Defending Angels (8 page)

“He was allowed just one call,” Professor Cianquino said in a reflective way.

Bree swallowed, choked, and laughed as airily as she could. “The other option, of course, is that some joker called and pretended to be him. I even thought that maybe you had some help picking the gift out.” She faltered. “From, you know, someone who knows me pretty well. And then maybe that someone thought it’d be hilarious to jerk my chain a little.”

“You mean Payton McAllister?” Professor Cianquino smiled. “No. I had some help, but not of that kind. And it wasn’t a technical glitch.”

Bree abandoned the sandwich and grabbed the glass of wine. Had everyone in the southeastern states heard that she’d been dumped by Payton the Rat? She took a healthy slug to hide her irritation. Professor Cianquino winced. It was, she silently agreed as it went down her throat, far too nice a wine to belt back, but so what? Then the rest of what Professor Cianquino said registered and she gulped at it again. She said politely, “Then what you’re telling me is that Benjamin Blackheart Skinner called me after he died? The call was from a ghost?” She kept her tone gentle and very reasonable. Clearly, whatever ailed poor Professor Cianquino wasn’t limited to his leg. A line from
Hamlet
entered her head (and exited almost immediately),
Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

He looked at her sternly. “What is the single most valuable piece of information you learned from me?”

Bree didn’t even have to think about that. He’d drummed it into all of his students. “ ‘You will find truth in experience.’”

“And what can you conclude from that?”

Bree looked at him, not sure where this was headed. “Well, I guess it means that you can talk yourself blue in the face, but you won’t know for sure until you try it yourself.”

He nodded, “That the only way anyone truly
knows
is through direct experience. So I can talk myself blue in the face, about whom that phone call was from and why I would like you to take on this case, but until you have direct experience, you aren’t going to believe me.” He reached across the table, laid his hand lightly on hers, and withdrew it. “I can assure you, I do know a hawk from a handsaw.”

“
Hamlet
,
Hamlet
,
Hamlet
,” the bird said.

“Be quiet, Archie.” The bird subsided sulkily onto its perch. “I would like you to take Benjamin Skinner’s case, Bree. The start of your new practice is what this is all about.”

Bree looked at the glass of wine in her hand. It was empty. She set it carefully on the table. “With all due respect, sir ...”

In the distance, the door chimes rang. Professor Cianquino activated the wheelchair. “Our client’s early.”

Bree stared at him. Benjamin Skinner was dead. Three C-SPAN reporters couldn’t be wrong. Could they?

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll bring her in. I may be some time. Please wait for me. And finish your lunch.”

He rolled out the door and shut it behind him. Bree poked at her food. She poured another glass of wine. She tried not to think that the most respected teacher in her law school was stark raving bonkers.

She applied logic.

He did say “her” when he referred to the client.

If he said “her,” he couldn’t be bringing the spook, ghost, haunt, revenant, decaying body, whatever, of Benjamin Skinner in for a case conference. Benjamin Skinner was a “he” as his pneumatic blonde sweetie had so breathily stated in her television interview.

She sat back. This was stupid. Professor Cianquino wasn’t crazy.
She
was crazy. She’d built a few bad dreams, a prank phone call, and a couple of half-seen shadows into perversity. Had the professor said one word about ghosts? The afterlife? The undead?

Not one.

Bree picked up the blue folder and opened it. It was background information on someone named Liz Overshaw who, Bree realized, as she skimmed through the pages, was the surviving majority partner in Skinner Worldwide, Inc. Ha. Not only a rich client, but a client right up Bree’s particular alley. Bree thrived on corporate tax law. She tossed the folder back on the table and began to walk restlessly around the room. “You know what my major concentration in law school was, don’t you?” she said to the bird. “It was ...”

“Business,” said the bird. “Corporate tax law.”

Bree swallowed, took a breath, then moved to the table to get a closer look at—What did the professor call him? Archie.

“Hey, Archie,” she said.

