The Savannah Madam

by Tom Turner

  “What are the choices?” Jackie asked.

  “Well, we got a bunch,” said Mike reaching down under the counter and pulling out a handful of life-size, two- by three-foot likenesses of humans from the waist up.

  He held up the first one: It was the blue outline of a body of a man with numbers on the upper torso. You scored a nine for a center body mass hit, a two for hitting the arm, and so on.

  Ryder shook her head. “I know which one I want,” she said, then to Jackie. “But you make the call.”

  Mike put the one with the blue body down and picked up one that was the same body outline and numbers, but this time in pink.

  Ryder elbowed Bull. “That’s your color, Harry,” she said, remembering when they first met him in the gym.

  Jackie laughed and put up her hand and wobbled it side to side. “Let’s see the next one.”

  He put that one down and picked up one of a cartoon man aiming a pistol straight ahead with both hands.

  “Better,” Jackie said, and the man put it down. He picked a fourth one and held it up to them. It was the cartoon figure of a crazed-looking psychopath: wild hair mashed forward, pupil-less eyes, fangs bared, and hands that looked like those of Edward Scissorhands, except with blood dripping from them.

  “That’s definitely our target,” Jackie said.

  Ryder nodded her approval.

  Jackie was in her lane, holding her Glock with both hands. She had earplugs in her ears and rented Bolle shooting glasses, which she thought made her look the female version of macho.

  Sighting in the paper psycho from fifty feet away, she closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. She didn’t see the target move and wondered if she hit it at all.

  Then from the lane next to her, she heard, blam!blam!blam!blam!blam!blam!—six times in a row in rapid succession— then the loud exclamation, “YEAH!”

  Ryder, of course.

  Jackie raised her gun in both hands, aimed, and pulled the trigger. This time she was careful not to close her eyes. She thought she saw the psycho man flutter and guessed she might have nicked him.

  Once again, from the lane next to her—blam!blam!blam!blam!blam!blam!—then, a triumphant, “ALL RIGHT!”

  Jackie yelled to her sister. “Jesus, do you have to be so loud?”

  Ryder peered around at Jackie. “What? You think you’re in church?”

  Then from her other side came blam!blam!blam!blam!blam!balm!blam!blam! Jackie thought it was even more shots than Ryder had fired. She waited for the sound of triumph, but wasn’t surprised that Bull’s reaction was more muted.

  She took a few steps around the divider and caught Bull’s attention. “Hit anything?”

  “Got him between the eyes.”

  “Attaboy,” Jackie said and went back and lined up her target. Blam!blam!

  Five minutes later Ryder came around to her sister’s lane. “You done yet?” Ryder asked.

  Jackie shook her head. “No, I got like”—she looked at the box—“forty bullets left.”

  “You’re kidding. You call ‘em rounds, by the way,” Ryder said. “Hell, I might as well go see a movie.”

  She walked away. Jackie had an idea how to get rid of her forty rounds faster and went out to the man at the desk. “I’ll take a machine gun, please.”

  “Which one?”

  “Um, the one that shoots the fastest.”

  Jackie was done in two minutes, but her ears were still ringing

  They all brought their targets out to a lounge area and counted up their scores.

  “The final score is, Jackie, eight, Harry, thirty-six, and Ryder”—Harry winced—“forty-three.” He glanced ruefully at Jackie. “Guess we’re buyin’.”

  As they walked out into the parking lot, Ryder turned to Bull. “I guess no one’s ever called you Bulls-eye before… get it?”

  Bull shook his head. “Jesus, gloat much?” Then, turning to Jackie. “Is she always like this when she wins?”

  “Always.”

  Ryder laughed. “Sound like a couple of sore losers to me.”

  33

  Jackie and Ryder headed back to their office, five minutes away.

  Jackie had just dialed her cell as Ryder sat in the passenger seat, reading emails.

  A man answered. “Hi, Jackie, don’t tell me, you want to make an offer now?”

