“Well, happy birthday,” Burr said, wondering how he could come up with a plausible way to change his mind since her announcement about buying. He couldn’t think of one, so it was time to move on.

  “Well, ladies, I’m going to circulate.”

  “I’ll give you a call,” Bibi said. “I have a pocket listing of a house you might be interested in.”

  “Yes, please do.”

  “But I don’t have your number.”

  “Oh, right.” He gave her the number to a cell phone that had long been disconnected due to lack of payment. “Well, nice to have met you both.”

  “Bye, Max.”

  “I’ll call you,” said Bibi.

  Not gonna happen, he thought.

  He spent the next fifteen minutes circulating around the young women passing the food and champagne with a stopover at the bar for a three-ounce Maker’s Mark. It was his drink of choice, back in the days when he could afford it. He noticed a woman, whom he guessed might be the hostess, eyeball him a few times. One time he saw her start to walk in his direction. It was time to skedaddle, and he now had a full stomach. He walked toward the door from the porch which went through a sunroom, then into a hallway, and he noticed a full bathroom on his left. He had a sudden idea and ducked into the bathroom. He quickly stripped off his clothes, dropping them on the floor and jumped into the shower. He did a quick, military shower, toweled himself off, got back into his clothes and prepared to leave the house—clean and with a full stomach. He went back into the hallway, took a few steps, and walked into the living room which he remembered he had gone through from the front door. He was thinking if he was lucky, he might find another party further north where he could stuff his pockets.

  Off to one side of the living room, he saw four men sitting, huddled around something. He looked back and didn’t see the hostess pursuing him. He walked over to the four men. They were playing backgammon. Somehow, he knew it was a pretty high-stakes game. One of the men looked up at him as he hovered.

  “Hey,” the man said. “Want to play?”

  “Sure,” Burr said. “A chouette, huh?”

  Max Burr used to be a hell of a backgammon player. But it had been eight years since he last played. Fifteen years back, he played regularly in daily post-work backgammon games at the Racquet Club in New York City. He remembered walking away with $9,000 after a marathon session. He also remembered losing it all a week later. But at one point he was making more money at backgammon than he was at his bank training-program job.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” said the man who had asked him if he wanted to play. “I’m Peter Farnum.”

  “Uh, Max Burton,” said Burr, and he sat down in a vacant chair.

  The other three men introduced themselves.

  “How much are you playing for?” Burr asked.

  “Ten bucks a point,” Farnum said, looking at Burr for a reaction.

  “Sounds good, I’m in,” Burr said. What the hell? He had a dollar fifty to his name. If he lost and it was time to pay up, he’d just say, oops, sorry, I left my wallet in my car. Be right back. Then he’d casually walk out of the living room, out of the house, unlock his bike, and pedal like hell! He’d be three blocks away before the four men got suspicious.

  But he didn’t lose. After twenty minutes he was up $280. After thirty-five minutes, he was up over $700, throwing double-sixes and perfectly timed rolls like crazy. He knew, though, from painful past experiences, he could—in just a few rolls of the dice—lose it all. So, he did something he had almost never done in the past.

  “Gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m late for a dinner party, so I’m sorry, but I’ve got to quit.”

  Three gave him dirty looks, like, who is this guy—who I’ve never laid eyes on before—taking the money and running?

  Peter Farnum just smiled and nodded his head. “Well, nice playing with you,” he said, “or maybe I should say, nice dice. We have a regular game over at the Poinciana. Wouldn’t mind getting a shot at winning our money back. Right, boys?”

  A few nods and grumbles.

  The four men paid him off and he strode out of the house on Coral Lane—a man holding his head high for the first time in a long, long while.

  FIVE

  Burr walked into LoLa 41 on Sunset Avenue like he used to walk into hip restaurants and bars back in the old days. With a swagger. Like he was in the same league as everyone else in the place. Hell, fact was, he had been in their league…back when he had hefty balances in all his bank accounts, a five-million-dollar house in a New York City suburb, a three-million-dollar Delray Beach house and a couple of nice, fat investment accounts at Goldman Sachs. Yeah, okay, maybe he did start off somewhere between first and second base with quasi-rich parents who sent him to all the right schools, but, Christ, he got halfway to home plate on his own, to the point where he was looking to buy a share in a private plane. Why not? Most of his friends had ’em, so why shouldn’t he?

