Angel's Verdict (21 page)

“You poor child,” Lavinia hobbled forward, her worn wool cardigan pulled tightly across her chest. “Ron didn’t want me to come, but I just had to see for myself.” She smiled proudly. “So I come out. I haven’t been out for years.”

“Mamma, Daddy, this is Lavinia Mather, my landlady at the Angelus office and a dear friend. Mamma, you’ve spoken with Ron on the phone. Ron, this is my father.”

Ron shook hands with Royal, gave Francesca a hug, and leaned over Bree. “Lavinia insisted on coming,” he said into her ear. “I won’t let her stay too long.”

“She looks—worn,” Bree said worriedly.

“It’s an effort, at her age.” He stepped back and raised his voice a little. “You’re looking pretty spry, boss.”

“I’m feeling fine. You guys want to see something impressive?” She hopped out of the chair on one leg, grabbed the crutches, and swung herself up and down the room.

Lavinia beamed. “Well, they told me you were coming along fine and I guess it’s true.”

“I’ll be back in the office in no time.”

“We’ll see about that,” Francesca murmured. “And here I am, forgetting my manners. Please sit down, all of you. Let me get you some tea, Mrs. Mather.”

“That would be tasty,” Lavinia said. “But I’m not staying long, so please don’t fuss yourself.”

“Sit down right here beside Royal on the couch. Do you take lemon or sweet?”

“I do love my sugar, thank you kindly.” Lavinia perched on the edge of the couch and looked around the room. “My goodness, my goodness. This place hasn’t changed much at all.”

“When were you last here, Mrs. Mather?” Royal asked.

Oh, about 1754
, Bree thought.
Coming in with the rest of the auctioned slaves to the paymaster’s office.

“A while ago,” she said with a sweet smile. She accepted the cup of tea from Francesca. “Just had to come and see with my own eyes that she was doing as well as Ron said. I do like to see for myself, when it’s important.” She settled the fragile cup on the end table and turned to Royal. “Bree told us you were taking a look at all that history Florida Smith dug up about the Haydee Quinn case.”

Bree hadn’t really intended to turn the case notes over to her father—despite what she’d told Florida Smith— but he wouldn’t leave her mother to go back to Raleigh, and her mother wouldn’t leave her. He was a restless man by nature, especially when he didn’t have any real work to do. The case files had kept him out of the rest of the family’s way for days.

“Yes, indeed. Very interesting. Very.”

“Is the case making any more sense to you than it is to Bree, here?”

Royal patted his pockets, realized yet again that he’d given up his pipe years ago, and settled for stroking his chin reflectively. “I was eight years old in 1952, and as a matter of fact, I was a witness to the burning of Haydee’s body.”

“You were?” Bree said. “Good grief.”

Francesca shuddered. “What a sight for a young boy.”

“Yes, well, as you know, we usually spent the fourth of July here on the river.” He smiled a little. “And the—ah—spectacle—was one of the reasons we don’t anymore. In any event, I saw him. I’ll never forget it. The poor boy was wild with grief. Of course, I was more than usually interested in the handling of the case, so I read everything about it I could put my hands on. And I eavesdropped whenever I could on the adults’ conversation. Your grandmother and grandfather, Bree, knew the Bullochs socially, and of course, the whole thing was a huge scandal and the topic of every gathering for weeks. And of course, you knew that Franklin represented the boy at the sanity hearing. It was a big break for him.”

“Yes,” Bree said. “I knew that.”

“So my own theory of the case may be tainted by what I recall. Although I did my best to set aside whatever bias I may have picked up as a youngster when I looked at these notes. She did a good job, this young woman. Very thorough.”

“So who killed Haydee Quinn?” Francesca asked.

Royal steepled his fingers and tapped his chin. “There are two questions that need to be answered before I have a legitimate theory of the case. Bree? What would those questions be?”

Bree answered promptly. “Where did she go after she staggered away from the Tropicana Tide with the knife wounds to her chest? And who went with her?”

