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

by Charles Dougherty

  Jimmy was still meeting with Sam and Tony when Connie made her call, so he didn’t hear it in person. It was all there on his tape machines, though.

  Rick was now having second thoughts about putting the police on Connie’s trail. He worried that if they put her in jail, she wouldn’t be able to stay in touch with the people who were holding the copies of the video.

  Day 12, Afternoon

  Joe was sitting in Mrs. Jonas Withington Belk’s parlor, sipping coffee from a translucent china cup. He was concentrating on not breaking the cup. It was awkward to drink from it, especially since he was used to the heavy mugs down at the station. He wondered why rich people deliberately spent money on things that complicated the simplest aspects of everyday life. The coffee was extraordinarily good, though. It nearly made up for the nuisance of the fragile cup.

  He tuned back in as Mrs. Belk said, "…so, Joey, I appreciate your coming to see me. I understand what you said about this being out of your jurisdiction, but I’m not comfortable with just any policeman. I remember you and Jonas serving Mass together, and you’ve always been so nice. Thanks for helping me." She trailed off, teary-eyed.

  Since her phone call earlier in the afternoon, Joe had managed to piece together that Belk had been missing since last night, when he had failed to show up for a dinner date arranged by his mother. She was still trying to fix Belk up with a "…nice girl, one of our kind," after all these years. Joe wasn’t surprised Belk had been driven to drink. He had already been the class drunk when they were in high school. It seemed to be his only means of coping with being the only child of a domineering mother. It had crossed Joe’s mind that maybe Belk had finally had enough. He could have just decided to take off.

  At Mrs. Belk’s request, Joe had stopped by Belk’s office on the way to her house, and had found Belk’s keys hanging in the driver’s door of his car. That was a little strange, even for Belk. Joe had called one of his associates at the county police department, to keep them in the loop. They were happy to have Joe running interference with Mrs. Belk for them, jurisdictional issues aside. Joe’s counterpart, Bill Washington, had offered all the out of sight support that Joe needed. Joe said goodbye to Mrs. Belk and called Bill.

  They talked it over. Given the odd circumstance of the car keys, together with Joe’s argument that Belk had never defied his mother before, they decided they would treat Belk as a missing person. Bill opened a case file and sent one of his men out to question a few people at the businesses around Belk’s office. After he got off the phone with Bill, Joe checked his voice mail as he drove back downtown. As he was listening to his long list of messages, he got a call waiting beep. He took the call, surprised that it was from Bill Washington.

  "On the Belk thing," boomed Bill’s rich bass voice, "we got lucky."

  "That was quick, Bill. Trying to make points with Mrs. Belk, huh?"

  Bill demurred, again calling it luck. One of his guys was in the neighborhood and had stopped to chat with a woman who ran a gift shop in the same converted residence that housed Belk’s office. He learned that she had noticed a black Lincoln Navigator with smoked glass parked next to Belk’s car yesterday afternoon. She had gone on about her business, not thinking much about it, when a minute or two later, she had seen a big black man with dreadlocks helping Belk into the passenger seat of the Navigator. She figured Belk was smashed and somebody was taking him home. The guy with the dreadlocks had even fastened Belk’s seat belt for him before he got in the driver’s seat and left.

  "Could 'a been a client," Bill suggested.

  "Plates?" Joe asked.

  "No reason for her to look. Not many black Navigators around, though, especially with big black men with dreadlocks drivin’. Most of us brothers tryin’ to clean up our act, not scare you white folks too bad. We'll find him."

  "Thanks, Bill. Been sleepin’ easier myself. That’s probably why. You put the word out on the Navigator?"

  "Soon as we hang up, "Bill said.

  After he disconnected the call, Joe wondered what Belk could have gotten himself into. He knew Belk seriously restricted his practice, so he doubted Bill’s supposition that the man had been a client.

  "Is the doctor back?" Jimmy asked the receptionist as he walked past her desk.

  "He came in just a few minutes ago," she replied.

