He was really stuck on the flaming headscarf. That was going to take some work. He got tired of posing in front of the mirror and decided to go over to Wright Square and drink a beer until it was time for the ghost tour. He wanted to follow along again and see if he could get any more ideas. Donald was waiting in the shadows as the people collected for the night’s ghost walk.
Donald was once again amazed at how ridiculous people managed to look when they were being tourists. He thought tourists were odd anyway. It seemed to him that normal behavior was suspended as soon as they went on vacation. Donald wasn’t sure about vacation; that was outside his personal experience. He reasoned that the odd antics of people on vacation had something to do with working hard for a long time and then suddenly stopping for two weeks.
It wasn’t like being out of work, where you had to worry about how you were going to make it. You had some money, at least enough for the two weeks, and you knew you would be going back to your job when it was over, so it must be like a two-week suspension of reality. Most of the tourists Donald had watched acted like children. Some were better behaved than others, but they all seemed to eat junk food and wear funny clothes -- and not enough of them. They grabbed, and pushed, and interrupted each other.
Most of the tourists Donald saw were American. He divided the American tourists into two categories: white people, and black people. The black tourists were better dressed and better behaved, in Donald's view, and more likely to give him a tip. Besides white people and black people, Donald had noticed a fair number of foreigners among Savannah’s tourist population. There had been foreigners in Washington, but it was the capital of the whole world, so they were to be expected there. He had never seen foreigners in Savannah when he was growing up, but there were a good many here now.
Most foreigners dressed normally, like white folks when they weren’t on vacation. They also talked funny, so you couldn’t tell what they were saying to each other, although most of them could speak good English when they had to. Some of the young foreigners dressed just like Americans and they spoke television English. The only way Donald could spot them for sure was the women, who didn’t shave under their arms or wear brassieres. Donald had learned that the foreign tourists were more likely than Americans to give him a tip.
Donald snapped out of his analysis of the human species as Delia started her ghost walk. He moved along in the shadows, well behind her flock. He wasn’t too interested in the content of her stories tonight. He wanted to know if she took the same route every night, and whether she always told the Black Caesar story when they got to the east end of River Street. He was looking for a place near the top of the wrought iron stairs where he could wait, unnoticed, until she led her group to just the right spot, and then he could charge down the stairs in his Black Caesar role.
He knew he couldn’t hang around too long in the park at the top of the stairs, waiting. There were lots of people around there in the evenings and they might notice a man in a pirate costume with a sword, especially if he figured out the flaming headscarf. It wouldn’t do for him to be the center of attention just before swooping down the stairs. It would spoil the whole effect, most likely, because the tourists would all be trying to make pictures of each other with the pirate.
Several of Delia’s group noticed the slightly built man following behind the tour with a notepad and a pen, looking at his watch. One woman wondered aloud to her husband if he was a reporter and somebody famous was in the tour group, disguised as a tourist. It could be one of those people from the movie about the book, she thought.
Joe had been waiting in Kathy’s living room when Dave and Kathy got in from their afternoon of looking at real estate. He was tired and frustrated with the as yet fruitless investigation into the death of Lenora Washington. Joe was looking forward to seeing his old hero from high school. He had wondered if the Dave Bannon in the incident report was the same Dave Bannon he had known. He had been planning to stop at the Waving Girl in the morning and interview him anyway, just in case the guy had remembered something since the officer at the accident scene had questioned him.
His musing was interrupted by the sounds of Dave and Kathy coming in her front door. He saw a remarkably fit, 50-year-old version of his high school hero. It was incredible how little Dave’s appearance had changed. Some gray in his hair and a few lines on his face summed it up. Joe knew that the same couldn’t be said in his case. He’d gained a few pounds since then, although he wasn’t fat, and lost most of his hair.
