Palm Beach Bones

by Tom Turner

  Reyes showed him two receipts. Both were from last Thursday. Ott turned to Crawford and nodded his head.

  “Okay with you if we go catch some tuna now?” Reyes said to Crawford with a sneer. “Oh, by the way, Detective. Love the shirt. That what they got you guys wearing these days? Green silk shirts with little flamingos on ‘em.”

  Crawford shook his head. “It’s a peacock.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Crawford and Ott scraped up eighty-five dollars and gave it to the couple who owned the boat. Sam and his wife seemed to think it was a pretty fair price for twenty minutes of boat rental and probably wouldn’t have minded if Crawford and Ott took it out on a regular basis.

  On the ride back to Mellor Park, Crawford filled in Ott about the snap of Arthur Sandusky. Ott shook his head disgustedly and reminded Crawford what Jenny Montgomery had said about Sandusky ‘creeping out’ Lila. This was definitely what it was. Ott said he figured a third of his teachers back at his alma mater had something a little “hinky” about them.

  Five minutes later, Ott dropped Crawford at Mellor Park and said he was going to see what else he could get on Sandusky, then go back and research more of Clyde Loadholt’s past cases. He said he wanted to be absolutely sure he hadn’t missed anything.

  Crawford went through the tunnel to David Balfour’s house and found Balfour in his basement waiting for him. Before Balfour could say anything, Crawford said, “Hey, David, I just wondered if you had another shirt, maybe like a plain old t-shirt or something?”

  “T-shirt, huh?” Balfour said. “I’m not really a t-shirt kind of guy. How ‘bout a nice, simple polo shirt. No alligator, no club logo—“

  “Perfect.”

  “I’ll get you one, but first I gotta tell you about my call.”

  “From the kidnapper?”

  Balfour nodded. “It was the same guy again. Spanish accent. Could be Luis, but I couldn’t tell for sure,” he said. “Anyway, he was really pissed off and said, ‘I told you not to go to the cops.’ Then said I’d better ‘call ‘em off or say goodbye to Lila.’”

  Balfour started to choke up. Crawford put his hand on his shoulder. “David, you gotta realize they can make threats, but bottom line it’s all about them getting the money. And that’s not gonna happen unless they deliver Lila.”

  Balfour nodded. “Yeah, I know, but—”

  “Which means one of two things,” Crawford said. “Either it was a bluff to see if you’d admit you were in contact with us, or someone knew Ott talked to Jenny Montgomery.”

  “I told him I hadn’t talked to anyone,” Balfour said. “I mean, I said it really emphatically too.”

  “So, like I said, they were just bluffing or somehow they found out about Ott and Jenny,” Crawford said. “I know Ott and there’s no way anybody’d know he talked to Jenny, except Jenny.”

  Balfour put his hand up to his chin. “So do you think she could be involved?”

  Crawford shrugged. “I don’t know. You know her, do you?”

  Balfour sighed and shook his head. “I really can’t see it. But how else would the guy who called know you guys were on the case?”

  Crawford shrugged. “That’s the question.”

  His cell phone rang.

  “Yeah, Mort.”

  Ott got right to the point. “I was doing a search on DAVID for Clyde Loadholt and got a hit from way back in 1996. Seems like Loadholt’s neighbors—on both sides of his house—phoned in a report of gunshots fired in his backyard.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, so the responding officers go there and it turns out Loadholt’s seventeen-year-old granddaughter had a gun and was shooting at him. Ended up hitting him once in the wrist, but finally he wrestled the gun away from her just as the guys got there.”

  “Jesus,” Crawford said. “Just like Jaworski said. There definitely was bad blood between Loadholt and his granddaughter.”

  “Yeah, but what could have been so bad that it escalated up to something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Crawford said. “But it’s worth you taking a drive back to Susie Loadholt’s house to try to find out.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Ott said. “Find out where the granddaughter is too.”

  “Yeah, definitely.”

  “Okay,” Ott said. “I’ll let you know what I come up with.”

