Palm Beach Nasty by Tom Turner Page A

self-destructive run where she confessed to drinking way too much and hitting the drugs pretty hard. Coke, in particular. She had apparently left out a chapter or two.
    She told him it got so bad that a bunch of her friends did an intervention on her one time. It got late—cocktail hour—and Lil’s friend, Mimi, whose house the intervention took place at, broke out a bottle of Santa Margherita. End of intervention.
    Eventually, she got talked into going to one of those dry-out places in Minnesota, but only lasted a week there. She promised him she had cut out the drugs completely. Strictly a social drinker, now, she said.
    Crawford couldn’t get the image out of his head. The big water bed, women—worse, young girls—coming and going. And Lil, right there in the middle of it, snorting coke and doing God knows what.
    He remembered something else Lil told him. About her friend, Nicole—the name of the other woman at Ward Jaynes’s house according to Misty. Something about this group of women, who sounded like a collection of rich lost souls, who met a couple times a week to pray and gossip at the old Paramount theater on North County Road. Lil described it as a kind of born-again group that jumped from fad to fad—yoga to Pilates to Facebook to whatever. Lil referred to them as members of The Church of What’s Happening Now. The mainstay, apparently, was the socially prominent Nicole, a pharmaceutical heiress.
    The common cause of the group seemed to be the pursuit of happiness, which, no one thought, was asking too much. But, thus far, that goal had proven elusive thanks in part to straying husbands, alcohol and drug problems, lack of purpose, or all of the above. As he remembered it, the point of the story was that one of the members was caught naked—legs to the sky—in the backseat of another member’s husband’s Bentley. Nicole had summarily banished the woman from the group, which seemed somewhat hypocritical, based on Nicole’s waterbed activities.
    After a while, Crawford got out of his chair and started pacing around his office. He didn’t want to think about Lil anymore.
    His mind jumped to Ward Jaynes. He didn’t want to let it get personal, but maybe he wouldn’t be able to help that.
    In any case, it was time to have a little talk with the man.
    He walked over to Ott’s cubicle and suggested they pay Jaynes a visit a little later. Ott jumped at it. Never interrogated a billionaire before, he said. Weren’t any up in Cleveland. Crawford told him to give him an hour. He needed to do what he always did. His Boy Scout routine. Be prepared. Research his subject. He went back to his office and dug up everything he could. He wanted to know Jaynes cold. He always started with Wikipedia, if his subject was a big fish, even though sometimes they got their facts a little screwed up.
    Turned out Jaynes grew up in Plattsburgh, New York, went to Plattsburgh High, then Syracuse University. That threw Crawford a little, because Jaynes exuded all the characteristics of a bored, entitled patrician from some fancy place like Greenwich. The clothes, the hair, the attitude, you could tell a lot from a few pictures in the paper. In Jaynes’s case, his eyes said it all. It was like they telegraphed what was going through his head . . . the fools I have to suffer, they seemed to say. The morons I have to put up with.
    After graduating from college, Jaynes worked for a year at Manufacturers Hanover bank, then jumped to Goldman Sachs for two years and after that went and got his MBA from Harvard Business School. At age twenty-seven he started Jaynes Funds. At thirty-six, he was a billionaire. Jaynes Funds mainly shorted stocks. So if a company tanked, he did well. Clearly smart, tough and shrewd—he was, now at forty-two, a multibillionaire and had weathered the 2007–08 crash like it was a mere speed bump.
    Crawford Googled him next. The man had amassed more gigabytes than most presidents. He found out Jaynes had