Madness Under the Royal Palms by Laurence Leamer Page B

was not a servant to be sent off with a tip. They were pawning him off with a cheap brass trinket because they thought he would not know the difference. They had destroyed his love for his wife. He might kiss her good-bye and tell her he loved her, but the words meant nothing. When he looked at Vera, he no longer saw the woman he thought he had married, but a deceiver like all the others. “I always thought women were angels,” he said. “I didn’t know they were little snakes who crawl up on you and eat you alive.”
    This was the man who would be there when Vera returned after her ladies’ luncheon. Eddy had turned away from her over money, and his disavowal would have made any woman wonder if he had truly loved her at all, or if it had been merely a scheme to win access to her fortune. With the love gone, or at least roundly deflated, all that was left standing angrily before her was a bold, thwarted mercenary. It was devastating to Vera, but she was a woman who for nearly eight decades had prepared a public face to meet the day, and she gave little evidence of her own pain.
    The fact that Vera could barely see out of her left eye did not bother her most of the time, but of course it affected her driving. Looking ahead, she could see the Colony Hotel and the business area where she would be meeting her friends. She would have been there in a minute, if not for the vehicle in front of her, a delivery truck from Green’s Drug Store.
    There were often slow-moving vehicles on the road, usually rubbernecking tourists looking at the mansions, and even though there was a broken double line, few drivers were tempted to pass. But Vera’s friends were waiting for her. As she sped up to pass the truck, the driver turned left into a driveway. Swerving to avoid the delivery vehicle, Vera crashed into one of the few walls along a road lined with shrubs. She was cut out of the twisted wreckage and flown by helicopter across the Intracoastal Waterway to Good Samaritan Hospital.
     
     
    W HEN V ERA’S SON J AMES arrived at Good Samaritan Hospital, he went in to see his mother alone. Her wounds would heal, but she believed her beauty was ruined and her marriage was dead too. “I want the pills, Jimmy,” she said. “I’d rather commit suicide than live as a crippled old lady.”
    Jim had long ago discussed death and decline with his mother. He had no philosophical or religious reason to deny her the pills; indeed, just the opposite. But he was tasked with looking over the family fortune, and he felt he could not foster an act that would bring him millions of dollars. And so he spurned her request. It hardly mattered, for within hours Vera was gone.
     
     
    E DDY HAD NOT INHERITED the fortune he thought he deserved, but he was a wealthy man and he lived like one. He had a white Rolls-Royce, a red Ferrari, a splendid home, a firm stomach, and insatiable appetites. He was often out prowling the byways in search of pleasure. He had been married to a woman three decades his senior, and now he slept with women decades his junior.
    Eddy had agreed to be the civilian chaplain for the Palm Beach chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, and at the monthly meeting, he said the prayers before dinner. It was a motley group including some who considered it a cheap insurance policy in case they got in trouble with the police; none stranger than the Lebanese American chaplain mumbling the prayers.
    One evening Eddy drove to Boca Raton in his red Ferrari to a party with Meaghan Karland, * a witty and provocative woman around town. Meaghan had known Eddy platonically for years, and she was startled when, during dinner, he took her hand and started moving it toward his groin. “Oh please,” she begged, as Eddy pushed her hand against his crotch.
    “Well, what do you think?” Eddy asked.
    “Well, it’s certainly hard,” the woman said, not knowing what answer was expected of her.
    “Let me show you,” Eddy said, upzipping his pants and