Angel's Advocate (23 page)

Probert Chandler’s two older children walked into the room. George looked exactly like a twenty-something Harry Truman, down to the wire-rimmed glasses and the genial smile. Katherine was a tubby, untidy woman with soft brown hair and sensible shoes. She was dressed in an extremely well cut pantsuit.

Both of them looked worried.

“Where’s Lindsey?” Carrie-Alice demanded.

“We’d hoped she was here.” George looked around the living room. “She’s not?”

Katherine sat down in a chintz chair with a grunt of annoyance. “We walked all over the darn multiplex looking for her, Mother. And then when we decided to give up and come home, we discovered that she’d swiped the car. And she’s not answering her cell phone.”

“She got up to go to the john and didn’t come back,” George said. “Kath went in to look for her and she wasn’t anywhere to be found.” He bent over the tea tray and took a cookie. “We had to take a cab back here. Cost me eighty bucks.”

“She can’t have gotten far,” Bree said. “She’s wearing the ankle bracelet, isn’t she?”

“I didn’t think of that!” George said. He scowled. “What do we do now? Call the police?”

“More police,” Katherine wailed. “I can’t stand it!”

“If she’s gone out of the permissible range of the signal, the police will be tracking her,” Bree said. “She’s not a high-priority risk. If she were, the police would have contacted you by now. But yes, it’d be a good idea to call. You want her brought back here, I take it?”

“Would they keep her downtown?” Katherine asked. The three Chandlers looked meaningfully at each other. Katherine spoke first. “Just kidding. Of course she’s got to come back here. This is her home.”

Bree nodded. She took out her cell and dialed the station number from memory. “They’ve got her on radar, so to speak,” Bree said, after she concluded the call. “It shouldn’t be long.”

“This is Miss Winston-Beaufort,” Carrie-Alice said belatedly. “She’s here because the DA’s office is willing to bargain, or negotiate, or something. We may not have to go to trial after all.”

“So we got that Eastburn woman to see some sense,” George said. “Good.”

Bree took a closer look at him. There was a lot she needed to know from Mr. George Tyburn Chandler. “Did you have something to do with this, Mr. Chandler? This sudden”—she searched for a politic word—“accommodation on the part of the State?”

“Me?” His glance slid sideways. “There’ve been some discussions on how to handle this at the home office, sure. I wasn’t about to see my little sister spend time in the joint.”

The slang sat awkwardly on him, like an ill-fitting suit.

“The discussions seem to have borne fruit,” Bree said dryly. “I think if we petition the DA’s office to dismiss the charges based on time served, we’ll be successful.”

“What about this upset tonight?” Katherine asked. She joined her brother at the plate of cookies. “She’s breaking parole, or something.”

“We’ll see,” Bree said. “But I don’t think the DA’s any more anxious to pursue this than you are.”

“She’s here on another matter, too,” Carrie-Alice said. “It’s about your father.”

“Dad?” George brushed crumbs from his chin. “Something about Dad?”

Bree got up and strolled toward him, so she could see his face clearly. She was going to hold her questions about the warehouse robberies in reserve, until Ron came back with more information and until she’d talked to Sam Hunter. “Yes, there’s some pretty compelling evidence that the car crash that killed him was no accident. That it was murder.”

The word hung in the air like dirty laundry.

“What!” Katherine clapped her hands over her mouth. Then she said, “You’ve got to be kidding. This is some kind of horrible joke.”

George shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a joke. And I think Miss Beaufort’s right.” He nodded at her. “I’ve had a lot of questions about Dad’s death. It’s about time someone else had questions, too.”

“She wants to look into it more,” Carrie-Alice said. “More reporters hanging around the house. More news stories. I can’t stand it.”

“We’ve got to do what’s right.” George sat down on the couch next to his mother and took out his checkbook. “So we’ll hire her to get right on with it.”

“So that kind of squashes any hope I had of patricide,” Bree said.

Antonia choked on her yogurt. “Will you
listen
to yourself?”

Bree grinned. “I’m a tough cookie, aren’t I?”

