Palm Beach Nasty

by Tom Turner

  THIRTEEN

  Nick took a cab from his studio condo at the Palm Beach Princess to Spencer Robertson’s palatial Mediterranean on El Vedato. The ride had only cost four dollars. He could have taken his old Taurus and saved the money, but that wasn’t part of the plan.

  As they pulled up, he shuddered when he noticed that Janet Schering’s house was next door. The terrifying night with her came rushing back like a rampaging succubus.

  He shook it off and gave the cab driver a five-dollar tip, instructing him not to leave until someone answered the door.

  He was wearing blue jeans, a sport shirt and carrying an L.L.Bean duffel bag. Sloppy rich boy chic was the look he was going for. He pressed the buzzer on the heavy mahogany door. It was a big, two-story house flanked by statuesque banyan trees, standing tall like Buckingham Palace guards.

  A middle-aged black man dressed in gray flannel pants and a crisp white shirt answered the door.

  Nick flashed him the biggest smile he could muster.

  “Wyman?” Nick asked, thrusting out his hand enthusiastically.

  The man looked confused, but shook Nick’s hand.

  “Ah, no, Alcie.”

  Nick slapped the man on the back. “Sorry, man, Wyman was way before you. I’m Spencer’s grandson, Avery.”

  “Well, welcome, Mr. Avery,” Alcie said, smiling.

  “Didn’t my grandfather’s executor, Paul Broberg, tell you I was coming?” Nick asked, a flicker of annoyance.

  “No, sir, but that’s okay,” he said, reaching for Nick’s duffel. “Good to have you here.”

  Nick thumped Alcie on the back. “Thanks, just flew in from out west.”

  Nick was relieved to see that it seemed Alcie had never even heard the name Avery before. The old man obviously hadn’t regaled him with loving anecdotes about his grandson.

  Nick walked into the living room, looking up at the ceiling. “God, it’s been years. Where’s my grandfather?”

  “Mr. Robertson’s taking a nap, sir, always does this time of day.”

  “Man, he’ll be surprised to see me,” Nick said, looking up at the pecky cypress ceiling looming eighteen feet above his head. He scanned the room—overstuffed club chairs in pastel patterns, paintings in expensive gold frames, the whole place reeked of that WASP understated elegance he had read so much about. There also was an overpowering medicinal smell. VapoRub and camphor, he guessed.

  “Ah . . . Mr. Avery, when did you last speak to your grandfather?” Alcie stroked his chin, like something was weighing him down.

  “I’m kind of embarrassed to say,” Nick said, scratching his head, “gotta be four, maybe . . . five years ago.”

  Alcie leaned forward and spoke softly.

  “Well, this is hard for me to say, but your grandfather’s got it pretty bad . . . the Alzheimer’s. Might not recognize you. Fact is . . . I know darn well he won’t.”

  Thank God . . . that Cynthia, such a gold mine.

  “Oh, my God,” Nick said, “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  Nick shook his head and dialed up his anguished look.

  “Well, I just hope maybe there’s some way I can make him feel better. Wish I had come down earlier.”

  “How long are you planning on staying with us, Mr. Avery?”

  “I don’t know, think I’ll kind of play it by ear. Oh, hey . . . if Paul Broberg checks in, don’t tell him I’m here, okay? Guy can be a major pain in the ass. Always trying to teach me how to balance my checkbook, stuff like that.”

  “I know what you mean.” Alcie laughed heartily.

  Nick thumped Alcie on the back again.

  “I appreciate it,” he said and winked. “I gotta tell you, it’s great to be back.”

  “And, sir . . . it is indeed a great pleasure to have you back.”

  Nick was proud of himself. He was, in reality, the total antithesis of a backslapping, hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy. This was all new to him and, goddamn . . . he was pulling it off like a champ. To the best of his knowledge, he had never once slapped anyone on the back before, and he knew, for a fact, he had never winked at anyone. This was the new Nick, he thought. A regular guy but also a man of newfound substance and class.

  He turned and scanned the living room again. He saw a lot of expensive-looking antique furniture. And . . . no, it couldn’t be. He got closer and studied it. But it was. Even an art history minor from Hofstra University could recognize it. A large Edward Hopper painting of a house on a dune was hanging crookedly on the far dark wall.

