Palm Beach Nasty (2 page)

That would be the end of Ott’s interview, since the two of them were the only homicide detectives on the Palm Beach force. There were six other detectives and seventeen uniformed cops, nicknamed “bags.”

Crawford was first on the scene. He heard sirens off in the distance. As he pulled up to the park, he clicked on his high beams, grabbed the Maglite on the front seat and jumped out of his car. The first thing he saw was a small neon circle floating at eye level fifty yards ahead. Then, after a few more steps, he realized the reflective circle was on the back of a sneaker.

The sneaker was on the foot of a body dangling from the thick, shiny branch of a banyan tree.

Then he heard short breaths and flicked his Maglite to his left. A woman in her fifties, black spandex tights and a white baseball hat was staring up at the body, her mouth slack, her expression frozen.

“I’m Detective Crawford. You the lady who called?”

She nodded.

“Stay right here, please,” he said, sweeping past her and aiming his Maglite up at the body. The victim, wearing black jeans, a faded red T-shirt and a hoodie hiked up over his stomach, looked to be around twenty. Crawford reached up and checked his pulse, even though he knew there was no point.

The vic’s head was tilted forward, purple and swollen, a lime green rope cutting into his neck. Crawford recognized it by the material: paracord, a type of rope used by the military.

The vic was around six feet tall, weighed probably close to two hundred. Had to be at least two perps, Crawford figured. One to pull up the rope, the other to lift up the body. Too much for one guy to do alone. Might have been a third on lookout.

He flicked the flashlight up and noticed the kid’s bulged-out eyes, a trace of ruptured blood vessels on his lids.

He reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out a pair of vinyl gloves, put them on, then shined his Maglite on the kid’s jeans. He reached into the back pocket and pulled out a lumpy wallet. He opened it and saw a Florida driver’s license. His name was Darryl Bill and he looked way better in the picture.

Bill had turned nineteen three days before.

Crawford looked around and saw the woman jogger hadn’t moved. He wondered if she was in shock.

“Ma’am, you all right?”

She nodded.

“How ’bout I take you over to that bench?” he asked, pointing. “I need you to stick around awhile, ask you a few questions.”

He led her to a park bench.

“I got a bottle of water in my car.”

“That’s okay, thanks.”

He walked back to the crime scene, got out his cell and dialed as he saw a squad car pull up and a tall uniform hop out.

“This is 211 at Mellor Park, South Palm,” Crawford said into his phone. “Confirming dead white male, nineteen years old. Notify brass, the ME and crime scene techs.”

He clicked off and scanned the area, looking for a public restroom or other buildings where security cameras could have picked up something. Nothing. He retraced his steps toward the park’s entrance gate, still looking for cameras, but saw none. Then he remembered that all four bridges over to Palm Beach had cameras specially installed to read license plates. Tag readers, they called them. He’d get a copy of the day’s recording from the south bridge and ID every plate that had come and gone since morning.

The tall uniform, Ramsey Steer, walked up to him. Crawford told him to watch where he stepped, tighten up the perimeter and tape off the scene. A few more cars rolled up.

He went back and studied the kid again. He had short blond hair, a two-inch mullet in back, and was wearing a cheap beaded necklace.

Crawford shined his flashlight on the sand and saw several sets of footprints. One set caught his eye. The toe of the shoe print looked like it had really dug in. He couldn’t see any heel mark that went with it. Like someone had his weight forward and was swinging hard, trying to knock one out of the park. He pictured one of the perps holding the kid’s arms behind his back while the other one whaled away on him.

Kid probably was out cold when he got lifted up. No way he was conscious or he would have been fighting for his life—kicking, biting, whatever it took. Crawford was surprised there wasn’t more blood on the sand below.

He saw the white EMT truck with the yellow stripe pull up. Two guys came running toward him, one with a trauma kit, the other a Zoli resuscitator.

Crawford caught one of their eyes and shook his head.

They were ALS—Advanced Life Support—a hospital on wheels. The truck carried everything a sick or injured person would ever need—ventilators, triage cardiac systems, defibrillators and more meds than a Rite Aid. But there was nothing they could do for Darryl Bill.

“ME on his way?” one of the ALS guys asked.

Crawford nodded and went to his car to get a camera.

Just as he got there, his partner wheeled up.

“Trick or treat?” Ott asked, as he got out.

