Angel's Advocate (16 page)

The dogs growled. A slow, subterranean rumble like an aural earthquake. Bree whirled. Her secretary and her paralegal stood at the foyer.

“Oh, my God,” Ron said.

“Do not move, dear Bree,” Petru said. He raised his cane as if it were a weapon. “I will fend them off. And where is Sasha?”

“He’s in the break room,” Bree said cheerfully. “I thought you’d know these two. Miles and Belli.”

“ ‘War’ and her ‘Soldier’ brother.” Trust Petru to know his Latin. “And where have they come from?”

Ron edged into the room. “Oh, dear,” he said fretfully. “I don’t know, but I can guess. Armand sent for them, didn’t he?”

“You don’t know them?” Bree said in surprise. “You haven’t met them before?”

“Something has happened,” Petru said glumly. “Something not so good, I trust.”

“It’s all right,” Bree said to the dogs. “Hush now, hush.” The rumbling died away, as if an avalanche had rolled out of hearing. “Come into my office, then, you two.” She didn’t wait to accompany them, but forged ahead, and sat down behind her desk. Petru thumped in and took the sole chair. Ron perched on the edge of her desk. “Friday night, I went out to Melrose. Lavinia called on Striker to tell him that . . .” Bree paused and bit her lower lip.

“Somebody’s gotten over the Bridge,” Ron guessed. “But who?”

“Josiah, I guess,” Bree said lightly. “Anyhow, somebody, Archie, I think, suggested these guys as protection, and here they are.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m a little puzzled that you two don’t know about it.”

“Well, we had no idea,” Ron snapped. “Honestly. You should know, Bree, that this entire organization is run on a need-to-know basis. It’s something I’ve complained about for centuries.”

“This is a distressing turn of events,” Petru said glumly. “There is a hierarchy, to be sure. We are all aware of that. But I would have been glad to have been in the noose.”

“The loop, Petru, the loop,” Ron said crossly. “I’m not surprised nobody told you, but I’m somewhat flabbergasted that no one thought fit to tell
me
.”

“Now you both know. And let’s not borrow trouble until it shows up at the door,” Bree said briskly. “We’ve got a case to investigate. Two of them. And I, for one, feel much safer going on now that those two are in the picture.” She tapped her pen on her desktop. “We’ve got a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it in. Cordelia Eastburn is pushing Lindsey’s case as fast as she can. I haven’t seen you since Friday afternoon, but you should know that Lindsey’s absolutely refused to allocute to the robbery and Cordy’s headed for trial like a flipping locomotive. So you, Petru, need to dig up as much as you can on Probert, particularly anyone who had a grudge against him. Use the Internet and make me a list. And Ron? We need a complete reinvestigation of the accident out on Skidaway Road. And I want both of you to read over the pleadings for Chandler’s request for a retrial. I need a summary of all the cases cited in the original indictment.”

“This summary is a paralegal’s job, perhaps,” Petru said. “Ronald is not equipped to render an opinion on the pleadings.”

“I want
all
of us to read them,” Bree said firmly. “One of us may pick up something the others have missed. I’m including myself in this, too. Okay? Are we all set with the assignments? We’ll have a progress report tomorrow morning about this time.”

“I do
not
see the connection between this young girl’s case and our client,” Petru said. “But I will search diligently for such, dear Bree.”

“Thank you. I’ll be searching, too. I’m going to talk to Miss Madison Bellamy.” She smiled at the looks of in-comprehension on the faces of her colleagues. “Nobody knows a girl like her very best friend. And if Lindsey doesn’t want to dig herself out of the hole she’s in, let’s hope Madison does.”

Petru and Ron went off on their separate tasks. Bree recalled enough about juvenile law to know that everyone’s interests would be better served if she went through Madison’s parents first, so she called Madison’s mother to set up an appointment.

“She’s at school, of course, until just after three this afternoon,” Andrea Bellamy said over the phone. “Why don’t I ask her to leave school and come home right now?” She sounded anxious, and her tone held the sort of exasperation most parents reserve for their teenagers.

“I’ll be happy to come by later this afternoon,” Bree offered. “There’s no need to interrupt classes.”

