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

by Charles Dougherty

  Deception in Savannah

  C.L.R. Dougherty

  Copyright © 2012 by C.L.R. Dougherty

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  rev. Oct 2017

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Day 1, Morning

  Day 1, Evening

  Day 2, Morning

  Day 2, Morning

  Day 2, Midday

  Day 2, Late afternoon

  Day 2, Early evening

  Day 2, Later in the evening

  Day 3, Morning

  Day 3, Afternoon

  Day 3, Evening

  Day 4, Morning

  Day 4, Afternoon/Evening

  Day 5, Morning

  Day 5, Afternoon

  Day 6

  Day 7, Morning

  Day 7, Evening

  Day 9, Morning

  Day 9, Afternoon

  Day 9, Late night

  Day 10, Morning

  Day 10, Midday

  Day 10, Afternoon

  Day 11, Morning

  Day 11, Midday

  Day 11, Afternoon/Evening

  Day 12, Morning

  Day 12, Midday

  Day 12, Afternoon

  Day 12, Evening

  Day 13, Morning

  Day 13, Midday

  Day 13, Evening

  Day 14, Morning

  Day 14, Midday

  Day 14, Afternoon

  Day 14, Evening

  Day 15, Morning

  Day 15, Midday

  And Later…

  Mailing List

  A Note to the Reader

  About C.L.R. Dougherty

  Other Books by C.L.R. Dougherty

  Epigraph

  "O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."

  Sir Walter Scott

  Dedication

  Deception in Savannah is a work of fiction. All the characters and events are products of my imagination. Savannah, Georgia, is a real and charming city, and I hope you’ll visit someday.

  I offer my thanks to my wife, Leslie Dougherty, and her parents, Alan and Carol Rea, for all the effort they put forth in helping me with my writing. They made this a better work than it would have

  otherwise been.

  Day 1, Morning

  Lizzie had a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. She swerved around the fool in the middle of the street with the evasive skill of a demolition derby driver, wondering what he was photographing that required him to stand in the traffic. Damned tourist. She took a deep breath and counted to ten, reminding herself that she didn’t really object to the tourists; they enabled her to make a living. She just wished they would stay out of the traffic. Downtown was claustrophobic enough with all the little streets laid out in the days of horses and buggies. The cobble-stoned streets charmed people right off the sidewalks, and then they had to pose for pictures with the old houses in the background.

  Lizzie loved being a tour guide, showing people around Savannah and telling them stories. Some of the stories had a nodding acquaintance with the truth, although the closer they came to fact, the more unlikely they seemed to her clients. A lot of Lizzie’s clients were preconditioned to believe almost anything about Savannah and its inhabitants, thanks to all the hype associated with "The Book." "The Book" was written years ago by a man from New York. Lizzie thought his book would have been better if he had just known some of the real denizens of the old city. Being an outsider, he’d had to make do with the people who would talk with him. Some of them were strange enough, though, even if they weren't necessarily real natives of the city. Lizzie was happy that his efforts had put Savannah on the tourist map, even if it was sensationalism that attracted visitors.

  Her destination this morning was the Visitors' Center, where she parked in a spot reserved for minibuses like hers. Her brochures were on display in the racks out front and her goal was to replenish the supply. She preferred to book her tours over the phone and pick up her clients at their hotels instead of picking up people at the Visitors' Center; Lizzie had discovered over the years that she got a less penurious class of tourists this way. As she stepped up to the front door of the Visitors’ Center, she noticed the slightly built black man standing there with a handful of fliers just before he greeted her.

  "Good morning, ma’am. My name is Donald," he said politely in a soft Geechee dialect, "and I help folks like you find what they lookin’ for. What you lookin’ for this mornin’?"

  "Never mind, Donald. Just checking on my brochures," Lizzie said, preparing to brush by him. Donald fanned out the brochures in his hand and held them out for her examination.

  "The way this work is, I show you how to get where you goin’, and then you give me a tip." Donald went on to explain that there was no charge for the brochures, and that he was providing a public service for the "tourisses."

  Lizzie was half-listening to his spiel while she studied the brochures he was displaying. Shocked with realization, she blurted, "Why, you took all my brochures off the display in there."

  "Yes, ma’am, it’s a service I provides for the local economy," Donald explained with patient enthusiasm. "It’s good, because it move the lost tourists somewhere else, so somebody else can help ‘em. I don’t charge nothin’. Work for tips."

  "How long have you been doing this, Donald?"

  "I just start today, but I got experience workin' in Washington."

  "You put those brochures right back where you got 'em," Lizzie told him. "I'm Lizzie Jones Carter, and I run tours of downtown. If you need money, come with me and wash this van before my nine o'clock tour, and I'll pay you twenty bucks."

