Palm Beach Deadly

by Tom Turner

  Poole laughed. “You mean Knight Mulcahy?”

  Crawford nodded.

  “Not guilty,” Poole said, holding up his hands. “But now I’m curious. Explain to me the motive you think I might have had to kill him.”

  “Money,” Crawford said. “Before you launched into plan B here, you could have killed Mulcahy to marry Jacqui then live happily ever—” Crawford caught himself.

  “See that’s the problem. The happily ever part. It doesn’t work, does it?” Poole said. “And just for the record, I am not a killer. Even though I tried to scare Jacqui into thinking I might once have been one.”

  He looked over at Ott. “Do you ever say anything?” he asked. “Or are you just the strong, silent type?”

  “You guys were having such a nice conversation,” Ott said. “But now that you ask: you’re telling us—quite convincingly—you didn’t kill Mulcahy, but couldn’t that just be a lie?”

  “Sure,” Poole, said with a little smirk. “It could be, because I have been known to tell a fib or two. But, turns out, not this time.”

  Crawford and Ott just studied Poole for few moments.

  “Is that called the intimidating detective gaze?” Poole said. “Times two.”

  Crawford smiled, then looked down at their three empty glasses. “Okay, Mr. Poole, I’m afraid we’re gonna have to head back up to Palm Beach now. Before the boat sets sail.”

  Poole sighed. “And I was so enjoying our conversation.”

  “Well,” said Crawford. “We’ve got the whole car ride ahead of us.”

  Forty-One

  Crawford and Ott were waiting for Poole to pack up his things in his cabin. “A shame this thing is going to go unused for the next 121 days,” Crawford said, looking around the huge duplex.

  “I know,” said Ott. “I was thinking maybe I’d take my vacation two months early. Throw in a bunch of sick days I never used. Borrow some of Algernon’s fashionable clothes. Always wanted to go to Sydney. See that Opera House and everything.”

  They put Algernon Poole in the cell in the basement of the station house, then drove down to William Oglethorpe’s house in Boca Raton.

  They got there and parked on the street. When they rang the bell, there was no answer, so they went and looked through the glass part of the garage door and saw that Oglethorpe’s BMW wasn’t there.

  They went back to the Crown Vic, got in and just waited. A half hour later they heard a car, then the garage door go up and saw, from across the street, the black BMW drive in.

  They got out of their car, walked up to the front door and pushed the doorbell. A few second later, Bill Oglethorpe answered the door. The expression on his face was something between surprise and annoyance.

  “Hello, Mr. Oglethorpe,” Ott said, “this is my partner Detective Crawford. May we come in?”

  Oglethorpe didn’t move. “What do you want?”

  “Just have a few questions,” Ott said.

  Oglethorpe sighed, turned, and waved them in. “You already asked me a few questions.” He pointed to some chairs.

  All three of them sat.

  “All right, ask away,” said Oglethorpe. “And let’s see if we can be done with this, okay?”

  “Mr. Oglethorpe, you were at the party at Knight Mulcahy’s where he was killed, correct?” Crawford asked.

  Oglethorpe’s gaze dropped to his shoes and finally he said. “Correct.”

  “And the way we heard it, Knight Mulcahy told you to leave,” Crawford said, “because you weren’t invited, correct?”

  Oglethorpe said something unintelligible.

  “What?” Ott asked.

  Oglethorpe eyed him with disdain. “I said, correct.”

  “Then, the way we heard it, Mulcahy insulted you and you threw a glass of wine in his face,” Crawford said.

  “It was scotch,” Oglethorpe said, his toe started tapping on the sisal rug. “Shitty scotch.”

  “And then Mulcahy forcefully escorted you to the front door and, apparently threw you down some steps,” Crawford said.

  “Let’s just say, two steps,” Oglethorpe said.

  “Close enough,” Ott said.

  “Then you went to your car—”

  Oglethorpe shook his head, violently almost. “What the hell’s the point of all this?”

  “Mulcahy was killed not long after he pushed you down the steps,” Crawford said softly.

  “And we’re after his killer,” Ott said.

