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

by Charles Dougherty

  "With Rick Leatherby gone, Barrera won't know how to reach us," Sam said. "She can't know for sure who we are, but I reckon she's got you pegged, Jimmy." She had figured out Jimmy was involved in the money-laundering scheme, but that was probably as far as she could get into their hierarchy, Sam reasoned.

  "Yeah, if Leatherby had told her more, she probably would have bypassed him and tried to deal directly with you, Sam. She's obviously no fool," Jimmy answered. "Who's that guy she's got makin' calls, you reckon? Think he's really her old man?"

  "Don't know. If she's fronting for somebody, they may know more about us than she does," Sam theorized.

  Jimmy had removed the phone taps from Leatherby’s lines in anticipation of the police investigation that was sure to follow his death. That meant they couldn’t tell who was calling Rick’s phones unless the person left a voice mail. Jimmy could still retrieve those without anyone knowing.

  The police had closed the clinic and sent all the employees home, once they had learned that no one was in charge and there were no patients in residence. They had carefully identified and questioned all the employees, including Jimmy, before releasing them.

  Sam and Jimmy finally decided Jimmy should check out Ski Cat’s safe house. Neither had been there, but they knew where it was. Maybe there would be some clue there as to how to reach Dopey.

  Dopey was feeling the aftereffects of a rough night. After he and the Jamaican had dumped Tony’s corpse in the Everglades, they had gone ahead with their plans to meet the Colombians. Dopey had managed to pretend to the Jamaican that the killing of Fat Tony was a routine thing, but it had taxed his nerve. He knew Ski Cat did stuff like that, but it was Dopey’s first up-close and personal encounter with cold-blooded murder. He had seen people shot in street-corner gunfights, but this was different.

  Fat Tony was Ski Cat’s boss, for one thing. Ski Cat would be some kind of pissed about the Jamaican shooting Fat Tony, and that worried Dopey more than anything. Ski Cat was crazy enough when he wasn’t agitated. Dopey didn’t want to think about what Ski Cat was liable to do to him when he found out about Tony. Dopey knew for sure Ski Cat would kill the Jamaican, and he’d most likely hurt Dopey pretty badly, too.

  But Dopey was more scared of the Jamaican right now. Carlisle had shot Fat Tony as casually as he would have spit on the sidewalk, so Dopey had managed to get through an evening of bragging and drinking with the Jamaican and the Colombians as if Fat Tony meant nothing to him.

  When he had finally gotten back to his hotel room, sleep was impossible. On top of his new problems, he hadn’t heard from Ski Cat for a long time. He had been accustomed to at least one call a day, more often several. It had been over 24 hours since Ski Cat had called. Dopey had tried his cell phone, but it had gone straight to voice mail. He had tried the ‘office’ in Yamacraw Village, but a strange voice had answered. He had the sense that something was wrong. Finally, he decided this was an emergency.

  Dopey knew Connie was talking to a cop from Savannah. The little nurse had told him all about it. She had been amazed that the cop had come all the way from Georgia to talk to Connie, and she even had the cop’s name. She wondered what it was about. So did Dopey. Dopey recognized Joe Denardo’s name from having hauled his inert form to Wright Square that night Meatball had cold-cocked him.

  He didn’t know why he was supposed to watch Connie, but he knew this could be important. Maybe it would help make up for getting Fat Tony killed. Dopey had a phone number for Ski Cat's safe house, even though he didn’t know there was such a place. Ski Cat had made him memorize the telephone number, and told him not to ever call it unless he was sure he was going to die, because Ski Cat might kill him just for calling it.

  Day 14, Afternoon

  After Joe left, Connie worked her way through what she had learned from him. She was certain the mob had murdered Rick. She had known him for ten years, and suicide just didn’t fit. Besides, he was so able to delude himself that he had probably been sure in his own mind that he had the whole situation under control.

