Palm Beach Nasty

by Tom Turner

  As far as Cynthia Dexter . . . it could have been two guys. But that was unlikely. His hunch was, thanks in part to Dominica McCarthy’s input, that it was just one guy. He had either been spooked and had to get out of there quick or he was an amateur, and wasn’t big on cleanup. Not that it couldn’t have been the same two guys who did Darryl Bill. Maybe they heard someone coming and beat it out of there. If it was just one, who had nothing to do with the Bill murder, obviously, he was going the copycat route.

  Next on Crawford’s agenda was to dig in on possible links between Darryl Bill and Nick Greenleaf. Then Cynthia Dexter and Darryl Bill, and also Ward Jaynes and Cynthia Dexter. Last of all, Jaynes and Greenleaf. He and Ott were going to have their hands full.

  Crawford felt psyched all of a sudden. A warm, pulsing rush shot through him.

  He had never been the fastest guy to clear a case, but he almost always got it done.

  He started up his car and called Ott. Told him he was going to Q & A Cynthia Dexter’s boss at the Poinciana, David Ponton. Cynthia had worked there for close to twenty years, and he figured Ponton could shed some light on her life. He told Ott the West Palm sketch guy would get the drawing of Greenleaf over to the Palm Beach station as soon as he was done. Ott said he’d make copies of it, then hit the street. See if somebody recognized Nick Greenleaf as more than just a guy who made a mean martini.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Having conquered the club world, or at least having gotten off to a very impressive start, Nick knew it was time to add a classy girlfriend to the mix. One who would not just look good on his arm, but might enhance his economic condition as well. Lil Fonseca fit the bill. So far everything had gone fine. They had had a nice lunch at Green’s Pharmacy, even though he didn’t get her weird comment about him being a party animal.

  Next, he wanted to impress her with his adopted grandfather’s big house. Find a way to imply that he’d be inheriting it and the vast fortune that went along with it. Having a butler bowing and scraping might help seal the deal, but since Alcie had a tendency to hover, Nick urged him to take the night off.

  He called Lil and, to show how in the know he was, chatted her up about the disappointing sales at the latest Christie’s auction. He had pulled an all-nighter on ArtAmerica.com and Americanartists.net and now felt almost ready to hold his own with the urbane curators at the Met and the Whitney. He had also gone to Barnes & Noble and spent a good chunk of his Albaran money on coffee table art books—plus everything he could get his hands on about Hopper, Bacon and Freud.

  He knew he had Lil at Edward Hopper, but just for insurance, told her his cook did the most extraordinary duck à l’orange in Palm Beach. Five-star Zagat, he effused.

  She accepted almost before he got the invitation out of his mouth and arrived at seven thirty. Nick took her into the living room and asked her what she’d like to drink.

  “AH . . . VODKA, please,” she said, gazing up worshipfully at the Hopper.

  Nick had gone to Lil’s gallery the day before and had given her a photo of the Hopper. She had immediately called her client, Ward Jaynes, and volunteered to bring the picture over so he could have first look.

  “It is just amazing,” she said, her eyes locked onto the canvas.

  “Pretty incredible, isn’t it,” he said, watching her hyperventilate.

  “Incredible? Are you kidding?” she blurted. “It’s a fucking Hopper.”

  She smiled, put her hand over her mouth. “Oops, sorry.”

  Nick smiled even bigger. He liked women who cursed with such panache.

  Her nose was practically pressed up against the Hopper now.

  “Want to see my Bacons and Freuds?”

  He hadn’t mentioned them before.

  “Ohmigod, are you kidding?” she said, refraining from F-bombing him again.

  “Follow me.”

  She gazed around the drawing room at the two Bacons and three Freuds.

  “Just incredible,” she said, her eyelashes batting like windshield wipers in a rainstorm.

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  She had tuned him out, gliding around the room oohing and aahing. She went up to one of the Bacons.

  “This is . . . absolutely fantastic.”

  “I know,” Nick said, going over to the bar and pulling out the Ketel One.

  “Soda? Water?”

