SAVANNAH GONE (15 page)

“How do I get in touch with him?”

‘Papa’ belched. “We don’t give out personal information.” He stuffed a hunk of sandwich into his mouth and went back to his magazine.

I slid two fifties from my wallet and held them up for him to see. He swabbed his mouth with a paper napkin, rose from his desk, then sauntered over and grabbed the cash. “Give me a minute.” I noticed he had a dab of mustard on his shirt.

He pulled open a file cabinet drawer and extracted a yellow folder. He rifled through it until he located a business card. He photocopied the card, then put the file back in the cabinet and handed the copy to me. “Have a nice day,” he said.

I glanced at the sheet of paper. In addition to his name and occupation, the card had Quinn’s phone number and email address. I said to him, “I really enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea. But man I sure do wish he could’ve gotten that marlin home in one piece.”

I stepped outside and headed across the parking lot. As I got close to my car I noticed I’d been dive bombed. Seagull shit sat smack in the middle of my windshield. So I went down to the dock and started picking through a trash can. I managed to find an empty Coke bottle and an old oily rag. I filled the bottle with river water and carried it back to my car, then cleaned the bird shit off as best I could.

Sitting behind the wheel, I tried reaching Dave Quinn on my cell. His voice mail picked up, and I hung up without leaving a message. I sat there and tried to figure out my next move.

What I really needed were the necessary tools to solve the murder: access to the crime scene, forensic reports, financial and phone records, things of that sort. Since I knew none of these items would be forthcoming, I’d have to wing it. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed back to the city.

~ ~ ~

In November 1864, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman left the captured city of Atlanta in flames. He then pointed his army south, on the fabled march to the sea. His intent was to break the back of the confederacy. Sherman tore up railroad tracks, burned plantations, destroyed crops and laid waste to everything in his path. The first practitioner of the wartime strategy known as scorched earth.

Four weeks after leaving Atlanta, Sherman and his boys hit town. Upon entering the city, he became mesmerized by the tranquil beauty. So instead of burning Savannah, he gave us to President Lincoln for Christmas. “Merry Christmas Abe. I’ve got Savannah wrapped up in a bow for you. Give my best to Mary.”

Now jump ahead forty odd years to the early part of the twentieth century. The South’s plantation society is a distant memory. A new century and a new era have begun.

The automobile, a recent invention, begins to appear on the crude roads of America’s towns and cities. At first it was considered nothing but a toy for the moneyed elite. But eventually there will be hundreds of startup companies, cranking out cars by the thousands.

Before that happens, though, the American public falls in love with auto racing. Daring drivers piloting roaring machines at breakneck speeds were all the rage. And, believe it or not, for a few short years, Savannah was the epicenter of car racing.

In 1908, forty-four years after Sherman spared us the torch, Savannah hosted the very first Grand Prix race ever held in the USA, the aptly named American Grand Prize. The Grand Prize wasn’t staged in 1909, but it returned to Savannah in 1910 and 1911. These races predated the first Indianapolis 500 by a couple years and attracted the top race car drivers in the world.

Hundreds of thousands of fans flocked to Savannah to see the races. They came from all over the country. Wealthy New Yorkers arrived by luxuriously appointed trains known as Wall Street Specials. In fact, every hotel and boarding house in town was packed beyond capacity. Pressed for space, the DeSoto Hotel lined its ballroom with cots to accommodate the overflowing crowd. Even the city jail was used. It was converted into the private sleeping quarters for Harvey Firestone of the Firestone Tire Company.

Determined to have one of the fastest tracks in the world, Savannah used prison labor to construct and improve the roads for the historic races. And, believe it or not, those crude cars could reach speeds of eighty miles an hour.

In attendance at the 1910 race was Howard Coffin, a founder of the Hudson Automobile Company. Coffin fell hard for the sublime beauty of the Georgia coast. A millionaire many times over by the time he turned thirty, Coffin purchased Sapelo Island not long after that 1910 race for the fire sale price of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

In addition to Sapelo, Coffin bought up vast tracts of land on St. Simons Island. He also purchased Sea Island, where he built the famous Cloister Hotel and founded the Sea Island Company.

