Palm Beach Nasty by Tom Turner Read Free Book Online Page B

was a very good question. Cynthia said how Broberg told Spencer Robertson all about it, and that Robertson was so furious he basically told the kid to stay away.
    “When was this?” Nick asked her.
    “What?”
    He was ready to mainline espresso into her.
    “The grandson incident, at the Poinciana?”
    She yawned. “Umm, ten . . . twelve years ago.”
    Avery Robertson would be about Nick’s age. The light bulb clicked on again.
    Cynthia kept jabbering about how Paul Broberg got all wound up and launched into another tirade about “entitled brat” this and “little bastard” that. Cynthia said she felt like she was not only being blamed for the kid’s self-indulgent spending spree, but also his whole reckless, misspent youth. In the course of his diatribe, Broberg mentioned that Avery was an orphan. Something horrible had happened to his parents, Broberg intimated. Cynthia didn’t dare ask what.
    Nick was hanging on to her every drunken word.
    Cynthia’s story about Avery Robertson catapulted Nick back to his childhood in Mineola, New York, a downwardly mobile Long Island suburb of New York City. His childhood was a cliché in many ways. His father was an abusive bully who used to work for Grumman, then when it closed down, had a series of dead-end jobs. The one constant in Sid Gonczik’s life was his daily twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. It brought out the cruel tormentor in him, which was bad news for everyone in the immediate vicinity. That usually meant Nick and his mother. When Nick turned seventeen and got up to 185 pounds, he decided not to take it anymore. One day his father came at him and Nick beat him unconscious with a brass fire poker. He had to be restrained by his mother or he might have killed him.
    Nick had no remorse. After that, his father kept his distance and never laid a hand on him or his mother either. Then later that year, October of Nick’s senior year in high school, Sid Gonczik went off to the hardware store one morning and never came back. Neither Nick nor his mother was heartbroken. In fact, they never even mentioned him again.

    T HE MORNING after Cynthia got close to setting the record for Bahama Blast consumption, Nick called her up. He pictured her with an ice bag on her head, sucking down glass after glass of Tropicana. He asked her what movie she wanted to see. Some really lame chick flick, of course.
    He had spent several hours after he went home from Viggo’s that night, working on a plan about how to mine the Spencer Robertson mother lode. He rejected several ideas and finally came up with one that he thought had merit, though it was still a long way from being fully developed. At its most basic, it was simply to gain entry into Robertson’s house. Not to clean out the silverware or make off with a couple flat screens, but just to get the lay of the land. See if he could somehow figure out a way to separate a few million from the second richest man in Palm Beach. He knew there had to be a way, some angle to work, especially since the man was way down the Alzheimer’s highway. Surely, once he got inside, Nick could figure out how to divert a sizable chunk of Robertson cash into his pathetically anemic bank account. What made him practically salivate was the fact that, according to Cynthia, aside from some older guy who took care of Robertson and maybe a cook, nobody was minding the store.
    Nick knew he’d have to keep an eye out for Paul Broberg, the old man’s executor, but except for him it seemed like the place would be easy pickings.
    He had already forgotten what movie Cynthia said she wanted to see, and steered the conversation back to where he wanted it.
    “You know, I got thinking last night,” Nick said. “I didn’t put it together, but Avery Robertson . . . he’d be about my age, right?”
    Cynthia thought for a second.
    “Yes, probably, around twenty-six, twenty-seven. Why?”
    Nick laughed. “Because I knew a guy by that name up in New York. A real