Palm Beach Nasty

PALM
BEACH
NASTY

TOM TURNER

Copyright © 2015 by Tom Turner

All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

For information, address:

The Permanent Press

4170 Noyac Road Sag Harbor, NY 11963

www.thepermanentpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turner, Tom—

Palm Beach nasty / Tom Turner.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-57962-384-5

eISBN 978-1-57962-411-8

1. Detectives—Palm Beach (Fla.)—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Palm Beach (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3620.U766P35 2015

813'.6—dc23                                     2014035887

Printed in the United States of America

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
have many people to thank for helping make
Palm Beach Nasty
a reality.

First, and foremost, are Susan, Serena and Georgie. Susan, I couldn’t have done it without your support and patience. Serena and Georgie, my beautiful daughters, you are the best . . . oh, and DFYU.

Then, in no particular order, come my readers. Some of them couldn’t hide from me and my dog-eared manuscript because we were onboard a boat or on an island—so thank you Liz Berens, Eduardo and Gillian Mestre, Bridget and John Macaskill and Loic de Kertanguay. Others who volunteered to read it—often after a cocktail or two—were Robin Senior, Doug and Ali Milne, Julia Ireland Randall, Chris Kirk, Laura Swiggett, Kathleen Rivers, Caroline Coleman and Marcie Barnhill. Still others felt obligated to read it because they’re family—so thank you John Turner and CeCe Haydock.

Lastly, I want to thank Ed Stackler, who has gone above and beyond a million times. Consummate editor, best eye and ear around, incredibly good guy.

Thank you all so much.

ONE

I
t turned out Crawford really missed the murder and mayhem up in New York. Which was weird, since the whole reason he’d gone south was to get away from it all.

At age thirty-six, with a bad case of acid reflux, chronic cynicism and acute burn-out, Charlie Crawford had packed up his Upper West Side apartment and headed down to the Sunshine State. He decided on the Keys, the plan being to take up surfing, give the Jimmy Buffett thing a shot. But after three months of listening to stoned-out beach bums in lame Hawaiian shirts oohing and aahing pretty average sunsets and duding each other to death, Crawford was ready to move on.

So he’d reached out to a handful of Florida law enforcement agencies, and when the Palm Beach Police Department made him an offer, he grabbed it. But almost a year into the job,
no one
had come close to getting knifed, shot, garroted or even banged up a little. Christ, what he’d give for a face-down stiff, a little rigor setting in. Crawford was drawing a bunch of nowhere cases, which could best be summed up by the one he was writing up now.

I
T WAS
late afternoon on Halloween, and a call had come in about a possible trespass up on the north end. The north end of Palm Beach was really two places, depending on the exact location. Obscenely rich and doing just fine, thanks. Spectacular houses on the ocean and Intracoastal that started at $10 million and went up from there. Or fixer-uppers, on postage-stamp lots at around a million. Even in the depressed 2008 market, some Russian fertilizer billionaire had just plunked down a shade under $100 mill for Trump’s monumentally ugly, but colossally huge, ocean spec house.

Despite being a homicide cop, Crawford was pinch-hitting on a routine call, because several uniforms were out with the flu. He pulled into the driveway of the address the dispatcher had given him and parked next to a big-haired blonde in a black Jag convertible. She smiled at him as he got out of his Crown Vic.

“Hi, I’m Detective Crawford.”

“Rose Clarke,” the woman said. “Place is one of my real estate listings.”

It was a two-story yellow stucco house with oversized columns.

“You put in the call?” Crawford asked, looking through a big picture window for signs of life.

“Uh-huh.” Beautiful smile, teeth like Colorado snow behind pouty lips.

“You think someone’s in there who’s not supposed to be?”

“Think?” she said. “I just saw a naked woman through the slider in back.”

“Who’s the owner?”

Crawford started toward the house. She followed. “Willard Gregg was,” she said, “but he died six months ago.”

“Couldn’t be a relative you saw, could it?”

“No way . . . I’d know about it.”

Crawford started walking. “I’m going to try round back.”

Rose nodded and Crawford went toward the side of the house, she a step behind him.

He pressed the back-door buzzer, shaded his eyes and looked through the slider. Nothing.

He felt Rose’s eyes on him.

“You look like that polo player . . . in the ads,” she said, “guy with the brooding eyes. Taco or something.”

He pretended to be absorbed in his work. He’d heard it before and wasn’t flattered. Crawford was six two, 180 pounds and had thick brown hair he wore a little longer than his boss, the chief of police, liked. He had hazel eyes and above his right eyebrow a thin scar zigzagged across his forehead.

