by Tom Turner
They followed the directions and stopped at a large room in which five or six doctors and nurses were bustling around, all apparently in the midst of saving the life of the man in the blood-spattered hospital bed. Amid it all, Crawford spotted Petrie’s distinctive brush cut, his hair standing straight up but splotched with blood.
“Can’t die with all those people taking care of you,” Ott said.
“You wouldn’t think so,” said Crawford, noticing a West Palm Beach uniform walk into the room.
Crawford caught his attention and walked over to him. “Hey, you the first-on-scene?”
“Yeah.”
“Detective Crawford, my partner, Detective Ott. Palm Beach homicide.”
“I heard of you,” the uniform said. “I’m Officer Green. Len Green.”
“What can you tell us?” Crawford asked.
Green cocked his head. “Well, this woman jogger showed up right after it went down. Told me the guy was getting mugged. Put up some resistance, I guess, after the guy knifed him.”
“How many knife wounds?”
“I’m not sure. Three, maybe four?”
“He missing anything?” Ott asked. “Wallet? Watch?”
“Think the guy got his wallet,” Green said. “Jogger told me she heard the vic’s dog growling and barking. Maybe saved his life.”
“Jogger get a look at the perp?” Ott asked.
“Not really. The usual. Dark clothes, wearin’ a hoodie.”
“White? Black? Any description?”
“I got her name and number ’case you want to call her.”
“Yeah, give it to me, please,” Ott said.
The uniform handed Ott a card. “I need it back.”
“Sure,” Ott said, raising his old leather notebook. “I’ll write it down.”
“So, Len,” Crawford said, “what’s the area like where it happened. Pretty safe, right?”
“Yeah, every so often there’ll be an incident,” Green said. “Why you guys lookin’ into it?”
“’Cause we interviewed the vic on something else yesterday.”
“Was it that murder up on North Lake Way?”
“Yeah, it was… you know anything about it?”
“Nah, sorry. Just they’re not all that common in Palm Beach.”
“Yeah, don’t happen much,” Crawford said, giving Green a pat on the shoulder. “Well, thanks, for the info, Len.” Looking over at the closed eyes of Simon Petrie on the hospital bed, he said, “Guess we’re not going to talk to our guy tonight.”
Green glanced over at Petrie. “Doesn’t look it. Glad I could help.”
Ott shook his hand. “Thanks.”
“Sure, man.”
Crawford and Ott walked away from Green. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Ott asked.
“That it was an attempt to kill the guy made to look like a mugging?”
Ott nodded.
Nine
It was not a quality Crawford was particularly proud of. It first reared its head four months into his partnership with Ott, when Crawford took a woman out to lunch who he had absolutely no romantic interest in. He simply wanted to pick her brain about a case he was working. Then, Ott had gotten wind of it.
“And here I thought you were a complete saint. Charlie,” Ott had said, shaking his head.
“You’re right, I am. Why?”
Ott chuckled. “Using that woman you took out for lunch to get intel.”
Crawford explained that since they had bupkis on the case, he felt it necessary to take a leave of absence from sainthood, at least temporarily. Until they came up with something. And, as it turned out, something his lunch date told him did jump-start the case and led to them clearing the murder two weeks later.
He was about to do it again: pick a woman’s brain under the guise of taking her out to lunch. In this case it was Vega, a woman who clearly knew a lot about SOAR, and, he thought, knew more than she had revealed in their first interview. She also seemed pretty close to Crux, having been a member of SOAR since back in the beginning, as well as being a current resident of Elysium.
He pulled the piece of paper out of his wallet that Vega had given him and dialed her number.
She answered after the third ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, Vega, it’s Charlie Crawford. Detective Charlie Crawford.”
“You didn’t need to add that, Charlie. You’re not that forgettable.”
“I guess that’s a good thing,” Crawford said. “So, I just wondered, can I buy you lunch?”
“When?”
“Today, I was thinking.”
