Palm Beach Nasty (7 page)

“Sounds like him.”

“Only thing is . . . I’m thinking the guy up there might have been Avery
Rob-inson
.”

“Well, the one here is definitely Rob-ertson.”

“Now you got me really curious, can you describe him again?”

“I can do better than that,” she said, talking very quietly as if she talked any louder it might shoot dagger-like splinters into her hung-over skull. “Actually I have a picture of him. You won’t believe why.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause Paul Broberg sent it to me. In case Avery ever showed up again at the Poinciana,” she said. “Guess I was supposed to tackle him or something, make sure he didn’t start charging up stuff.”

She guffawed like she had just delivered the world’s all-time funniest punch line.

“I’ll bring the picture, next time I come, you can see whether it’s the same guy you were thinking of. ’Course it is a few years old.”

“Thanks, that doesn’t matter. So this guy Avery doesn’t come around much anymore . . . ’cause of that golf thing?”

“ ‘Much?’ Are you kidding? Never. Impression I got was almost like the old man put guards at the bridges to make sure he never set foot in Palm Beach again. Word from my manager was if you crossed Spencer Robertson just once, it was the last time, including flesh and blood.”

Nick could barely restrain himself from cartwheeling across the room. He closed his eyes and did a fist pump. A game plan was taking shape.

“Weird thing is, Avery’s the old man’s primary beneficiary . . . least he was.”

Nick practically crushed the phone into his ear.

“He is? Why?” he asked, trying to tamp down his excitement.

“Broberg told me Robertson had a thing about charities. Didn’t trust ’em. Thought all the money went to administrative costs, none of it ever got to the actual cause.”

“So you’re saying he’d rather give his money to his grandson . . . even though he was a complete bum?”

“I guess. As long as he never came around.”

Nick did another fist pump.

T
WO NIGHTS
later, Cynthia came in with the picture of Avery. Nick could see “eager-to-please” written all over her.

“See the resemblance to you?”

He did. But the kid had big fleshy lips and a perfect aquiline nose. Blue eyes, too. Nick’s were green. But they did have the same hair. Similar facial structure, too.

Nick put the picture down on the bar.

“That’s not the guy I was thinking of, I’m pretty sure the one in New York was Avery Robinson.”

Cynthia powered through a few watered down Blasts and after her fourth one excused herself, garbling something about going to the “itta guls room.” Nick picked up the picture of Avery Robertson and stuffed it into his wallet.

As far as taking her to the movies on Thursday night, that was not going to happen. He had gotten all he needed out of her. He imagined her showing up at Viggo’s on Friday after being stood up the night before, loaded for bear, ready to rip him a new one.

When Cynthia came back from the bathroom, he made her the last Bahama Blast he’d ever make her. Because he had decided tonight was his last night at Viggo’s. He made it extra strong—three ounces of rum. Because at this point he didn’t much care whether she slammed into a big ficus, a twelve-inch wall or a concrete bridge abutment.

The drink, of course, was on the house. To ensure a big tip.

Even though Nick knew his days of counting on tips would soon be behind him.

TEN

C
rawford was still reeling from Misty’s little shocker.

Ott had just left his office and Crawford was pretty sure, based on Ott’s lack of reaction, that he hadn’t picked up on Misty’s Liliana reference.

He had heard a few people call Lil “Liliana,” mainly people she didn’t know that well. He flashed back to what she told him late one night. How she had gone through a “bad patch” right before she met him. A nasty self-destructive run where she confessed to drinking way too much and hitting the drugs pretty hard. Coke, in particular. She had apparently left out a chapter or two.

She told him it got so bad that a bunch of her friends did an intervention on her one time. It got late—cocktail hour—and Lil’s friend, Mimi, whose house the intervention took place at, broke out a bottle of Santa Margherita. End of intervention.

Eventually, she got talked into going to one of those dry-out places in Minnesota, but only lasted a week there. She promised him she had cut out the drugs completely. Strictly a social drinker, now, she said.

Crawford couldn’t get the image out of his head. The big water bed, women—worse, young girls—coming and going. And Lil, right there in the middle of it, snorting coke and doing God knows what.

He remembered something else Lil told him. About her friend, Nicole—the name of the other woman at Ward Jaynes’s house according to Misty. Something about this group of women, who sounded like a collection of rich lost souls, who met a couple times a week to pray and gossip at the old Paramount theater on North County Road. Lil described it as a kind of born-again group that jumped from fad to fad—yoga to Pilates to Facebook to whatever. Lil referred to them as members of The Church of What’s Happening Now. The mainstay, apparently, was the socially prominent Nicole, a pharmaceutical heiress.

The common cause of the group seemed to be the pursuit of happiness, which, no one thought, was asking too much. But, thus far, that goal had proven elusive thanks in part to straying husbands, alcohol and drug problems, lack of purpose, or all of the above. As he remembered it, the point of the story was that one of the members was caught naked—legs to the sky—in the backseat of another member’s husband’s Bentley. Nicole had summarily banished the woman from the group, which seemed somewhat hypocritical, based on Nicole’s waterbed activities.

After a while, Crawford got out of his chair and started pacing around his office. He didn’t want to think about Lil anymore.

His mind jumped to Ward Jaynes. He didn’t want to let it get personal, but maybe he wouldn’t be able to help that.

In any case, it was time to have a little talk with the man.

He walked over to Ott’s cubicle and suggested they pay Jaynes a visit a little later. Ott jumped at it. Never interrogated a billionaire before, he said. Weren’t any up in Cleveland. Crawford told him to give him an hour. He needed to do what he always did. His Boy Scout routine. Be prepared. Research his subject. He went back to his office and dug up everything he could. He wanted to know Jaynes cold. He always started with Wikipedia, if his subject was a big fish, even though sometimes they got their facts a little screwed up.