Victory Drive, the ribbon of asphalt I was navigating on my return from the Bull River Marina, was part of the original course layout. Today it borders two very unique neighborhoods: Ardsley Park and Chatham Crescent. These were Savannah’s first automobile suburbs, due in large part, to the success of the great Savannah races.

Anyway, there I was, heading west on Victory, not far from where the racecourse starting line once stood. Afternoon traffic was starting to pick up. Grayson Stadium, home of our minor league baseball team, was on my left. Ahead and to my right, was the WSAV building, the local NBC broadcast affiliate. Beyond that, historic homes and live oak trees line the street.

I glanced in my rear view and noticed a dark Chevy Camaro ripping up asphalt like one of the race cars of old. The car changed lanes several times, weaving in and out of traffic, then fell in behind me.

The Camaro pulled in tight and rode my bumper for a block or two. So close, if I tapped my brakes, they'd end up in my back seat. With one eye on the road and one eye on the mirror, I downshifted and hit the gas, putting a little space between us. The Camaro’s driver punched it and locked onto my bumper again. The sun glared off his windshield, the grill shiny and looming. I checked my rear view once again. Two assholes riding low in the front seat, grinning like jack-o-lanterns.

I stuck my hand out the window and gave the driver the finger. He returned the salute. The jerk-off on the passenger side raised a pump-action shotgun, racked a shell, then leaned out the window and leveled it at the back of my car.

I flogged it, whipped the wheel to the right, and the GTO’s throbbing V8 roared. I fishtailed onto Waters Avenue, a funnel cloud of tire smoke trailing behind me. I heard, then felt, the concussive blast explode my rear windshield. A pale mist of shattered glass. The back end of my car broke loose, and I lost control. Then a flood of white-hot adrenaline coursed through me like a river of electric eels. I swerved into oncoming traffic and glimpsed faces. Eyes flung open. Mouths agape. Horns blaring. Tires squealing.

I turned into the skid and almost clipped a blue Honda Civic traveling in the opposite direction. I yanked hard on the steering wheel, but over-corrected and jumped the curb. I stood on the brakes and jerked the wheel back to the left. I spun completely around, then got it under control and slid to a stop. Another couple of inches, and I would have t-boned a Shell station gas pump.

I let out a lungful of air and forced myself to breathe. I felt the back of my head, then looked at my hand. No blood, but the message was clear...BACK THE FUCK OFF.

I climbed out and did a quick inventory. In addition to the blown-out glass, the buckshot penetrated the metal skin of the car and shattered one of my taillights. My blood boiled at the thought of what would’ve happened if Megan had been riding in the back seat.

I checked the street, but the Camaro was nowhere in sight. I jumped back in the GTO and got the hell out of there.

“What’d you do, use the back of your car for target practice?” asked Chip, a guy in his early thirties. Chip worked for Coastal Auto Glass, one of those mobile glass replacement outfits. We were standing in front of my place, and he was running his fingers over the pitted pockmarks on the back end of the GTO.

“Quail hunting accident,” I replied. I don’t hunt, and wouldn’t know a quail from a crow.

He raised his eyebrows and looked at me with an expression of dubious disbelief. “No kidding. Who were you hunting with, Dick Cheney?” Everyone’s a fucking comedian, even Chip, the auto glass guy. “By the way,” he said, “quail season runs from November to February.”

I shrugged. “How quick can you have it replaced?”

“Bout an hour, give or take. You’ll need to wait an additional hour after it’s installed before driving though. The adhesive takes a while to set up and harden.” He ran his fingers over the chewed-up holes again and shook his head. “Unreal.”

I stood there looking at the shattered glass, then said to him, “If you need anything, I’ll be inside.”

I walked into the house and headed for the kitchen. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and took it into the living room. I plopped down into an old easy chair and tried to wrap my head around the murder investigation. It felt like I was making progress, and I’d picked up some interesting intel from Natalie. And my soon to be repaired car was proof I’d ruffled some feathers.

I took a long swig of the beer, then retrieved a legal pad and pen from an end table drawer. I drew four columns, one for each suspect: Bill Taylor, Frank Chambers, Congressman John Thigpen, and the newest addition, archeologist Jack Hutchins.