  But then, the shit hit the fan.

  After walking around LoLa, Burr finally spotted Bibi and Candace at a corner table. Problem was, a man was sitting at the table with them. What the hell? If he joined them, he’d be evening things out. He walked toward them, and Bibi spotted him and gave him a smile and a wave. He walked up to the three of them.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  “You snuck away from your boring dinner party?” Bibi said.

  “Yeah, well, just wanted to celebrate your, ah, what was it…thirtieth birthday?” Max said and the women laughed. He could be so damn charming.

  Burr introduced himself to the man, whose name was Seth something.

  Then, he started to sit down in the fourth chair. “Ah, sorry,” Seth said, “my friend Jamie is sitting there. He’s in the men’s room.

  Bibi pointed at an empty table. “Grab a chair from that one.”

  All of a sudden, Burr felt like a fifth wheel. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, come on,” Candace said. “The more the merrier…as long as they’re men, that is.”

  Burr smiled, nodded, and got another chair. Bibi and Candace moved over to give him room. He placed the chair between them and sat down.

  The waitress came over and Burr ordered a Maker’s Mark.

  “We met Max at Jan and Brock Landreth’s cocktail party,” Bibi explained to Seth.

  “Which I didn’t get the stiff card to,” Seth said, shaking his head.

  “Ah, well, you didn’t miss much,” Candace said.

  “Good hors d’oeuvres, though,” Bibi said. “Right, Max?”

  “You mean, ’cause I was stuffing my face?” Burr said.

  “Seemed to really like the shrimp,” Candace said.

  “Who doesn’t?” said Seth.

  Burr noticed a tall man wearing a long-sleeved yellow shirt walking in their direction. He looked very familiar.

  Jamie, the man in the yellow shirt, approached the table and glanced down at Burr.

  “A new addition,” Bibi said and then introduced Burr to Jamie as Max Burton.

  “You look kind of familiar. Did you go to Deerfield?” Jamie asked.

  “Ah, no. No, I didn’t,” Burr said.

  Jamie put his hand up to his mouth. “I could have sworn…well, anyway.”

  Jamie Rouillard had been two classes ahead of Burr at Deerfield, a boarding school in Massachusetts. Burr remembered him well. A jock and…kind of a bully, he was almost certain. Hockey captain, he was pretty sure. One of the top goal scorers on the lacrosse team too. You always remembered the older guys, especially the jocks, but they didn’t always remember you.

  The conversation swung around to people the others knew in common. Occasionally, Burr would hear a name that he knew, but he kept quiet. They talked about somebody’s plane this, somebody’s yacht that, somebody’s affair this, somebody’s divorce that—gossip, lots of gossip. It brought back memories to Burr, almost all of them bad.

  Finally, right after the five ordered dinner, Jamie Rouillard snapped his fingers and glanced at Burr. “I know why you look familiar, you were married to Amelia Lawson, right?”

  Burr knew he couldn’t flat out deny it and get away with it. He nodded. “Yeah. Sadly, we had a fairly short run.”

  He and Amelia were going to get married the summer after his college graduation from the University of Virginia, until he told her he had this—ridiculous in hindsight—compulsion to be a United States Marine. Maybe it was because his father was a Marine, or because his grandfather was a Brigadier General in the Marines way back between World Wars I and II. So, Amelia waited for him to finish his time in the Marines, and then they were married in 2002.

  It lasted seven years, five years of bliss, two years of pure hell. He was just glad they didn’t have kids, though she had wanted them.

  “So didn’t you live up in Connecticut and have a place down here somewhere?”

  “Yeah, Southport, and down in Delray,” Burr said, eager to cut the conversation short and change the subject.

  “What happened to her? She was a beautiful woman. Funny, too, as I remember.”