  Donald, long accustomed to obeying assertive women, meekly agreed. He thought it was for the best, because he had noticed Lizzie’s bag was full of brochures, so he figured she probably wouldn’t tip him for one more, anyhow. Besides, he didn’t think she looked or talked like a tourist. She came across as way too sure of herself.

  Lizzie tidied up her allocated slots in the display rack, and she and Donald got in the van. She drove to her house in the historic district and pulled the van into her backyard through a gate off the alley that ran behind her house. Donald washed the van and cleaned it inside. He studied the brochures in the rack on the passenger side of the dashboard. They had pictures of the van he had just cleaned and of the lady who was going to pay him, as well as a map of the historic sites. He read the copy and realized he had just tried to give Lizzie one of her own brochures. This was a lot more complicated than the brochure scam he had learned from Luther in Washington. He would have to give some thought to how to make it work here.

  When he was finished, Lizzie gave him a cup of freshly brewed coffee, complimented him on the job he had done, and paid him. She told him he could come back tomorrow morning at eight, and clean and wash the van again, if he wanted. He thought that was a good deal. Twenty dollars would feed him and buy his beer for the day, with a few dollars left over. It didn’t quite satisfy his entrepreneurial spirit, though, because it seemed a lot like work, as opposed to what Luther had called free enterprise. As Donald was leaving, Lizzie put a dozen copies of "The Book" in the van and drove away to pick up her clients for her morning tour.

  Donald ambled along Barnard Street, thinking about how he had come to have this almost job, was
hing Lizzie’s van. After he had gotten out of the Army, Donald had spent some time in Washington, D.C., drifting. He fell in with a street hustler named Luther, who became a mentor of sorts to Donald. Luther tried to teach Donald to scam tourists, but Donald, although willing, had a little trouble getting the hang of it. He knew he didn't think the way other folks did; he had figured that out in the Army. It wasn't the way he felt about things that was different, but the mechanics of his thought process itself. He didn’t think any more slowly than other folks; he just went at it differently. His thoughts ran in lots of different directions at once, sort of like a swarm of wasps when you hit their nest. Keeping up with one particular wasp was nearly impossible when that happened, and you didn’t know for sure which one would sting you, so you had to keep an eye on all of them as best you could.

  Luther made a good living by taking all the free maps from the display rack at the Smithsonian Metro stop each morning. He would stand just outside the stop, and when someone emerged looking lost, Luther would offer a courteous greeting and ask if he could provide any directions. He was engaging enough so that most people who were uncertain about where they were going would ask the way to wherever they were bound. Luther would then produce one of the maps, explaining while he unfolded it that he was an unofficial tourist guide. He would point out their current location and mark the route to the requested destination with a felt-tipped pen.

  He would then hand over the map, saying, "I hope this helps make your vacation more enjoyable. My name is Luther, and I make my living helping folks like you. If you found me helpful, I could use a small contribution, or at least your prayers. God bless you."

  Donald knew he wasn’t as smart as Luther. Luther lived in a big condo in Arlington and drove to work in a new Cadillac, which he parked near a Metro stop on his way to D.C. He had a number of understudies like Donald, who paid him a percentage of their collections during their two-week training period. Several aspects of this troubled Donald. He thought there was something fundamentally dishonest about Luther's hustling. Donald felt like taking all the maps was almost like stealing. When he brought this up with Luther, Luther explained that what they were doing was actually helping to put the maps to their intended use. Without Luther or Donald, the tourists probably wouldn’t look at the maps. Even if they did find the maps and look at them, Luther claimed they would still get lost without help.

  Donald wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know his way around Washington very well, and he worried that the tourists might get more lost with his help than without it. Luther said that was all right. The only thing that mattered was that Donald get the tourists out of his own immediate vicinity. If they got lost somewhere else, another of Luther’s protégés could help, and earn another tip. Luther said this was what free enterprise was all about, and free enterprise helped the economy by spreading the tourists' money around. Luther was a great proponent of free enterprise, especially as it applied to hustling tourists, and he drew a firm line between free enterprise and work. This whole approach ran afoul of Donald’s sense of what was right. Even though Luther did his best to persuade Donald that his business was consistent with Donald’s ethics, he couldn’t get through to Donald.

  Donald thought he would be more comfortable operating on a smaller scale in more familiar surroundings, so he made his way back home to Savannah. He didn’t have a condo to live in, but his mother had a spare bedroom in her place in the Yamacraw Village housing project since her sister had moved out, and he could walk from there to the tourist district, so he didn't need a Cadillac like Luther.

