by Nancy Grace
“These are our friends Ken and Suz,” Dottie said, and Virginia shook the newcomers’ hands and thanked them for coming.
Then Renee, who had exchanged her hiking shorts for jeans, held out a plate of…something…
“What are these?” Virginia asked politely, peering at a dozen or so shapeless blobs on a ceramic plate.
“Mock deviled eggs,” Renee said. “Dottie made them herself!”
“I hope you like them. They’re my specialty.” Dottie smiled proudly.
“Oh, my…thanks! Come on in and have a seat.”
The future guerrillas trooped over the threshold. Obviously afraid to plop themselves down next to the eight angry bits of fur, they stood, imperceptibly edging toward the kitchen and away from the wieners.
“Seriously,” Virginia said, setting the mock-deviled-egg thingies on the counter beside the chips and dip, “don’t mind the dogs, they never bite.”
Virginia tossed ingredients into the blender as Suz looked cautiously around the den.
“Have you been here long?”
“You mean on St. Simons? All my life,” Virginia said, just before turning the blender on high speed, a Salem Light pressed between her lips.
Not only that, but she hadn’t even left the Island once in over twelve years.
It just wasn’t worth it.
She was sure that the moment she turned her back, the Commission would call a closed-door “emergency” meeting and suddenly a mini-mart would wind up perched on the dunes off her own back deck.
Virginia turned off the blender and wielded the foamy green slush over a waiting tray of glasses. “Allrighty…who wants one?”
“What are they?” Dottie—of the mock deviled eggs—asked warily.
“My specialty. I call them hairy margaritas.” She poured five without waiting for orders, and handed them around.
“Let’s sit, shall we?”
Only when Virginia rolled over the liquor cart and the dogs drifted off to sleep did the future guerrillas relax a tiny bit and move in the direction of the sofas.
“So, Ken”—she targeted him first, sensing that he, like Sidney, was the leader of the pack—“what do you do?”
“I’m in computers.”
“Really? Software, programming?”
“Radio Shack.”
“Ah.” She nodded, sipped, and listened politely as Ken demonstrated a deep knowledge of all things tech-related.
Then she learned Dottie was a biology teacher, Renee a Wal-Mart cashier, and Suz a waitress at the Shrimp Boat. All were relative newcomers to the Island. Perfect.
The conversation flowed and a general good mood slowly seeped over the future eco-guerrillas, punctured by an occasional sharp bark emitted by a wiener obviously embroiled in a doggie nightmare.
“And what do you do, Virginia?” Ken asked.
Deflecting the question about the present, she instead addressed the past. “Well, I used to be the Chief County Commissioner.”
“Really?”
She filled them in on the goofy-golf debacle, then launched into her crowning glory.
“It happened before the last vote on constructing a major bridge connecting the Island to the mainland,” Virginia informed the rapt audience, as they munched chips and dips and mock deviled eggs, and sipped the all-important drinks.
“What happened?”
Virginia smiled, reeling them in. “Well, the afternoon of the bridge vote, I called Chairman McKissick’s office and talked to his assistant, Sean.”
Sean was a nineteen-year-old, a five-foot-nine-inch looker, a Glynn County High School grad who’d done a year at Glynn Junior College. She would soon be one in a long line of secretaries who had walked off the job after one too many booty gooses from Chairman McKissick.
Virginia still remembered when Sean answered the phone, “Chairman McKissick’s office, here to serve the people of the Golden Isles. The Chairman’s office is always open to his constituents. May we help you?”
“Does he make you go through that spiel every single time you answer the phone?” she had asked Sean. “I bet he made that up, didn’t he?”
No answer from Sean. She didn’t understand the question.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind. Just put McKissick on the line. Tell him it’s Virginia Gunn.”
After several minutes on hold with the local easy-listening station being broadcast today from Raymond Smith’s Toyota on Glynn Boulevard, Sean came back on the line, clearly uncomfortable with lying, but maintaining all the professionalism her nineteen years could muster. “The Chairman is in a meeting. May I take a message?”