“You have a key, Rose?”

She handed him one.

“Thanks.”

He keyed the lock and thought he heard footsteps inside.

It crossed his mind to call for backup, but he nixed it. He was pretty sure the Manson family wasn’t waiting in ambush.

“Stay here, please.”

“Okay,” Rose sighed.

He walked in. There was a torn rubber carpet mat on the living room floor and holes on the walls where paintings had hung.

“Palm Beach police,” he said, pulling out his Sig Sauer semiautomatic, “whoever’s in here, come on out.”

Nothing.

He inched toward a closed door and turned the knob. An air mattress lay on the floor with sheets and a puffy comforter on top. Men’s and women’s clothes hung on doorknobs.

“I don’t want to say it again . . . come on out
now
.”

He pushed open a door to a bathroom and saw toothbrushes, cosmetics, a man’s razor with shaving cream on it. He backed out and spotted a yellow Lacoste shirt hanging on a closet door. He opened the walk-in closet and saw shadowy shapes behind the clothing.

“Okay,” came a man’s voice, “we’re coming.”

“Slowly, hands up.”

First, came a man in blue boxers, then a woman in red, lacy panties and a black push-up bra.

“Who are you?” Crawford handed the woman a terry-cloth bathrobe that hung from inside of the closet door.

“We’re the Kazmeyers, I’m Dick and my wife, Jan,” the man said, like he was making introductions at a cocktail party.

“Hi,” Jan said, knotting the sash on her bathrobe.

Crawford heard steps behind him.

Rose walked in and her eyes popped.

Crawford holstered his gun. “What are you doing here?” he asked the couple.

Jan glanced at her husband. “Just kind of . . . crashing.”

“Wait a minute,” Rose said, “you were at my open house here a couple of weeks ago.”

Jan nodded sheepishly. “We . . . hid in the garage after—”

“—actually that little room with the hot water heater,” Dick corrected her.

Rose’s mouth dropped.

“When the open house was over and you left, we came out,” Jan said.

“Got our mattress and stuff from the car,” Dick said, like describing a camping trip to Yellowstone.

They still had their hands up.

“Winters up in Buffalo get really long,” Jan said. “This is our fourth season down here.”

“Rent free,” Rose muttered.

“Okay,” Crawford said, “you can put your hands down.”

“Thanks,” Dick said, then to Rose, “We kept our stuff in that little crawl space . . . in case you showed the house.”

“How very thoughtful of you,” Rose said.

“You hardly ever showed it, though,” Jan said.

“ ’Cause it’s way overpriced,” Rose said. “Besides nothing’s moving in this market.”

“Get dressed, please,” Crawford said, “we’re going down to the station.”

Dick started to panic. “Can’t you just give us a ticket?”

“No,” Crawford said. “We don’t have tickets for something like this.”

“Isn’t it breaking and entering?” Rose asked.

“We didn’t break anything,” Dick said, suddenly indignant.

“And we entered perfectly legally,” Jan added.

“Let’s go,” Crawford said.

Rose, by his side, nudged him and whispered, “Only in Palm Beach.”

I
T WAS
six thirty now and Crawford was at the station writing up the incident, wishing the crashing Kazmeyers had come on someone else’s shift. Half listening to his radio, he thought he heard the dispatcher say the code for homicide.

No way. Yesterday’s big investigation had been a socialite’s poodle getting pancaked by a Lamborghini. Day before had been a blue-haired lady who sideswiped a mailbox after happy hour at Ta-Boo.

“Say again,” Crawford said into his radio.

“Call from a jogger,” dispatch said, “reporting a young white male, down at Mellor Park”—then a long pause, as if he couldn’t quite process it himself—“hanging . . . from a banyan tree.”

TWO

C
rawford flipped on his strobes as he turned left onto Brazilian and floored the Vic. He figured it was a ten-minute drive to the park in South Palm Beach he could do in five.

He eased up to South Ocean, looked both ways, flicked his siren, punched the accelerator and made a skidding right turn heading south. He stepped on it again and heard the delayed roar of the Crown Vic’s 405. A cluster of trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk was a purple and black blur as he blew past them.

He fished his cell phone out of his breast pocket and, doing seventy in a thirty-five, dialed his partner, Mort Ott. Ott was in West Palm, interviewing a witness on a mail-fraud case.

“Yeah, Charlie?”

“Got a seven down at Mellor Park.”

A long pause.

“You’re shittin’ me?”

“No,” said Crawford, and clicked off.