  Oglethorpe looked back and forth between them. “And you think it might be me?”

  “Convince us otherwise,” Crawford said.

  Oglethorpe was silent for a few moments. “This is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

  “We get that a lot,” Ott said. “Like my partner said, convince us.”

  “So I got in my car and left,” Oglethorpe said.

  “Not the way we heard it,” said Crawford. “We heard you got in your car, then a few seconds later opened the door, got out and walked around the house.”

  “Like maybe you had some unfinished business to take care of,” Ott said.

  “Yeah, the unfinished business was taking a piss.”

  “And you had to walk around the whole house to do that?” Ott asked.

  Oglethorpe glared at Ott, then Crawford. “You got the wrong guy,” he said. “Keep looking.”

  “I’ll say it again…convince us,” Ott said. “And what’s the deal anyway, goin’ around crashing parties, what’s that all about?”

  For a second, Oglethorpe looked both embarrassed and chastened. Then: “Is that a crime?”

  “No, but it’s kinda weird,” Ott said.

  All of a sudden, all of the air seemed to slowly seep out of Bill Oglethorpe and a very sad look appeared on his face. Then he gave a little half smile and turned almost sheepish. “I try to be an…addition. I try to bring something to the party, I guess you would say. People don’t seem to mind. I’m a pleasant enough guy. I have good manners and social graces”—Ott shot a quick glance at Crawford, like, where is he going with this?—“plus what Jacqui said.”

  “Wait, what?” Crawford said.

  “Mulcahy’s wife, Jacqui,” Oglethorpe said.

  “Yeah, what about her?” Ott said.

  “I was talking to her at another party about a month ago, she said I’d be welcome at any party she ever gave.”

  “So are you saying,” Crawford said, “that you were actually invited to their party?”

  Oglethorpe eyes went into a thousand-yard stare. “No,” he said softly.

  “So you weren’t invited to the Mulcahy party?” Ott asked.

  Oglethorpe shook his head and looked forlorn. “Guess she forgot,” he said.

  “So going back to what we were talking about,” Crawford said. “You got out of your car, took a leak, then what?”

  Oglethorpe was still locked in the thousand-yard stare. “I just went around and looked in the window…at her. At Jacqui. She’s such a beautiful woman. Why in God’s name she ever married that…Neanderthal…”

  It was 4:30. Crawford and Ott were headed back up to Palm Beach.

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Ott said.

  “What’s that, Mort?”

  “Only in Palm Beach,” Ott said. “Just a lonely, delusional guy who wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

  Crawford nodded as Ott pulled onto 95. “Yeah, and for us, one more dead-end street.”

  Forty-Two

  Crawford and Ott were in Crawford’s office looking at the whiteboard a half hour later. It was 5:30 and it had been a long day. Crawford had just put lines through Algernon Poole and MWDBBB. Aside from the fact that Oglethorpe was clearly not the type to shoot somebody, even if he’d just been thrown out of someone’s house, the time-line, they realized, was off: Algernon Poole had seen Oglethorpe get into his BMW—the second time—at least forty-five minutes before Knight had been killed.

  Still on the list of Knight Mulcahy suspects were
Chuffer Church, Ainsley Buttrick, Ned Durrell, Sam Pratt, and Earl Hardin.

  “Gotta tell ya, Charlie,” Ott said, slouched down on the chair facing Crawford. “Same old, same old. Nobody’s jumpin’ out at me.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Crawford said. “All we got is—compliments of my friend Willow—maybe brown hair and maybe a blue jacket. So, that means everyone except Ainsley Buttrick is in the mix.”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t rule him out,” Ott said.

  Crawford shook his head. “I’m not,” he said. “And when you think about it, we also got close to a hundred other guys at the party. Could be any one of them, too. Someone else might have a motive we don’t even know about.”

  “Yeah,” Ott said. “You think we gotta start all over again?”

  Crawford sighed. “I don’t know. Let’s go down the list one last time.”

  Ott nodded and yawned at the same time.

  “Okay. I just don’t see Church, Pratt, and Durrell,” Crawford said. “I mean, none of ‘em could stand Mulcahy, but I don’t see that as being enough to kill him. Just not enough there.”

