Ricki felt like that ended the conversation in her victory, and Riley sulked in her seat for the rest of the journey. This pleased Ricki in as much as she would have peace and quiet for a few minutes before applying her mind to gathering clues. It was most likely of course that Cavanaugh knew nothing about the jewel at all, but it was, for now, the only card she had in play.
The simple matter of even getting to Cavanaugh’s house proved difficult, however. The entire end of the street where he lived was cordoned off with yellow police tape, and numerous police officers milled around as forensic investigators gleamed in the morning sun, no doubt with rivers of sweat under their bright white disposable paper coveralls. Roberta’s boyfriend, Terry, stood with one hand on his nightstick and the other on the butt of his pistol talking to a disheveled man in a suit.
“Hey Ricki, that’s Cavanaugh’s son!” Riley exclaimed. “I wonder what’s going on.”
It seemed at least to Ricki that the drama unfolding before them had buried her sister’s grievance with her for now. Ricki had seen this set up before—and judging from the distraught man Riley had named as the son of her lead, she had the next potential clue in her mind. Joe Cavanaugh was surely dead. She pulled her Toyota up to the curb close to Terry, immaculate as always in his deep blue uniform. Handsome, twenty-five years old and with a short crop of ginger hair, Terry Valance was every inch the fine image of a police officer. His partner, a portly sergeant by the name of Dobbs was everything that was to be despised. Whereas, from Ricki’s experience, Terry had always treated Roberta with respect as her boyfriend and fastidiously ignored the barbs about her mixed heritage, Dobbs was a racist pig who Ricki had heard was surprisingly easy to bribe into busting people on trumped up charges. Ricki also knew that Terry knew this, but was powerless as Dobbs was his sergeant. Dobbs sat casually on the hood of his police cruiser, paying no attention to the crime scene but eyeing Riley with a leer.
Terry saw the Vaughan sisters pull up, and excused himself from his conversation with Cavanaugh Junior, with a gentle hand on his shoulder. Joseph’s son nodded sadly, and waited, staring into space a few feet behind Terry as he turned to speak to Ricki and Riley as they got out of the Toyota.
“Morning ladies. I’m afraid I can’t let you through here,” he gestured to the yellow tape, “not even for Roberta’s sisters. Nasty business.”
His deep-voiced Georgia accent was warm, yet his tone showed that he would take no argument on the subject.
“What’s going on, Terry? Is Mr. Cavanaugh OK?” Riley said, clearly not having made the same conclusions as her elder sister had.
“Depends which one,” Terry replied casually. “Joe Cavanaugh Junior is, as you see, alive but upset. Joseph Cavanaugh Senior has sadly passed on sometime this morning.”
Junior looked briefly up at Riley and Ricki at the mention of his name, and a flash of recognition came across him as he saw the younger sister he had encountered previously.
“Come on, Terry,” Ricki chided, “there’s no crime scene investigation for an old man who dies in his sleep. What did he die from?”
Terry rolled his eyes.
“Let me guess, you girls were here to speak to him? OK, keep it to yourself; this isn’t public knowledge as yet, and it won’t be until the coroner’s report. Seems Mr. Cavanaugh strangled himself with a leather belt. His son says he was heartsick for some old flame of his over on the other side of town. She wanted nothing to do with him and he took his own life. Strange, really, that an old guy like that would go out in that way, you know? You’d figure that was more of a young fool’s game. Anyway, I gotta get back to it. Say hi to Roberta for me, would you? I’ve not seen her in a week. Stay safe, ladies.”
Terry turned, and ducked under the yellow tape, collecting Sergeant Dobbs on the way. The sergeant gave one last lascivious look at Riley, who at twenty was at least half his age, and followed his young partner. Bile rose in Ricki’s stomach, but Riley didn’t seem to notice. Just as well that Ricki was always on the ball to look out for her younger siblings, even if they barely ever appreciated it.
“What do you make of it?” Riley said.
Ricki turned to her sister, now eying Cavanaugh Junior over her shoulder. He seemed to be within earshot, but was now sitting on the porch of one of the neighboring houses staring at his shoes.