“So you can pick my brain?”
Busted.
“Well, no, just because I’m sick of watching my partner eat. His table manners are atrocious.”
Which was kind of true.
“I know. I’ve seen him wrestle with those big, greasy sausages at Greens.”
“Not pretty, right?”
She laughed. “What time?”
“How’s 12:30? At Greens? I’ll pick you up.”
“No need. I’ll just take my bike. It’s a pretty short ride down North Lake Way.”
“Sounds good. See you then.”
Talk about quick and easy.
When Vega walked into Green’s she was wearing her dark brown hair up and looked quite attractive. She was dressed in a short beige skirt, which made Crawford wonder how that could have been compatible with pedaling a bicycle. Vega, possibly because she was a Mensa, seemed to anticipate his unasked question.
“I decided to walk after all,” she said.
He nodded as he held her chair. “Welcome to Greens.”
“Do all detectives have such good manners?”
“Every single one of ’em,” Crawford said without hesitation. “Charm school’s part of our training.”
He walked around the table and sat facing her. “So, do you have a favorite thing here, since you seem like a… semi-regular?”
She picked up the menu, then put it down without looking at it. “I’m a vegetable-wrap gal.”
Crawford smiled. “How’s that ever going to put meat on your bones?”
“Because I have a side of tater tots.”
Crawford nodded and chuckled. “Now you’re talkin’. An excellent choice.”
Vega nodded. “How about you?”
“The mouth-watering sardine platter with egg wedges and… tater tots”
Vega frowned. “Ew, gross. Sardines?”
He’d had to defend the oily little fish before and had his standard defense ready. “Little suckers are packed with nutrients and protein and an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acids.”
“You sound like a commercial. Except I doubt they’d refer to them as little suckers in ads. I can’t stand to even look at ‘em—they’re like oysters. Ug-lee!” she said with a shudder.
“Another one of my favorites. Oysters.”
“Yuck,” Vega said. “I guess we’re just not very compatible in the culinary department.”
“That’s not true. The tater tots… can’t live without ‘em.”
Crawford had learned to restrain himself whenever he was champing at the bit to question someone about a case. Dominica and Rose had called him out on it more than once. To the point where Rose had accused him of being virtually inept at conversational foreplay and Dominica had called him All-Business Charlie on several occasions.
Much as it was contrary to his nature, he figured he’d stick with non-dead guy questions for a bit longer. “So, I’m curious, where’d you grow up?” he asked her after they’d ordered.
“Why are you curious about that?”
“I just am. I’m going with the Midwest.”
Vega shook her head. “Oxford, Mississippi.”
“No kiddin’. Deep in the heart of Dixie.”
“Yup. It doesn’t get much deeper,” Vega said, spearing a tater tot, then another.
“You don’t have any accent.”
“Yankee parents
.”
Crawford nodded. “So, where’d you go from there?”
“Yale University. Deep in the heart of beautiful downtown New Haven. How ’bout you?”
“Your Ivy League rival to the north…Dartmouth. Mensa scholarship.”
Vega laughed. “Yeah, right,”
Not particularly funny, but a good transitional opportunity. “What’s that about anyway, all you SOAR people being Mensas?”
“Almost all,” Vega said, poking at her vegetable wrap. “I don’t really know what it’s all about, tell you the truth.”
“It kind of limits the ability of SOAR to grow, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s a very small pool; there just aren’t that many Mensas out there to recruit.”
Vega put her fork down and wiped her mouth. “Let me explain a little because I’m sure you’re just dying to know. Think of us—the forty-three members of SOAR—as kind of a Board of Directors. Crux calls us “the founders,” meaning we collectively, in effect, came up with a constitution, then a game-plan for spreading the beliefs of SOAR across the country, and then, if all goes well, the world. And, just to be clear, we have no intention of requiring future SOAR converts to be Mensas. Or else it would be a very rarified religion. Hell, we’ll take you if you got an IQ of eighty.”
