by Tom Turner
“Why?” Ott said.
“‘Cause it would probably come back to bite me in the ass.”
“Why’s that?” Ott asked.
“Because you’d go to whoever and say, ‘This author told us you had a motive to kill Knight Mulca—”
“That would be kind of a bush move,” Ott cut in. “We treat everything we hear as strictly confidential.”
“Whatever,” said Durrell. “Fact is, I have absolutely no idea who killed Knight Mulcahy except it wasn’t me. Kinda glad he’s not around to call my next book a piece of shit, though.”
Thirteen
Lila Moline was too Audrey Hepburn-ish for Crawford. Classically beautiful with dark straight hair, prominent cheekbones and striking brown eyes, but a little frail, a little brittle, not enough meat on the bone for him.
Crawford could tell Ott was smitten, though. For one thing, he was on his best behavior. He wasn’t throwing around zinger lines meant to catch someone off guard, no ‘gotchas,’ or ‘Ott-chas’ as Crawford called them.
Norm Rutledge, head of Palm Beach PD, had once given Ott a stern lecture about cleaning up his Q & A. “This is Palm Beach, you know,” Rutledge had said to him, “not fucking Cleveland”—where Ott had spent twenty-two years staring down at stiffs on the snow-covered streets.
Crawford was nibbling around the edges, working his way up to a direct question about Moline’s relationship with Knight Mulcahy as they stood at the counter of Moline’s shop, Les Trucs, on North County Way. Moline was facing them, nobody else was in the shop. To Crawford it felt like one of those places which—on a good day—had a grand total of twenty customers come through its doors. The kind of place where you went when you were looking for something very specific, or just wanted to kill a half hour.
“So Mr. and Mrs. Mulcahy were old friends of yours?” Crawford asked.
“I’ve known them both for quite a while,” Moline said. “As you know, Palm Beach is a small town.”
Ott nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s come to our attention,” Crawford said, “that you might have been having a relationship with Mr. Mulcahy.”
Ott gave him a look like, ‘Nice and delicate, Charlie.’
But to Crawford’s surprise, Moline didn’t flinch. She just sighed. “You’ll never quote me, right?”
“Never,” said Crawford as he and Ott shook their heads in unison. “That’s not how we do things.”
“Okay, the reality is Knight and Jacqui had kind of an open marriage,” Moline said. “I mean, they didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was.”
Crawford and Ott waited for more.
“Knight asked me out for dinner once when Jacqui was out of town,” she said. “He was a rich and powerful man and I was flattered. Except he took me to this complete dive in—of all places—Riviera Beach. So, long story short, we had an affair. Only problem was, as I soon found out, he was having affairs with half the women in Palm Beach.”
“Like who else?” Crawford asked.
Moline sighed again. “I’m not going to say. I just know he was. I mean, there was even talks of orgies. I didn’t even know they were still around.”
Ott who was taking notes looked up. “Really? Orgies?”
“I don’t know,” Moline said with a shrug. “Nobody ever asked me to one.”
A few minutes later, Crawford and Ott thanked Lila Moline and went in different directions.
Crawford was ten minutes late for his “working drink” with Rose Clarke. She was talking to the bartender at Mookie’s when Crawford got there. He had suggested they go to a bar in Citiplace at first, but she said she’d rather go to the place that Crawford had once mentioned to her: his cop bar in West Palm.
Soak up some local color, she said.
You mean, go slumming, he said.
Whatever you want to call it, she said.
He came up behind her as she and Jack Scarsiola, the owner and bartender, seemed to be deep into it.
“He tellin’ you about his heroic exploits back in the good ol’ days?” Crawford said, flicking his head at Scarsiola, a former West Palm Beach cop.
Rose swung around and smiled. “Hey, Charlie,” she said. “No, about some barroom brawl you had in here.”
Not one of Crawford’s prouder moments. “I don’t recall,” he said.
Scarsiola burst out laughing. “Come on, you remember,” he said. “You were Mike Tyson that night.”
Crawford flicked his head. “Let’s go sit at a table.”
