Palm Beach Taboo (Charlie Crawford Palm Beach Mysteries Book 10)

by Tom Turner

  “Okay….” Ott said.

  “My latest theory,” Crawford said.

  “You have ’em every five minutes.”

  “Not quite that often,” Crawford said, stopping at the banyan. “Get behind it, so no one can see us.”

  Ott nodded. They just stood there and watched. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. They heard the sound of a door opening.

  Crawford pointed.

  Ott nodded.

  Bemmert and Swain walked out of the enormous main house toward the garage apartment, walked up its stairs, opened the door and went inside.

  “I’ll be damned,” Ott said.

  Crawford pointed to a security camera on the street. “We need to take a look at the tapes on that. Going back to the murder last Wednesday and the night Simon Petrie was assaulted.”

  Ott nodded. “Got it.”

  As had been the case more than a few times in the past, Crawford and Ott were prepared to wander off the reservation to get their killer. Not way, way off the reservation, but well outside their jurisdiction. That was something Norm Rutledge would never openly sanction, or encourage, but—fact was—that was of lot less concern to Crawford and Ott than it had been when they first joined the force. Plus, as Crawford reminded Ott, Rutledge had been crystal clear about what he wanted at the end of their meeting earlier: Make something happen. And I don’t much care how you do it.

  They had found that sometimes they had had to adopt unorthodox methods to solve homicides in Palm Beach. This was because they’d quickly learned that murder suspects in Palm Beach were smarter, or covered their tracks better, or were unorthodox themselves… often in cunningly creative criminal ways. More so than the ones in New York and Cleveland, it seemed anyway, where Crawford and Ott had formerly pounded the pavement. There was one, a brazen billionaire who had even gone so far as to confess to Crawford that he had murdered someone, then arrogantly asked, so what are you gonna do about it?

  It took a while but finally Crawford and Ott did do something about it.

  It seemed to have evolved into an unwritten understanding with Norm Rutledge. He didn’t press too hard to find how they got their man, or woman; all her cared about was that they did. The fewer questions asked the better. The unspoken part, though, was equally important: Don’t get caught…wandering off the reservation, that is.

  They walked back to the car, got in, and drove up to the driveway of 702 Coquina.

  They pulled up to the barrier gate and Ott pressed the button.

  “Hey, fellas,” Swain said, through the annunciator, “welcome back.”

  The mechanical arm went up and Ott drove in.

  They stopped in front of the garage apartment next to the same blue Sentra, got out of their car, and started up the stairs.

  Ott was the unofficial door-knocker and Crown Vic-driver.

  Larry Swain opened the door with a welcoming smile. Like he had really missed them. He was wearing a sleeveless black tank top and had a small tattoo on his upper right shoulder.

  “Come on in, fellas,” Swain said.

  The three walked over to where Guy Bemmert was sitting.

  Bemmert was in the same chair as last time. “Palm Beach’s finest,” he said jovially, making no effort to get up.

  “Mr. Bemmert,” Crawford said with a nod. “How ya doin’ today?”

  “Not bad. Have a seat, boys.”

  They did. The sofa was nowhere near as comfortable as Patrice Lord’s.

  “So, first question is about Marie-Claire Fournier,” Crawford said, plunging right in.

  Bemmert tried hard not to change his expression, but his eyes narrowed slightly. “What about her?”

  “We understand from her daughter”—though Patrice Lord had never actually said Bemmert’s name—“that you met with her before you joined SOAR?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And how would you characterize that… meeting? Actually, it was more like an interview, wasn’t it?”

  “Ms. Fournier and I had a nice chat.”

  “As we understand it, again from her daughter, Ms. Fournier wanted to have a say about who was getting into SOAR. And apparently, she felt that because she was giving SOAR a lot of money, she wanted to approve any new, ah, congregants.”

  “I don’t know about any of that. All I know is we had a nice meeting and that was that.”

