04 Lowcountry Bordello (6 page)

Six

Fifteen Church Street was a lovely brick English side-hall house. Similar to Charleston single houses, the narrow end of the house faced the street, but with the front door leading to a hall that ran the length of the house. According to BedandBreakfast.com, it was built circa 1842 and was currently owned by Jack and Annelise Simmons. Nate pulled through the gate, as we’d been instructed, and down the narrow drive all the way to the back. The car would be hidden from all but the most inquiring eyes.

Thankfully, we kept essential equipment, a change of clothes, and overnight necessities in each of our cars for emergencies such as this. We walked back around front and climbed the steps. On the landing, we looked at each other.

“I always wonder whether to knock on the door at a bed and breakfast. It’s a business—”

“And it’s also someone’s home.” I shook my head at him and knocked.

“They’re certainly in the holiday spirit,” said Nate.

The stair railing and every window were festooned with pine boughs, gold ribbon, magnolia blossoms, and white lights. Poinsettias lined the steps. The wreath on the door was a work of art.

Mrs. Simmons welcomed us into the hall, which ran down the right side of the house. She was a lovely woman, with a chin-length blond bob.

“Thank you for letting us check in so early, Mrs. Simmons,” I said.

“Please, call me Annelise. No problem at all. We’re happy to have you with us.”

“You have a lovely home,” said Nate.

The buttery yellow walls with white trim, gleaming floors, and gilded accents spoke of good taste and regular maintenance. The scents of the season—pine, cinnamon, and cookies baking—enveloped us. LeAnne Rimes crooned “Hard Candy Christmas.” Annelise needed some happy Christmas music.

“Thank you so much.” She went about the business of getting us checked in. “So y’all are locals, then?” she asked as she handed us our key.

“That’s right.” Nate smiled. Sometimes I wondered if he knew the effect that smile had on women. “From time to time we just like staying over downtown. Walk to dinner. It’s nice.”

“Well, you won’t be needing my overview of the area, then. But I do hope you’ll join us for our social hour at six. We’ll have wine and cheese. We can get better acquainted then. I’m afraid the weather’s too bad for us to be on the verandah. We’ll gather in the living room.”

I leaned in closer, spoke in a soft voice. “To be perfectly honest, Annelise, Nate and I are getting married Saturday. We desperately need some alone time. All the wedding preparations—you know how hectic that can get.”

She returned my smile. “Congratulations. I understand completely. Well, if you feel like company, we’ll be here. Breakfast is served between eight and nine thirty.”

We thanked her and carried our things to the third floor. The Rose Room was aptly named. The walls were a lovely shade of pinkish red—it’s easy for red wall paint to lean towards tacky, but this room was anything but. A black iron queen-size bed with a shelf of sweetgrass baskets above sat between two windows. A day bed and an armchair would give us room to spread out and work. The remaining décor was a mix of period pieces and wicker.

I crossed the room and checked out the view. From either side of the bed I could see rooftops, treetops, and beyond those, the harbor. On a clear day, this would be a beautiful vista. Looking down, I could see part of the south end of Church Street. Far more important to us were the windows on the front of the house.

I moved to the right front window. Diagonally across the street was the bordello.

“This was a stroke of brilliance.” Nate peered out the left front window. “I need to walk around the block to be sure, but it would appear the only way to leave the property without resorting to going over or through some mighty thick shrubbery is to pass by these windows. I suppose one could hop the fence and slip through the yard to the left, but why would they? They don’t know we’re watching.”

I stepped into the adjoining bath. A third window there offered another view.

“Only the killer—and the person who moved the body, assuming that’s not the same person—would connect the body in the park to that house. The rest of the benefactors will have no reason to suspect anyone would be watching. And we need to keep it that way. If one of the clients is our guy, he may not be bold enough to come back in the next twenty-four hours, but the process of elimination may point us in the right direction.”

“So what we need is for all the other patrons to be horny this evening. Then we can focus on whoever doesn’t show up.” Nate stepped away from the window. “I’m going to walk around the immediate neighborhood. I’ll grab the binoculars, the camera and tripod, and the mobile hotspot from the car on my way back in. Anything else you think we’ll need?”

