Palm Beach Nasty (24 page)

Crawford could just see the gleeful look on Rutledge’s face as he fired him and told him about all the charges being filed against him. He’d be sporting a grin twice the size of the Sunshine State.

Crawford decided to either scrap the whole plan or at least change it drastically. Take Misty and Dominica out of the mix. An alternative was that he and Ott could play crooked cops. That they had dreamed up a blackmail scheme after seeing the Misty pictures. Crawford figured it wouldn’t be hard for Jaynes to believe a cop would go dirty for $20 million.

Crawford watched two attractive women and a much older man walk into the restaurant and wondered what the arrangement was. Figured the man’s bank account probably had a lot to do with it.

A few minutes later, in came Dominica, wearing a beige skirt and a white top that suggested cleavage but didn’t push it. He noticed the bounce in her walk again and the sparkle in her eyes . . . and what amazing emerald green eyes they were.

“You look really . . . nice,” Crawford said, thinking “hot.”

He stood up and held her chair.

She looked at him funny. “You sure you’re a cop?”

“Sorry, I don’t know what got into me.”

He pushed in her chair and sat down opposite her.

He looked around for the waitress, spotted her, and raised his hand. She came over.

“Pinot Grigio, please,” Dominica said.

“Thought you liked red.”

“I switch around,” Dominica said, taking a look at the menu.

“You realize that’s the preferred drink of the Palm Beach ladies-who-lunch bunch?”

“Yeah, but they have like five or six.”

He smiled and picked up the menu. He could feel her staring at him.

“So . . . how come you got nobody yet, Charlie?”

“Jesus, what are you, Rutledge’s echo?” he asked, and took a sip of his club soda and lime. “This place is famous for their grouper, by the way.”

She gave him the thumbs-up.

“Why do I get the feeling, Charlie,” she said, looking around the restaurant, “you asked me here to talk shop?”

He shrugged and gave her a quizzical look. “You got me.”

She was observing him as closely as she would a hair follicle at a crime scene.

“Somehow I got the sense you had something very specific you wanted to talk about.”

“Like what?”

She shrugged and glanced down at her nails.

“Not that I wouldn’t think you’d ask me out to dinner, just to be with me.”

“But?”

“But us girls down in CSEU talk. A lot, actually—”

“Yeah, and . . . ?”

“And, for whatever reason . . . the subject of Charlie Crawford comes up a lot.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Yeah. But word is, according to the girls anyway,” she said, “you’re maybe more into criminals than women.”

Crawford frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She just shrugged and smiled.

“Okay, McCarthy, I’m going to come clean with you.”

“I like Mac better.”

“Okay, Mac, here goes . . . I was going to give you a chance to be a hero, but nixed it, decided it was too dangerous. You are, after all . . . a girl.”

“Jesus, who writes your stuff?” She looked both amused and like she could slap him.

“Ott and I had this idea. Well, actually it was my idea, maybe not one of my all-time great ones—”

He told her about transforming her into Misty Bill’s fictitious older sister.

Dominica listened closely as Crawford explained how he and Ott planned to step in at the last moment and save Misty and Dominica, then nail the hitters.

“Wait a minute, ‘
save us
?’ What in God’s name makes you think you’d need to save us?”

“Christ, don’t get all macho on me. Thing is, I already killed it.”

She looked at him suspiciously.

“I’m serious, I don’t want you to play the bait. As tough as you may think you are, something could happen. And I can just hear Rutledge now. ‘Nice goin’, Crawford, screwed the whole thing up and got the cute CSEU killed.’ ”

“The ‘cute’ CSEU?”

Crawford looked sheepish.

“Yeah . . . that’s what cops call you.”

Dominica turned matador red.

The waitress showed up with her grouper.

“Thank you . . . but what if, Option Two, Jaynes just pays the blackmail money?”

“That works . . . proves he did it, plus it doesn’t put anyone in harm’s way. But it’s never gonna happen.”

“Why not?” Dominica asked, taking a bite of her grouper.

“ ’Cause he’s gonna figure a blackmailer can always come back for another bite of the apple. That happened to him a year or so ago. This sleazeball lawyer came back and hit him up again. I think that was a policy changer. Why he took out Darryl Bill. Killing Bill was his ‘don’t screw with me’ statement. Guy just might like killing people, too. Got a little bored with stocks and bonds.”

Dominica was processing. She took the last bite of her grouper, finishing off her plate before Crawford was half done with his pompano.

“Jesus, for a skinny broad, you sure got a hell of an appetite.”

She cocked her head and smiled.

“Is that a bad thing?”

F
IFTEEN MINUTES
later, sipping an espresso, Crawford asked for the check.

A few minutes later they were outside.

Crawford looked up at the sky. It was one of those amazing Florida nights where the clouds formed a kind of ghost-like Grand Canyon formation. They had a majestic architectural mass to them and appeared to be dead still, not moving an inch.

“Want to take a walk?” he asked.

“Sure.”

They went east a half block, then down a street. They were in the heart of what West Palm city officials called “the new West Palm Beach,” and what residents called “the ghost town.” There were four or five high-rise condominium buildings that had all been built at the same time—the wrong time. A time, five or six years ago, when demographers and developers were giddy over the 20 percent increase in prices that had been going on for years.

