"Dave, I’m really sorry to do this. I’ve been so looking forward to this evening and I know you have, too, but I guess I’ve got this stomach bug that’s going around. I need to go home," Kathy said, sadly.
"When you’re sick, you’re sick. Let’s get you back where you can at least be comfortable. I’ll drop you and get something to eat on my way back downtown and we’ll do this another night."
"Tell you what. Like all good little Italian girls, I’ve got a pan of Mama’s lasagna in the freezer. I’m not hungry, but we’ll microwave some for you and we can share a bottle of wine."
"Sure, if you’re up to it," Dave agreed. "I really don’t mind a rain check for when you’re feeling better, though."
Kathy protested that she would enjoy his company. She thought it would keep her mind off her queasiness, if he didn’t mind hanging around her place. Dave turned around and they pulled up in front of her condo about a half an hour after they had left.
When Ski Cat heard Kathy exclaim about the broken door, he knew he was screwed. He figured the best way out was just to charge down the stairs and out the front door. He would count on surprise. He could shove past the people before they figured out what was happening. Better that than getting trapped or getting hurt trying to escape from a third floor window. The guy had looked average-sized; Ski Cat thought he would be a pushover. Ski Cat was accustomed to using his bulk to his advantage.
He hoped his guys had put the Navigator where he told them to, in that restaurant parking lot. He thought that in the evening, there would be plenty of cars there, so his wouldn’t stand out. He didn’t want to make a getaway in the old bateau in the dark. He had planned to bring Leon over tomorrow to pick it up. Ski Cat turned at the landing, and charged down the last flight of stairs to the door.
Dave had quickly pushed Kathy to the side of the front porch away from the door, telling her to call 911. He was still trying to figure out whether it was smart to go inside when the door jerked open in front of him. He had a fleeting impression of a black giant with dreadlocks flying as Ski Cat roared and lunged at him.
Dave’s moves were instinctive after that point, choreographed 30 years earlier by a forgotten hand-to-hand combat instructor at the Ranger School at Fort Benning. He braced his left leg and lifted his right foot slightly, swinging his 190 pounds behind the heel of his right hand, which came up under the point of Ski Cat’s chin. Ski Cat’s head snapped back with the force of their combined momentum, bringing the base of his skull back against his cervical vertebra with a snapping sound of teeth breaking.
In the same fluid motion, Dave’s right elbow continued its forward arc, slamming into Ski Cat’s sternum. A solid thump accompanied the popping sound of a rib giving way. As Dave recovered his balance, pivoting clockwise, his right arm came around like a whip cracking, driving his distended knuckles into the side of Ski Cat’s skull, just behind his right eye, shattering the bones at his temple. Dave regained his balance, his left arm preparing to strike, as Ski Cat collapsed, convulsing, in Kathy’s foyer. It was over so fast that Kathy wasn’t even sure what had happened. The 911 operator was just answering as Ski Cat’s convulsions ceased.
"Tell ’em to send an ambulance," Dave said, lowering his left arm, which was cocked for yet another punch.
Kathy passed that on, telling the operator what had happened. The county police and an ambulance arrived simultaneously a couple of minutes later. The next period was a blur for Dave and Kathy, as the police herded them into her living room while the ambulance crew worked on Ski Cat. Finally, having confirmed Ski Cat’s demise with the trauma center at the other end of their telemetry link, the ambulance attendants pulled a sheet over his face. The sergeant who had taken charge of the scene nodded to them, indicating that they could move the body.
Joe had shown up minutes after the county police. He had been on his way home when he had heard the dispatcher send an ambulance and a county police car to his sister’s address. He was sitting in the den with Dave and Kathy while the county police interviewed Dave. The story was simple enough, but everybody was amazed that an average looking guy like Dave had dispatched a thug like Ski Cat so readily.
"You study some kind of martial arts?" the investigator asked.
"No. I did have a lot of training in hand-to-hand combat in the Army, but that was 30 years ago," Dave answered. "I guess it just came back."
Dave was in a state of shock. It was just starting to register with him that he had killed somebody. He supposed he was all right. He couldn’t summon any remorse, though, and that surprised him a little bit. He had reacted in a split second to Ski Cat’s threat. He couldn’t recall thinking about what to do, nor could he recall what, exactly, he had done. One second the guy had been charging him, and the next second the guy was down.
Unbidden, he remembered the old infantry adage that he had first learned in military school and later had drilled into him at Fort Benning. "The spirit of the bayonet is, ‘Kill or be killed.’ There are two kinds of bayonet fighters: the quick and the dead." It suddenly had new meaning for him. He had never seen combat in the Army. He had been able to hold his own in the inevitable scuffles in school, but he had never been seriously threatened with bodily harm before.
The police saw no basis to file any charges. They knew where to find Dave, and Joe vouched for him, which in small-town Savannah counted for a lot. They went on their way after finishing their examination of the premises and verifying with Kathy that nothing appeared to have been stolen. Joe sat with Dave and Kathy until the wee hours of the morning. When Dave finally collapsed into a fitful sleep, Joe and Kathy stretched him out on the couch, and Kathy went up to bed. Joe went home, trying as he drove to figure out what Ski Cat had been doing breaking into his sister’s place.
