by Tom Turner
Crawford looked up at the uniform. “What do you know, Art?”
“Went down about forty, forty-five minutes ago,” Art Nystrom said, flicking his head. “Man over there owns this place and is uncle of the vic. Heard what he described as the sound of firecrackers, grabbed a gun and ran down here. Saw a white car—didn’t know what make it was—go haul-assing outta here right behind a vintage Ferrari Testarossa.”
“So motive was car theft?” Crawford asked.
“Apparently,” Nystrom said. “But not just any car; thing was worth over two million.”
Crawford nodded.
“What’s the vic’s name?” Ott asked.
“Amir Al-Jabbah,” Nystrom said, then flicking his head toward the tall, skinny man. “He’s that guy’s nephew. Jabbah Al-Jabbah is his name.”
Crawford looked around the garage, then pointed. “We got a bunch of security cameras.”
Nystrom nodded. “Yeah, but the hitter sprayed ‘em. At least the ones we checked so far.”
Ott turned to Crawford. “So the hitters were boosting the Testarossa,” he said. “Then the nephew showed up?”
Crawford nodded. “I guess, but it looks more like an ambush. Like the hitters were waiting for the vic.” He turned to Nystrom. “Art, go check around the house. See if there are any cameras that didn’t get sprayed. Maybe we’ll get a shot of the Ferrari, who was in it. White car too.”
Nystrom nodded and he and the other uniform walked toward the oversized open door of the garage.
Crawford glanced over at the third uniform talking to the owner. Ronnie Riker had a pad out and was taking notes. Crawford walked over to them as Ott continued snapping pictures on his iPhone of the car and the dead man.
Riker nodded at Crawford as he walked up to them. “Hey, Charlie,” then turning to the man next to him. “This is Mr. Al-Jabbah, the uncle of the deceased. This is Detective Crawford, homicide.”
Al-Jabbah just nodded and made no move to shake hands.
“I’m sorry about your loss, Mr. Al-Jabbah,” Crawford said.
“Thank you,” Al-Jabbah said, his eyes unblinking and penetrating. “I do not want my nephew staying in the car any longer than necessary.”
“I understand,” Crawford said. “We’ll try to make it as quick as possible. The Medical Examiner should be here shortly.”
Crawford and the ME, Bob Hawes, had had a rancorous relationship on the three murders they had worked on together. Hawes thought Crawford was a cocky New Yorker; Crawford thought Hawes was a pig-headed redneck.
“He and the crime-scene techs need to do their investigations,” Crawford explained to Al-Jabbah.
Al-Jabbah nodded. “I want you to make it fast.”
Mort Ott came up to them.
“Mr. Al-Jabbah,” Crawford said. “This is my partner, Mort Ott. Mr. Al-Jabbah is the uncle of—”
Ott nodded. “Sorry about your loss, sir,” he said.
Al-Jabbah nodded again, this time more impatiently.
“We need to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right,” Crawford said.
“Okay,” Said Al-Jabbah, “go ahead.”
Ott had his pad and pen out. He was the designated note-taker, since he had once complained—back when he and Crawford first started out—that there was no way in hell he could read Crawford’s chicken-scratch notes. Told him his handwriting was worse than a doctor.
“Your nephew, how old was he?” Crawford asked, and he could see the past-tense jarred Al-Jabbah.
“Twenty-two.”
“And can you tell us about him?” Crawford said. “Did he work? Was he in college or what? As much information as you can provide, please.”
“He is a student at Palm Beach Atlantic University and is staying here with me. He is my brother’s oldest son. My brother lives in Saudi Arabia.”
“And Mr. Al-Jabbah,” Ott said, “this is a tough question, but do you have any idea if someone might have had a motive to kill your nephew?”
Al-Jabbah cocked his head and chuckled derisively. “Detective Ott, my nephew is a college student,” he said. “Who in the name of God would want to kill him?”
Ott thought for a second. “Well, then, is it possible that whoever did it was targeting you? Mistook your nephew for you, maybe.”
The chuckle was more derisive. “That’s absurd. No one wants to kill me either.”
