by Tom Turner
“Got me,” Crawford shrugged as a bald man in his sixties walked in from the back.
“Detective Crawford?” the man said.
Crawford stood up and shook his hand. “And my partner, Detective Ott.”
Then Ott shook Mitchell’s hand.
“Come on back,” Mitchell said turning.
The three went back and sat down in Mitchell’s office.
“Sorry about what happened to your friend,” Crawford said.
“Yeah, poor bastard,” said Mitchell. “What a way to go.”
Crawford and Ott nodded.
“We understand your poker game was still going strong, and Clyde was still in it,” Crawford said.
“Yeah, he wouldn’t have missed it. He stayed sharp in retirement. Guy won way more than he lost.”
Ott put his notebook down on the back of Mitchell’s desk. “Mr. Mitchell, in all the conversations you fellas had over the years, did Clyde ever talk about anyone he was afraid might be out to get him? Someone who threatened him? Anything at all like that?”
Mitchell leaned back in his chair and cupped his chin. “Not really. Palm Beach is hardly a place with a lot of murderers and bad guys running around. Or guys making threats. Know what I mean?”
Crawford nodded. “He said something to his wife about meeting with someone to ‘repair an old wound,’” Crawford said. “So we’re thinking it might go way back. How long were you in the poker game?”
“From the beginning,” Mitchell said. “The whole thing was actually my idea. Started out Rich Meyer, Clyde, Will Barnes and me. Then Will Barnes moved down to Lauderdale. So we got Lem Richey and Rob Jaworski in. Thing’s been going for over twenty-five years.”
“Every week, right?”
“Yeah, well, pretty much,” said Mitchell. “We had a few canceled. But it was almost as regular as going to church.”
If church was a place with strippers and lots of booze.
“Do you remember any conversations between Clyde and Rich Meyer about someone Clyde may have arrested and where Meyer was the judge?” Crawford asked.
“I see where you’re going,” Mitchell said. “A connection between Clyde and Rich’s murder. Never thought about that before. Sorry, I can’t remember anything at all like that. And that’s something I’d probably remember.”
“Nothing at all?”
“No, sorry,” Mitchell said, shaking his head.
Crawford glanced over at Ott and thought he recognized Ott going into his wind-up, about to throw his high, hard curveball. His eyes got all squinty and he started breathing a beat faster.
“Mr. Mitchell,” Ott started. “I went back a little ways. Before you opened your practice as a defense attorney, you worked as a prosecutor, correct?”
“Correct. Fourteen years.”
“So what occurred to me is that maybe there was a case or two where Clyde Loadholt was the arresting officer, you were the prosecutor, and Rich Meyer was the judge.” Ott said. “Then I took it a little further and wondered, could there be someone out to get all three of you?”
Mitchell looked chilled by the idea. “Talk about something I’d remember. It’s a good theory, but it never happened. I was in quite a few trials where Rich presided, but I never prosecuted any case where Clyde was the arresting officer or involved in any way. I know that for a fact.”
Ott shrugged and smiled. “Hey, you know how it is, half of what we do is theorize.”
“And ninety percent of the time it doesn’t pan out,” Crawford said. “So not once were the three of you tied up in the same case?”
Mitchell shook his head. “Not once. Hey, I’d love to help you catch the guy but that never happened. If it had, I guess I’d be afraid I was next in line.”
“Just throwing stuff at the wall,” said Crawford. “Seeing if anything sticks.”
Crawford looked over at Ott. Seemed like he was out of questions and theories. “You have anything else, Mort?”
Ott shook his head.
“Oh, yeah,” Crawford said, like it was an afterthought, “one last thing. I heard something about…strippers at the poker games?”
Mitchell flushed crimson red. “Just once. It was a night I didn’t play. I…I…I…” He seemed to run out of gas.
“So you don’t—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Mitchell said, his eyes circling the ceiling. “‘Cause I wasn’t there.”
“But what—”
“End of story,” Mitchell said. This time he stared Crawford straight in the eyes.