  Nick was finally where he belonged.

  AS FAR as Spencer Robertson was concerned, Nick could have been an upright piano or a two-legged rhino. Because when the shriveled-up, bent-over man first saw him, he greeted Nick with a frail wave, then tried to pat him on the head. Haltingly, he said, “Hello, Oswald,” as Alcie suppressed a chuckle.

  “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Avery,” Alcie whispered, “he does that with everybody, gives ’em a nickname. Calls me Zapruder.”

  Right after the greeting, Robertson asked Nick to join him for a game of backgammon, although he had difficulty coming up with the name, calling it “backhammer” instead. Nick had certainly read about the game, but had no idea how to play. There were references to it in Fitzgerald and O’Hara. Nick had never even seen the board it was played on. The game wasn’t exactly a fixture in the Gonczik household.

  But it didn’t matter in the least, since Robertson didn’t seem to have much of an idea how to play anymore. Alcie told Nick he had read the rules once and knew the basics. Nick just winged it and Alcie didn’t seem to notice.

  When Nick suggested they stop playing and get something to eat, Robertson protested noisily and flapped his arms like a petulant kid, saying, “I wanna play” over and over. They played on for another forty-five minutes. Alcie seemed clearly relieved to have someone else share the burden. Once, Alcie explained, he and Spencer had had a five-hour backgammon marathon.

  Nick’s initial plan had been simply to get his hands on the old man’s checkbook and credit cards. But after having been there two days he dismissed the plan as being the thinking of a small-minded man, one utterly lacking in ambition. It was a quick fix, not a long-term, life-changing answer to his dream of becoming fabulously rich and socially prominent.

  As he had envisioned it in that plan, he probably would have been able to cash thousands of dollars of forged checks and go on a spending spree with Robertson’s credit cards. But eventually, he knew, Paul Broberg would catch up with him: spot an AmEx bill, a checking account statement, whatever, and the jig would be up.

  That plan was just penny ante anyway. After all, Broberg probably didn’t leave more than $20,000 in Robertson’s checking account. Okay, it was not a bad day’s work, but then what? He’d have to hightail it out of Dodge. Another bridge burned. And, fact was, he really liked Palm Beach. Loved it, in fact. Driving around checking out all the big, look-at-me houses. Watching everyone strut down Worth Avenue as if they were models on a runway. Nick was absolutely certain he had a future in the town. It was, after all, the perfect place to reinvent oneself. Plenty of people before him had. The stories were legend.

  He told himself again: think big. Think over-the-top, Palm Beach excessive, grandiose, big-ass big.

  As he went from one painting to the next in the old man’s collection, he began to set a new plan in motion. Because even an art history minor from a third-rate college could recognize the millions—hell, tens of millions—of paintings that hung on the swirled stucco walls of the Robertson living room and library. The Hopper was a big solitary, lonely looking house on Cape Cod. Nick remembered looking at a bunch of slides of the artist’s other paintings back in art class. He remembered how the more he looked at Hopper’s work back then, the more it tended to bum him out. Those sorry-looking losers in that all-night diner. That same old bleached-out couple in a lot of the paintings—Hopper and his wife—Nick seemed to remember, who looked like they’d rather be somewhere els
e with someone else. He always got the feeling Hopper might be the type of guy to take a header off the George Washington Bridge.

  Nick went around from painting to painting, studying them, mesmerized by them. One hauntingly bizarre picture in the den was by Francis Bacon. He’d read something about him in the paper recently. Sounded like a guy who was way out there. But what stuck in his head was an item about how one of Bacon’s paintings had fetched the highest price of any living artist. He planned to spend a lot of time surfing the net, becoming an art expert.

  There was one painting in the library that quickly became his favorite. It was by Lucian Freud, an artist he had once done a midterm paper on. He chose Freud because a girl in the class he had the hots for said how cool the artist’s “retro-Dada slant” was. Whatever the hell that meant.