“Awfully coincidental, that’s what I think. I’m not going to say I don’t believe in coincidences; they happen all the time of course. It does strike me as strange however that Mrs. Frome reports the Rock of Rhodesia missing, fingers Mr. Cavanaugh—the dead one, I mean—and then he decides to end it all. Terry was right; strangling himself doesn’t tally with the age of the man. The elderly usually go for the length of hose attached to the car exhaust or pills.”
Riley shook her head.
“Well, he couldn’t have done it with the car; we already impounded it. And I don’t think he’s got much money for enough painkillers to off himself that way. A belt might just have been the cheapest and most convenient way to go, really.”
Ricki scanned up and down the street. Apart from the police cruisers and her own Toyota, the only other car on the road was a green Volkswagen Golf, a new model at that and quite an unexpected sight in these impoverished areas of Savannah. Riley’s theory held water. It was logical and seemed like the obvious one, but Occam’s Razor was not infallible in and of itself.
“OK, here’s what we’re going to do. You stick around here, steer clear of that jerk Dobbs and ask around with the neighbors, get some background on these people. See if the cops will let anything else slip, got it?” Ricki opened the door to her Toyota.
“Hey, where are you going? What am I going to do about getting a ride back?”
Riley didn’t seem thrilled at the prospect of hanging round this area all day.
“I’m going to see Mrs. Frome, see if she really has lost this necklace. If she has, and it’s not some kind of scam, then that will give us some kind of lead.”
Ricki started her car.
“A lead to what?” Riley had to shout over the thrum of Ricki’s engine. Ricki had to respond in kind.
“If the jewel is gone, and Cavanaugh is dead, and Cavanaugh had the jewel, I think it’s pretty likely that someone murdered him for it!”
Ricki reversed up the street, leaving Riley, the crime scene, the green Volkswagen, the police and the still living Mr. Cavanaugh behind. She had to see the prejudiced old Mrs. Frome alone, and it was not a meeting that she anticipated would go in the slightest bit smoothly. It just hadn’t been one of those weeks.
Chapter Eight
Riley
Riley watched her sister speed away over near molten roads.
Could she be right? She looked over to where Terry was now standing, twenty meters beyond the yellow taped police cordon. Surely she should tell him right away what Ricki had come up with. No, Ricki was their leader. She knew what she was doing, and if she had really thought that Joseph Cavanaugh had been murdered, then surely she would have been the first to flag it up to the authorities. In any case, it was just a hunch. Most likely there was no connection at all between the missing diamond and this strange death. Riley decided that until Ricki came up with something concrete, it would be best to leave the cops out of it.
Cavanaugh Junior was opening the door of the green Volkswagen. He saw Riley looking at him and he gave her a grim smile and smoothed his thinning hair back into place. He had clearly ruffled it in his grief and upon seeing his own reflection took measures to return the stray strands to a suitable position. Some of the wisps disobeyed. Cavanaugh frowned at them, and then realized Riley was still looking at him, and gave another wan, unconvincing smile that held no warmth. Riley saw the tension in his drawn jowls; clearly the grief of his father’s death was sitting ill with him. Cavanaugh had the bearing of a man who had lost too much weight too quickly and not through a good diet and hours at the gym. His eyes moved languidly, too slowly. The genial, overly polite man that Riley
and Roberta had encountered the week before seemed buried within his pallid flesh, where the cheerful smile once offered her lemonade now was drawn a razor thin line. Misery? Or something else? He drove away, taking the same left turn that Ricki had made not two minutes previously, toward the main roads that led across town.
“I guess the cops are done with him, too,” Riley said to no one in particular. She frowned at the disappearing Volkswagen. Something was strange about that man, like he didn’t fit with Savannah, that either he was somehow not a citizen here, or that the town was not a part of him. That was not strange in and of itself; there were plenty of oddballs, dunks, soothsayers, weirdoes, hookers and heroes in Georgia. It was probably cognitive bias, Riley told herself. The word murder had been thrown into the ether by her sister, and now it buzzed in Riley’s mind like a hornet, driving her thoughts to suspicion. Damn it, it wasn’t like she didn’t have enough on her plate, just by being here, she was wasting time and money by not hunting down cars. Why did she always end up doing as Ricki said, anyway? Ricki was right; she wasn’t as good at leading as their father had been, and to Riley’s mind he never would be. Riley kicked an empty can listlessly, sending it skittering into the gutter.
