Angel's Verdict (2 page)

One of the fires was moving.

Lt. Edward O’Malley, shoulders resting against the warehouse wall, hands shoved into his trouser pockets, pushed his hat a little further back on his head and narrowed his eyes. He was off duty, after a sleepless twenty-four-hour stretch on the Haydee Quinn murder. So what he was seeing wasn’t real. It was a fragment of nightmare, borne of fatigue. A hallucination. There was a pint of rye in the inside pocket of his suit coat; as he reached for it, the screams started: just one, at first, the startled shriek of a horrified woman; then a shout; then the confused clamor of a terrified horde of people.

The blazing fire moved on. The flames billowed up from the handcart; some part of O’Malley’s mind registered it as a baler wagon, maybe from the Cotton Exchange up on Bay Street. And he knew the man who pushed it. The cart bumped awkwardly along the cobbled street, the wheels groaning over the uneven bricks. The youngster behind it cried out a long, continuous mourning keen, a wail of grief, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open to the dark sky above. Alexander Bulloch. Haydee’s lover. A briefly considered suspect in Haydee’s death, until Bagger Bill Norris confessed and the case was done.

The stench from the cart was overwhelming: a roasted stink of flesh corrupted by flame. The iron wheels groaned, skidded, and the cart tipped over, throwing flaming logs across the stones. A blackened human form hung halfway from the cart. The flames hadn’t yet consumed the hair, which stirred in the wind as if lifted by a loving hand. Black as a crow’s wing, black as a starless night, no longer scented with gardenias, but the scent of burning. Haydee’s hair. Haydee herself hung from the cart, the violet eyes now sockets in her grinning skull, the creamy skin now flaked into ash.

O’Malley turned and ran up the iron steps, as if pursued by the corpse itself.

My age is as a lusty winter, frosty, but kindly.

—
As You Like It
, William Shakespeare

 

 

 

 

“Alexander Bulloch was insane with grief,” Justine Coville said. “I was a mere child at the time, of course, but the murder made all the newspapers. I’d always been exceptionally sensitive to the adult world, even then. I remember the headlines as clearly as I see this law office where I’m sitting right now. Alexander snatched the body from the funeral home. Said her ghost had come to him and demanded the purification by flame. So he set her body afire.” She closed her eyes dramatically, with a faraway expression, as if looking back sixty years ago. “And all that remained of the body was her long black hair, black as a crow’s wing, black as a starless night.” She sat back in the visitor’s chair. “What do you think of that, Miss Winston-Beaufort?”

There was only one visitor’s chair. Bree and her secretary Emerald Billingsley didn’t have much of a furniture budget. Bree’s desk, a small bookshelf, and the client’s chair were set behind the rattan screen that partitioned the small office into two separate spaces. Bree had the window. EB’s desk faced the office door, which was the old-fashioned type, with frosted glass on the upper half.

“It’s a terrible story!” Bree said. She knew that on the other side of the screen, EB was listening just as hard as she was. Justine Coville’s acting career stretched back more than fifty-five years, and the old lady knew how to hold an audience. She was a . . . Bree searched her mind for a tactful adjective—remarkable-looking woman. She favored bright red lipstick and startling blue eye shadow, and patronized an overenthusiastic plastic surgeon. The effect would have been a little ghoulish if it weren’t for the intelligence in her faded blue eyes. “What happened to Alexander, then? And Haydee’s body? Was it completely burned up?”

Justine shook her head. “There was enough to bury, certainly. She’s over in Belle Glade with a tasteless memorial. A huge marble angel. Of all the beings who may be watching over Haydee Quinn, an angel is the least likely. Of course, since this is Savannah, the most haunted city in the nation, there were those who believed Alexander Bulloch about the visitations from her spirit. There was enough talk about Haydee’s witchy charms when she was alive, so everyone was more than ready to believe she would come back from the dead and tell Alexander what to do. All those men in her life, my dear! In those days, she made quite a scandal. Folks didn’t think it was natural. So it stood to reason, so the Savannah gossip went, if anyone could come back from the dead, it would be she.”

“Which meant the powers that be didn’t come down too hard on Alexander about stealing Haydee’s body and giving it a Viking sort of funeral,” Bree guessed.