Crawford waded in. “So then, you think this was just a robbery? Your nephew just happened to drive in, in the middle of it?”
Al-Jabbah shrugged. “That’s the only thing it could be. They took the most expensive car.”
Crawford saw the ME walk through the wide front door of the garage fifty feet away.
“Here comes the Medical Examiner,” he said. “Bob Hawes is his name.”
Hawes went straight to the car and didn’t even glance over at Crawford and the others.
Crawford thought for a second. “Mr. Al-Jabbah, I don’t know much about cars like these,” he gestured, “but aren’t they kind of like expensive paintings? Someone steals one and it’s pretty tough to sell. Because everyone knows it’s been stolen and no one wants to touch it?”
Al-Jabbah thought for a second. “It is harder, but I’m sure there is a market for it in a foreign country. Somewhere in South America maybe. Why don’t you do your job and check out boats? Ones leaving from Miami maybe.”
Crawford nodded, having had his fill of Jabbah Al-Jabbah. “Thank you. We’re going to go over and talk to the ME,” Crawford said to Al-Jabbah as he pulled out his wallet and handed him a card. “Call me anytime. My partner and I will keep you in the loop on the investigation. If I could get your number, please?”
Al-Jabbah gave him his cell phone number, turned abruptly and walked toward a door to the main house.
“I don’t know about that guy,” Ott said, after Al-Jabbah walked away.
“What don’t you know?” Crawford asked.
“I don’t know.”
Crawford smiled and looked over at Bob Hawes. “Come on, time to go talk to Mr. Personality.”
Seventeen
Crawford called it “zig-zagging.” Going from one homicide to the next. He’d much rather stay on one case from beginning to end, without the distractions of another one. But being one of two homicide cops in Palm Beach—Ott the other—that was not always possible.
Crawford had woken up at three in the morning, but the reality was that he had never really fallen asleep. Well, maybe ten minutes here, then wide awake, then fifteen minutes there, then wide awake again, then tossing and turning with snatches of sleep. He just kept thinking that maybe he and Ott were missing a chapter in Knight Mulcahy’s life. As far as Amir Al-Jabbah went, it was just too early.
At 3:10, he got up to stay up. He tuned to iTunes and started going over re-runs of Knight Mulcahy’s shows. He’d heard his show before, but more as back ground noise when he was in his car, his focus being on something else. There was a lot more bombast and bluster than he remembered. A lot of the time it seemed that Mulcahy was almost completely unfiltered, which now made sense, based on what Crawford had heard about him before his sobriety. Going straight from his “Bloody lunches” right into the studio and immediately going on the air. In fact, the more he listened, the more certain segments seemed like nothing more than drunken rants.
At 5:30 a.m., Crawford got dressed and went to Dunkin’ Donuts. Jeanelle served him his medium extra-dark and he took the coffee and two blueberry donuts back to his apartment. The donuts had a nice crusty crunch to them, which was just the way he liked them. The coffee was the way it always was—hot and good.
He clicked iTunes back on and listened to Mulcahy go off on Florida governor Rick Scott’s misshapen, bald head along with, “his 75 IQ and serial-killer eyes.”
At 8 a.m., he was still tuned in, thinking it was about time to hop in the shower and head to the station. He got up and walked to his bedroom. Just as he got to the door, he heard Mulcahy say the words, “which was the
same day I took my first walk on the wild side.”
Crawford stopped dead, turned around, sat back down in his faux leather recliner with the twin cup holders and just listened.
“Hey, you gotta share the love in life,” Mulcahy went on, seemingly by way of explaining his previous shocker. “Ravelasian guys like me gotta spread it around.”
‘What the hell was he talking about?’ Crawford wondered, as he paused iTunes and popped open his MacBook Air and typed Ravelasian in Google. The first definition he got—once he figured out that it was actually Rabelaisian—was, “of, relating to, or resembling the work of Rabelais, esp. by broad, often bawdy humor and sharp satire.” He checked out Rabelais in Wikipedia. The picture of him was a man with an unnaturally long head with a weird, four-sided, lumpy black hat perched on top of it.
