Kathy had several houses to show to a couple from New Jersey today. They were retiring here in spite of their view that the South was backward and the people were ignorant, "… because of the natural beauty and the climate," as they all said. Most of the newcomers ended up at The Marshe Landes, a "plantation" developed by one of the paper companies.
Kathy’s Uncle John was fond of saying, "It’s one of those plantations where they plant Yankees and harvest dollars." He would tell Kathy and anyone else around that, "When I was growin' up, plantations had fences and gates to keep the stock in. Now they got 'em to keep people like me out, like they think I might want somethin’ they got there. I got all the skeeters and skunks I need without botherin’ theirs." John knew first hand about plantations, having grown up as a subsistence farmer on several thousand acres that were the remains of his family’s antebellum plantation.
It did tickle John that his son, Billy, had built a business trapping and transporting pests from the lawns of The Marshe Landes out into the surrounding marsh. Kathy thought it was funny too. The newcomers' love of natural beauty didn’t extend to allowing raccoons into their swimming pools.
"They leave all kinds of trash behind," one of her clients had explained.
Uncle John told Kathy, "Yep, they do, but you can’t really blame the ‘coons. Trash is livin' there. Coons can't tell the difference," which summed up his feelings about the recent arrivals from up north.
Day 2, Morning
Sergeant Joe Denardo sipped at a cup of sour coffee as he sat at his desk studying the incident report from last night’s hit and run. It was not a rewarding effort. He really didn’t have much to go on, and the case was sad. Lenora Washington was 19 years old, working hard to help her grandmother, Lou Washington, get by. Lou had ironed clothes for lots of folks in the Denardo’s neighborhood when Joe had been growing up. She was cheerful, never complaining about the hand life had dealt her. Lou’s daughter Ann, Lenora’s mother, had been about Joe’s age. He remembered her sometimes coming to work with Lou, and seeing her playing in the park down the street from where he lived. She had occasionally joined in the neighborhood games of "half rubber," a form of stickball played with a solid sponge rubber ball that had been sliced in half, struck with a broomstick. As far as Joe knew, the street game was peculiar to Savannah.
Ann had become a trial to Lou when she was in her teens. By the time Joe had gotten out of the Army and joined the police department, she had become part of the drug culture that had populated River Street at the time. He remembered when the needles finally took their toll, leaving old Lou with a dead daughter and three-year-old Lenora to raise. Lou had done her best for her granddaughter, and Lenora had thrived. This summer, she had gotten a job at one of the new, pricey restaurants downtown. She had been a good employee, according to her boss, and an outstanding student, with an academic scholarship to begin the next term at the University of Georgia.
The only evidence Joe had was a set of skid marks. The car had been southbound on Habersham Street, and from the skid marks, it had been going well over the 25-mile-per-hour limit. The point of impact was difficult to estimate. Based on where the body had ended up, and where the skid marks started and stopped, the driver had been standing on the brakes, trying to slow down enough to negotiate the turns around the square, when the car hit Lenora. The physical evidence didn’t support the theory that the driver had been trying to avoid striking her. It looked as if the car had been sliding through the turns with the brakes on when it hit her, and had resumed its high-speed travel as soon as it cleared the last corner of the square, never having stopped.
The responding officer had found only one witness, a David Bannon, who was staying at the Waving Girl Bed and Breakfast on the square. He had heard the accident, but had not seen it. Joe wondered in passing if he was the same Dave Bannon who had been a couple of years ahead of him at Benedictine Military School, but he decided it was probably a different guy. A local, even a former local who was visiting, probably wouldn’t be staying at a tourist spot like the Waving Girl.
