by Tom Turner
“Hello, anyone here?” a man said as he pushed open the door at 215 Arabian. He stepped into the foyer, his wife just behind him. “Hello,” he said again.
Rose, who was in the house’s kitchen, reached for the can of pepper spray in her purse but didn’t take it out. “Who is it?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant. “Who’s there?”
The man and his wife walked into the kitchen. “Oh, hi, we’re the Clearys,” the man said with a smile. “We just got into town and were driving around. Are you the agent for this house?”
“Yes, yes, I am,” Rose said, at ease again.
“Can we take a look at it?” the woman said. “My sister lives close to here. Down on Mediterranean.” Two blocks to the south.
The man smiled. “They want to spend their sunset years together.”
His wife gave him a look.
Rose stepped in seamlessly. “Well, then, this house will be perfect for you,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Rose Clarke. Nice to meet you.”
“Dan Cleary and my wife, Dina,” Cleary said, shaking hands. “Nice to meet you too. So, the big question is…how much?”
“The asking price is two million five, originally it was three million two.” Rose said. “Off the record, the owners are quite motivated. They bought a condo at the south end and don’t like carrying two places at the same time.”
“Can’t blame ’em,” Cleary said. “So let’s have a look. That seems like a pretty reasonable price for Palm Beach.”
“Oh, it is, it is,” Rose said. “The house is a shade over five thousand square feet, so it works out to about five hundred dollars a square foot, which is well below the average here.”
“So what’s wrong with it?” Cleary asked.
“Nothing,” Rose said. “Some people think of it as a teardown, but I don’t agree. I just think it needs the bathrooms to be renovated, put a new appliance package in here” —she gestured around the kitchen— “and probably a new countertop, then you’ll have yourself an incredible place.”
Dina Cleary, who had an iPhone in hand, held it up. “Do you mind if I call my sister and get her to look at it with us?”
“No, not at all,” Rose said. “The more the merrier.” She was thinking that the sister, who apparently had no problem living this far north, might actually help her with the sale.
As Dina Cleary dialed, Rose’s phone rang. She looked down at the caller. Charlie.
Too bad. Because when Rose Clarke was on the verge of making a deal, she took calls from no one, not even God.
Dina Cleary’s sister walked in, and Rose recognized her immediately. She had sold her the house on Mediterranean five years before.
The sister recognized Rose right away. “Oh, wow,” she said to Dina. “You’re in really good hands. Rose is the best agent in town. How are you, Rose?”
Rose shook her hand. “Couldn’t be better,” she said. “Long time, no see.”
Rose took all three of them through the house. They liked it. Dan Cleary asked Rose how much it would cost to redo the bathrooms and put new appliances and countertops in the kitchen. Rose gave them ballpark numbers and said she had the perfect contractor for the job.
“We love it,” Dan Cleary said. “The only problem is we have to sell our house in New York first.”
That was a scenario Rose had encountered many times before. But, as always, she had a solution. “So, what if we did a contract that stipulated we have a long closing? So you can have plenty of time to sell your house.”
“What’s long?” Cleary asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, three months, maybe?”
“No, we’d need more than that,” Cleary said. “How about four?”
The seller just might go for it, Rose thought. “Mm, that’s pretty long. I can try it, but I’m guessing the most they would do is three.”
“But what if we offered the full asking price?” Cleary asked.
The seller would almost surely go for the asking price and a four-month closing. “I think that would be a strong offer. Let’s give it a shot.”
Cleary turned to his wife. “Are you good with that?”
Dina Cleary nodded eagerly. “The good thing is, we’ll probably have plenty left over from the sale of our house to do the renovation.”
Cleary looked at his sister-in-law. “What do you think?”
“I think I’d love to have you guys this close,” Laura said, turning to her sister. “You could come borrow sugar anytime.”
“The hell with that,” Dina said. “Borrow wine.”
All four laughed and Rose made arrangements for the Clearys to come down to her office later that day, when she’d have a contract ready for them to sign. She hadn’t closed a deal this easily in a long time.
