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

by Charles Dougherty

  "Mission something important? Mission?" Belk slurred into one of the phones in his right-most right hand. "Don’t know about missions. Used to give my lunch money to missions in second grade. God’s work. Nuns said so."

  "Got a video missin’, Mr. Belk?" tried Willie, realizing the guy was looped, and finally connecting the name to the customer who was usually a little wobbly. "Spanish Lady," he added, hoping that might help Belk to remember the video.

  "Don’t know Mission of Our Spanish Lady, Father," gurgled Belk, confused about how he had come to be talking to this strange priest about missions, but not wanting to burn any bridges with the Church, either. "Video of the mission might help get some of the children to give their lunch money," he offered, helpfully. "Out of school now, Father. Lawyer. Years ago," he tried to explain.

  He was noticing that it was almost 5 o’clock. He knew he had to leave at 5 o’clock to go to his mother’s house for drinks. This priest from the Mission of Our Spanish Lady would have to call another time. Maybe Mother knew something about it, he thought, absently hanging up the phone and putting some of the papers on his desk into his briefcase. He knew he was supposed to do that. That was why he carried a briefcase.

  As he walked to the parking lot, he wondered drunkenly about the big, black sport utility vehicle parked next to his car. He didn’t remember anyone else being inside his office. He was puzzled about whose car it was as he put his key into the driver’s door of his car.

  As he was turning the key, Ski Cat hit him hard with a fist to the back of the neck. The world went dark for Belk. One big arm encircled his chest; the other grabbed his briefcase as it slipped to the ground. Within seconds, Belk was slumped in the passenger seat of the Navigator, held more or less in place by the seat belt. His arms rested neatly on top of his briefcase, with his fingers splayed against the dashboard. Ski Cat pulled out of the parking lot, noting that there was not a soul around. As he drove back toward Victory Drive, he called Fat Tony on his cell phone.

  "Picked up the package, Tony. There in a few minutes."

  Willie still held the phone in his hand as he tried to think of what to do with the DVD. The Belk guy was hopeless. Odds were good that he was the one who had put the DVD in the return slot, since it was in the case for the one he had rented yesterday, but he was so drunk you couldn’t converse with him.

  Willie remembered him well enough now. He was one of those people who were always drunk, and so used to it they almost seemed sober until you tried to talk to them. Willie had a number of customers like that. In fact, he had vague memories of periods like that in his own past, before he settled down and became a serious businessman.

  He was trying to remember what had ever caused him to open this store when his eye fell on the mystery DVD again. That brought him back to his present problem. He decided he would try Belk first thing in the morning, on the off chance that he might pass through the real world for coffee and breakfast. If that didn’t work, then maybe he should call that guy, Dr. Leatherby, who seemed to be the target of the Hispanic lady’s video. He would really have to work out his approach carefully for that one, though.

  "Think you hit him too damn hard, Ski Cat," Fat Tony criticized, as Jimmy steered the Julia’s Pride out of the mouth of the Wilmington River and into the ocean. Belk slumbered peacefully on the sea berth at the back of the wheelhouse.

  "He drunker than a skunk, Tony," Ski Cat protested. "Smell like he bathe in third-run Daufuskie corn liquor. Hardly hit him at all; he fold up like a wet rag. Have to get him sober before I can work on him. He so drunk he ain’t know I hurt him."

  Tony went back to the shrimp hold and scooped up a bucket of slushy ice. They had loaded up the Julia’s Pride as if they were going shrimping, in case the Coast Guard or the Fish and Game people stopped them.

  As the boat got farther offshore, the motion changed from the pounding, bone-jarring shocks that they had endured leaving the inlet to an easy, corkscrew roll as the breaking inshore waves gave way to the long, slow, ocean swells. Tony noticed that Ski Cat was looking a little seasick as he came back into the wheelhouse with the bucket.

  "Hey, Ski Cat, you all right?" Tony asked, knowing Ski Cat was queasy from the motion of the boat.