“Bet you could get a good buy in that building,” Crawford said, looking up at a brand new twenty-story building that looked eerily abandoned.

Dominica pointed to the three huge retail spaces on the ground floor that were meant to be occupied by upscale home furnishing shops or restaurants.

“Been vacant for close to three years,” she said.

“See that building over there,” Crawford said, pointing to a new office building.

She nodded.

“That’s where Jaynes’s offices are. He owns the building and his office is on the penthouse floor. Gets to look down on his four-hundred-foot yacht on the Intracoastal.”

Dominica looked up to the top of the building. “Is that the one that rotates?”

“Yup, the Lazy Susan building, they call it, does a slow 360 every day. At some point in the day everyone gets killer ocean views.”

They walked east over to Flagler, then south along the Intracoastal.

After a while Dominica asked, “Want to sit down?”

There was a bench a few feet in front of them.

“Sure.”

They both sat and looked across the Intracoastal at Palm Beach.

Then Dominica turned to him.

“I been thinking; I want to do it.”

“What?”

“Be your decoy, play the big sister. I don’t care whether you were trying to con me or not. It’s time you put somebody in jail. It’s not good having killers running loose on the streets of Palm Beach.”

Crawford turned toward her and they locked eyes.

“But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just a gut feeling I got, like Jaynes represents something to you maybe.”

She exhaled slowly.

“Don’t overanalyze it, Charlie, but yeah, I’ve run across men like him before,” she said staring over his shoulder. “And they’re not my favorite types.”

“Go on.”

She looked him straight in the eyes. “That’s it . . . that’s all you’re getting out of me.”

It was against his nature not to poke and probe.

“Okay,” he said.

“So let’s go, we gottta solve this sucker. The rate you’re going you’ll be a grandfather by the time you wrap it up.”

“Don’t know if being a grandfather is in the cards.”

She laughed and—out of the blue—seeing no one in sight, he put his arm around her.

She looked up at him.

“What’s this, Charlie?”

“Just . . . figured you might be . . . cold.”

“It’s eighty degrees out.”

“Yeah, but the breeze—”

He leaned toward her and kissed her, violating his cardinal rule about public displays of affection. He found it so tacky when other people did it, but couldn’t help it.

He kissed her again, this time putting a lot more behind it. She suddenly responded as if he had touched a secret button. She put both her arms around him, one hand going first to the back of his neck, then up into his hair.

Still kissing her, he put his hand on her back, moved it under her blouse. What the hell was he thinking? In a public place. He moved his hand down her back. She was breathing in short gasps.

She pulled away. Her eyes looked unfocused.

“Where’s your place again?” she asked.

“Down Flagler, about a mile.”

“Mine’s closer.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

D
OMINICA
’
S LONG
brown, naked body had no tan line.

“What . . . you go to France to get a tan?” Crawford asked, running his fingers lightly across her shoulders.

“Nobody can see me on my balcony,” she said, leaning toward him and kissing him. “You know, Charlie, I been thinking . . .”

“Yeah?

“The girls down at CSEU . . . they really don’t know what they’re talking about.”

THIRTY-NINE

N
ick Greenleaf was antsy. He had been holed up in the house on El Vedato for days. But he was afraid about going out, having someone point at him and say, “hey, you’re the guy on the flyer.”

Lil was preoccupied, going full speed ahead lining up option buyers. If she wasn’t so busy, he was certain, she’d be spending all her time with him, doing the deed by now. He called her late in the afternoon and she assured him that she had buyers committed for at least five more paintings. According to her, that would translate into more than $6 million in cash.

Nick needed a change of scenery bad. He also wanted to execute a side plan, which he had no intention of telling his new partners about. There had been some hard bargaining between them about the partnership structure. Specifically, Lil said she deserved 50 percent for coming up with the whole thing and having the buyers. Nick saying no way, none of it would have been possible if he hadn’t become a fixture in the Robertson household. And Alcie, the little weasel, had said, “Look here, you dudes already broke the law. I ain’t. You don’t cut me in for a third, an anonymous letter gonna find its way to the po-leese.”

It ended up being a third, a third, a third.

Nick’s side plan involved one Lucien Freud and two Francis Bacons that he had found in the front coat closet, behind a big leather golf club bag and two walking canes. He had stumbled across them one day when he was looking for an umbrella and was positive he was the only one who knew they were there. His guess was that Spencer had absent-mindedly set them down there, probably just before his brain went permanently AWOL.

Nick set his alarm for two in the morning, when Alcie would be dead to the world. He got up, took one of the Freuds and one of the Bacons from the closet into the library and locked the door. The other Bacon was huge, probably four-by-six feet, so he left it for another day. Then he bubble-wrapped the two paintings and taped them together. His plan was to take them over to his condo at the Princess for safekeeping, knowing his partners would never be the wiser.

He picked up the paintings and walked to the garage. Nick got a chuckle every time he walked in and saw the juxtaposition of Spencer Robertson’s vintage Rolls-Royce Cloud Three and classic Ferrari Testarossa bookending Alcie’s dented gray Corolla. That was another thing he had recently spent time studying online. His next car. He had it narrowed down to a Lamborghini Gallardo or a Tesla Roadster. But for the moment, Alcie’s Corolla, with the keys on the floor, would do just fine. It had a good-sized trunk and was unlikely to attract attention.