Monument to Murder

by Margaret Truman

  “Seems like their testimony worked,” Brixton said. “She only got four years.”

  “That’s right. The DA wasn’t happy about it but I was. The way I figured it, she’d get straight behind bars, come out and maybe put some sort of a life together without drugs and booze. I’d kept up with her while she was incarcerated. A friend of mine at the prison worked with the kid and kept me in the loop. Louise Watkins made good use of her prison time, Bob, earned her GED, took advantage of the drug-rehab program, and came out clean.” His laugh was more of a grunt. “My friend, she told me that Louise had a real talent for numbers, could do all sorts of math in her head. She—my friend—was going to help find Louise a job with an accounting firm or something else where she could use that talent. But then—”

  “Then she was gunned down.”

  “That hurt, Robert. I had intended to contact her when she was released to see if I could help her find her way. I never had any kids and maybe was looking to play daddy to somebody. I never got the chance.”

  “What would you say if I suggested that she might have taken the rap for someone else?”

  “You mean for a friend? That would have to have been one special friend.”

  “For money. Ten grand.”

  “Who?”

  Brixton shrugged. “That’s one of the things I’m being paid to find out, along with who shot her.”

  “You really think you can do that?”

  Another shrug. “I’ll try. Did she say anything, anything when you were with her that might help me?”

  Cleland finished a cream puff and a swallow of coffee. “No,” he said. “I wanted to question her further but the chief nixed that, told me to take the statement, cuff her, and turn her over to the DA’s office. That’s what I did.”

  “What about the guy who got stabbed? From what I’ve heard, she claimed he’d tried to rape her.”

  “I don’t remember much about him. Fairly young, twenty-four, twenty-five. I reviewed the crime-scene photos in preparation for testifying at her sentencing. Good-lookin’ fella, came from Atlanta. Autopsy showed plenty of drugs in his system, no surprise since he was hanging out at Augie’s.”

  “Good-looking enough that he didn’t need to rape anybody for sex?”

  “I’d say so, but you never can tell what a junkie’ll do.”

  Brixton stretched and grimaced, rubbed his right knee.

  “When are you gonna get that knee replaced?” Cleland said.

  “One of these days.”

  It had happened during Brixton’s final year on the force. He and his partner had been dispatched to pick up a parole violator and were met with a hail of bullets, one of which hit Brixton in the knee. His partner killed the fugitive and called for backup. After undergoing surgery, Brixton had spent the next six months in rehab, and had been assigned to a desk job until his retirement papers came through.

  There wasn’t much else he could ask Cleland, at least at that juncture, and they settled into easy conversation about their days together on the streets of Savannah. Cleland took Brixton out a back door to show off his vegetable garden, which Brixton dutifully admired. Of all the things he enjoyed doing, gardening wasn’t among them. An hour later Cleland walked him to the front door. Brixton looked up the quiet street at a small, red pickup truck parked at the curb. He’d noticed what he assumed was the same truck behind him on the highway on his way to Cleland’s. Sun on the windshield obscured the driver’s face. Brixton clapped his former partner on the back before he got into his car and drove off. The red truck remained parked.

  His visit with Joe Cleland hadn’t resulted in his learning anything tangible, but it did accomplish one thing.

  He believed Eunice Watkins.

  CHAPTER 4

  Brixton dialed the number he’d been given for Eunice Watkins. He wanted to see whether Louise’s mother was home and up for a visit. An answering machine picked up his cell phone call. He didn’t bother to leave a message, deciding to stop by her house anyway if only to get a feel for the atmosphere in which the daughter had been brought up.

  The address was in the Pinpoint section of Savannah, about eleven miles from downtown. Inhabited primarily by African-Americans, it had been established by freed slaves following the Civil War and was one of the last bastions of Gullah-speaking people, a Creole language patterned after several West African languages. As Brixton entered the town he saw a sign proudly proclaiming that it was the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

  The Watkins place was one of a dozen similar homes that sat side by side on a tree-lined street. He pulled up in front of the house number he had and surveyed his surroundings. The only activity was a few school-age kids playing and a delivery truck from which furniture was being carried into a house across the street. A recent vintage Ford sedan was parked in the Watkins driveway.

