Deception in Savannah: A Humorous Novel of Murder, Mystery, Sex, and Drugs

by Charles Dougherty

  Day 5, Morning

  Lizzie answered her doorbell at eight a.m. to let Joe Denardo in. She had just opened the door when her phone rang.

  "Come on in, Joe," she said, dashing back in to get the phone. "Coffee’s in the kitchen."

  Joe had just finished pouring a cup of coffee for himself and refilling Lizzie’s cup when she hung up the phone and stepped into the kitchen.

  "Well, that was Donald," Lizzie told Joe. "He can’t wash the van this morning, because he's in the hospital. A nurse took the phone from him to tell me he's all right, but he's sedated and needs to rest. He's in Memorial Hospital, room number 3215."

  "What happened? Did they say?"

  "No. No idea, but I think I'll go see him later. I don't have a tour this morning, and I'm kind of worried about him."

  "Think I'll tag along if it’s okay. I'm probably less likely to set off his cop alarm if I'm with you. Give me a call and I'll meet you there." Joe walked to Lizzie's front door. He thought he would use the time until their visit to go to his office and see what had happened overnight. He thanked Lizzie for the coffee and waved as he pulled away from the curb, thinking that Lizzie really had a knack for picking up strays.

  Joe got to the station in time to catch up on the latest gossip. The most bizarre story was the one about the interrupted ghost tour last night. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but a man named Donald Tompkins had been taken to Memorial Hospital, where he had been admitted for treatment for shock and second degree burns to the head and neck. "Bingo!" thought Joe, as he punched "Tompkins, Donald" into his computer and discovered that the only reference was the incident last night. Donald had a clean record, and he lived with his mother in Yamacraw Village.

  Joe drove out to Memorial a little early and learned that the resident who had treated Donald in the emergency room was still on duty, working a second shift for someone else. The emergency room was quiet at 10:30 in the morning, and Joe was able to buy the tired doctor a cup of coffee and talk with him about the incident involving Donald.

  The doctor didn’t know much, except about Donald’s injuries, which were more baffling and painful than dangerous. He said Donald had been jabbering semi-coherently about "Black Caesar" and "working for tips," and "loonies from New York with pepper spray," none of which made any sense in the context of his injuries.

  The doctor went on to describe how he had surgically removed the remains of a melted hard hat from Donald’s short, thick Afro. After careful work with scissors and a little bit with a saw, they had finished by shaving Donald’s head to get him cleaned up. The doctor thought once the painkillers wore off and Donald’s hair grew back, he’d be as good as new. Just as they were finishing, Joe's cell phone rang.

  "Denardo," he answered.

  "Hey, Joe. It's Lizzie. I just pulled into the parking lot at Memorial. Meet you in Donald's room. ‘Bye."

  Joe turned off the phone as he left the hospital cafeteria, mindful of all the warning signs about cell phones. When he got to the room, he found Lizzie chatting with a slender, cheerful looking black man, sitting up in his hospital bed. Donald seemed a little dopey from the medication, and his head looked like it had been smeared with Vaseline and rolled in feathers. On closer inspection, though, the feathers turned out to be gauze pads.

  After the introductions, Joe explained why he was there, referring to Donald’s comments when he met Dave.

  "Yep, I was in Wright Square that night," Donald acknowledged. He figured he was in so much trouble with his mother now that a little beer wouldn’t make it any worse. "I fell sound asleep settin' on the bench drinkin' a beer. Didn't know how tired I was, I reckon. I should have skipped drinkin' that beer and gone on home. Squealin' tires and a loud thump woke me up, and I saw Dave bendin' over the girl. I 'da been more wide awake, I might've stayed there to talk to the police, but all I's able to think about was gettin' home so Mama wouldn’t give me a hard time about drinkin' beer."

  Joe thanked Donald and excused himself to go back to his office and write up some notes on his interview with Donald, adding them to the meager contents of the hit and run case file.