  Ski Cat ignored the question as he lifted Belk like a baby. He staggered back to the working deck with his burden, followed by Tony. Ski Cat dropped Belk carelessly on the deck. Belk groaned and shifted, trying to regain a comfortable position in his stupor. Tony threw the bucket of slush in his face, and his eyes snapped open.

  "Sorry, Father, but I never heard of Our Spanish Lady. Like to help, but I’m late. Call tomorrow about the mission video, okay?" Belk continued the interrupted telephone conversation, not registering his new surroundings.

  Tony noticed his face was bleeding from small cuts inflicted by the sharp edges of some of the larger chunks of ice. "That’s it. Tell us about the missin’ video," Tony prompted, "And we won’t have to hurt you. Have you home in no time."

  Tony crossed himself surreptitiously and said a silent prayer asking to be forgiven for misleading Belk.

  "Don’t know about the mission video," Belk protested.

  Tony nodded to Ski Cat, who took a Leatherman tool out of his pocket and started unfolding it.

  "Weed eater be quicker, we had electric," Ski Cat commented professionally as he sized up his victim.

  Ski Cat helped Belk focus what was left of his mind on answering Tony’s questions. Belk was not at all reticent. He wasn’t trying to withhold his help from the missions. He was completely at a loss. The fat, white priest kept asking about the video and when he would send it to the TV station.

  All the while, the black priest -- Belk was sure he was from the Mission of our Spanish Lady -- kept doing something to Belk’s hands. Belk was so out of it that he thought at first that Ski Cat had joined hands with him to pray. Sometimes it hurt pretty badly. The Benedictines had been rough when he had been in their military school, but not like this. These guys must be Jesuits, he figured.

  They kept asking about Connie Barrera, and Belk thought that must be the woman his mother was trying to fix him up with. He wondered what she had to do with the mission. He worried that he was late for supper. He hoped that wouldn’t embarrass his mother in front of this Barrera woman, but he hadn’t asked her to fix him up, nor had he meant to be late.

  "Not my fault," Belk mumbled, thinking how desperate his mother must be getting if she was setting him up with a Hispanic woman. "Spanish Lady," he mumbled as Ski Cat broke another finger.

  "What was the signal from the Spanish Lady?" Tony asked him. "You were going to send the video to that TV station, but the Spanish Lady had to tell you when."

  "Oh," Belk said, recognition dawning in his voice, "Mission video?"

  "Yeah! Atta boy! Tell us about the missin’ video. Where is it?" Tony asked, sensing a breakthrough at last.

  "Don’t know where mission. Father from Our Spanish Lady called me," burbled Belk in reply.

  "So you didn’t have the video, right?" Tony tried, thinking maybe they were getting somewhere. "Who would send the video when the Spanish Lady’s father called?"

  "Father had the mission video," said Belk, helpfully, recalling part of his earlier phone conversation with the anonymous priest from the Mission of Our Spanish Lady. "Guess he’d send it."

  Ski Cat and Fat Tony went through this one more time with Belk, for confirmation, with Jimmy listening. Then they wrapped Belk in a 90-foot length of heavy chain, shackling the ends together. Belk was sure they were Jesuits at this point. He remembered something about Jesuits and chain. Maybe Sister Mary Grace had turned him in for not giving his lunch money to the missions that one week in second grade.

  "Kathy Denardo told," he said, remembering the embarrassment of that long ago day, just before Ski Cat knocked him unconscious.

  Ski Cat was feeling kindly toward Belk, since he had been generally co-operative, so he cracked him squarely across the top of his head with
a piece of pipe to spare him the agony of drowning. Then they tossed him over the side and turned the boat back toward shore.

  Tony and Jimmy were amazed that Sam had been correct about Belk’s file being a red herring. Connie Barrera’s father had the video; now they just had to find him. They couldn’t make any sense out of the Kathy Denardo remark, though. Who was she? What had she told, and to whom? Jimmy was annoyed that Ski Cat had hit Belk before they could ask him any more questions, but what was done was done.

