Monument to Murder (3 page)

“Warms your heart, doesn’t it, to see one of our own in the White House,” St. Pierre said.

“Maybe it warms
your
heart, Wayne,” Brixton said. “I’m not from here. Remember?”

“That’s right. You are a Yankee interloper who came to our fair city to find fame and fortune.”

Brixton grinned.

“And did you? Find fame and fortune?”

“What I found is humidity and the stink from those paper plants that settles over everything in summer. She’s good-looking.”

“Mrs. Fletcher Jamison, first lady of the land? Yes, she is a fair thing, youngest first lady since Jackie O. Mrs. Kennedy was thirty-one on inauguration day. Jeanine was thirty-eight. Jack and Fletcher robbed the cradle.”

They went to the street.

“Washington’s almost as hot and humid in the summer as this place is,” Brixton commented.

“Another fifty years or so and you’ll get used to our weather, my friend. In the meantime, stay in touch. If you decide to go ahead with this case, I’ll do what I can to help.”

Go ahead with the case?

Brixton had already made that decision.

CHAPTER   3

Brixton left a sleeping Flo Combes in bed when he got up the next morning. She’d worked late at the touristy clothing shop she owned in the historic district and announced when she got home that she intended to sleep in. They’d sat up until midnight watching an old black-and-white movie, made a halfhearted attempt to kindle some passion, gave it up with mutual yawns, and went to bed—to sleep.

Brixton stood in her bathroom and took in his image in the mirror, turning left and right to present more-flattering perspectives. He was in decent shape for a fifty-year-old man. Despite his aches and pains, he exercised regularly at his apartment and at a local gym. A shade under six feet tall, he’d managed to keep excess weight off his midsection and to maintain muscle tone in his upper arms and chest. He knew one thing: no matter how he deteriorated as he grew older, he’d always have his wiry, gunmetal-silver hair, which he kept closely cropped.

When Brixton was a cop he had a reputation as a tough guy, not mean or bullying but someone you wanted at your back when the situation went downhill. He was also known as a tough kid while growing up in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn; plenty of scraps had sent him home with a bloody nose or black eye. That pleased his father. The old man worked nights as a bartender in some of the borough’s rougher neighborhoods and wouldn’t have stood for his only son backing away from a fight.

His decision to pursue a career in law enforcement was accepted by both his father and mother. Although Mrs. Brixton quietly hoped that her son would go to college and become an accountant or a lawyer, or at least land a white-collar job, that route had no appeal for Robert, although he did go to college, CCNY, and graduated with a degree in business administration. But the thought of spending his adult life behind a desk was anathema and he queried the NYPD. No jobs available. A friend said he’d heard that the Washington MPD was hiring, so Robert applied there and was hired. It took four years to decide that he and the nation’s capital weren’t made for each other.

That’s when he headed for Savannah, one of the nation’s first planned cities. James Oglethorpe had arrived there in 1732 with 114 colonists and had laid out the new city according to a plan he’d used in England. Brixton had to admit that Savannah was a pretty city, and the people were friendly for the most part. There was, of course, that entrenched genteel, aristocratic set that Wayne St. Pierre had grown up in and that Brixton found too precious for his liking. But in the main he’d enjoyed his twenty-four years there—except every summer.

He showered and dressed, kissed Flo on the forehead, and swung by his own place to change into fresh underwear and a clean shirt. He called a number on his cell phone that was answered by Joe Cleland, the retired detective who’d taken Louise Watkins’s confession twenty years earlier. Brixton and Cleland had partnered for a while and he liked the beefy, African-American cop with the booming voice and ready smile.

“Joe, Bob Brixton.”

“Hello, Robert. I figured you might be calling. Wayne said you were working the Louise Watkins case.”

“Seems like it, Joe. Spare me an hour?”

“Anytime, my man.”

Brixton got directions to Cleland’s house and headed there in his 2004 Subaru Outback.

Cleland lived in a small one-story redbrick home set on a lovingly maintained piece of property. Brixton noted as he got out of his car that behind the house was a preserve of sorts that afforded plenty of privacy. Cleland heard his arrival and opened the front door before Brixton reached it. They shook hands, gave each other a quick hug, and went inside where Cleland had laid out coffee and a platter of Danish pastries. “Good coffee,” he said. “I guarantee it. I’m particular about my coffee after all those years of drinking station-house motor oil.”

