Monument to Murder Read online

  “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 wh
o 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.

  “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.”