She hit speed dial for Crawford but it went to his voicemail. “Hi, Charlie, you’d be proud of me. I just made the fastest deal in the history of Palm Beach real estate. Anyway, get back to me when you can. I’m driving down the island, just left Arabian, doing my weekly house checks.”
The man in the black car watched as the two cars pulled out of the driveway and drove past him. In the tan Lexus were a man and two women. In the white Jaguar, the hot blonde was smiling ear to ear. Johnny Cotton turned the key and his car started up. Both of the cars drove south on North Lake Way. Then the one with the man and two women turned left onto Mediterranean, but the blonde continued straight. Finally, she turned left onto Angler Avenue and pulled into number 208. Cotton liked the location for two reasons. It had a Chattahoochee pebble driveway, so you could hear if a car pulled in, and it had a long, tall hedge that made the house impossible to see from the street.
After Crawford’s meeting with a crime scene tech at the station, he listened to Rose’s message. He shook his head and groaned. His immediate reaction was that making house checks with a killer on the loose was about the worst idea Rose had ever had. But he knew Rose and how fearless, and sometimes pigheaded, she could be.
He tried her again, and again it went to voicemail. Suddenly he thought back to his lunch with Rose two days before and the black car that had followed him to Green’s. The black car driven by Johnny Cotton, who no doubt had seen him leave with Rose after lunch.
He dialed her again. Voicemail. “Dammit, Rose, stop what you’re doing and go back home. Then call me.”
Without hesitating, he ran to the back of the police station and got in his car. He drove up to Rose’s office building going twice the speed limit. He rushed into the building and went straight into the manager’s office, almost plowing over an elderly female agent.
The manager, Brook Cavanaugh, started to say hello, but Crawford cut her off. “I need to know the addresses of all of Rose’s listings.”
Cavanaugh hesitated a split second. “Why—”
“Right now, Brook,” Crawford said. “This is life or death.”
Brook waved her hand for Crawford to follow and walked quickly toward Rose’s office. Rose was just one of two agents who had an actual office. The rest of the agents were located in a big bull pen area similar to Sotheby’s.
Brook pushed open the door, walked in, sat down in Rose’s chair and opened a file cabinet. “Grab that pad,” she said to Crawford pointing at a yellow lined pad.
Crawford pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket and reached down for the pad.
“Ready?” Brook asked.
Crawford nodded.
“Here goes: 114 Indian, 215 Arabian, 208 Angler Ave, 310 Palmo Way,” Brook said, leafing through Rose’s files and giving Crawford all fifteen addresses.
As soon as she was done, Crawford ran out of the office, jumped in his Vic and headed north.
Cotton waited a few moments to see if anybody else drove in. He didn’t know whether the blonde was showing the house to a prospective buyer.
After a few minutes, no one had followed her in.
Time to make his move.
He reached into the center console, took out the nylon stocking, and s
tuffed it into the pocket of his jeans. He stepped out of the car and started walking toward the house.
As he walked, his anticipation peaked, causing a surge of adrenaline. The sensation triggered a memory… The nun who had taken his eight-year-old hand, placed it on one of her breasts, then started to disrobe… He flashed to playing strip poker with his friend Neil and two girls whose names he had long since forgotten—how they’d laughed at his naked fourteen-year-old body and his undersized symbol of manhood.
It got worse. Four years later, he’d married his child bride, Natalie.
Natalie wasn’t particularly pretty or smart but certainly had a knack for spending money like no other girl in Wheeling, West Virginia. So it had fallen to Cotton to keep her in clothes and dresses, which she’d wear to nothing more fancy than dinner at the Olive Garden. That was another thing about Natalie, she didn’t like to cook. As a consequence of her wanting to be first on her block with toe rings, anklets, Joe Boxer watch rings, puka-shell necklaces, and sunflower cord chokers, then go out for dinner almost every night, Cotton had been working two and sometimes three jobs. He drew the line, however, at working in a coal mine since black lung had killed his uncle, grandfather, and great-grandfather.