“Okay, Mr. Mitchell,” Crawford said, pulling a card out of his wallet and handing it to Mitchell. “Thanks for your time. You think of anything else, anything at all, give me a call, please.”
All three stood up. Crawford shook hands with Mitchell then Ott did. “I definitely will,” said Mitchell. “Good luck catching the guy. I’ll sleep a lot better once you’ve got him.”
Crawford and Ott walked out of his office and to an elevator.
“That stripper thing,” Ott said, pressing the elevator button. “Ol’ Chuck didn’t seem real comfortable on that subject.”
“Yeah, like he had a spotless attendance record at the game, except that one time,” Crawford said.
“I’m thinking there might be something to the stripper,” Ott said as they walked out of the elevator.
Crawford turned to Ott in the lobby of the building. “So you thinkin’ she goes and kills the judge, then three years later lures Loadholt out on a boat and kills him?”
“Hey, coulda happened,” Ott said with a shrug. “I see ‘skeptical Charlie’ plastered all over your face. Hey, man, I’m just a guy lookin’ for a link.”
“I know. So am I,” Crawford sighed, walking toward the Caprice. “Like you said to Mitchell, half of what we do is theorize.”
“Yeah,” Ott said. “And, like you said, ninety percent of the time it doesn’t pan out.”
“Yeah,” said Crawford. “But probably more like ninety-nine percent.”
Ten
The Mentors, as the five women called themselves, referred to it as the power booth. Off to the left and in the rear of Madeline’s, a restaurant across from the Palm Beach Publix. There were three on one side and two on the other. The three on the one side—according to Forbes—represented a net worth of more than six billion dollars. They were, in no particular order, Marla Fluor, Elle T. Graham, and Diana Quarle. On the other side were Rose Clarke and Beth Jastrow, rich but nowhere near as rich as the other three.
Marla Fluor was, in fact, the first woman partner at Goldman Sachs. She had gone on to start her own investment fund, which had beaten the Dow in nineteen out of the past twenty years. Elle T. Graham was a woman from a little town in New Hampshire who had ended up in Silicon Valley at the age of twenty-two after graduating from Harvard. She had been a big player in a company called Wesabe, which went on to be one of the biggest crash-and-burns in Silicon Valley history. But she landed on her feet and launched Grouptank, which had been, and still was, a major homerun. Diana Quarle was right up there with Tory Burch in designing trendy women’s clothes and shoes, all of which sported the distinctive Q. She now had more than nine hundred shops in high-end locations.
Beth Jastrow was a classic rags-to-riches story. With no college degree, she had started out as an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress on a riverboat casino on the Mississippi. Then she moved up to blackjack dealer, after which she became the manager of a drop team that collected and transported the casino’s daily revenues, and by age twenty-eight was the vice president of casino operations. Now, at age thirty-seven, thanks to a Chinese backer, she had a silent majority interest in two Las Vegas casinos.
Then there was Rose Clarke. Poorer by a few hundred million, Rose could hold her own in business and just about any other arena.
They were discussing a woman that their group was taking under their wing to try to help bring to a higher level of business success.
“I’ve never se
en hustlers like the Vietnamese,” Marla Fluor was saying. “I mean that in a very positive way. So the backstory on Sandy is she now has three shops and wants to go wide and franchise the whole operation.”
She was talking about a thirty-year-old woman named Sandy Lu, who had two nail-and-spa salons in West Palm and one in Lake Worth.
“Think she’s a little premature?” asked Beth, “West Palm, Lake Worth…the world?”
“Yeah, I do,” Marla said. “But I like her spirit, and her ambition. Plus she’s got a really great concept. She packs more into a thousand-square-foot space than I’ve ever seen before. Her gross is over three million for the one on Belvedere alone. And her gross per square foot is off-the-charts.”
“Jesus,” Rose said, after polishing off a bite of her Caesar-salad-hold-the-croutons-cause-it-might-be-fattening.“That’s incredible. Know what her net is?”
“Twenty-five percent,” Marla said. “Five hundred K. Then close to four hundred between the other two.”
“So what’s she need us for?” Beth asked.