  It was George Jurgens, the real estate agent on Casa Romantica, who she had called earlier.

  “Sorry, not today,” she said. “But I need to pick your brain.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Does Sea Island Bank do a lot of mortgages on Mercer Island?”

  “I’d say about three-quarters of them.”

  She sat up straight. “Really? Why so many?”

  “Two reasons: One, the CFO lives here and is a real hustler. He promotes Sea Island to everyone he ever comes in contact with—from the check-out kid at Publix to the guys in his golf foursome. Two, they have really aggressive rates. Their mortgage rates are a half point lower than the big guys, like Sun Trust, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.”

  “Thanks, that’s very helpful, George,” she said. “One last question: do you know if Robert Bull had anything to do with getting mortgages for people? Before he retired.”

  “Nah. Robert Bull had much bigger fish to fry,” Jurgens said. “Getting mortgages for people was done by employees much lower on the totem pole.”

  Jackie looked at Ryder who seemed to be half paying attention. “Well, thanks, George, that’s very helpful. I owe you one.”

  “Just buy me a drink at the Cabana bar.”

  “You got it,” Jackie said and tapped end.

  Ryder looked up. “Checking that mortgage thing?”

  Jackie nodded. “Yeah, not much there.”

  Ryder nodded and held up her iPhone. “I just got an email from a woman named Victoria.”

  Jackie cocked her head. “And who might she be?”

  “Johnny Redneck’s new madam at Casa Erotica,” Ryder said. “Looks like I made the cut.”

  Jackie shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “You are not going to that place.”

  Ryder shrugged. “What’s the big deal? I’ll just go and have a little look-see. Get the lay of the land.”

  Jackie thrummed her fingers on her desk. “What if Ronnie Wallace is there? What if John Redmond’s there? Those are just two reasons not to go anywhere near that place.”

  “One, John Redmond’s never laid eyes on me before,” said Ryder. “Two, I was wearing my Yankees cap and shades when I took the shots of Teflon Ron. So, no way he’s going to recognize me either. And three, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in a dead stall on this case. We need to do something to shake things up. I go there and—”

  “And what? What are you going to find out to move the case forward?”

  “So glad you asked,” Ryder said. “For one thing, I’ll maybe see if Suggs Brown is there or has anything to do with the place. Figure out what his role is in this whole thing. And for another, to scope the place out in case we ever need to go there.”

  “What if they hire you and want to put you to work right away?” Jackie asked. “You ever thought of that?”

  Ryder shook her head. “Come on. You really think they’d hire me and say, ‘Okay, now go do that fat guy over there?’”

  Jackie suppressed a laugh. “Who knows? They might.”

  Ryder shook her head in disbelief. “How many jobs do you know where they expect you to start work five minutes after they hire you?”

  Jackie shrugged. “Hey, I admit it, I don’t know anything about how the prostitution business works, but I’m pretty damn sure you don’t either.”

  Ryder thought for a second. “I’d just tell ‘em I want to think about it if they hire me. Say I’ll get back to ‘em in a day or so.”

  “And I’m telling you this is not like a normal business where everything is by the book,” Jackie said. “Not like they’re gonna
have five stars from the Better Business Bureau.”

  Ryder glanced out the window, then back to Jackie. “What if I brought my gun?”

  Jackie rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s a swell idea. You’re there to be checked out and you got a big lump on your hip?”

  “Yeah, maybe not.”

  Jackie leaned closer to her sister. “So, can we be done with this conversation?”

  Ryder sighed as Jackie’s cell phone rang.

  It was Harry Bull.

  “Hi, Harry,” Jackie said.

  Ryder walked out of her sister’s office.

  “That was fun,” Bull said. “Except getting my ass kicked by a girl.”

  “Guarantee you, that made her day,” Jackie said.

  “So, I was thinking, how about dinner tonight?”

  Jackie thought for a second. “I’ve got to work kind of late.”

