Madness Under the Royal Palms (25 page)

Mark and Bryan were not going to squander their years dancing the stilted social dance of the island. They were bemused by the thank-you notes they were constantly receiving after their parties from those with approved island manners. It was a pain dealing with a mailbox full of these things as stiff as cardboard, but the weirdest part was the notes themselves. “People take their pen and slash their name,” Mark said as if describing the custom of an exotic lost tribe. “Do you know why they do that? You slash your name out on the card and then write a note. Why the hell do that? It’s some old WASP rule.”

Mark knew that when they were through slashing a line above their name on thank-you cards, it came down to money, and money was Mark’s game. The ostentatious display of wealth is not merely a frivolous indulgence but a means of social intimidation and control, but how does one impress? The Windsors’ friendships can be purchased for cash on the barrel head, and the streets are full of ersatz counts and princes, titles made up or bought or largely meaningless. Two of the leading socialites are beer princesses, wearing the tiaras of former Miss Rheingolds. Worth Avenue is full of luxury goods to set one apart and above, but most of it is either counterfeited or bought for a pittance at Off 5th and other outlet stores. Even before the wearer has worn her stunning new Versace to the Red Cross Ball, it has been copied in Shanghai and is on sale in America.

The endless Bentleys outside the Trump International Golf Course look as distinctive as a parking lot full of Hyundai Accents and Honda Civics. In Palm Beach the Everglades and B&T have lost much of their ultimate status and no longer define social success. And what is first class when the retired druggist next to you has traded in frequent flyer mileage for his seat?

Private jets are the best defining distinction left, not time sharing, not piddling planes, but jets big enough for a mogul and his entourage, and the general aviation building at Palm Beach International Airport is the new Everglades Club. Mark and Bryan travel in their own Bombardier Challenger 300, a midsize jet able to fly to Europe, and they are intimately familiar with the denizens of general aviation.

“In the gay world, it doesn’t make any difference—WASP, Jew, social background,” Mark says, choosing his words carefully. “But there is absolutely rank and prestige assigned to someone’s perceived financial wherewithal. I don’t know if I’m right or not, but I’ve heard people say that Bryan and I run around with sort of the A-crowd gay people.”

J
AMES
“J
IMMY
” B
ARKER IS
eighty years old, and is an emissary from a world in Palm Beach that has almost disappeared. He lives in the middle of town in a modest, nondescript two-story wooden house built in 1936. A stroller could walk by a thousand times without even noticing the 5,600-square-foot home nestled back among far more imposing residences.

Jimmy and his longtime partner, Kenneth W. Douglas Jr., purchased the house in 1973 when he was running his eponymously named art gallery on Worth Avenue. The James Hunt Barker Galleries did not feature the marquee names of international art, but an eclectic collection largely of American artists. Jimmy was an unpretentious man who did not make searing intellectual commentaries on the art that he sold. He had a cocktail party every week where his friends in the room met his friends on the walls. It was the place to be, a congenial, happy crowd with the ubiquitous Jimmy introducing people and helping to pass drinks.

Many of the paintings in the gallery ended up on the walls of Jimmy’s house. He had a large collection of paintings by his lifelong friend the late Channing Hare, including three portraits of Jimmy as a young man, elegantly stylish and lean, a
Town & Country
gentleman. There were valuable paintings as well by Eastman Johnson, the nineteenth-century portraitist whose subjects ranged from Abraham Lincoln to cranberry pickers and Indians. Jimmy was not an abstract man, so there was no abstract art in what was a treasure of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century portraiture.

Some of the displayed china had been in the Andrew Jackson White House and there was silverware that was at least as old. The furnishings ranged from antiques to bric-a-brac, and included an armchair upholstered in silk and a brocade divan. There was a virtual kennel of over a hundred porcelain Staffordshire Cavalier King Charles spaniels. It had been Jimmy’s mother’s favorite dog, and it had become his as well. No interior decorator would have laid claim to such a hopeless mishmash of styles and tastes, but if one set aside conventional judgment, it worked brilliantly and was a stunning signature marking the life and artistic loves of James “Jimmy” Barker.