  “So you’re goin’ with Buttrick or Hardin?” Ott asked.

  Crawford nodded. “Yeah, but not with a lot of conviction. Buttrick just struck me as a guy who could get really nasty, even though he played it down. Said Mulcahy trashing him on the air was like a gnat on the ass of an elephant.”

  “He said that?” Ott asked with a smile.

  “No, that’s my interpretation.”

  “And Hardin going out the French doors looking like he was a man on a mission,” Crawford said. “Problem is we don’t know what time that was.”

  “Yeah,” Ott said, “not only that but I got the sense he’s on your short list ‘cause of how you feel about him.”

  Crawford thought for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, you might be onto something. Which ain’t exactly professional.”

  They fell silent for a minute or two, suspects and motives churning around in their heads. Finally, Crawford, who had been looking out his window at the full moon, turned to Ott. “Remember when we met with Skagg Magwood, how he said Earl Hardin and Sam Pratt were in the line-up for Mulcahy’s show the week after he bought it?”

  Ott nodded. “Sort of.”

  “That’s what he said,” Crawford said. “I wonder if there’s anything there?”

  “You mean like Mulcahy was about to drop a bomb or something?”

  Crawford nodded. “You never know,” he said. “I mean, maybe he found out about Hardin’s cozy little arrangement with that real-estate flipper. Rose Clarke couldn’t be the only one who knew about it. I’m guessing Mulcahy had a bunch of sources.”

  “So maybe he was about to go public with it,” Ott said.

  “Yeah, imagine if you were about to get outed for having a three-million-dollar a year scam…wouldn’t you want to shut up the Mouth of the South?”

  “Damn right,” Ott said.

  “We gotta talk to him again,” Crawford said. “I’ll call him first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “And Sam Pratt?” Ott said. “Wonder what Mulcahy was going to say about him? Magwood mentioned a play, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” said Crawford. “No details, though. Didn’t sound like much at the time.”

  “But what was your sense about the guy, Pratt?” Ott asked. “You spent five hours with him on the golf course.”

  “Yeah,” Crawford said. “Then another hour and a half in the men’s locker room afterwards.”

  “And?”

  “Like I told you, good guy, I liked him.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first likable guy to ever kill someone,” Ott said.

  Crawford nodded. “Yeah, I guess maybe I really want it to be Hardin, a guy who really is not a good guy.”

  Ott started to say something, but Crawford held up his hands. “I know,” Crawford cut him off. “Unprofessional again, so shoot me.”

  Crawford looked at his watch and got to his feet.

  “Where you headed now?” Ott asked.

  “Got a dinner.”

  “Oh, yeah, with who?”

  “Rose,” Crawford said wearily. “It’s like a payback for intel she came up with. You know, shit you shoulda come up with.”

  “Fuck off,” Ott said, shaking his head. “You forgetting all that stuff I got on the Al-Jabbah?”

  “Yeah, okay, I take it back,” Crawford said, yawning.

  “I swear,” Ott said, shaking his head. “Like going out to dinner with Rose is heavy lifting. Any time you want me to sub for you, just gimme the word.”

  Crawford grabbed his jacket, then turned to Ott. “Thanks for the generous offer, Mort, I would have, but—”

  “But what?”

  “I thought tonight was your bowling night.”

  Forty-Three

  Rose was dressed to the nines: Maximum cleavage, minimum skirt length. Way, way more skin—taut, lean skin—than clothing material.

  Crawford was wearing blue jeans, a blue sport shirt, and a cream-colored white jacket, his treat to himself: a forty percent off mark-down from Jos. A. Bank.

  As a pair, they were what Crawford’s mother would have referred to as a “cute couple.”

  They had talked a lot about Rose’s recent real-estate deals. Her latest two being a fifty-million-dollar house on the ocean bought by one of the latest internet billionaires, who had graduated from high school just six years before, and the other for a mere seventeen million, sold to a professional golfer from Australia.

  “So I’m buying,” Rose said. “And we’re getting a bottle of the best champagne in the house.”

