Killing Time in Charleston, page 1
part #1 of Nick Janzek Charleston Series
Killing Time in Charleston
A Nick Janzek Charleston Mystery (Book 1)
Tom Turner
Tribeca Press
Copyright © 2019 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
Killing Time in Charleston/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
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Charleston Buzz Kill (Excerpt)
Chapter 1
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tom Turner
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One
A year after what happened in Boston, Janzek flew down to Charleston, South Carolina, for his college roommate’s wedding. It took him about five minutes to fall in love with the place. Beautiful old houses, five-star restaurants on every block, streets crawling with killer women and, best of all, no snow in the forecast. What was not to love?
He had wandered off from his friend’s wedding reception with Cameron, the twenty-eight-year-old sister of the bride. Together they discovered the culinary gusto of an out-of-the-way spot called Trattoria Lucca, then followed it up with some jamming music at a quasi-dive he figured he’d never be able to find again. Last thing he remembered was teetering down a cobblestone street, arm around Cameron’s shoulder, looking for a place that had either Lion or Tiger in its name. That Cameron, what a handful she turned out to be.
The day after the wedding he canceled his return flight to Logan Airport, then on Monday morning walked into the Charleston Police Department on Lockwood Street. The résumé he had knocked out in his hotel room that morning had a typo or two in it, but that didn’t seem to bother the chief of detectives who hired him on the spot.
Now, three months later, he was coming down the home stretch: Interstate 26, just north of Charleston. The first half of the trip down had been a little dicey, since the day he had picked for the move had turned out to be especially cold and windy. He was driving a U-Haul, his car on a hitch behind it, and had been wrestling the steering wheel of the orange-and-white cube the whole way down. A few miles before Wilmington, Delaware, a gusty blast blew him into the path of a rampaging sixteen-wheeler, which roared up on his bumper like an Amtrak car that had jumped the tracks. It was a close call, but things quieted down after he hit the Maryland border.
He had the window down now and was taking in the warm salt air, which reminded him of the Cape when he was a kid and life was easy. He was looking forward to the slow, Southern pace of Charleston. Kicking back with a plate full of shrimp and grits, barbeque and collards, or whatever the hell it was they were so famous for, then washing it all down with a couple of Blood Hounds, a bare-knuckled rum drink bad girl Cameron had introduced him to.
He was thinking about how he might get his lame golf game out of mothballs, psyched about being able to play year-round. One thing he’d miss would be opening day at Fenway, but he’d heard about Charleston’s minor league baseball team and figured it would be good for a few grins. One thing he’d never miss would be staring down at stiffs on the mean streets of Beantown.
The ring of his cell phone broke the reverie. He picked it up, looked at the number, and didn’t recognize it.
“Hello.”
“Nick, it’s Ernie Brindle. Where y’at?” Brindle was the Charleston chief of detectives, the man who had hired him.
“Matter of fact, Ernie, I’m just pulling into Charleston. A few miles north. Why, what’s up?”
Brindle sighed. “Looks like it’s gonna be trial by fire for you, bro. I’m looking down at a dead body on Broad Street... it’s the mayor. The ex-mayor, guess that would be. How fast can you get here?”
Janzek had figured he’d at least get a chance to unload his stuff from the U-Haul before his first-day punch-in.
“Thing is, Ernie, I’m driving this big old U-Haul with all my junk in it. Can’t I just drop it—”
“No, I need you right now. Corner of Broad and Church.”
Janzek stifled a groan. “Is Church before or after King Street?”
“Two blocks east. Just look for a guy under a sheet and every squad car in the city. Not every day the mayor gets smoked.”
“Okay, I’m getting off I-26. I see a sign for King Street.”
“You’re just five minutes away,” Brindle said. “Welcome to the Holy City.”
“Thanks,” Janzek said. “Kinda wish it were under different circumstances.”
Janzek rumbled down Meeting Street, breathing in the fragrant scent of tea olive trees. He got stuck behind a garbage truck and his first instinct was to lay on the horn, but something told him you didn’t do that in Charleston. Up ahead, he saw a horse-drawn carriage jammed with gawkers. The garbage truck and the carriage were side by side—like blockers—creeping along at ten miles an hour. The smell of horse manure wafted through his open windows and replaced the sweet tea olive smell.
Janzek finally saw an opening, hit the accelerator, and slipped between the truck and the carriage. Broad Street was just ahead. He had never seen so many squad cars except at an Irish captain’s funeral up in Southie. Ernie Brindle was keeping an eye out for him, and when he saw the U-Haul pull up, he directed Janzek past the long line of black-and-whites to a spot in front of a fire hydrant. Janzek got out and walked over.