The knock on Ott was that he was not the most sensitive guy around. Maybe it was the twenty years in Cleveland homicide.

“A kid . . . nineteen, hanging from a tree.”

“Fuckin’ A,” was all Ott said, taking long, deliberate strides toward the crime scene.

Ott had come down about two years ago. So far he and Crawford had a mostly good relationship. Ott had a go-with-the-flow attitude, didn’t get too ripe after eight hours in a car, and never sucked up to Chief Norm Rutledge, the way other guys did. The Palm Beach cops looked at Ott as a throwback. A guy who said “fuck” every third word, drank at the low-life cop bar in West Palm and still used Ten-Code even though the Palm Beach department had switched over to “plain talk” five years before.

Some of them called him “Sip,” after Andy Sipowicz, the bald, cranky cop in the old TV show,
NYPD Blue
, but most of them just called him “F-bomb.”

Ott walked up to the body, too close for the EMT supervisor’s liking.

“You mind?” the EMT said.

“Not if you got a way to bring him back.” Ott pulled on his gloves and looked up at the kid.

“Two perps, I’m guessing,” Crawford said. “Maybe three.”

Ott nodded as two uniforms came up behind them. “Really put the wood to the poor fucker,” Ott said.

“Yeah, wearing gloves.”

“Why you say that?”

“Noticed a couple fibers—looked like leather—on his lips. Left cheek, too.”

Ott moved closer to the body and nodded.

“Guy I took in once, just offed a bunch of hookers,” Ott said, “used these high-tech ski-racer gloves. Real light padding. Told me he got a nice bone-on-bone crunch.”

The young EMS guy glanced over, caught Crawford’s eye, and shook his head.

Ott was looking up at something over the kid’s head. “Check out that knot,” he said, pointing. “A sheep shank. Military. Maybe one of our perp’s some psycho just back from Iraq.”

Ott theorized a lot, but was more often right than wrong.

A uniform, his flashlight shining down, was about to step on a shoe print.

“Hey, dipshit, not ’til we cap it, huh,” Ott said, then to Crawford, “Fucking guys tryin’ to fuck up our crime scene. ID him yet?”

“Name’s Darryl Bill, from somewhere in West Palm,” Crawford said. “I’m gonna diagram the scene and make sure Steer doesn’t let anybody unauthorized get through.”

Ott nodded. “I’ll put placards down. Cutter on his way?”

Crawford nodded and smiled at Ott’s dated reference to the ME.

“It’s all comin’ back, huh Mort?”

“Just like ridin’ a Schwinn.”

Crawford turned away and started snapping pictures of the footprints in the sand. Then he walked a little farther and spotted the kid’s other Nike over by a swing set. He noticed the shoelace was broken, as if the kid’s foot had been twisted violently to one side. Ott came over for a look.

Crawford saw someone approaching; he flicked his flashlight in their direction.

It was a woman in a blue jacket that said Crime Scene on the back.

“We got the cute one,” Ott said.

Crawford had heard about her. A crime scene tech named Dominica McCarthy whose bulky nylon jacket and polyester pants did little to flaunt a figure everyone agreed was way above average. The Crime Scene Evidence Unit techs were the fingerprint and DNA analysts. Their TV counterparts got a lot of face time on the tube, but in real life, they mostly crawled around on their hands and knees with tweezers and baggies.

McCarthy looked over at them, holding her gaze on Crawford for a second, then looked up at the body.

The ME came next. George Bull was an egotistical showboater with thirty years on the job. He’d walk around a crime scene grabbing his chin and striking poses, then answer all questions the same way: “You’ll get all your answers in my write-up.”

Crawford decided to steer clear of the great man.

He and Ott spent the next forty-five minutes combing the scene and questioning the jogger, who had little to tell beyond recounting her grisly discovery.

“I don’t see ’em coming up with any good prints,” Crawford told Ott. “Best shot’s probably DNA off that hoodie.”

Ott nodded. “Guys were pros. Nice clean job.”

Crawford walked toward the cars and went past Dominica McCarthy, who had just finished bagging the hands of Darryl Bill. She was even better looking close up.

He nodded.

She nodded back.