Day 13, Morning
The first thing Joe noticed as he and the forensics team entered Connie’s condo with their search warrant was that the door had been jimmied in exactly the same fashion as Kathy’s. He thought that was curious, and he directed one of the evidence technicians to check to see if the same tool had been used to splinter the doorjamb in both units. He also had Connie’s unit dusted for fingerprints.
Joe and his colleagues from the county noticed Connie’s condo appeared to have been searched, rather than just broken into. This, too, was consistent with what they had seen at Kathy’s, although at Kathy’s, the search appeared to have been much more thorough, albeit incomplete. Based on what they found at Connie’s, they theorized that the searcher had been looking for something specific and had probably found it.
Joe paused in his search when a county policeman came in to report that the county police had found a black, late model Lincoln Navigator parked at a seafood restaurant up the street. It stuck out, since it was the only vehicle in the lot this morning. A check of the registration revealed that it belonged to a John Wilson, a.k.a. Ski Cat. Joe and Bill Washington both made the connection to Belk’s disappearance simultaneously.
"So Ski Cat’s our big black man with dreadlocks," Bill announced.
"Looks like it," Joe agreed.
The series of coincidences, all appearing to involve Ski Cat, and all concentrated in the tiny community of Thunderbolt, was troubling to both of them. They wondered what Ski Cat could have been up to that caused him to kidnap Belk and search Connie’s and Kathy’s condos. They knew Ski Cat as a minor thug who had graduated from the numbers racket to peddling drugs at the retail level.
Joe couldn’t vouch for Connie, but he was certain Kathy wasn’t involved with drugs, and nothing other than Ski Cat’s break-in suggested that Connie might be. Belk was another story. Although Joe thought it was unlikely that Belk was doing coke, given his long-standing penchant for alcohol, there could be any number of reasons that he had known Ski Cat.
"Maybe he was representing Ski Cat in some legal matter," Bill suggested.
"Could be," Joe allowed, "But I kind of doubt it. I've known Belk since we were little. He was the class drunk at B
enedictine and I don't think he’s sobered up since. He didn't do any legal work that required sobriety – weird, I know, but he always turned away clients if he thought they really needed a lawyer, so he didn't have much of a practice; just wrote a will every now and then for somebody his mother sent -- that kind of work."
The team had finished dusting for fingerprints and had taken the broken molding from the front door to compare to the similar sample from Kathy’s door, and to the pry bar that had been in Ski Cat’s possession. The county police were towing the Navigator to the impoundment lot, where it could be thoroughly searched.
Bill and Joe agreed that it was time to ratchet up the search for Belk, and Bill was going to get a warrant to search Belk’s office and subpoena his telephone records. He told Joe he was welcome to come along on the search of Belk’s office, but Joe declined, and they went their separate ways.
Joe wanted to get on with looking for Connie. He thought her connection to these events might be deeper than just her involvement in the hit and run accident. He had also asked one of his guys to see what he could find out about Rick Leatherby. Joe knew Rick had moved to Savannah from southern California at about the same time as Connie, and he wondered if they had any association before Connie went to work at the clinic. He made a note to himself to call his friend in the L.A.P.D. to see if they knew Leatherby or could connect him to Barrera.
Willie had been puzzling over how to proceed with his plot to extort money from Rick Leatherby. He could tell from Leatherby’s reaction to his phone call that the doctor knew all about the video. Willie figured the woman who had made the video must also be putting the squeeze on this Leatherby character. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have made the video.
Willie thought that if he just knew how to get in touch with her, he could probably put the squeeze on her as well. His accidental acquisition of the DVD could really mess her up, by his reckoning. He wondered how big a bite she was trying to take out of Leatherby. He wanted to try to stay in the same ballpark.
Otherwise, he would either leave money on the table, or screw up the whole deal. He was struggling to figure out how to get in touch with her. She had obviously worked at the diet clinic, but she wasn’t likely to be hanging around there now. She had to be hiding out somewhere, if she had already started to put pressure on Leatherby, and Willie was sure from the doctor’s reaction that she had already come down on him.
Willie wondered what would happen if he could find a way to tie his demand for hush money to hers. He could agree to keep the DVD quiet for, say, a fourth of her demands, but he needed to know how much she was asking. Otherwise, he would have to trust the doctor to play fair. There was a fat chance of that, Willie was sure. He was certain the doctor was crooked, just from what the woman said in the video.
He could try asking the doctor what it was worth to him for Willie to keep quiet, and see what he said. That option was worth thinking about, but Willie didn’t like it because it felt like he was giving his mark too much control. He could also pretend to the doctor that he was squeezing the woman as well and play the doctor off against her imaginary offer. That way, he could keep raising the ante, if he sensed that he had started too low. He liked this option. He could take the doctor’s first offer and jack it up by pretending to check with the woman until he felt like he had gotten enough. Willie knew he couldn’t do this if he made the first offer. He had to get the doctor to blink first.