Brindle, a short, intense guy with hair he didn’t spend much time on, eyeballed Janzek’s mode of transportation. “Jesus, Nick, not just a U-Haul but dragging a sorry-ass Honda behind it?” Brindle shook his head. “Thought you were s’posed to be a big-time homicide cop.”
Janzek glanced back at the car that had served him long and loyally. “I’m not much of a car guy, Ernie.”
Janzek looked down at the body sprawled half on and half off the sidewalk. Brindle pulled the sheet back. The late mayor was dressed in an expensive-looking blue suit, which was shredded and splattered with blood. A crushed gold watch dangled loosely from his wrist.
“So, what exactly happened?” Janzek asked, looking around at the cluster of cops, crime scene techs, and a man he assumed was the ME.
“According to a witness,” Brindle said, “he was crossing the street when a black Mercedes 500, goin’ like a bat out of hell, launched him twenty feet in the air.”
“So... intentional then?” Janzek said.
“Yeah, for sure. Guy said he saw the driver aiming a gun.”
“In case he couldn’t take him out with the car?”
Brindle nodded. “I guess.”
“Pointing it out the window?”
“Uh-huh,” Brindle said.
“So, he was a lefty,” Janzek said. “Guy say whether he fired it or not?”
“He didn’t think so. Didn’t hear anything, anyway.”
“How’d he know it was a 500?”
“He’s a car salesman,” Brindle said. “On his way to the bank.”
Janzek knelt down next to the body to get a closer look. It was clear the mayor had landed on his face. His nose was shoved off to one side, and his forehead and cheeks looked like a sheet of salmon.
The guy he figured for the ME, who’d been talking to two men nearby, came up and eyeballed him with a who-the-hell-are-you? look.
“Jack,” Brindle said to the man, “this is Nick Janzek, new homicide guy.” Then to Janzek, “Jack Martin is our esteemed, pain-in-the-ass ME.”
“Good one,” Martin said, crouching down next to the body, then looking up at Janzek. “So, how come you caught this one, Nick?”
Janzek didn’t know the answer.
“’Cause I liked his sheet,” Brindle said.
“Who you got him with?” Martin asked Brindle.
“Delvin.”
Martin shook his head and glanced over at Janzek. “Urkel? Good fuckin’ luck.” Then he noticed the blue parka Janzek was wearing. “You plannin’ on goin’ skiing or something, Nick?”
Janzek glanced down at his coat. “Just drove down from Boston. Weather was a little different up there.”
Martin nodded and kept looking Janzek over.
“Hey, Jack,” Brindle said, “how ‘bout examining the mayor ’stead of Janzek?”
Martin ignored him. “Boston, huh?”
“Yeah,” Janzek said. “Massachusetts.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” Martin said, looking over Janzek’s shoulder at the U-Haul. He shook his head, shot Brindle a look, and muttered, “Just what we need down here.”
“What’s that?” asked Brindle.
“Another frickin’ wiseass Yankee.”
Two
Picture Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind, a two-story Greek Revival-style house with enough piazza and balcony space for a small platoon of soldiers to do marching drills. Leading up to it was a long, perfect allée of live oak trees and, in between, a smooth tabby driveway. A black butler in a dark suit, white shirt, and a tie with the logo and coat of arms of Pinckney Hall on it watched from the porch as Ned Carlino pulled up in his Tesla Roadster.
Carlino got out, stretched, and looked around as Jeter, the butler, walked down the last few steps to greet him.
“Hey, Mr. Carlino,” Jeter said, his bushy white eyebrows arching, “welcome back to Pinckney.”
“Thanks, Jeter. Good to be back.”
Ned Carlino, fifty-four years old and a stocky five eight, was not a man you’d ever mistake for Rhett Butler. Born in a socially unacceptable suburb of Philadelphia, he had gotten a scholarship to Villanova, then another one to Harvard Law, and quickly became one of the best ambulance chasers around. Back then, his card read Personal Impairment Attorney, but everyone knew.
His first big case came at age twenty-six when Hector Nunez, the hotheaded, power-hitting, Philadelphia Phillies right fielder, lost it after a called third strike in the fifth game of the playoffs and flung his bat in disgust. It clanged off the metal railing in the boxes to the left of the Phillies dugout, then bounced off the head of an out-of-work cleaning lady from across the river in Camden.
Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her.
