The Savannah Madam

by Tom Turner

  “You’re very welcome,” Bull said.

  The sisters started to walk away, then Ryder turned back to Bull. His hands were on the bar, ready to lift. “Want a hand with that?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he chuckled, sliding out from under the bar and standing. “Go for it.”

  Ryder sat down on the bench, then flattened out, slipped under the bar, and put her hands on the barbell.

  She quickly exhaled four times, then pushed the bar up with all she had. She got it up a few inches, then halfway, then grunting with exertion, lowered it back down.

  Ryder slid out from under the bar, stood, smiled, and slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s as high as you got it on your last one, bro.”

  9

  “He liked you, you know,” Ryder said to her sister as they got in Jackie’s Acura. “What did you think of him?”

  “I wouldn’t say he’s exactly my type,” Jackie said, starting the engine.

  “And what exactly is your type?”

  “Well, first of all, that three-day growth thing?” Jackie said. “I mean, make up your mind, are you going to grow a beard or be clean-shaven?”

  “Mmm, never thought of that.”

  “And also, I don’t remember ever going out with a six-pack ab guy before,” Jackie said. “But he did have such gorgeous eyes.”

  “How do you know he has six-pack abs?” Ryder said. “He had a shirt on.”

  “You could just tell,” Jackie said, driving out onto Berwick Street.

  “Yeah, guess you’re right,” Ryder said, nodding. “He sure thought I was a wiseass.”

  Jackie smiled. “Perceptive man.”

  “Funny,” Ryder said. “Oh, by the way, I don’t know if you were paying attention, but he came up with a better phrase than cat house.”

  “Oh, you mean, ‘pleasure palace?’”

  “So you did hear?”

  Jackie nodded. “Every word.”

  “Where we going now?”

  “To see Glen Cromartie,” said Jackie. “The man who got a lifetime ban at Casa Romantica.”

  Ryder turned to her sister as they got onto Waters Avenue. “How’d you get him to agree to see us?”

  “Well, ‘cause I knew he played pickleball. So right after Sarah Dunn told me about him, I went to the courts in my skimpy little outfit and got into a game with him.”

  “Pickleball? What the hell is that?”

  “Come on, girl. A big jock like you and you don’t know?” Jackie said, turning right onto Eisenhower. “It’s this game where you hit a whiffle ball with these square wooden paddles on a court half the size of a tennis court.”

  ‘Why don’t you just play tennis? You used to be pretty good,” Ryder asked. “Not half as good as me, of course.”

  Jackie ignored the jab. “I do. I play both,” she said. “So anyway, after we played, Glen Cromartie asked me to come for a drink at the Cabana bar for happy hour.”

  “And you said—”

  “‘Nothing in the world I’d rather do, Glen,’” Jackie said, looking at her watch. “It starts in ten minutes.”

  “Wait a minute, I’m not going to some happy hour with a bunch of fifty-year-old farts,” Ryder said.

  “Well, good, ‘cause these old farts are in their sixties and seventies.”

  Ryder laughed. “How old’s your buddy Glen?”

  “You mean, what he told me or what he really is?”

  It was jumping at the Cabana bar.

  Every man’s head turned when Jackie and Ryder walked past the Tanglewood club house, then along the edge of the pool to the three-sided bar. The sisters walked up to the bar and a young woman bartender gave them a big smile.

  “What can I get you, ladies?”

  Ryder glanced over at her sister. “Are we officially done for the day?”

  It was 5:30. “Unofficially,” said Jackie.

  “Well, good, then I’ll have a Rum Punch with a Meyers floater on top,” Ryder said.

  “Hey, go for it,” Jackie said, then to the bartender. “I’ll have a ginger ale.”

  Ryder frowned as the bartender walked away. “You wuss.”

  “Hey, someone’s got to be the clear-headed interrogator.”

  “Whatev,” Ryder said.

  “There’s my little pickleball hottie,” came a raspy voice from behind them.

  Jackie and Ryder turned. The man was wearing navy blue cargo shorts and a baby blue Tommy Hilfiger collared sport shirt. He had gray hair, a salt-and-pepper beard and something green lodged between his two front teeth.

