Palm Beach Nasty (12 page)

Crawford looked Ott over.

“That it?”

“What?” Ott asked.

“Your whole name?”

“Yep, short and strong . . . just like me.”

J
OHNSON
and Do-rag were at the bar, as Ott approached, huddled conspiratorially.

“Two more,” Ott said to Jack Scarsiola.

Johnson heard Ott’s voice and swung around.

“Hey, lemme ask you a serious question,” Johnson slurred. “You ever seen that reality show? Those cops in Memphis?”

Ott didn’t answer.

“The dumb fat one,” Johnson said, “dead ringer for you.”

Ott took the two beers from Scarsiola and rolled his eyes.

“You been working on that all this time?” he said. Then, “Fucking Neanderthal.”

He walked away from the bar and back to Crawford.

“Didn’t take my advice, did you?” asked Crawford.

Crawford caught a glimpse of Sonny Johnson and Dorag push off from the bar and start toward them.

A few seconds later they were a couple feet away.

Johnson stared down at Ott.

“What did you say, you fat fuck?”

Crawford looked up at Johnson.

“Go drool on someone else, will ya?” he said.

For a drunk guy, Johnson had a quick right.

Crawford didn’t see it coming until Johnson’s fist was a foot from his face. He turned and it thudded into the side of his head, almost knocking Crawford out of his chair. Ott exploded out of his seat like he was blasting off a launch pad. He crashed into Johnson, knocked him backward like a blocking dummy, then took him down to the floor.

Crawford got up, unsteady, then Do-rag threw a punch at him. Crawford ducked it and swung back at him. He connected more with the guy’s ear than jaw, but it did the trick and Do-rag flipped backward onto a table where three guys were sitting.

Crawford glanced over at Ott. He and Johnson were writhing around on the floor like a pair of mud wrestlers. He saw Ott get off a straight right, his arm like a cobra strike.

Then Do-rag got up. He seemed to have a quick debate with himself about whether to wade back into battle with Crawford. Then, from ten feet away he charged, drawing back his fist. But Crawford’s knee was faster. He caught Do-rag square in the three-piece, and when he pitched over, Crawford slammed him with an uppercut. Do-rag staggered and went down hard, done for the night.

Ott climbed off Johnson, and Crawford saw a few drops of blood trickle down onto Joey Ramone’s likeness.

“You okay?” Crawford asked Ott.

“Yeah,” Ott said, picking up his empty mug from the floor. “Wasted a perfectly good Yuengling, though.”

“You got good hands,” Crawford said.

“For a fat fuck, you mean?”

“For an
old
fat fuck.”

Ott put the mug down on the table and picked up a thick Corona beer coaster.

He frisbeed it over at Johnson and it bounced off his shoulder.

“We gotta go, boys,” Ott said, getting up. “Can’t get anything done here, with all your distractions.”

Crawford and Ott walked up to the bar.

“Sorry about that,” Crawford said to Jack Scarsiola. “What do we owe you?”

“I should pay you,” Scarsiola said under his breath. “Twelve bucks.”

Crawford handed him a twenty.

“Thanks,” Crawford said, and put the change down on the bar.

Ott ignored Scarsiola and walked away.

Crawford and Ott went down the sidewalk to their car.

Just before they got in, Ott looked up at Crawford.

“Guys’ll never live that down,” he said, a big lump coming up on the side of his face, “getting beat up by a couple Palm Beach pussies.”

EIGHTEEN

N
ick had to fight his first instinct which was to rent a Ryder truck, strip the walls of the Hoppers, Bacons and Freuds, drive up to New York and get Christie’s or Sotheby’s to give him big guarantees in their spring auctions. But in keeping with his new policy of not doing anything rash, he spent hours on the Internet researching how the art market worked.

He quickly found out about something called
provenance
. It put the kibosh on his get-rich-quick art scheme. The gist of provenance was that you had to prove you owned a painting through a paper trail of documentation. That could come in the form of transaction records or a painting being gifted in a will, but galleries were very strict about it. Possession was definitely
not
nine-tenths of the law when it came to art. Galleries and museums spent a lot of time investigating and verifying in order to confirm that a painting was neither stolen nor fake. And the better known the artist and the more valuable the painting, the more digging around they did.

So Nick decided the answer was to bide his time. He was pretty sure he could sell one or two of the lesser-known pictures in Robertson’s house to one of the galleries on Worth Avenue. None of them were going to knock themselves out doing a provenance search on a $20,000 painting by a somewhat obscure artist.

Nick’s new life, meanwhile, was hard to beat. A cook cooking him anything he wanted, for starters. Today was eggs Benedict for breakfast, followed by cold salmon and a salad with lots of walnuts and avocado in it for lunch. Tonight, the cook had told him, was going to be a two-inch steak with béarnaise sauce. He spent most of his time reading, novels out by the pool and art books in the library. He wanted to be informed and knowledgeable for the fancy dinner parties he’d soon be attending.