None of that shed much light on Mulcahy’s “walk on the wild side” comment, so Crawford Googled the line itself. Of course, the first thing that came up was the song by Lou Reed, which was, in fact, Crawford’s source for what he thought the phrase meant. Crawford’s take was that Mulcahy was coming clean—with clearly no remorse—about some kind of sexual act outside of normal male/female sexual congress. For many—most maybe—a ‘walk on the wild side’ meant a gay liaison, but, based on what he was learning about the life of Knight Mulcahy, it could have been anything from simple voyeurism to a romantic relationship with a neighborhood pet.
Crawford went back and hit the iTunes button. Mulcahy had now shifted out of the ‘wild side’ conversation to some political ramble that was only quasi-intelligible.
Crawford clicked off iTunes, went and got a jacket and tie and headed across the bridge to the station.
He got in at 9:30 and went over to Ott’s cubicle.
Ott looked up then made a big production of looking at his watch. “Meet a cute girl at Dunkin’ Donuts or something, Charlie?”
Crawford’s usual check-in was 8:00.
“Funny,” Crawford said. “Gotta question for you: what does, ‘walk on the wild side’ mean to you, Mort?”
“Means you met a cute guy at Dunkin’ Donuts.”
Crawford ignored the comment. “So it means hooking up with someone you normally wouldn’t hook up with, right?”
Ott chewed that over for a second. “Yeah, more or less,” he said. “If your normal go-to is a woman, it would mean a guy or a transvestite or a—”
“Yeah, okay,” Crawford said sitting down. “So I spent half the night listening to the best of Knight Mulcahy and at one point—totally out of the blue—the guy says how one day he took a walk on the wild side.”
“Really?”
Crawford nodded.
“That was it?” Ott asked. “No more details.”
“No, it was pretty short,” Crawford said, “like, I don’t know, maybe Skagg Magwood mighta been giving him the ‘ol—” Crawford pantomimed a gesture of cutting his throat.
“Cut him off. Like he didn’t want listeners knowing Knight had gone poofter?”
“Something like that.”
Ott shifted in his chair and cupped his chin. “So what are you thinking?”
Crawford shrugged, remembering what Dominica had conjectured: Maybe it was a guy who had the rendezvous with Mulcahy down at his pool house.
Eighteen
Crawford had gone back to his office. He made a call on his landline.
“Rose Clarke.”
“Hey, Rose, it’s Charlie.”
“Hey, Charlie,” Rose said. “This isn’t your cell number.”
“I’m at the station,” Crawford said. “So I have kind of a strange question.”
Rose laughed. “I like strange,” she said. “Fire away.”
Crawford exhaled, wondering just how to phrase the question. “So,” he decided to start out broadly, “what have you heard about Knight Mulcahy’s sex life?”
“I thought I told you,” she said. “Prolific, in a word.”
“And strictly heterosexual?”
“Funny you should ask,” Rose said. “‘Cause as macho as the guy was, there were these murmurings.”
“About what?” He didn’t want to lead the witness.
Rose sighed. “Okay, Charlie, you’ve gone past your allotment of free questions.”
“Happy Hour at The Conch,” he offered.
“You’re not getting off that cheap,” she said. “Lunch at Whitney’s.”
Crawford faux-sighed. “You got a deal.”
“Okay,” said Rose. “Now what’s the question again?”
“About those murmurings you heard.”
“Oh, yeah, that Knight was bi,” Rose said. “Well, the way I heard it, he was maybe not…fully committed, more like a ‘dabbler.’”
“A ‘dabbler?’”
“Yeah, the occasional bromance.”
The obvious question. “Like with who? You got names?”
“Okay, now it’s gonna be dinner at Whitney’s and a nooner.”
Crawford laughed. “Come on, Rose, just a name or two.”
“Well, I heard about this guy who was a riding instructor. Over in Wellington, I think,” she said. “I don’t know his name. Then another guy who’s a waiter at Cafe L’Europe. Renny something. I’ve seen him and he’s a real dreamboat.”