“Mercy,” Lavinia said. “You brought this girl up right, Mr. Royal.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Mather. I did, didn’t I?” They smiled delightedly at each other. Bree’s heart contracted a little. They were both so dear to her. “Daddy,” she began. She stopped and chewed at her lower lip.

“What is it, my dear?”

“Do you think . . .”

“That young Alex had anything to do with it?” He tilted his head to one side. “This case has been getting at you . . .”

Bree made a dismissive gesture.

“Well, something’s been getting at you. But if it’s a concern that Franklin was involved with a coverup, it shouldn’t be.” He frowned with distaste. “Not Franklin. No. Not knowingly, at any rate. That kind of dealing just wasn’t in your . . . uncle. You’re not thinking logically about this, Bree. Again, what do you need to do before you can come to a rational conclusion about whether an injustice has been done?”

“Follow the body,” Bree said.

“If an injustice has been done—and I suspect it might have been—the answer lies there. Follow the body, Bree.”

“The missing witness,” Bree said. “Of course. Ron, do you think Petru could come up with a list of the employees at the Tropicana Tide?”

“From 1952?” Royal said. “That’d be quite a feat of research.”

“It would,” Bree agreed. “But you don’t know Petru. If it exists in a record somewhere, he’ll dig it up.”

“You’re thinking that the barkeep or one of the dancers might have seen Haydee after she staggered off into the night?” Royal patted his pockets for his long-gone pipe.

Bree had the flutter in her chest that meant there just might be a crack in the case. “The odds are pretty good, aren’t they? The Tropi was what Dent calls a hangout for lowlifes.”

“Who’s Dent?” Francesca asked. “That poor sorry soul who keeps leaving you daisies?”

“Is that where they came from?” Bree said. “Anyhow, Daddy, I doubt that any employee of William Norris’s would be all that interested in helping the police.”

“I like it,” Royal said.

Lavinia murmured in admiration. Bree looked at her. Was she imagining it? Or was Lavinia fading, just a little? She glanced at Ron, a worried question in her eyes.

“Oh my,” Ron said promptly. “Do I hear the phone?”

“I didn’t hear it, but then, I turned the ringer down so it wouldn’t bother Bree,” Francesca said. “It’s probably Florida Smith again. She’s been trying to reach you, but I told her business would have to wait until the weekend was over.”

“Mother,” Bree said, “you can’t just summarily dispose of my phone calls.”

“Oh! There it is. Such sharp ears you have, Ron.” She rose, crossed the small living room, and picked it up.

Lavinia put her hand on Royal’s knee. “Is this child getting around okay, Mr. Royal? Able to take a shower and such?”

“She’s made a remarkable recovery.”

“She looks good,” Lavinia said judiciously. “Needs fattening up, but that’s nothing new. I made her another batch of my Brunswick stew, by the way. Soon as she gets back to the office, I’ll make sure she eats a pint or two.”

“Not much going on at the office at the moment,” Ron said with a casual air. “She’ll be able to ease back into the caseload. Of course, if she’s out too long, things will begin to back up.”

“Now that’d be stressful,” Lavinia agreed. “Waiting too long to get back.”

They both smiled at him. Bree knew those smiles. She looked down at Sasha, who thumped his tail in a rather mischievous way.

Francesca hung up the phone. “That was home, dear. There’s a tax question come up about the assessment on Plessey. And that big old live oak fell over and dammed up the creek. Art Johnson’s raising a hullabaloo. Says it’s going to flood his cow pasture. Gurney thinks we should come home, but I told him not while my darling girl is laid up like this.”

“Your darling girl is doing just fine,” Ron said. “She has me to run her errands . . .”

“. . . and me to stuff her full of my good food,” Lavinia added, “and to wash her hair if she needs a hand.”

“And Antonia to take care of everything else,” Bree said. “Please, Mamma. I love you. You’re driving me crazy. I have to get back to work.”

“It’s time to go, Chessie.” Her father got up and enveloped her in his arms. “She’s going to be just fine.”

