Monument to Murder (2 page)

CHAPTER   2

Brixton did what he usually did after a new client left—he asked Cynthia for her take. Cynthia Higgins was savvy, with an antenna that picked up on subtleties Brixton sometimes missed. She’d been working for him since he started his private investigative agency four years ago, and not only had an uncanny talent for cutting through BS, she also put up with him. On top of that, he appreciated that she was a splendid-looking female, rounded where she was supposed to be, with an open face, a high-octane smile, and a mane of blond curls. She prettied up what was basically a drab office, which saved him the expense of buying decorative things. Her husband, Jim, worked for a company that conducted ghost tours of Savannah. Savannah is known as the most haunted city in America. Brixton wasn’t sure whether he believed in ghosts but kept an open mind.

“A nice lady,” Cynthia responded, “but I’m not sure what she wants you to do, find out who murdered her daughter or identify who the kid took the fall for.”

“Seems to me she’s more interested in finding who paid the daughter off than who killed her.”

“Maybe one and the same. Sounds like an archaeological dig you’re going on, sixteen years since she was murdered, twenty years since she went to prison. Lots a’ luck.”

Brixton endorsed the thousand-dollar check Mrs. Watkins had written and asked Cynthia to deposit it. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said.

He paused in the hallway to look at the new sign he’d had installed on the door to his office “suite”—
ROBERT R. BRIXTON, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR
. Many people called him Bobby, which annoyed him. “Bobby” was okay in high school, but it was no name for a grown man, any more than calling the lady he occasionally slept with his “girlfriend.” He was too old to have a girlfriend, and he hated “significant other.” He referred to her as “Flo” because that was her name.

He puffed away on the street and pondered the meeting he’d just come from. Mrs. Louise Watkins had handed him a formidable challenge. The Savannah PD hadn’t been able to solve her daughter’s murder and probably hadn’t tried very hard. Ex-cons with a history of drug addiction and turning tricks never ranked high on the priority list. Brixton didn’t see how he could do any better. As for the daughter having been paid off to go to prison on someone else’s behalf, any chance of coming up with that other person was zilch at best, since the answer had been buried with the kid. But he’d give it his best shot with no guarantees. If the stone wall was too high to scale, he’d cut bait and not milk the mother for any more of her ten grand than was fair.

“Enjoy your cigarette?” Cynthia asked when he returned.

“No. It’s too hot out to enjoy anything.”

“Better than snow.”

“And if you didn’t buy all the secondhand-smoke nonsense, I’d be enjoying a cigarette in my air-conditioned office.”

He slid behind his desk, called Savannah PD, and asked for Detective St. Pierre. Wayne came on the line.

“Bob Brixton,” he said.

“Well, well, well,” St. Pierre said, “a voice from my not-too-distant past. How in hell are you, Bobby?”

St. Pierre knew that Brixton didn’t like being called Bobby and did it to irritate him. Brixton didn’t bother to correct him the way he used to. “I’m hot,” he said, “patiently waiting for December.”

“You never did get acclimated to our fine weather, did you, Bobby? If you were back up north you’d—”

“Yeah, I know, I’d be bitching about the snow. I need some time with you, Wayne. I’ve got a case that goes back a few years. You worked it. Louise Watkins. Did time for manslaughter, a stabbing at that dump Augie’s, and then got herself killed shortly after she was released.”

“Rings a bell, Bobby. What’s it to you?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. I can pop over now.”

“Oh, no, my man, not this morning. I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

“Then I’ll buy you lunch, or dinner.”

“You must have picked yourself up a good-payin’ client. I just happen to be free this evening and have been hankerin’ for some of Huey’s red beans and rice ever since I got back from the Big Easy. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds all right as long as you don’t expect me to eat grits. Huey’s at seven.”

