Madness Under the Royal Palms (27 page)

“Come on, Fred, you’ve got three grandkids. You’ve got your two sons’ widows and ex-wives. You’ve got your adopted son, Brian.”

“I want to give everything to my son,” Fred insisted.

“But why? I don’t understand.”

“Well, ah that’s me,” he said as if the answer should be self-evident. “That’s me.”

“These people have been problems for you, so forget it,” I replied, growing irritated with him. “That’s your attitude. They haven’t come through and given you anything good, so you aren’t going to give them anything good.”

“I’ve never taken a step back, but I think I’m doing the right thing. If I’m erring because I choose to give everything to my son, that’s my error.”

Fred was not, however, giving everything to his son without an explicit trade-off. Young Fred was to be the engine of his father’s wrath, casting away the Keils, and forcefully proclaiming Fred’s innocence to a cynical, corrupt world.

On some profound, unspoken level, the boy must have understood what the trade-off would be. It was a terrible thing to say that you never want to see your father again, a father whom you once loved. It took courage for a boy to say that—not in a guilt-ridden, half-embarrassed way, but with resolve, and that one act is the most positive sign that Fredchen might end up a young man of character and purpose.

As I look back on the thirty or so hours I spent talking with Fred, I realize that my studied empathy was a faulty technique. I was projecting myself upon Fred and looking for things that were not in him. He was an evil man, and he was no less evil because he did not understood good and evil. What he wanted he called good, and those who kept him from what he wanted, he considered evil. He was neither Adolf Hitler nor Jeffrey Dahmer, but he was a study in wickedness. His profound self-absorption and narcissism had metastasized into malevolence. Fred hoarded money because it constituted his only true sense of self-worth. To lose half his money was to lose half his being. When he went into his office that tragic morning, he probably exploded in narcissistic rage, willing to do whatever he had to do to keep himself whole.

Cutting Fred’s money in half had cut him in half. His only salvation now was to hold on to as much of that money as was left, hold on to as much of himself, and hold on to it for his son.

Fred had nothing left to live for until he heard some extraordinary news that he hoped would give his tale a proper ending. Not for him a middling foundation. Not for him parceling out his money to ingrates who unfortunately bore his name. He would not have done that anyway, but now he would have his exquisite revenge. One of his lawyers suggested to him that if he should die while his case was being appealed, then his conviction would be thrown out, and the Keils’ civil suits would shrink to almost nothing. It was sweet beyond belief. In death, Fred could have revenge that he could not have in life. He had something to live for now, or rather something to die for; so he stopped taking his pills.

In early June when Fred was taken down to the South Florida Reception Center on his way to a state prison, he was immediately transferred to the hospital. There in Miami, on August 23, 2007, he died. “It was a tragic thing to see,” reflects his civil attorney Cohn, who was at his deathbed.

Fred had died thinking that in death he had delivered his enemies the Keils a blow fatal to their aspirations of feeding off great portions of his fortune. But it turned out his lawyer had given him misinformation. Criminal verdicts are negated in federal but not in state courts, and Fred’s death changed nothing.

Fred wanted no priest or minister intoning what he considered meaningless words over his grave, and no memorial service. He wanted to be cremated and the ashes tossed to the winds. The body was brought up to a funeral home in Lake Worth, just south of Palm Beach, where Wolfgang insisted on seeing the remains. It was a mark of how complicated and conflicted Fredchen was about Fred that he also asked to see the body of a father he had not wanted to see in life. The body was cremated and the ashes secretly strewn somewhere.

Fredchen could not visit his father’s grave even if he wanted to, but he drives out with his aunt Angie to the cemetery in West Palm Beach where his mother’s body rests in a mausoleum. The boy usually sits on a fence in front of the marble vault and says that he talks to Rose. He trusts almost no one, and is afraid that his aunt Angie will die. “He holds everything in,” says Angie. “He doesn’t express his feelings. He still calls what happened ‘a thing.’ He doesn’t talk about it. Always when it is brought up, he wants to change the subject. I don’t think he has really grieved his mother’s death. He tries not to think about it. That’s what worries me, that he will eventually explode.”