The bird blinked one beady eye, shifted on its perch, then pecked frantically at a bit of cuttlefish hanging in his cage. If it was an African gray parrot, it was unlike any African gray parrot she had seen before. It was large, as such parrots are, but its plumage was a soft sepia brown mixed with streaks of black and gold. If it looked like any kind of bird at all, it was an owl. But, she knew (and why she knew this was a total mystery; she had an affinity for odd bits of facts) that owls didn’t talk. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, they were among the stupidest birds in the avian hierarchy.

“Who’s stupid?!” Archie demanded and clicked his lethal-looking beak with the sound of a scythe through flesh.

Bree noticed, first, that the door to the cage had been removed, and second, that Archie had two-inch talons on each claw. She backed away. She went to the door and hesitated at the murmur of voices beyond. Getting Liz Overshaw as her first client was quite a coup. Professor Cianquino had told her to wait. She would wait. She moved back to the bookshelves, whistling idly, and trying not to cast nervous glances over her shoulder.

She picked up the first volume of the
Corpus Juris Secundum
and admired the soft feel of the calf leather. She ran her fingers over the raised gold lettering on the spine, and looked at the title in the soft office light. It wasn’t the
Corpus Juris Secundum.
The gold letters clearly spelled out:

The last, the ultimate in case law?

A familiar bookmark leaped out at her. It was a copy of an old woodcut, a rubber stamp of a man in medieval dress, a pointed cap on his head, and a quill pen in his hand. Beneath the caption at the bottom, the words:

This set of books had belonged to Uncle Franklin? Bree ran her hand through her hair. Her memories of her uncle were of a stern, remote old man who treated everyone in his life with the same gentle courtesy. He’d sat on the seventh circuit court as a judge for many years. She couldn’t imagine anyone less interested in an elaborate, fantastical joke.

Maybe it was just cases that had been heard in the Supreme Court? She flipped the book open and read:

Bree stared at the pages. What kind of lunacy was this?

Uncle Franklin’s edition of the
Corpus Juris Ultima
was formatted exactly like the
Secundum
.

Except that the cases cited were totally nuts.

The cause of action in the case of
Lucifer v. Celestial Court
was wrongful dismissal. The plaintiff alleged rank prejudice, arguing for the enforcement of one of the Seven Celestial Virtues,
caritas
, which, if Bree recollected her Latin correctly, was the highest form of caring love. The arguments for the defense included all of the Seven Deadly Sins, but rested heavily—and most successfully—on the sin of Pride. Bree scanned the summary of the defense with mild astonishment; Lucifer had quite a rap sheet. Bree read on, chuckling—a forced, panicky sort of chuckle—but a chuckle nonetheless. As pastiche, this was pretty funny. Elaborate, but pretty funny. The disposition of the case was no surprise; Lucifer was remanded into custody, and sent back to hell for all eternity, with little, if any, hope of an appeal.

Somebody had spent years putting this together. Probably a whole group of somebodies. And this sort of elaborate fantasy wasn’t without precedent. She could walk into any Borders bookstore and find scholarly volumes dedicated to unicorns, dragons, and witches. Not to mention vampires, fairies, and werewolves.

Celestial law might even be a saner subject than most. It certainly had more academic heft than, say, elves, if one were inclined to whimsy. She looked up and down the rows of gorgeously bound volumes. Uncle Franklin’s collection was just more elaborate than usual. Clearly, this was a man who hadn’t done things by halves.

The door from the living room opened. Bree jumped, as guilty as if she’d been caught reading personal mail.

“Put-it-back, put-it-back, put-it-back,” Archie squawked.

Bree gave the bird a nasty look, closed Volume One carefully, and slipped it back on the shelf.

Professor Cianquino said, “We’re ready for you, Bree. If you would join us, please?”

Bree picked up the blue folder containing the background information about Liz Overshaw, and followed his wheelchair into the living room.

I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

—“Lead, Kindly Light,” John Henry Newman

Liz Overshaw sat on the cream leather couch in front of the fireplace, one thin leg crossed over the other. Bree had seen pictures of her in newspapers and magazines. She was the chief financial officer of Skinner Worldwide, Inc. Corporate America flung her achievements in front of the media every time a gender discrimination suit was filed in federal court. She was in her late forties, too thin, with the polished, sort of tightened-up look of someone with a lot of money to spend on age-denying surgeries. She was dressed in Armani—a conventional, skirted suit of beige gabardine. She wore a sapphire and diamond Rolex, and her pearl drop earrings were huge and obviously real. Her graying hair was short, uncombed, and she was in need of a shampoo. She’d also chewed off most of her lipstick. And, as Antonia would have said had she seen them, you could put groceries in the bags under her eyes.