  “Hello, Glen,” Jackie said, opting to forego the standard cheek-kiss. “This is my sister, Ryder, who’s just dyin’ for you teach her how to play pickle.”

  “Well, hello, Ryder,” Cromartie said, his eyes gliding over Ryder from top to bottom, “I’d be delighted to play with you.”

  Ryder ignored the possible double entendre. “My sister was just kidding,” she said. “I have congenital hip dysplasia and can’t move too well.”

  Cromartie frowned. “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.... You mean like what dogs get?”

  Ryder smiled. “Yeah, picked it up from our Labrador retriever when I was a kid.”

  Cromartie didn’t seem to know whether she was kidding or not. “Well, your sister here’s a really good player.”

  Jackie put her hand on Cromartie’s arm. “Oh, Glen, you old flatterer, you.”

  Ryder eyed Cromartie. Old, that was for damn sure.

  They were seated at the end of the bar a half hour later. Jackie looked down at the round bowl of crudités on the bar, which contained celery, carrots, cauliflower, radishes, and a dip. Cromartie had the best seat in the house, sandwiched between Jackie and Ryder. The crowd had thinned out and Cromartie had told them all about his pickleball, bocce, and golf games. According to him, he excelled at all three, even though Jackie knew he was at best a 3.0 pickleball player.

  Jackie was on her second ginger ale, Ryder on her third Rum Punch, and Cromartie, Jackie guessed, on either his fourth or fifth Jim Beam.

  Jackie turned to Cromartie and flashed him her best dazzler. “Do you know what I do, by any chance, Glen?”

  Cromartie looked puzzled. “Do? What do you mean?”

  “For a job.”

  “Tell you the truth, I didn’t know you had a job,” Cromartie said. “Most people here don’t.”

  “Yes, well, my sister and I are private investigators.”

  “What?” An enormous frown cut across Cromartie’s face. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “We’re investigating the murder of Miranda Cato,” she said, lowering her voice.

  Cromartie took a long slug of his Jim Beam while his eyes flicked around, looking for something to light on other than Jackie’s eyes. “I told those detectives everything I knew,” he said, his voice dropping to nearly a whisper.

  “We just wanted to ask you if you had any theories about who might have done it,” Jackie said, attempting to take the focus off him as a suspect.

  Cromartie looked suddenly meek. “I only went there a couple of times,” he said. “It was a nice place to have a drink and… relax.”

  “Did you ever see anything that might have made you think Miranda’s life was in danger?” Ryder asked.

  Cromartie swung hard in her direction. “Jesus, no, it was just a bunch of fellas sitting around in her living room.”

  Jackie and Ryder didn’t say anything for a few moments. It was deliberate, their method—which they had used plenty of times before—of seeing if their subject might blurt something out to fill the silence.

  But Cromartie just kept hitting on his drink. Long after there was anything left in it. He was making that sucking sound.

  “Glen, I heard about an incident between you and one of the girls,” Jackie started. “I just have a quick question about it.”

  Cromartie’s hand shot up. The bartender spotted it and started mixing him another drink.

  “That was bullshit,” Crom
artie said. “The girl was high on something. And paranoid to boot.”

  Ryder glanced at Jackie on the other side of Cromartie. “But you were told not to come back, right?” Jackie asked.

  Cromartie stood up and wiped his mouth with a napkin. The green thing was still lodged between his two front teeth. “I didn’t expect this of you, Jackie,” he said. “This is below the belt.”

  Interesting choice of words, Jackie thought. “Didn’t expect what?”

  “This...ambush,” he said, clearly feeling panicked. “Why don’t you go talk to Wendy?”

  “Who is she?”

  Cromartie’s eyes darted around, and he lowered his voice. “One of Miranda’s girls. Like her second in command.”

  “But Miranda’s place is long gone,” Jackie said. “It hasn’t been around for close to a year.”

  Cromartie edged closer to Jackie. “I think she works for Ashley Slade now,” he said. “Ask her about Perrier, too.”