Scarsiola went to the tap and drew up a beer as Rose followed Crawford over to the table.
“Mike Tyson, huh?”
“Don’t listen to that guy,” Crawford said as he pulled out her chair.
“Bet you’re the only guy in this place who does that.”
“Does what?”
“Pulls out a chair for a woman.”
“Don’t be a snob, Rose,” Crawford said. “All cops go to charm school.”
She laughed as Crawford sat down and Scarsiola brought over his Bud draft.
“Devastating uppercut,” Scarsiola muttered with a wink.
“Can it, Scar,” Crawford said as Scarsiola walked away.
“Come on, Charlie, us girls love to hear about tough, macho guys,” Rose said.
“Sorry, but that ain’t me,” he said, taking a sip of his Bud. “So how’s business.”
“Sucks,” she said. “I had two contracts fall through this week.”
“Which means you only make three mil this year instead of four?”
Rose laughed and took a sip of her wine. “Nah, more than that,” she said. “By the way, this wine isn’t half bad.”
“Meaning it’s a quarter bad?”
“No, meaning it’s pretty good,” Rose said.
“Well, good. You didn’t think I’d bring you to a place that sold swill, did you?”
She leaned across the table and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Never.”
Crawford reached into the breast pocket of his jacket. “So, I brought a bunch of photos that were taken at Knight Mulcahy’s party.”
He handed her the stack and she started going through them.
“Ned Durrell,” she said, shaking her head, “what a dick. You ever read one of his books?”
Crawford shook his head. “Not all the way.”
“Writes sex scenes like he’s never had sex before.”
“That wouldn’t be Knight Mulcahy’s problem.”
“No, sure wouldn’t.”
“He ever go after—”
Rose looked up and smiled. “Yes, and I had absolutely no interest. Yuck.”
“Just checking.”
“I don’t remember seeing the man in the double-breasted blue blazer there that night,” Rose said pointing.
“Let’s see,” Crawford said eagerly.
Rose handed him the picture, but the man was cut off above the chin.
“And you said his name might be John?”
Rose nodded. “I think so.”
“‘Cause someone else thought it was Bob.”
“I don’t know for sure,” Rose said. “Know what’s kinda creepy?”
“What’s that?”
“That somebody in one of these pictures is Knight Mulcahy’s killer.”
Crawford nodded. “Except maybe not everyone who was there is in these pictures.”
Rose nodded and scanned the room. “Can we talk about something other than Knight Mulcahy’s murder now?”
“Sure,” Crawford said. “What do you want to talk about?”
Rose thought for a second. “Why you’re so obsessed with your job? I mean, I’m really into mine, too, but I’ve never seen anyone like you.”
Crawford shrugged. “I don’t really know the answer.”
Rose shook her head. “Yeah, you do. Come on.”
“Because I have no life?”
“You could if you wanted,” Rose raised her hand for a waiter. “This conversation calls for another
drink.”
“Ah, sorry, aren’t any waiters here, kid.” Crawford stood. “Same thing?”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking at her empty wine glass, “how about something with a little rum in it?”
“I got just the ticket,” Crawford said, as he turned toward the bar.
Three minutes later he was back with two dark-colored drinks with limes floating in them.
“So whaddaya got there?” Rose asked. “Looks kinda lethal.”
‘Meyers and OJ with a big hunka lime,” Crawford said. “A health drink, you might call it.”
Rose laughed. “Oh, is it now? How come it’s so dark? Must be about seventy-five percent Meyers.”
“Nah, only two-thirds.”
Rose laughed. “You tryin’ to get me drunk or something? So you can take advantage of me?”
“I thought you wanted me to tell you why I have no life,” Crawford said, taking a hefty pull on his rum drink. “Ah, nectar of the gods.”
“So? Why don’t you? Have a life, that is. You’re definitely a workaholic…right?”
He took another long pull and looked at his half-filled glass. “I’d say I’m definitely some kinda ‘holic.’”
“Seriously, I want to hear,” Rose said, taking a more restrained sip.
