The Savannah Madam Read online

  The Savannah Madam

  The Savannah Series Book 1

  Tom Turner

  Tribeca Press

  Copyright © 2020 Tom Turner. All rights reserved.

  Published by Tribeca Press.

  This book is a work of fiction. Similarities to actual events, places, persons or other entities are coincidental.

  www.tomturnerbooks.com

  Farrell Sisters /Tom Turner – 1st ed.

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Afterword

  Palm Beach Nasty - Sample

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Charlie Crawford - New York Homicide

  Also by Tom Turner

  About the Author

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  1

  Diana Milton, reporter for the Savannah Morning News, was writing a feature series on women who worked in unusual—read: male-dominated—professions.

  She had just asked private investigator, Jackie Farrell, about the Philomena Soames murder case up in New York. Diana had read about it on the Savannah Investigations website, and it was the reason why she had contacted Jackie in the first place.

  Jackie, whose full name was Jacqueline Gardiner Farrell, was the founding partner of Savannah Investigations. At five-foot-three, Jackie joked about her parentage, since her father was six-three and her mother five-ten. She was a blonde with striking blue eyes, a dazzling smile, and a gym-trim body. Her clothes tended to run somewhat on the conservative side, but watch out: every once in a while, she’d surprise you with a slit skirt eight inches above the knee and a plunging neckline.

  “Savannah Investigations principal, Jackie Farrell,” read the firm’s website, “was instrumental in cracking the New York murder case of actress Philomena Soames.” Immediately below the headline, the site announced: “We specialize in domestic surveillance cases, missing persons, and undercover operations.”

  The backstory on the Soames murder was that Jackie, twenty-nine at the time, worked for the New York branch of a Hollywood film production company called Montana Films but got such a pathetically anemic paycheck from them that she had taken on a part time job. (A “side-hustle,” the Millennials called it.) Through a low-level showbiz contact, Jackie got hooked up with the British actress, Philomena Soames, who had worked in a few indie films that had done well at Sundance but not at the box office. Philomena also fancied herself a writer and figured she just might have the great English novel in her, but had stalled out halfway through chapter five. So, she put the word out that she needed a “creative muse.”

  A few years before, Jackie had written a screenplay that seemed terminally stalled in development and before that, while an undergrad at University of North Carolina, had won the Scribner Award for “Best Young Novelist”—even though, technically speaking, it was a novella. So, Jackie applied for the job with Philomena Soames, got it, and the two soon became fast friends.

  “So, give me all the details,” Diana Milton asked Jackie. “The Soames murder, I mean.”

  “Well,” Jackie said, taking a sip of her coffee. “The murder took place five and a half years ago. I don’t know if you remember the story or read about it, but Philomena lived down in Tribeca,” Jackie said, explaining that she went to Philomena’s apartment three times a week to work on her novel with her, “and she was stabbed twenty-seven times there.”

  Jackie had actually discovered her mutilated body and still had nightmares about it. Three of the four rooms in Philomena’s apartment had been splattered with blood. More blood than Jackie thought a human body contained.

  “I remember something about it not turning out to be who the police first suspected, right?” Diana asked.

  Jackie nodded.

  The police had three suspects. A maintenance man in the building where Philomena lived, who had once been arrested for rape, but had not been convicted. His name was Hector Milagros. The second suspect was a former boyfriend of Philomena’s named Dylan Kidd, who was a TV commercial director. The third was Angus Benedict, a businessman and Philomena’s wealthy fiancé.

  The detectives who caught the case talked to Benedict first at his West Side brownstone. He was a Managing Director of an English-based hedge fund and was overcome with grief, seemingly incapable of accepting the fact that his future wife had just been brutally murdered. The detectives showed him the least graphic crime-scene photos of his dead fiancée while he sobbed inconsolably. He claimed that Philomena and he had planned to have brunch together the next morning—a Sunday—at a place in the West Village. The detectives thanked him, said that they were sorry for his loss and that they’d be in touch as soon as they had something.

  Then they took in Milagros and put heavy pressure on him for seven straight hours in a closet-sized room at the downtown precinct house. He claimed to have been at his apartment in Bensonhurst watching TV when it happened, but had nobody who could back up his alibi. The long and the short was they couldn’t break him, and their attention shifted quickly when they talked to a few people who knew Dylan Kidd, the ex-boyfriend of Philomena’s. Turned out that Kidd, one of those men who was handsome in a three-day-growth, cleft chin, blue-eyed-badass kind of way, had kind of sketchy reputation. One of his ex-girlfriends volunteered that the main reason she was his ex-girlfriend was that she discovered he had more girlfriends than there were New York delis. Also, a friend of Philomena’s volunteered that she had heard Kidd had a habit of pulling out S&M paraphernalia after a few tequilas.