“Why do you insist on calling him ‘the Chairman’ every single time?” Virginia had asked. “Did he tell you to do that? You know what? Never mind. I know he did. That pompous ass. Just give him a message. Tell him I’m calling from over in room one-fourteen of the Jekyll Island Days Inn with a very important message for him and his wife. I’ll hold.”
No need to hold. Thirty minutes later, they met in person. Virginia recounted the tale for her guests. Toby parking surreptitiously outside one of the Island’s only restaurants. The Oyster Box. She walked over to his car and got in.
“Okay, Virginia, what is it this time?” he demanded. “Worried about the sea turtles again? Get over it, Virginia, the Island’s changing. You can’t stop progress. Haven’t you ever heard that? Move on with your life. Have you ever thought of actually getting a real job? And what’s the deal with the Days Inn, was that supposed to mean something to me?”
Virginia said nothing, just relaxed back in the leather seats and studied McKissick’s smooth pink face up close.
She couldn’t believe she was noticing only then for the first time, after having known the man for twelve years, that he was the only person she had ever come across who had both a toupee and dandruff. Her powers of perception were diminishing.
“Then what happened?” Dottie prodded, and Virginia realized she was stalling the story with details.
“Then I pushed the tape into the tape deck”—she got to the good part—“and when that tape started to roll, McKissick nearly wet his pants right there on the seat of his Lexus! Of course, it’s leased. He tried to eject it, but you know what I did?”
They shook their heads, rapt. No, they didn’t know. But they wanted to.
“I pushed it right back in and turned up the volume. A truck pulled right beside us, so he couldn’t very well smack me. Ha!”
Yes, both Virginia and her archenemy Toby McKissick had been well aware that a physical confrontation in the parking lot of the Oyster Box would be all over the Island by four thirty the same afternoon.
“He was over a barrel,” Virginia told her guests.
“What was on the tape?” Renee persisted, and Virginia told them, explaining how she got her cleaning lady of eighteen years, Marta, to get the tape from McKissick’s cleaning lady, Luisa. The audio quality was pretty good, under the circumstances, and any moron could make out Luisa and her boss, Chairman McKissick, on the phone planning a tryst at the Jekyll Island Days Inn twenty miles away and across the bridge.
“That first tape alone would have gone a long way to saving the ecosystem,” she told her guests as she poured more tequila into the blender. “It was the second tape, though, that did the trick. It was made the same day from a recorder strategically placed under the bed in room one-fourteen, their regular.”
Everyone shook their heads, completely grossed out.
“The things on that tape should never be heard by anyone,” Virginia declared, “much less his wife. So McKissick had to listen to the entire tape trapped inside his Lexus while I laughed like crazy.”
Virginia flipped the blender on “High.”
“Then came the Commission meeting that night. I sat on the back row of the Glynn County Middle School auditorium and listened to McKissick go on and on about the old bridge.”
And he did it with feeling. “It’s not just a br
idge, people. It’s not just a road. It stands as a tribute to this Island’s great history, a historic piece of art, in fact. I say ‘no.’ ‘No’ to those who would destroy that monument that represents the spirit of the Island…our Island. Who of you will join with me and take up this cause? Who will be brave? Join hands with me, my fellow commissioners! Let us fight this destruction together. Save the old bridge!”
McKissick’s forehead glistened under the auditorium’s bright overhead lights, usually reserved for night basketball games.
It was clear to a blind man that McKissick was now desperate to stop the new bridge. He could have passed for a fervent evangelical preacher straight from the heart of the snake-handling, tongue-speaking bunch.
The other commissioners looked dazed and confused. Did he literally want them to stand and join hands? they wondered. Or was it figurative?
“You should have seen it,” she said, laughing through her Salem Light, still pursed between her lips while she talked. The blender had stopped.
