Dead in Boca

by Miriam Auerbach

  I stated the obvious. “It’s my job.”

  Then I said, “You understand, Junior, as it explicitly states in the contract, once I find this swine, uh, swindler, I turn him over to the police. Now I’m telling you, and this isn’t in the contract, that if anything happens to him while he’s not in their custody, you’re dead meat.”

  Now, I swear when I said that I didn’t know that within twenty-four hours Junior would be buried six feet under, and I would regret my threat.

  Chapter 2

  “CAPICHE,” JUNIOR said, adopting the parlance of his paternal roots. “You’re a straight shooter, Horowitz. In more ways than one. I respect that.”

  It’s always nice to have the respect of a crook.

  “So where do we go from here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know where you go. That’s your business. I go see Miss Lil. You can let her know to expect me. She still living in the penthouse at the Castle del Mar?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Castle del Mar Condominium Residences, a luxury mid-rise on Boca’s oceanfront, was one of Junior’s buildings. The business he’d inherited from his father, Castellano & Son Development & Construction, named all its properties in honor of its principals. Boca alone boasted the Castle del Mar and its twin tower, the Castle del Sol; Castlewood Estates; Castlewalk Garden Villas; and Castellano Mediterraneo Luxury Apartments. And those were just the residential developments.

  “Okay, I’ll run out there in an hour or so,” I said.

  “Great doing business with you, Horowitz.” Struggling a bit, Junior rose from his seat. “By the way, Brigitta sends her best.”

  “Oh. Uh, thanks.”

  Brigitta was Junior’s new bride. She and I went way back to my previous incarnation as a Boca Babe. Here’s the 411 on Boca Babes: they’re high-maintenance, highly enhanced, high-end consumers married to high-income men. Boca Babes often come in the guise of trophy wives, such as Brigitta. She’s a Danish glamazon about my age, facing forty (once they pass that magic number, Boca Babes transform—into Botox Babes).

  Brigitta’s first husband, whom she’d been with since she was fourth runner-up for Miss Universe in the mid-eighties, croaked a couple months ago in his own mid-eighties. At that point, Brigitta had renewed our acquaintance, which she, like all my Babe friends, had terminated when I terminated my husband. After her own husband kicked the bucket, she sought my advice on widowhood. Although our circumstances were hardly similar, given that my widowhood was self-induced, I was happy to give advice, although of course I never take any myself.

  I advised her to lay off men for a while and get to know herself. She promptly joined an exclusive dating service, where she got hooked up with Junior, who had recently dumped his wife of forty-some years. Within weeks, Junior and Brigitta were wed.

  Although invited, I did not attend the joyous event. This was not out of pettiness about her defiance of my counsel. I may be many things, but a hypocrite I am not. Rather, I stayed away out of dread, or if you want, superstition. You see, the last two weddings I attended ended in murder.

  The first was the Shapiro shindig, where I blew away my husband at the reception in front of five hundred witnesses. The second was the union of my best friends, Chuck and Enrique, where the officiant was bludgeoned to death with an organ pipe.

  After that, I swore off nuptials. So I didn’t go to Junior’s and Brigitta’s, and guess what? Nobody was whacked, thereby supporting my contention that marriage plus me equals murder.

  “Horowitz!”

  “Huh?”

  “Whatsamatta? You go into a trance or something?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Okay. Catch ya on the flip side,” Junior said as he stepped out the door.

  “You got it.”

  In hindsight, his parting words were prophetic. I’d never again see Junior on this side of the great beyond. Whether I’ll see him on the flip side beats the hell out of me.

  After Junior left, I wrapped up the case I’d been working when he came in, involving a company that scared senile seniors into paying for government documents that they could get for free. Having successfully slammed that scam, I headed out to see Miss Lil.

  As soon as I stepped outside, the wall of heat hit me. South Florida summers are brutal. Unrelenting, thick, dense air, burning fire and dripping water simultaneously. Within seconds, your lungs are struggling, and your pores are sweating.