  Jimmy eyed his tape machines and saw that the one monitoring Rick’s phone had run for a few minutes while he had been out at Sam’s place. He had left it with a fresh tape inserted, so it was easy to tell. He put another fresh cassette in, transferring the used one to a portable player.

  He listened to Connie’s latest call, thinking as he did that this whole thing had spun out of control quickly. He reasoned that this latest message from Connie was consistent with the phone call Rick had gotten earlier in the day from the unidentified man they thought was Connie’s father, referring cryptically to the missing video.

  Jimmy was having a real problem visualizing a happy ending for all this. In spite of Sam’s aversion to knuckling under, this was one of those situations where it looked as if Sam had been dealt a losing hand. Jimmy was beginning to think they should have just played along with Connie, paid her price, and tracked down her network until they were sure they had her boxed in. Then they could have recovered most of the money. Now, though, their idiot doctor had thrown the police into the mix.

  Jimmy was hoping there might still be a way out of this. He wasn’t sure they could save the doctor, but now that they had the idea for this Chromatic Nutrition scheme, they could always find some other quack with medical credentials to sit there and look good, and somebody to be a color consultant. It would be a problem for a while, but he thought it might be less trouble than shutting down the clinic completely. He was worried that they couldn’t get it off the ground a third time -- not very soon, anyway.

  He was thinking that they could go to Connie and tell her about Rick’s treachery. She certainly would find that credible, as long as she had known the jerk. They could offer to take her into the fold, so to speak. She couldn’t come back to the clinic -- at least not until the police lost interest in her, but they could fix her up with a new identity, pay her price, and help her to hide from the cops while they figured out how to dismantle all the booby traps she had set for them. Once they disarmed her, Sam could have his revenge.

  That still left the problem of Leatherby, but there were several ways to handle him. It might be possible to rehabilitate him, but the fundamental problem was that he couldn’t be trusted. At least Jimmy didn’t think he could be trusted. The guy was just a scumbag with no sense of right or wrong. Jimmy wasn’t sure he could sell this scheme to Sam. Sam was too angry right now. Jimmy needed to give him time to cool down. That would also give Jimmy a chance to flesh out his plan and think through all the options.

  Dave was sitting on a brick retaining wall down on River Street watching the hordes of excited, enthusiastic tourists milling around. They were set against a backdrop of a freighter in the river, working its way upstream to the new State Port against the surging current of an outgoing tide. The freighter had two tugs for company, looking for all the world like little dogs nipping at the heels of some oblivious behemoth. He thought about how Savannah had changed during his absence, and about the parts that had stayed the same. When he was growing up, Savannah had been neither a tourist destination nor a place to which people retired.

  River Street had been exciting back then, but in a different way. It had been working waterfront, but dying by inches. There hadn’t been any souvenir shops in those days -- just a few rough bars. It had been a rite of passage to go into one or another of the bars in your military school uniform and order a beer. Nobody ever had been refused service if they were brave enough to go inside.

  It was not buying the beer that was the test. It was getting past the thugs in the bar who wanted to rough you up. Nobody ever got hurt too badly, though. A few broken noses and concussions were to be expected. More damage th
an that would have been bad for business, and the bartenders had always had sawed-off pool cues, loaded with lead, to keep their patrons' behavior within acceptable bounds. Things looked different down here now. Dave wondered briefly where all those people had gone, the ones who used to hang out here.

  The first impression Dave had gotten when he came back to town was that the Old Savannah had vanished, replaced by a spruced-up simulation of the real thing, geared to tourists. Now he had started to realize that the old city was still the same. It had just sort of gone underground. You couldn’t get in unless you knew the handshake.

  There was a heavy layer of tourists and newcomers spread over everything, and some of the longer-term new residents even thought they were locals. This was all tolerated by the old Savannah establishment, which was still intact beneath the surface. Savannah had always been a polite, cosmopolitan place, and if some outsider wanted to play at being a local, why the locals just egged them on. The true locals fed the fantasy because it kept things interesting, like having a wild card thrown into a deck. Try as they might, the pseudo-locals didn’t quite know how to behave.

