could stop a tank. Or a manned toll booth-like gatehouse where you’d be eyed suspiciously unless you pulled up in a Maserati or a Maybach. The architectural style was not readily identifiable, just massively, grandiosely big. Municipal building big. Cold, too. Even the majestic royal palm trees, which formed a straight allée to the house, didn’t soften its starkness. Or warm up the battleship gray stucco exterior.
Crawford remembered hearing that royal palms like these went for about a hundred dollars a foot. He estimated their height and how many there were, then started to do the math, but gave up. He needed a calculator.
According to the Palm Beach County public records he had read, the mega structure had been built just six years ago. He recalled something he was told, how landscaping could make a house look as though it had been there forever. But from the outside of this one, he got the feeling it had never been lived in, everything too clean and new. It looked like a $50 million crash pad.