  This was a subject Burr wanted to steer as far away from as possible.

  “We kinda lost touch,” Burr said. “How ’bout you, Jamie, were you ever married?”

  “Yeah, talk about quickies,” Jamie said, but he still wasn’t done with Burr. “You sure you didn’t go to Deerfield.”

  Bibi, God bless her, jumped in. “I think he’d know where he went to school, Jamie.”

  But he could see the cogs of Jamie’s brain moving inexorably toward what he remembered hearing about why Amelia Lawson Burr was no longer married to Max Burr and the circumstances that had led to Burr’s marriage going off the tracks, and his whole life going into a major tailspin.

  Burr didn’t want to be there when it all clicked and Jamie snapped his fingers again and said, Holy shit, now I remember, it all just came back to me… But then, if he had any decency at all, he’d stop because he wouldn’t want to embarrass Burr. Maybe not, though, that might just be exactly what Jamie Rouillard would do.

  So, Burr got to his feet, his eyes blinking rapidly, seized with a fight or flight moment. “’Scuse me, gotta hit the head.”

  Two minutes later, he was unlocking the bike which he had chained to a tree near the Publix parking lot. He definitely hadn’t wanted Bibi and Candace to see him pull up on the broken-down Schwinn with a slow-leaking rear tire.

  SIX

  But before he bolted from LoLa, he’d gone up to the hostess and asked, “Can I ask you a big favor?”

  “Sure,” she said, “what do you need?”

  “The table over in the corner with the blonde woman wearing blue glasses—”

  “Yes, I know who you mean.”

  “In five minutes, can you give her this.” He handed the hostess a hundred-dollar bill. “Just tell her I got a call and had to leave unexpectedly. Name is Max.”

  “Sure, no problem,” she said. “Have a nice night, Max.”

  It was less about him paying his share and more about affecting what Bibi and Candace would think of him after he bolted. He wanted to leave a favorable impression of himself in the women’s eyes, though he was not quite sure why or what difference it made. It was not like he was ever going to be calling either one up and asking them out on a date.

  *****

  The hostess stopped by the corner table and held out the hundred-dollar bill to Bibi. “A man named Max asked me to give this to you. Said he got a call and had to leave unexpectedly.”

  Bibi took the money. “That was very generous, but that man is a little strange,” she said, and then to the hostess, “Thank you.”

  Jamie Rouillard had now remembered. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said, “about your friend Max.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Candace.

  “It all just came back to me. First of all, I don’t think his last name is Burton. And I am absolutely sure he did go to Deerfield.”

  “But why would he lie about his name and about not going to school there?” Bibi asked.

  “I’ve got a pretty good guess,” Rouillard said, putting down his wine glass. “So, as he said, he used to have a house down here, and one up in Southport. The one in Southport was right on the sound. You know, a really nice house on the water with an amazing view. Plus, a nice fat stock portfolio, I heard.”

  “Why do I know this doesn’t end well?” Bibi said.

  Rouillard nodded. “So then, you’ll excuse the expression, the shit hit the fan. First of all, the portfolio was with Bernie Madoff.”

  Bibi’s eyes bugged out. “Oh, my God, you’re kidding. Didn’t he just die…in prison, maybe?”

  “Yup, not too long ago. So that Madoff fiasco was back in….um, 2011, I’m pretty sure. But poor old Max had a double whammy.”

  “Oh God, what else?” Bibi asked.

  “He had a good run investing in expensive real estate in Palm Beach. He’d buy houses, fix ’em up and sell ’em for a tidy profit—”

  “Oh yeah, he mentioned that,” Bibi said. “Sounded like he was still doing that?”

  Rouillard shook his head emphatically. “No way. He got killed back in—whenever it was…2009, 2010—the Great Recession. Except for him it was the great bankruptcy. I heard he had like five or six, um, ten-million-dollar houses he got stuck with. Couldn’t unload any of ’em.”