  Either you belonged here, or you didn’t. Nothing could change that. You could have been born somewhere else; your family could have been "away" for generations, but when you came to Savannah, you were home. On the other hand, you could have been born here and grown up here, but if your "people" weren’t from here, then you couldn’t be, either.

  The true locals grasped these distinctions intuitively; it wouldn’t occur to most of them that there was a need to articulate such thoughts, Dave realized. The outsiders could never grasp such nuances. This dichotomy was at the heart of the city’s charm, for Dave. He couldn’t quite put into words why it was that he felt so at ease here, but he was willing to accept the feeling and make the most of it.

  He felt as comfortable with Kathy as he did with Savannah. He didn’t think it was just because he had known her for so long, although he was sure the experiences they had shared growing up helped give them a lot of common ground. There had to be more to it than that. For once, he didn’t feel the need to analyze his attraction to someone. He was happy just to let it be, and to revel in the fact that Kathy seemed to feel the same way.

  He looked at his watch and realized he had better get back to his room and shower and change; he was due to pick Kathy up in about an hour and a half. He wondered as he walked whether she had talked with her uncle about the dock at Vernon View. She had suggested that her Uncle John would probably be happy for Dave to keep his boat at John's place on the Vernon River. Dave needed to get the boat down here. The Waving Girl was nice, but it was stretching his budget, especially since he was paying to leave the boat in a marina up in Charleston.

  Ski Cat saw the lady in unit 2B come home at a little after 5 o’clock. He hoped she had some kind of nightlife. No way would he go into that place when she was there, especially since his instructions precluded him from giving her a solid crack on the head to keep her quiet. Some people he knew liked to break in when people were in the house -- they got off on sneaking around quietly, and not waking the occupants.

  "Not me," thought Ski Cat. That was too dangerous. Even a woman could slip up behind you with something heavy and turn out your lights. Then you woke up in jail. Ski Cat would wait until she went out. If it looked like she was in for the night, he would check with Tony, see if he thought maybe just a little light tap on the head and some tape on her wrists and ankles would be all right. Ski Cat didn’t mind doing that. It was this pussyfoot stuff that gave him the willies. At least he was catching crabs. Too bad Dopey wasn’t here. That boy did love steamed crabs, but Dopey was probably enjoying himself.

  Just as it was getting dark, Ski Cat’s patience was rewarded. A man showed up in a nondescript car and knocked on the door of 2B. This worried Ski Cat a little bit. If that guy was staying, he might as well take his crabs and go home, he thought, as the door opened and the man went inside. But Ski Cat was living right. After about 20 minutes, Kathy Owens came out with the guy and they got in her car and drove away.

  Ski Cat waited a few minutes to be sure they were gone, and then he eased the bateau up under a riverfront restaurant and tied it off to a piling. He managed to scramble out from under the restaurant and get ashore without getting wet or muddy. He wasn’t fastidious, but he didn’t want to leave a trail of muddy footprints. He ambled down the main street to the condos and walked up to Kathy’s door and rang the bell, just in case. He took out his pry bar; five seconds later he was in Kathy’s foyer, the door pulled shut behind him.

  Day 12, Evening

  Joe was working late this evening. He had gotten a preliminary report from the lab on Rick’s S600; the findings were inconclusive. The only thing they had for sure was that the tires were the same type that left the skid marks, but that didn’t pin it down as the hit and run vehicle. Donald’s eyewitness testimony was fine, but Joe was afraid of what a defense attorney would do with the time lapse between the accident and Donald’s report. This would make his testimony a little shaky, particularly when it came out that Donald didn’t even recall seeing the car leaving the scene until he had seen it again in Leatherby’s garage.

  Joe didn’t need a lot of corroborative evidence, but he needed more than he had. They had not found any clothing fibers or hair on the smooth, aerodynamic front end of the car, but they were hoping there might be a match between paint traces on the victim’s clothing and the paint on the car. He was still waiting for lab results on the paint.