There were more people on the street now, venturing out from their houses to gossip and goose neck at the police operation at the Cavanaugh house. Riley remembered Ricki’s instructions, and grudgingly agreed in her mind that interacting with the neighbors was a decent starting point to further the case. There was a group of young mothers with attendant flocks of children. The mixed bag of boys and girls aged between three and nine years old were running riot in their local vicinity. They chased each other, occasionally overstepping the patience lines of their parents and being suddenly frozen on the spot under a powerful, irresistible spotlight glare. Riley decided that she would rather perform the autopsy on Cavanaugh herself than attempt to extract information from these mothers. Across the street two men sat drinking on a porch. Whilst drinkers were freer with their words, in Riley’s experience the effects of alcohol on the ability of people to make use and relay the results of their observation skills rendered them useless in most cases. Standing alone and smoking a cigarette was an improbably thin, nervous looking white woman. Dressed in a vest that had once possibly been a vibrant sunburst yellow and orange pattern with cut off denim shorts, evident years of hard smoking and possible dabbling in harder substances had left what could have been a person in her late thirties looking twenty years older. Her heart shaped sunglasses perched uneasily on an over long nose and prematurely lined lips that were stained an over bright shade of crimson. The getup complemented a dyed blonde, permed hairstyle only in so much that the combination of the two distracted from the ravaged frame that bore them. Perfect, Riley thought. She crossed the street, feeling the eyes of Sergeant Dobbs tracking her and resisting the sudden urge to flip him the bird.
“Hi, I’m Riley,” she said once she had come face to face with the woman. The woman had noticed her approach once Riley had crossed the median line of the distance between them, and looked at her now with wariness feigning as indifference.
“Cheryl,” the woman said flatly. She did not take Riley’s proffered hand, and did not return her smile. Riley had not expected anything else, so was not offended.
“Any idea about what’s going on here? I’m waiting for a ride to get home, but they’re late. Mind if I hang out with you? I don’t know many folk round here.”
Cheryl’s eyes, barely visible through the tinted plastic of her cheap sunglasses, softened a little.
“Honey, you’ll learn after a few years in the business that if you’re doing home calls, the john always pays for your taxi home, you got it? Pimps who drive around all day picking up their girls from places like this should be spending their time getting more clients instead of making sure your money is coming in.”
Riley didn’t intend to give Cheryl the impression that she was a prostitute, but if it formed some kinship between them, it would be counter-intuitive to set her straight. Riley tried to look appreciative.
“Thanks for the advice. I haven’t been doing this long. It’s just until I get back on my feet, y’know? Say, what’s going on here? Is it a bust or something?”
Cheryl gave her an expression that said that she’d heard the line about turning tricks temporarily a dozen times before, but took a final drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out underfoot so that she could speak clearly.
“Nah, you never seen cops when there’s a suspicious death? Looks like old man Cavanaugh is dead. I bet one of his loans came back on him big time, poor bastard. Would have thought his son might have helped him out some. Heard he was loaded, or at least he used to be.” Cheryl sassily cocked her head, displaying both her disdain for Cavanaugh the younger and also an impressive stretch of wrinkled skin on her neck.
“So Cavanaugh was broke, right?” Riley thought for a moment. “I don’t see why a loan shark would go for murder over a beating, though. I mean, isn’t that just like using a flamethrower on a hornet nest?”
Cheryl laughed scornfully.
“Girl, you really are green aren’t you? Fresh off the train from the hills or something? Lookit these cops right here. You think they’d have that many cops out for a black guy? Sure, maybe a loanie might not take the risk of offing the old man, but someone sure thought it was worth it. You should know better, y’know, being black and all. These cops don’t care about you, and yeah, I know, I’m white so what do I know. I’ll tell you this though, the only thing more worthless in this town than a white hooker is a black one, especially to guys like that prick, Dobbs.”
Riley turned to follow Cheryl’s jutted jaw. Dobbs was laughing and joking as the body of Cavanaugh passed him by, covered in a sheet on a gurney. The corpse was loaded into the back of a waiting ambulance, and Riley and Cheryl watched it in silence as it drove away. Once the sirens had retreated, Cheryl continued.