  She was shaken by the mob’s evident willingness to write Rick off at this point; it didn’t add up, to her way of thinking. They had obviously taken Belk, so they presumably had his copy of the DVD, disarming her threat. The fact that she was still alive had to mean they believed her lie that there were others like Belk. If they believed she was still a threat, they would probably be calling her, now that Rick was out of the loop. The police had found her easily enough, so the mob couldn’t be too far behind. This thought, coupled with Rick’s death, was making her anxious, but before panic took hold, the woman from the City Attorney’s office showed up.

  "You look much better than the last time I saw you," she said, brightly. She introduced the woman with her, explaining that she was a notary public and was there to notarize the release documents Connie had agreed to sign.

  She reviewed the documents with Connie, ensuring that she understood them. Connie asked when she could expect to receive the money, and to her surprise, the woman said she had a cashier’s check in her briefcase, and that as soon as the documents were signed, she was authorized to turn the check over to Connie.

  Connie said, "I need a favor, if you can help me. You’re the only lawyer that I know in Miami Beach."

  "How can I help?" the woman asked, obviously on her guard. "Clearly, I represent the City."

  "Well, I need legal advice on a completely unrelated matter. My business partner in Savannah committed suicide yesterday and the police are beginning to ask me questions. I want counsel concerning some of the business issues he was involved in. The police mentioned that he might have been laundering money for the mob," Connie extemporized.

  "Wow! Some vacation you're having. Sorry to hear about your partner. I do have a law school classmate in private practice here in South Beach. She's good at defending white-collar criminal cases. We see a lot of those down here. Want me to call her for you?"

  Connie gratefully accepted her offer. The woman was free after lunch, and made an appointment to come to see Connie at 1 p.m.

  Jimmy had retrieved Dopey’s message from the answering machine at Ski Cat’s safe house. Dopey had sounded agitated, saying, "I gotta talk to you real bad, Ski Cat." Dopey left a pager number on the machine. Jimmy noticed that the call had come in only a few minutes ago. He left in a hurry, stopping at the nearest fast food place. He called Dopey’s pager from the pay phone there, and, when he got the pager message, Jimmy punched in the number of the pay phone, figuring Dopey would call right back. He kept the receiver to his ear and pretended to carry on a conversation while surreptitiously holding down the switch hook, waiting for the callback. Jimmy felt strangely exposed, standing at the pay phone having an imaginary conversation. His anxiety was put to rest as the phone rang.

  He released the switch hook, and said, "What do you want with Ski Cat?"

  Dopey was puzzled; he had expected Ski Cat to answer. This guy was white, too, from the sound of his voice. Dopey wondered if he was a cop. His mind racing, Dopey blurted, "Who this is? Where Ski Cat?" surprising himself with the panic in his voice.

  "Ski Cat’s busy. Tony asked me to handle his calls," Jimmy replied, giving away just enough so that maybe Dopey would keep talking with him, if this really was Dopey.

  "Tony dead. He ain’t ask you nothin’. Who this?

  "Tony’s boss. Who you?"

  "This Dopey, who you?"

  "My name don’t matter, Dopey. I’m Tony’s boss. I know Ski Cat worked for Tony, and I know Ski Cat left you in Miami Beach to watch that lady in the hospital. You got a credit card Ski Cat gave you that Fat Tony pays for. Got your pager number off Ski Cat’s emergency answering machine. Now talk to me, dammit."

  "Okay, man. I believe you. Tony piss off a bad dude last night. Dude shoot him dead, just like that. Lady in the hospital, she talkin’ to a policeman, name Sergeant Denardo. You tell Ski Cat it ain’t none of it my fault. He goin' to skin me, he think I got Tony shot."

&nb
sp; "Dopey, who shot Tony?"

  "Don’t know. Bad dude. He in my car when I get Tony at the airport. He shot Tony. I run."

  "Remember my voice, Dopey. I’ll be callin’ you again," Jimmy said as he hung up the phone.

  "Okay. Where Ski Cat?" Dopey hung up the phone when he realized the other guy was gone.

  "Shit," Sam muttered. "Whole thing turned to shit."

  He and Jimmy were in the shack across from the shrimp dock.

