by Tom Turner
“Yeah, thanks,” Ott said.
Then they all shook hands.
“You guys might just want to stick around,” Eaton said. “I’ll comp you on our show tonight. Got a really good singer named Lulu Perkins.”
Forty-Four
On the way to the New Orleans airport, Crawford called Alexa Dillon.
“Got done sooner than I expected,” he said. “So I’m good for tomorrow night, if it still works for you.”
He was dying to know what she had on Loadholt.
“Sure does,” Alexa said, excited. “You’ll pick me up?”
“Yup. In my chariot. A gold Camry.”
Crawford turned to Ott on the plane. “I really thought we were gonna find her there,” he said.
“I know,” Ott said. “I was sure we’d be headed back with our killer in cuffs. What do we do now?”
Crawford thought for a moment then shrugged. “I really don’t know,” he said.
And, for once, he really didn’t.
But as part of his routine follow-up, he decided to try to track down Lisa Troy, Elizabeth Jeanne Loadholt, or whatever her new name might be, in Macau. He was thinking it was possible, though hardly likely, that she had flown halfway around the world and back again, all to kill her grandfather.
Crawford and Alexa Dillon had barely sat down when he asked her what her Clyde Loadholt scoop was.
“You’re not much for foreplay, I see,” Alexa said.
He had been told that before. Rose had said it a few times. How he’d just dive right in.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guilty as charged.”
The waiter came up to the table and they ordered drinks. Then Crawford asked her how she had ended up in West Palm as a reporter at the Palm Beach Morning News.
It actually turned out to be a pretty interesting story. She was the illegitimate daughter of a bass player in an obscure rock band. Though she didn’t use the word, her mother was a groupie from Oklahoma City who had ended up in England in the late ‘80s. Her mother stayed over there and Alexa spent her childhood in Wales after her mother settled down and became a barmaid in a Swansea pub.
Then Alexa told him she had been “discovered”—she did the air quote thing with her fingers—by a scout for Elite modeling agency when she was in New York for her eighteenth birthday. She scrolled down on her iPhone and showed Crawford a cover she had done for InStyle magazine back in 2008, when she had blond hair.
Looking at her brown straight hair, Crawford said. “I like your natural color better.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You know how it is, every girl’s gotta be a blond for at least fifteen minutes.”
“So how old were you then?” He was trying to do the math.
“When I did the cover?”
He nodded.
“Twenty-five,” she said. “On the old side of a model’s shelf life. Plus I didn’t really like the life. Except the money, of course.”
Crawford drained his first mojito.
“You know, you coulda been a model,” Alexa said.
Crawford laughed. “Yeah, right,” he said, shaking his head. “I was right smack in the middle of New York City for fourteen years and nobody ever discovered me.”
“How old were you when you started out there?” Alexa asked.
“Twenty-three. I was there until I was thirty-seven,” Crawford said. “Fourteen long years. Most of them good. The last two…not so good.”
“Why?”
“Umm, my marriage broke up, for one thing. I guess you could say I burned out,” Crawford said. “Staring down at dead bodies on the streets of New York gets old.”
She took a sip of her rosé. “But that’s what you do here?”
“Yeah, but there aren’t as many here,” Crawford said. “Plus they have nice tans.”
She laughed. “Not Clyde Loadholt.”
Crawford laughed. “True,” he raised his hand to the waiter. “So back to you, you were too old to hobble down the runway at age twenty-five?”
“Nah, I decided to go to journalism school instead.”
“That’s a big switch,” Crawford said. “Where?”
“Northwestern.”
“That’s about the best, right?” Then to the waiter. “Two more, please.”
“It was good,” Alexa said. “Brutal winters out there, though.”
“So how’d you end up here?” Crawford asked.
“They offered me a job and I grabbed it,” Alexa said. “Been here ever since.”
Okay, he figured, that was enough foreplay. “So tell me about Loadholt?”
“Sure,” she said, putting her hand on his. “Since you’ve been such a good boy and listened to me talk about things you probably have no interest in—”
“That’s not true.”
“Anyway,” Alexa said, leaning closer to share her scoop. “Loadholt’s granddaughter took a couple of potshots at him in his backyard.”
Crawford laughed. “That’s it?”
Alexa nodded. “I thought that was pretty good.”
“It is, but I already knew it,” he said.
She looked disappointed. “So…I suppose you want to go home now?”
Crawford shook his head. “No, I’m having a nice time.”
After reading over the menu, they ordered dinner.
Crawford had enchiladas con camarones and Alexa the arroz con pollo.
Then they talked some more. Alexa complained about her boss and Crawford complained about his. She suggested they switch.
Then she started to ask him questions on the subject that always made him cringe. About his first, and thus far only, marriage. He said he still got a card from her on his birthday, but that was about it. He tried to put the spotlight back on Alexa, asking about boyfriends and/or marriages. She said that at age thirty-three she still hadn’t met the right guy. A couple of guys for short hauls, she said, but no keeper for life.
Yeah, he had had a few of those too, he said.
“Recently?” she asked.
