White Hot

Frank just scowled, and Jeremiah, who prided himself on knowing when a well was dry, headed back to the hospital. He barely noticed the crush of snowbirds out enjoying the perfect winter day, just drove the winding, pretty streets of Palm Beach with his mind focused on the task at hand. Croc, jewels, Mollie. The lies Croc had told him, the dozen different ways Mollie might fit into them. He didn’t speculate, didn’t let his thoughts get ahead of him, just articulated the questions and the facts with cold precision.

He was walking past the information desk when he heard a hoarse, familiar voice. “Tabak—thank God.” He turned, and there was Helen Samuel in a pink ladies-who-lunch suit that made her look like a wizened Loretta Young. He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen her outside of the Miami Tribune building, maybe not even in the parking lot. She grinned at him. “They won’t let me smoke in here. Nazis. Two more minutes and I’m having a seizure.”

“What’re you going to do when you get sick, Helen?”

“I’m never getting sick. I’m going to fall over dead at my goddamned computer, you wait and see. If I don’t, drag my ass out of the hospital, sit me at my desk, and put a bullet in my head. Okay? You’ll do that for me?”

He frowned at her. “You have been without nicotine too long.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Look, I heard about Weasel getting beat up—”

“Croc.”

“What?”

“His nickname’s Croc, not Weasel.”

“Oh. I knew it was some disgusting animal. Well, I figured maybe there’s a connection—maybe not, either—but you could look into it—” She made a face. “Damnit, I’m not making any sense. What’s one goddamned cigarette? You think the building’d blow?”

Fatigue gnawed at Jeremiah. “Look into what, Helen?”

She straightened, focusing. “Michael and Bobbi Tiernay have two sons. This is widely known but not widely discussed. Deegan, the younger son, is at school down here, interning for your Mollie Lavender as a thumb in his old man’s eye—or maybe his mother’s, or his grandmother’s, or the whole damned family’s. It’s hard to say because they’re the stiff-upper-lip type, and because they know how to do spin control better than most. The older son is Kermit. He’s twenty-two. He flunked out of Harvard after his freshman year. He went in as a top student, but he flipped out after he got his first C, then couldn’t pull it together, and next thing, he’s back home in Palm Beach.”

“Jesus, Helen, you think—”

She silenced him with a look. “So his family tells him to sink or swim. It’s some weird, warped tough-love thing, I guess. Anyway, he takes off, disappears, there are rumors of substance abuse and general rebelliousness. They figure he’s in Colorado or someplace and go on with their lives, making it clear they do not wish to discuss their number one son.”

Jeremiah couldn’t speak. He stared at Helen, knowing she wouldn’t have dragged herself to a West Palm Beach hospital to give him rumors and innuendo. What she had was solid or she’d have kept it to herself. She certainly wouldn’t have gone without a cigarette for this long.

Croc was Michael and Bobbi Tiernay’s son?

“I’ve got his high school graduation picture somewhere.” She dug in handbag, circa 1980, and produced a black-and-white photo cut out of a high school yearbook or newspaper. “He went to private school. Apparently he was quite the egghead.”

It was Croc. Younger, cleaner, meatier, more optimistic, less world-weary. He probably hadn’t slathered his french fries in ketchup in those days, or bussed tables and detailed cars for a living.

Then Helen said, “I think he came into his Atwood trust fund when he turned twenty-one. Nothing the family could do about it.”

“That would be a lot of money?”

Helen grinned. “For an investigative reporter, you can be so naive about some things. Yeah, it’s a goddamned lot of money. I don’t know, Tabak,” she said, going philosophical on him, “where love and support and respect stop and enabling begins—well, I never had kids. Thank God, because I’d have messed it up.”

“Why?”

“The job. You know it as well as I do.” She shook off the attack of introspection. “Okay, so I’ve given you what I’ve got. I wished I’d put it together sooner, but there it is.”

“It was there for me to see, too. I just needed to do the legwork.”

“Yeah, well, the kid’s a friend, right?”

Jeremiah stared at her.

She sighed, nodding with understanding. “Happens to the best of us, Tabak. I’ve got some snooping I might as well do while I’m up here. A society columnist never sleeps. Plus, I need a freaking cigarette or I’m going to start foaming at the mouth.”

“Thanks for the tip, Helen,” Jeremiah said, his voice flat, his senses dulled.

“No problem. Get your head around this one, Tabak. That little shit’s been lying to you from the get-go. You know, this is going to leak out. The long-lost Kermit Tiernay, heir to the Atwood fortune, son of Michael and Bobbi. You’d better decide where you want to be standing when the poo-poo hits the fan.”

She strutted out, and Jeremiah made his way blindly to the elevators. If Croc could turn out to be a rich ne’er-do-well, he supposed he could end up a Helen Samuel in another thirty years. He shuddered at the thought.