All that was left of Fred was his money. All that was left was an epic legal struggle involving about twenty highly paid attorneys whose fees will probably total over twenty million dollars. Fredchen was shielded from this, but one day the richest boy in Palm Beach will learn about the millions of dollars the lawyers earned, and the struggle of the Keils for a goodly portion of his inheritance, and he will learn lessons about life and humanity that most people never learn. He will learn about his father too, and the wages of wealth.

“Fred Keller spent his whole life accumulating a fortune that gave him freedom and control, but it became only a source of evil, greed, and sorrow for everybody who touched it,” reflects Dr. Alexander. “It’s the ring in Tolkien’s trilogy. Everyone else wants it, but if you put the ring on, it destroys you.”

I
was going out to cocktail parties, dinners, and balls and often I saw Eric Purcell and Helder “Sonny” Peixoto. Eric and Sonny were inseparable, wildly appreciative of each other. They finished each other’s jokes and routines. They shared liquor and food, and if at the end of the evening they ended up foiled in their search for women, they enjoyed each other’s company so much that it hardly mattered. They reminded me of an upscale version of Georg and Yortuk Festrunk, the two wild and crazy guys played by Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live.

I was one of the few people on the island who knew about Eric’s time in prison. Since then, he had put on some weight, and dressed in clothes artfully designed to disguise the poundage. For the first time in his life, he looked like what he was: a middle-aged Palm Beach millionaire out on the prowl.

Sonny was nearly twenty years younger than Eric, and had he lost thirty pounds, the Portuguese American bon vivant would have been darkly handsome, with the smooth looks of a matinee idol. Sonny was good with young women, but he was good with practically everyone. He remembered your name the first time he heard it, and after that unfailingly came up and gave a hearty hello, with maybe a slap on the back or a firm handshake that included grasping your arm with his second hand.

Fifty-three-year-old Eric had met thirty-four-year-old Sonny at a Halloween party at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in West Palm Beach in October 2006. Eric had bought a ticket to the event, but Sonny never paid his way anywhere. He had such an authoritative manner that he could just walk into events with the most rigorous security and vetting. That was an ability that impressed, even awed Eric. Even more impressive were Sonny’s business ventures, doubly notable since it was hard to understand why a megamillionaire enjoyed sneaking into events. The supposedly wildly successful Boston entrepreneur talked about his elaborate project to build a major development in Portugal. He often called Eric from what he said was his home in Delray Beach, just south of Palm Beach, to discuss their plans for the evening.

Each man had something that the other wanted, and that brought them close together. Sonny gave Eric youth, while Eric gave Sonny sophistication. They both liked pretty young women. Sonny knew where all the parties were and how to get into them, while Eric had a Bentley and a Palm Beach address. They headed out together to the Palm Beach party world almost every evening. To some of the events, they had even been invited.

Eric was used to conning people. He did not see a con as anything despicable, but just a shrewd and necessary way to maneuver through the endless shoals of life. After a few weeks listening to Sonny’s tales, Eric realized that that was precisely what they were—tales. Sonny talked about his homes and his yacht, and most afternoons Eric drove over to West Palm Beach to pick up Sonny outside what he said was his local residence, a large house in the El Cid area, just across the Intracoastal Waterway from Palm Beach.

“Sonny, you know, I’ve been broke before, and you don’t need to bullshit me,” Eric said one day as they were driving across the middle bridge back into West Palm Beach. “I checked the records. You don’t own that house.”

“No, no, the company owns it,” Sonny replied with casual confidence.

“Why don’t you just drop all this? Because I don’t need it. I still like you, Sonny. Just drop it.”

For a while Sonny was silent, but from then on he did not run his numbers on Eric. Sonny told his friend that he had been a cop in Boston and things had gone bad.

The two men told each other about their secret lives. Stories that would have driven many people apart only brought them closer. Sonny could see how a woman could make you so mad that you flailed out at her, and how she might bludgeon you half to death with the legal system, taking your money and seven months of your life. And Eric could see that Sonny had been a tough cop beating up on the bad guys, until the system came down on him. He loved Sonny’s stories of working the Latino hood, where they called Sonny the “El Diablo Blanca” and his black partner “El Diablo Negro.” Anyway, Sonny was not just a cop. He had ambitions, and had even run twice for the city council in Cambridge. Eric could see how you could have a silly traffic accident and some old guy dies and you get blamed, and poof, there goes your career. It could happen to anybody.

