Angel's Verdict (9 page)

Bree’s dead clients frequently came to her through such objects.

Bree bent and picked up the jewel.

She wasn’t disappointed.

The apparition trickled from the jewel like water pooling from a narrow crevice. It was dark—more an absence of light than any particular gray or black—and formed itself into a shape that was vaguely human. A woman, Bree decided, or womanlike, at least.

“I’m Brianna Beaufort,” she said. “Have you come to me for help?”

“Help . . .” The voice was less than a whisper, almost less than sound.

“You’re Consuelo Bulloch?”

The shadow swayed. It might have been a nod. It might have been a wind from whichever circle of Hell poor Consuelo had been sentenced to. A faint echo sounded: “Yes.”

Not for the first time, Bree was frustrated by the dysfunctional modes of communication between her and her clients. There didn’t seem to be too much she could do about it, although she had filed a petition protesting the current process with Goldstein, the recording angel at the Celestial Hall of Records. Dead souls, she’d argued, should have the right to unobstructed dialogue with counsel. Goldstein had been amused, but at least he’d sent the petition on to wherever it was supposed to go.

“Have you come to me regarding the murder of Haydee Quinn?”

The shadow flared briefly into an angry flame.

“Haydee . . .” The malice in the shadow’s voice came through loud and clear.

“You’d like me to file an appeal on your behalf, Mrs. Bulloch?”

“Yes. Yes. Help me! Treachery . . .” The shadow sighed. “Treachery . . .”

The shade of Mrs. Bulloch trickled away as slowly as it had arrived. Bree tucked the brooch into her briefcase and took out her cell phone. She’d call the Angelus office and get the staff moving on collecting the existing filings on the Quinn case. Flurry Smith would be a good source of background data, too. She’d schedule an interview with the scriptwriter as soon as possible.

“Ready to go?”

Bree jumped. She’d been so absorbed in planning the case that she hadn’t noticed Dent come into the room. He held a small cardboard pastry box.

“Yes, I’m ready.” She gestured toward the box. “I see you got the beignets.”

“They gave me a couple extra. You look like you could use a good feed.”

“Thank you,” Bree said in surprise. “It’s been a long day. I’d like a beignet.”

“I like a woman with a little more meat on her bones than you have.” He handed over the box. “There’s one for your sister and your colored friend, too.”

Bree took a deep breath. “Dent, please don’t take this amiss. But in polite society there are acceptable ways to speak about other people and unacceptable ways. It borders on rude to refer to my weight. It is disrespectful to refer to Mrs. Billingsley as ‘colored.’ And to be perfectly candid, I have no interest, none, in what you personally like about women.”
Good grief
, Bree thought,
I sound just like Francesca
.

“
That’s
what I like to see,” Dent said. “A nice big smile.”

“I was thinking about my mother,” Bree said stiffly. “Dent, you’re past praying for. Let’s round up Mrs. Billingsley and my sister and go back to Savannah.”

“You didn’t mean that. That I’m past praying for.”

She’d hurt his feelings. Again. “No. Lavinia would remind me that no one is past praying for, and she’d be right. But do try to be less dense . . . I mean offensive, Dent.”

“Who’s Lavinia?”

“My landlady.”

“Your landlady owns the Bay Street building?”

“I have a satellite office on Angelus Street. She owns the house.”

She tucked the cardboard box under her arm and picked up her briefcase. “Let’s go. I’ve got a lot to get through this afternoon, and it’s late.”

“You going to take on Mrs. Bulloch’s appeal?”

Bree froze. The back of her neck prickled. “You mean Mrs. Coville. Justine.”

“No,” he said patiently, “Mrs. Bulloch. That was Mrs. Bulloch you were talking to, wasn’t it? Just now?”

Bree set her briefcase down so that her hands were free, backed up a little, and faced him. “Okay, Mr. Dent. Spill it. Who are you? What do want? And what do you want from me?”

This supernatural soliciting cannot be good.

—Macbeth
, William Shakespeare

 

 

 

 

“Dent’s a what?” Bree said to her paralegal, Petru Lucheta. Bree had arrived at the Angelus Street office well after four o’clock and called a quick staff meeting.