“It was pretty bad, wasn’t it?” Brixton agreed as he took a chair at the dining room table, poured himself a cup, and plucked a raspberry cheese Danish from the platter. “How’s retirement treating you?” he asked.

“Just fine,” Cleland replied, joining him. “I keep busy with the garden, grow the best damn lettuce and tomatoes in Chatham County. Of course, it gets a little lonely now and then with Beatrice gone.” Cleland’s wife had died of cancer less than a year after he’d retired.

“You look good, Joe.”

Cleland patted his sizable belly and laughed. “Hard as a rock,” he said. “So, you want to talk about Louise Watkins. Funny, lots of perps I dealt with are all fuzzy in my brain but I remember her. I remember when she came into the barracks and told the desk officer she wanted to confess to a killing.” His laugh was rueful this time. “They called me to the desk and I took her back into one of the interrogation rooms. Man, she was pitiful, looked like she could use a good meal.”

“She’d been running loose for too long,” Brixton said. “She just blurted out her confession to you?”

Cleland nodded his large head. “That’s about it, Robert. She rolled through her so-called confession like she’d been rehearsing it for weeks.”

“‘So-called confession’?”

“That’s the way it struck me. I mean, it didn’t set right the way she did it. I sat there wonderin’ why she was doing it. Hell, chances were that no one would ever link her to that stabbing, no earthly reason for her to give herself up. Of course, she did tell us where the knife was. We dragged that portion of the inlet and there it was, just like she said.”

“Prints?”

“Partials. The lab said they were sufficient to make a match with her.”

Brixton wondered why Louise’s mother hadn’t mentioned that. “Did you press her?”

“Sure, but she never backed off from what she’d said, just repeated it almost word-for-word. I had her write out her statement, watched her hands shake while she did. I left her alone for a while and talked to the chief about my suspicions that she might be lying.”

“And he said?” Brixton waved away his response. “No,” he said, “I can imagine what he said. He told you not to look a gift horse in the mouth. You had a live one, which meant the stabbing wouldn’t end up in the cold-case file.”

“‘Sometimes we get lucky,’ was what he said.”

“Not lucky for her,” Brixton said. “You testified at her sentencing.”

“Sure did. The public defender just went through the motions. Hell, she’d already been found guilty based on her confession, so he focused on the sentencing. Her mother, a good woman, testified on her behalf. So did an older brother. He was going to divinity school I believe.”

“Seems like their testimony worked,” Brixton said. “She only got four years.”

“That’s right. The DA wasn’t happy about it but I was. The way I figured it, she’d get straight behind bars, come out and maybe put some sort of a life together without drugs and booze. I’d kept up with her while she was incarcerated. A friend of mine at the prison worked with the kid and kept me in the loop. Louise Watkins made good use of her prison time, Bob, earned her GED, took advantage of the drug-rehab program, and came out clean.” His laugh was more of a grunt. “My friend, she told me that Louise had a real talent for numbers, could do all sorts of math in her head. She—my friend—was going to help find Louise a job with an accounting firm or something else where she could use that talent. But then—”

“Then she was gunned down.”

“That hurt, Robert. I had intended to contact her when she was released to see if I could help her find her way. I never had any kids and maybe was looking to play daddy to somebody. I never got the chance.”

“What would you say if I suggested that she might have taken the rap for someone else?”

“You mean for a friend? That would have to have been one special friend.”

“For money. Ten grand.”

“Who?”

Brixton shrugged. “That’s one of the things I’m being paid to find out, along with who shot her.”

“You really think you can do that?”

Another shrug. “I’ll try. Did she say anything,
anything
when you were with her that might help me?”

Cleland finished a cream puff and a swallow of coffee. “No,” he said. “I wanted to question her further but the chief nixed that, told me to take the statement, cuff her, and turn her over to the DA’s office. That’s what I did.”

“What about the guy who got stabbed? From what I’ve heard, she claimed he’d tried to rape her.”