  I grew up here, so I’m used to it. Even so, I swear the summers are getting hotter. And longer.

  I locked the office door and took two strides to my ride, which is also my pride: a 2003 100th Anniversary Harley Hugger. I bought it with proceeds from the sale of my bling after I widowed myself. The Hog was my declaration of independence. And every day that I ride it is a reaffirmation of my freedom.

  I put on my black leather jacket, chaps, gloves, and my full face helmet. I was covered in black from head to toe. Call it a biker’s burka. The only visible part of me was my long dark ponytail. When I ride, with that hair flying behind me, I look like one Bad-Ass Babe. My Boca Babe life is so last century.

  I turned on the ignition, revved the engine, backed out of the parking space, and headed toward the Atlantic. All those thick layers of body armor were stifling. But anybody who rides without full gear is suicidal. Real bikers understand that anything can happen on the road, and we’re prepared, physically and mentally. I ride despite the discomfort and danger. Or maybe because of them.

  Twenty minutes later I pulled into the covered entranceway of the sumptuous Castle del Mar. I parked next to the valet station, took off my helmet and leathers, and asked the valet to keep an eye on the bike. Carrying my gear, I went into the lavish lobby. It featured marble floors, burgundy Oriental carpets, stately neoclassical columns, a gilded ceiling, and huge, arched glass doorways opening onto the beach. An immaculately dressed concierge sat behind a large maplewood desk. I gave him my name, and he checked his computer log. Seeing that I’d been cleared, he said, “Please follow me, madam.”

  I held up my biking gear and asked, “Would you mind keeping these for me while I’m upstairs?”

  “Not at all, madam,” he replied. He took my belongings and went into a back room, returning with a claim check. Then he escorted me to Miss Lil’s private elevator, keyed in the access code, and waited until the doors closed behind me.

  The little cabin was mirrored on all four sides and the ceiling. I couldn’t avoid looking at my reflection. My hair was plastered to my head from the helmet. My face was bare. Dirty Harry didn’t do makeup, and neither do I. I ran a comb through my hair, refastened my ponytail, and put some balm on my lips. I figured that made me presentable for the venerable Miss Lil.

  The elevator doors opened, and I stepped into a wood-paneled vestibule. Silently, one of the panels slid aside, and Miss Lil stood, framed in the opening. Although in her eighties, she maintained the regal bearing, big sprayed hair, and precision makeup of Southern upper-class women. She wore a sleeveless, white knit St. John dress with gold trim and matching gold sandals with three-inch heels to boost her petite stature. While impeccably tasteful, the getup might have worked better on her a half-century ago, when her upper arms didn’t flap like chicken wings and her French-pedicured toes weren’t gnarled like rooster claws.

  I hadn’t seen her since my Boca Babe days, when my own appearance had been far different from now. As I expected, however, she graciously refrained from commentary on my new no-frills style.

  “Harriet, how absolutely lovely to see you,” she exclaimed. Her voice was soothing, her words slow and melodious. She reached out, took both my hands, and gave me an air kiss on both cheeks.

  “Poor thing,” she said. “It looks like the heat has gotten to you. Come in, dear. I’ve got some nice iced tea for us on the balcony.”

  She led me thro
ugh spacious rooms filled with American colonial furnishings and paintings and European objets d’art: Meissen figurines, Fabergé eggs, and such. Hey, I was an art history major, for all the good that did me. It was my post-Boca Babe return to school at the local community college that ultimately led to my present, profitable profession. Nonetheless, for a moment I felt a pang of longing for my former life, when I too had resided in such resplendence. But I quickly suppressed the emotion, reminding myself I had chosen a new, independent path.

  We emerged onto an outdoor covered terrace providing an awesome vista of the Atlantic. I stepped to the waist-high glass enclosure to admire the view. The ocean colors ranged from sapphire to aquamarine to turquoise to emerald and sparkled just like those jewels. Boats of all kinds and sizes floated in the distance. On the shore, the breakers dissipated into frothy white rivulets. The air was still hot here, six stories up, but the breeze coming off the shore, combined with the brisk spin of an overhead fan, created a fine, cooling effect. Views like this are one of the reasons I stay in South Florida, heat notwithstanding.