“Lots of things,” Marla said. “She’s plowed a lot of the money back into the spas and doesn’t have a lot of capital on hand. And franchising is capital-intensive. But mainly she needs help with the big picture, not to mention our contacts.”
“I’m in,” Beth said.
“Me too,” Diana said. “I can help her with my retail connections.”
Behind their booth, the door opened and Crawford and Ott walked in.
“Jesus, who’s that?” Diana asked as the men strolled to the counter.
Rose swung around. “Oh, that’s two of Palm Beach’s finest. Detective Charlie Crawford is the one I believe you’re referring to. And his partner, Mort Ott.”
“He’s gorgeous,” Diana said. She did not mean Ott.
“And single,” Rose said, choosing not to mention her special relationship with him.
“Is he the guy who used to be up in New York?” Diana asked. “Had a thing with that actress for a while?”
Rose nodded. “Yeah, Gwendolyn Hyde.”
“How do you know so much about him?” Marla asked.
Rose batted her eyelashes and looked down. “We’re friends.”
“What kind of friends?”
“All right, you two,” Elle said. “You sound like a couple of cheerleaders getting all hot and bothered about the quarterback. Can we please get back to Sandy Lu?”
“Yeah, we’re supposed to be captains of industry,” Beth said. “Not a bunch of pom-pom girls.”
“I saw your girlfriend when we came in,” Ott said, sitting down at the counter.
Crawford shook his head. “I don’t have a girlfriend, my chubby little friend,” Crawford said.
“Cut the shit, Charlie,” Ott said. “That wasn’t you coming out of a certain house on the ocean this morning when I was on my way in to the station?”
Crawford groaned and snuck a look up at Rose’s table.
Diana, Marla and Rose were all giving him fluttery little hand waves.
Eleven
Rob Jaworski, the man who’d once managed the dog track in West Palm Beach, arrived at the station at exactly one. Crawford guessed he was in his early seventies. He was slightly stooped, had watery eyes, and walked very slowly.
But, boy, could he talk.
He spent the better part of forty-five minutes theorizing about the possible suspects in the death of his poker-playing friend, Clyde Loadholt. His first suspect was a man, Jaworski had no idea what his name was, who, many years ago, had cut off Loadholt in his car on Dixie Highway. The incident had quickly escalated and, long story short, the man had first thrown a full can of Coke at Loadholt’s car, then pulled a gun out of his glove compartment and waved it threateningly at Loadholt as they both were doing fifty.
Loadholt had called for back up as he stayed behind the man at a safe distance.
After the man was pulled over and arrested, he clocked in at 0.126 on the drunkometer and, a month later, made the mistake of representing himself at his trial. He ended up spending a week in jail, lost his job because the story made the front page of the Palm Beach Morning News, and eventually his wife left him. Then, one day, according to Jaworski, he called up Loadholt again and threatened to burn his house down. Loadholt arrested him again. And again, the man, who was drunk at the time he made the call, went back to jail, after once more trying to act as his own attorney.
“How long ago was this?” Crawford asked.
Jaworski thought for a second, doing the math. “Oh, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years ago.”
“You really think that twenty-two, twenty-three years later that man would decide to lure Clyde onto a boat and kill him?” Crawford asked.
Jaworski threw his hands up in the air. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe he got drunk again and figured Clyde was the reason his whole life was in the shitter. You never know, the man was a complete hothead.”
Crawford glanced over at Ott, who was chewing the tip of his pen, apparently having decided he didn’t need to take notes anymore.
“Got any more thoughts on the matter, Mr. Jaworski?” Ott looked like he wasn’t sure he should ask.
“Well, matter-of-fact, I do,” Jaworski said.
Ott didn’t look surprised.
“There was this cop who, according to Clyde, was dirty,” Jaworski said. “I can’t remember exactly what he did, something to do with taking bribes from somebody.”
Couldn’t get much more general than that, thought Crawford, thrumming his fingers on his desk.
“Or, no, I remember what it was. Somehow Clyde found out about a contractor bribing someone on a government project. Yeah, yeah, that’s what it was.”
