“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind. Just put McKissick on the line. Tell him it’s Virginia Gunn.”
After several minutes on hold with the local easy-listening station being broadcast today from Raymond Smith’s Toyota on Glynn Boulevard, Sean came back on the line, clearly uncomfortable with lying, but maintaining all the professionalism her nineteen years could muster. “The Chairman is in a meeting. May I take a message?”
“Why do you insist on calling him ‘the Chairman’ every single time?” Virginia had asked. “Did he tell you to do that? You know what? Never mind. I know he did. That pompous ass. Just give him a message. Tell him I’m calling from over in room one-fourteen of the Jekyll Island Days Inn with a very important message for him and his wife. I’ll hold.”
No need to hold. Thirty minutes later, they met in person. Virginia recounted the tale for her guests. Toby parking surreptitiously outside one of the Island’s only restaurants. The Oyster Box. She walked over to his car and got in.
“Okay, Virginia, what is it this time?” he demanded. “Worried about the sea turtles again? Get over it, Virginia, the Island’s changing. You can’t stop progress. Haven’t you ever heard that? Move on with your life. Have you ever thought of actually getting a real job? And what’s the deal with the Days Inn, was that supposed to mean something to me?”
Virginia said nothing, just relaxed back in the leather seats and studied McKissick’s smooth pink face up close.
She couldn’t believe she was noticing only then for the first time, after having known the man for twelve years, that he was the only person she had ever come across who had both a toupee and dandruff. Her powers of perception were diminishing.
“Then what happened?” Dottie prodded, and Virginia realized she was stalling the story with details.
“Then I pushed the tape into the tape deck”-she got to the good part-“and when that tape started to roll, McKissick nearly wet his pants right there on the seat of his Lexus! Of course, it’s leased. He tried to eject it, but you know what I did?”
They shook their heads, rapt. No, they didn’t know. But they wanted to.
“I pushed it right back in and turned up the volume. A truck pulled right beside us, so he couldn’t very well smack me. Ha!”
Yes, both Virginia and her archenemy Toby McKissick had been well aware that a physical confrontation in the parking lot of the Oyster Box would be all over the Island by four thirty the same afternoon.
“He was over a barrel,” Virginia told her guests.
“What was on the tape?” Renee persisted, and Virginia told them, explaining how she got her cleaning lady of eighteen years, Marta, to get the tape from McKissick’s cleaning lady, Luisa. The audio quality was pretty good, under the circumstances, and any moron could make out Luisa and her boss, Chairman McKissick, on the phone planning a tryst at the Jekyll Island Days Inn twenty miles away and across the bridge.
“That first tape alone would have gone a long way to saving the ecosystem,” she told her guests as she poured more tequila into the blender. “It was the second tape, though, that did the trick. It was made the same day from a recorder strategically placed under the bed in room one-fourteen, their regular.”
Everyone shook their heads, completely grossed out.
“The things on that tape should never be heard by anyone,” Virginia declared, “much less his wife. So McKissick had to listen to the entire tape trapped inside his Lexus while I laughed like crazy.”
Virginia flipped the blender on “High.”
“Then came the Commission meeting that night. I sat on the back row of the Glynn County Middle School auditorium and listened to McKissick go on and on about the old bridge.”
And he did it with feeling. “It’s not just a bridge, people. It’s not just a road. It stands as a tribute to this Island’s great history, a historic piece of art, in fact. I say ‘no.’ ‘No’ to those who would destroy that monument that represents the spirit of the Island…our Island. Who of you will join with me and take up this cause? Who will be brave? Join hands with me, my fellow commissioners! Let us fight this destruction together. Save the old bridge!”
McKissick’s forehead glistened under the auditorium’s bright overhead lights, usually reserved for night basketball games.
It was clear to a blind man that McKissick was now desperate to stop the new bridge. He could have passed for a fervent evangelical preacher straight from the heart of the snake-handling, tongue-speaking bunch.
The other commissioners looked dazed and confused. Did he literally want them to stand and join hands? they wondered. Or was it figurative?
“You should have seen it,” she said, laughing through her Salem Light, still pursed between her lips while she talked. The blender had stopped.
“All those middle-aged guys visibly recoiling at hand-holding in the auditorium. They were like little lost sheep, asked to improvise their votes right there on the spot. They didn’t dare speak out and make it part of the official record.”
So in the end, she recalled, when McKissick called for the vote and raised his own hand, displaying the very sweaty armpit of his white Brooks Brothers, the others-after searching McKissick’s face for any nonverbal sign to tell them what the hell they were supposed to do-followed suit.
Virginia went around refilling every glass. “That brand-new, beautiful, and magnificent four-laner was voted down unanimously. Not one person in the room expected them to do that-not even themselves. It wasn’t at all what they’d agreed to ahead of time at the Catfish Cove in Brunswick. And progress stopped cold right there in the Glynn County Middle School auditorium.”
They all nodded.
The old two-lane with a single toll keeper still stood between St. Simons and Savannah on the mainland. There would be no convenient four-laner inviting in tourists by the vanload clocking sixty mph. Not on this island.
Not if Virginia Gunn had anything to do with it.
18
Atlanta, Georgia
EIGHT THIRTY SHARP, MATT LEONARD WALKED BRISKLY INTO THE darkened bar at Atlanta’s Piedmont Driving Club.
He immediately spotted Sims Regard, sitting on a burgundy leather barstool. Regard, the first lieutenant for Floyd Moye Eugene, hadn’t yet spotted him. Leonard paused-only for a split second-to steel himself.
Had an acquaintance been watching, they might have noted that Maltin’s move was utterly out of character. As the name partner in the criminal defense law firm known simply as “the Leonard Firm”-and, coincidentally, the baby brother to the chairman of the powerful Senate Revenue Apportionments Committee-Matt Leonard was one of the most sought-after criminal defense lawyers in the South.
This deal, however, was in the big leagues.
He’d never had anything to do with Eugene-in fact he had studiously avoided him over the years.
The two of them were about to reverse a trend that had lasted for decades, and its effects would reverberate all the way down the state to the tip of the Georgia Coast.
Regard spotted him. “Matt.”
“Sims.”
They shook hands.
Leonard ordered a scotch, then got right down to business, speaking in a low voice though the bar was nearly empty.
“Look, I get it. It’s up on appeal now and it looks pretty grim for the defense. How can Carter deliver? He’s just one out of nine. Plus, this calls for an outright reversal, with prejudice, so Cruise walks and the State can’t re-try him.”
Regard took a pull off his drink before speaking. “Simple rotation. Carter was assigned to write the opinion months ago. That little snot of a law clerk told us right over the phone about the assignment. Otherwise, we’d have targeted one of the other judges.”