The truth can be comprised of a mosaic of half-truths, and even when Sonny presented the most truthful story of his life to his compadre Eric, the details fell apart. He told Eric that he was a Boston cop, but he was a transit cop. There was nothing dishonorable about that, but it was more prestigious to say that he worked only aboveground. And he was a bad cop, not because he was overly tough and merciless to criminals, but because he was overly tough and merciless to anyone who irked him. He was a bad cop because he was bad tempered and swaggering, and used his badge as a license to do whatever he wanted. He had had at least five traffic accidents in which he was to blame, but he learned nothing.

One day in January 2003, Sonny was in uniform and was supposed to be on duty. Instead, he was roaring along in his own car at forty-five miles per hour in a thirty-mph zone when he barreled into seventy-nine-year-old John J. Todd’s Buick, killing the World War II veteran and caretaker for his disabled wife. In exchange for five years’ probation and giving up his driver’s license for ten years, Sonny pled guilty to vehicular homicide and headed south to Palm Beach County, where his brother Samuel Peixoto worked as a sheriff’s deputy.

Sonny was living largely on a few hundred dollars a month that his mother sent him from Boston. He was not staying in the main house in West Palm Beach where Eric picked him up, but in a modest rental apartment in the rear. The Louis Vuitton suits and designer tuxedo he wore he had picked up used at the Goodwill Embassy Boutique. He had no car. He had no computer. Every afternoon he went over to the boutique Hotel Biba to use their free computer to check his e-mails and learn where the party scene was that evening. Each day a coterie of bartenders, waiters, photographers, and various hangers-on passed along information.

Eric loved to go out every evening, but he was not particularly outgoing; it was Sonny who pulled it off. They attended elaborate celebrations on yachts at the town dock. They went to private dinner parties at some of the greatest homes on the island. They walked into the most exclusive balls in their tuxedos. They sought a table in the ballroom at the Breakers where they could sit down to dinner, but if they could not find two vacant seats, they had a few free drinks and then sat at one of the bars before returning after dinner to dance the evening away.

At the March of Dimes Ball at the Breakers, Sonny and Eric not only found a table, but Sonny decided to bid on one auction item: a chance to have his name as a character in the next novel by best-selling Palm Beach author James Patterson. Sonny stood up and hung in as the bidding got higher and higher, finally winning at a formidable ten thousand dollars. When a March of Dimes representative tried to collect for the winning bid as well as for the three-hundred dollar ticket to the event, Sonny grew livid, and left belligerent messages on the woman’s answering machine.

Only one other time did Eric and Sonny get caught. That was at a cocktail party at Neiman Marcus on Worth Avenue where most of the guests were far older and there were few attractive young women. Shannon was there at the department store that evening, and the society editor noticed Sonny. “Who the hell is that?” she asked one of the executives. “I don’t know,” the woman replied. “He just walked in off the street.” When approached by security, they merely sidled out of the store and moved on to the next party.

Sonny was an inordinately charming man. No one except for his brother and Eric had any idea of the darkness of his past, and Eric did not consider it dark so much as intense, fascinating, manly, and unlucky. In Palm Beach, it usually took money to become part of the public society celebrated in the Shiny Sheet, but Sonny was a regular practically from the day he arrived, usually with Eric beside him. Sonny was the facilitator. He put people and events together. He was the party man. Everyone liked getting Sonny’s calls, for there was always something happening somewhere, and he was the man who knew about it.

The two wild and crazy guys spent New Year’s Eve at the Breakers and had their pictures in the Shiny Sheet. Success played on success. There was nothing rarer than a bachelor with even a hint of youth, and Eric and Sonny were increasingly on invitation lists.

Even if Sonny had not been invited to a party, he acted so effusively that he could have been one of the hosts. At one Palm Beach gathering, he went up to a dark-haired middle-aged man dressed in the proper island sports attire and started a conversation. The good-looking man he had instantly befriended was Dr. G. Heath King, a psychoanalyst whom Eric had already gotten to know.

To King, therapy is not merely a profession but a way of seeing, and it combined philosophy, history, and literature in an eclectic manner unique to him. He is perfectly capable of interjecting into the most banal of social chitchat an insight of such savage penetration that it shatters the demeanor of the most sophisticated partygoer. One of his intellectual mentors is the dark Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who said that if one can read the language, there is great meaning in something as small and subtle as the intonation of a voice or a mere handshake.