“Classes,” Andrea Bellamy snorted. “It’s her senior year and she’s already been accepted at Pepperdine. Maddy’s body may be in class but the rest of her is in la la land. The school’s done a pretty good job of keeping the TV people off school grounds, but they’re waiting like a pack of vultures the minute the bell rings to let the kids out. All this attention isn’t doing anybody any good.”

Bree, realizing that Andrea Bellamy wasn’t going to come up for air anytime soon, interrupted firmly. “Then I’ll see you and Madison at three thirty this afternoon?”

“Sure! I’ll make you some latte. And maybe you can give me a clue about when all of this is going to die down.”

“Soon, I hope.”
If I can keep the miserable Lindsey from more grandstanding.

Bree rang off with relief. Madison had looked like a smart, sensible kid in the surveillance videotape. Maybe, just maybe, she was going to get somewhere with Lindsey’s defense. In the meantime, she wanted a clear idea of Probert Chandler’s movements on the last night of his life. There was just time enough to get a handle on that, before she was due out at the Bellamys’.

She’d begin with where Probert Chandler spent his final hours as a temporal: the Miner’s Club.

The Miner’s Club, a bastion of the Savannah Old Guard, was on Abercorn facing the Colonial Park Cemetery Square. James W. Oglethorpe had left a variety of legacies behind him, but the best was the layout of Historic Savannah herself. He’d divided the village into twenty-four town squares. Originally, each square was created as a center for some good civic purpose, like a church, a school, a park, or a government house. Each of the squares was surrounded by homes.

In the three hundred-some years of her history, Savannah had been burned to the ground, ravaged by hurricanes, and bombed by pirates. A hodgepodge of architectural styles was intrinsic to the city’s heritage. Queen Anne, Georgian, Victorian, Greek Revival, Spanish, and Art Deco homes existed peaceably cheek by jowl. The Miner’s Club occupied a large, New Orleans-type building that had housed, successively, an expatriate French duke, a whorehouse, an orphanage, and a flour tycoon. Bree drove the half mile down Liberty and parked on Abercorn, not far from the old mansion itself. The exterior was blue-green stucco. Scarlet bougainvillea wound its way across the wrought-iron porches and balconies and the last of the hydrangea bloomed like puff-balls against the wrought-iron fence.

Bree pushed open the heavy mahogany door and walked into a small foyer, covered in a thick blue wall-to-wall carpet. A second mahogany door led directly off the foyer. It was partly open. Bree heard the clink of glasses and the low hum of conversation. She pushed the door open all the way and walked into a wood-paneled bar and dining room.

The ceilings were low. A clutch of small round tables sat scattered next to the row of windows that overlooked the street. There were perhaps half a dozen people seated there, mostly men, mostly dressed in suits. Bree waited by the long polished bar until the man behind it finished polishing the doubles glass he held in his hand and put it on the shelf. “Montel,” she said, “how have you been?”

He turned and cocked his head a little. “Miss Beaufort,” he said, as if satisfied he’d identified the right species of bird. He came toward her, folding his bar towel into a neat square. “I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you how much we miss the judge.”

“The judge” was Bree’s great-uncle Franklin. His death, and the subsequent inheritance of his caseload, was the reason Bree had the practice on Angelus Street. She’d loved him, but been unnerved by what she’d learned about him after his death. She still wasn’t wildly happy about his legacy.

“He did enjoy coming here after sitting on the bench all day,” she said.

“May I get you something to drink?” Montel was a grave, slender black man who could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy, a well-known, well-liked fixture at the club.

Bree perched on the nearest bar stool. “Just a club soda, if you would.”

Montel took a slim Tom Collins glass from the shelf and filled it with ice, lemon, and club soda. Bree accepted it with thanks and sipped it gravely. She let the silence run on a bit. Then she said, “Uncle Franklin never talked much about Mr. Chandler. I understand he was a member here, too?”

Montel nodded thoughtfully.

“You recall he had that tragic accident just after he left here, the last night of his life.”

“Some four months ago, that would be.” Montel nodded. “Mm-hm. I do remember that.”

“Do you remember who he was with?”

“Now, the po-lice asked me that,” Montel said cautiously. “And he met with a number of folks, as I recall. Didn’t really sit down with nobody, though. Sat right where you are right now.”

Bree looked down at the bar stool. She hoped Probert wouldn’t choose this moment to make an appearance.

“Had him more than a few, he did.”

“Drinks?” Bree said.

“Drinks. Manhattans, as a matter of fact.”