Jimmy grew up on a Kentucky tobacco farm run by his formidable divorced mother. The Barkers were either land poor or land rich, however one chose to see it. They had the lifestyle of the aristocracy without the money. He had not been brought up in a great antebellum mansion, but on a working farm. There was a cook in the kitchen, jackets mandatory for dinner, and public school during the day. He went to the University of Kentucky, not Princeton. He had the easy manners and confidence that come only with generations of wealth and are far more difficult to acquire than money. When he went to New York in the fifties, he hobnobbed with the Whitneys and other elite families. For him, life shone brightest among the wealthy.

Jimmy came down to Palm Beach in 1961 to be the assistant manager of the Palm Beach Art Gallery, then the only gallery on Worth Avenue. He spent the summers in another gallery on Nantucket, but he never truly left Palm Beach. By the time he had started his own gallery, he had already become what is often called a character. Palm Beach used to have any number of idiosyncratic individualists who survived and prospered in the rarefied hothouse of the island, where the broader world would have smothered them.

Jimmy loved Staffordshire Cavalier King Charles spaniels so much that at one time he had sixteen of them, six beyond the liberal limit set by a dog-loving town council. Jimmy was so beloved that the elected officials were reluctant to punish him. One council member offered to help by taking one of the dogs. In the end, Jimmy whittled it down to only two spaniels, Holly Golightly and Annabel Lee.

Jimmy has a generous character, and years ago had taken into his house sixty-five-year-old James Heyman. The man was what people called slow, but if you took time with him, he was a pleasure to have around, and helpful too. Every morning Heyman ate a late breakfast of eggs and toast with his patron.

I had talked to a number of gay men of Jimmy’s age, and the conversation was almost always difficult. I took one man to lunch who also lived most of his adult life in Palm Beach. He is one of the best-known walkers, and in the last years of his life is still deeply in the closet, imprisoned in an image that he finds necessary to project. On another occasion I had lunch with a man on his yacht. He had just moved to Palm Beach and appeared to be in his late fifties. He had been married twice, had several children, and for the first time in his life was acknowledging his homosexuality. He was leading a schizophrenic life, escorting ladies to the Everglades and also hanging out with the gay elite of the island, the latter more pleasurable than the former. He was trying to have it both ways, and he had not yet realized the impossibility. We ate lobster salad served by his chef, and drank a bottle of chilled chablis, but never once in our two hours together did we discuss what was the most important fact in his life.

I felt comfortable asking Jimmy about his sexuality. He was a wry, elfin figure of a man, far younger in spirit than his eight decades. The fact that he was gay seemed less a statement of his sexuality than a unique addition to his personality. It was as if he had tried all the categories in which humanity encased itself, and decided he would wear this one. When I asked him about being gay on the island, he acted as if was a strange question.

“Well, you know, most artists have a tendency to live in a way that the family people don’t approve of,” he laughed, his words rushing out of him in a torrent. “Living in resort areas like here and Nantucket and coming from a horsey family in Lexington, it’s not something one thinks about. Most people dealing with the art world don’t care. It’s just not a question that I can answer for you, because I’ve never really paid any attention to it.”

In some people I would have considered such an answer a pathetic evasion, but I did not feel that way with Jimmy. “The difference from your era is that there’s an open gay world here now,” I insisted.

“Is there?” he asked incredulously, as if I was suggesting his life had been less than open. “See, I don’t know who they are. There is a thing of mending it together in all sorts of ways, but I don’t really know what you mean when you say it’s more open. I think it’s more publicly used as something to cause people to pay attention. You know, any time you talk about sex, everybody sits up and takes an interest, but in polite circles, you don’t spend a lot of time discussing it.”

And that was the end of that discussion.