Antonia waved her spoon in the air. “The toughest! I’m so proud. That’s my sister, folks.” She sang (and paraphrased) Professor Higgins’s song about being an ordinary man: “
‘She has the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein. A simple girl she is, down to her fingertips, the sort who never could, never would, let a rude opinion pass her lips.’
I did tell you we’re doing
My Fair Lady
after the Holmes run is over, didn’t I? What do you want to bet on me doing Eliza?”

“I won’t bet on a certainty.”

Antonia looked enormously pleased.

The two of them lay relaxed in the living room. Antonia was on her third cup of yogurt. Bree was too tired to eat anything. She’d driven home from the Chandlers’ with a check for five thousand dollars in her briefcase and a hollow taste of victory in her mouth. “I totally get it about your cynicism, though.”

Bree was startled. “Was that cynical? Am I getting cynical?”

“And why not? You’ve told me over and over again that justice works just as well for the rich as it does for the poor . . .”

“Most times,” Bree said. “I said most times.”

“And here’s a prime example of a little brat princess getting off of a particularly heinous crime . . .”

“I wouldn’t call snatching a shoebox of money from a Girl Scout heinous,” Bree said doubtfully. “Crummy. Impulsive. Ill judged. But not heinous. Heinous is whacking poor old Probert Chandler over the head with a giant flashlight and leaving him for dead in the rain.”

“True,” Antonia said soberly, “very true.”

“But I am glad that I can proceed with the investigation into Chandler’s death with some legitimacy now.” She chuckled. “Although George may not like the commotion over the warehouse robberies, if robberies they were, and if we’re able to get the police department on to them. This is all connected somehow, Tonia. I’m sure of it.”

“It is?”

“Absolutely. The Girl Scout incident, the warehouse robberies, Chandler’s murder—all three.”

“If you say so,” Antonia said dubiously. “You’re pretty sure of yourself, don’t you think? Isn’t Daddy always telling us not to jump to conclusions? Feels to me like you’re doing the broad jump.”

Daddy didn’t have a ghostly client telling him the case rested on those connections, either. But Bree didn’t say that aloud.
Lindsey. Marlowe’s. Blood. Blood. Blood.

“Don’t you think it’s truly weird that the corporation’s making this big effort to keep the warehouse robberies out of the news? And isn’t it even weirder that they’re managing to do it? Can you imagine covering up that scale of crime?”

Antonia shrugged.

“So the question is Why? I know why,” she answered herself. “Bad publicity is a big part of it. Like a clutch of Caesar’s wives, they are. Needing to be above suspicion or reproach. But there’s something else. And I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

Antonia yawned. “So you’ve got another fat-cat paying client, Bree. Good on you. But what convinced you that this Chandler was murdered? I mean, you figured that out way before all this stuff about the autopsy and the eyewitness statement from poor old Mrs. Nussbaum came out.” A looked of pleased awe came over her face. “Hey! Maybe you’re psychic! Are you, Bree? Would that be totally cool, or what?”

Bree shook her head and glanced nervously at her twin sentinels. Belli and Miles sat on either side of the fireplace, staring at them both with yellow eyes. Antonia had anticipated the need for a hundred-pound bag of dog food and picked up a huge bag of Iams on her way back from her afternoon duties at the theater. She’d fed the two huge dogs herself, and Miles, at least, had unbent enough to lick her face. That was enough for Tonia, who loved animals as much as Bree did, as long as, she said, they didn’t remind her of a Godzilla movie.

“Which, you know, they still do. Remind me of a Godzilla movie, that is. But it’s a nice kindly Godzilla, not the pissed-off one.”

“Hm?” Bree had been gazing up at the mirror over the fireplace. The frame was made of some old bronzy metal. She remembered the day Great-Uncle Franklin had dragged it into the town house. She’d been about ten, she thought, and the family was taking a long weekend in Savannah, as they occasionally did. Her mother had pitched a fit. A Francesca-style fit wasn’t all that dramatic, unless you were a family member and used to her generally sunny disposition. “Remember Mamma demanding that Uncle Franklin take that mirror to the dump?”