King had a Kierkegaardian moment with Sonny. The psychoanalyst sensed that beyond the extrovert’s bluster was a needy man pathetically promiscuous in his attempts at creating friends. He was fleeing from some dark secret, and even in this artificial world, was marked by a special inauthenticity.

Sonny may not have read Kierkegaard, but he had a profound instinctive awareness of his impact on those immediately around him. He doubtless was both attracted to this man of obvious insight and frightened by him, and for both reasons sought to draw him near. He started e-mailing King to give him the one thing of value he could offer: invitations to parties to which Sonny himself might not even have been invited.

The psychoanalyst replied with the abrupt idiom of truth:

Quite frankly, I suspect you of being a con man, a dissembler who failed in politics and now lurks the courtyards of Palm Beach.

Heath

 

That was King’s entire e-mail, devastating in its brevity and accuracy. Sonny replied in a semiliterate screed full of one lie after another about his past, from deceitfully declaring that he had full disability benefits to blaming the elderly man for the automobile accident in which he died. Sonny was not confrontational, but in King’s words, “more muted and subdued, a whining, petulant plea to appease.”

King was an immensely intelligent man, but he risked enraging Sonny if he got too close to the man’s inner life. After a few exchanges, they both broke off with a conciliatory détente.

E
RIC AND
S
ONNY WERE
friends the way men often are friends—joshing, irreverent buddies. They were both drinkers, and as they wended their way from party to party, Sonny mixed drinks as if there was a rule that one could not down two of the same beverages. By midnight he was slurring his words.

Late one evening, Eric was driving Sonny back to West Palm Beach in the Bentley. Eric could tell that his friend was about to throw up.

“You know, I’m not going to live very long,” Sonny said with great seriousness.

“What are you talking about?” Eric replied, nonplussed at his friend’s morbid musings.

“No, seriously,” he said. “I like you. You’re my best friend. But I’m not going to live very long.”

Sonny was so drunk that the next day he could not remember just what he had said. “Did I say anything last night?” he asked Eric. “No, nothing,” Eric said, and moved on quickly to another subject. Eric liked to keep things light.

S
ONNY MET THE WOMAN
he had always been looking for when he crashed a bachelorette party at the Players Room at the International Polo Club in Wellington. Amity Kozak was breathtakingly gorgeous, and Sonny was smitten from the moment he saw her. He would have made up a story anyway, but in her honor he made up an even larger one. He told the woman that he was in the mortgage business and had his own sponsor’s tent at the U.S. Open finals at the polo grounds the following Sunday. He invited Amity to join him.

The polo matches in Wellington twelve miles west of Palm Beach are part of the elaborate social schema of the island. Every Sunday during the season, the parade of Rolls, Mercedes, and BMWs makes the dismal trek west on Southern Boulevard to what was once farmland and is now a growing community centered around horses.

The games are occasions for afternoons of drinking and eating, with sporadic ganders at the competition itself. As on the island, there is an elaborate class system. The most prestigious place to watch is from the covered seats in the clubhouse. Then there are sponsor tents with catered food and drink, and on the other side of the field next to the parking lot, a line of tailgate parties, some of them little more than a few six-packs of beer, deviled eggs, salted nuts, and inebriated sportifs.

The following Sunday afternoon, Sonny was standing at the center of his gregarious drinking buddies when Amity arrived with another stylish thirtyish woman, Ashley Swain, and her date. Ashley worked affixing permanent makeup, tattooing lipsticklike coloring and eye shadowing. The two women became friends when Amity had gone in to have her lips done and to set up a Botox appointment. It used to be that women were fifty before they thought seriously of plastic surgery and other cosmetic treatments, then it was forty, and now it is thirty, with even twentysomethings like Amity coming in for preventive maintenance.

Amity had never been to a polo match before, and she was impressed with Sonny and his friends. She did not notice that the sponsor’s name on the tent was not Sonny’s but a beverage company’s. It was a hot day, and although Ashley’s date was in a sports shirt, Sonny was dressed in the approved Palm Beach way. He wore a blue blazer with a silk handkerchief in his pocket, and a white sports shirt, his dark hair greased so it would not dry out in the merciless South Florida sun.