“An outcast angel.” Petru had a thick black beard, black plastic-framed eyeglasses, and a thick Russian accent. He was the second angel Bree had hired on behalf of the celestial law firm Beaufort & Company. Lavinia Mather, her landlady, was the first. Ron Parchese, the third, fussed around the French press coffeepot at the other end of their small conference table. He was her secretary.

Three other members of the Company weren’t there: Professor Cianquino almost never left his mansion flat on the outskirts of Savannah; Bree’s dog, Sasha, was at home with Antonia; and Gabriel, who Bree privately thought of as the firm’s muscle, never showed up unless he was needed to whack a few heads.

Bree propped her elbow on the table and sank her chin in her hand. Increasingly, the Angelus office was the only place where she felt completely at home. There weren’t any secrets here, for one thing, and nobody commented on how thin or tough-looking she was getting. There was a price to pay for the work she did, and as long as she didn’t completely lose her humanity, Bree didn’t really mind. But she did mind when other people noticed how thin she was getting. How—hard.

Bree sat up, shook herself, and glanced around the table. “Dent says he’s in rehab.”

“Angels Anonymous,” Petru said. “That would be correct. It’s a traditional twelve-step program.”

“But what’s he in recovery for?”

Ron depressed the plunger on the coffee carafe. “Sounds like a bad case of incivility, if you ask me.”

Bree made a face. “You can get kicked out for not being polite?”

“Ronald is kidding around. The poor soul’s in treatment, and it’ll be up to him to tell you why.” Lavinia had a slight reproof in her soft voice. “Although it does sound to me like that ol’ boy’s handing out insults right and left.”

“He doesn’t seem to mean it,” Bree said doubtfully.

“He’ll find out if he means it or not,” Ron said confidently. “Step Four is to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.”

“What if he doesn’t make it through all the steps?”

“What’s he doing now?” Ron poured the coffee, dividing evenly into four cups, and handed them around.

“Right now he’s a hire car driver for Savannah Drives. But he kicks around a lot. He’s been a nurse’s aide, washed dishes at a restaurant, that sort of thing.” Bree looked at the coffee, picked up the cup and sipped at it, then set it down. “He’s managing. It’s a sort of life, I guess.”

“There you are, then.”

“He’ll kick around here forever?”

“He can always opt out for a lower place in the Sphere, I guess.” Ron shrugged his shoulders. “Up to him.”

Petru took off his spectacles, polished them vigorously, and put them back on again. “I do not see that Mr. Dent has anything but a peripheral role in this case. Shall we address the needs of our new client? It’s after four o’clock, and my sister Rose has promised borscht for dinner. Homemade. I will bring the remnants for you all tomorrow.”

Bree had a sudden impulse to invite herself over for dinner. She wasn’t wild about borscht, but she did wonder how her employees spent their nonworking hours. She’d never met Rose, for example, or Ron’s partner, or seen Ron’s apartment, although he’d insisted on her help choosing the paint for the walls. (He chose a color called Crystal Pink.) But they didn’t ask, and she made it a practice not to pry. Instead, she moved on to their current case.

“As usual, the initial client meeting left a lot to be desired.” She glanced at Ron. “I don’t suppose we’ve heard anything about my petition to the courts to get better client access.”

“That would be no,” Ron said. “I play poker with Goldstein on Thursday nights, you know . . .”

“I didn’t know.”

“I nudged him about it last week. Fell about laughing at the thought of it, Goldstein did. Just before he laid down a full house, jacks high.”

“We’ll do the best with what we’ve got, then. First things first. I need to be sure we’re representing the right client.”

“You were embarrassed by the last case,” Ron said. “No need. All of us were led down the garden path on that one.”

“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Bree said testily. “I was taken aback.”

“It would be as well not to be confused again,” Petru agreed. Bree looked closely at him. He didn’t look as if he were chuckling, but Petru’s beard hid a lot. “What leads you to think Consuelo Bulloch may be the wrong client?”

“I half expected we’d be representing Haydee Quinn. Perhaps even William Norris. There’s some evidence, anecdotal, to be sure, that Haydee’s returned looking for some kind of justice. I made arrangements to interview Tyra Steele at her hotel tonight, just so we cover all the bases. As far as Norris is concerned, if Florida Smith is right, and he was executed for a murder he didn’t commit, I would think he’d want reparations made.”

“But it was Mrs. Consuelo Bulloch who asked for our help,” Petru said. “You are sure it was she who approached you?”

“I asked her directly.”