  “Perrier?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  Cromartie looked like he was about to break into a sprint. After a series of quick steps, he was gone.

  “Well,” Ryder said with a smile, “I solved one mystery anyway.”

  Jackie turned to her sister. “Oh, yeah, and what was that?”

  Ryder pointed to a celery stalk in the bowl of crudities. “What was stuck between loverboy’s teeth.”

  10

  After the Glen Cromartie interview, Jackie had to meet up with some friends. A few days before, she had made plans to have dinner with a few women at one of the restaurants on Mercer Island. She asked Ryder if she wanted to join them and Ryder said yes, but allowed that she better cut back on the alcohol or she’d soon be passed out in her mashed potatoes.

  On their way from the Cabana to the Cypress restaurant, Jackie dialed the number of Talmadge Bartow, the man who Harry Bull said had been Miranda Cato’s oft cheated-upon boyfriend. But the call went to voice mail and Jackie left a message.

  It was just past eight o’clock and two other women, Jody and Angela, had joined them at Cypress. Jody and Angela were both divorcees, Jody in her mid-thirties and Angela in her late thirties.

  Most people who knew Jackie were aware of what she did for a living but knew she didn’t like to talk about it much. And on those rare occasions when she did, she kept it all pretty vague. She never talked about “cases” or “vics” or “perps,” feeling that a private investigation was all about being discreet and tight-lipped. As a consequence, she found that she ended up listening a lot more than talking.

  “For the last couple years, I wondered about him,” Angela said, referring to her ex-husband. “He was always a little too… into my clothes. Plus, he seemed to have lessons with that cute golf pro, Larry, like constantly.”

  “So, is he officially ‘out?’” Ryder asked Angela. “Or is it still in the whispering stage?”

  “Oh, God,” Angela said. “No, publicly he’s still deep in the closet with the lights off. He told me he’s trying to figure out how to tell our boys first.”

  Ryder put her hand on Angela’s hand. “How old are they?”

  “Fourteen and eleven,” Angela said, with a sad shake of her head. “I don’t envy him. It’s not going to be an easy conversation.”

  Jackie patted Angela’s other hand. “I hear you,” she said. “Are you still thinking about moving downtown?” Downtown Savannah was twenty minutes from Mercer Island.

  Angela nodded. “I’ve looked at a few three-bedroom condos. You know how it is here. Not a lot of single men in their thirties and forties.”

  Jackie laughed. “Yes, but hundreds—maybe thousands—in their sixties and seventies.”

  “Who think they’re in their thirties and forties,” Jody chimed in, then flicked her head. “Don’t look now, but there are three geezers in that corner table who’ve been checking us out.”

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Ryder said. “One of ‘em looks like he’s ready for a respirator.”

  “Oh, that’s cruel,” Jody said with a chuckle.

  Jackie turned to Jodie. “What about you?” she asked. “Are you thinking of moving downtown, too.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for the last two years,” Jody said. “Being a ninth wheel at dinner parties gets old.”

  Angela nodded. “At least you get invited.”

  “The other thing I’ve been thinking about is moving to Charleston,” Jody said. “I kind of think of Savannah as the poor man’s Charleston”

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa, that’s not fair,” Jackie said. “Charleston people just have a very high opinion of themselves.”

  “Yeah, fancy old families with no money,” Ryder said.

  Jackie nodded. “I remember when I first came down here this guy told me the first question Charleston people ask you is, ‘What was your grandmother’s maiden name?’ And the first question Savannah people ask you is, ‘What do you want to drink?”

  Angela laughed. “So true,” she said. “What about you, Jackie?”

  “I love it out here,” Jackie said. “A million things to do. Beautiful. Safe. Quiet.”

  Angela rolled her eyes. “Amen to the quiet part. I’m so sick of quiet Friday and Saturday nights.”

  “Not to mention Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.”

  They all laughed.

  “I’ve been working on Jackie,” Ryder said to Angela and Jody. “Trying to get her into the city.”

  Angela shot Jackie a quizzical look.

  Jackie shook her head. “Yeah, but the idea of being dragged around to a bunch of singles bars doesn’t do much for me.”