  Donald had been having some trouble focusing his attention on Joe's questions. The wasps in his head were buzzing furiously, and he couldn’t get them to stay in formation well enough to formulate answers. One particular wasp that wore an "I Love New York" T-shirt kept pushing the others aside and stinging Donald before he could sort out the things that happened the night of the accident from the things that had happened to him last night.

  While Lizzie was still with Donald, they learned that if he felt all right, he would be discharged that afternoon. Lizzie volunteered to pick him up later and take him home. He expressed concern that he had messed her up by not being there to wash her van this morning, and vowed that he would do it tomorrow, "…for sure, Miss Lizzie."

  "Donald, let's wait and see if you're well enough, but don't worry. You can go back to washing it every day as soon as you're able," Lizzie said.

  Kathy woke up as the sun came streaming through her bedroom window. She stretched luxuriously and enjoyed the warmth, feeling like she imagined her old cat had felt when she took a nap in a sunny spot on the living room floor. She hadn’t thought of the cat in years. It had been the family pet when she and Joe were teenagers, and they both thought the cat had it made. She wondered if last night’s time with Dave had put her high school days in mind. Probably, she decided, getting lazily out of bed and going to the kitchen to start coffee. She had spent a delightful evening with Dave over a languid dinner at one of the city’s fine restaurants. They had lingered over the meal for a couple of hours, but she didn't notice the time passing until they got up to leave. She saw the grandfather clock in the entrance hall as they left the old mansion that housed the restaurant and was surprised at how quickly the evening had passed.

  She had initially been a little anxious about their date. She hadn’t gone out with anyone since she had started dating her ex so many years ago. Once she had gotten through the divorce, she had lost herself in the joy of her job. And, to be honest with herself, she hadn’t had any offers, unless you counted the occasional proposition from male clients when their wives were otherwise occupied. Kathy didn’t think of herself as narrow minded, but she did draw the line somewhere before that kind of carrying on. So, she had been worried about how to behave on a date with Dave. She liked him a lot; she always had. But she had never considered him in a romantic light. She didn’t want to jeopardize this newly rediscovered friendship by being a social dork of some kind.

  She smiled over her coffee as she sat at her breakfast bar, thinking how silly her worry had turned out to be. Two 50-year-old people who had known each other longer than they could remember, she and Dave had seemed to hit it off perfectly. They discovered a mutual need to feel their way slowly into this new dimension of their relationship, and that relieved all of Kathy’s anxiety. She was having a lazy morning at home today as she had no appointments, and she and Dave had stayed up late talking. As she glanced out her window, she saw Connie next door sitting on her balcony, sipping coffee and looking lonely. Kathy was feeling so comfortable that she wanted to share the wealth, so she opened the door and stepped out onto her own balcony, coffeepot in hand.

  "How about a warm-up?" Kathy offered.

  Connie seemed startled, and Kathy worried aloud, "Sorry. Hope I'm not disturbing you."

  "Not at all," Connie assured her, "Come on over the railing and have a seat." As she held out her mug to accept the proffered coffee, Connie said, "I have way too much time to myself, lately. I’m glad of your company."

  Kathy explained that she was taking a morning off, just relaxing after a busy few weeks.

  "So you sell real estate," Connie said.

  "Well, I've worked in real estate off and on for years, but I got serious about it a few months ago after my divorce," Kathy explained.

  "Selling houses sounds like a real kick," Connie said, "especially somewhere
like Savannah. There are so many nice neighborhoods here."

  "So, Connie, you said the other day that you had moved here a couple of years ago. What do you do for a living?" Kathy asked.

  This led to Connie telling her about the diet clinic. Connie felt slightly ashamed to admit to being part of something that she was sure looked like such an outrageous swindle. Kathy had a disarming manner, though, and she made it easy for Connie to talk about the clinic.

  "Everybody I know around here was pleased to see the clinic open so soon after the nursing home went under. Seems like you all hired all the folks who lost their jobs when the nursing home failed. That was great!" Kathy said. "We were all glad to see that happen. The local gossip was that the nursing home was a front for a drug money laundering scheme, anyhow."