While he toiled, unbeknownst to him, his older brother and Natalie fornicated. Until the night he came home early from his job as a short-order cook. They admitted it had been going on for three months, so the next day Cotton left her and hit the road with only a handful of possessions. Realizing that an honest living had gotten him nowhere, he decided he was too smart to be a working schlub making minimum wage. So soon thereafter, he launched into a career of crime.
At first, it was tough to tell what he was best at. He started out with burglary 101, shoplifting and breaking into empty houses. Lifting flat screens, jewelry and silverware. Then he graduated to cars. First, anything with four wheels, then exotic, foreign cars. He had moved down to Florida and bumped into a guy in a bar in Fort Lauderdale who peddled Porsches, Maseratis and Ferraris to a Colombian gang that shipped and sold them to South American drug dealers and businessmen. That was a profitable gig until he crashed a Testarossa into a Lauderdale canal with three cop cars right behind him.
That resulted in jail hitch number one. At Redfern Correctional. Much like Malpaso, Redfern had an art program, and Cotton wasted no time signing up for it. He gravitated toward Impressionism and found that he had an innate talent for copying famous paintings. The two artists who taught at Redfern urged him to become an artist when he got out, assuring him he had a great future ahead of him. But it soon became apparent to Cotton that while he had an undeniable knack for painting a Monet that was a dead ringer for a Monet, he was incapable of coming up with original subjects that would captivate serious buyers. But as far as copies went, he was a master, good enough, he was confident, to fool museum curators.
During his second year at Redfern, he approached one of the art teachers and proposed a plan. Something told Cotton that the teacher was not thrilled with being a starving artist and might be tempted by his proposition. Cotton laid it out in minute detail: He would paint copies of lesser known but still desirable Impressionist painters. The teacher, Richard Heyman, who was articulate, cultured, and looked the part, would then go to galleries in places like Atlanta, Jacksonville, Orlando, and New Orleans and peddle them as originals. “Art forger” had a much nicer ring to it than “burglar” or “car thief,” and Cotton was convinced he could be one of the best in the business. Richard Heyman embraced the project with enthusiasm, and as soon as Cotton finished his five-year hitch, he set up his easel in the garage of his $700-a-month rental apartment.
His first sale was a “Willard Metcalf” painting of haystacks in the foreground and cows in the distance. Heyman sold it to a gallery in Atlanta, after claiming that he found it in his recently deceased great-aunt’s attic. Next to be sold was a “Valentin Serov” portrait of an unknown nobleman with a very impressive mustache and bulky muttonchop sideburns. Heyman sold this to a gallery in Tampa and, to keep things uncomplicated, again said he had discovered it in his great-aunt’s attic. The next paintings of Johnny Cotton’s were in the distinct styles of Impressionists Frédéric Bazille, Eugène Boudin, and Eliseu Visconti.
The money was starting to roll in, and Cotton was only in his mid-twenties. He believed that as an artist it was his birthright to play the role of reckless bohemian and live a life in which drugs, alcohol, and wanton women were part of his daily activities. So, in short order, he graduated from cocaine to crack and, in a nod to certain nineteenth-century Impressionist artists, started imbibing absinthe at the rate of a bottle a day. Lastly, he began picking up women at a nearby junior college, posing as Gianni, a young Italian artist from an aristocratic royal family. He was able to pull off an Italian accent quite credibly, but playing a suave, young aristocrat…not so much. Still, it turned out that eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls were rarely short on gullibility.
A pretty freshman named Christie Hart, however, proved to be his downfall and the reason he ended up doing a ten-year stretch at Malpaso. His jail term could have been a lot longer, or even resulted in the death penalty, if Cotton hadn’t banked enough money to hire a good lawyer instead of the public defender he had gotten stuck with in Fort Lauderdale. It turned out that the more absinthe and high-grade weed Cotton consumed on his first (and only) date with Christie Hart, the more she started to resemble his ex-wife. What finally sent him into a homicidal rage was something innocuous Christie said about him helping her pay for a new dress. He choked for a full ten minutes, long after she had stopped breathing.