Crawford was taking notes. “Anybody else?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“This riding instructor, you know where he…rides?”
“In the back of Knight’s Bentley maybe?”
“Naughty girl. The place where he teaches riding.”
“I think it might be, Wellington Riding Academy,” she said. “I can find out for sure.”
“Yeah, please,” he said. “So any other guys he ‘dabbles’ with?”
“I’ll check my sources, but you definitely owe me a nooner.”
“Rose, as tempting as that sounds, I got two murders.”
Crawford heard a door shut in the background.
Rose lowered her voice. “I gotta go, Charlie, I’m at an open house.”
Crawford went back down to Ott’s cubicle.
Ott was on the phone. “Email it to me, will ya?” He listened. “Yeah, ‘preciate it.”
He hung up and turned to Crawford. “Evidence tech is sending me the shots of the shoe impressions. Not sure they’re gonna help.”
“Well, at least we’ll have the exact size,” said Crawford. “So more on the theory of it being a guy down at the pool house.”
Ott leaned forward eagerly. “Yeah?”
Crawford nodded. “Yeah, word is ‘ol Knight may have had a few toy boys parked around town.”
Nineteen
Crawford and Ott were on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic College, just across the bridge in West Palm Beach. It described itself as a faith-based, Christian college, which struck Crawford as a little weird since Amir Al-Jabbah certainly seemed about as Muslim as you could get.
What Ott had found out in a phone conversation with the dean of Students was that Amir was a twenty-two-year-old Computer Science major, who had spent his junior and senior high school years at nearby St. Andrews School in Boca Raton. He was the son of a prince in the royal family of Saudi Arabia.
Ott had requested a meeting with the dean and asked him if it would be possible to see if some of Amir’s classmates would attend. The dean seemed eager to cooperate and said he’d do whatever he could.
“What’s this guy’s name again?” Crawford asked as they walked into an administration building on South Flagler.
Ott pulled a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. “Ah, Dean Hoogesteger, I think you pronounce it. Easier if we just call him Dean.”
They walked up to a receptionist and said the dean was expecting them. She led them into his office. Four people were there. The dean, behind a big mahogany desk, and three students.
“Gentlemen,” said the dean standing and reaching across his desk to shake hands. “I’m Howard Hoogesteger”—then turning to the students—“a
nd these three boys were friends—or at least knew—Amir. That’s Josh”—he pointed to each one as he gave their names—“Logan, and Sam.”
They all shook hands and sat down in the extra chairs that the receptionist had brought in.
“Well, first of all, let me say to all of you,” Crawford said, “we’re sorry about what happened to Amir and will do everything necessary to apprehend the people involved in this.”
Ott smiled at the three boys. “And whatever help we can get from you guys would be very much appreciated,” he said.
The dean and the three boys nodded.
“So, what can you tell us about Amir?” Crawford asked.
The three of them looked nervously at each other and no one spoke.
“Josh, you seemed to know him best,” the dean said. “Would you like to…”
Josh scratched his chin. “Ah, well, Amir was a pretty, ya know, nice guy.”
“Could you be a little more specific, Josh?” Ott asked.
“Well, ya know, being a foreigner made it kinda…tough,” Josh said.
“In what sense?” Ott asked, looking to pick up the pace.
“Well, fitting in, wasn’t that easy,” Josh said.
“I kinda got the feeling that’s what Amir wanted to do the most. Fit in,” Logan said. “But he wasn’t good at sports. Lotta guys from over there are good at soccer, but not Amir. Kinda had a hard time with girls, too.”
Crawford was thinking that with all his uncle’s fancy cars, the girls ought to be all over him.
“So what did he do in his spare time? When he wasn’t at class or studying?” Ott asked Logan, clearly the chatty Cathy of the group.
The three boys exchanged uncomfortable looks again.
“Well…” Josh started, then seemed to run out of gas.
“He was into metal,” Logan took over. “Got in with the skinheads, too.”
Crawford, Ott and the dean did a collective, “What?” of disbelief.