“So what happened?” Ott asked, restlessly.
“Clyde had him drummed out of the department,” Jaworski snapped his fingers, “just like that. No pension. No nothing. Clyde didn’t tolerate any of his guys not walking the straight and narrow, so everyone said.”
Crawford looked at Ott, like…had he missed something? Ott looked baffled too.
“Wait, you said the guy was a contractor, not a cop?” Ott said.
“Yeah, well, one or the other,” Jaworski said.
Crawford saw Ott’s silent chuckle.
“Did this also take place twenty-two, twenty-three years ago?” Crawford asked.
Jaworski thought for a second. “More like twenty-five.”
Crawford snuck a look at Ott, then his watch. It was five of two. Fifty-five minutes of theories, none of which seemed to add up to much.
“Then there was his granddaughter,” Jaworski moved on.
“What about his granddaughter?” Ott asked, stifling a yawn.
“There was real bad blood there,” Jaworski said. “Something happened. Don’t know what, though.”
“Bad blood between Clyde and his granddaughter, you mean?” Crawford asked.
“So I heard,” Jaworski said.
“About what?” Crawford asked.
Jaworski went into a thousand-mile stare. Finally, “Sorry, I can’t remember exactly.”
Crawford looked at his watch again. It was 2:03. “One final question, were you there when a stripper came to Loadholt’s house, the night of a poker game?”
Jaworski’s expression didn’t change. “A stripper?” he said, scratching the back of his head. “I don’t know anything about a stripper. Well, there was one at my brother’s bachelor party, but that was like…forty-five years ago.”
“Mr. Jaworski,” Crawford said. “I want to thank you for coming in. You’ve been very helpful, but we have another interview that was supposed to have begun a few minutes ago.”
Jaworski looked disappointed. Like he could have gone on for another couple of hours. Like what the hell was he supposed to do with the rest of his day?
“Glad I could help,” Jaworski said getting to his feet. “You boys ever need me again, I’d be happy to come back in and help you solve this sucker.”
The first words out of Lem Richey’s mouth as his old friend, Rob Jaworski, walked out of the station were, “Did the old buzzard talk your ear off?” Richey was the man who owned the Jiffy Lubes and looked to be in his mid-sixties.
“We had an interesting conversation,” Crawford said tactfully, leading Richey back to his office where Ott was waiting.
Richey chuckled over an apparent memory of Jaworski after being introduced to Ott. “We had to practically gag him sometimes,” he said. “Had this little joke that the reason the dogs ran so fast at his track was to get away from Rob and all his jawboning.”
Crawford and Ott laughed politely.
Richey chuckled to himself. “I didn’t say it was a good joke,” he said. “I used to think that Rob’s chatter was a way to distract us in the poker game. You know, so we’d mess up. But maybe I was overthinking it—” then a sudden frown came across Richey’s face. “By the way, I want it understood, no questions about any strippers.”
Crawford glanced at Ott, then back at Richey. “Did you talk to Chuck Mitchell, Mr. Richey?”
“Doesn’t matter who I spoke to,” Richey said. “Is that understood?”
Reluctantly, Crawford nodded.
Unlike his poker friend, Lem Richey didn’t have any theories. He just said he was really shocked when he saw the story in the Morning News about Loadholt’s murder. Said Loadholt was really generous with the booze on poker nights and how he thought the game was pretty much all Loadholt had for a social life anymore. Kept to himself, tended his garden, and watched his Marlins on TV.
Crawford and Ott saw Richey out a little after two thirty then went back to Crawford’s office.
“That was a waste of a perfectly good hour and a half,” Ott said.
“You don’t think our killer was any of Jaworski’s suspects?” Crawford said with a smile, sitting at his desk.
Ott laughed and shook his head. “I’d say the priest at my church is more likely to have done it,” he said. “I mean, a guy Loadholt busted for road rage somewhere back in the nineteenth century? A dirty cop or was he a contractor? His granddaughter pissed off for some goddamn reason… I mean, are you eff-ing kidding me?”