He noticed Dave’s eyes instinctively flicked to his shoes, checking the shine. He chuckled to himself. Old habits died hard, Joe knew. He always did the same thing when he met somebody, and had already noted that Dave wore deck shoes; not shiny, so he didn’t have to be self-conscious about his own scuffed loafers. Funny, the things that a military high school did to you, Joe thought, as he jumped to his feet and stuck out his hand in welcome.
"You look good, Dave," Joe said, meaning it.
"Thanks. You too, Joe. Kathy tells me you've done well in the police department. Congratulations."
"Well, she always did brag about me. I had planned to visit you tomorrow at the Waving Girl, to see if you had remembered anything else about the hit and run."
"Not really. I didn't see anything but the aftermath. But I did happen to meet a guy named Donald at Lizzie Jones's house this morning who remembered seeing me checking on the girl. You guys know about him?"
"Nope. You're the only witness we've found. I need to talk to him. Who is he?"
"You'll really have to ask Lizzie. I just shook hands with him. Didn't even get his last name. He apparently cleans Lizzie's tour bus every day, though, so she can probably help you find him," Dave answered.
"Okay, guys, no more police business on my time," Kathy said, planting three frosty beers on the coffee table as she sat down. "Where do you think Dave should live, Joe? The Marshe Landes?"
That got Joe off and running on the subject of The Marshe Landes, and all the new people who had come to Savannah since their childhood.
The new Savannah that had grown up amazed Dave. He saw it as almost like an overlay, resting only lightly on what he half-jokingly referred to as the real city. He had gotten the sense that there were almost two separate cities coexisting in some multidimensional way. There was the one in which they had all grown up, and there was the one in which the new arrivals lived. They existed at the same co-ordinates on the space-time continuum, but they only touched each other in superficial ways.
"You know," Dave mused aloud, "To me, Savannah will always be a small town. The folks I see here are the kind of people I've always known, but now there seems to be a lot of outsiders peeking around the edges. Every so often, one of the outsiders does something that pokes through the invisible membrane that divides our city from the outsiders' city. When that happens, it causes ripples on our side, but the ripples die away like the ripples in a pond after a fish jumps. Seems strange. Reckon that happens in other places, too?"
"Whoa! That's pretty eloquent for conversation over a beer. We should switch to white wine if you're going to carry on like that. You should definitely look hard at the Marshe Landes," Joe teased.
Before Dave could get defensive, Kathy responded, "It probably does happen in other places. It could be that we can only see it in Savannah because we belong here. We have a perspective from growing up here that an outsider could never grasp – kind of a genetic memory, almost."
Joe and Kathy had drifted into a brother-sister dialogue about old neighborhoods and new, and the people who lived in them. Joe noticed Dave looked somewhat pensive during their recitations.
"I don't think you'll have any trouble settling back in here, Dave," Joe offered. "It's still home, no matter how many new people come here." He wondered, though, if Dave would look at the people moving in from up north the same way the rest of the locals did, or if his having lived elsewhere would give him a different, maybe a more tolerant, perspective.
John "Ski Cat" Wilson was putting together the little packages of cocaine that his runners would sell tonight. It was mindless work, something he had done so often that he was sure that he had fallen asleep in the middle of it lots of times without breaking his rhythm. He was oblivious to the smell of cabbage that permeated every building in the Yamacraw Village housing project, but he couldn’t manage to ignore the racket of several televisions tuned to different channels. That always bothered him most about this place. The sacrifices a man had to make for the sake of his career, he thought.
He idly wondered what that little dipshit Donald was up to. The worthless dumb-ass had been crashing with his poor old mother next door for weeks now. He stayed gone in the daytime, but he usually came back in the late evening when Ski Cat’s business was booming. That made him nervous about Donald.
He could be an informer, Ski Cat thought. He had assigned one of his boys to watch Donald. The spy had reported that he had been watching Donald through a peephole he drilled in the connecting wall between their bathrooms. Donald was dressing in women’s clothing and admiring himself in the mirror. Ski Cat was thoroughly disgusted to learn that he had a pervert next door. Even worse, the faggot was living with his mother.