  Dopey was enjoying South Beach a great deal, now that his stick-in-the-mud older brother had gone home. Every morning, he would go over to the hospital after breakfast, dressed in pressed blue jeans and a clean t-shirt. Compared to most of the people on the streets, Dopey looked dressed up enough to be a banker, except for his ever-present stocking cap. He would buy a bouquet of cheap flowers from a street vendor on his way over and then he would walk down the corridor past Connie’s room, making sure she was still there.

  He noticed this one little nurse who had two striking features, to his way of thinking. He had struck up an acquaintance with her early on. He really wanted to examine her features up close sometime. He asked her to go to the beach with him on her next day off, thinking she would probably wear a bikini like the other girls there, so he could get a better look. She had politely declined, saying that she was dating a doctor.

  This was a slight expansion of the truth. He wasn’t a doctor, yet. He was a medical student with an eye toward becoming a South Beach plastic surgeon -- and she wasn’t dating him, exactly. He was paying her to let him experiment on her prominent features.

  He had an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and he had designed a new, top-secret breast implant. The thing that made this implant unique was that the patient could adjust it after it was implanted. He was currently testing to see what the upper limit of comfortable expansion would be, so every time Dopey saw the little nurse, he found her inexplicably more attractive.

  She didn’t seem to mind him stopping to talk and stare. When she had asked him which patient he was coming to see, he had told her he was a private detective and couldn’t discuss the case he was working on. She wondered if it had something to do with Disney World, since he was disguised as one of the Seven Dwarfs, but she kept her speculation to herself. She thought he was kind of cute, the way his ears stuck out.

  Once Dopey had made his daily trip to the hospital, he would go back to the hotel and put on his bathing suit. He would spend a few hours walking on the beach, ogling the livestock, as he had come to think of it.

  Dopey fancied himself a connoisseur of the female form, by now. After the initial shock had worn off, he had begun to concentrate on searching for the few truly exquisite breasts that were on display each day. He had started to wish that most women would keep their tops on.

  A lot of them just plain gave tits a bad name -- some were ugly enough to make a Southern Railways fast freight take a dirt road. When he had complained to one of the police patrols about them, the cops had told him it was a free country and every woman had a right to express herself, whether he liked it or not.

  Once Dopey had completed his survey each day, he would take a nap until late afternoon, when it was cool enough to enjoy being outside again. Then he would go to one of the sidewalk bars on Ocean Drive to meet his friends. Dopey had fallen in with a group of young guys, all about his age, who were pretty cool.

  They were involved in dealing coke and pimping for some of the hookers on Collins Avenue, but that was just business. He thought they were really nice guys, and they treated him like one of the crowd. He was having a blast. He’d never had friends of his own to hang out with. He’d always been Ski Cat’s little brother, Dopey, just a "Hey-boy." He liked being somebody, and putting bar tabs on the credit card from Fat Tony that Ski Cat had given him.

  He’d never had a credit card before; he’d always thought you actually had to pay for stuff. No wonder white folks lived so well. They all had these plastic cards you could use to get stuff free, just by signing your name. He had noticed that a lot of the black people down here had the cards, too. They even acted like tourists, some of them, and he had always thought tourists had to be white. He wondered how you got a card, if you didn’t know Ski Cat or Fat Tony, but before he could follow that line of thought, he spotted his new best friend Carlisle, from Jamaica, waving him over to a table. Yes, sir. He liked it here. No hurry to go back to Savannah and be Ski Cat’s flunky. Now that he had his card, he was just going to stay here and get drunk with all his new friends.

  Day 12, Morning

  Old Bully had finally gotten tired of foraging at the Marshe Landes. He was as fat and full as a tick on a hound dog. He needed to go stay with Billy and Pigmeat so he could rest a little while and get some wholesome food instead of all the fatty stuff the people at The Marshe Landes ate. About dawn, he crawled into the trap, ignoring the bait, and settled down to nap until somebody showed up to give him a ride to Billy’s place.

  Donald made his way quietly into the Leatherby’s garage shortly after sunup. He walked past that big, black S600 twice; once on his way in, and again, carrying the trap with Old Bully inside, on his way out. He had to turn sideways with the trap to get by. As he backed past the right rear fender of the car, it was at the same angle, although much closer to him, that he had seen the night of the hit and run in Wright Square.