  Lil looked over. “Just lots of vodka.”

  She had gone from hyperventilating to breathless. Nick imagined her silently calculating the value of each piece or maybe fantasizing about becoming the exclusive representative for the sale of the magnificent “Robertson Collection.” Attracting collectors from all over the world. Or maybe she was imagining becoming a rich society wife. Mrs. Avery Robertson had a ring to it.

  Nick brought her drink over and motioned for her to sit. But she was too jacked up.

  “Lil, I’m glad you like the collection,” he said and took a long sip of his Johnny Walker Blue. “I knew you would. I accompanied my grandfather when he bought several of them. He was a great teacher, invaluable at developing my eye, educating me as to value . . . and you know what?”

  “What?”

  “One day I’m going to own every single one of ’em.”

  She toasted him, her glass held high.

  “Oh, God, please forgive me, that sounded so incredibly tacky,” Nick said.

  “No, not at all,” she said, turning quickly from the Freud she had been studying.

  She slugged back what was left of her drink.

  “You mind, Avery?” she asked, handing him the empty glass. “I had a brutal day.”

  “It would be my pleasure,” he said, remembering how good his hit rate was with women he plied with stiff drinks.

  Suddenly, he heard shuffling.

  “Hello, Oswald,” Spencer Robertson’s voice warbled from across the room.

  This was not part of the plan. The old man went to bed at seven every night and stayed put for fourteen straight hours.

  “Set up the backgammon board, Oswald,” the old man commanded, not seeing Lil.

  He was in a pair of white cotton pajamas with blue piping. Nick could see the outline of the Depends.

  “Sure thing, Grandpa,” Nick said, wishing Alcie was here to intercept the old man. “Grandpa, I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine—”

  Lil, smiling winsomely, took a few steps toward Spencer Robertson.

  “Hi, Mr. Robertson, I’m Lil Fonseca.”

  Spencer’s eyes narrowed as he tried to focus in on her.

  “Hello, Bill, do you play backgammon?”

  “Lil, Grandpa.”

  “A little,” she said, holding up her thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

  Nick whispered to her. “He’s a little . . . you know.”

  Lil nodded. “Got it.”

  They played for close to two hours. The old man wouldn’t let them stop. Lil had several more vodkas. Nick slipped the cook a hundred-dollar bill and asked her to stay up longer.

  The duck ended up dry and Lil soused.

  She kissed Nick on the cheek after dessert and a snifter of Courvoisier, then left. Nick was a little disappointed, after all the drinks she had knocked back.

  But still, his life was coming together the way he imagined it would back in Mineola ten years before. He was morphing into an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. One of the ones whose life didn’t end tragically.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The recent article in the Press put Crawford in a mood way beyond cranky.

  The writer couldn’t seem to fathom why Crawford, the detective who had cracked the Taxidermist serial killer case with such dispatch, seemed to be going nowhere in the Bill and Dexter murders. The rest of the local media were piling on, too, and actually seemed happy nobody had been caught. With newspapers dying and circulation at an all-time low, they could go for weeks with headlines like, “Palm Beach Murder Wave. Will There Be More?” Or the one thought to be in particularly bad taste, “L
ink Sought Between Hanging Boy and Reclining Nude.”

  It had been years, after all, since Palm Beach had a murder and now, they had two. The Glossy, being the somewhat prissy stepsister of the Press, was clearly a rank amateur when it came to covering serious crime.

  Crawford, and Ott were sitting in Ott’s cubicle talking over the Glossy’s coverage of the case, specifically the fact that the reporter who specialized in writing about architectural review meetings was handling the murders. Not surprisingly, the stories fell short of hard-edged crime reporting.

  The Press writers, on the other hand, had a lot of practice covering daily drive-bys in Riviera Beach and were no slouches at murder. Word was that they had staffed up, maybe hoping for more. The national press and TV had reporters and trucks camped out all over Palm Beach. Greta van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera and their aggressive younger associates, had taken over a whole wing of the Best Western in West Palm, turning it into a coed frat house. It turned out, though, that Greta and Geraldo were actually putting their heads down on pillows in Palm Beach—the Breakers and the Brazilian Court respectively.