“I don’t remember much about him. Fairly young, twenty-four, twenty-five. I reviewed the crime-scene photos in preparation for testifying at her sentencing. Good-lookin’ fella, came from Atlanta. Autopsy showed plenty of drugs in his system, no surprise since he was hanging out at Augie’s.”

“Good-looking enough that he didn’t need to rape anybody for sex?”

“I’d say so, but you never can tell what a junkie’ll do.”

Brixton stretched and grimaced, rubbed his right knee.

“When are you gonna get that knee replaced?” Cleland said.

“One of these days.”

It had happened during Brixton’s final year on the force. He and his partner had been dispatched to pick up a parole violator and were met with a hail of bullets, one of which hit Brixton in the knee. His partner killed the fugitive and called for backup. After undergoing surgery, Brixton had spent the next six months in rehab, and had been assigned to a desk job until his retirement papers came through.

There wasn’t much else he could ask Cleland, at least at that juncture, and they settled into easy conversation about their days together on the streets of Savannah. Cleland took Brixton out a back door to show off his vegetable garden, which Brixton dutifully admired. Of all the things he enjoyed doing, gardening wasn’t among them. An hour later Cleland walked him to the front door. Brixton looked up the quiet street at a small, red pickup truck parked at the curb. He’d noticed what he assumed was the same truck behind him on the highway on his way to Cleland’s. Sun on the windshield obscured the driver’s face. Brixton clapped his former partner on the back before he got into his car and drove off. The red truck remained parked.

His visit with Joe Cleland hadn’t resulted in his learning anything tangible, but it did accomplish one thing.

He believed Eunice Watkins.

CHAPTER   4

Brixton dialed the number he’d been given for Eunice Watkins. He wanted to see whether Louise’s mother was home and up for a visit. An answering machine picked up his cell phone call. He didn’t bother to leave a message, deciding to stop by her house anyway if only to get a feel for the atmosphere in which the daughter had been brought up.

The address was in the Pinpoint section of Savannah, about eleven miles from downtown. Inhabited primarily by African-Americans, it had been established by freed slaves following the Civil War and was one of the last bastions of Gullah-speaking people, a Creole language patterned after several West African languages. As Brixton entered the town he saw a sign proudly proclaiming that it was the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The Watkins place was one of a dozen similar homes that sat side by side on a tree-lined street. He pulled up in front of the house number he had and surveyed his surroundings. The only activity was a few school-age kids playing and a delivery truck from which furniture was being carried into a house across the street. A recent vintage Ford sedan was parked in the Watkins driveway.

He got out and went to the front door, rang the bell. Based upon his unanswered call, he didn’t expect to find her at home. But a curtain on a narrow vertical window next to the door was pulled aside, the sound of a sliding deadbolt was heard, and she opened the door.

“I hope you don’t mind my just stopping by,” Brixton said. “I tried calling but got your answering machine.”

“I’ve been letting the machine take calls,” she said.

To avoid bill collectors?
he wondered.

“Please, come in,” she said, stepping aside to allow him to enter.

An air conditioner in a living room window exhaled barely cool air into the tidy, pleasantly furnished room. A spinet piano occupied a short wall at the base of stairs leading to the second level. The hardwood floor glistened from a recent waxing, its center covered by a hooked rug of various colors. An older-model TV with its bulky back sat on a TV cart with wheels across from a couch covered in a green-and-white-striped fabric. Two chairs in a matching pattern flanked it.

“Please, sit down,” she said. “Would you like some sweet tea? I made some fresh this morning.” Sweet tea was a Savannah stalwart enjoyed year-round, well-steeped tea with plenty of sugar added.

“That would be nice,” Brixton said. “Thank you.”

While Mrs. Watkins fussed in the kitchen, Brixton walked around the small living room, stopping to peruse books on a tall bookcase interspersed with a variety of small, framed photographs. There were photos on the piano, too, and a cluster of them hung on a wall near the TV, each one perfectly straight. Brixton could never get his photos to hang straight and wondered whether the lady of the house spent a good part of her day keeping them in line. One picture on a bookcase shelf caught his eye. It was a color photo of a group of six teenage girls, three black, three white. They seemed happy in the shot, mugging for the camera the way teenagers do. He’d just picked it up to take a closer look when she returned with the tea and he put the photo back on the shelf.