“No. Should I?”

“You were about four at the time. So never mind.”

They were both sprawled on the couch in front of the fireplace. Antonia poked Bree with her toe. “How come you didn’t call me back earlier today? The theater’s dark on Mondays. I thought maybe we’d go down to Huey’s for a big shrimp salad. But it’s too late now.”

“Phone calls,” Bree said. “Darn. I meant to call Sam Hunter back. But you’re right. It’s too late now.”

“Oh, yeah?” Antonia wriggled her eyebrows. “Maybe
he
wanted to take you out to Huey’s.”

“It’s more likely he called to tell me to butt out of the Chandler case. Ron was over at the PD today, scarfing up autopsy and forensic reports. That’s bound to set him off.”

“But he’s going to change his mind now, right?” Antonia yawned suddenly. “Gosh. It’s only ten thirty, and I’m beat. I think I’m going to go to bed early for a change.”

Bree grabbed her sister’s ankle and shook it affectionately. “Good idea. I’m going to take a long hot bath, and go to bed myself.”

“Well, I’m taking a long hot bath first.”

“Make it a shower and use the little bathroom, will you? I don’t want to hang around waiting for you to finish piddling around.”

Antonia flounced off the couch and made a rude noise. But a few minutes later, Bree heard her banging around in the small bathroom, so she got up and unpinned her hair. Sasha, who’d been dozing in the middle of the living room floor, woke suddenly and stared intently at the phone on the stand by the front door.

The phone rang. Bree froze. The sound was insistent and invasive, and she was very sure she didn’t want to answer it. Sasha looked at her.

“How bad, Sasha? It’s not Mamma, is it? Or my father?”

Sasha squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, and the worst fear ebbed from Bree’s heart. But she still didn’t want to answer the phone.

The bathroom door banged open. “Are you going to get that?!” Antonia shrieked excitedly from the hall. “It might be L.A. calling! It’s only seven thirty there!”

Belli and Miles growled like a pair of ore trams rattling through the depths of a mine.

“Bree!”
Antonia danced angrily into the room, wearing a large towel, sarong-style, and a furious expression. “For God’s sake!”

“Why would L.A. be calling?”

“Because I’ve signed up with an agent there, that’s why. You knew that.” She grabbed the handset and said, with an abrupt change of tone, “Hel-lo. Antonia Winston-Beaufort here. Oh. It’s you. Yes. She’s here.”
Sam Hunter,
she mouthed at Bree. “And she was going to call you back today, Lieutenant, but as you know she’s busy busy bus—”

Bree snatched the phone out of her hand. “Hello, Lieutenant. Why am I sure I don’t want to hear what you have to tell me? It’s not Lindsey, is it?”

“Lindsey Chandler? No. Patrol picked her up about forty-five minutes ago and took her home. I called because of something else.”

“What is it? Where are you?”

“I’m at the Seaton Stud. The owner here, Missy Trask, asked me to call you.”

“Missy couldn’t call me herself?” Bree said stupidly. “Is she all right? What’s wrong?” An urgent, utter panic hit her. “Abel? Is Abel okay?”

“She’s in a bit of a state.” Hunter was tired, and when he was tired, he got brusque. “Might be a good idea if you can get on over here.”

“Lieutenant!” Bree’s voice was tight. “What’s going on? Why are you there?”

“Why?” he asked grimly. “Because I’m at a crime scene, Miz Beaufort, looking at the body of Shirley Chavez, lately of this parish.”

What? All my pretty little chickens?

—
Macbeth
, Shakespeare

“This is
all
your fault!” Missy Trask’s face was blotched with tears and cold with rage. “Stirring things up! You come out here with those damn black dogs like some damn vulture and look. Just
look
!” Her sturdy body quivered with fury. She wore the clothes she’d worn that afternoon. The flannel shirt was the worse for wear; she’d pulled the tail free from her jeans to wipe her face and tucked half of it into her waistband. The other half flapped free.