  Seth nodded. “Yeah, there was a time back then when you couldn’t give ’em away, I remember,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Rouillard said. “So, he lost his shirt. I mean everything. Ended up selling them for distressed prices. Or a couple of them, I think the bank actually foreclosed on ’em. Meanwhile, he was leveraged to the hilt. Ended up losing both his houses, virtually penniless…but the worst part was…”

  Which was when an old college friend of Candace’s stopped by their table, interrupting the conversation.

  “Candace Bishop? Is that you?” the woman said, amped up.

  “Oh, my God, Jennie?” Candace said. “It’s me all right, but the last name is Hartson now. I had a marriage we won’t talk about. What have you been up to for the last…fifteen years?”

  “Twenty, but who’s counting.”

  And they never got around to the end of Jamie Rouillard’s story.

  SEVEN

  It was nine o’clock at night the day after the Norweb homicide, and Crawford and Ott were in Crawford’s office, discussing their next moves. The furniture and office itself were a far cry from Palm Beach chic. Ott had just hoisted his size eight and a half Skechers up onto Crawford’s desk.

  Next to his partner, Ott was shorter by seven inches, rounder by four belt sizes, older by thirteen years, and balding. An easy man to underestimate. That would be a huge mistake, however, because at fifty-three, Ott could bench press his weight, outrun Crawford, and outthink any Florida mutt, miscreant, or outlaw out there.

  He was fully recovered now from gunshot wounds that had put him in Good Samaritan Hospital six months back and was ready and eager to take down Harley Norweb’s killer.

  Crawford and Ott had gone back to the basics of police work earlier in the day, going through sheets of convicted felons who had been soldiers in either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. There were a good-sized number of sheets of convicted felons from those wars, but they were only concentrating—at this stage anyway—on ones who had been convicted of violent crimes. Assault, homicide, manslaughter, and rape being ones that were of particular interest. They had come up with only three candidates so far. They figured they could always expand their list if those three went nowhere. One man had been convicted of manslaughter and had spent fourteen years at Raiford Prison and sounded like a real hard case. The second was a man who had been convicted of a series of rapes in the Miami area. And the third had been convicted of multiple assault charges stemming from robberies of convenience stores and gas stations in the West Palm Beach area. They were able to track down the parole officer of the one who did time at Raiford and actually got a phone number for the robber, but so far had nothing on the rapist in Miami.

  Ott had commented that these crimes were far different than the sniper murder of Norweb, and he wasn’t seeing a connection. Crawford agreed but said they had to start somewhere.

  The parole officer called them back with a number for the man convicted of manslaughter and said he was a career criminal living in a shabby motel in Boynton Beach, a town or two to the south of West Palm.

  Then Crawford and Ott split up to make calls. Ott went back to his cubicle.

  Crawford dialed the man convicted of manslaughter and a raspy voice answered. “Yeah?”

  “Clyde Smith?”

  “Who’s askin’?”

  Crawford hated conversations that started out like this. Like the guy had to prove he was a tough guy.

  “I’m a homicide detective in West Palm, and I got some questions for you.”

  “Jesus, man, at nine at night? Okay, I got no secrets from the po-lice.” It was ham-handed sarcasm.

  “Where were you around five o’clock yesterday?”

  “On a boat. Fishin’.”

  “Where were you fishing?”

  “Out in the ocean.”

  “Yeah,” Crawford said testily, “where out in the ocean?”

  “Went out of this marina in Hypoluxo. I don’t know exactly where in the ocean.”

  “Who was with you?”

  “A couple of buddies of mine and the captain, one of ’em’s brother.”

  “And you were out there from when to when?”

  “About four, no, three-thirty, ’til it got dark.”

  “Gimme the names of the others. Phone numbers, too.”

  “You don’t believe me, Detective?”

  Crawford started to groan but opted for light sarcasm of his own. “Of course I do. You have such a sterling record.”

  It took a minute or two, but Smith gave him four names and four numbers that he dug out of his cell phone.

  “What did you catch?” Crawford asked.

  “A swordfish and three wahoos.”

  Crawford was taking notes on his iPad.

 

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