  All of the local and national attention had a predictably bad effect on Norm Rutledge, who had become a huge distraction, always hovering and criticizing.

  Ott had run off a hundred copies of the sketch that the West Palm sketch artist had dropped off. He walked out of the station and was on his way to pound the pavement.

  HE HAD just finished Jungle Road and was now on El Vedato with the stack of sketches. He looked down at the top one. His impression was that Greenleaf didn’t look like a man guilty of murder. Soft features and kind of baby-faced. Reminded him of the towel guy at his gym. But Ott had been fooled before. A guy in Cleveland who slaughtered his whole family, then gutted their two cats, looked pretty innocuous in pen and ink.

  He and Crawford had done about all they could to track down Greenleaf, including a twenty-four-hour stakeout at the Palm Beach Princess. They thought about scheduling a press conference and declaring him a “person of interest” or posting his name and picture on the Internet but decided it might blow up in their faces. Spook Greenleaf out of town. Might make Palm Beach even more jittery than it already was, too.

  This was police work at its most basic, Ott thought: hoofing down the street wearing out shoe leather. It had been a long time since he had gone door to door. The upside was maybe he’d lose a few pounds. He knew the odds were very long that Greenleaf would be answering any doorbells. Or that someone—a mother, a sister, a friend—would go, “Oh, yeah, that’s Nick. He’s right here, in the kitchen. Let me get him for you.” But, maybe, someone might recognize him, provide them with a lead, move their stalled investigation forward.

  He had just left a house where nobody had answered the door. Out of habit he looked up to the second floor to see if anyone was peering out from behind a curtain. No such luck. Now he was standing on the porch of a two-story Spanish stucco house with a wide balcony that had views of the Intracoastal.

  He pressed the buzzer and a woman in her seventies, with long platinum blonde hair and a string of mega pearls, came to the door.

  “Yes?” she asked, fluttering her eyelashes and looking at his stack of flyers.

  “Hello, ma’am, Detective Ott, Palm Beach police. I’m trying to locate a man, I wondered if maybe you had seen him?”

  He handed her a flyer.

  The woman reached for the half-moon glasses hanging by a silver chain, then examined the sketch.

  A flicker . . . but then it faded and died.

  “Sorry, my memory . . . sometimes I forget what I had for breakfast.”

  She was eyeing him now, like he was Cary Grant.

  “Well, thank you m’am, I appreciate it,” Ott said, ready to move on.

  She studied the sketch, then her eyes got big.

  “Can you wait one second, Detective?”

  “Sure.”

  She was back in a few seconds.

  “Make you a deal,” she said. “I’ll keep an eye out for that man, if you keep one out for Scroggins.”

  “Scroggins?”

  She handed him a picture. It was a poodle that looked more like a Fifi, Ott thought. Her neatly hand-printed flyer said that he was lost at the intersection of South County and Banyan, gave the dog’s weight, a phone number, then said, reward $25,000.

  “$25,000 . . . wow,” Ott said, figuring that probably worked out to about five grand a pound.

  “He’s all I had,” she said sadly.

  “Give me a bunch of those, I’ll get the word out. I’d advise you, though, to put the $25,000 in big red letters at the top.”

  “That’s a good idea, Detective,” she said, flipping back her hair and smiling coyly up at him. “You know, Detective, you are a very handsome man.”

  As he walked down the long driveway to the house next door, Ott figured, the last time he got propositioned was back in the nineties. And she was a suspect, trying to get off.

  Ott was beginning to wish he had taken his car as he hit the buzzer on the large two-story Mediterranean. A middle-aged black man opened the door. He was dressed in gray flannel pants, a white shirt and dark tie. Ott introduced himself. The man nodded and said his name was Alcie Luvley. He had erect posture and a dignified, yet friendly way about him.

  “Mr. Luvley, you ever seen this man?” Ott handed him one of the sketches. “Name’s Nick Greenleaf.”

  Alcie took it, studied it and said softly, “Hmmm.”