The meeting with Eunice Watkins was the only one he had scheduled for the day, and the chances of having another potential client pop in unannounced were as likely as a sudden cold front dropping the temperature thirty degrees. He told Cynthia that he’d be at the
Savannah Morning News
going through back issues, got in his car, and drove to the paper’s plush headquarters on the city’s rapidly developing western suburb. An old friend, a reporter who covered the crime beat, was there and settled him in the paper’s morgue, where back issues were preserved on microfilm.

He didn’t find much of interest on Louise Watkins, nor had he expected to. There was a four-paragraph article on the unsolved stabbing in the parking lot of Augie’s, and a follow-up piece a week later when Louise Watkins came forward to admit having wielded the knife. The reporter mentioned that Ms. Watkins was known to be a drug user and had been arrested twice for soliciting.

He fast-forwarded to four years later, when Louise was released from prison and gunned down on a Saturday afternoon on a street in a less-than-savory part of town. The police characterized it as a drive-by shooting; no suspects had been identified. There was no second story.

He returned to the office and spent the rest of the day paying bills and catching up on paperwork. Cynthia left at four to take care of some personal business, and he closed up fifteen minutes later, going to his apartment, where he sacked out in front of the TV with a beer before heading back out for dinner.

St. Pierre was already there when Brixton arrived. The younger detective was a foppish sort of fellow, fond of brightly colored bow ties and pastel sport jackets. Because he was tall and angular, and reed-thin, clothes draped nicely on him. He wore his now-graying hair longer than most cops, swept back at the sides and curling over his shirt collar. That he became a cop was unlikely considering his background. He was the only son of a Savannah couple ensconced in the city’s upper social strata, had gotten a degree in fine arts from SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design—today the nation’s largest art school—and it was assumed that he’d continue his education in that field with an eye toward becoming a museum curator. But he had made an abrupt U-turn and announced that he intended to take the test to become a Savannah cop. According to him, the decision almost killed his mother: “She took to her bed for weeks the way southern women sometimes do,” he had once told Brixton with a chuckle, “probably a case of the vapors.” But his parents eventually got over it, at least on the surface. Never having married, Wayne St. Pierre was the quintessential gadfly; his idiosyncrasies were legion. He was an unlikely cop if only because of the wealth, money, and property left him by his parents. The richest cop in America? Could be. But he was a good homicide detective, especially when it involved members of Savannah’s upper crust, the sort of people John Berendt made hay with in his
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

“You’re looking good,” St. Pierre said as they shook hands and Brixton motioned for a waitress to take his drink order. St. Pierre’s usual concoction was already on the table, a sidecar made with Tuaca, a brandy-based orange-vanilla liqueur. It looked refreshing.

“Beefeater martini,” Brixton told the waitress, “cold and dry, shaken, with a twist.”

“So,” St. Pierre said, “tell me about this new client of yours.”

Brixton recounted for him what had transpired at his meeting with Louise Watkins’s mother. St. Pierre listened attentively, taking an occasional sip of his drink. When Brixton was through, St. Pierre raised his eyebrows and said, “Seems to me you’re chasin’ another Savannah ghost story.”

“Ghost, hell,” Brixton said. “The daughter was only too real. So were the bullets that killed her.”

St. Pierre shrugged.

“Metro termed it a drive-by shooting.”

“That’s right.”

“But from what I’ve read, she was alone on that street.”

“True. I refreshed my memory before comin’ here. That little girl was all alone.”

“Which says to me that she didn’t accidentally get in the way of a shooting meant for someone else. She was the target.”

“Nothing in the files to support that, Bobby.”

“But it makes sense, doesn’t it? And knock off the Bobby stuff.”

His grin was wide and mischievous. “I forgot that you’re sensitive to that name. My apologies.”

“For the sake of argument, Wayne, let’s say I’m right. Let’s say that she was the target. She’d just gotten out of prison, where she spent four years doing time for someone else, someone who’d paid her off. Maybe that person wanted to make sure that she didn’t change her story once she got out of the can and point a finger at him. Possible?”