  He got out and went to the front door, rang the bell. Based upon his unanswered call, he didn’t expect to find her at home. But a curtain on a narrow vertical window next to the door was pulled aside, the sound of a sliding deadbolt was heard, and she opened the door.

  “I hope you don’t mind my just stopping by,” Brixton said. “I tried calling but got your answering machine.”

  “I’ve been letting the machine take calls,” she said.

  To avoid bill collectors? he wondered.

  “Please, come in,” she said, stepping aside to allow him to enter.

  An air conditioner in a living room window exhaled barely cool air into the tidy, pleasantly furnished room. A spinet piano occupied a short wall at the base of stairs leading to the second level. The hardwood floor glistened from a recent waxing, its center covered by a hooked rug of various colors. An older-model TV with its bulky back sat on a TV cart with wheels across from a couch covered in a green-and-white-striped fabric. Two chairs in a matching pattern flanked it.

  “Please, sit down,” she said. “Would you like some sweet tea? I made some fresh this morning.” Sweet tea was a Savannah stalwart enjoyed year-round, well-steeped tea with plenty of sugar added.

  “That would be nice,” Brixton said. “Thank you.”

  While Mrs. Watkins fussed in the kitchen, Brixton walked around the small living room, stopping to peruse books on a tall bookcase interspersed with a variety of small, framed photographs. There were photos on the piano, too, and a cluster of them hung on a wall near the TV, each one perfectly straight. Brixton could never get his photos to hang straight and wondered whether the lady of the house spent a good part of her day keeping them in line. One picture on a bookcase shelf caught his eye. It was a color photo of a group of six teenage girls, three black, three white. They seemed happy in the shot, mugging for the camera the way teenagers do. He’d just picked it up to take a closer look when she returned with the tea and he put the photo back on the shelf.

  “Is that your daughter in that picture?” he asked.

  “Oh, my, yes, it is.”

  “Looks like a happy occasion.”

  “It was. Louise was sixteen when it was taken, a year before she left home. She was taking drugs by then only I didn’t know it. I suppose I preferred not to know, turned a blind eye on what she was doing, wanted to believe only good things about her. What a glorious smile she had, light up a room. You can see it in that photograph.” She left, returning seconds later with two other pictures of her daughter. Louise Watkins had, indeed, been a pretty girl, and the smile her mother had cited was evident in both shots. Brixton thought that showing him the pictures might cause her to tear up but she didn’t. She placed them on a coffee table next to the pitcher of tea, and a plate of brownies, and urged him to sit and enjoy her offerings, which he did.

  She asked why he’d stopped by.

  “I just wanted to touch base with you again,” he answered. “I spent time with two colleagues from the police department. One is still there, the other has retired. He was the one who took down Louise’s confession.”

  “Detective Clela
nd,” she said. “A nice man. He testified at her sentencing hearing.”

  “Right. He told me that he never quite believed her confession. It sounded rehearsed to him.”

  A flash of spark lit up her eyes. “Exactly,” she said. “Louise was paid to say what she did.”

  Brixton nodded.

  “I asked Detective Cleland, and other policemen, to question her further, to press her to tell the truth,” she said, “but they didn’t. It was like they didn’t care enough to do it.”

  Brixton debated trying to explain why no one probed deeper at the department—that they were happy not to have another murder or manslaughter case to pursue. Confessions make everything so much easier for a cop, even when they might not reflect reality. A bird in hand, in this case a bird named Louise Watkins.

  The phone rang. She allowed it to sound four times before the answering machine, which was next to the TV, picked up. After her outgoing message, the caller grunted and hung up.

  “Another one,” she said flatly.

  “Another what?”

  “Another call. I received two last night.”