  He circled the painting several times, stalking it almost, eyeballing it from every conceivable angle. It was certainly not your typical pretty picture. It was a woman with dark hair and her white dog, neither one of them looking particularly happy. But something about it hooked him. The woman was in a ratty yellow bathrobe and one of her boobs had popped out. The dog had his head resting on her leg. He thought maybe he liked it because everything about it was so off-kilter.

  Alcie had walked into the library when Nick was a foot away from the Freud, mesmerized by the eerie flesh tones of the woman in the painting.

  “You like that one?” Alcie said in a tone which thinly disguised his disdain.

  “Yes, there’s something about it that I connect with,” Nick opined.

  Something about how much he could get for it.

  He wondered whether Alcie had paid any attention to the paintings.

  “What’s your favorite, Alcie, if you had to choose?”

  Alcie had loosened up a lot in the last two days, partly because Nick had told him to drop the “Mr. Avery.” Way too Stepin Fetchit.

  “Tell you the truth, Avery, I like beautiful views and happy stuff.”

  Nick assumed he meant bad landscapes and Norman Rockwell.

  “How ’bout that one in the library . . . the big white house?”

  Alcie squinted as he thought.

  “You know, the one next to the samurai sword collection,” Nick said.

  But Alcie couldn’t seem to place it.

  “I can’t say I remember that one.”

  Christ, how could he miss it? Right in the middle of the goddamn room, above the massive coquina fireplace. Nick was delighted, though. The fact that Alcie was not even slightly observant.

  Nick let it go and Alcie quietly excused himself to go polish the silverware.

  Nick spent the next hour going from painting to painting.

  He was looking at his future and it was very, very rosy.

  FOURTEEN

  Rose Clarke, the big blonde broker in the black Jag convertible, left a message for Crawford a few days after he rousted the squatter couple from Buffalo. He had no idea why she called, but he called her back and they kept missing each other. They were in the fifth inning of a game of telephone tag.

  Rose was in her car showing houses to two men when her cell rang. She looked down at the number.

  “Can you excuse me?” she said to the man in the passenger seat.

  The man nodded.

  “Finally, we connect,” she said.

  “Hi, Rose, sorry ’bout that,” Crawford said.

  “No prob, I know you’re a busy man. Just wanted to tell you something that might be helpful. About somebody . . . you might have an interest in.”

  That was a little too murky for Crawford.

  “Let’s talk now,” he said.

  Rose checked her watch.

  “I can’t right this minute, I’m showing houses to a couple of gentlemen. How’s one thirty?”

  “Perfect. I’ll come by your office.”

  Donnie, the man in the back seat of Rose’s Jag, assumed that when she said, “a couple of gentlemen,” to whoever it was she was talking to, that was code for a couple of gaybos. Tutti fruttis, Donnie called them. He noticed Palm Beach seemed to have more than its share. Toned guys with short hair, wearing stylish clothes and fancy shoes.

  He listened as Rose hung up, then came back to the two questions that had been bugging him: One, why was this woman—supposedly Palm Beach’s most high-powered broker—taking customers around jammed into a space the size of a glove compartment? Not that Donnie minded convertibles. He liked the wind in his face way better than air conditioning. But he was six four. What was he supposed to do with his legs? Amputate the suckers? Of course, his partner, Fulbright—all five foot three of him, got the front seat.

  On cue, Rose swiveled and looked back at Donnie.

  “You okay back there?”

  He nodded. Her lips were like big fluffy pillows.

  “I normally take the Range Rover when I have more than one client, but I had a little car trouble.”

  What did you expect? Donnie thought. It was a goddamn Range Rover. Only cars that had more problems were Jags.

  “What was wrong with it?” he asked.

  “Something to do with the catyliptic connector.”

  Donnie’s specialties were guns, cars and hookers.

  “Sure you don’t mean catalytic converter?”

  “Yeah . . . I guess that’s it.”

  Donnie’s second question was, why was this woman who sold $40 million pads on the ocean, schlepping around a couple of guys looking at fixer-uppers on marginal north end streets? Donnie suspected Fulbright had touched someone up for a favor. The guy liked to exploit the leverage of his profession.