R
ose Keller’s death, Fred’s arrest for her murder, and his plea of innocence were front-page news for days in the
Palm Beach Daily News.
The opinion of many men seemed to be that Rose had gotten what she deserved. No one wanted her dead, but it was unthinkable that this German gold digger should, after ten years of marriage, walk away with half of the wealth that her husband had taken a lifetime to accumulate. Others blamed Judge Kroll for her outrageous decision, and thought that if anyone should be sitting out in the Palm Beach County Detention Center, it should be the judge. When the first trial ended in a hung jury in 2005, with the majority for conviction, there were those who thought that Fred would end up beating the charge.

The court ruled that Rose’s estate had a right to half of the Keller Trust properties; her will gave 70 percent of her estate to young Fred, and 30 percent to the Keils. And thus the great struggle was over Fred’s 50 percent. How much of that fifty million dollars would go to Wolfgang in his wrongful injury suit? How much would go to Wolfgang and the other Keils in Rose’s unlawful death suit? And how much would go to young Fred, either as the result of his suit against his father, or in his father’s will? And how much would go to the lawyers?

By early 2007, these lawyers were involved with at least eleven civil cases pending in the Florida courts and still more to come, in what Judge Kroll described as “the messiest case the court has ever seen…Sadly the person who will lose the most at this point is the couple’s only child, the most precious asset of this marriage.”

Almost from the day he arrived in county jail, Fred began writing weekly letters to his son that were redacted by the boy’s therapist and then read to young Fred. Fredchen listened to the letters, but he did not reply. This was in part because immediately after Rose’s death, his aunt Angie informed the eight-year-old boy that Fred had murdered his mother. The following day, she brought the boy to the office of Dr. Nicholas S. Aradi, a marriage and family therapist who became in essence the Keil family counselor. Unbeknownst to Fred, he had been treating Rose during the divorce. He was also seeing Angie, who took custody of Fredchen, and would later see Wolfgang, in addition to the weekly session with young Fred.

In his sessions with the family therapist, Fredchen expressed a profoundly conflicted love for his father tainted with sadness, anger, and hate. He missed his mother in ways that he could not even begin to articulate, and he wanted his father to be punished for the terrible thing he had been told he had done, and yet he loved and needed his father. In wanting Fred hurt, he was hurting himself. He was torn apart, and the way to survive was not to feel. One way not to feel was not to see his father.

During Keller’s second murder trial in January 2007, I often sat looking at Fred and wondering what lay behind that impassive, unemotional countenance. As far as I was concerned, he might win the verdict, but he had already lost in human terms. Like his brother Paul, Fred’s second son, Eric, had died of cancer while Fred was in jail, and all he had left of immediate family was a young son who refused to see him and a stepson who hated him. And he had no one in the courtroom to offer him emotional support, no adult son, no daughters-in-law, no former lovers, no business colleagues, no subordinates, nobody. Occasionally two of Fred’s tennis-playing acquaintances showed up separately. They twisted and turned in their seats, and usually were gone after no more than a half hour. It was as devastating testimony about Fred’s life as anything presented in the courtroom.

Douglas Duncan, who had led his defense in 2005, stayed on for the second trial, bringing with him his partner, David Roth. Forensic experts and other minor witnesses appeared for both sides, but it came down largely to the testimony of Wolfgang and Fred, the only two living people who knew what happened in that office at Keller Trust on November 10, 2003.

Wolfgang sat in the witness chair, the lines on his pallid countenance far outstripping his age, deep-set small eyes overshadowed by his thick eyebrows. Rose’s brother did not so much sit as slouch, as if the burden of holding himself up erect was too much for him. He was over six feet tall, but his posture was so bad that he seemed much shorter, and he had gained about thirty pounds since the shooting. He leaned back in apparent agony even to the most benign of questions, then answered in a thin voice barely audible without the microphone.

In words devoid of affect, Wolfgang described how on the morning of the shooting, Rose and he had sat behind a table with Fred across from them. As Wolfgang sat down, he took out his cell phone and placed it on the table. He said that Fred asked that they close the door, and the three of them began discussing splitting up the business. The discussions had hardly begun when Fred turned and walked back a few feet to where his briefcase was resting under a table.