  Joe had checked Connie’s driver’s license records, which revealed that she had surrendered a California license when she got her Georgia license almost two years ago. That showed her old address, which prompted Joe to call a friend at the L.A. police department. The only information of interest that resulted from his inquiry was that the guy remembered someone else calling a few days ago, looking for Connie Barrera. He hadn’t personally taken the call, though. It had been a second- or third-hand question from somewhere in the department and he didn’t know who had initiated the inquiry. Joe thought that was intriguing, but it didn’t lead to or support any conclusions.

  On the strength of Donald’s and Rick Leatherby’s statements, Joe had gotten a warrant for Connie’s arrest and put out a bulletin on the national law enforcement networks, trying to find her. He also had a search warrant for her apartment and subpoenas for her telephone and credit card records. He planned to search the apartment first thing in the morning and have someone serve the subpoenas then as well.

  He had been surprised to learn that Connie was Kathy’s next-door neighbor. He had called Kathy to see if she knew Connie but had not been able to reach her yet. He doubted that she knew anything about Connie, if she had even met her. Kathy had only owned her condo for a couple of months and if she had met an interesting neighbor, Joe was sure she would have told him about it.

  When Joe couldn’t reach Kathy by phone, he figured she was either working late or out with Dave Bannon. She seemed smitten by Dave. Joe was happy that they were enjoying each other's company, and so was their mother. Joe wondered idly whether Dave had decided to move back to Savannah. He hoped that he would, for Kathy’s sake.

  Joe thought Dave was too young to stay retired for good. He couldn’t imagine that someone as bright and energetic as Dave could do nothing for very long. Dave had mentioned to Joe that he didn’t want to go back to the corporate world, nor did he want to continue with his management consulting practice. Joe guessed Dave was financially able to poke around until he found something that caught his attention, but he didn’t appear to have struck it rich. Joe thought that was a fortunate situation. He wished he had that luxury, even though he liked being a cop. He couldn’t think of anything he would rather do than police work. It was in his genes and besides, he thought, he was good at it.

  Joe brought his wandering attention back to the case file. He realized there wasn’t much that he could do this evening. He could search Connie’s apar
tment, but this late in the game, another few hours wouldn’t matter. It would be tough to justify the overtime. He might as well wait until morning. He started cleaning off his desk, getting ready to go home.

  Ski Cat was methodically tearing Kathy’s place apart. He was looking for a DVD, or anything else that would link her to her next-door neighbor, Connie Barrera. When you weren’t looking for something specific, you had to examine everything in a place to be sure you hadn’t overlooked anything. Ski Cat knew he could make a quick sweep through the place looking for the DVD. That would be easy. You just pictured all the places in a given room where somebody could hide a DVD. Thirty minutes inside a place this size would give him all the time he needed to either find a DVD or say for sure that there was not one here. Searching for clues as to where someone had gone, like he had done at Connie’s, well, that was a little more difficult, thought Ski Cat. In a case like that, though, he still had a good idea of what to look for and where to find it.

  This time, however, Tony didn’t want him to look for anything in particular, other than the DVD. He told Ski Cat to search for anything that might show that this woman had known Barrera. That meant not just pawing through everything in the place, but actually examining a lot of it. This was tedious, painstaking work, and Ski Cat was worrying about how much time he had. He hoped Kathy and her friend had big plans for the evening, and that none of the plans involved an early return to the condo.

  He had started upstairs in the back bedroom, which was set up as an office. It could be converted to a guest room by folding out the couch, he noted, but something about the place made him think this lady didn’t have many long-term visitors. Ski Cat’s morale plummeted when he saw the roll top desk and the file cabinets. This could take all night. He would just have to go through it all as quickly as he could, and then move on to the front bedroom. Ski Cat noticed that neither the desk nor the filing cabinets had locks. He thought that probably didn’t mean much. The woman lived alone, so she wouldn’t lock drawers anyway. He opened the roll top desk and started through the pigeonholes. He began at the top left corner of the desk, working methodically across and down. He found payment books for the condo and her car, bank statements, credit card bills, and a folder of receipts labeled "business expenses." Ski Cat thought she was well organized, but he couldn’t get any leverage out of that, since he didn’t know what he was looking for. He plowed on.