  “So do I. I’m starting to get used to your Yankee dinner hours. What’s ‘kind of late?”

  “Eight fifteen, eight thirty.”

  “Hmm, might have to get something to tide me over ‘til then,” Bull said. “Boiled peanuts or a couple Slim Jims maybe.”

  “Yuck. How can you eat junk like that?”

  “Very easily.”

  Jackie laughed.

  “You got a special place you want to go?” he asked.

  “Let me think,” she said. “How ‘bout that seafood place in Sandfly, Driftaway—”

  “I know it well.”

  “So sound good?”

  “It sounds great,” Bull said. “Meet you there at eight thirty.”

  “Look forward to it, Harry.”

  “Don’t forget your Glock,” Bull said. “You should be strapped at all times.”

  She laughed.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, just sounded kind of funny,” she said. “Bye, Harry.”

  “Bye, Jackie.”

  Jackie hung up and decided she was going to look into Suggs Brown. Without Harry Bull knowing about it.

  Somewhere at the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department, she knew, there would be an extensive file of the incident in which Brown killed his partner. And possibly IA—Internal Affairs, the division that investigated officers suspected of illegal behavior—had gotten involved. The big question was, could the public somehow gain access to the file? Because, through her work, Jackie had learned long ago that Savannah-Chatham PD was not at all eager to have the public second-guessing them or asking questions they didn’t want to answer.

  While she thought about this, her hunch was that maybe John Redmond’s and Suggs Brown’s friendship might have extended beyond their days of riding bikes and stealing candy together. She suspected that finding out if they had stayed in touch, maybe even close touch, was probably going to be as challenging as retrieving the file that detailed the circumstances and specifics of Suggs Brown fatally shooting his partner. Jackie wished she had asked Harry more questions about Suggs Brown when she’d had the chance. She even thought about calling him back but vetoed it because she didn’t want him to know she had serious questions about Brown and was looking into him. Something told her Harry wouldn’t be too pleased about that.

  So instead she turned to her go-to: Google. It rarely failed her, at least on general subjects. She entered the name and address, John E. Redmond, Atlanta, Georgia. A few things popped up on her search, though, at first, she didn’t see anything that looked useful. But when she scrolled down, she saw a two-paragraph newspaper article about Redmond making a $25,000 contribution to what was apparently his alma mater, Columbus State University. It was a start anyway.

  The second paragraph read: Mr. Redmond matriculated at Columbus State in 2004. The following year he took a job in the entertainment business. There it was: chances were the entertainment business might be a loose definition of the strip club industry. John Redmond, it seemed, was a man in a hurry. One year of campus keg parties and fourth-tier football games and he was ready to start moving on up.

  Jackie selected the next article in her search results. It was a USA Today piece about a man named David Love, a “disgraced” general in the Army Rangers, “who was removed from his position for an ‘inappropriate’ extramarital affair.” It went on to say, “Love apparently swapped sexual partners and frequented swingers clubs across the country, behavior that put him at risk for being the target of blackmail and espionage. Love, who worked at the Pentagon, went to clubs where members could have anonymous sex with strangers in Baltimore, near the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and near Fort Benning, Georgia.”

  Jackie had no idea what this had to do with John Redmond and stopped reading the article when her cell phone rang. It was her friend, Larry Davis, who worked at Hawk Professional Investigations, just outside of Atlanta. Davis was Director of Special Operations at Hawk and was smart, savvy and had twenty years’ more experience as a P.I. than she did. Jackie had called earlier to ask him what the procedure was to get a look at a file on a closed accidental homicide. Specifically, about Suggs Brown and his late partner. Davis explained that it was necessary to file a request through the Georgia Open Records Act to get a copy of the case file. Her first question was: How long will that take?

  When he told her it typically took seven to ten business days, she thanked him, but was thinking to herself, forget it, no way in hell could I wait that long. Then, when Davis added that police departments had the right to redact certain personal information, she decided not to bother.