As Wolfgang told his story, he largely controlled his emotions, until Assistant State Attorney Andrew Slater displayed a large photograph of Rose lying in a pool of blood. Then Wolfgang began to cry almost inaudibly, holding his right hand over his stomach.

“I thought he [Fred] was going to get some more papers from out of his bag,” Wolfgang said. “The next thing I know I hear a bang and smell gun powder and I have excruciating pain in my chest. I look down and see him. The pain was going through my chest like a hot piece of iron, and I look up and he is coming forward with a gun in his hand.”

As Wolfgang retold the story, his mother, Brigitte, and sister Angie sat in the front row of the courtroom as far from the defense table as physically possible. Brigitte leaned forward in her seat as if trying to reach out to comfort her son in his agony.

“He was firing at Rose and I was screaming in shock,” Wolfgang went on. “As soon as he shot me, Rose screamed and jumped out of her chair and tried to get out and he took a shot at her. I turned out of my chair. I tried to grab the gun. He held on to the gun, and I had my hand over his hand. I was hit, but I didn’t pay attention. I just wanted to get the gun away from him. I grabbed the gun by the barrel and we were pulling and pushing. We bumped into some stuff and we ended up on the sofa. I was looking into his face and he had this mean look in his eyes. I was thinking, ‘I’m going to die, I’m dying today, I can’t believe it’s happening.’”

“How long did it take you to struggle for the gun with the defendant on the couch?” the prosecutor asked.

“Just a few seconds,” Wolfgang said, anguished. “I kind of pushed him on the sofa on his back. I twisted and pulled the gun at the same time, and now I had the gun. He slipped off the sofa. I got off the sofa and was standing and I pointed the gun at him, he tried to grab for it, and I took a shot at him. I was thinking that was the only way to survive, but I was in so much pain, I thought I was going to die that day. I looked over at my sister and saw her bleeding right out of her neck. I kneeled down next to her and I put the gun to the right of her and I tried to hold the blood in her with both my hands around her neck. I said ‘Rose, Rose’ but she didn’t react anymore.”

“What did you to do?” Slater asked.

“Almost to the left there’s a desk where the secretary works, and I picked up the phone and called 911.”

The jury had already heard the 911 tape, its words and emotions resonating with everything Wolfgang had just said. “Fred Keller shot me,” he said moments after he was shot, his voice trembling with emotion, almost hyperventilating. A few minutes later he added, “He shot my sister too.”

The testimony had been going on for an emotional eternity, and Judge Edward Garrison called a break. All through this overwhelmingly dramatic testimony, Fred sat looking at his yellow legal pad, making notes and showing not a glimmer of emotion, though his attorney Duncan kept clutching his hands together, looking as if he were about to explode with tension.

As soon as the jury stepped out into the jury room, Wolfgang walked with painful steps over to his mother and sister. Angie hugged her brother and rubbed his back. His mother came to his other side, and Wolfgang sobbed inconsolably. If agony is the one costume the truth always wears, Wolfgang seemed to have spoken the truth. If he had lied in this courtroom and in his 911 call, it was a lie of such proportion that he was a man of evil beyond even the magnitude of this crime.

After Wolfgang’s testimony, I walked out of the courtroom and saw him sitting by himself in the corridor on a bench that looked out through immense picture windows on a panoramic view of the Palm Beach that had been the island of Wolfgang’s dreams as much as it had been his sister’s. I went over and talked to him for a while. Wolfgang was hardly more than a teenager when he arrived to go to college. He thought he was beginning what would be a life of affluence and privilege beyond anything he had ever seen or contemplated. Now it had come to this, his nights punctuated with nightmares, his days full of fears and paranoia. He worried that Fred might hire someone to kill him, to finish off the job he had begun, and he wanted Fred locked away forever. He wanted money too, lots of it, because that was all that was left. His pleasures had been emptied out like a reservoir drained of water. He was in his mid-thirties, but he was in some ways an old man, suffering from what he said was almost constant pain, his athletic pursuits finished, haunted by his sister’s death.