“I doubt they would have in any event,” Justine said candidly. “Alex was a Bulloch, after all. The family doesn’t mean much nowadays, of course. Alexander senior, Alex’s father, didn’t have a lick of sense about agribusiness. Switched from hogs to tobacco in 1961 just before the surgeon general’s report. It was all downhill from there. But back in the ’50s, the family had money, and money means clout. He told Judge Franklin—your great-uncle, of course, who is the man who brought you and me together after all—that she appeared to him three times, begging him to consign her bones to the fire.”

Bree doodled pensively on her yellow pad. She didn’t know if her own last three clients had been ghosts or not, but they definitely had been dead. She knew better than most that Haydee could have visited her grieving lover from beyond the grave. As for Franklin himself . . . “Surely not
Judge
Franklin then,” Bree said mildly. “He wouldn’t have been more than thirty years old. He wasn’t named to the bench until the late ’70s.”

“I believe the family retained him to represent Alex at the commitment hearing.”

“Alexander claimed an insanity defense?” Bree sat up. Franklin’s other law practice, the hidden one, specialized in handling appeals for dead souls condemned to Hell. She knew that to her cost. She’d inherited his practice after he died. She’d inherited this one, too, with its office on Bay Street for the convenience of his mortal caseload.

“That the boy was mad—temporarily at least—was the only possible interpretation of his bizarre behavior. The family had better sense than to claim he was actually visited by a ghost,” Justine continued cheerily. “They wanted to send the poor young man away to the booby hatch in lieu of a prison sentence. A private sanatorium. I suppose it would be called rehab these days. Either way, it’d be nothing so non-PC as booby hatch, would it?” Her crimson lips stretched in an over-collagened smile. “He got out after a year or two and eventually married one of the Bulloch cousins. Maria? Madeline? Something like that. She was from Charleston, I believe. They had the three daughters, Samantha Rose Bulloch, who is a Waterman now; Alexandria Charles Bulloch, who never married; and Marian Lee Cicerone. Some dago name like that.”

Bree winced at the slur.

The old lady continued merrily on. “Yes, Marian Lee married down, as they say. Alexander had a pretty successful career as a mortgage broker in the family bank. That part isn’t in Phillip’s script, of course. Too
ordinaire
for the movies.”

Behind the bamboo divider that separated her corner of the Bay Street office from her assistant’s, Bree heard Mrs. Emerald Billingsley start to type on her computer keyboard again. Then, because the body in the handcart seemed a weird conclusion to an equally weird story, (and because she was sure EB was dying to know, too) she asked, “Did he ever say why Haydee asked him to burn her body?”

“Purification,” said EB from behind the screen. “Stands to reason. Isn’t that what that Alex said?”

“Poor deluded boy,” Justine said with a dismissive air. “If there was ever a sane reason, I didn’t hear of it myself. Phillip’s script has some hoodoo explanation that makes very little sense at all.” Then, “Do come around that screen and see me, young woman. I’m not fond of spectral voices at the best of times.”

There was a sound of a chair being hastily shoved back, and in a moment, EB’s face appeared around the edge of the screen. She smiled. “Been a long time since anyone’s called me a young woman, Ms. Coville. Thank you. And I do beg your pardon, Ms. Beaufort. And yours, Ms. Coville. Couldn’t help but listen in.” She wore an old but neatly ironed beige suit and a carefully starched white shirt with a handmade ribbon collar. Her Afro was combed in a perfect neat puff around her head. “It’s your voice. Just like listening to music. Don’t know anyone doesn’t like to listen to music. And you have a way of telling a story, Ms. Coville. You surely do.” Her eyes, brown and shamelessly guileless, met Bree’s green and skeptical ones. “Was your voice something you had as a baby? Or did it come on a bit later, like? I remember you on that cop series on TV. I wondered about that beautiful voice of yours then, and I wonder about it now.”

“Years of stage training, Mrs. Billingsley. I began on the stage, you know.”

“That is something,” EB said. She edged a little further into the area. “Really something. On the stage, you say? Now, how’d you get from the stage to this TV movie they’re making down on the river?”

Justine waved an arthritic hand toward the corner. “Perhaps you’d like to bring a chair and hear a little bit about it? If you don’t mind, Miss Winston-Beaufort.”