  Bad cop time. “Mr. Bemmert,” Ott said, “what we were told was that Ms. Fournier felt Crux was getting a little sloppy in his admission policy. And after she met with you, she was opposed to you coming on board SOAR. She did a little background check and found out about certain issues with your previous employer.”

  Bemmert shook his head vehemently. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s complete bullshit.”

  “And,” Ott went on, “the problem was she never got a chance to tell Crux what she discovered about you… because she died right after meeting with you.”

  “So, let me get this straight: are you suggesting I had something to do with that woman’s death… even though the medical examiner said it was an aneurism. I mean, come on, I understand you’re desperate to find a killer, but you’re way off base. Trying to make a natural death a murder. Gimme a break.”

  Bemmert did indignance to perfection.

  Ott glanced over at Crawford. Hand-off time.

  “Well, I guess we’re gonna find out,” Crawford said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bemmert asked.

  Crawford paused a moment. “Marie-Claire’s daughter is going to exhume her mother’s body. Have an autopsy done.”

  Bemmert gripped his chair arm tightly. “Okay, so what? What does that have to do with us?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Crawford said. “But, like I said, looks like we’re going to find out.”

  “Well, good. Then you’ll see you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Let me ask you something else,” Crawford said. “How friendly are you with Leo Peavy?”

  Bemmert shrugged. “I mean, we’re both officers of SOAR… what specifically are you asking?”

  “Well, do you know anything about his background?”

  “Just that he had a big job at that place, Interworld.”

  “And….” This was the first peep out of Larry Swain, who seemed to be looking at Bemmert to give him permission to proceed.

  Bemmert smiled broadly. “Oh that… so I bet you don’t know this… Peavy and Fannie Melhado were a thing. Until like… a week ago.”

  “Really?” Crawford said, glancing at Ott. “We didn’t know that.”

  Crawford remembered Peavy’s recent trash-job of Fannie and guessed maybe she had cut him loose. Which likely meant Peavy had developed an extreme case of sour grapes.

  “Question is,” Bemmert said with a smirk, “why did a woman with looks and money have anything to do with a funny-looking guy with goopy eyes and excessive nose hair?”

  Ott laughed. “Maybe he’s got a beautiful soul.”

  Bemmert glanced over at Crawford. “Are we done here? Because Larry and I have to go up to Elysium to attend to some business.”

  Crawford got to his feet and Ott followed. “Yes, we are, and we want to thank you for taking the time to meet with us.”

  “You’re welcome,” Bemmert said.

  Larry Swain nodded.

  As Ott walked past Swain to the front door, he took a fast glance at Swain’s tattoo. Then he and Crawford walked out.

  At the bottom of the steps to the apartment, Ott turned toward the garage. “Hold on a sec.”

  He walked up to one of the garage doors and looked through a window at chin height, shading his eyes. “Hey, check this out.”

  Crawford came over and looked though the garage window, too.

  “Harley Davidson, huh?” Crawford said.

  “Yeah, let’s get back in the car.”

  They walked over and got in the Vic. Ott started it up and turned to drive out.

 
He turned to Crawford, clearly amped up. “I didn’t want them to see us snooping around. Did you check out Swain’s tattoo?”

  “Yeah. Looked like a skull.”

  “It’s the logo of a biker gang called the Outlaws. Started out in Chicago but has a big chapter in Cleveland. They don’t get any more violent than those dudes. Worse than Hell’s Angels.”

  Crawford shook his head. “This thing gets more bizarre by the minute. Now we got a happily-married biker and a Mensa.”

  Ott nodded. “I don’t know if you saw it, but in small letters below the tattoo it said, ADIOS.”

  “Adios?”

  “Stands for ‘Angels Die in Outlaw States.’”

  Thirty-Four

  “So, I guess ol’ Larry goes from assistant treasurer to potential murderer?” Crawford said.

  “Who the hell knows, man, but he sure fits the profile a lot better.”

  “Yeah, that he does.”

  As Ott drove up the on-ramp to I-95, Crawford took out his cell phone, dialed a number and put it on speakerphone.