  Connie perked up at that. She asked so many questions about it that her intensity made Kathy uncomfortable.

  "I really shouldn’t spread that kind of gossip," she demurred, to Connie’s continued probing. "What matters is that you all have made a going concern out of it now," Kathy finished, trying to close the topic.

  Connie thought, "Yeah, lady, if you only knew," as she said, "Oops! Time gets away with good company. I've got to get to work!" and went inside.

  Although Connie got dressed for work, she drove herself to the beach. She parked her car on Butler Avenue and wandered slowly down the strand as she thought through all the pieces of information she had collected over the last few days. She had played along with Rick as if nothing was wrong, but he had acted strangely. When she had asked if he wanted to go to her place last night for some quiet time, just the two of them, he had begged off, claiming he didn’t feel well. She hadn’t pressed him, but took his rejection as confirmation of her suspicions regarding his burgeoning relationship with Mary Lou. After Rick had settled the tab for their dinner, he had taken her home, given her a perfunctory kiss, and purred away in his Porsche like a man with too much on his mind.

  She had spent the rest of last evening assessing how she really felt about Rick. She decided she was comfortable with him, and that was about as romantic as she could make it. They had a lot in common, most of it on the tawdry side. She didn’t really need Rick now, at least not emotionally, the way she once had. She realized that somewhere along the way, she had outgrown him. She was financially tied to her job, but only because she needed her paychecks from the clinic to make the mortgage payments on the condo. Other than that, there was nothing to keep her here. She could sell the condo, pay off the mortgage, and start living her own life, without Rick. That was starting to seem attractive to her. She felt like she was waking up from a long, boring dream.

  Connie had gone to bed early last night, sober, and slept better than she had in recent memory. She had been sitting in the sun this morning, thinking about what she should do next, when Kathy had come over and unwittingly handed her the key to extricating herself from the prison that Rick and the clinic had become. She realized she had subconsciously wanted to separate herself from Rick for a long time. Now she might have the means to do it. She ticked off her mental list: hit and run, infidelity, inappropriate relations with a patient, and ties to organized crime.

  It was the last item that clinched it for her, because by her reckoning, that gave Rick access to some cash. The other items would have given her enough leverage to squeeze Rick, but she knew he didn’t have any money that he could use to settle with her if she decided to dissolve their partnership, so to speak. Connie was shrewd enough to know that money laundering meant large amounts of cash and limited accountability. She could make a video on a DVD using her laptop computer and document everything she knew about Ricks' transgressions. That much was straightforward. The issue of how to use that weapon once she had created it needed a little thought, but first, she had set herself the task of figuring out how much Rick was going to pay for her silent departure from the scene.

  Day 5, Afternoon

  It was a slow day for Willie Smith as he sat behind the counter in his video rental store, but that was okay with him. His overhead expenses were low, and he could just kind of sit here and chill out. When business was slow, it just meant there was a reduced risk of the religious nuts deciding to put up a picket line outside William’s Video Emporium.

  He had originally thought a classy sounding name might keep the anti-porn crusaders from figuring out what he was doing, but they were smarter than Willie gave them credit for being. Willie had worried over the protestors for the wrong reason, as it turned out. He’d thought they would shame his potential customers and keep them from coming into the store, but he was wrong.

  Most of Willie’s customers were so twisted they actually got a charge out of walking past the Christian picket line. Some of his customers would make off-color comments and lewd gestures to the protestors as they entered the shop. This so disgusted the people picketing that they sometimes packed up their signs and left. They’d been prepared to make catcalls themselves, but apparently they didn’t want to get up close and personal with the perverts they were trying to protect from Willie’s corrupting influence.

  Willie was busiest in the evening hours, so he had a habit of dozing during the daytime. He was nodding off when one of his regulars came in, tripping the door alarm and waking him up.

  The rum-addled guy maneuvered well, like most experienced drunks. If you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t realize he was three sheets to the wind, thought Willie. He was usually dressed nicely, in a suit, like today. He came in every few days and rented an old-fashioned porn video. "Nothing kinky for old Jonas Belk," he would confide to Willie.