And then damned if he didn’t launch in on the subject of Dominica McCarthy. Those damn mojitos! He actually caught himself from saying she was maybe a keeper—even though he might have been thinking it.
“So you really like this woman, huh?” Alexa asked. “And she works in the same building as you? How does that work?
He told her that at the moment it wasn’t working at all. Fact was, they barely spoke. Except on the occasional job together.
“Well, then,” she said, “you ought to do something about that.”
“Like what?” Crawford asked lamely.
“What the hell do you think? Don’t let her get away.”
Forty-Five
He actually did stop after two Mojitos but then they shared a bottle of wine. So it wasn’t a three aspirin, ice-bag-on-the-head, suck-down-a-quart-of-Tropicana-in-a-single-gulp hangover, but he could still feel it as he rolled into the office at eight the next morning.
He had decided on the drive in that he was going to revisit something he had already done before. Earlier he had checked with security at Emerald Dunes, the gated community where Rich Meyer had been killed, to see if they kept tapes of people coming and going out of the front gate. He knew that was standard practice at many places. The head of security told him that they didn’t have tapes going back that far, so Crawford asked him if maybe the Jupiter Police had requested them at the time of Meyer’s murder. The man didn’t know so Crawford spoke to one of the detectives on the Meyer case, who told him he was pretty sure there were tapes in the cold case file. And sure enough, in a battered, brown cardboard box there were nine tapes. He still felt Meyer and Loadholt were connected. He had found out that Emerald Dunes, where Meyer lived at the time of his death, was a place where a lot of retirees lived, many people sixty and older, therefore the shooter, who Shirley Meyer said was in his twenties or thirties, should stand out.
Then he had another thought and walked downstairs to where the four members of
CSEU—Crime Scene Evidence Unit—were headquartered. The first member he saw was Bayard Jones on the phone, the second was Dominica McCarthy, looking into a microscope.
He came up behind her. “Let me guess, DNA off of a perp’s toothbrush?”
Dominica looked up and smiled. Known as either the “cute” or “hot” CSEU, Dominica had striking emerald green eyes, sharp, high cheekbones, thick dark hair, and a body everyone agreed was way above average.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said. “Good guess but not even close. Hair sample from that B & E on Everglades Island.”
Crawford shrugged. “So,” he said, trying to sound all business, “can I borrow you for something on the Loadholt homicide?”
“Right now?”
“Well, as soon as you’re available,” he said.
“Give me ten minutes,” she said.
He nodded. “I’ll be on the tape machine,” he said. “Pick up a cup of office rotgut and join me.”
He had been watching the tapes of cars driving in and out of Emerald Dunes. It was of cars coming and going two hours before Meyer’s murder and two hours after.
Dominica McCarthy came up behind him with a bottle of water.
“Not real big on the office rotgut,” she said.
He got up and pulled over another chair.
“Thanks,” she said. “So what are we doing, Charlie?”
“This is a tape from back when a guy named Judge Meyer got killed,” he said. “Shows cars going in and out of the development where he lived and where the homicide took place. Two hours before and two hours after TOD.” Time of death.
“Okay,” she said. “Roll it.”
Crawford hit a switch.
They had been on the machine for about forty-five minutes now.
“I’d say it’s a toss-up between white Buick LaCrosses and silver Cadillac CTSes, with a few gray Lexuses thrown in.”
While they watched, Crawford filled her in on the case. The early suspects who had not panned out. Them looking into Elizabeth Jeanne Loadholt’s high school reunion. Their trip up to New Orleans.
“So what are you working on?” Crawford asked, making conversation.
“Well, as you know, we came up empty on Loadholt,” Dominica said.
“Because the ocean washed everything away?” Crawford said.
“The ocean and the little fishies,” Dominica said. “So mainly I’ve been on that string of burglaries.”
“Getting anywhere?” Crawford asked.
“I think so,” Dominica said. “Looks like it was an inside job on one. I’m not sure they’re all related.”
They went back to watching cars come through the Emerald Dunes gate for another fifteen minutes.
“Kind of like watching grass grow,” Crawford said.
Dominica smiled and cocked her head to one side. “Why did you get me up here, Charlie? This isn’t exactly what us CSEU’s do.”
“I wanted another set of eyes on it,” Crawford said.
“And Ott’s old, bloodshot ones wouldn’t do, huh?”
Crawford laughed and looked at this watch. “It’s lunch time and I’m buying.”
“Green’s?” she asked.
“You know me, I’m a creature of habit. Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast, Green’s for lunch—”
“And Marie Callender’s chicken parm in the microwave for dinner.”
“Yup,” Crawford said. “Some would call it gourmet cuisine.”
Dominica chuckled. “You mean someone like Ott.”
Forty-Six
Being the creature of habit he was, Crawford ordered the hamburger at Green’s.
Being a big eater, Dominica ordered a bowl of clam chowder, chicken Caesar salad and chocolate ice cream for dessert.
“Doesn’t that clash?” Crawford asked. “Something from the sea and something from a scrawny bird.”