One thing was sure, Nick realized, if he was going to play the role of art connoisseur, he damn well better look the part. He could no longer be a schlub dressed in Haggar slacks. It was time for an extreme makeover, time to overhaul his image, upgrade his lifestyle. The right clothes, he knew, were an investment in the future. Problem was he had maxed out his Sears Discovery card and was now down to the last of his life savings, $1,800 in tip money. He knew he had to bite the bullet and go to Maus

& Hoffman, a high-end men’s clothing store on Worth. It was known for splashy colored shirts, pants and jackets, with prices way beyond a bartender’s salary. He picked out a pair of tan linen pants there that cost $400, then exhaled hard, and bought a long-sleeved pink shirt with a small blue-green flamingo on the breast pocket for just under $300.

Next he found a hand-tailored double-breasted blue blazer marked down from $1,200 to $600 which he felt exuded
GQ
. Fortunately, he didn’t have to spring for a tie. He had rummaged through Spencer Robertson’s mildewy closet and found a rack of them. He had turned one of them around to examine the label—hoping, praying almost—and yes, there it was, the distinctive label of the fabled Lilly Pulitzer. He was over the moon.

After buying the pants and shirt, Nick walked back to the shoe department. The cheapest pair of loafers cost more than $600. That would come close to wiping him out. He thanked the salesman, then asked for directions to a shoe store he had heard so much about.

It was time to step up—and into—his first pair of Stubbs & Woottons, which he’d heard didn’t actually cost an arm and a leg. They were fashionable shoes he had become aware of several months ago, having spotted a pair on a well-heeled Viggo’s patron. The shoes, actually black needlepoint slippers with martini glasses on the vamp, seemed to immediately proclaim the man a bon vivant, a swell, a player. Nick had seen another pair with crossed golf clubs on another Viggo’s patron. They were essentially theme shoes and he just had to own a pair.

He walked across the street into an alley of chic shops, following the directions he had been given. He saw the sign and went inside. There were several pairs in his size. He felt the slightly rough texture of the celebrated slipper shoe. It was a tough choice, between a pair with dice stitched into them—showing a five-two lucky seven, then another with skull and crossbones, and a third, the sun on the left shoe and the moon on the right one. Then he looked up and saw the perfectly coiffed salesgirl come toward him. She had found another pair in his size. They had a caricature of the devil in red with a pitchfork. He nodded, smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.

He wore them proudly to his appointment with a cosmetic surgeon in Boca Raton later that day. He had been told Boca had more cosmetic surgeons than landscapers, pool guys and personal injury lawyers put together.

L
ATER THAT
afternoon, when Alcie was off duty, Nick carefully removed a painting by an artist named Seagraves Albaran off of a wall in the powder room of Spencer Robertson’s house. He wrapped it in brown paper and took it to a gallery at the corner of Worth and South County, which specialized in American realism.

“Oh, my God,” said the young blonde working there, “I know a man who collects Albarans. This is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time.”

In less than a half hour, the woman had snapped a shot of the painting with her cell, e-mailed it to her buyer and gotten his approval to buy it.

Nick loved his new line of work even though he had a sneaking suspicion that the woman might not be giving him full market value, and he knew for a fact, that her 50 percent commission was highway robbery. But what did it matter . . . he had gotten a check for $16,000, not to mention her card and cell number.

So in practically no time at all, he had a nice, new bank account—adding three zeroes to his net worth—and had met an elegant Palm Beach beauty to boot. He imagined an intoxicating future ahead of him with the woman. He looked at her card.

Lil Fonseca. Had a nice exotic ring to it.

Besides being suddenly flush with cash and the possibility of a new woman in his life, Nick had become the de facto grandson of a man who had paintings worth millions. So what if the old guy wished him Happy New Year twice a day, wore Depends and called him Oswald?

Nick was seeing Spencer Robertson’s life close up—such as it was—and realized, like most people, his was a series of routines. He slept until ten at which time he was served a hard-boiled egg and a piece of toast slathered with Peter Pan chunky peanut butter. Then he turned on the TV and spent the morning watching quiz shows and, in the afternoon, soap operas and the Golf Channel. The
New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times
and the
Glossy
were delivered daily but, with the exception of the
Times,
were never removed from their plastic bags. The old man opened the
Times
religiously to the crossword puzzle each morning. He just stared at it, though, knowing he was supposed to do something, just not sure what.

Nick was ecstatic about his new life. He knew he was a much better grandson to Spencer Robertson than Avery Robertson had been, or ever would be. He watched cartoons and inane quiz shows with the old man and listened to his bursts of blather. He even developed a certain fondness for him and even wanted to improve the quality of his life . . . just as long as old Spencer didn’t stretch it out
too
far. All he asked for, in return, were a few dozen paintings. Why not? Spencer couldn’t take them with him, so who better to end up with them than an art history minor who actually knew the difference between a Hopper and a Holbein.

A
ND
,
THE
fact was, he owed it all to one person.