  Ott was in Susie Loadholt’s living room. It seemed like Susie and her sister Mavis were a package, you didn’t get one without the other. Ott wished he had brought along duct tape for Mavis’s mouth.

  “Girl was hell on wheels,” Mavis had just volunteered.

  Susie wasn’t disagreeing with her sister. “Yeah, she and Clyde seemed to go at it all the time.”

  “What happened to her parents, Mrs. Loadholt?” Ott asked.

  Susie looked at Mavis. Mavis looked grim.

  “Well, her father just up and left one day. Megan, my daughter, never heard from him again.”

  Mavis exhaled loudly. “Guy was a good-for-nothing bum. She was better off without him.”

  Again, Susie didn’t disagree with her. “So then Megan had her own problems. Wasn’t really up to taking care of anyone, including herself. Ended up we took in Elizabeth Jeanne. Adopted her.”

  “Bad decision,” Mavis muttered under her breath.

  “She was always a handful,” Susie said.

  “So what happened? Where is she now?” Ott asked. “Elizabeth Jeanne.”

  Susie shrugged. “I don’t know,” her voice was so low it was almost inaudible. “She ran away. And just like her father, we never heard from her again.”

  “When did she run away?” Ott asked.

  “Right after that incident with the gun you were asking about,” Susie said. “A few days after she graduated from high school.”

  “Good thing she took off,” said Mavis, “or else she might have killed Clyde.”

  “So you have no idea where she went? Or where she is now?” Ott asked.

  Susie shook her head. “Nope. None. We tried really hard to find her. Even with all of Clyde’s resources in law enforcement, but there was no trace.”

  Mavis cocked her head. “You sure Clyde tried that hard?”

  “‘Course he did,” Susie said, but it wasn’t the strongest affirmation Ott had ever heard.

  “What about Elizabeth Jeanne’s mother, Megan?” Ott asked. “Where is she?”

  Susie frowned. “Up in Hobe Sound. This house in a development off of Route 1. She got remarried.”

  “Another bum,” Mavis volunteered.

  Susie turned to her sister. “At least he didn’t take off on her.”

  “Yet,” said Mavis.

  Ott got Megan’s address in Hobe Sound, thanked the two women, and got to his feet.

  He drove straight up to Hobe Sound and found Megan Sullivan outside her house with a dog that had one eye. Megan was expecting him because Susie had called and said he’d be coming. She wasn’t able to offer any more information about the whereabouts of her daughter. It was a short conversation and Ott was back in his car ten minutes after getting there.

  He called Crawford and filled him in.

  “Can’t say I’ve run across a lot of granddaughters taking pot shots at grandpa,” Crawford said.

  “I know,” Ott said. “Not so sure I want to be one now.”

  Ott was referring to the fact that he had a married daughter who, he suspected, was trying to get pregnant.

  “You don’t have a lot of say in the matter,” Crawford said.

  “Do I ever?” Ott gave a half-hearted laugh. “So where do we go with this? Looks like another dead end. Plus I’m not sure I see Elizabeth Jeanne—who’d be in her late thirties now, if she’s alive—as being prime perp material. Violent nature or not.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Crawford said. “Coming back twenty-one years later to finish off the job she started in the backyard…seems pretty unlikely.”

  “Okay, so if she’s out, Hector Re
yes and his sister are out, the gay couple is out,” said a frustrated Ott, “and the stripper Chelsea and her husband are out, who the hell’s in?”

  “Slow down, Mort, they all seem out,” Crawford said. “Which doesn’t mean they definitely are.”

  “I don’t know, all their alibis were pretty tight,” Ott said.

  “Not Elizabeth Jeanne’s,” Crawford said.

  “Wherever the hell she may be,” Ott said dubiously, looking at his watch. It was twelve forty. Twenty minutes to Professor Sandusky’s class. “All right, Charlie, gotta cut you loose now. Got a class to get to.”

  “Take good notes, bro.”

  Thirty

  Crawford dialed Alexa Dillon’s number. The reporter answered right away.

  “You’re not going to cancel out on me, are you, Charlie?”