Carlino, who was watching the game in a bar because he hadn’t paid his cable bill, beat it over to Thomas Jefferson Hospital—where he figured they’d take her—in just twenty minutes. Practically beat the ambulance. He crept up to a woman at the nurse’s station in the ER and told her he was a cousin of the woman who had been hit by the bat, even though she was sixty and Hispanic. The nurse looked at him funny, but Ned was not about to be deterred.
Long story short, the former cleaning lady, Ned’s new client, got four million dollars when his expert witness convinced the jury that she would have constant migraines and possibly life-altering seizures for the rest of her life. The expert witness was convincing, and Ned, even more so. Half of the four million went to the woman and the other half to Carlino’s firm, Suozzi and Scarpetta—or Sleazy and Sleazier as one TV news reporter dubbed it. Carlino managed to wangle nearly a million for himself. He immediately paid off his cable bill, bought a BMW, and moved to the Main Line. After five years of following his sensitive nose to massive settlements—including one where he represented the widow of a three-pack-a-day smoker and wangled twenty million dollars out of National Tobacco Company—he decided to seek legal respectability and become a trial lawyer.
That was thirty years ago, and, surprisingly, a few of the big Philadelphia white-shoe, establishment firms pursued him despite his low-born Italian heritage and somewhat unsavory reputation. Because—unsavory or not—Ned Carlino was a winner. Along the way, in the great tradition of most American success stories, Carlino decided he needed to burnish his image and erase all hints of his past. He first became a prodigious collector of modern art, outbidding a Connecticut hedge fund owner on a Jim Dine and several Jasper Johns. Then, in addition to his townhouse in Rittenhouse Square and his Nantucket beach house, he bought a third house on the Intracoastal in Palm Beach and a fourth on Sullivan’s Island outside of Charleston. Three years after that, he sprang for the five-thousand-acre Pinckney Hall plantation, forty minutes south of Charleston. Lastly, he became a philanthropist and sat on the boards of a hospital and a library in Philadelphia, to which he had just donated nine million dollars for a twenty-thousand-square-foot wing. The Edward G. Carlino Research Library was etched elegantly into the building’s limestone facade.
“Jeter, grab my bag in the trunk and take it upstairs,” Carlino said. “I’m going over to the guest house.”
Jeter smiled wide, and his teeth looked like a freshly painted picket fence. “William is waitin’ on you there, sir.”
Carlino walked across the driveway, then down the antique-brick path to the guest house where he pushed open the massive mahogany door, which he’d had shipped over from a tumbledown manor house in England. He walked into the vast living room, painstakingly decorated piece by piece by Madeline Littleworth Mortimer herself. He waved at William across the room and gestured that he needed a drink. William nodded eagerly and reached for the Myers’s rum bottle.
The first girl he saw was Ashley. Twenty-three, give or take, she was wearing black-and-silver spandex tights, a gypsy top, and red jellies—teen dream, circa 1994. She was shoving quarters into an antique slot machine, which was lined up next to a collector’s item Gottlieb pinball machine on the far wall. She looked up and gave him a Marilyn Monroe pop of the lips and a fluttery smile.
Justine was sitting in a pudgy, leather couch facing a huge fireplace with a mantelpiece from a Normandy castle. She was wearing a miniskirt with pin-striped tights, a white silk top, and Tory Burch flats. Under the tights was one of the best pairs of legs in South Carolina. The look was girl-who’ll-do-practically-anything-to-get-ahead, circa 2018.
“Hey, Mr. C,” she said, her hoop earrings jiggling beneath her Jennifer Aniston haircut. She came up to him and gave him a prodigious kiss on the lips. “So glad you’re back, lover boy… I missed you desperately.” She knew exactly what he wanted to hear.
He kissed her back, then reached down and cupped her remarkably perfect breasts. She smiled up at him and pretended to like getting pawed.
“Missed you too, honey,” he said, marveling at how tight her stomach was, “but I told you, lose the Mr. C, it makes me feel old.”
“Sorry… Ned,” Justine said with a wink. “I got the sheets all turned down.”
“Hold on, girl, I haven’t even had my first drink yet.”
Martha was sitting on a barstool as Carlino approached. She turned to face him. William, behind her, was adding a lime wedge to his drink. Martha, twenty-five and runway-model striking, was dressed in a short tartan skirt. Her legs were spread, a few inches beyond discreet, revealing a black thong and light coffee-colored thighs. Bad girl cheerleader, circa... hard to tell.
“Welcome home,” she purred.
Carlino walked over and kissed her on the lips.
“Oh, baby, can’t wait to rip your clothes off,” she whispered and winked at William, who pretended not to be listening, “and do all those naughty things you like so much.” She was the one who talked dirty, but in such a refined way.