“Phew. I’d just make the cut-off.”
“The modest detective,” Vega said with a wide smile.
Crawford smiled. “So, you’re in the early stages now, right?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely, the early, early stages. I don’t expect to be around when it really ramps up and gets big,” Vega said, picking up her fork again and taking a bite of her vegetable wrap.
“I’ve got so many questions I don’t know where to start—so what exactly are the beliefs, or I guess you’d call it, the ideology of SOAR?”
Vega smiled. “We’d need fifty lunches for me to answer that question adequately. Suffice it to say that we share certain tenets of Zen Buddhism and Sikhism with certain elements of Crux-inspired ideology thrown in. That probably doesn’t help much.”
“Ah, I’m a little rusty on both Zen Buddhism and Sikhism. But I’m guessing you do a lot of meditation and reflection? Stuff like that? All I know about the Sikhs is they wear those turbans.”
“Yes, and as you’ve seen, we don’t.”
“Why not?”
Vega thought for a moment. “Well, I’d say because we believe most Americans are suspicious, or maybe distrustful is the right word, of people who wear turbans.”
“Really?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re aware of that. We’ve actually had long discussions about this,” she said. “Not to mention, a turban’s too damn hot in Florida.”
“I hear you on that,” Crawford said, nodding. “And so… how many members do you expect to end up with… say twenty years from now?”
“Crux’s prognostication is that in ten years, a million members. In twenty years, five million. In fifty years twenty-five million.”
Crawford whistled.
“If you think that’s a lot, you should read the projections on the growth of Islam. I remember the figures: 1.6 billion ten years ago, to 2.76 billion in 2050.”
“Not sure I want to be around then. We’re gonna have a pretty packed universe.”
Vega smiled. “I’m guessing you’ll be a spry ninety-year-old then.”
The magnitude of what Crawford was hearing was mind-boggling. A religion from out of nowhere, born in the unlikely and rarified air of Palm Beach, with twenty-five million members in fifty years.
“Do you call it a religion, a sect, or what?”
It was like Vega had been asked the question before. “We just call it SOAR.”
Crawford nodded. “So, change of subject: Christian Lalley, you’ve had time to think about it, who do you think might have killed your friend? Of the forty-three members of SOAR, would anyone have had a motive, or was there anyone you can think of who just plain didn’t like the man? I mean, really didn’t like the man.”
This time Vega speared a threesome of tater tots, then put the fork down, saving them. “I honestly don’t know. I mean, there’re politics in SOAR and definitely a hierarchy, but Christian was on the descent, not the ascent. The power he had was in the past. Crux, I’m sure, deemed him not enough of a heavyweight to handle SOAR’s finances when their assets went from a hundred million to a billion. Which is why he brought in Guy Bemmert.”
Crawford had a fleeting memory of Bemmert from one of his first interviews the day before.
Vega thought for a moment, then. “You seem like a nice guy and a good detective—I read about a case of yours, by the way, in the Post—so I’m going to give you a tip. Look into Leo Peavy. Look deep into Leo Peavy.” Crawford clearly remembered Leo Peavy—one of the men he’d also interviewed the day before. He had rheumy, watery eyes closest in color to a washed-out, faded yellow; thick, mutton-chop sideburns (think Neil Young circa 1985), and thin brown hair combed straight forward
“Look into him… how do you mean?”
“He’s just one of those guys who bears examination. That’s all I’m going to say on that subject,” Vega said. “But I’ll give you another scoop while I’m gossiping.”
“Please do.”
Vega leaned closer to Crawford and lowered her voice. “Do you know what blabbermouth soup is?”
He smiled. “No, can’t say I do.”
Vega smiled. “It’s another name for a martini,” she said. “So, every couple of weeks or so, Christian and I would go to Ta-boo for Happy Hour and get…well, happy.”
Crawford laughed. “Martinis will do that.”