  Willie wondered what "old Jonas" did that allowed him to stay sloshed all day long and rent flicks to watch in the afternoon. The geek often returned them the same afternoon he had rented them, explaining to Willie that he was somewhat absent-minded, and he was afraid he’d forget if he didn’t do it while he was thinking about it.

  Belk was the ne’er-do-well son of Mrs. Jonas Withington Belk, who had inherited square miles of timberland from her Withington ancestors. She had been married to Jonas Belk, Sr., long enough to conceive Jonas Junior, as she called him dotingly. Shortly after fulfilling his assigned role in the reproductive process, Jonas, Sr., did the proper thing, and died.

  Belk was almost sure his father had succumbed to terminal boredom, maliciously inflicted by his mother. Mrs. Belk was well suited to widowhood, once she had dealt with the exigencies of procreation.

  She had set out on the road to parenthood with every intention of raising little Jonas to be her ideal son. This would have made him a pansy and a mama's boy, in the normal course of things, but hormones and chromosomes had won the battle of nature versus nurture. Little Jonas grew up to be a severely conflicted, but nonetheless straight, drunk. He had managed, with his mother’s money and determination, to be admitted to the Bar upon graduation from the University of Georgia law school. His mother had set him up in a nice office and had arranged to have clients referred to him.

  Belk, however, had been plagued by an ethical conflict. He knew he was a bumbling drunk, and that he therefore shouldn’t take on clients who actually needed competent representation. He resolved this issue by only agreeing to represent clients after he had determined that they didn’t need a lawyer. This limited his practice to a level that allowed him lots of idle time. Belk filled his hours by watching Willie’s videos.

  Connie had decided she would charge Rick $500,000 to keep quiet about what she had learned. She thought that was a bargain price, but she wanted out in a hurry after discovering the money laundering. If Rick would pay her off, she would agree to disappear. She had in mind an extended stay on one of the many family islands in the Bahamas. She reasoned that a half-million dollars would go a long way in that part of the world. She had put a lot of thought into the logistics of this deal.

  She knew Rick was a pushover, but she wasn’t so sure about his financial backers. Rick had been mysterious about where he’d gotten the money f
or this venture, telling Connie only that their investors insisted on anonymity. At the time, Connie had thought this was odd, but she didn’t know much about investors, so she didn’t wonder too much about it. Now she understood.

  She figured she needed to protect herself for a long time, given that her threat of disclosure would engender as much fear in the investors as it did in Rick. She was sure the investors would not be as manageable as Rick. They had ways besides money to deal with threats of disclosure.

  She decided her DVD would include everything she knew about the situation, including a detailed financial review, the results of her discussion with Jimmy, and details about the landscaping and maintenance contractors. For additional impact, she would also include her story of the hit and run, and Rick’s dalliance with Mary Lou. Connie knew Rick wouldn’t want any of those things made public. They would jeopardize his precious social standing. She was certain, too, that the references to money-laundering would get the attention of the investors.

  Connie spent several hours organizing her materials, and learning to use the video recording features of her laptop with its internal camera. It didn't produce studio quality results, but it was adequate, and it offered the virtue of privacy and simplicity. She could do the whole job right in her living room, with no fear of anyone else watching.

  After pondering the logistics of her threat for a while, she concluded that she could have a lawyer hold the DVD for her. She would mail him a postcard every week, and if he failed to receive a card after two weeks, he would follow her instructions to forward the DVD to an investigative reporter. She checked the yellow pages, and found that an attorney named Jonas Belk had an office just a block up the street from her condo.

  Connie made her video, and then saved it to DVD, making three copies. She put the DVDs in her briefcase, and went to her bank on Victory Drive. She put one of the extra copies of the DVD into her safety deposit box. On her way back to Thunderbolt, she called Belk on her cell phone and learned that he could see her immediately. She found him to be courtly and charming. He listened to her requirements and agreed that he could help her. She was just the kind of client Belk liked.