Liz stared pensively at the floor and turned the Rolex she wore around and around her wrist with an agitated forefinger. She looked up as Bree approached her, then cast a sideways glance at Professor Cianquino. “She looks like some kind of albino.”

“It’s her hair, Liz,” he said. “That silver blonde is, of course, unusual.”

“I’d dye it, if I were you,” Liz Overshaw said to Bree. “But then, you probably like the attention. I’ll tell you something, young woman. You don’t want to stand out in a crowd if you want serious people to take you seriously. You especially don’t want to look like a dimwit model. Business life is hard enough for women as it is, especially in the South.”

Bree drew a deep breath, opened her mouth, and then got a fit of the giggles. Talking owls, a multivolume encyclopedia of celestial law, and now positively the rudest woman she’d ever met in her life. It wasn’t memories of Payton the Rat that made Melrose an uncomfortable place to be; it was the lunatics in it. “Oh my,” she said. “I do apologize. I can tell you, Ms. Overshaw, I haven’t modeled a thing since I handled Play-Doh in kindergarten twenty-five years ago. As for the dimwit part, you’ll just have to judge for yourself, after we talk.”

Liz Overshaw looked at her coldly. “Cianquino, this is a mistake.”

“You’ll find that she’s exactly the lawyer you need for this particular case.” He turned to Bree and nodded at the far corner of the couch. “Sit down, please, Bree.”

Professor Cianquino’s cool professionalism doused her fit of hilarity like a dash of cold water. Bree sat down.

“This is Liz Overshaw.”

Bree nodded. “How do you do?”

“Not goddamned well, as you might guess.” Liz cleared her throat with an irritating sort of gargle. “This business with Skinner ...” She cleared her throat again. “We’ve got to do something about it.”

“You were—and still are, I imagine—a senior partner with his most well-known company, Skinner Worldwide, Inc.?” Bree asked. Bree’s mother was fond of reminding both her daughters that honey was a far more effective flycatcher than vinegar, so Bree added, “And an admired and effective CFO, as all women in business know.”

Liz ran both hands through her hair. “Yeah. Actually, if I can come up with the funding, I’ll be the majority shareholder, too. Skinner left options on his stock to his partners. We—that is, I—just have to decide whether I want to buy him out, or find an appropriate buyer.”

This kind of arrangement wasn’t unusual when the stockholder in a corporation wanted to bar family heirs from getting control of a company. Bree made a note in the file. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Liz flung her hand up irritably. “Christ, no. I’m not here about that. If I needed business counsel you think I’d be talking to you?” She glanced at Bree sideways and pursed her lips. “Not that you aren’t perfectly competent, I’m sure. Cianquino doesn’t deal with idiots.”

“Then how can I help you?”

“I told you. I’ve got to do something about Skinner before I end up in the ha-ha room at the sanatorium.” She glared at Professor Cianquino. “You
sure
I can trust her?”

He smiled and shrugged. “There isn’t anyone else I can recommend to you. Her qualifications are unique.”

“All right,” she said crossly. “Just fine.” She inhaled, and then let her breath out with an explosive “Pah!” “You’ve read the reports of Skinner’s death?”

“The newspaper account, yes,” Bree said. “And of course, the television news channels covered it quite extensively.”

“The coroner’s office is calling it a heart attack. He had a heart attack and drowned. Skinner didn’t drown.”

“Heart attacks take a lot of assertive men in their early sixties,” Bree said in a mild way. “And is it likely that the medical examiner would make a mistake? Especially with such a prominent man as Mr. Skinner?”

“Prominent son of a bitch, you mean,” Liz said. She made that hawking noise in her throat, like Felix Unger in those endless reruns of
The Odd Couple
. Bree looked down and studied her own toes. Liz Overshaw couldn’t help it if she had postnasal drip. But she sure could be less noisy about it.