Beneath Bill Taylor’s name I wrote: Wounded Pride. Violent Tendencies. Let’s face it, getting dumped a month out from tying the knot had to sting...a lot. According to Claire’s parents, Taylor hit her when she told him the wedding was off. Did the embarrassment of getting dumped push Taylor over the edge and turn him into a murderer? Also, what did he do after he left Leoci's at approximately 10:00 pm Friday night? According to Caroline, Claire’s watch stopped working at 11:14 pm. That was more than enough time for him to abduct Claire, kill her, then dump her body in the river.

Next on the list was Frank Chambers. Below his name I wrote: Financial Dire Straits. And below that I wrote: Shotgun Blast. Chambers had to be hemorrhaging cash in order to keep Liberty Island going. I noticed very few sold homes when I was down there, but the golf course grass was green, the float planes were gassed up and ready to fly, the spa was open, and the horses were ready to ride. And if Claire had been able to squash his rezoning, his land near the port would be worth a pittance, compared to the value if it was zoned industrial instead of rural.

I needed to speak with yacht captain Dave Quinn to confirm or shoot holes in Chambers’ alibi for Friday night. And on the subject of shooting holes, if Chambers wasn’t the killer, then who else had turned the two shooters loose on me? Had my sniffing around down at Liberty Island made him nervous? I added the name Dave Quinn below the words Shotgun Blast in the Chambers column.

In the Thigpen column, I added a question mark. He’d been the earliest and loudest cheerleader for expanding the harbor, and hoped to ride that success into the highest office in the land. But I’d yet to figure out how to get in front of Thigpen so I could put the screws to him.

Last on the list was Jack Hutchins, the Indiana Jones wannabe. I had no concrete reason to suspect Hutchins, other than the fact that he was stepping out on his wife and seeing Claire on the sly. Plus he’d been a bit evasive when I asked him about the last time he’d seen Claire. Ergo, inclusion on the shit-head list.

Not coming clean on hooking up with Claire was a giant red flag. Granted, he was married and didn’t want his wife, or Cavanaugh for that matter, to find out about his extracurricular activities out on Sapelo. But a lie, any lie, carries weight. Below his name I wrote: Married. And then, R.J. Reynolds/Bags of Gold.

Was it really possible Hutchins was secretly looking for the one hundred pound bags of gold Reynolds was rumored to have buried on Sapelo? This seemed far-fetched. I scribbled long-shot.

I looked at the list of suspects. I had lots of questions, but very few answers. It reminded me of a robbery case I worked when I was in the Army. A number of weapons were disappearing from a base in Texas. On the surface, the duty sergeant looked clean. There were four or five other soldiers that had access to the arms room, but I couldn’t pin it on any of them. How did I solve the case? Let’s just say I managed to procure some photos of the duty sergeant with his pants around his ankles, receiving a blow job from a frizzy-haired bottle-blonde. When I shared the photos with the duty sergeant’s redheaded wife, she went ballistic. Then she took me to one of those rental storage places where the guns were hidden.

I drank a little more beer and thought about Jack Hutchins. I fired up my laptop, then Googled the value of one hundred pounds of gold. To my surprise, at current prices, one hundred pounds of the precious metal came in at approximately a million and a half dollars. That in and of itself didn’t amount to probable cause, but let’s face it, people have been killed for a whole lot less.

I added the one point five million to Hutchins’ column. Maybe not such a long-shot after all.

Next I Googled Jack Hutchins, archeologist, North Florida University. The search returned the university archeology program page, which was housed within the anthropology department.

I clicked on the department page, and there he was in a group photo along with three other professors. Each of the professors had their own individual page.

I opened Hutchins’ page. The dork stood there with his hands on his hips, dressed in one of those silly bolo string ties, smiling for the camera.

In addition to his photo, there was his bio, which included his education and credentials. There was quite a bit of information on the work he did out on Sapelo, as well as additional photos of him and his students excavating a site. I couldn’t help but notice all the young females in the photos, and recalled Natalie’s remark about Jack dating his students when he was back in Florida.

In most of these shots, the archeologist was wearing a straw hat, and a pair of mirrored wraparound sunglasses. Joe Cool. I wanted to step on his sunglasses...while they were still on his face.