Defending Angels Read online

  “You’re not from Russia, or anything,” Bree asked Ronald Parchese rather anxiously, several hours later.

  “Russia?” he said, even more anxiously. “No. Do I need to be to get the job?” Ronald was slim, without being skinny, and had the sort of clean-cut looks that prompted her mother to talk longingly of grandchildren: blond, fair-skinned, with pale blue eyes and a boyish face. He was elegant, too; his black trousers were well-cut, and his striped shirt immaculate. He made Bree feel dowdy in her all-purpose trouser suit and white T-shirt.

  “I didn’t mean actually Russian,” she said, to his further bewilderment. “I was just wondering if you were a Southerner like me, or if you’ve come to Savannah from somewhere else. But you say you’ve lived in Savannah all your life?”

  “Every second, Miss Beaufort. Except for my little trips.”

  “Little trips?”

  “I try to get to Italy every year. My people were from there originally, you know, but not for years and years and years.”

  “I see.”

  “You aren’t looking for a foreign national for any reason? Because I would think that my trips to Italy would count.”

  “Oh, no, no.” Bree felt herself beginning to stutter. “Forget I said anything about alien venues. Look, I’d like to take a second and read your résumé. Would you like a cup of coffee while I do that?”

  “I’ll take care of the coffee,” he said. He rose lithely to his feet. “What sort of equipment do you have in the break room?”

  “Just a Mr. Coffee. But the beans are from Starbucks.”

  “Tsk. Not good. We’ll have to look into a Melitta. Right now, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Ronald headed toward the kitchen, followed by Sasha, who’d taken to him immediately. Bree looked over his résumé. His word-processing skills were sensational. He’d taken a course at the Chatham County Community College in legal terms, and he had a two-year administrative assistant’s degree from a local secretarial school. And she liked him. “Your braids,” he’d said after they had shaken hands and sat down together for the interview, “are a stroke of genius. Who had the nous to pull that off?”

  Ronald Parchese on paper was a nice all-American kid. She’d hired Petru. She hadn’t really had a choice. In some obscure way, at such a remote level of consciousness that she almost didn’t recognize it, a sorting process was going on and Petru was inevitable, like Mrs. Mather was inevitable and the sixty-volume copy of the Corpus Juris Ultima stacked on her kitchen counters.

  She wanted somebody NOT inevitable. Like Ronald, who didn’t have a clue about all the stuff that was gathering around her like a silken net. He hadn’t even glanced at the Rise of the Cormorant, for instance, or if he had, he hadn’t said a word.

  So why not two assistants? One for whatever the Skinner job was really all about, and one for the Brianna Winston-Beaufort who was going to continue with a normal law practice long after the weirdness of the Skinner case was over.

  The retainer from Liz Overshaw gave her a head start on expenses; and she’d saved enough before she’d made the move to Savannah to run her office for six months with an assistant. But she hadn’t budgeted for two. She wasn’t even going to have enough work for two until her practice built. If it ever did.

  Ronald came back with a tray, which he settled on the trunk. He glanced indifferently at the newspaper headline about Huey’s, handed her a cup of coffee, and settled comfortably into the leather sofa with his own. “What do you think? Are my qualifications okay?”

  “I’d love to hire you,” Bree said promptly. “But I’m not sure you’d be comfortable here.”

  He flushed a bright, angry red. “If it’s because I have a domestic partner ...”

  “Of course it isn’t that,” Bree said indignantly. “Do I look like a bigot to you?”

  “You’d be surprised at what bigots look like,” he snapped.

  “I probably would. But they don’t look like me. Or my sister,” she added.

  Ronald’s complexion returned to normal and the tremor left his voice. “Does your sister work here, too?”

  “God, no! But she lives with me and she bounces all over. She’s like a tennis ball loose in the room. You keep tripping over her. She’s bound to bounce in and out of here several times a week.”

  Ronald’s eyes brightened. “I know exactly what you mean! You love her, but brattiness rules.”

  “Exactly.” Bree set her cup down and sighed. “The reason I’m not sure you’d like it here is because you’re too normal. I can’t tell you,” she added passionately, “how much I want someone as normal as you are to be here every day when I walk in the door.”

  “There’s a first,” Ronald muttered. “If you could call my mother and tell her that, I’d appreciate it. So what’s with me being so normal?”

  “I’ll show you what I mean. Let me just ask you something.” Bree leaned forward, smiling. “You see that picture over the fireplace?”

  “Do I not!” Ronald said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but really, Bree, it’s just hideous. How could you!”

  “Ha!” Bree said. “I thought so! Please, please, please come here and work for me! The first thing we’re going to do is get rid of that horrible thing. I don’t seem to be able to get rid of it all by myself.”