  After hearing this, the detectives went to Kidd’s apartment in Chelsea to talk to him. They hit his apartment buzzer on the building intercom. Kidd answered, they identified themselves as cops and he buzzed them up. Only problem was when they got up to his apartment on the twentieth floor, he wasn’t there.

  They got the building superintendent to let them in and found the stove on and a piece of uncooked salmon in a pan, along with a half-finished Heineken on a granite countertop.

  The detectives figured that Kidd had taken the back elevator or the stairway down while they were coming up on the front elevator. They put out an APB and tipped a TV reporter, who went on the eleven p.m. news and said that a “person of interest” in the Philomena Soames murder case had “eluded” the cops and was now the object of an “intensive, city-wide manhunt.”

  The next day Kidd walked into the precinct house and gave himself up. He explained that he had panicked and run. They put him in a small roo
m, too, and good cop/bad copped him for four straight hours. The real reason he ran, he said, was the fact that he had had dinner with Philomena the night she was killed at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. He figured the detectives had found that out and that’s why they were coming after him. He explained that he was trying to talk Philomena into giving their relationship another go, and she had allegedly told him she’d think about it.

  No way the cops bought that, though, since she was engaged to Angus Benedict. And because six hours after dinner with Kidd she was found viciously hacked to death. Kidd allowed that the police might reasonably jump to certain conclusions about his guilt.

  At that point, the detectives read him his rights and arrested him. The next day the front-page articles in both the Daily News and Post were about the arrest of Philomena Soames’s murderer. To juice up the stories, the papers made not-so-subtle references to handcuffs, leather masks and other sado-masochistic sex toys found at the apartment of the alleged killer.

  To everybody in New York, it looked like the cops had their man.

  Everybody except Jackie.

  Part of it was Jackie had inside knowledge. For one thing, Philomena had broken off her engagement with Angus Benedict three days before she was killed. The main reason, Philomena explained tearfully to Jackie, was that he was jealous of every man Philomena even looked at. He had actually assaulted an actor who had a sex scene with her in a movie that was never released. Five hours after he beat the hell out of the guy, Angus called the actor and offered him twenty-five thousand dollars to pretend it never happened. That was more than the actor made for any part he’d ever played. He took the money and kept his mouth shut.

  There also was the fact that Angus sometimes carried a pistol with him. When Philomena told Jackie that, Jackie said, “Are you kidding? That’s so totally un-British.”

  Philomena laughed and said, “British? The man’s as American as you are.”

  Turned out that Angus, nee Alan, had gone to Oxford and, overnight, morphed into an upper-crust Brit. Fact was, though, he had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in a little town outside of Buffalo, New York.

  The one time Angus had shown up at Philomena’s apartment when Jackie was there, he’d been wearing a bowler hat and carrying a black cane with an ornate gold knob. Philomena thought it was cute; Jackie thought it was ridiculous.

  Jackie was pretty sure that Philomena hadn’t told anybody else about breaking her engagement. She and Philomena had become incredibly close: best friends really. Which was why Jackie was going to do everything she could to make sure that Philomena’s killer went to jail for the rest of his life, though she would have preferred he get the chair, given the brutality of the murder.

  Philomena had told Jackie a number of times about Angus’ temper. How he’d go off on people who were driving too slowly when they were in front of his—what else?—Aston-Martin. Or how, one time, he reamed out a waiter who brought him a lime instead of a lemon. But mainly, it was his insane jealousy. Another time, a young guy recognized Philomena when she and Angus were walking down the street. The guy wanted to do a selfie of himself and Philomena. Angus grabbed the guy’s cell phone and stomped it into a hundred pieces.

  Jackie had actually been part of the reason Philomena had called off her marriage to Angus. One day after hearing Philomena’s latest story about her boyfriend’s temper, Jackie had asked simply: “Are you sure this is the guy you want to spend the rest of your life with?”

  Philomena didn’t answer, but the next day she broke it off.

  Then, three days later, Angus called Jackie and asked where Philomena was. Jackie knew but she didn’t tell him.

  Philomena was having dinner with Dylan Kidd at that very moment.

  Another thing: The talk about Dylan having sado-masochistic sex toys... Well, the fact was that Philomena had initiated him into the wonderful world of S&M.

