Free Palm Beach Nasty by Tom Turner Page B

studied it. But it was. Even an art history minor from Hofstra University could recognize it. A large Edward Hopper painting of a house on a dune was hanging crookedly on the far dark wall.
    Nick was finally where he belonged.

    A S FAR as Spencer Robertson was concerned, Nick could have been an upright piano or a two-legged rhino. Because when the shriveled-up, bent-over man first saw him, he greeted Nick with a frail wave, then tried to pat him on the head. Haltingly, he said, “Hello, Oswald,” as Alcie suppressed a chuckle.
    “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Avery,” Alcie whispered, “he does that with everybody, gives ’em a nickname. Calls me Zapruder.”
    Right after the greeting, Robertson asked Nick to join him for a game of backgammon, although he had difficulty coming up with the name, calling it “backhammer” instead. Nick had certainly read about the game, but had no idea how to play. There were references to it in Fitzgerald and O’Hara. Nick had never even seen the board it was played on. The game wasn’t exactly a fixture in the Gonczik household.
    But it didn’t matter in the least, since Robertson didn’t seem to have much of an idea how to play anymore. Alcie told Nick he had read the rules once and knew the basics. Nick just winged it and Alcie didn’t seem to notice.
    When Nick suggested they stop playing and get something to eat, Robertson protested noisily and flapped his arms like a petulant kid, saying, “I wanna play” over and over. They played on for another forty-five minutes. Alcie seemed clearly relieved to have someone else share the burden. Once, Alcie explained, he and Spencer had had a five-hour backgammon marathon.
    Nick’s initial plan had been simply to get his hands on the old man’s checkbook and credit cards. But after having been there two days he dismissed the plan as being the thinking of a small-minded man, one utterly lacking in ambition. It was a quick fix, not a long-term, life-changing answer to his dream of becoming fabulously rich and socially prominent.
    As he had envisioned it in that plan, he probably would have been able to cash thousands of dollars of forged checks and go on a spending spree with Robertson’s credit cards. But eventually, he knew, Paul Broberg would catch up with him: spot an AmEx bill, a checking account statement, whatever, and the jig would be up.
    That plan was just penny ante anyway. After all, Broberg probably didn’t leave more than $20,000 in Robertson’s checking account. Okay, it was not a bad day’s work, but then what? He’d have to hightail it out of Dodge. Another bridge burned. And, fact was, he really liked Palm Beach. Loved it, in fact. Driving around checking out all the big, look-at-me houses. Watching everyone strut down Worth Avenue as if they were models on a runway. Nick was absolutely certain he had a future in the town. It was, after all, the perfect place to reinvent oneself. Plenty of people before him had. The stories were legend.
    He told himself again: think big. Think over-the-top, Palm Beach excessive, grandiose, big-ass big.
    As he went from one painting to the next in the old man’s collection, he began to set a new plan in motion. Because even an art history minor from a third-rate college could recognize the millions—hell, tens of millions—of paintings that hung on the swirled stucco walls of the Robertson living room and library. The Hopper was a big solitary, lonely looking house on Cape Cod. Nick remembered looking at a bunch of slides of the artist’s other paintings back in art class. He remembered how the more he looked at Hopper’s work back then, the more it tended to bum him out. Those sorry-looking losers in that all-night diner. That same old bleached-out couple in a lot of the paintings—Hopper and his wife—Nick seemed to remember, who looked like they’d rather be somewhere else with someone else. He always got the feeling Hopper might be the type of guy to take a header off