“Everything’s possible, Robert. That’s what makes life so inherently fascinating.”

Brixton finished his drink and motioned for a refill. St. Pierre did the same.

“You said you refreshed your memory, Wayne. Does that include going back into the files on when she confessed to the stabbing at Augie’s and was sentenced?”

“What files?” he said. “There’s not much. I called Joe Cleland before I came here.”

“How is Joe?”

“As irascible as ever. He claims to be enjoying his retirement but I don’t believe him. Joe was the one who took her statement. Remember?”

Brixton nodded.

“He said she just walked into headquarters and told someone at the desk that she wanted to confess to the stabbing. Joe was summoned and took her into a room where she told him her story, said she’d been drinking at Augie’s and went outside with this guy, said he tried to rape her and so she stuck a knife in him like any upstanding young woman would do to preserve her virginity. Sweet little thing, wasn’t she, walkin’ around carrying a big ol’ knife like that? She had turned tricks as I recall. Maybe he got from her what he wanted but didn’t want to pay for it.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. She told her mother—who, by the way, is a very nice lady—that she’d been paid to admit to the stabbing but wouldn’t tell her who it was. That’s honorable. Sort of. She wanted her mother to know that she wasn’t a killer, but wasn’t going to betray this other person. You know what I think, Wayne?”

“Mind if we order first?”

“Not at all.”

Red beans and rice with andouille sausage for him; Brixton opted for a New York strip steak.

“So here’s how I see it. I believe the mother. Louise Watkins was paid off to go to prison. Ten thousand bucks is pretty tempting for someone in her situation. She sees it as a way of paying back her family for all the heartache she’s caused them. I also think that maybe this person who handed her ten big ones figured she’d get fifteen, maybe twenty years, but the judge takes pity on Louise, figures she’s been punished enough in her young life, and slaps down four. She walks out a free woman and this other person makes sure that she never tells the real story. Boom-boom. Not to worry.”

Their meals were served, which got Wayne off the hook from having to comment immediately to Brixton’s what-if. They dug in, saying little except for small talk with Wayne doing most of it. When they’d finished, St. Pierre dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “Excellent,” he said. “Truly excellent. Now, my old friend and colleague, here’s what I think of your thesis. I think you’re creating a scenario to justify going forward with this client of yours. I think Savannah’s ghosts have taken possession of you. It happens, you know.”

Brixton laughed. Maybe St. Pierre was right, he thought. Maybe that special aura that surrounds Savannah, Georgia, had invaded his soul and caused him not to think clearly. He dropped the subject—for that evening—and they lingered over hot, black coffee.

“Know what surprises me?” St. Pierre asked.

“What?”

“That you elected to stay in Savannah when you retired from the force. I figured you’d be packed and gone, back to Washington or New York.”

Brixton shook his head. “When I first got here I figured that’s exactly what I’d do. Put in my time. Earn the pension check. But this place grows on you, like the Spanish moss on those oak trees. Maybe it’s the funny way you people talk, funny but charming. My ex-wife is a southern girl, from Virginia.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Go back to Washington? Why do you think I left there? They built the city on a swamp, and swamp creatures keep showing up. They’re known as bureaucrats and elected officials.”

Brixton had ended up in Washington, D.C., because the New York PD had put on a hiring freeze. But four years had been enough. He’d had it with politics playing a role in every aspect of his life, including policing. Savannah was expanding its force and he figured it was worth a try. His marriage had broken up; he was footloose and fancy-free. So he took the Savannah job and now here he was, years later, with a pension check and his own private investigative agency that sometimes generated enough income to pay its bills. Why hadn’t he taken the money and run? Who knew? Inertia probably.

Brixton covered the check. As they left, they paused to look at a TV set over the bar. Video of the president of the United States and the first lady showed them hosting an event on the White House lawn for some of D.C.’s disadvantaged children.