  “Rose,” he said in response to Ott’s inquiring look.

  She answered, “Hello, Charlie.”

  “Hi, Rose, I’ve got you on speaker and Mort is with me, so keep it clean.”

  “I always do… except… when I don’t.”

  “Tell us what you told me about Guy Bemmert.”

  “Well, for one thing the guy’s cheap as shit… oops, sorry, Mort. I told you about him trying to shave a half million off the price of one of those SOAR houses because it had a little wood rot.”

  “Yeah you did, what else?”

  “Well, as I told you, supposedly he embezzled or extorted—I don’t really know the difference—a lot of money from that mortgage company where he was CEO. I don’t think he ever got prosecuted for it, but he definitely got fired.”

  “I’m asking because I Googled him and couldn’t find much except where he’d worked and how long he was there,” Crawford said.

  Rose was silent for a moment. “You know, I’ve heard if you hire the right people, they can clean up your dirty laundry. Kind of make all the bad stuff go away. On the internet and everywhere.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that too. But did you hear this stuff about Bemmert from a pretty reliable source?”

  “Let me think… yes, actually I heard it from a New York banker who did business with Bemmert’s company… at least until Bemmert screwed the pooch. Oops, sorry again, Mort.”

  Ott shrugged. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Good,” said Rose, “I wouldn’t want to corrupt you.”

  “So, is that pretty much it?”

  “Pretty much. Except he had to pay a big fine. Left him almost broke, as I remember.”

  “Thanks,” Crawford said. “If you wouldn’t mind checking again who the owner of 702 Coquina is…. You said it can take a while to record the new owner.”

  “I will when I get back to the office. By the way, with all this info I’m giving you, we must be up to at least three dinners you owe me.”

  “I’m looking forward to all of ’em.”

  “Me, too. Bye, boys, sorry ’bout my mouth, Mort,” she said and clicked off.

  Right after Ott turned north onto 95, Crawford got a call on his cell phone. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Detective, it’s Simon Petrie.”

  “Hi, Simon. I was just thinking about you. How you doing?”

  “As well as can be expected, I guess, for a guy who’s got holes in his chest and neck. I wanted to have a little chat with you. You haven’t caught Christian’s killer, right?”

  “No, not yet. Are you still at Good Sam?”

  “Yeah, I get out in a few days.”

  “How ’bout we come there in a half hour or so?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Crawford clicked off and turned to Ott. “You get the gist of that?”

  “Petrie’s maybe got a tip for us?”

  “I guess we’ll soon find out.”

  They had one stop to make before Good Sam. Crawford had brought another SpyTec bug along with him. They drove up to Elysium on North Lake Way. The parking lot was separated from the main house by a ficus hedge that made their job easy. Crawford even had a cover story if Vega happened along: He had lost his gym locker key around the time he was last at Elysium.

  He didn’t need it, though. With Ott as lookout, Crawford simply went up to Vega’s white BMW and attached the magnetic bug to the underside of her rear bumper, then casually walked back to the Vic.

  “Maybe shoulda put one on her bike, too,” Crawford said.

  Ott smiled, stepped on the accelerator and five minutes later they were at Good Samaritan Hospital. Ott parked, they went up to the desk, then up to Petrie’s room on the fourth floor. Two officers were still stationed at his door. Crawford and Ott nodded to them, then walked in.

  Petrie, reading a magazine, set it down on a bedside table and smiled. “You chaps made good time.”

  “We’re eager to hear what you got,” Crawford said.

  Ott nodded.

  “So, I’ve had a lot of time to think since there’s not a hell of a lot else to do here and I’m going to tell you something I swore I’d never tell anybody. ’Cause I think it might be important.”

  “Great,” Crawford said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I swore to Christian I’d never tell a soul, but he’s dead. So here goes: he said that Marie-Claire told him she had a conversation with Guy Bemmert and wanted to make sure he never got into SOAR. Because—”

  “Yeah, we just found out about that,” Crawford said. “We spoke to her daughter, Patrice Lord, just this morning.”