“The courts don’t make that kind of mistake, anyway,” Ron said. “She’s who she says she is. You don’t want to take the case?”

“Of course we’ll take the case.”

“Then we should proceed in our usual fashion,” Petru said.

“That’s fine. But I am going to check out Tyra Steele’s claim to be possessed, if only to pursue this apparent vendetta against Mrs. Coville.”

“It sounds like a temporal case to me,” Ron offered. “Not a Company matter.”

Bree looked at him thoughtfully. “You’re probably right. It’s time I paid some attention to the temporal cases, too. They’re the ones that pay the bills. Anyhow, Consuelo wants to file an appeal—I’m assuming to get out of Hell altogether. Since I’m not sure what circle she occupies, or for that matter, how guilty she is, I don’t know if we can accomplish that. Worst case, we’ll fight to get her moved closer to the Outer Gates. Best case, she gets moved upstairs.”

“It is not upstairs,” Petru said fussily.

“I know. Sorry. It’s a figure of speech.”

“The Sphere is everywhere and nowhere.”

“Got it.”

“It is all things.”

Bree rapped the table with her knuckles. She wished there was a twelve-step program for pedants. She’d shove Petru in it so fast his beard would fall off. “Let’s move on.”

“Did she kill somebody?” Lavinia asked. “Mrs. Consuelo Bulloch, that is?”

“It’s possible,” Bree said cautiously. “The director and the scriptwriter on
Bitter Tide
seem to think so. The state of Georgia executed Bagger Bill Norris for the crime.”

“Mr. Norris is not our client, however,” Petru said. “We are certain of this.”

“As sure as I can be.”

Lavinia set her coffee cup down with a clatter. “My goodness. I remember a bit about the Bulloch case. Consuelo was that boy’s mamma, the one that got himself all tied up with that Haydee Quinn you mentioned?”

Bree had guessed that Lavinia’s temporal body was at least eighty years old, but she hadn’t considered that her landlady might be an original source of information about the Haydee murder. “My goodness, Lavinia. You bought this house in the late ’50s, didn’t you? So of course you were around Savannah then.”

Lavinia nodded. “Happened before I started work for your Uncle Franklin, though. He was a good man, Mr. Franklin. Weren’t that many folks in Savannah at the time that would have hired a colored secretary.”

Dent’s voice, unbidden, popped into Bree’s head.
Lavinia says colored.

“Did anyone make an issue of it?” Ron asked sympathetically. “Your race?”

Lavinia gave him a look. “Folks’ll make an issue of just about anything, but back then they especially took on about the coloreds.”

Bree smacked the palm of her hand against her forehead a couple of times.

“You got a headache, honey?” Lavinia asked. “You want some tea?”

“It’s Dent,” Bree said. “Or rather Dent’s voice. He wants to know why . . .” She smacked her head again.

“Quit that,” Lavinia ordered. “Wants to know what?”

Bree looked at them all in dismay. “I don’t have a good feeling about this. What’s Dent’s voice doing in my head?”

“Depends on what he’s saying, doesn’t it?” Ron said with an infuriatingly reasonable air.

“But . . .” Bree gave it up. “He wants to know why referring to African-Americans as ‘coloreds’ is inappropriate when he does it but not when Lavinia does it.”

Lavinia leaned over and shouted into Bree’s ear: “Because I am colored! And you aren’t.” She thought a minute and shouted again, “Nobody cares when you insult yourself. It’s a bit humorous, even.”

Bree put her hands to her ears in protest.

Dent’s voice went away, as completely as if it’d been switched off.

“It’s gone,” Bree said, mildly disoriented.

“He’ll be back,” Ron prophesied.

“What do you mean he’ll be back? I don’t want him back!”

“You sponsoring him?” Lavinia asked.

Bree reran the conversation with Dent in her head. “He saw our new client. Temporals can’t see the clients. Except for me. So I asked him who he was and where he was from. He said he was on rehab leave from the Sphere and wanted to go back. He asked me to help him, too. I said I’d see what I could do but I wasn’t familiar with beings in his situation and I’d do some research and get back to him. Then,” Bree added in dismay, “he asked if I’d be his sponsor. I said, ‘Sure, why not, be glad to.’ I mean, we don’t turn anybody away from here, right? It’s part of our job to help the dead, isn’t it? Not just the condemned dead, but any dead.”