“No kidding. And as the name implies, Christian sometimes would get pretty talkative.”
Crawford was eager to know where the story was going but didn’t want to push it.
Vega read him. “I know, I know, ‘Get on with the story, Vega,’” she said. “So, do you remember that scandal a year or so ago when the bank president here was accused of having young boys come to his house for… whatever?”
“Yeah, like that guy Epstein, but boys instead of girls.”
Vega nodded. “Except it was all… you’ll excuse the expression, bullshit.”
Crawford couldn’t remember all the details except it ran under big lurid headlines in the Palm Beach Post. He wasn’t seeing the connection to Christian Lalley but guessed he soon would. “So, go on, tell me about it.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do you know anything about Crux’s father?”
Crawford shrugged. “Nothing except he was recruited from a bank in New Zealand to head a British bank in New York. Got fired, as I remember it.”
“Okay, here’s the whole story: so, the banker who took over after Crux’s father got fired was that same guy who got accused of pedophilia with those boys here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, and it gets worse. That same man who got accused—Whitmore’s his name—supposedly had an affair with Crux’s mother when Crux’s father was off on some gambling junket somewhere”
Crawford shook his head slowly. “Jesus, this is a lot to comprehend. And when did all this take place?”
“Long time back. Like twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago. So according to Christian, who knew Crux way back then, Crux always had it in for this guy Whitmore… I forget his first name. Crux apparently has a very long memory.”
“Boy, I’ll say,” Crawford said putting up a hand. “So now, I’ve got a ton of questions.”
“I figured you would. I’ll try to answer them as best as I can, but here’s a little bit more,” Vega said. “According to Christian, Crux and Peavy came up with a plan to, excuse my mouth”—she looked around to make sure the waitress wasn’t nearby—“fuck over Whitmore.” Suddenly, she snapped her fingers. “Now I remember: his first name is Holmes. Holmes Whitmore. Anyway, Christian figured that it was probably Peavy’s plan, but Crux approved it. Approved it with gusto, no doubt. So, what Peavy did was hire th
ese boys to go—one by one, over a period of a few days— to the rear door of Whitmore’s house, then just stand there. In the meantime, they were caught on surveillance cameras from the street.”
Crawford was staggered. “That was it? So, you mean, they never went inside?”
Vega nodded.
Wow, thought Crawford, the plan was perfect in its simplicity. He remembered seeing one of the tapes on WPEC news, the CBS affiliate. A grainy photo of a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, casting his eyes around furtively in what was clearly the back door of a recognizable house. Holmes Whitmore’s house, it turned out. That was the only one he saw, but he remembered hearing there were also tapes of two other boys as well. What was amazing was that Holmes Whitmore was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion by three tapes that didn’t even show any of the boys going into his house.
As Crawford recalled, Whitmore was never tried; he moved away from Palm Beach after vehemently denying any guilt. But no one, it seemed, not a soul, was buying his innocence.
“So that was Crux’s revenge, huh, for something that happened twenty years ago?”
“Yeah, apparently his father and mother got divorced after her affair with Whitmore. And I forgot which—either the mother or the father—turned into a raging alcoholic.” Vega shrugged. “Maybe both of ‘em”
“So—”
“I know. Now you have a gazillion questions,” Vega said. “So, how’d Christian find out about all this is one question, right?”
Crawford nodded.
“Christian, who was treasurer of SOAR at the time, had the job of being… well, the unflattering word for it is bagman. Meaning he paid off each of those boys. Two hundred dollars apiece to go up to the back door of Whitmore’s house and be caught by the cameras. He was also told to pay them a thousand apiece to claim they had sex with Whitmore. But it never got that far.”
“He was told. By who?”
“By Peavy.”
“Not Crux.”
“No, but Christian figured the order came from Crux,” Vega said. “Anyway, turned out the boys were never called on to testify or anything. They never were even interviewed by the cops. The damage done just by those tapes alone was plenty.”