Palm Beach Nasty (9 page)

T
HIS TIME
Lil motioned to the back room with her head and fluttered her long eyelashes.

“Whaddaya say?” She grabbed for his hand.

“I say, some other time.”

“Come on, you can skip the foreplay.”

She came up to him intending to give him a kiss on the lips, but he turned and all she got was cheek.

He went and sat down in a love seat.

“What’s wrong, Charlie?”

She came over and sat in his lap.

He looked over at the front door, worried someone might come in.

“Relax,” she said, putting a hand on his chest. “You’re always so damn uptight, Charlie.”

“Okay, maybe so. It’s just not a real good idea . . . fornicating on the job.”

“Funny how that didn’t bother you last time.”

He heard the tinkle of the gallery’s bell.

A tall, older man with a barbershop quartet mustache walked in.

“Hello, Dixon,” she said, “picking up your Botero?”

The man glanced over at Crawford.

“Dixon, this is my friend, Charlie Crawford. Charlie . . . Dixon Fordman, my favorite client.”

Fordman’s ruddy face beamed.

Crawford stood up and shook his hand.

Lil went to the back room and brought out a large painting covered in bubble wrap.

The man took the painting, thanked her, gave her a kiss on the cheek and left.

Crawford had procrastinated his Q & A long enough. He opened his mouth to ask his first question.

“Oh, hey, before I forget,” she cut him off, “will you go with me to the Fall Ball?”

She waved a beige vellum invitation at him.

He had politely said “no” to the Red Cross Ball, the Susan Komen Cancer Research Ball and some other thing. What was she not getting?

“And what exactly is the Fall Ball?”

“This charity ball for bipolar kids, or maybe it’s diabetes.”

“There’s a difference, you know.”

“I forget which, doesn’t matter, it’ll be fun.”

“Do I really look like a cummerbund kind of guy?”

“I promise, Charlie, you’ll have a great time. Dancing, drinking, bunch of fun people.”

The drinking part sounded okay.

“Lil . . . one more time, I’m a cop. I’m what is known as a public servant. Servant . . . as in the cleaning lady. Or butler, if they’re still around.”

“In Palm Beach? Oh, you bet they are. Tell you what, think about it? You don’t have to just turn me down cold.”

He nodded.

“Lil, I need to talk to you about Ward Jaynes.”

She didn’t look quite so tan. “What about him?”

“Tell me what you know about him.”

“Ward Jaynes is an occasional client of the gallery. He’s not one of my favorite people, but I tolerate him because he’s got a lot of money . . . even though he doesn’t part with it easily.”

Her eyes burrowed into his.

“What are you really asking, Charlie?”

“What do you know about his . . . personal life?”

“Nothing,” she said, a little too fast.

The front door bell tinkled again. She got up quickly.

Crawford reached for her arm and held it.

“Tell me what you know about a sixteen-year-old girl named Misty.”

She shook her arm loose, walked away and gave the customer who just walked in a dazzling smile.

THIRTEEN

N
ick 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.

A
S 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 else
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.