  Miss Lil had an iced tea service laid out on a colorful, round inlaid stone table. We sat down on cushioned chairs, and Miss Lil poured. Then, in the Southern manner, she asked after my mother. Boca is a small town, especially to those in the upper echelons, which my mother finally reached upon her marriage to husband number five, the late, moneyed Mortimer Rosenberg. I informed Miss Lil that Mom was just fine and promised to give her Miss Lil’s regards. She then inquired whether there was “someone special” in my life, now that it had been a few years since Bruce, as she so diplomatically phrased it, “passed.”

  I took a gulp of my tea, delaying just a little too long before replying in the negative. In that split second my mind flashed to Lior Ben Yehuda, my instructor of Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. Specifically, my mind flashed to his tall, buff build, dark wavy hair, dark burning eyes, sensual lips, and sexy Israeli accent. Something had been simmering between the two of us for a while, and I had an uneasy feeling it was about to boil. So far our physical encounters had been limited to the gym—and that involved full-body, up-close-and-personal contact. However, I had the sense we would soon bust out of that defined territory into . . . the undefined. But I’d be damned if I was going to admit that to anyone. I didn’t even want to admit it to myself.

  But of course, Miss Lil wasn’t fooled, as I could tell from the mischievous sparkle in her eyes. Fortunately, she didn’t pursue the subject. However, I felt that this line of discussion provided a perfect opening for me to get to the purpose of my visit. It was only later that I realized that Miss Lil had finessed that opening, allowing her to save face as we got down to the embarrassing business at hand.

  “Speaking of special someones, Miss Lil, I understand there’s been someone in your life recently,” I commented.

  “Yes, that is so, dear.” She took a sip of tea then abruptly set the glass down. “Will you join me in having a mint julep?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah, okay.” I guessed she needed some liquid courage to tell her story—iced tea wasn’t going to cut it.

  She headed inside.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “Oh no, you just sit. I’ll be right back.”

  I gazed down through the balcony’s glass enclosure. On the beach below, men and women sunbathed, children played, and seagulls scavenged. Miss Lil returned a few minutes later, bearing a bamboo tray with two glasses filled with amber liquid topped with fresh mint leaves. She sat back down, and we each picked up a glass and took a sip.

  I did my best not to wince as the booze slid down my throat. Bourbon is not my favorite poison. Hennessy cognac V.S.O.P. is. But there are times in the course of an investigation when you have to go along to move along.

  After a couple more sips, Miss Lil started to open up.

  “Harriet, I believe there is one true love for everyone. For me, that was Frankie, Junior’s daddy. He treated me like a queen from the day we met till the day he died. Of course, he had good reason. I gave him head like nobody’s business.”

  I swallowed the mint leaf whole and proceeded to have a coughing fit. She sure had one thing right: it was nobody’s business.

  She went right on without skipping a beat. “I had plenty of suitors in my young days, but I never met one like Frankie before, and don’t expect to again. So I’m not looking for love, but I do enjoy male companionship from time to time. And Thurman was a fine companion.”

  “You met him on the internet, I understand?”

  “Yes, on SuperSeniors.com. He winked at me.”

  “Winked?”

  “Yes, dear. That’s when someone expresses interest but leaves it to you to kick it up a notch with an instant message. You need to get with the times, Harriet.”

  No kidding.

  “So,” she continued, “we IM’d for a while, then we met, and things just progressed from there. At first he took me out to restaurants. He knew the cleverest little out-of-the way spots.”

  Of course he did. Places where he wouldn’t be seen by the other women he’d burned.

  “Like what?”

  “La Maîson d’Antoine. La Cucina Toscana. Burt’s Steakhouse.”

  I’d have to look those up.