  “From whom?”

  “I don’t know. A man. Both times he said something like, ‘Don’t be stupid.’”

  “That’s all he said?”

  “Yes. And there have been two others like that one just now. He hangs up.”

  “Has this happened before?” Brixton asked.

  “No. Never.”

  Brixton stood, arching against a pain. “Excuse me,” he said, “bad back.”

  “Would you like an aspirin?” she asked.

  “What? Oh, no, no thanks.”

  He walked to the bookcase and brought the photo of the six girls back to her. “Schoolmates?” he asked.

  “No, Mr. Brixton. That was taken at a retreat at CVA.”

  “The Christian Vision Academy on Ogeechee Road?”

  “Yes. The school held a retreat, inviting young girls of color to their campus for a weekend, sort of an outreach to bring the races closer together. It was a nice gesture. Louise didn’t want to go but I insisted. From the looks of things in the picture she had herself a good time. She told me she did when she got home.”

  Brixton cleared his throat before saying, “I need to ask you a question, Mrs. Watkins. I don’t mean to upset you but—”

  “You go right ahead and ask any question you wish, Mr. Brixton. Most of my upset is behind me.”

  “Yeah. Well, when Louise was on the streets as a—as a prostitute—did she work for anybody?”

  She looked puzzled.

  “Did she have a boss, a pimp, a guy who managed her, if that’s what you’d call it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did she ever mention any of the other women she worked with?”

  “No. Louise never said anything about those times. She was embarrassed enough, I suppose, that I even knew.”

  “How did you know?”

  “She called when she was arrested. I bailed her out.”

  “Well, thank you, ma’am, for the talk and the sweet tea. It was excellent.”

  He picked up the photo of the six girls again and looked closely at it before returning it to the bookcase.

  “I was so pleased that Louise went to that retreat,” Mrs. Watkins said. “Maybe if she’d spent more time with girls like that she wouldn’t have strayed into trouble the way she did.”

  Brixton didn’t know whether she was right or not and didn’t comment.

  “But I suppose that wasn’t possible. Louise didn’t have much opportunity to be with young women like those in the picture. They come from—”

  “The other side of town?”

  “Yes, I suppose you could put it like that, Mr. Brixton. Thank you for coming all this way to see me.”

  “Next time I hope to have more to report.”

  “Would you be needing another check?”

  “No, ma’am, not yet. Thanks for the hospitality. I’ll be in touch.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Cynthia was in a foul mood when Brixton returned to the office. Her husband, Jim, had done too good a job of weaving scary ghost stories into his commentary during one of the tours he’d hosted the night before, causing a mother with two frightened, small children to complain loudly about his lack of sensitivity where children were concerned.

  “What’d Jim say?” Brixton asked.

  “He told her that if she didn’t want her precious little darlings to be afraid, she shouldn’t take them on a ghost tour.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” Brixton said.

  “She complained to the tour operator and demanded her money back.”

  “You husband was right,” Brixton said.

  “Not if he loses his job. You got a call from an attorney who’s looking for an investigator. Here’s his number.”

  “Thanks.”

  Brixton returned the attorney’s call and made an appointment to meet with him later that afternoon. His next call was to Wayne St. Pierre at the police barracks on Habersham, at the corner of Oglethorpe.

  “Nice dinner last night,” St. Pierre said. “Did I thank you? I think I did but if I didn’t, I do now.”

  “You thanked me. Wayne, I need to access arrest records going back fifteen, sixteen years. Louise Watkins had been arrested for soliciting at least a few times. I’d like the names of other hookers who were brought in with her on those nights.”

  St. Pierre laughed. “They’re probably grandmothers by now, Bobby.”

  “I hope they are. Can do?”

  “I’ll check and get back to you.”

  He called less than an hour later. “Ready to write?” he said. “Your Ms. Watkins was dragged in with three other lovely ladies of the night, a couple of them veterans of the streets.” He rattled off the names.