“Lookit him; not a care in the world. I didn’t know Cavanaugh that well, but when I go I’d hope I don’t have Dobbs laughing over my body, that’s for damn sure. Cops in this town are criminals, you know. Think about it, you can do whatever you want; no one will ever arrest you because you’re in the gang, and you can kill anyone you want, at any time. I had a pimp once, Johnny Silver he called himself. Way I hear it, he got pulled over for a traffic violation, and he ended up with three bullets in him, from Dobbs’ gun. Alright, sure he was a pimp but he never hurt nobody more than he needed to, and he looked after me alright. But Dobbs knew he could get away with it; no one cries for a dead pimp at City Hall. When the paper told the story, Dobbs said Johnny had pulled a gun on him, and he had to defend himself. Got a commendation for bravery out of it too. Regular folk are all happy that there’s one less pimp on the street, but they don’t see that a good pimp looks out for his girls, and with him gone the real bad guys move in, and the girls suffer.”
Cheryl took another cigarette from a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes and offered one to Riley, who declined. Cheryl lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, exhaling a thick cloud of blue-gray smoke. Riley for her part was enraptured and disturbed by Cheryl’s story. Was Terry, her sister’s boyfriend, complicit in the deaths of people, by virtue of his inaction? Did he know? Surely he must know. He was Dobbs’ partner after all. Was he there when Johnny Silver died? Riley realized that she was getting distracted. She had to stay focused, and control the conversation with Cheryl. She decided to change the subject.
“What do you know about Cavanaugh’s son? He just left,” Riley said, thumbing over her shoulder. “Green vee dub?”
Cheryl looked at her with suspicion now, dipping her head forward to see Riley over the rim of her sunglasses. Riley saw that she had a fading bruise on her left eye, and the whites of both eyes were heavy bloodshot.
“Say, you’ve got an awful lot of questions. You better watch that. Asking too many questions gets you hurt, or dead.”
“Sorry,” Riley said with placa
ting hands. “I just spoke to him, seems like a nice guy, is all.”
“Oh sure, real nice,” Cheryl spat, removing her sunglasses and pointing to her bruised eye. “That schmuck wanted a free ride, and slapped me around when I said no way. Sure, he looks like butter wouldn’t melt, but he’s a miserable swine. He lost his job, had to move back down here and straight off, he was bossing his old man around. I saw them from my window, yelling at each other about money. I mean, come on, old man Cavanaugh was like a thousand years old; where was he going to get money? He was on food stamps like everyone else round these parts. He’s a bum, and a pig, just like Dobbs, if you ask me. Anyway, looks like the show is over. You take care, Riley.”
Cheryl went back through the beaded curtain that hung in her open doorway. The police were packing up, or at least the crime scene investigators were pulling out their equipment from the Cavanaugh house and stripping off their overalls. Dobbs and Terry ducked under the yellow tape, heading for their squad car. Terry waved at Riley, and pointed to his black and white cruiser, indicating that he was offering her a lift. Riley remembered her sister’s words, to take the lift with Terry, but to steer clear of Dobbs. She shook her head at Terry, and turned to walk up the street toward the intersection. Even if she was in no danger with Terry around, she would rather take a cab than spend any time at all with Dobbs. She head Dobbs laugh, and involuntarily felt her pace quicken.
Her thoughts were ablaze with more questions following her chat with poor, beaten, broken down Cheryl. How could anyone experience what she had, and still be alive? Riley was sure that she had heard only the PG-13 version of some of the events from her life. Just like Dobbs, she had said, when talking about Joe Cavanaugh Junior. Did that include murder? Abuse of power? Surely there was no motive for him to kill his own father, especially as he had no estate from which to benefit; but then, how many times had Riley herself wished an untimely death on one of her sisters? She hadn’t done so for years, not since mom and dad had died—the guilt Riley had felt that somehow her childish wishes for divine retribution for perceived harsh crimes committed on her by her family as a child, ranging from scolding for an untidy room or Ricki’s patented hard knuckled dig to the ribs had been almost too much to bear.
The Evil That Men Do Page 5