  “No, Rose, that wasn’t our deal,” Crawford said. “I’m buying and we’re getting a perfectly good bottle of Moet & Chandon.”

  “That’ll do,” Rose said. “Why’d you pick that?”

  “Had it at my wedding,” Crawford said. “Way too much of it.”

  Rose smiled. “Whatever became of Mrs. Charlie Crawford?”

  “Miranda? She married a very successful orthopedic surgeon in New York,” Crawford said. “House in Southampton, ski place in Telluride, Colorado. Couldn’t put ol’ Charlie the cop in the rear-view mirror fast enough.”

  “I bet that’s not true,” Rose said.

  “Trust me,” Crawford said, seeing his segue opportunity. “Speaking of New York, I got a question for you: you know anything about Sam Pratt and a play he might have been involved in. Maybe having to do with Knight Mulcahy.”

  “Scammin’ Sammy, you mean,” Rose said. “And you bet it had to do with Knight Mulcahy. That whole thing really took the cake, though not a lot of people know about it.”

  Crawford raised his hands. “Well, come on, tell me all about it.”

  “Let’s order first,” Rose said.

  Crawford ordered the steak and Rose the veal chops and the waiter poured two flutes of Moet.

  “So what happened was, Sam—who always teeters on the edge of financial destitution, maybe because he’s hardly ever worked in his life—came up with this scheme—”

  “Also, known as a scam?”

  Rose was nodding prodigiously. “Absolutely. So he went to a few people, who I think he felt had more money than brains. One of whom was—”

  “Knight Mulcahy.”

  “Exactly,” Rose said. “So he conned Knight into thinking he had gone to college with a producer who was going to do a remake of that play Six Degrees of Separation—”

  “Oldie but a goodie.”

  Rose nodded. “So Sam got Knight interested because he was smart enough to play to Knight’s massive ego and told him he wanted him to be executive producer. Then he did something else really smart.”

  Crawford signaled for Rose to go on.

  “You know that actor Trent Payne? Canadian guy, I think,” Rose asked. “Guy who was in Drayton Hall, that TV series back in the 90s with a big cult following?”

  “Kind of,” Crawford said.

  “Well, apparently ol’
Trent hadn’t had a role, except maybe dinner theater, in like fifteen or twenty years and was about as strapped for cash as Sam. So, Sam gets Knight to put up twenty-five grand for what he called a “commitment fee” and gives Trent half of it to come have lunch with Knight and sell him on how he and Julia Roberts are going to be in Six Degrees. And how it’s gonna be the biggest thing since Hamilton.”

  Crawford had leaned in so far that his face was a foot away from Rose’s. “And Mulcahy bought it?”

  “Hook, line, and sinker.”

  “That’s incredible. How long ago was this?”

  “Only about three months ago.”

  “So how’d it turn out?”

  Rose took a long pull on her second glass of champagne. “This stuff’s not half bad,” she said. “So Sam gets Knight to put up another 250k to be executive producer, sends him the script, and tells him about all these Broadway actors who are gonna be in it. Then a month goes by, then another…then…crickets.”

  Crawford flagged the waiter down again. He poured out the rest of the bottle.

  “One more bottle?” Rose asked.

  “I gotta be at the office early tomorrow,” Crawford protested.

  “So,” said Rose, “some days you just gotta play hurt.”

  She smiled at the waiter and asked him to get another bottle.

  “So keep goin’,” Crawford said.

  “Okay, so then Sam goes into no call-back mode,” Rose said. “Knight’s callin’ him like twenty times a day and Sam’s not answering. Finally, Knight goes to his house and confronts him. And, the way I heard it, Sam finally confesses.”

  “Wait, that he scammed him?”

  Rose laughed. “No, way more creative than that. That his old college buddy, the producer, absconded with the money and went to Switzerland. And Sam’s looking high and low but can’t find him anywhere.”

  “Sounds like Sam shoulda been in the play,” Crawford said. “Guy seems like a hell of an actor.”

  “I know, right?” Rose said. “So then Knight puts a PI on the case who—fifty grand later—gets to the bottom of it.”