No telling what kind of trash you were going to get for neighbors here in old Yamacraw. Ski Cat had not known Donald when they were growing up; they had met when Donald moved in next door. Donald told him he had grown up in the shantytown on the west side of West Broad Street, before the city tore it down. That was back when there was a West Broad Street, before the honkies changed it to Martin Luther King Boulevard, trying to win black votes.
Ski Cat had encountered Donald in the breezeway one night shortly after Donald moved back to Savannah. Donald had introduced himself, and then gone off on Ski Cat’s name. Not that Ski Cat blamed him. It was sort of a strange name for a black drug dealer. Ski Cat had been called Ski Cat since his early teens, though. He had tried water skiing behind his father’s bateau when he was about 13 years old. Ski Cat’s older brothers had found skis in somebody’s back yard when they were mowing lawns. His brothers were too heavy to get up on skis behind the ancient, wheezing outboard boat, and his little brother’s feet were too small to stay in the bindings. Ski Cat, however, had been just the right size, and he had been Ski Cat ever since.
One of his older brothers had joined the Army and hadn’t been heard from since. The other had been killed trying to rob a liquor store that belonged to an old Greek a few years ago. Ski Cat had been driving the getaway car. As soon as his brother had walked in the front door of the store with the stocking over his face, the Greek had pointed a gun at him and said, "Show me your gun."
Puzzled by the shop keeper's request, his brother had obediently pulled his pistol out of his pocket, and the Greek had shot him, right in the forehead. Ski Cat had seen it all through the store window. His first irrational thought had been, "Mama gone be pissed ‘bout that stockin’." Then he had realized his brother was dead. He had driven quietly away from the store and had left the stolen car in an alley.
The next day, "Fat Tony" Cicero had settled next to Ski Cat on a park bench in Forsythe Park, where Ski Cat was absentmindedly feeding breadcrumbs to the pigeons. Ski Cat had never met Fat Tony, but, like all the street-smart kids, he knew who the man was. Everybody knew that Fat Tony was responsible for bolita, the local numbers racket, and that all the pimps paid him a street tax, too.
"Kid," wheezed Fat Tony, "That liquor store you and your brother tried to hit yesterday belongs to some friends of mine. We don't like guns and violence in our neighborhood. Reckon your brother knows that by now, but I gotta be sure you understand, too. Sorry your brother learned the hard way. You try anymore shit like that, and we'll fix it so you can see him regular."
"Yes, Suh," Ski Cat replied, "I understand, but I got to make a livin', too. Starvin' just another way to spend time with my brother, I reckon."
"I like your style, Boy," said Fat Tony. "You stay out of trouble for a few days, and maybe me and my friends find you some way to make a livin' with us."
Tony and his "friends" checked out Ski Cat and decided his evil older brother had led him astray. He was big, mean, and stupid, so they saw a real career opportunity for him. They put him to work as a numbers runner and, given his size and strength, they occasionally used him when they needed to "straighten out" somebody who had fallen behind on his payments. Once they learned Ski Cat was sober and dependable in addition to his more obvious traits, they moved him to a job running drugs out of Yamacraw Village. He would sell cocaine to the tourists on the street a packet at a time, restocking at the apartment that was now his. Tony had caught Ski Cat’s former boss skimming money, and Ski Cat had been instrumental in the guy’s "retirement," taking over the territory that came open.
Day 4, Morning
Donald was reviewing his plans as he was walking to Lizzie’s to clean the van. Delia was two for two on the Black Caesar story. She told it both nights, just as she came to the staircase. The problem was that her arrival time was almost ten minutes later last night than the night before, because one of the fat ladies in the group couldn’t walk very fast. Donald figured that slow walkers would happen every so often, but he hadn’t thought of that before. He congratulated himself on his foresight, thinking it was a good thing he had decided to scout the situation before he jumped in with both feet and a flaming headscarf.