  Then he handed the flyer back to Ott. “Sorry, can’t say as I have.”

  “You positive?”

  “At first, I thought . . . someone from way back, like twenty years ago.”

  “This man’s only around twenty-five years old.”

  “Oh, well,” Alcie said, “guess not.”

  “I tell you what,” Ott said, handing the flyer back to Alcie, “hang onto it, will you? Just in case.”

  Alcie nodded.

  “Absolutely.”

  “You never know,” Ott said again, handing him his card.

  “You never do, do you,” said Alcie, his unusually wide smile revealing a sparkling set of uppers and lowers.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Crawford came back to the station after an hour and a half conversation with David Ponton, manager of the Poinciana. He stopped off to pick up the warrant giving him access to Nick Greenleaf’s condo at the Palm Beach Princess.

  Ott, who had just returned from handing out sketches, held one up to Crawford.

  “This is our boy, Nick, Todd . . . whoever.”

  Crawford glanced at it, then tore it out of Ott’s hand.

  “Jesus, Charlie, easy.”

  “I saw this guy . . . yesterday.”

  “Where?”

  “Tell you later,” he was already halfway to the elevator.

  THERE WERE no open parking spots in front of the Fonseca Gallery, so Crawford went a few doors past it and pulled into a spot behind a black Mercedes stretch limo. Limos—stretch or otherwise—were not an uncommon sight on Worth Avenue, but this one immediately caught his attention. Its engine was idling, barely a whisper, the New York vanity plate read, “Shortem.”

  Crawford just had a hunch Shortem was related to Rainmkr.

  He edged up to the plate glass window of Lil’s gallery and looked in. Sure enough. He saw Ward Jaynes through the window, standing near Lil’s desk, gesturing to Lil with choppy hand motions.

  Lil sat in the chocolate brown leather chair opposite him, chin in hand, listening intently. He watched as Lil handed him a photograph. Another couple was looking at a painting on the far side of the gallery. Crawford turned and headed back to his car. He figured it was better if they didn’t know he had seen them together.

  WHEN HE returned forty-five minutes later, Jaynes and his limo were gone.

  As he approached the front door, he saw Lil alone in the gallery, pacing catlike.

  He opened the door and walked in.

  She swung around and put her hands
on her hips.

  “So, Charlie . . . traded me in for a woman in a blue, plastic jacket?” Lil asked, wearing a beige skirt that stopped just centimeters short of her crotch.

  “We work together, Lil,” Crawford said. “And, just for the record, it’s not plastic.”

  “Whatever, she’s very cute,” Lil said, running her hand through her long, streaked hair.

  “I need to talk to you about that guy you had lunch with yesterday,” Crawford said, avoiding her assertive cleavage.

  “O-kay,” she said, like it wasn’t okay.

  “How do you know him?”

  “I sold a painting of his. Why?”

  “How much did you pay for it?”

  She cocked her head to the side and put her hands on her hips.

  “What difference does it make? Is he an ax murderer or something?”

  “How much, Lil?”

  “Sixteen thousand dollars.”

  “A check?”

  She nodded.

  “Made out to Nick Greenleaf?”

  Her face tightened and she broke eye contact. Then she looked back at him and her smile returned.

  “Yes . . . to Nick Greenleaf.”

  He heard a whisper of tension in her voice.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Lil?”

  “Jesus, Charlie, I’m not used to the third degree from you.”

  “Sorry, but once a cop always a cop. I need to know how to find Greenleaf.”

  He made a note to go around to the banks, find out if Greenleaf was a customer.

  The bell tinkled, the door opened and two women walked in.

  Lil gave them an enthusiastic wave.

  “I need to speak to him, Lil. You have an address?”

  “No, I—”

  “A number?”

  “All right, all right,” she said, and walked back to her desk. “You know, I do run a business here.”

  She opened up a red leather book and turned away, so Crawford couldn’t see it.

  “Here we go . . . . 6-5-5-0-1-2-3.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lil put her hand up to her sculpted chin. “What do you want him for?”