  "I think one of the broad's bunch shot Tony," Jimmy said.

  "That's nuts. Tony never even got in touch with her."

  "But nothing else makes any sense, Sam."

  "Barrera’s people must have been following Dopey in order to have been waiting for them at Dopey’s rental car. It didn’t make sense for them to shoot Tony before they found out why he was there. Why did they let Dopey go?" Sam wondered. "She must have a bunch of crack heads working for her, pulling senseless shit like that. If they're that crazy, it don’t add up that they let Dopey hang around watching her all that time -- or let him get away after they shot Tony."

  "Also, she's talking to the cops. That damned Leatherby put the cops onto her. We should have killed him sooner," Jimmy mused.

  "Okay, we've definitely got to find a way to make peace with this woman. She's in a different league than Leatherby. We've seriously underestimated her, and with Ski Cat and Tony both dead, we don’t really have anybody else we can trust to deal with this. Dopey's not capable of doing anything but watching her and it looks like she's made him anyway. With the blame for the hit and run pinned on Leatherby, she should be able to shake off the police pretty easily, as savvy as she seems to be. She's a major threat to the money-laundering operation, and I believe what she said about other copies of the video in the hands of more people like Belk. We can't touch her right now. She already knows you're in this, Jimmy, so you call her up and set up a payoff," Sam ordered, reluctantly.

  Willie was steamed now. He had just caught the end of a news flash about Rick Leatherby's death. He figured it was a conspiracy for sure. They knew he had the video and they were going to screw him out of the money. He wondered for the millionth time who "They" were and why "They" had decided to pick on him. He had never done anything to hurt anybody -- well, not much, anyway. But "They" had always had it in for him. Even when he was a little kid, "They" had always set him up, but never like this.

  He couldn’t believe it. He had no sooner gotten the DVD in his hands and figured out how to make a little money out of it than "They" were on him like a duck on a June bug. "They" let him run for a little while, like a fish taking the bait. Then, when he could almost count the money, "They" tightened down on the line and stopped him. "They" made the drunk lawyer disappear, so Willie couldn’t put the squeeze on him, but Willie found a way around that and called the doctor. Willie wondered if he had momentarily outsmarted them on that one.

  Maybe "They" had set that up, too, just to let Willie run and tire him out. Willie wasn’t sure, at this point. At the time, he had sure felt like he had control of the situation. In hindsight, though, "They" could have been playing with him all along. Maybe "They" had just noticed that he was about to get around the problem of Belk’s disappearance and all "They" could think of to do was snuff the doctor to keep Willie from winning. Well, "They" couldn’t count him out yet. No, sir. Willie still had the DVD.

  The people behind the money-laundering would still want that video. Willie just had to figure out who they were, the money-laundering people. That was a little harder than finding Belk or finding the doctor. He could see a pattern here. He had obviously moved faster than they had expected. He almost got ahead of them and got the prize, so it made sense that this next test would be a little harder yet. It would have been harder anyway, but he had come so close last time that it probably pissed them off, so they made this one extra hard, out of spite.

  Well, that was all right with Willie. They kept underestimating him. Everybody always did. They confused being lazy with being stupid. It was not the same at all. Willie knew he was lazy, but he was a genius. He just hadn’t found anything that was enough of a challenge to make him shake off his laziness. He wasn’t confused, though. This wasn’t a big enough challenge to get him all lathered up; he wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. He could win this one and show them up without even trying, whoever they were. That way, just in case something went wrong and he didn’t win, he wouldn’t be out anything. Sort of like that old proverb, "Nothing ventured, nothing lost," or whatever it was Benjamin Franklin said when he invented lightning. Yes, sir, Willie would show them. He would win this one without half trying, he thought, as he thumbed through the Yellow Pages, looking under "Laundry."