Crawford shrugged. “I don’t know, I don’t seem to do much besides work anymore,” he said. “I used to love to play sports. Go to the occasional art gallery even. Saw lotsa movies. Now I just run around after guys who kill people.”
“I have an idea,” Rose said, wiping her lips with a cocktail napkin.
“You always do.”
“Maybe you should get into a relationship,” Rose said. “Something where it’s not all about you chasing guys who kill people, but more about doing stuff with someone else. You know, the ol’ ‘sharing your life with someone’ concept. You’ve heard of that, right, Charlie?”
He had certainly teed that one up for her.
“Got any idea about who might be a candidate for this, ‘sharing my life with?’”
“Don’t be a jerk, Charlie,” she said. “Not necessarily me, though that would be a damn good choice, but there are lots of women out there…”
He waited.
She tapped her fingers on the table a few times, then looked up. “But clearly you couldn’t do any better than me.”
He took another sip of his drink, more moderate this time. “The question is, could you do better than me?” he said. “And I think the answer to that is a definite yes.”
Fourteen
Jabbah Al-Jabbah was sitting at a Starbucks a block away from the mosque in Lake Worth. With him were Bashir El-Nadal and Habib Hamdi. Bashir had been born Jamie Deering and Habib, Deshawn Brown. Bashir had grown up in a middle-class white neighborhood, loved tennis as a kid, and wanted to make a career of it, but he didn’t have a big serve and his net game was only so-so. Nevertheless, he had borrowed his new Muslim name from his tennis idol, Rafael Nadal. He thought Nadal had kind of a Muslim ring to it.
Deshawn came from a desperately poor black family, with no father in the picture, and had dropped out of school halfway through tenth grade.
Bashir and Habib both wore thobes, long, loose white robes that hung down to their ankles. Bashir’s had a stain at the right elbow from changing the oil on his Nissan Altima.
Al-Jabbah, a fifty-one-year-old man from the Saudi Arabian royal family, was wearing a black wool bisht over his thobe, which indicated superior rank.
Four men in work clothes had shot threatening glances at them when they walked in. Muslims weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms anywhere in Lake Worth, Florida. Things had gotten much worse after the Paris massacre, then the slaughter of the fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, a few days later, and finally when Trump said no Muslims should be let into the country. A few days after Trump’s edict, someone had thrown a pig’s head at the mosque in Lake Worth and someone else, or maybe the same person, had made a call with a profanity-laced warning that the mosque was going to get fire-bombed.
Al-Jabbah, a man with a formidably intimidating glare, just stared back at the four rednecks. He was giving them his ‘don’t fuck with me’ look, which seemed to further imply, ‘cause you have no idea who you’re messin’ with.’
Al-Jabbah slid two hundred-dollar bills across the table to Bashir, then did the same to Habib.
“This is for the shooting range,” Al-Jabbah said. “I want you both to spend many hours there, perfecting your marksmanship.”
“This won’t go very far,” Bashir said. “That place is really expensive.”
Habib nodded in agreement.
Al-Jabbah reached in his pocket, pulled out four more hundred-dollar bills and slid them across the table. “That’s enough to make you into sharpshooters.”
Bashir nodded and leaned into Al-Jabbah. “So…can you tell us what our fatwa is going to be?”
Al-Jabbah ignored Bashir’s misuse of the word. He knew perfectly well what Bashir was asking.
“Just learn how to shoot straight,” Al-Jabbah hissed. “I will let you know when you need to know.”
Bashir smiled and said, a little too loudly for Al-Jabbah. “Don’t worry, my brother, we’ll be able to take out a whole school in five minutes after a coupla weeks there.”
Al-Jabbah leaned forward, his nostrils flaring. “Never, ever again say anything like that in a public place. Do you understand me?”
Bashir, rebuked, nodded and lowered his eyes.
Al-Jabbah looked around to see if anyone might have heard what Bashir said.
Satisfied that no one had, he stood up.
“I will see you at the mosque,” he said. “As-Salaam-Alaikum.”
“As-Salaam-Alaikum.”
“As-Salaam-Alaikum.”