T
HE SECOND CRUCIAL MOMENT
in the trial came when Fred testified during the defense’s two-day presentation of its case. Fred spoke softly in hardly more than a whisper, pressing hard on each syllable but barely audible, as if he were telling secrets that he wanted no one to hear. He wore a blue sports jacket, a light blue shirt, and gold-tinged glasses that reflected the afternoon sunlight. His lips were clenched so tightly it was as if he had only one thin lip. The downturned cast of his frown lines was not quite covered by his trim gray beard. He looked straight at the jury, but it seemed not a mark of character as much as something that his defense attorneys had told him he should do.

Fred spoke in a pained voice, as if to make every word a vehicle to pronounce the unfairness of his situation. Through the careful prodding of his attorney Duncan, Fred portrayed himself as a generous, caring man who, to please his wife, brought over her entire family to America and gave them lives of affluence and possibility.

Fred described Rose as a woman who, during the years of their marriage, had nothing to do with his business except spending its profits. She was so out of control that even after winning her extraordinary financial victory, she threatened to kill Fred and everyone in his office. That was the reason Fred had faxed the Riviera Beach police to alert them of this threat, and the reason he was carrying a gun in his briefcase when he had his meeting with Rose and Wolfgang.

As Fred recollected that fateful morning, his testimony of the casual discussion in the office with Rose and Wolfgang did not differ much from what Wolfgang had said. The main difference was that Fred said that he was nervous when Rose shut the door.

“At one point when you were discussing, did you see Wolfgang do something?” Duncan asked.

“He was sitting there and he had what I saw was a gun in his hand with a barrel on it pointing at me. I said, ‘He’s going to shoot me. He’s going to shoot me.’ Wolfgang would do anything for Rose. He had the ability, he had done target practice, and he would do something like that if Rose wanted.”

(The supposed gun that Fred said he had seen was Wolfgang’s cell phone. Even if Wolfgang had pulled the phone off his belt clip at that precise moment, it was almost unthinkable that he would have pointed the black instrument at Fred with the antenna like the barrel of a gun.)

“What did you do?” Duncan asked gently.

“I was cornered,” Fred continued. “I was scared. I had never had a gun pointed at me my whole life. I couldn’t get out. I didn’t know if Rose had a gun or not. I turned around with my back to him so he would have to shoot me in the back. I went over to my briefcase and got the gun out and turned around and shot him. I fired one shot at him, not to kill him, to disable him from shooting me.”

“After you shot Wolfgang, what happened?” Duncan continued his gentle questioning.

“He got up and charged me,” Fred said as if his former brother-in-law had acted with mindless aggressiveness. “I thought I had to get away, he’s charging me like he’s going to knock me down. And I shot him again. I was concerned about dying. He’s up on top of me and grabs the gun out of my hand and points it at me and I’m shoving the gun away from me so he can’t shoot me. A shot gets fired and we end up on the sofa. I try to prevent him from shooting me in the head. He shot me behind the ear and I passed out.

“I regained consciousness and saw Rose lying there on the floor. I did not see Wolfgang. The door was opened. I cried for help, help, help and ran out and went to the front door and Wolfgang was sitting in a chair talking on the phone and a gun was on the desk, and I thought, ‘I got to get out of here.’”

T
HE JURY BEGAN THEIR
deliberations late in the afternoon. When they reached their unanimous verdict after only five and a half hours, defense attorney Duncan knew what they were going to say. So did Fred, usually the perennial optimist. He stood between Duncan and Roth in a gray sports coat and open shirt and heard the verdict. Nearby stood half a dozen sheriff deputies.

Fred was found guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and shooting in a building. It was not until a day later back in his cellblock that he realized the magnitude of what had happened, and for a few days collapsed into abject despair.