  “I’m thinking Bemmert found out Marie-Claire told Christian she was going to blackball him, then—lo and behold—the next day, she died,” Petrie said.

  “Was Christian the only one who knew about it?” Crawford asked.

  “At that time, yes,” said Petrie.

  “Except Marie-Claire mentioned it to her daughter,” Ott said.

  “But her daughter had nothing to do with SOAR and had no reason to ever mention it to Crux, who she didn’t like anyway,” Crawford said.

  Petrie shifted in his bed. “So, this is me filling in some blanks with all the spare time I’ve had on my hands,” Petrie said, “but I’m guessing Bemmert might have offered Christian money to keep quiet. About Marie-Claire wanting him to be blackballed.”

  Crawford nodded slowly. “But did Christian ever tell you he got money from Bemmert to keep quiet?”

  “No, we were friends but that’s not something he’d ever tell me. Or anyone, for that matter,” Petrie said, brushing back his hair. “But it makes sense, right?”

  “It sure does,” Crawford said.

  “Or maybe it was the other way around,” Ott said. “Maybe Christian went to Bemmert and demanded money. Extorted him.”

  “Yeah,” Crawford said with a nod. “That coulda happened.”

  “So Bemmert got a two-fer,” Ott said. “One, he offs Christian so he doesn’t have to pay him, and two, he gets his job.”

  “If Christian was, in fact, extorting him,” Crawford said.

  Ott nodded, then to Petrie. “Anything else you thought of… lying here in bed?”

  Petrie glanced over at him. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Ott nodded. “It sure is. But why would he tell you this in the first place?”

  “Christian and I went way back. Plus, he’d tell me lot of stuff after a drink or two.”

  Crawford and Ott both nodded. They knew all about the notorious blabbermouth soup.

  “But you’re leaving out the obvious,” Crawford said.

  Petrie nodded. “I know. I was just about to get to that. You mean, if Bemmert found out Christian told me any of that, he’d have a motive to kill me.”

  “Absolutely,” Crawford said. “First, he shuts up Marie-Claire, then Christian, then you… or tries to anyway.”

  “E
xcept you were lucky…you had a ferocious dog,” Ott said.

  “Good old Chief,” Petrie said with a smile.

  Crawford nodded. “Well, thanks for all your insights. We’ll keep you up to speed on where things go.”

  “Yes, please do. Things are pretty dull around here.”

  “Later,” said Ott as they headed for the door.

  They nodded at the uniform guards as they walked out.

  “Well, that’s very interesting,” Ott said as they walked down the corridor.

  “Sure is,” Crawford said. “I’m going to do something I probably should have thought of a long time ago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Check Christian Lalley’s bank account. See if he made any large deposits after holding up Guy Bemmert.”

  Thirty-Five

  Crawford knew from his search of Christian Lalley’s room at 1450 North Lake that Lalley banked at PNC on Royal Poinciana Way. He was fortunate to get a court order in record time to examine Lalley’s banks accounts and also find a cooperative banker at PNC who gave him access to Lalley’s accounts.

  And, surprise, surprise… seemed Lalley had made substantial deposits in the month preceding his murder.

  The most interesting thing, Crawford found, was that the deposits got larger and larger. The first one was for twenty-five thousand dollars, the next one fifty thousand, and the third was a hundred thousand.

  Crawford went by Ott’s cubicle to tell him what he had found.

  “So, your theory was right,” Ott said. “Lalley was getting too greedy for Bemmert. But here’s the bad news. I just took a look at those CCTV tapes on Coquina—”

  “And?”

  “They show that Bemmert and Swain came back to their house on Wednesday the day of Lalley’s murder at a little before six and never went out after that.”

  “Shit.” Crawford wanted to pound something.

  “And the night of Petrie’s assault they drove in at 3:30 and never left.”

  Crawford threw up his hands. “Christ, just when I thought—”