Al-Jabbah drove his Bentley Continental GT Speed Coupe to the Royal & Alien Club on North Lake Way in Palm Beach. He knew that he had done the right thing reading the riot act to Bashir. He was pretty confident Habib was discreet, but Bashir was a different story. He’d need to threaten him. Better still, his whole family. Bashir had a wife, or maybe she was a girlfriend, and two young daughters. Al-Jabbah needed to make it clear their lives would all be in danger if Bashir wasn’t absolutely and totally discreet.
The valet nodded at Al-Jabbah as he opened the car door for him. “Morning, Mr. Al-Jabbah. Gonna play eighteen today?”
Al-Jabbah just nodded and walked into the clubhouse.
The Royal & Alien Club, founded in 2015, had once been called the Mid-Island Club. But, due to the devastating effect the 2008 stock market and real-estate crash had on its membership as well as the overall decline in golf’s popularity in general, the Board of Governors had discreetly put out the word two years back that the club was up for sale.
There had been no serious bites for more than a year, until finally a group headed by Eliot Segal had stepped up to the plate. The price Segal offered was far less than what the Board of Governors was looking for, but they had to take it because the club was deteriorating—deferred maintenance had been taking its toll everywhere.
Eliot Segal, who originally was going to call the club Segal Golf & Tennis, quickly had a list of prospective members who could never dream of being admitted to the WASP clubs or even the traditional Jewish ones—even though Segal was Jewish and gave generously to Jewish causes. The established Jewish clubs weren’t much different from their WASP counterparts. Their membership consisted predominantly of businessmen and women, and their spouses, from rich, old Jewish families, mainly from New York, plus another twenty percent who were strictly new money—doing their damnedest not to show it.
Eliot Segal had come up with the name for his club after numerous bong hits and a tumble with a voluptuous Bollywood ingénue. Postcoitally, he had Netflixed a movie on his ten-foot flat screen called Guardians of the Galaxy, a Marvel comic feature starring a few young Hollywood bucks and a bunch of CGI-alien-bad guys. The voluptuous Indian starlet had
fallen asleep twenty minutes into it, but Eliot hung in.
As he watched a blue-skinned alien portrayed by an actor in The Walking Dead, Eliot came up with the name for his new club. Royal, because that was a word that reeked of old and venerable, which was exactly what his new club was not. It was just Eliot at his most tongue-in-cheek, spoofing some old fuddy-duddy club in Scotland that had been around a million years. Him saying, ‘Hey, I’m just messin’ with you. I had to call it something.’
And the second word, Alien, felt perfect. Because that’s exactly what its membership would be. Outliers from Palm Beach’s establishment. Meaning Johnny-come-lately Jews, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Kazakhstanis, Muslims, actors, rock n’ rollers, professional athletes, TV chefs, video game mavens, porn stars, house flippers and even one Real Housewife of Orange County.
“Hello, Mr. Jabbah,” said the man at the front door of the Royal & Alien clubhouse, which was in the Georgian style of British West Indies architecture, featuring prominent columns with elegant molding and dentils.
Al-Jabbah just nodded and walked through the building until he got to the voluminous men’s locker room.
It had six-foot high mahogany lockers on three sides of the room with little gold plaques, which had members’ names on them. The man who had the locker to the right of Al-Jabbah was Albert Ginsberg. They called each other Al, of course. Ginsberg was a man who had made it big in the blue-jean business. On the other side of Al-Jabbah’s locker was didn’t-catch-his-first-name Zhzhyonov, a Russian oligarch. Next to him was Latrelle Jones, a prominent rapper. And next to him, Juan Echavarria. Nobody knew for sure what he did, but cocaine was as good a guess as any.
Four other members were in the locker room in various stages of undress. One was Juke Jackson, a brand-new member who he had just met recently.
“Hey, Jab,” Juke said to Al-Jabbah, a towel around his paunch. “You’re not hot in that rig?”
Al-Jabbah was not fond of the other nickname some of the members had given him and had certainly never had his bisht referred to as a ‘rig’ before.