“All those middle-aged guys visibly recoiling at hand-holding in the auditorium. They were like little lost sheep, asked to improvise their votes right there on the spot. They didn’t dare speak out and make it part of the official record.”
So in the end, she recalled, when McKissick called for the vote and raised his own hand, displaying the very sweaty armpit of his white Brooks Brothers, the others—after searching McKissick’s face for any nonverbal sign to tell them what the hell they were supposed to do—followed suit.
Virginia went around refilling every glass. “That brand-new, beautiful, and magnificent four-laner was voted down unanimously. Not one person in the room expected them to do that—not even themselves. It wasn’t at all what they’d agreed to ahead of time at the Catfish Cove in Brunswick. And progress stopped cold right there in the Glynn County Middle School auditorium.”
They all nodded.
The old two-lane with a single toll keeper still stood between St. Simons and Savannah on the mainland. There would be no convenient four-laner inviting in tourists by the vanload clocking sixty mph. Not on this island.
Not if Virginia Gunn had anything to do with it.
18
Atlanta, Georgia
EIGHT THIRTY SHARP, MATT LEONARD WALKED BRISKLY INTO THE darkened bar at Atlanta’s Piedmont Driving Club.
He immediately spotted Sims Regard, sitting on a burgundy leather barstool. Regard, the first lieutenant for Floyd Moye Eugene, hadn’t yet spotted him. Leonard paused—only for a split second—to steel himself.
Had an acquaintance been watching, they might have noted that Maltin’s move was utterly out of character. As the name partner in the criminal defense law firm known simply as “the Leonard Firm”—and, coincidentally, the baby brother to the chairman of the powerful Senate Revenue Apportionments Committee—Matt Leonard was one of the most sought-after criminal defense lawyers in the South.
This deal, however, was in the big leagues.
He’d never had anything to do with Eugene—in fact he had studiously avoided him over the years.
The two of them were about to reverse a trend that had lasted for decades, and its effects would reverberate all the way down the state to the tip of the Georgia Coast.
Regard spotted him. “Matt.”
“Sims.”
They shook hands.
Leonard ordered a scotch, then got right down to business, speaking in a low voice though the bar was nearly empty.
“Look, I get it. It’s up on appeal now and it looks pretty grim for the defense. How can Carter deliver? He’s just one out of nine. Plus, this calls for an outright reversal, with prejudice, so Cruise walks and the State can’t re-try him.”
Regard took a pull off his drink before speaking. “Simple rotation. Carter was assigned to write the opinion months ago. That little snot of a law clerk told us right over the phone about the assignment. Otherwise, we’d have targeted one of the other judges.”
Leonard nodded.
“It’ll go down like this,” Regard went on. “The four knee-jerk liberals on the bench dissent on principle to every death penalty that’s put before them. They’ll join the new majority. All we needed was the one swing vote. It’s simple. The vote will now be five to four for reversal instead of five to four to affirm the conviction. The four weak sisters on the bench are always looking for a way to reverse a death case. They don’t care if he walks. Both the guilty verdict and the death penalty sentence will be reversed on appeal. It’s up to Carter to find a reason.”
There was a long pause and neither spoke.
“You understand, right, Leonard? Carter’s a piece of cake, he’s already on board. What about your end?”
Leonard was slow to speak, twisting his ring, running his fingertips nervously over the three rubies in the family crest before answering. “My contact says the Committee meets to change the wording in the Georgia code tomorrow morning, seven o’clock. No press will show because the time and date were changed for the meeting, and notice won’t be published in the main foyer until eight a.m., as usual…an hour later. Topic’s not identified, it’s listed under ‘supplemental.’ The Committee vote will be over before notice is even posted.”
Leonard downed a gulp of the scotch placed in front of him and waited for the bartender to fade away before going on. “Two of five on the Committee are still back home, but three are still in Atlanta, and that gives us a quorum. They’re with us on this. They’re investors in the high-rise, which helps. The code change comes out of Committee and goes straight to the full Assembly by noon. It’s tacked on to a big insurance bill that everybody wants…you know, voter pressure. The insurance bill is set to pass by eighty-eight percent at two tomorrow afternoon. That’s eighty-eight percent already locked in. Could be even more by the time it’s done.”