  Day 14, Evening

  As he waited on the evening flight from Miami to Atlanta, Joe was thinking he was lucky he didn’t have to travel often. He looked around at the businessmen waiting on the flight with him and realized they did this frequently, maybe every day, some of them. They would put in a full day doing whatever they did for a living, then go to the airport, grab a hot dog and a soda, get on a plane, fly for a few hours, check into a hotel after most people had gone to bed, get up in the morning, and do it again. He was still tired from the flight to Miami last night, and he wouldn’t get to his apartment until after midnight tonight even if his connection in Atlanta was on time. At least he didn’t have to do it again tomorrow, like some of these folks. As Joe counted his blessings, he came to the break in the case.

  After talking with Connie’s lawyer and securing an agreement from the County Solicitor in Savannah not to prosecute Connie for her attempts at blackmail, Joe had spent a fruitful hour and a half with Connie and her lawyer. Her story about the hit and run rang true and it was consistent with the meager evidence they had. Her fingerprints had been found all over the passenger side of the S600, but not on the driver’s side, where Leatherby’s had been the only ones. One of Joe’s guys had questioned the bartender at the Port Royal Saloon who had been working the night of the accident. The guy identified Connie from her driver’s license photo, and said he remembered her because her suggestive dancing with a couple of customers had been almost like a floorshow. He also remembered her quarreling loudly with her drunken date about who should drive as they left shortly after 1 a.m. He identified her date as Rick Leatherby, again from a driver’s license photo.

  Connie had told Joe of her suspicion about Jimmy’s part in the money-laundering scheme and copied the relevant files from her laptop onto a DVD for Joe, as well. She made it clear that she didn’t believe Rick had committed suicide.

  "He was too good at fooling himself to ever realize he was in trouble," she had elaborated. "He would have thought he was in control of the situation, so he wouldn’t have had any reason to kill himself."

  She had laughed at Joe’s suggestion that Rick could have been driven to suicide by guilt. She was convinced that Rick’s investors had decided he was a liability and killed him. Joe thought this was possible, but he had offered no comment. Connie had been unable to identify the investors, but she thought Jimmy probably worked for them, given that he had held the same job in the operation’s previous incarnation. Connie had agreed to call Joe if she thought of anything else, and to be available through her lawyer if he needed anything further.

  The accuracy of her perceptions was borne out when Joe had checked in with Charlie after his meeting with Connie. He had told Charlie about Connie’s information and Charlie had given him the latest on Leatherby’s death.

  "The medical examiner determined from the angle of the rope marks on the neck that he was choked from behind, probably by a shorter person, before he was hung. Used the same cord they used to fake the hanging." Charlie explained. "He had most likely been choked to the point of unconsciousness, but he died from the hanging. Also, the lab found a complete set of right hand fingerprints on the note. They aren't Leatherby's, so we may have the killer if we get a match."

  After another dinner of t
asteless but no doubt nutritious hospital food, Connie had been drowsy when her phone rang. The insistent chirping brought her back from an aimless walk down an imaginary white sand beach, where she had been watching the gulls soar over clear, blue water.

  "Yes?" she said into the receiver, rapidly working her way through a mental list of possible callers.

  "Ms. Barrera," intoned an eerily familiar voice, "I represent the investors in Chromatic Nutrition."

  Connie demanded a name as she frantically tried to place the voice.

  "Oh, my name’s not important. Let’s just agree that there’s no need for any more violence. The investors are willing to treat your recent action as balancing the books, if you get my meaning. We don’t want to go into detail on an open line, but since Dr. Leatherby and Tony Cicero are both out of the picture, we wanted to speak directly with you, to see if we could go forward based on your original offer."

  "I’m not sure what you mean," Connie demurred, her blood running cold.

  "It’s okay, Ms. Barrera," the voice said in a smooth but somehow menacing tone, "We got your message about Tony, and we think we need to settle our differences. It surprised us that you found Tony, um, objectionable, before you even met with him. You’ve clearly had our other guy in view for a while, so we don’t understand your violent reaction to Tony. Then you let the other guy go. We don’t get it, that’s all. It’s obviously your call, though. We just want you to know we’re prepared to keep doing business with you on the same terms you set out before."