Dominica laughed. “It might, but I have it all the time, so let it clash.”
Crawford tilted back in his chair. “I’ve missed your snappy banter.”
“And I’ve missed your…less-than-snappy banter,” she said.
Crawford chuckled. “I got a call from David Balfour. He asked me to go out waterskiing then have dinner on his boat afterward. Want to come?”
“I didn’t know you and David were all buddy-buddy?”
“I wouldn’t say we’re exactly buddy-buddy,” he said. “It’s partly payback for a favor I did for him.”
Dominica leaned closer. “But…last time I checked, Charlie, we weren’t going out anymore.”
Crawford nodded. “We weren’t. But I’d like to change that.”
“Oh, I see. And is that a unilateral decision?”
“Of course not,” Crawford said. “You need to be on board with it.”
“To use a boat analogy.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Crawford said. “Come on, it’d be fun. Plus, I’d get to see you in a bathing suit again…”
Dominica smiled. “Oh, so that’s what this is about.”
“Well, partly.”
She smiled. “Where’d you learn how to water ski anyway? Living in New York City.”
“On the East River, dodging garbage barges,” Crawford said. “Hey, I didn’t always live in New York City, you know.”
Dominica nodded. “That’s right, a Connecticut boy.”
“Uh-huh.”
Their orders came and they both dug in.
“Just when did you decide you wanted to go out with me again?” Dominica asked, putting her soupspoon down.
“When I was on a date,” he said.
“I see.” She was nodding again. “Well, it just so happens I have no romantic entanglements at the moment, so I would be happy to accept your kind invitation,” Dominica said. “When are we talking?”
“Saturday.”
“Which gives you plenty of time to change your mind,” Dominica said, digging back in to her clam chowder.
“That’s not gonna happen,” he said. “Can you wear that green and white bikini, please?”
“Charlie, I’ve got news for you,” Dominica said. “You’ve gotta be crazy to wear a bikini waterskiing.”
“So…be crazy.”
“Sorry, it’s going to be my black one-piece.”
Crawford snapped his fingers. “Damn.”
Dominica laughed. “Eat your hamburger, will you.”
Crawford did as he was told. In mid-bite he looked up and saw Rose Clarke come through the front door.
The woman had an incredible walk. Smooth and flowing, with a certain swagger and confidence. She came up to their table. Rose and Dominica were friends and many would say the two best-looking women in Palm Beach.
“Hello boys and girls,” she said, looking at Dominica, “So back together again. Palm Beach’s dream couple.”
Dominica looked up and smiled. “How ‘bout just a couple of cops having lunch together?”
“No sale,” Rose said. “And besides, are you CSU people really cops?”
“CSEUs,” Dominica corrected her.
“Well, they’re CSUs on TV.”
“That’s Hollywood, Rose.”
Crawford’s eyes were going back and forth between them like he was watching a ping-pong match.
“Care to join us?” Crawford asked when they paused.
“Thanks, but I got a customer lunch,” Rose said, then leaning down and dropping her voice. “He’s only looking to spend two or three million or I’d take him somewhere a little more upscale.”
Crawford and Dominica went back to the station and got on the tape machine again.
For twenty minutes, they watched the procession of cars with elderly men and women at the wheel.
Then a yellow sports car with a distinctive teal green stripe and a young woman at the wheel rolled up.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Dominica asked. “Looks too young for this crowd.”
Crawford paused the machine. He wasn’t much of a car guy but knew it was an expensiv
e sports car. Something from the Ferrari or Maserati family, he thought.
He looked more closely at the driver. Then he leaned even closer.
There was no question about it. It was Elizabeth Jeanne Loadholt.
Forty-Seven
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Crawford said.
“What?”
“That’s our killer,” Crawford said. “Clyde Loadholt’s granddaughter.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” Crawford said. “Her name is Elizabeth Jeanne Loadholt, or whatever she’s going by these days.”
Then he told Dominica about how Shirley Meyer, the judge’s widow, had said the killer was short and had what sounded like a boy’s voice.
Crawford said Loadholt must have slipped on the nylon stocking somewhere between the front entrance where she got caught on tape and when she showed up at Meyer’s condo.
Dominica nodded. “So all you need to do is find her, huh?”
Crawford sighed and gave her more details about his trip to New Orleans with Ott. And how Elizabeth Loadholt was suspected of living in Macau and may have fled back there after killing Loadholt.
“Looks like you and Ott got another road trip,” said Dominica.
“Somehow I don’t think that’s in the budget.”
Crawford called Ott, who was away from the station, and told him what he had found.
Ott’s mood went from high to low in the course of five seconds. Jazzed up by the confirmation of their killer’s ID, followed by the realization that she might be ten thousand miles away.
Crawford was back in his office, going through a stack of 9x12-inch color glossies taken by the police department helicopter on the day after Loadholt’s murder. They were of the Palm Beach Marina and four other marinas across the Intracoastal in West Palm Beach. Crawford had asked for them to be shot by the police department photographer after Susie Loadholt made the comment about Clyde going to someone’s boat to “repair an old wound.”