  Jackie decided to slip out of her comfort zone and test a theory. She leaned closer to the others, and first eyed Angela, then Jody. “Have either of you ever heard of Casa Romantica?”

  Angela shook her head and Jody said, “No. What’s that?”

  “Well, you remember when that woman was killed about a year ago in her house?”

  Jody nodded. “Oh sure, they stole all her jewelry, I heard. And she had some valuable paintings.”

  That she had bought at tag sales, Jackie refrained from saying.

  “I heard she was mixed up in some weird sex triangle or something,” Angela said.

  Just as she suspected, if her gossip-prone friends hadn’t heard about it, it was a well-kept secret.

  “What about it?” Jody asked Jackie.

  “I just wondered what you had heard,” Jackie said. “How about, did you ever hear about there being a ‘cat house’ out here somewhere?”

  “A cat house?”

  “Um, a pleasure palace.”

  Angela nodded knowingly. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Before your time, though. Like ten years ago. This house was full of Korean women, down in Linkswood”—one of the sections of Mercer Island—“and you’d see them driving around in golf carts in really suggestive lingerie.”

  Jody smiled. “Word was they were delivering something.”

  “Yeah,” Angela cackled. “Themselves.”

  Jody laughed. “Yeah, going to meet a man whose wife was busy playing mahjong.”

  “I remember it well,” Angela said. “Used to call ‘em the ‘Korean quickies.’”

  Jackie nodded, having proven another theory: There was plenty of gossip on Mercer Island, maybe twenty per cent of it accurate.

  She glanced up and saw the three older men in golf outfits stand up and sidle over in their direction. Two seemed to be wobbling slightly as they approached. “Hello, ladies,” said one with a shiny red face. “We’ve been admiring you from afar.”

  “Oh, have you now?” Jody said.

  The three nodded.

  “Why?” Ryder asked, with an innocent smile. “To introduce to your sons?”

  11

  Before being hired on the Miranda Cato murder, as Jackie had told Sarah Dunn, she and Ryder had been working a missing-persons case. A fifty-one-year-old woman who lived in a house on Jones Street in downtown Savann
ah had disappeared one afternoon without a trace. They had been hired by the woman’s husband, Ralston Oldfield, who at first suspected his wife Kay Lee had been kidnapped. The odd thing was; however, he had not been contacted by anyone since she’d vanished a week earlier. No ransom call, no demand for money, nothing.

  Jackie had asked him why he had not reported his wife’s disappearance to the Savannah-Chatham police, and he said because he thought they were totally incompetent and didn’t trust them to not, “screw it up royally.” Then he started droning on about the “staggering” crime rate in Savannah and how the local cops “couldn’t catch a goddamn cold.” He wasn’t wrong about the crime rate—it was way too high for a city the size of Savannah.

  It turned out Ralston and Kay Lee had separate bank accounts—hers being a money market account, his a regular checking account— and Jackie and Ryder discovered that her account had been active since she disappeared. It appeared Kay had written three checks in the amounts of $300, $500, and $300 again, so Ralston’s latest theory was that his wife’s kidnapper had forced her to write and cash the checks, then had taken the cash from her.

  Jackie and Ryder were dubious, though, since the Oldfields’ six-thousand-square-foot, palatial brick home was clearly worth more than three million dollars and she had in excess of $200,000 in the money market account. Why would the alleged kidnapper force her to write checks for such paltry amounts?

  Oldfield, who was from an old patrician family and a senior vice president at Sun Trust, said, “Hey, five hundred here, three hundred there, it all adds up. At the rate she’s writing checks—” Oldfield paused to do the math “—it’ll be over twenty-five thousand by the end of the year.”

  But Jackie and Ryder just weren’t buying it.

  In the course of their investigation they had also found out that Kay Lee Oldfield had two passions: One was an hour-a-day yoga session at Hardy’s gym on Habersham and the second was volunteering at a church, counseling ex-convicts, who were judged to be rehabilitated and thus to pose no threat to the people of Savannah. Kay Lee’s specialty was helping the ex-cons write résumés, which had landed a fair number of them decent jobs.