Rick Leatherby and his wife, Sarah, were watching the local news as they finished breakfast. The hit and run accident of the night before was the lead story. Sarah was appalled by it, but in Rick's view, she was appalled by reality in all its guises. She had led a sheltered life. She still had a place in Rick's plans, though. He expected her to establish their position in the community as leading citizens, supporting the arts and the appropriate charities. That was good for Rick’s business. Rick himself was listening carefully to the news account, trying to determine whether there were any clues that might lead the police to him. After he had taken Connie home, he had pulled his car into the garage and gone over it carefully with a bright, hand-held lamp, looking for any evidence of his encounter with the girl. He couldn’t find a sign of any contact. He supposed the big, impact-absorbing bumper had been what hit the girl. The few marks he could find were only smudges in the road grime. He planned to leave the big Mercedes in the garage for a while and drive his Porsche, just in case someone had gotten a glimpse of the car. He knew if anyone had gotten his tag number, the police would have already found him, so he thought he was safe. It was damned inconvenient, though, to have to ground the S600.
He realized there had been a pause in Sarah’s chatter, indicating that she might be waiting for a response. He struck a reflective pose, as if lost in thought about one of her profound questions. If he could hold the pose long enough, Sarah would no doubt give him a clue as to what they were supposedly discussing.
After a brief hiatus, Sarah indeed spoke up as if no reply had been expected from Rick. "They’re cute, but they make such a mess."
Rick knew immediately that they had another raccoon problem. He wished he could solve it permanently with a flashlight and a shotgun, but Sarah wouldn’t stand for such a violent, ecologically unsound approach. Of course, Rick didn't own and had never fired a shotgun, but he had the attitude.
"Little rascals sure are persistent. When did Billy catch that last one?" Rick asked, feeling smug because she hadn’t caught him tuning her out. He was really annoyed by her jabbering away while he was thinking about important matters.
"Two weeks ago," Sarah said. "The day of the last meeting."
Rick guessed that would have been a meeting of Marsh Dwellers for a Better Environment.
"There's a really good program today," she babbled on. "Somebody from a place called the Seascape Institute is coming to talk with us about an endangered variety of algae that grows on the empty bleach bottles that the crab fishermen use as floating markers for their traps. If they pull the traps up at the wrong time, it interrupts the reproductive cycle of the algae. They think we should push for a boycott of blue crabs, because the algae are so important to the ecosystem."
Rick wondered if the algae got out of sorts when it got interrupted like that. Then he started puzzling over how the algae reproduced before there were bleach bottles. Were only bottles tied to crab traps satisfactory for the algae, or could they get it on with just any old floating bleach bottle?
"Wish you could go," said Sarah. "It’s pretty interesting."
Rick wished he could go, too, but not to the meeting with Sarah. He did think it might be fun to disrupt that kind of foolishness, though, if he only had time.
"I’ll call Billy. Get him out here again," Rick said, picking up the keys to his Porsche. "The Mercedes isn’t running right. Use the BMW if you need to go somewhere."
Billy Jones and his partner, Calvin "Pigmeat" Mungeon, were training a new recruit when Billy’s cell phone rang. The unnatural sound of the phone distracted the raccoon they were working with, so Billy walked away and left Pigmeat to carry on with the training. He watched Pigmeat give the young ‘coon a cracked oyster as a treat for scattering garbage around their simulated swimming pool.
"Again?" Billy groaned as he listened to Rick Leatherby complain that there was another raccoon in his back yard. "I'll get right over with
another trap as soon as I can, Dr. Leatherby,"
"Why can't you just poison them and be done with it?" Rick wanted to know.
Billy patiently explained, "Well, they tried that over in South Carolina, and once they got rid of the raccoons, grub worms took over everybody’s swimming pools. Gotta work within the ecosystem."
Rick hung up, and Billy went back over to where Pigmeat was putting the trainee in a cage.
"Time to catch Ol’ Bully again," Billy said. "He done scattered the doctor’s trash, right on schedule. You stay here and work with that little feller 'til he gets the hang of really making a mess."