“Is that your daughter in that picture?” he asked.

“Oh, my, yes, it is.”

“Looks like a happy occasion.”

“It was. Louise was sixteen when it was taken, a year before she left home. She was taking drugs by then only I didn’t know it. I suppose I preferred not to know, turned a blind eye on what she was doing, wanted to believe only good things about her. What a glorious smile she had, light up a room. You can see it in that photograph.” She left, returning seconds later with two other pictures of her daughter. Louise Watkins had, indeed, been a pretty girl, and the smile her mother had cited was evident in both shots. Brixton thought that showing him the pictures might cause her to tear up but she didn’t. She placed them on a coffee table next to the pitcher of tea, and a plate of brownies, and urged him to sit and enjoy her offerings, which he did.

She asked why he’d stopped by.

“I just wanted to touch base with you again,” he answered. “I spent time with two colleagues from the police department. One is still there, the other has retired. He was the one who took down Louise’s confession.”

“Detective Cleland,” she said. “A nice man. He testified at her sentencing hearing.”

“Right. He told me that he never quite believed her confession. It sounded rehearsed to him.”

A flash of spark lit up her eyes. “Exactly,” she said. “Louise was paid to say what she did.”

Brixton nodded.

“I asked Detective Cleland, and other policemen, to question her further, to press her to tell the truth,” she said, “but they didn’t. It was like they didn’t care enough to do it.”

Brixton debated trying to explain why no one probed deeper at the department—that they were happy not to have another murder or manslaughter case to pursue. Confessions make everything so much easier for a cop, even when they might not reflect reality. A bird in hand, in this case a bird named Louise Watkins.

The phone rang. She allowed it to sound four times before the answering machine, which was next to the TV, picked up. After her outgoing message, the caller grunted and hung up.

“Another one,” she said flatly.

“Another what?”

“Another call. I received two last night.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know. A man. Both times he said something like, ‘Don’t be stupid.’”

“That’s all he said?”

“Yes. And there have been two others like that one just now. He hangs up.”

“Has this happened before?” Brixton asked.

“No. Never.”

Brixton stood, arching against a pain. “Excuse me,” he said, “bad back.”

“Would you like an aspirin?” she asked.

“What? Oh, no, no thanks.”

He walked to the bookcase and brought the photo of the six girls back to her. “Schoolmates?” he asked.

“No, Mr. Brixton. That was taken at a retreat at CVA.”

“The Christian Vision Academy on Ogeechee Road?”

“Yes. The school held a retreat, inviting young girls of color to their campus for a weekend, sort of an outreach to bring the races closer together. It was a nice gesture. Louise didn’t want to go but I insisted. From the looks of things in the picture she had herself a good time. She told me she did when she got home.”

Brixton cleared his throat before saying, “I need to ask you a question, Mrs. Watkins. I don’t mean to upset you but—”

“You go right ahead and ask any question you wish, Mr. Brixton. Most of my upset is behind me.”

“Yeah. Well, when Louise was on the streets as a—as a prostitute—did she work for anybody?”

She looked puzzled.

“Did she have a boss, a pimp, a guy who managed her, if that’s what you’d call it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did she ever mention any of the other women she worked with?”

“No. Louise never said anything about those times. She was embarrassed enough, I suppose, that I even knew.”

“How did you know?”

“She called when she was arrested. I bailed her out.”

“Well, thank you, ma’am, for the talk and the sweet tea. It was excellent.”

He picked up the photo of the six girls again and looked closely at it before returning it to the bookcase.

“I was so pleased that Louise went to that retreat,” Mrs. Watkins said. “Maybe if she’d spent more time with girls like that she wouldn’t have strayed into trouble the way she did.”

Brixton didn’t know whether she was right or not and didn’t comment.

“But I suppose that wasn’t possible. Louise didn’t have much opportunity to be with young women like those in the picture. They come from—”

“The other side of town?”

“Yes, I suppose you could put it like that, Mr. Brixton. Thank you for coming all this way to see me.”

“Next time I hope to have more to report.”

“Would you be needing another check?”

“No, ma’am, not yet. Thanks for the hospitality. I’ll be in touch.”