Francesca sighed, looked from Ron to Lavinia and back again, and threw up her hands. “Okay, okay. I give. But the
instant
something else goes wrong, I’m all over you like a Persian rug.”

Like much of what Francesca said, it made sense. Sort of.

There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them how we will.

—Hamlet,
William Shakespeare

 

 

 

 

“I do not see how Beaufort & Company can be concerned with the missing jewel,” Petru said. “This is a temporal issue. The Beaufort & Company charter is for celestial matters only. The missing witness? Absolutely.”

Bree’s right leg was propped on a chair. She, Ron, and Petru sat around the conference table at the Angelus Street office. Lavinia was upstairs, and Sasha was outside in the cemetery, poking around the gravestones. Her parents had finally gone home.

Ron and Petru both agreed that the Company couldn’t support the search for the missing peacock pin. Bree thought they should.

The cast was itchy. Her knee hurt like the devil. She was glad to be back at work, but her temper was short. “The jewel is the contact point for our client, Petru. How else can I get hold of her?”

Petru shook his head no. “Whoever took it committed a theft. This thievery will weigh in the balance at the end of the thief’s days, of course, but there has been no miscarriage of celestial justice.”

“True.” Bree stuck her pen down the top of her cast and scratched at her leg. It didn’t help. “Okay. So I’ll handle the investigation of the theft from the Bay Street office.”

“Did you tell Lieutenant Hunter the pin was gone?” Ron asked. “This is a case for the police, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t, no.” Bree doodled circles on her yellow pad. “I’d like to avoid talking to the police for the moment. I think Justine clocked me over the head.”

Petru’s eyebrows shot up. “The old actress?”

“She was desperate to get the pin back. She’s worried about losing her job. She didn’t stop to think. She certainly didn’t intend to push me into the path of Mercury’s car.”

“Hm.” Petru tugged at his beard.

“I support our justice system, both temporal and celestial. You know that. But I don’t want to feed Justine to the wolves, so to speak. The poor woman’s suffered enough.”

Ron said, “Maybe it wasn’t Justine. Maybe it was Sammi-Rose Waterman. She was drunk enough to do something stupid, from what you’ve told me. Or that mean-looking sister of hers. Marian Lee.”

“Payton was with Sammi-Rose when she left the restaurant,” Bree pointed out. “I suppose Payton could have done it or even the three of them together, but it doesn’t make much sense. Payton’s a creep, but he’s not violent. And he’d be in a heap of trouble with Smilin’ John Stubblefield if he let one of their clients launch into an assault with grievous bodily harm. I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but it’s unlikely. Besides . . .” She paused. Parts of her memory were coming back. Justine wore a distinctive perfume. Gardenias. She was sure there had been an odor of gardenias in the air. “Either way, I’ll look into it.” She put a final flourish on the doodle and sat back. “Anyhow. Let’s move on to the Haydee Quinn case. I had a long chat with my fa—with Royal before I finally got him to go on back to Plessey. I finally reviewed Florida’s material. She did a sensational job on the background, and she made a time line of the events leading up to Haydee’s death. I’ve made notes in places where I think we might pursue things further.”

She moved to the whiteboard that hung between the windows facing the cemetery, balanced herself on her crutch, and picked up a red marker.

“There were several witnesses,” Bree said. “A young chorus girl, Charis Jefferson; a waitress, whose only name was Darcy, no last name; and the bartender Moses Busch. Busch states: ‘Billy said he’d kill her and himself before he let her go.’ ”

She picked up the marker again and wrote:

“There were over forty witnesses to this,” Bree said. “Plenty of verification. His three friends all went on to other bars. Their whereabouts after the assault on Haydee are all verified.”

“This is what Moses Busch says.” Bree read aloud, “All three of ’em had been drinking up a storm. Haydee kicked the kid out to keep Billy from pounding him to a pulp.” She looked up at them. “Alexander’s 1952 Buick automobile was seen at the Bulloch home within thirty minutes. This was verified by a routine patrol car.”