  That’s it! Donald remembered now. He had seen this car tearing away right after the noise woke him up, right before he had seen Dave bending over the girl’s body. Now he had it put together. That's where the picture belonged. He’d been thinking the car had something to do with the ghost walk, or maybe Black Caesar, but he had been mistaken. No wonder he thought he needed to tell Joe about it. Joe was trying to find out who hit that girl. Donald at least knew whose car hit the girl. Okay, he would call Joe from Lizzie’s, just as soon as he got back from taking this big fat raccoon out to Billy’s house. Donald worried that it would be bad for Billy’s business if he told on Dr. Leatherby. He hoped none of the rich folks at The Marshe Landes would blame Billy and cancel their "‘coon catchin’ contracts," as Billy called them, but he knew Billy would want him to do what was right. By now, Donald was pulling into Billy’s yard.

  Rick was going through stacks of bills, approving them for payment, when Frances called on the intercom to tell him there was a Detective Sergeant Denardo to see him. He was frustrated by all this paperwork that he had to deal with in the wake of Connie’s departure. She should have had it better organized, he thought. He didn’t just need a color consultant. He needed a business manager, too, to sort out all the stuff Connie had apparently screwed up.

  "He got an appointment?" Rick asked, querulously.

  "No, Doctor, but he says he’ll only need a few minutes," she drawled.

  As much as Rick didn’t want to be bothered, he couldn’t afford to turn away a potential patient. Especially a cop. They were all fat, weren't they? If he played this just right, maybe he could end up with a nice juicy contract with the police department. Yeah, that’s what he needed. Sergeant sounded kind of influential to Rick. If Rick could help him lose weight, this guy could probably help him to get a deal with the city government.

  He told Frances to show the sergeant in. A minute later, the door opened and a handsome, muscular guy in a well-tailored suit entered. Rick offered his hand, which the sergeant shook firmly. He asked the cop to have a seat. Rick was thinking this guy had about as much of a weight problem as Mary Lou had, and went on the defensive quickly. Was this about the hit and run? What else could bring this guy here like this? Why did it take him so long to get here, if that was it? His anxiety increased as Joe offered his badge holder and i.d. for Rick’s perusal. Rick glanced at them and waved them away, doing his best to act unconcerned and thinking as fast as he ever had in his life.

  "I take it this is an official visit of some sort?" he asked, in a tone meant to sound open and friendly. "How may I help you?
"

  "Thanks for seeing me so quickly, Doctor. We have an eyewitness who says your car was involved in a hit and run the other night." Joe let the silence hang.

  Rick, a master of the pregnant pause himself, said, "I remember that accident from the news. Terrible. My car, you say?"

  "An eyewitness gave us your tag number. Were you driving the car that night, Doctor?"

  "Ah, no, I wasn’t, Sergeant. I was working late at the clinic here, as my wife will tell you. One of my associates used the car for a while that evening, though. Connie Barrera. She wanted to impress some friends who were visiting, and it’s sort of a company car anyway, you see. Registered to the clinic, you probably noticed. She took it when she got off work and returned it here sometime before 2 a.m., when I left to go home." Rick was on a roll, now, feeling smug.

  Joe asked if the doctor had noticed any damage to the car. Rick said he hadn’t noticed any, but that he hadn’t driven the car much since then. He explained that he preferred his Porsche when the weather was nice. Joe said that that was good, as they would be impounding the Mercedes, and he was glad it wouldn’t be a major inconvenience to the doctor. He asked if the car was at Rick’s house, and learning that it was, explained that Rick should alert his wife. There would be a team with all the paperwork showing up shortly to pick up the car. Rick agreed to do that as soon as they were finished and sat back, waiting almost eagerly for the question that he was sure Joe would ask next.

  "Your associate, Ms. Barrera, is she here now, Doctor?"

  "No. It all starts to make sense, now. She quit coming to work right after that night. She just didn’t show up the day after the accident -- no calls, didn’t answer her phone. Then she came in for a few hours in the next couple of days, said she wasn’t feeling right. Then she disappeared. Guess we know why now, huh?"