Billy tossed a patented, humane pest trap in the back of his pickup truck and drove away. The traps were carefully designed to catch pests without injuring them. This was important to Billy’s business, as he had a significant investment in each raccoon. He was thinking that he and Pigmeat really needed to get several more raccoons trained up at the rate the developers were building houses in the marshlands.
They had talked about diversifying into gators, but they hadn’t worked out the details. You couldn’t really train a gator the way you could a raccoon. A gator might not even be able to get inside a pool fence without help. That would make them more labor intensive, but nobody would be willing to ignore them. Billy was sure everybody would be willing to pay a premium for alligator removal.
He did worry that the gators might eat a dog or a small child, but Pigmeat maintained that the Yankees only had artificial dogs, like poodles and such, which even a gator probably wouldn’t eat. Besides, they were all too old to have children, except for grandchildren, who weren’t around much, and were always carefully supervised.
Billy also worried that the gators would eat his trained raccoons, which Pigmeat allowed was a consideration. The big thing, though, was the Game and Fish people would still sometimes respond to calls about alligators. There was some risk that they would go to all the trouble to put a semi-trained gator into somebody’s pool just to have the state waste tax dollars hauling it away. Billy couldn’t abide the government wasting money, not to mention taking his personal gators. Pigmeat didn’t care, though. He figured if the law got tired of catching gators, they would open the season on them, and, since gators had been protected for so long, there were plenty of them to go around.
As Billy drove through the main gate at The Marshe Landes, he reflected on the absurdity of a gated community in a place like this. You could land a boat within a minute’s walk of any house in here and take a whole platoon of thieves and evildoers right into somebody’s back yard. He wondered what these fools were thinking.
He pulled his truck into the service drive of the Leatherby place and got his trap out of the back. He rang the bell at the service entrance by the garage door, but there was no answer, so he opened the door and let himself in, as he had often done before. If you had a gated community, he reckoned, you didn’t need to lock your doors.
He walked past the big, black Mercedes S600 sedan sitting by itself in the garage, noticing one of those goofy, oversized bumper stickers that the Marsh Dwellers for a Better Environment distributed. It had a caricature of a raccoon wearing a sweater with the logo of The Marshe Landes development on it. The raccoon had his arms spread wide in welcome, and a damn-fool grin on his face.
Billy wondered whose pool that ‘coon lived in. He emerged onto the pool deck and set the trap carefully in the shrubbery. He hoped Ol’ Bully would wait a day or two before he went into the trap. Sometimes the old raccoon was so eager to get home that he made it all look too easy. That was why Billy had taken Pigmeat into the business -- so they could train up some more ‘coons. Fresh talent was critical to the viability of the enterprise.
Day 2, Midday
Back from her Marsh Dwellers for a Better Environment meeting, Sarah was on the phone with her mother, who was nagging her about what a loser Rick was. Her mother couldn’t understand why Sarah put up with him.
"You know he chases everything in skirts, Sarah," she said pausing for breath. "Of course, I can't imagine any woman desperate enough to fall for such a loser."
This had been going on for so much of Sarah’s married life that she had no independent perspective on her relationship with Rick. She could only see her marriage through the lens of her post-adolescent need to show her mother that she had not made a mistake in her selection of a mate. She was so engaged in this continuing effort to show her mother that she had done well that she had long ago blinded herself to Rick’s faults.
"Mother, Rick has his good points, and I'm just not feeling up to more of your criticism right now," Sarah whined. "Look how well his new clinic is doing."
Sarah finally got off the phone with her mother. She needed to relax. Even after all these years, her mother could still get her worked up and anxious. She opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of iced tea. If she sat out on the pool deck in the shade with the tea, maybe she could put her mother's tirade out of her mind.
She noticed as she sat down by the pool that Billy had put a pest trap down on top of her violets again. She had complained to him about that the last time he had come by to pick up the trap. He had apologized, but maintained that the trap had to be in just the right place or the raccoon would be too suspicious to go into it. It wasn’t lost on Sarah that the raccoon was a poster child for the Marsh Dwellers for a Better Environment at the same time that almost all the members paid Billy $100 per month to keep the poster child’s friends and relatives out of their yards.
