HOUSTON, TEXAS // Café Layal is one of five Middle Eastern restaurants situated within a few blocks of each other on the western edge of Houston.
There, on a recent warm summer evening, Ayman Khatib, 38, takes a seat with friends to enjoy a shisha and a coffee, as a long evening after the Ramadan fast begins to unfold.
Mr Khatib, from Palestine, is a musician. Every Sunday, he plays at Layal. His face adorns posters on the wall of this large restaurant and shisha coffee shop, and he gets nods of recognition from customers, as well as special treatment from staff. A Jordanian at a nearby table wonders if he will play tonight, since Layal's keyboard - a mid-1980s Korg model - stands idle.
Mr Khatib smiles politely and waves off the request.
"You have every kind of Arab in Houston," he says. "From Morocco to the Gulf, everyone comes to this city."
In Houston's deeply-rooted and well-embedded Arab community, the murder of Salem Saif Al Mazroui, an Emirati military officer, shocks those who hear of it. Mr Khatib shakes his head when hearing of the killing, but says he is not surprised the Houston police has rejected anti-Arab prejudice as a motive.
"This is very sad. There's too much crime here. But Arabs don't have any problem because of who we are."
Mr Al Mazroui was shot dead on August 7 in the home he shared with his father, who was in the US for cancer treatment.
One suspect, Detone Lewayne Price, 18, was arrested at his home last Wednesday. A second, Corey Trevon Perry, 17, of Houston, was arrested on Saturday. Both have been charged with capital murder - the most severe murder charge available to prosecutors.
Mr Al Mazroui, 28, and his father had returned from prayers and left their car idling outside their apartment to unload groceries when two men forced their way in. As the father and son tried to flee, three shots were fired and Mr Al Mazroui was killed. Investigators found fingerprints on the vehicle, which the robbers used to escape before abandoning it.
Houston is America's fourth-largest city and is traditionally a centre for the oil and gas industries. The Arab connection is a strong one that reaches all the way to the UAE.
A sister city to Abu Dhabi since 2001, Houston is home to several joint venture energy projects between US and Arab energy companies, including the UAE's Zakum Development Company, Zadco, an arm of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Adnoc.
And if energy is "the true nexus" between the US and the Arab world, as David Phillips, the chairman of Houston's Bilateral US-Arab Chamber of Commerce, suggests, this Texan port city is right at its heart.
But energy is no longer the single source of connection, Mr Phillips says. This autumn, the chamber is preparing to take three trade delegations, each comprising 25 to 30 American chief executives, to the region, including to Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Additionally, the education and health sectors are becoming more and more represented, he says.
The growing role of the latter is not surprising. Houston Medical Centre comprises an entire neighbourhood of the city. It is said to be home to the largest concentration of world-class medical facilities in the world.
These include the MD Anderson Cancer Centre, to which the UAE donated US$150 million (Dh550.8m) earlier this year, and which last year, according to officials at the facility, cared for 90 Emiratis among its 7,000 international patients.
The official US census counted 41,143 Arab-Americans in the greater metropolitan Houston area in 2009. Community leaders, however, believe there are more, perhaps as many as 120,000.
Mouna Boucetaa, the co-ordinator for the Arab American Community Centre on Houston's south side, puts the number at 150,000 "if we count undocumented Arabs. All those who have come to get work or get married".
Arab people, says Mrs Boucetaa, are attracted to Houston for a number of reasons. Not only is there a big community making fitting in easier, but "Arabs like the coast. We like to be near a beach".
Arab Americans in Houston are traditionally a wealthier group, middle-class and college-educated. With the city escaping the worst of the US recession, Mrs Boucetaa says Arabs have migrated in large numbers from across the US for economic reasons in recent years.
The Arab community here is growing. According to official census numbers, it has doubled since 2000.
Back at Cafe Layal, the keyboard no longer stands idle. A musician gamely makes his way through what appears to be a polka version of Simon and Garfunkel's The Boxer.
A crowd of young and old - Arabs, Americans and others - fill the large patio space where shisha is being inhaled.
Rami Saadi, Layal's 24-year-old manager, takes a few minutes to pause on a busy night.
"People from all over get on well in Houston," he says, before adding with a smile, "and everyone loves shisha."