He would have to find a way to wait at the top of the stairs inconspicuously. Maybe if he wore a raincoat to cover his pirate stuff, he could whip it off at the last minute. But what was he going to do about the flaming headscarf? That was a key part of the story. He couldn’t stand there and wait with his head on fire. He was certain that would attract the attention of at least a few of the more inquisitive tourists.
He focused his attention on the headscarf. He had to figure that out. He had thought for a minute last night that he had found a solution. As he had strolled down River Street after parting ways with the ghost tour, he had noticed a restaurant hostess standing at a podium out in front of one of the tourist dives. On top of the lectern, there was a little black iron pot with flames blazing up out of it.
At first, Donald didn’t pay much attention, but as he got closer, he noticed it wasn’t really on fire. The "flames" were fluttering strips of crepe paper with a red lamp shining up from inside the pot. Under the lamp was a fan, which caused the crepe paper to flutter and flicker in the light from the lamp. It looked pretty realistic. Donald stood transfixed until the hostess slithered over to him in her skintight black sequined dress and asked how many were in his party.
"Ain’t no party, Missy," he muttered, thinking she was trying to get herself invited. He didn’t know her anyhow, and he didn't see any party, either. Donald thought she had a lot of nerve. "Just lookin’ at the fire," he said.
The hostess got back behind her podium quickly and watched Donald as if she thought he was strange. He didn’t take offense, though. He did notice that the flaming pot was plugged into an extension cord. He couldn’t think of a way to make that work for the headscarf. If the tourists saw that the pirate was connected to an extension cord, they would think it was some kind of animated exhibit like the ones Donald had seen at Disney World. Even a foreign tourist wouldn’t tip an animated pirate statue. Besides, he would have to have a really long extension cord, and he might trip over it going down the stairs.
Donald had only been gone from Lizzie's for a few minutes when she got a phone call from Joe. "So, Sergeant, gonna arrest me for fixin' your sister up with Dave Bannon?" she teased.
"Nah, that’s great. We had supper together last night. Good guy, like always. I’m looking for a fellow named Donald. Dave said he washes your van in the mornings."
"He does, but he just left. I don't know how to reach him. He's not in some kind of tro
uble, is he? He seems like a nice kid. Good worker, too."
Joe was disappointed that he had missed Donald. "No, no trouble. I just wanted to ask him about the hit and run. Dave said Donald was there. Don't know what he might have seen that could help us find that car. You got a last name for him?"
"No, I don't, but I'm sure he'll be back tomorrow morning about eight." She went on to tell the story of how Donald had come to be washing her van every day. "He's just a really delightful, engaging guy. He's always cheerful."
With nothing more than a first name and a description, Joe was stymied. He and Lizzie agreed that he should come by her place tomorrow morning at about eight o'clock.
Connie had spent the better part of the morning in a frustrating meeting with Jimmy Taglio. His monosyllabic, evasive answers to her questions about the building maintenance expenses had irritated her, and her questions had become ever sharper and more direct. He had responded to her change in approach by becoming more and more surly and uncommunicative. Connie put it down to his being an Italian male. Being Hispanic herself, she was loath to put tags on people, but to her thinking, Jimmy exhibited all the worst traits associated with the stereotype. She couldn’t tell which irritated him more; her gender and ethnicity, or her having come from California.
He had mumbled, "I should 'a known a woman wouldn't know nothin' about plumbin' an' airconditionin', but it looks like a Chicana from California would at least understand about gardenin' in the heat."
That one had gotten to her. She hadn’t run into prejudice like that since she had come here, although she had certainly been prepared for it. Everybody in California had warned her about southerners, but she hadn’t thought that someone of obvious Italian ancestry would harbor the feelings associated in her mind with rednecks. To her, Jimmy was just as much an ethnic minority as she was. Her discussion, as unsatisfactory as it was, had ended on a more or less positive note.
Deception in Savannah: A Humorous Novel of Murder, Mystery, Sex, and Drugs Page 7