He paused and took another sip.
“It’s a blip on the screen. It’ll mean nothing to anybody voting on the insurance bill.” Leonard looked over each of his shoulders before finishing. “Even if they bother to read it, which they won’t, even then, they won’t get what it means. The wording just re-defines ‘tree’ as any growth two feet or over, not twenty. By summer, condos will be less than a football field from the first sea oat on the beach…directly on the sand, get it? Asking price twelve million apiece.”
Buried deep in Georgia law, Leonard found the old Georgia code reading that no structure could be erected within fifty yards of the first tree closest to beach and marsh. The word “tree” was defined as any natural, living plant growth twenty feet or over.
Naturally, the old regulation destroyed any possibility of ocean or marsh-front condos and high-rises. Nothing but grass or sea oats grew anywhere near the crystal-white sand, and certainly none topping twenty feet.
The two men wordlessly clinked their glasses.
This was good, Matt thought. It was damned good. The Cruise reversal was the only way his firm would ever get their state and federal funding back. They needed the money, desperately.
Environmentalists just assumed the beaches were protected. Every time developers tried to plant a resort, golf course, or even a simple mini-mart on St. Simons Island, the granolas went berserk. The Island remained pure while the rest of the Georgia and Florida coasts were littered with motels, snake farms, even paper mills pumping tons of smelly goo into the air and ocean.
Not so on pristine St. Simons.
But for nearly fifteen years now, Floyd Moye Eugene had slowly and surreptitiously bought up huge sweeps of Island beach. He had never used his own name—that would have been too obvious—but rather the names of a dozen fake shell corporations that had no function whatsoever created specifically for this purpose, and a few in his wife’s name. Next to an environmental trust, he now reigned as the single largest private landowner on the Island.
But the land could never be developed…until now.
Matt Leonard downed the rest of his drink.
“Listen,” he t
old Sims, after sipping from his glass, “Carter’s got to come through on the damned reversal.”
“He will.”
“The firm needs it. Cruise’s was the first Penalty case we’ve ever lost, and the hit was big. We lost all our federal funding on the Death Penalty Project…a couple of million…and we’ve seen a complete drain of death cases since the conviction. Plus, it made us look bad…made me look bad.”
“I know, I know…don’t worry.”
Just thinking about it now, two years later, Leonard’s face burned at the memory. It was the worst beating he’d ever taken in a public courtroom. Hailey Dean had gotten his client so worked up after she’d cross-examined the defense’s chief alibi witness Cruise refused to take the stand.
No, instead, what did he do? Cruise wolfed down his evening sedative right there in the courtroom. The little shit had saved it in a sweat sock.
Leonard shook his head, stuck in the dark memory.
That was the first year in fifteen that a Leonard Brother didn’t rule the state as president of the Georgia Bar Association. Referrals dried up, and his own client denounced him openly at sentencing. He’d shared headlines with Hailey Dean for seven weeks while the case was tried. They always painted her the hero and him the shit. Halfway through her closing argument, two jurors started crying into napkins, and the rest acted disgusted every time he tried to break her rhythm by objecting. The press loved it.
Regard snapped him out of it. “I’d love another drink, Matt, but I’ve got business across town.”
Before he could speak, Regard slid off his barstool, walked out of the bar, and disappeared into the night.
Matt Leonard sat still, alone, second drink melting down.
All he could think was Dean. Hailey Dean.
19
New York City
THE PHONE WAS RINGING JUST AS HAILEY STEPPED INTO HER apartment. She dropped her bags inside the door and made a run for it.
It was probably Dana, trying to change her mind to come back downtown. She was headed for a new club when Hailey left her, whining about having to go alone.