He was also worried about the details of how he would carry out the transaction. He was thinking about having the doctor leave a bag of cash somewhere, and then he could deliver the DVD to the doctor later, if the money was all there. Willie didn’t have a lot of imagination when it came to this sort of thing. He was too honest, he guessed, to know how to deal with these crooks. He felt all right about it though. What he was doing wasn’t like blackmail, or anything, because his victims deserved it. It made him sort of like an instrument of justice -- he was punishing a bad person. It wasn’t like trying to shake down an honest, law-abiding citizen. That would be a different thing altogether, and Willie thought only a dishonest person would do such a thing.
Rick was at his desk, wondering what he was going to do when his next crop of patients checked into the clinic. He needed to keep them occupied for a couple of days with tests and examinations, and he needed someone to do their individual color analyses so that the dietician could develop custom diets for them. He still had the staff of personal trainers and massage therapists and nurses to keep them busy for most of their stay, but he was stuck on the color consultant.
Just this morning, Connie’s secretary had referred a call to him from a panic-stricken woman, an existing patient. The lady had just returned from a three-week vacation in the Virgin Islands and had been sunbathing every day. She had also had her hair tinted while down there and she had gained fifteen pounds. She was certain her diet no longer worked because of the new hair color, or the suntan, or both. Rick had told her they would call to schedule a follow-up stay for her as soon as they could work her in. In the meanwhile, he advised her, have everything cooked well done and stay out of the sun. She had not been happy at the prospect of losing her tan, but she grudgingly agreed.
Rick was angry with Connie -- she was costing the clinic a lot of revenue. He had tasked Frances and Connie’s secretary with delaying the admission of all new patients, on the basis that they were having trouble with the air-conditioning system. He was secretly relieved that Mary Lou would be included in the hiatus.
She had been calling daily, but Frances had told her Rick was at a medical conference in Tibet and couldn’t be reached except through a Buddhist prayer wheel. That seemed to confuse her for a while. Rick was impressed with Frances’s creativity. He was surprised a hick like her would know what a Buddhist prayer wheel was. He had to ask her, himself. She might talk slowly but she thought quickly.
Rick was confident that the air-conditioning story would work. Everybody hated the summer heat and humidity here. If it weren’t for air-conditioning, this place would go back to being a hick town and nobody but people like Frances and "Shrimp Boat Sam" would live here.
Frances interrupted to tell him there was a man on the phone who had called before about something that Rick was missing. Rick took the call.
"So, Doc, you figured out how much that missin’ video’s worth to you? I got an offer from somebody else, thinks it’s pretty important," the mystery caller said, his nasal southern accent grating on Rick’s ear.
Rick was alarmed at the possibility that someone else had seen the video. He wondered who that could be. It was possible that one of Connie’s accomplices was dealing directly with Sam, he supposed, a thought that made his blood run cold.
The first thing that occurred to him was that Sam would learn Rick had doubled Connie’s demand. He didn’t want to speculate on Sam’s reaction to that discovery. He tried to think of what might have prompted Connie to go directly to Sam. Maybe Sam had gone to Connie. That was more likely. If that happened, then Connie’s accomplices might try to play Rick off against Sam. He and Sam didn’t have quite the same interests at stake. Rick needed more time to think this through.
"Who else would pay you for the video?" Rick asked, stalling. "I’m the one who cares about whether it’s made public."
"There’s at least one other party, besides the lady who made it," Willie said, smugly. "Them people laundering money don’t want nobody to see it, neither."
That settled it for Rick. This guy was setting up a bidding war between him and Sam.
"Next time I call, you better be ready to make me an offer, and it better be a good one, hear?" Willie threatened, as he hung up.
Rick wondered who this guy was. This was getting complicated. Connie had clearly figured out where Rick’s money was coming from. If she went directly to Sam with her half-million dollar offer, Rick was definitely shafted. Sam would pay her, and Rick would get zip, not to mention that Sam would be seriously pissed off. Rick thought about th
is latest twist.
He finally saw a way out. It would cost him his half-million off the top, but it would keep Sam in his pocket. Now that Rick imagined a great vulnerability on Sam's part, he could probably find a way to make up that half-mil. He called Sam and set up a meeting.
Jimmy had immediately briefed Sam on Rick’s latest phone call from the mystery man. They still couldn’t figure out who he was, but he had to be one of the people Connie had set up to make the video public if anything happened to her. Maybe he really was her father, like Belk said.
Sam was intrigued that the guy was attempting to play Leatherby off against him. He couldn’t figure out Connie’s angle on that; he wondered if Connie was trying to raise the ante for the doctor. That might work if Sam didn’t have any other source of information except Rick, but he did. It also occurred to him that maybe the guy was trying to branch out on his own. That thought offered some interesting possibilities.
If he just knew who this character was, Sam might be able to buy enough information from him to break Connie’s stranglehold. He already knew Rick had doubled Connie’s original demand, apparently to feather his own nest at Sam’s expense. When they got through this situation, Sam was planning to give the doctor some hands-on training in business ethics.
Deception in Savannah: A Humorous Novel of Murder, Mystery, Sex, and Drugs Page 20