  Donnie—the antithesis of a Palm Beacher, if there ever was one—was wearing cargo pants and a blue jean jacket with cutoff sleeves. He was an ex-army sergeant with dirty blond hair that he wore on the slightly long—decidedly unmilitary—side. He thought he bore a striking resemblance to Michael Douglas in his Streets of San Francisco prime, but Fulbright told him he was deluding himself. More like Nick Nolte in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

  Fulbright, sitting erect in the front seat, was chatting up the broker.

  He was a skinny guy, forty years old, with a leather jacket and beady eyes that darted around like rats in a cage. He had a left to right comb-over, a 150 IQ and big feet. His real name was Roy Rozzetti, but back when he and Donnie hooked up fifteen years ago, he told Donnie he was a former Fulbright scholar who had “lost his way.” Donnie had no idea what a Fulbright scholar was, but knew all about losing one’s way. He liked the name, Fulbright, and from then on that’s what he called the squirrelly little guy. The two had been a good team because—as is often the case with partnerships—one was the thinker, the other, the doer.

  Donnie listened to Rose go on about how the last house they looked at had really good “bones.” To him it was a dump with low ceilings and a lousy kitchen—the whole thing would have cost about $350,000 in his Lake Worth neighborhood, instead of $1.9 million here. No way could he picture Fulbright in Palm Beach anyway, unless there was a section of town for psychotic geniuses in black jeans which ballooned out over toothpick legs. Rose was now on a street about as far north as you could go, telling them there were “better values here due to geographic challenges.”

  Donnie knew that meant it was a shitty location.

  Donnie figured Fulbright’s biggest challenge was going to be his bank. It was next to impossible for anybody—in this busted economy—to get a mortgage. And here was Fulbright, a shifty-eyed ferret, who couldn’t even show the Wells Fargo banker a pay stub. His only hope was seller financing, even though he probably had a sizable wad of cash stowed away in some can in his backyard. Fact was, Fulbright never spent a nickel on anything except Sudoku books and cheap leather jackets that looked like they were made out of Naugahyde.

  Donnie heard Rose ask Fulbright if he was a golfer. He almost lost it. Did the guy look like a fucking golfer? Bony, short dude with huge pointy shoes. He made that guy Rodney whatever in Caddyshack look like
Arnold Palmer. Fulbright resembled an aging jockey who never got out in the sun.

  “I don’t play much anymore,” Fulbright said, straight-faced, to Rose, “used to shoot in the low eighties—”

  Right, thought Donnie, you mean your bowling score.

  Rose nodded and kept her eyes on the road.

  “What is it you do, Mr. Fulbright?”

  No hesitation whatsoever.

  “I trade futures . . . Chicago Merc.”

  Donnie loved it. If he didn’t know better, he would have bought it. The guy was pretty damn convincing.

  Last time someone asked Fulbright what he did, he said he was the southern district sales manager of Dick’s Sporting Goods. Went on about the Nike and Body Armor reps always hawking him for better display locations. Guy had a real knack.

  Fulbright turned to Rose.

  “You trading us in, Rose . . . for some other guy?”

  “Oh, no, you got me for as long as you want. Thing is the next house is kind of a dog. I predict we’re in and out in two minutes.”

  Donnie leaned forward from the backseat.

  “So who is the lucky guy?” he asked.

  “The man who called?” she asked. “Oh, he’s a policeman, a detective actually . . . working on that murder on the south end.”

  “I heard about that,” Donnie said, “a guy got hung?”

  Rose shuddered, then nodded.

  “That’s a tough way to go . . . can’t imagine one human being doing that to another one,” Donnie said.

  CRAWFORD EYED the two guys climbing out of Rose’s convertible. That was one thing you had to love about Palm Beach. You could never tell when some bearded schlepper in sandals and bad shorts could turn out to be the owner of a couple hundred 7-Elevens. Or the opposite, when some George Hamilton-looking dude in an ascot and double-breasted blazer might be down to his last stock coupon.

  But these two guys . . . like Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in that old movie. Or two down-and-out shit bums hitching around the country. Or maybe a couple of homeless guys who wintered in Florida so they wouldn’t freeze their asses off in their refrigerator box up north.