“Hm,” Bree said. “His usual?”

“Not like the man at all. No, sir. Strictly a draft beer, if he was here during the week, and on one or another great occasion, a champagne cocktail. But that was about the extent of it. Until that night.”

“Did he seem upset at all?”

“That he did,” Montel said. “That he did.”

“Did he say anything to you? Perhaps mention why he was upset?”

A peculiar look chased itself across Montel’s face. “Well, Mr. Chandler was from up North,” he said. “He wouldn’t be of a mind to talk to me about that, now, would he? Or the members, either.” Bree remembered what her mother had said about Probert not being “local.”

“You didn’t, um . . .” Bree searched for a diplomatic way to ask if Montel had eavesdropped. There wasn’t one. “You didn’t happen to overhear anything you think I might need to know?” She lowered her voice. “I think we’re looking at a case of murder, here, Montel. I wouldn’t want you to betray a confidence, but it’s important.”

“Murder, you say.” Montel folded his bar towel into neat thirds. “Blood.”

“Blood?”

“He say something about blood. Into his cell phone. Mad-like.”

“Mad-crazy? Or mad-angry?”

“Angry. I would say very angry. He was so mad, he was like to spit.”

“Was this before he started drinking more heavily than usual?”

“Oh, yeah.” Montel nodded in a dignified way. “To my way of thinking, that phone call set him off.”

“And he finished how many Manhattans . . . ?”

“Four.”

“Yikes,” Bree said. “Four. And then staggered out of here and went on home?”

“Well, now, I suppose he did.” Montel smiled gently. “His permanent home, you might say.”

“You wouldn’t happen to recall who was here that night, offhand? People that knew Mr. Chandler?”

“Well, now, he come in with Mr. Lindquist, the one that he started his stores with. And his son, George, was here for a bit. But Mr. Lindquist went off to the opera with his wife. George, he drifted off somewheres. Mr. Stubblefield was here. The judge was here, as a matter of fact, and some others I could name. Mr. Chandler did stop and have a word with Mr. Peter Martinelli.”

Bree wrote the names in her notebook. “But Mr. Chandler wasn’t here with anyone in particular?”

“No, I can’t say that he was. Spent some time on his cell phone, though, after that one call that made him mad.” Montel frowned disapprovingly. You didn’t do business at the Miner’s Club, and cell phones were a particular anathema. But it was a lead, anyway. She could ask Hunter for Chandler’s cell phone records. And she could check on Peter Martinelli. The name rang a faint bell.

Bree fished the lemon slice out of her club soda and bit into it. “I may be back to ask more about this, Montel. Thank you kindly for your hospitality.”

“You’re entirely welcome. You take care, then.”

Bree went back into the crisp, sunny day not much wiser than she’d been going in. Except that Montel was a shrewd judge of character and hard to fool. Probert Chandler’s drinking the night of his death had been atypical. And a man not used to drinking, on a wet, curving road . . . easy pickings for anyone wanting to cause an accident.

Except that Skidaway Road wasn’t the quickest route back to the Chandler home. It was the quickest route out to the Marlowe’s on Highway 80.

Bree didn’t read a lot of detective stories—sometimes she thought she’d be better off in this new career of hers if she did—but she did recall a useful aphorism from a book she’d found abandoned in an airport on a trip out to Hawaii with her sister. The detective was a huge fat guy who never left his brownstone apartment. He had an athletic young assistant, whom he frequently admonished: never theorize in advance of the facts. Which was pretty good advice. So Bree put a clamp on her imagination—John Allen Lindquist murdering his former partner for acing him out of Marlowe’s billions? Son George killing off Dad to get more shares?—and drove out to the fatal bend in Skidaway Road.

Bree had reviewed the police diagrams of the accident thoroughly. The car had gone off the road opposite a little white house surrounded by a white picket fence. Bree parked her car a fair way beyond the bend of the road, to avoid getting clobbered by traffic headed the other way, and walked back to the spot where it’d happened.

The guardrail was bent, whether from Chandler’s accident or another, Bree couldn’t tell. She hiked her skirt above her knees and stepped over it. The bank dropped abruptly to a deep swale choked with kudzu. Bree made a face. Four months since the car had gone over the side, and the greenery had grown so rapidly, so ferociously, that there wasn’t a sign of where the car had actually landed.