  “Whoa,” Brixton said. “Wanda Johnson? Isn’t she the one who left the biz and established some sort of mission for hookers, get ’em off the street and into the straight life?”

  “That’s her. Moved to Atlanta, got plenty of TV coverage when she opened her mission.”

  “The other names don’t ring a bell but that’s okay. I’ll try Johnson first. It’s a long shot that she’ll remember Louise Watkins, but worth a stab. Thanks, Wayne.”

  A few calls to Atlanta gave Brixton a number for Wanda Johnson’s Refuge Project. Brixton placed the call and, after being put on hold, Wanda came on the line. Brixton introduced himself, told her why he was calling, and said he’d like some time with her.

  “Louise Watkins, you say?” Ms. Johnson said in a husky voice. “I do remember her, sort of a lost soul as I recall. Didn’t belong out there on the streets, but then again none of my girls do. Sure, happy to see you, Mr. Brixton. When do you want to come?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Sounds fine with me long as it’s in the daytime. I’m out doing God’s work most nights.”

  They agreed on a time, noon the following day, and he received directions.

  “I’ll be in Atlanta tomorrow,” Brixton told Cynthia when she came into his office with checks to sign. He told her why.

  “You’re really into this case, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Just doing what I promised, looking for information about what happened to Mrs. Watkins’ daughter.”

  “You buy her theory that her daughter was paid to go to prison?”

  “Maybe. If it’s true, her murder might be linked to it.” He raised his hand against her reservations. “I know, I know, it’s all supposition at this point. But I owe it to my client to at least try and prove that she’s right. Will I? Prove it?” A shrug. “I’ll give it a week. If I haven’t made any headway, I’ll tell her I bombed and suggest she save the rest of the money her daughter gave her.”

  The attorney’s office was too close to drive to but far enough that by the time Brixton walked there in the late-afternoon sun and humidity, his shirt stuck to his body and perspiration ran down his face. He’d put on a tie to l
ook professional even though he knew it wasn’t necessary. Old habits die hard. Besides, he wasn’t pleased with society’s casual approach to dress these days. He’d been on airplanes where his seat companion, if male, was dressed as though he were going to a mud-wrestling contest. Females too often viewed a commercial flight as a teenage sleepover with plenty of skin showing. He had nothing against female skin, liked it as much as the next guy. But it was a matter of time and place, like going to see a potential client wearing a tie.

  He knew the lawyer by reputation, a matrimonial specialist with a not particularly savory image. Probably needs a tail on a philandering husband or wife to see whether the guy really did go bowling with his buddies every Tuesday night, or whether she actually attended weekly Tupperware parties at a girlfriend’s house. He had done his share of those assignments since opening his agency and never felt clean when one was concluded and he’d turned over his notes, photographs, videos, or audio files. But that kind of work was bread-and-butter for most PIs, and he’d invested in some pretty esoteric electronic equipment to stay competitive with larger agencies. That he charged less than those bigger agencies gave him a certain advantage.

  His expectation was correct: the attorney had a client, a husband, who was convinced that the missus was cheating on him and wanted proof before he filed for divorce. Brixton didn’t care who slept with whom, no matter who they were, everyday Joes or hot-shot celebrities. The tabloid mentality that TV, newspapers, and magazines had adopted left him cold. But he didn’t write the rules when it came to divorces. A buck was a buck, and he’d been successful in rationalizing those assignments, and compartmentalizing them from real life, his own real life.

  He accepted the assignment, got an up-front on the fee, and left the office. He didn’t like the guy the moment they shook hands, sized him up as smarmy, one of those attorneys who’ll deliberately prolong a divorce case to keep the fee meter running. The guy had giggled rather than laughed, and spent part of the meeting telling Brixton about some of his juicy cases, which Brixton didn’t want to hear. It turned out that the husband who wanted his wife followed owned a fairly popular restaurant down on River Street. Brixton knew the place from his days on the PD, and had eaten there a few times since retiring. He wouldn’t go again.