Cotton’s teacher partner, Richard Heyman, was the one who hired the lawyer. Figuring that Cotton was his meal ticket and wanting to do everything he could to keep the income stream from Cotton’s copies flowing, he hired the best trial lawyer he could find—cost be damned.
When Cotton first met the lawyer, they had a brief conversation.
“You’re innocent, right?” the lawyer said. It was more a statement than a question.
“Ah…”
“Because the circumstances of the unfortunate victim’s death are remarkably similar to a case I had a few years ago where a man and a woman were involved in what’s called asphyxiophilia, which is sex where oxygen is depleted by partial strangulation, thus heightening the sex act. Unfortunately, the strangulation went too far, and the woman lost consciousness and died.”
It was apparent the lawyer was spoon-feeding Cotton an alibi.
Cotton started nodding. “Yes, that’s exactly what happened. It just went too far. And we both had had a lot to drink.”
What started out as unpremeditated murder and a life sentence ended up getting pled down to involuntary manslaughter. Cotton became an inmate at Malpaso and resumed his career as a forger under the not-so-watchful eyes of Malpaso prison officials.
Then under the patient, expert tutelage of Marty Sanchez, Cotton read and studied everything he could get his hands on about artists and their creations. Shortly thereafter, he got to know Luna Jacobs. She was overweight and not much to look at, but he was in prison after all. They began having a broom closet affair and, as others observed, she spent more time teaching him than any of her other students.
The other thing Luna Jacobs did was speak on his behalf at his parole hearing. She stood up and rhapsodized about Cotton’s good behavior, exceptional talent as an artist, and her certainty that he would be a positive addition to the community upon his release.
Her recommendation was instrumental in getting Cotton sprung from Malpaso fifteen months before his scheduled release date. One of the painters he had been drawn to was Amedeo Modigliani, who had been born a Sephardic Jew in Italy but spent the bulk of his short career painting, experimenting with drugs, and drinking to excess in Paris. It was his hedonistic, bohemian lifestyle—which Marty Sanchez described in vivid detail—that initially drew Cotton to the famed artist. One of his favorite Modigliani paintings was entitled Portrai
t of Woman in a Hat. On the day of his release, he went to a women’s clothing store in Melbourne and bought a wide-brimmed brown felt hat, the closest thing he could find to the hat worn by the woman in Modigliani’s painting.
He gave it to Luna, telling her it was for all that she had taught him and for everything she had done for him over the past year. She thanked him but was somewhat befuddled why he had chosen the hat. Then Cotton sat down and watched a football game on Luna’s living room TV while going through a six-pack of beer. After that he went into Luna’s makeshift studio in her second bedroom, calmly jammed a sock in her mouth, and choked her to death. Then he took her clothes off, sat her in a chair, and put the brown floppy hat on her head.
He had a similarly special yet dramatically different pose planned for the blonde whose name he found out was Rose Clarke. When he first laid eyes on her she reminded him of a sexy version of Edward Hopper’s wife, Josephine, whom Hopper featured in many of his paintings. And, as it turned out, Rose had been wearing a pink dress the day he first saw her coming out of Green’s Pharmacy and getting into her white Jaguar. The moment Cotton first saw her, he’d flashed to a painting of Hopper’s that haunted him. It was called Morning Sun, and it pictured Josephine sitting on a bed with no top sheet, looking pensively out a window. Her blonde hair is pulled back in a bun, and her pink nightgown rises up over her thigh. It was that detail that aroused Cotton, but what captured his interest was Hopper’s deft use of light and shade to convey that it was, in fact, morning sun.
In case Rose was not wearing her pink dress again, Cotton had bought a pink negligee from a woman’s store on South Olive. He planned to position Rose in a position similar to Josephine’s in Morning Sun—on a bed with only a bottom sheet, looking out a window. The only difference was that Rose Clarke would be dead.
Cotton walked up Angler, looking both ways down the street, and slipped in between two hedges separating the house Rose Clarke had entered from the adjoining one. He walked between the two hedges until he spotted a space in the one hedge then squeezed through it.