All of them still professed to believe the wildlife had as much right to be here as the Marsh Dwellers did, but wildlife didn’t make very good neighbors. The deer that were so graceful in their timid beauty ate the shrubbery. Squirrels gnawed their way into the attic and made nests in the insulation, driving her crazy with their scratching and scurrying. The raccoons would get into the garbage cans and seemed to take delight in breaking open the plastic bags and emptying them into swimming pools. She wondered what natural process drove the raccoons to do that. The lady next door had reported to Sarah soon after they met that raccoons had stolen hundreds of dollars' worth of steaks and lobster from her barbecue grill in a split second while her back was turned.
"I complained to one of the State Game and Fish Commission officers when I saw him at the next Marsh Dwellers' meeting," she had told Sarah, "and I was struck speechless when that ignorant hick told me he wouldn’t give me a citation this time, since it was my first offense. I was just about to give him a piece of my mind for being so smart-mouthed with me when he wrote my name on a printed warning form and handed it to me. It was a warning about harassing wildlife. They say feeding wild animals is harassment, and it's a misdemeanor punishable by a fine, and for repeated offenses, a 30-day jail term. The very idea that a public servant would be so rude. I was so miffed that I wanted to move back to New Jersey, where it's civilized. My husband finally persuaded me to stay for a year to see if it got better, and, you know, it did. The warm winters are divine, and there aren’t any mosquitoes then. But I still don't understand these people."
Sarah didn’t like it here very much, climate aside. The neighbors at The Marshe Landes all seemed to be frustrated social climbers. The locals were all polite and outwardly welcoming, but they never let newcomers into their groups. She had the strangest sense that the locals considered the people at the Marshe Landes inferior, somehow.
By this time, Connie's hangover was mostly an unpleasant memory. She was almost ready to rejoin the human race, although she was in no way ready to go back to the clinic and face Rick. She put on her robe and went to the door to get her morning paper just as Kathy walked out to start her day.
"Hi," Kathy said, with a realtor’s smile and enthusiasm. "We haven’t met. I’m Kathy Owens, your new neighbor. Hope I didn’t disturb you too much moving in."
Connie did her best to act as if she were okay. "Welcome to the neighborhood," she said. "I've lived here for two years, and it's nice to have someone in
the unit next door, finally." She wished to herself that Kathy would be on her way. Connie wasn’t antisocial, but she wasn’t up to company at the moment, either.
"Well, thanks. Nice to meet you, but I've got to run," Kathy said. "I have several houses to show today, but drop in any time you feel like company." Kathy hurried on her way.
Connie was pleased with herself that she was able to give all the appropriate responses, even if it had taken all of her diminished mental capacity to do it. She picked up her newspaper and went back inside.
She took the paper out onto her balcony and settled into a lounge chair, where she got frustrated trying to turn the pages. Her fingers felt twice their normal size, and didn’t quite behave the way her brain demanded. Besides her impairment, the paper was already soggy with the day’s humidity. She knew the hit and run wouldn’t have made the morning paper anyway. She gave up on the paper and just sat holding it, staring off into space.
Connie thought again about what a jerk Rick had become since the clinic’s early success. She wasn’t surprised that there were enough self-deluded people to keep the place in business. She had, after all, made a living from the vanity of others for her whole adult life. Nor was she annoyed with Rick for his taking advantage of peoples' foolishness. She knew someone else would do it if he didn’t. What she couldn’t abide was that Rick had started to take himself so seriously at the same time he took her contributions to the clinic for granted. Lately, he had become too absorbed in the business, focusing on opening more clinics and multiplying his fortune.
Deception in Savannah: A Humorous Novel of Murder, Mystery, Sex, and Drugs Page 3