  “He was completely attentive and a wonderful raconteur,” she continued. “After a while, he started coming here. I’d cook homemade meals for him. He didn’t get those at the hotel, so he was most appreciative.”

  “Which hotel?” I interrupted.

  “The Boca Resort & Club.”

  Boca’s premier accommodation, just across the Intracoastal Waterway from Miss Lil’s digs on the beach.

  “He’d take their little shuttle boat over here sometimes, instead of driving across the bridge,” she went on. “I will say it was romantic. As though we were in Venice. To make a long story short, the last time I saw him was two weeks ago. He had been calling me every day, so when he didn’t, I got a bit worried. I called the hotel, and they said he’d checked out. I didn’t know what to think. He had said he had no family. His parents were long gone, and his sister had died of cancer some years back. He’d never had children, as his late wife was barren due to radiation exposure as a child. Her father worked in Madame Curie’s daughter’s laboratory in Paris and had frequently brought the child to work.”

  I had just taken another sip of her bourbon libation, and it was all I could do not to spit it out when I heard that whopper.

  “So,” Miss Lil continued, “I had no one to call. When I hadn’t heard from him in a week, I became suspicious. I called my bank. They told me I had wired $100,000 to an account in the Caymans on the day of Thurman’s disappearance.”

  The Cayman Islands’ banking system is the Caribbean equivalent of Switzerland’s. In other words, impenetrable.

  “After that,” Miss Lil went on, “I immediately checked my purse. My American Express card was gone. I called the company, and they told me I was on a South American junket, charging up a storm from Bogotá to Buenos Aires. I’ll tell you, it frosted me to know that he must have had a female companion with him posing as me.”

  She took a deep breath. “So at that point I called Junior. He’s had his people straighten out all my financial issues.”

  Of course. When most people’s identities get stolen, it takes years to straighten out the mess. When it happens to a Castellano, it takes a week.

  “So the money part’s okay. My identity is restored. Amex has written off the charges. I’m out a hundred grand, but I can live with that.”

  How nice. Kind of like I could live with the theft of a hundred.

  Maybe the guy stuck to stealing what his victims would see as “small” sums, not worthy of the embarrassment of going to the cops with their sordid stories.

  “And I’m not heartbroken,” Miss Lil con
tinued. “As I said, I wasn’t looking for love. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be made a fool of. So I want you to hunt down this cretin, maggot, lyin’ sack o’ shit and string him up by his balls.”

  It was a good thing I wasn’t in mid-sip right then, because I would have choked again. I looked down at Miss Lil’s mint julep glass. Empty. I guess that explained her sudden personality transformation.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. “I’ll need some basic information. Do you have a photo of him?”

  “No. I’ve realized that he always managed to disappear when cameras were around.”

  Big surprise there.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Appeared to be around seventy. Five foot ten, a hundred and seventy-five pounds, full head of gray hair, gray eyes, thick eyebrows, handlebar mustache, manicured fingernails, no visible distinguishing marks.”

  I guess she had prepared.

  “I see. Okay, what did he like to eat?”

  “Veal scaloppini, coq au vin, osso bucco, filet mignon.”

  “Drink?”

  “Glenlivet. Straight up. Château Margaux with meals. Espresso and Amaretto with dessert.”

  “Car?”

  “Don’t know that one, honey. They’re all the same to me. It was silver, though.”

  Right. Like half the cars in Boca.

  “Any unique speech inflections?”

  “New England. Like Kate Hepburn.”

  “Any disabilities, aches, pains?”

  “His back would go out once in a while for a couple days.”

  “Clothing?”

  “Palm Beach.”

  That meant khakis, Ralph Lauren polo shirts, navy blazers with club insignia, tasseled loafers, no socks.

  “Okay, Miss Lil. Anything else you can think of to help me identify him?”

  “No. You get your fine ass out there and haul in that bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, son-of-a-bitch thief.”

  With that, she pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims 100s and lit one with shaking hands.