  Day 1, Evening

  Donald had just dozed off on the bench in Wright Square when he was awakened by the squeal of tires. Then there was a thud, like a bag of sand would make if you dropped it from the roof onto pavement. He roused enough to see a black car with some kind of funky bumper sticker roaring away into the night. He had a buzz from the malt liquor he’d been sipping earlier. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep on a park bench like some bum; after all, he had that room at his mother’s place. She didn’t like him to be drinking there, though, so he’d taken some of the money he got from washing Lizzie’s van and bought the two beers to enjoy in the cool of the evening in the square. He liked the squares downtown. The contrast between the geometric layout of Savannah and the moss-hung, shambling oak trees had a magic appeal to Donald.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been slouched on the bench before the car woke him up. As he became more alert, he saw a man come down the steps from the Waving Girl Bed and Breakfast with a flashlight. The man crossed the street and knelt down by the bushes at the edge of the square to look at something in the gutter by the curb. Donald eased over to see what was happening, and realized the man was looking at the crumpled body of a young girl. Donald could hear sirens in the distance, coming closer by the second. He knew it was late because the lights at the Rose of Sharon old folks’ home on the other side of the square were off. The well-honed instincts of a street person compelled Donald to move on, although his curiosity made him want to stay. He remembered he had to get up early to wash Lizzie’s van in the morning, so he sidled away from the square like a ghost, vanishing into the night before he was noticed.

  Dave Bannon felt the girl’s neck for a pulse and decided she was dead just as a patrol car rolled to a stop beside him. As he was wondering who had called the police, a woman in uniform got out of the car and knelt next to him, checking for a pulse herself.

  She looked over at Dave and asked, "Did you see what happened, sir?"

  "No, I didn't. I was getting ready for bed, and I heard the screeching of brakes and a loud thump. I came out to see what it was, but there was no car in sight. You got here just a minute after I did."

  "See anybody else around?" she asked.

  "Nobody," Dave told her. By then, an ambulance had pulled up near them. As the attendants went to work, the policewoman and Dave went to sit in her patrol car while she filled out her report.

  "You live around here?" the policewoman asked Dave, taking him for a local because of his Savannah accent.

  "No, I'm staying at the B and B over yonder," he replied, and her eyebrows went up.

  "Tourist?" she asked.

  "Not exactly," Dave prefaced his explanation. "I grew up here and left after college. I'm thinking about moving back now."

  "Thought I recognized the accent," she remarked. "Ain’t many of us left that grew up here." She made sure she knew how to get in touch with Dave in case there were any follow-up questions, and wished him well with his homecoming.

  Dave walked back to the B and B and let himself in, easing the door shut so he wouldn’t disturb the other guests. He wondered why no one else had come out to see what was going on. He figured all that noise in a quiet neighborhood like this must have attracted some attention. Somebody had called the cops, anyhow.

  "I still think you should have stopped, Rick," harped Connie Barrera.

  "Right," said Rick Leatherby, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I’m out drinking with my sleazy mistress at 1 a. m. when my wife thinks I’m working late at the clinic. Not to mention what the local news would have to say."

  Rick could visualize the reporters on the television news in a feeding frenzy, describing how this rich doctor had run over somebody. They would fry him. His vanity assured him that everyone would be thrilled to see another of the mighty take a fall. He thought again how unfair life was. This whole thing was Connie’s fault anyway. She was the one who wanted to go out drinking and dancing. Then she had started flirting with those two salesmen like some cheap floozy. He was embarrassed to be around her, lately. When he had criticized her behavior, she had started slapping at him while he was driving. No wonder he had run over somebody. Now Connie thought he should take the blame for that. He was beginning to regret having brought her to Savannah. She was a distraction. He needed to spend more time on the social circuit with his wife, to drum up business for the clinic.

  Connie, meanwhile, was hol
ding her tongue with some difficulty. She was tired of Rick and his recently acquired, pompous manner. Sleazy mistress, indeed. So that’s how he thought of her these days. She was beginning to resent his narrowing perception of her role in his life. She had long ago accepted that she would live in the shadows, socially, but she had been more than his mistress for the years they had been together. She was his business partner in the diet clinic and his soul mate as well. Her influence as his alter ego had inspired the development of the clinic to begin with. She knew he was jealous because she had been dancing with a couple of guys at the Port Royal Saloon. She had seen the flush rise on his face as she gyrated. She might be his mistress, but she wasn’t his possession. If it hadn’t been for her, Rick would still be playing lead guitar in a second-rate rock band on the bar circuit in California. She was just about fed up with him.

  Day 2, Morning

  Dave Bannon had passed a restless night in his room at the Waving Girl after the hit and run. He kept hearing the screeching tires and the sickening thump, and seeing the crumpled figure of the girl in the gutter. He was relieved when dawn lit his window. He showered and shaved in a leisurely fashion, and went downstairs to the sitting room to read the morning paper until it was time for breakfast at 7:30. Dave was having trouble being retired. He was without an immediate goal for the first time in his life, and he was struggling to deal with this lack of purpose.