  Call it S&M lite, but S&M, nevertheless.

  So, while Dylan was getting raked over the coals in the press for his twisted proclivities, the fact was that Philomena had pulled out the whips and hand cuffs first.

  All Jackie had was a hunch. That the cops had the wrong guy. But it was a strong hunch. So, she went and talked to the detectives who had arrested Kidd. She told them all about the broken engagement and everything that Philomena had told her about Angus Benedict. His volatile temper and his violent tendencies. In fairness, the detectives didn’t completely blow her off; they brought Angus back down to the station, where they re-interviewed him. Once more, he snowed them with his pseudo-English charm. He downplayed everything, admitting that everyone who ever came in contact with Philomena hit on her and how that got old but, hey, that’s the price you pay for falling in love with a movie actress. As for Philomena calling off the engagement, he flat-out denied it. He said that Jackie had never liked him and had just made it all up, even implied that Jackie liked Philomena in a way that was more than friend-to-friend.

  When the detective told Jackie that, she showed them she had a temper of her own, and as one detective wrote in his report, he had to “calm her down,” while assuring her that Dylan Kidd was indeed their man.

  So, what ended up happening was, Jackie took the law into her own hands.

  She called up Angus and said she had just read Philomena’s journal.

  “Her what?” Angus said, in an agitated voice she had heard a few times before.

  “Her journal,” Jackie said, “everything you always wanted to know about the life of Philomena Ashburn Soames.”

  “She didn’t have any journal,” Angus said, anger creeping into his voice.

  “Oh, really?” Jackie bluffed. “Would you like me to read you a few spicy excerpts? Alan.”

  Angus was silent but, she guessed, seething. “So, what’s your point? What are you after?” he asked at last.

  She didn’t hesitate. “I bet the newspapers would pay me a lot of money for this journal. But I’m giving you first crack. Three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “You’re fucking mad,” Angus said in his upper-crust English accent, and hung up.

  Exactly as Jackie expected, he called back a half hour later.

  “A check will be fine,” she answered when she saw his name on her cell. “I know you’re good for it.”

  “I want to come there and see this journal you claim to have.”

  “Sure,” she said, “come on over.”

  “Tonight,” he said. “Eight o’clock.”

  “Make sure you bring your checkbook,” she said.

  Then she called the detectives.

  She told them all about her conversation with Angus. It took some convincing, but she persuaded them to come to her apartment at 7:30. One of them hid in her coat closet, the other around the corner in the small butler’s pantry off her kitchen.

  At eight o’clock sharp her buzzer rang.

  Jackie buzzed Angus up, then went and got the journal she had bought four hours before at a neighborhood stationery shop. She left the door open and positioned herself on the far side of the living room.

  Angus walked in. He got right to business. “Let me see the damn thing.”

  “Let me see your checkbook first,” she said.

  He pulled out a pistol with a silencer instead and aimed it at her.

  “Jesus!” she cried, genuinely terrified.

  The two detectives, guns drawn, stepped out into the open, got Angus to drop his gun, cuffed him, and read him his rights.

  Five months later, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder.

  Jackie, who was still making a little more than minimum wage at Montana Pictures, decided she was ready for a career change.

  2

  Diana Milton’s mouth was agape. “That’s an incredible story,” she said as she hurriedly took notes. “You get a medal from the mayor, or something?”

  Jackie laughed. “Yeah, key to the city… made of plastic.”

  “So, after Philomena Soames, was that w
hen you decided you wanted to become a detective?”

  “No, it was furthest thing from my mind, actually,” Jackie said. “Something happened six months later: My college roommate’s son, actually my godson, went missing. My friend lived in Savannah—out on Wilmington Island, to be exact. Anyway, I flew down to comfort her more than anything else. She didn’t know if it was a kidnapping or what. Never got a note or anything. She was really distraught, as you can imagine. At the time she was separated from her husband, and needed someone.”

  Diana leaned closer. “So, what happened?”

  “Well, there wasn’t much to it. It was the obvious.”

  “The husband?”

  “Exactly. So, I found out where he was staying,” Jackie said, “went there, nosed around a little, and found out the boy was there. Then I waited in my car, just like in the movies, on a stake-out. Finally, the husband came out of the house, got in his car, and drove off. Turned out, he was just going to get some groceries. I thought it was pretty bad that he had left the boy there alone. Anyway, I just went in, told the boy his mother missed him, and he needed to come with me. That was pretty much it. Needless to say, my friend was relieved.”