  “I’m afraid I am,” he said. “I’m sorry, but let’s do a rain check. Something came up and I gotta work.”

  “Understood,” she said. “Something on Clyde Loadholt?”

  “I can’t say,” Crawford said.

  “C’mon, Charlie, you blow me off,” she said, “how ‘bout throwing me a bone?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just a little tidbit?”

  “Sorry.”

  It was her turn for a dramatic sigh. “O-kay,” she said, “but definitely a rain check, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Ott walked into the classroom at 1:01.

  Arthur Sandusky eyed him like he was a Martian.

  “Auditing,” Ott said. He walked past him briskly to the back of the room and sat at a desk. He had always been a back-of-the-room kind of student. He looked up. Sandusky was still eyeing him suspiciously. Ott smiled back.

  Sandusky shot a somewhat forced smile back at him then started in on his lecture.

  Ott thought it was actually pretty interesting as he wondered what the likelihood of a man who was knee deep in a kidnapping plot would be doing delivering a marketing lecture like it was just another day. Unlikely was the word that came to mind. A word he and Crawford had been using a little too often lately.

  Nevertheless, there were a few things that pointed to Sandusky as possibly being the man behind the kidnapping.

  A girl a few seats ahead of Ott kept looking back at him. Shooting him furtive glances. He realized that it was not that she was finding him cute, or that she was smitten with a fifty-one-year-old, slightly overweight, hair-challenged man, but that she was wondering just what the hell he was doing there. The big thing Ott noticed was that most students spent the majority of their time texting away on their cell phones rather than taking notes. He wondered whether it was like that now at his alma mater. Arthur Sandusky was actually an authoritative, engaging speaker and, Ott figured, the class’s subject was way more interesting than something like calculus. In his head, Ott rehearsed what he was going to say to Sandusky at the end of class.

  He waited until all the other students had left. Sandusky picked up his North Face book bag and started toward the door.

  “Great lecture, professor,” Ott said, raising his voice.

  Sandusky turned to him. “Thank you,” he said, then cocking his head. “Who are you, anyway?”

  Ott walked up to him. “Your second worst nightmare,” he said. “Second only to those cops who arrested you up in North Carolina.”

  That knocked what little color there was out of Sandusky’s face. He had a caged look, as if he were considering making a run for it.

  “I’m a friend of Lila Bacon.” Ott said.

  Sandusky got blinky and started to shake a little.

  “Got a question for you,” Ott said. “Is that what you professors do these days: make students drop your classes and go looking for new advisors?”

  Sandusky exhaled and looked down. “I…I’ve called her to try to get her back.”

  Ott took a step closer to Sandusky and rose up on his toes to get eye-to-eye. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he said, getting in Sandusky’s face. “You think anybody who got a snap like that would want to come back and get advised by a scumbag like you?”

  Sandusky’s eyes darted around like he was looking for a hole to dive into.

  “I have another question,” Ott’s vitriol had kicked up a notch. “Where were you yesterday, and what exactly were you doing?”

  Sandusky looked up. “As a matter-of-fact, I was up in New York City. Flew back late last night. I was at a seminar called Empower 17 all Thursday and Friday.”

  Ott frowned. “And you’ve got receipts and ticket stubs to prove it?”

  Sandusky was already reaching into his back pocket. “I don’t have a ticket stub for the flight, but you can check. I’ve got receipts for breakfast and dinner yesterday.”

  He pulled out his wallet, reached in, pulled out two receipts, and handed them to Ott. The first one was for a lunch place in the east thirties of Manhattan. The second one was from an IHOP on Third Avenue. The total, including tip, was twenty-two dollars and fourteen cents.

  “How many people is this for?” Ott asked, holding up the receipt.

  “Just me,” Sandusky said with a shrug. “Hey, it was New York City.”