Bree didn’t mind. Clearly, EB didn’t, either. Usually EB had firm views about being professional—and gossip rated high on her list of what was unprofessional—but she was as interested in the activities of Sundowner Productions as anyone else in Savannah. They wouldn’t charge the old lady for time spent listening to reminiscing. It wasn’t as if mortal, paying clients were beating down the door to the Bay Street office anyway. Bree’s alternate office at 666 Angelus, which was just around the corner, had another set of problems altogether. There was no shortage of souls wanting to reverse their sentences to Hell; but those cases didn’t pay the bills.

Something else nagged at Bree; Justine Coville didn’t behave like a client who had accomplished what she’d come in for. There was something else on the elderly actress’s mind. Whatever it was, Bree hoped she’d get around to it soon.

EB stretched out one hefty arm, pulled her desk chair into sight, and sank into it with a grateful sigh (which meant, Bree knew, that her feet were bothering her again).

Justine smiled at her audience. “My initial training, of course, was for the theater. Of course you are aware that in the current climate . . .” She paused, one eyebrow raised. “But surely you don’t want to hear about all this.”

EB quirked her own eyebrows encouragingly. “I surely would.”

“Well, the current theater has this maniacal emphasis on youth. Any actress over forty will tell you how hard it is to get decent parts these days. It doesn’t seem quite fair. My early days were hard enough, and then to end them with a small but telling role in a made-for-TV movie . . .” She let a shadow come and go over her face. EB murmured in sympathy. “I’m sure you know what I mean, Mrs. Billingsley. It was hard for your people, too. In a different way, naturally. But both of us, you and I, having to take jobs we weren’t suited for. Jobs that were quite beneath us, just to make ends meet.”

Bree bridled a little at the term “your people,” but if EB wasn’t going to call Justine on it, neither would she.

EB said, “Isn’t it the truth.”

“Of course, you can’t get anywhere without a bit of talent, too,” Justine said modestly.

“And hard work,” EB said.

“
Very
hard work. Now for women? Women in the acting profession, there’s a prejudice even harder to combat than color, Mrs. Billingsley. Especially for actresses who’ll admit to being a little over sixty.” She paused.

“Sixty? Never!” EB said, right on cue. She caught Bree’s eye and winked. “You don’t look a day over forty. Not a day.”

Bree murmured, “A-hum!” in spurious, but kindly, agreement. She sneaked a look at her watch. Almost noon. EB had scheduled an hour’s appointment beginning at eleven. Bree had to meet her sister, Antonia, at home for a quick lunch and then get on to the Angelus office.

Justine patted her artfully streaked hair. “One has to work at it.”

Justine was one of the first of Franklin’s former clients to make an appointment. She’d called in response to the letters EB had sent out announcing Bree’s assumption of the Bay Street practice. Like Bree, the judge had two case loads, one mortal, one not. Franklin’s files on his mortal clients were scrupulously accurate: Justine’s stated purpose was to come in and make changes to her will. The changes were minor. Bree had wondered at first if the old lady was merely bored and looking for a way to spend some time. This was fine with Bree. Justine’s birth date was January 1930, which made her exactly eighty this month. She was a gallant old lady—her attempts at looking young with the outlandish makeup and too much plastic surgery were brave stands against the erosions of time. Regardless of what she said about her difficulties in the business, Justine was pleased with her part in the movie being made about the 1952 murder of Haydee Quinn the B-girl. She reported to the set every day, despite the severe arthritis that gnarled her wrists, hands, and ankles. She deserved a little slack.

Besides, there was that nagging sense that something else was on her mind. Bree sat back and prepared to listen.

“There’s no getting around the fact that I’m older than the current kingpins would like. Fortunately, people like Phillip Mercury are not ageists. Phillip Mercury is interested in talent and talent alone.”

“I heard that,” EB said disingenuously. “Sundowner Productions is his company, isn’t it?”

“His and the bank’s,” Justine answered cynically. “Although there are a couple of backers, I believe. At any rate, dear Phillip absolutely refused to have anyone else play Consuelo Bulloch.” Justine patted the pearls at her throat with an air of mild complacence. “ ‘It’s not just that you’re Savannah-born and bred,’ he said to me. ‘It’s that aristocratic air.’ ”