  After hanging up with Davis, she decided to Google Harry Bull on a whim. Bull got more ink than Redmond. Five newspaper articles. Specifically, two years ago he was named Chatham County officer of the year, and then in the next article there was a mention of him having cleared thirty-one murder cases in a two-year span.

  It was interesting. But it did nothing to advance her case.

  So, she Googled Suggs Brown. All she found at first were several newspaper articles in the Savannah Morning-News relating to the accidental shooting of his partner. She read through several of them. They had been front-page news for three days running, but she didn’t find much detail beyond what Bull had told her. Then, something suddenly popped out at her on the last line of one of the articles. It was a ten-word line: Sergeant Brown was an Army Ranger during the Iraqi War. Flashing back to the article that she hadn’t finished about the disgraced Army Ranger general, she Googled John Redmond again. And, exactly as it had before, the article came up right below the one mentioning Redmond’s $25,000 gift to Columbus State University.

  She skipped through what she had read before and got down to the eighth paragraph: Love was running operations at the U.S. European Command, the Pentagon’s front-line against Russia, up until May of 2003, when he was busted and fired for the extramarital trysts. Investigators also found Love misused government resources in order to call and send emails to arrange for the sexual encounters. It was also discovered that General Love was assisted by Ranger First Lieutenant John E. Redmond in organizing these encounters and, on frequent occasions, accompanied by him. The extramarital liaisons effectively ended Love’s thirty-year career, as well as that of Lieutenant Redmond.

  That was both the end of the article and, it was apparent, Redmond’s life as a Ranger. Jackie exhaled, then looked away from her screen and out the window. She just pondered for a few long minutes. It certainly was a riveting story, but was it relevant? What it did do, without question, was inextricably link John Redmond and Suggs Brown, because there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that Brown and Redmond had been Rangers in Iraq together. She wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the two had gone down to the draft board together after graduating from high school.

  The articles also served the additional purpose of giving Jackie a rough timeline for Redmond: He was busted from the Army in 2003. He spent one year at Columbus State. He opened up a strip club in Savannah shortly after that. A few years later, he moved up to the big time and opened hi
s bottle clubs in Atlanta, which had apparently become very successful. Then, around 2015, he opened Casa Romantica, which had a nice run until Redmond’s partner, Miranda Cato, was murdered.

  Next, Jackie surfed the website for the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department. She had noticed before that, under the “About Us” tab, the department had a drop down that said, “Command Post.” She clicked on it and saw a page with photos of various division heads and captains. Then she went to another tab, which said, “Investigators.” In the top drop down, right above “Robbery,” it said “Homicide.” She clicked it and, there in a dramatically staged photo, stood four homicide detectives. Behind them, yellow tape that read, “Crime Scene Do Not Cross,” had been strung across the width of the photo. The four homicide cops— Harry Bull, Suggs Brown, Walter Newell, and Zed Murphy—were standing shoulder to shoulder, arms folded across their chest, no one smiling. It was as if the photographer had said, “Okay, boys, gimme your best macho look.” Jackie thought she detected a slight hint of protest in Bull’s expression. Like he had just rolled his eyes at the photographer’s suggestion. Suggs Brown, on the other hand, with his short dirty blond hair and linebacker’s chin, looked like he was way into it. Jackie took out her iPhone and took a picture of Suggs Brown, then enlarged it. Something in his eyes reminded her of a serial killer she had once seen on a wanted poster.

  Her cell phone rang. She looked at the number. Wendy. Finally.

  “Thanks for getting back to me,” Jackie said. “I have a few questions. You got fifteen minutes?”

  “Sure,” Wendy said. “On the phone or in person?”

  “I’d prefer in person.”

  “Want to meet again at the coffee shop here?”

  “Yeah, that’s good,” Jackie said. “Can we make it in a half hour?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Thanks.”

  As she stood and walked out of her office door, Jackie felt the extra pound or so on her hip. Wearing the holstered Glock would take some getting used to, but she felt strangely comforted by its weight.