  Thirty-One

  Crawford had just gotten a call from Ott, who told him in so many words that Arthur Sandusky was not their man. Ott had confirmed that Sandusky had taken a Jet Blue flight up to JFK airport at 6:00 a.m. on Thursday morning and returned to West Palm Beach airport at 11:55 on Friday night. He had also checked Sandusky’s calls on his cell phone and there were none to, or from, anyone in the West Palm/Palm Beach area. If he had been involved in a kidnapping, Ott was certain there would’ve been calls to his accomplices, unless he used a burner phone. But no, Ott was absolutely certain, a burner wouldn’t even have been in Sandusky’s vocabulary.

  Crawford was sitting on the couch in the basement of David Balfour’s house, having just hung up with Ott. With Sandusky out and Jamie Ransom highly unlikely, that left Luis Arragon as the leading suspect.

  Crawford dialed Balfour’s number.

  Balfour picked up after the first ring. “Yeah, Charlie?”

  “Can you come down here?”

  “Sure, be right there,” Balfour said. And a minute later he came down the steps.

  For a guy who was always perfectly coiffed and turned out, he was unshaven and looked haggard.

  “What’s up, Charlie?”

  “So I had an idea,” Crawford said. “Can you give Luis Arragon a call and tell him you need him tonight? That you’re planning on going out and having one too many.”

  “Sure. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking you spend some time with him, have a conversation or two, find out what he’s been up to the last few days.”

  “So you mean, see if he’s got an alibi or not?”

  “Yeah, exactly. Only problem is, if Luis is our guy, he’s gonna think it a little strange you going out bar-hopping the night after your niece got kidnapped.”

  Balfour nodded.

  “Which is why I came up with a cover story,” Crawford said. “You need to act all worried and stressed out. Not your usual self. That’s what he’d expect, if he’s behind this thing.”

  Balfour nodded. “Well, I am all worried and stressed out, don’t need to fake it,” he said. “So I make it seem like I’m goin’ out ‘cause the pressure got to me? Needed a couple of shooters, right?”

  “Yeah, exactly,” said Crawford, “and you can even say to him, when you first get in the car, something like, ‘Luis, I might be getting an important call and I’ll need to take it in privacy. So if a call comes in, I want you to pull over and I’ll get out and take it.’”

  Balfour was nodding. “Sounds good,” he said. “Want me to call him now?”

  Crawford nodded. “Where are you thinking of going?”

  “Cucina Dell’Arte,” Balfour said. “Bartender there makes stiff drinks. The way I’m feeling, I’m gonna need a double or two.”

  Thirty-Two
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br />   The Mentors, three-fifths of them anyway, were sitting in Rose Clarke’s living room having cocktails. Marla Fluor and Elle T. Graham were also in attendance. Diana Quarle was up in New York working on a big deal to acquire a retail competitor. Beth Jastrow had flown off in her private jet to put out a fire at one of her Las Vegas casinos. Both would return to Palm Beach for the weekend.

  At their last meeting, on Beth’s boat, Marla had proposed that they put their collective weight behind Laura Dominguez, the Miami politician, and Beth had sung the praises of a twenty-four-year-old author named A. Carol Owurson who had just written her first novel.

  Dominguez was scheduled to come and meet with the five on the weekend. Beth had said she was sure Owurson’s book would be a blockbuster if they got behind it. The other four agreed that they would read it just as fast as they could.

  “I have a lot of respect for Beth’s taste,” Rose said, “I mean, witness Lulu Perkins”—the singer who they had gone to hear in Atlanta—“but if this woman’s so good, wouldn’t she have an agent?”

  “Not necessarily,” Marla said. “I understand it’s really tough to get one these days. The question is, what did we think of the book?”

  The three looked around at each other.

  “It’s pretty dark, that’s for sure,” Elle said. “They call it ‘dystopian,’ right?”

  Rose and Marla nodded.

  “Yeah, I actually looked that up,” Rose said, reading from a piece of paper. “‘A society characterized by human misery, as in squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.’”

  Elle laughed, “She’s got all that in the book, except overcrowding.”

  The other two laughed. “Gotta say,” Rose said, “it kind of bummed me out. I mean, what a rotten life she had. Can you imagine growing up in that household?”

  “I’d kill myself,” Elle said.

  “She tried that once, remember?” Marla said.

  “I’d succeed,” Elle said.