Turned out Jaynes grew up in Plattsburgh, New York, went to Plattsburgh High, then Syracuse University. That threw Crawford a little, because Jaynes exuded all the characteristics of a bored, entitled patrician from some fancy place like Greenwich. The clothes, the hair, the attitude, you could tell a lot from a few pictures in the paper. In Jaynes’s case, his eyes said it all. It was like they telegraphed what was going through his head . . . the fools I have to suffer, they seemed to say. The morons I have to put up with.

After graduating from college, Jaynes worked for a year at Manufacturers Hanover bank, then jumped to Goldman Sachs for two years and after that went and got his MBA from Harvard Business School. At age twenty-seven he started Jaynes Funds. At thirty-six, he was a billionaire. Jaynes Funds mainly shorted stocks. So if a company tanked, he did well. Clearly smart, tough and shrewd—he was, now at forty-two, a multibillionaire and had weathered the 2007–08 crash like it was a mere speed bump.

Crawford Googled him next. The man had amassed more gigabytes than most presidents. He found out Jaynes had scores of lawsuits in the last five years, right up there with the cigarette companies. Crawford navigated his way around and realized it would take weeks to read everything about the guy. Jaynes had some pretty nasty chapters in his life and, it seemed, way more enemies than most. The surprising thing was how many of them were women.

Crawford had seen pictures of Jaynes’s house—a word that hardly did it justice—in a Sunday
Palm Beach Press
profile. Crawford had heard that when Jaynes bought the place, it set the record for the highest selling price in Palm Beach. Fifty million. Then a few months ago, Trump sold his humongous beast to the Russian fertilizer king and . . . trumped it.

ELEVEN

O
tt was driving them to Jaynes’s house. They were going down South Ocean Road.

“See that place,” Ott said, pointing to a big Mediterrean behind a high stucco wall, “that’s the house that Alex Cross built.”

“Who the hell’s Alex Cross?” Crawford asked.

“Christ, man, you illiterate or something?”

Crawford raised his hands. “Sorry, never heard of him. Who is he?”

“Only the most well-known James Patterson character there is.”

Crawford laughed. “Okay, got it, Patterson’s house.”

“Yeah . . . thanks to Alex Cross.”

Ott hung a left and drove the white Caprice down a long driveway.

Crawford was amazed they could just drive right in. Usually at a place like this there was some massive steel reinforced gate that could stop a tank. Or a manned toll booth-like gatehouse where you’d be eyed suspiciously unless you pulled up in a Maserati or a Maybach. The architectural style was not readily identifiable, just massively, grandiosely big. Municipal building big. Cold, too. Even the majestic royal palm trees, which formed a straight allée to the house, didn’t soften its starkness. Or warm up the battleship gray stucco exterior.

Crawford remembered hearing that royal palms like these went for about a hundred dollars a foot. He estimated their height and how many there were, then started to do the math, but gave up. He needed a calculator.

According to the Palm Beach County public records he had read, the mega structure had been built just six years ago. He recalled something he was told, how landscaping could make a house look as though it had been there forever. But from the outside of this one, he got the feeling it had never been lived in, everything too clean and new. It looked like a $50 million crash pad.

Its parking court could easily accommodate fifty Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds. But the only car parked there was a fire-engine red Ferrari. ‘Rainmkr’ boasted its license plate.

“Well, well, now isn’t that interesting,” Crawford said. “That car left the island right around the time of Darryl Bill’s murder on Friday night.”

Ott pulled in next to the Ferrari.

Crawford opened his door, got out and looked down at the gleaming red car. Ott climbed out and came around next to him.

“You don’t really think that if Jaynes was behind it, he’d do it himself, do you?” Ott said.

“My gut says ‘no,’ ” Crawford said, turning and walking toward the house. “But it’s been wrong before.”

Crawford and Ott had talked over how they were going to play it on the way over. The pictures that Darryl Bill had taken were their ace in the hole. Misty had brought them into the station house in a sealed envelope, then beat it out of there in a hurry. There was only one that would nail Jaynes, but it would more than do the job. It was of Misty on top of a man with a long, jagged scar on his left shoulder. She was naked except for a blue tank top that had been hiked up over her breasts. She was smiling into the camera. It was pretty sick, Crawford thought, seeing how her brother was snapping the picture.

They decided not to tell Jaynes they had seen the pictures. See whether he’d go into full denial mode or just how he’d react. They could nail him for sex with a minor, but they wanted to get him for a whole lot more than that.

Ott was going to lead it off. Crawford just wanted to observe for a while.

The front door looked to be twelve feet high and heavy, like you had to be a weight lifter to muscle it open. Ott pressed the buzzer and waited.

Nobody answered.

“Where the hell’s Jeeves?” he asked.

Crawford shrugged and studied the door. It looked like it was imported from some medieval castle in Bavaria.

Ott pressed the buzzer again. They waited a few seconds then walked down the steps.

They walked around the side of the house. Ott shouted “hello” a couple of times, then tried “anyone home?” No response.

They walked along the east side of the house down a cast-stone path and passed through a cluster of podocarpus hedges on one side and ancient-looking trees with gnarly trunks on the other. As they got to the end of it, the view opened up wide and there was a big, eye-popping ocean vista. Crawford stopped to take it in. Now he got what all the fuss was about—living on the ocean—looking out at that jaw-dropping view all day long. Fifty feet away he could see the end of a pool. It was the infinity-edged kind, where the water comes up all the way to the top, flows over the sides, then recycles back into the pool. It created the effect that the pool and ocean were connected—one long, floating body of water. Crawford wondered what the price tag on a pool like it was. His eyes drifted over to the pool house. It had a row of six squatty, powerful-looking columns in front like a mini-Parthenon.