Crawford took down the license plate number of a Mitsubishi two-door that he’d seen when he first pulled up. It looked like a nineteen-year-old kid’s car. It was black with bald tires, low to the ground. He took off a glove and touched the car’s hood with the back of his hand, not wanting to get his fingerprints on it. It was warm. Maybe been there an hour and a half. He shined his flashlight inside. The car was surprisingly neat except for one Magic Hat beer in the cup holder. Then he walked back to the crime scene and approached Dominica McCarthy, who was bagging the hoodie.

“ ’Scuse me,” he said.

She looked up. Big emerald green eyes and sharp, high cheekbones.

“You might want to dust that black car over there,” he said, pointing. “The Mitsubishi.”

“Thank you, Detective . . . already did.”

Crawford nodded and walked over to his car.

On the ride back to the station, he was amped up. He was leaving white-collar crime and Mickey Mouse bullshit in the rearview mirror. Dick and Jan from Buffalo bunking for free in some dead guy’s house . . . that was someone else’s job.

He finally had himself a murder.

He’d never admit to anyone he’d missed it.

But he had.

THREE

T
odd Tropez sized up her net worth. Somewhere in the $8–$10 million range, he figured. Conservative stock portfolio. J.P. Morgan. Smith Barney maybe. Probably had an ivy-covered white brick colonial up north, ocean-front condo down here, owned both free and clear. Nothing conservative about her clothes, though, or the bling. Manolo shoes, flashy designer dress, giant rock on her finger. North of three hundred K easy. A triple string of Wilma Flintstone-sized pearls and diamond earrings dangling from her mushy earlobes. It crossed his mind to just follow her out and roll her.

But he wasn’t into that anymore.

Todd looked around the darkened bar for younger options. He saw a few but no one looked anywhere near as rich. Keep your eyes on the prize, he reminded himself. The woman took a long pull on her drink, then smiling at him, fluttered her glued-on lashes.

“So I’m guessing . . . twenty-eight?” Her orange corduroy throat waggled along with a small fortune in facial reconstructive surgery.

“Twenty-
six
,” Todd said, raising his hand to the bartender.

“Oh, God,” she said, “I was twenty-six when you were born.”

Sure you were,
he thought. She’d shaved off at least fifteen years. Who was she kidding? Even in the dimly lit Tiger Room, designed to shroud crow’s feet, wrinkles and pouches, the woman had to have at least one foot into her seventies.

The Tiger Room at the corner of Peruvian and Cottage Row in Palm Beach was owned by an astute Cuban businessman who built his business on the sound concept that even septuagenarians get horny.

Todd smiled at her the way Amory Blaine would have. He was going through his F. Scott Fitzgerald phase now. That was the way he did it: picked an author and read everything the guy ever wrote. John O’Hara had been before Fitzgerald and before O’Hara was a more obscure guy, Boston writer by the name of J.P. Marquand.

Margo, the bartender, brought over his Mount Gay. “Here you go, Todd.”

“Put the gentleman’s drink on my tab, please, Margo,” the woman said.

“Will do, Mrs. Schering.”

“Thank you.” Todd raised his glass to her.

“It’s Janet,” the older woman said, flipping her long platinum wig the way women half her age did.

Todd could tell being called Mrs. Schering made her feel old. He also knew his drink would have been on the house, since bartenders took care of their own.

When Margo said his name, he realized again how much he hated it.

Todd. Should have changed it, too, back when he jettisoned his last name Gonczik. Tough enough making it in Palm Beach, but with the name Gonczik? And Todd, he thought, such a mama’s boy name.

He thought about going with Trent. It had a sort of Waspy ring to it.

But Trent Tropez? Nah . . . that was lame, too. A guy in a soap opera with capped teeth and blond flecks in his hair. Plus Trent was one of those Brant, Brent, Brett kind of names. Phony as Janet Schering’s age . . . and nose, for that matter.

Todd took a big slug of courage. The Mount Gay went down easy.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked.

“Love to,” Janet Schering said, eagerly sliding off the zebra-skinned bar stool.

Todd had weighed his options and decided on a slow dance. It was a toss-up which would be worse, pressed up against the old bag or doing some spazzed-out version of the twist with her.

He put his left hand in her right and his arm on her shoulder and smiled down at her wizened four foot eleven. Her back was bare, her expression eager. His hand slid along the flank of her shoulder, then down her back. He could feel goose bumps spring up at his touch. Then his hand snagged on something. He realized in horror it was a mole. A mole the size of a blueberry. He slid his hand back to her bony shoulder.