“How many webcams do we have in the Explorer?”

Nate rolled his lips in, looked thoughtful. “A dozen of the air purifiers.”

“That should do it. But no need to bring them up. We need some snacks. Cheerwine and Dove Dark Chocolate Promises. Something salty. Bottled water. Other than that I think we’re good.”

Nate shook his head and silently chuckled. “I’ll be back shortly.”

I called my sister, Merry, and asked her to swing by and see about Rhett. “I’m not going to make it back to Stella Maris until tomorrow, probably late in the day. Play with him for a while, will you?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll go by this afternoon when I get home. I need some quality time with my ‘nephew.’ We’ll go for a walk on the beach. Do you want me to take him home with me?”

“Why don’t you just stay in one of the guest rooms at my house like you’re going to do while we’re in St. John? You pack lighter than Rhett does.”

“Okay. Are you getting nervous?”

I smiled. “Not really. I got it right this time. I’m excited. Mamma’s nervous enough for both of us.”

Merry laughed. “That’s for sure. See you in a bit.” She ended the call.

I squinched my face at the phone. She wasn’t going to see me until late tomorrow, if then. I shrugged it off as Merry being at work, eager to get off the phone, distracted.

After checking the view from both front bedroom windows again, I moved the upholstered armchair over to the corner between the right front window and the window facing south on Church Street. Then I grabbed a couple pillows from the daybed and fashioned a lap-desk. So much had happened so fast. I hadn’t had a chance to process everything.

My instincts were to dig straight into deep background on Thurston Middleton. But I needed to organize my thoughts. Like evidence, I needed to log and tag each fact. This case felt like a bowl of spaghetti in my brain. So many pieces already piled on top of each other and twisted together. I needed to sort what we knew into possibilities—feasible theories, or narratives of the crime. I pulled out my laptop and started a case file.

Because I had no proof there’d been a body in 12 Church Street the night before, and I had unequivocally witnessed—and documented—a body-free parlor, I started with what I knew: Seth Quinlan was blackmailing my client’s wife. Olivia had gone to the house the night before to meet with her aunt. While there, she’d seen what she believed to be a body in the parlor. With excruciating detail, I documented the lack of evidence indicating a murder had been committed on the premises.

Then I created a profile on Seth Quinlan. I logged into a subscription database and located his birth certificate. No father was listed. He was roughly twelve years older than us. I checked public records. He owned no property I could locate except a 2010 Dodge truck. He had no adult criminal record, and no civil suits had been filed against him.

I was able to pull a copy of his driver’s license from another database. At six feet three inches tall, two hundred twenty pounds, with long, unruly, medium brown hair, and hazel eyes, he was a nice enough looking man in an outdoorsy kind of way. I wondered why he’d never married, moved away from his aunts.

A quick property search told me The Willow-Mary Trust owned the house at 12 Church Street. It didn’t take long to verify that Willowdean Beauthorpe owned half interest in the trust, and Olivia Beauthorpe Pearson had inherited the other half. This kind of information is only available if you know what to look for, which accounted for why I’d missed it a couple years back.    

Only after I’d documented all the facts did I allow myself to create a sub-file labeled “Speculation.” Here is where I would list all the possibilities. Speculation and possibilities were not admissible in court.

I heard Nate on the stairs before the door opened.

“Annelise sent up cookies.” He set down the camera equipment, then crossed the room and bent to give me a kiss that made me lose every thought in my head. When he stood, his smoky blue eyes held mine. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

“We need to wrap up this sordid business so we can go back to dreaming about our honeymoon.” He handed me a napkin with two iced Christmas tree cookies.

“That gets my vote.” I refocused, with great effort. “If you want to put the camera here, I can move. I thought the angle was better from the left window.”

“This will work just fine.” He went about setting up the tripod and camera.

“I’ve documented thoroughly how I don’t think there was a body in the house across the street last night.”

“That might well come in handy later. We can hope neither of us ends up on a witness stand, but I wouldn’t put money on it.”

“Purely as a hypothetical exercise, if there was a body, the only person who couldn’t’ve been responsible is Aunt Dean. She was upstairs with Olivia while Robert was wandering around downstairs in the dark with a flashlight. At that point, there was no body. Aunt Dean was still upstairs when Olivia came down and found the body.”

Nate canted his head towards his shoulder, looked skeptical. “If we believe everything our clients have told us thus far. They have both been less than forthcoming.”

“Right.” I inhaled deeply. “So for the moment, I see Seth as suspect number one.”

“Agreed. He had the means and the opportunity. But what was his motive?”

“Based on the information we have right now, the only thing I can come up with is mistaken identity. He could’ve seen Robert come into the house and mistaken Thurston for Robert. If Olivia could confuse the two, surely Seth could.”

“And he’d be thinking if Robert showed up at the house it was to put a stop to the blackmail.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But what would Thurston Middleton have been doing in that house to begin with? I’m going to have to talk to Aunt Dean as soon as the ladies are back from their outing.”

“Talking to her is just as likely to send rats scattering as Sonny going in there with a search warrant. If she’s an accessory to whatever Seth has done in his bouncer capacity over the years, she’ll tip him off. And surely she’s protective of her paying customers.”

“But she’ll be more protective of Olivia. Olivia is her partner, unwilling though she may be, and her heir. If I can convince her my only agenda is to protect Olivia, she might talk to me and keep it quiet.”

Nate was quiet for a moment. “That will work better if Olivia goes with you.”

I winced, shook my head. “That’s too risky. She’s too much of a loose cannon. But by then we’ll have cameras live and the landline tapped. With Olivia’s consent, it’s like putting the whole house on a nanny cam. What Miss Dean does after I leave will tell us a great deal.”

Nate pulled the binoculars out of a black duffle bag, adjusted the focus, and scanned every angle available from the window. “So if Seth is suspect number one, who do you make for suspect number two?”

“As much as I wish we could, we can’t exclude Olivia.”

“No, we cannot. She had means and opportunity. It’s possible she killed Thurston for some unknown motive, but if it was her, it’s more likely that she mistook him for Robert, even when he was upright.”

“I just can’t see that. Olivia is volatile, no doubt. But she seems crazy about Robert, and vice versa. She was nearly catatonic when she thought he was dead.”

He raised both eyebrows, then pulled a chair up to the camera so he could sit and look at the flip out screen. He adjusted the camera. “I can get shots of the license plate from any car turning into the drive. If someone street parks, I may have to go downstairs to get the right angle. Bring me up to speed. What else’ve you come up with so far?”

I filled him in on Seth and the house, how Olivia’s story held up that far. “I got Olivia’s email with the girls’ first names and the last names they go by—those of their benefactors. Suspects three through seven are Amber Calhoun, Wendi Gibbes, Dana Huger, Heather Prioleau, and Lori Russell.”

“And there are five other men, patrons of the establishment all, with last names of Calhoun, Gibbes, Huger, Prioleau, and Russell, who may also have had a motive to kill either Thurston or Robert.”

“When you say it like that I get queasy.” I turned back to my laptop.

“So first we need to figure out if Mr. Middleton expired inside that house. The next two questions:
If
he did, was he the intended victim, or was he in the wrong place at the wrong time; and who had a motive to kill him or Robert.”

“What a godawful mess.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Scanning my notes, I said, “In addition to the previously mentioned twelve suspects, it’s possible one of the residents had an old boyfriend or other family member who was on a mission to get her out of there and somehow had an altercation with Thurston. You can never rule out the spouse, of course. And then there’s the final possibility, an unidentified third party was in the house for reasons unknown, with intent to kill one of the two men, or who possibly fell into a misunderstanding.”

Nate stared at the camera screen. “And then there’s Raylan.”

“Olivia’s brother? How did he get involved in all this?”

“Well, he’s just gotten out of the passenger side of your brother’s car across the street. Do you want to go ask him, or shall I?”

“
Blake
? Sonavabitch. Blake is out there?” I sat the pillows and my laptop on the floor and scrambled out of the chair, searching the street from my window. I grabbed my phone and tapped Blake’s name in my favorites list. On the street below, he reached into his pocket, glanced at the screen of his phone, then returned it to his pocket. On my end of the line, I heard his voicemail greeting.

“
Ooooh!
I cannot believe he just sent me to voicemail. I’m going down there.”