  Ronald lowered his coffee cup and looked at her in dismay. “Well, my dear, you can’t, of course. It’s one of the copies of the Rise of the Cormorant.”

  A slight wind rose from the corners of the room and stirred his hair. Bree wanted to scream, or smack herself in frustration.

  Instead, she offered Ronald Parchese a pitifully low salary, which she promised to increase as soon as she was able.

  Ten

  Begin at the beginning...go on till you come to the end; then stop.

  —Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

  “Was Benjamin Skinner murdered?” Bree asked her new employees. She sat at the head of the twelve-foot table in the conference room. Ronald Parchese was at her left. Petru sat at her right. Sasha sat in the corner. Mrs. Mather perched on a chair at the end, a dust cloth in one hand and a can of furniture wax in the other. (Keeping the place clean, she’d told a skeptical Bree, came with the rent. Bree thought it was just plain nosiness.) “That question’s at the heart of the case. Our client, Liz Overshaw, is convinced he was. It’s our job to find out.”

  “Too exciting,” Ronald murmured. “I watch Law & Order, but that’s about it for my investigative technique.”

  “This Skinner fell off a boat and drowned, I thought,” Petru said.

  Bree rubbed her forehead. “Yes. I know. Maybe he was pushed? I don’t know.”

  “If he was pushed, the son musta done it,” Lavinia said. “That’s all who was on the boat he fell off of. A disgrace, that’s what it is. A chile killing his own pa.”

  “Liz doesn’t think it was the son. Or rather,” Bree corrected herself, “she believes the murderer is one of four people.”

  “There was somebody else on the boat?” Ron asked.

  “Not as far as I know. We’re looking at investigating these four people.” Bree looked at her notes. “Douglas Fairchild, Carlton Montifiore, John Stubblefield, and Chastity McFarland.”

  “Who-ee,” Lavinia said. “Some big names you got there.”

  Bree nodded ruefully. She referred to the extensive notes she’d made after a preliminary Internet search on Skinner. “Yes. Douglas Fairchild is a prominent investor here in Savannah and a partner in a lot of Skinner’s local projects. This condo called Island Dream, for one. John Stubblefield is the senior partner of one of Georgia’s most prominent law firms. They represent Skinner and his family.” She paused. “We’ve already been warned off that guy. Which makes me wonder if there isn’t something to Liz’s suspicions. Anyhow—Carlton Montifiore is a local builder. He puts up a lot of Skinner’s buildings here in Georgia, including Island Dream. And Chastity McFarland is, or rather was, Ben Skinner’s mistress.” />
  “Most times it’s the wife,” Lavinia said wisely. “This Ben got a wife? Olivia done for Josiah in just that way. He’s got some grudge against women, that Josiah. You got to watch yourself with him, Bree.”

  It took Bree a minute to figure out that Lavinia was referring to the bodies buried in the cemetery outside.

  “He’s a widower,” Bree said. “Skinner, that is.”

  “Any of them suspects on the boat?” Lavinia asked.

  “No,” Bree said firmly. “None of them were on the boat.”

  Lavinia subsided with a thoughtful air.

  “We need to add the son and his wife to the suspect list, don’t we?” Ronald asked. “I mean, I know it’s screamingly obvious that they would be the murderers. So obvious that they might be after all, if you catch my drift.”

  “So obvious that it can’t be them that it must be them,” Petru said. “Hm.”

  “I guess we should,” Bree said. “But Liz was pretty sure it was one of the four on the newscast.”

  Ron lifted both his eyebrows. “Did she say why?”

  “Yes,” Bree said.

  “And?”

  She sighed. “She said Skinner’s ghost told her.” She raised both hands to forestall the storm of skepticism. “I know, I know. It’s totally insane.”

  “It’s important to know how he told her,” Lavinia said seriously. “In a dream? In a daytime appearance? All these things matter, with ghosts.”

  “I’ll ask,” Bree said dryly.

  “I have to admit, this is ke-vite a good reason to ignore the relatives as suspects,” Petru said. “It is not often that the dead are allowed to speak.”

  “Still and all,” Ron said. “Skinner could be wrong. It’s happened before. The dead aren’t exactly infallible.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Petru grumbled.

  Everyone nodded wisely except for Bree, who sighed and said, “We’ll take a close look at Grainger and Jennifer Skinner. Actually,” she added, “I know Jennifer Skinner, formerly Jennifer Pendergast, and if she’s as much of a screaming pain in the neck now as she was in school, I wouldn’t put it past her to kill her father-in-law.” She wrote Jennifer’s name in capitals at the bottom of her suspect list. “Now. The question is, where to start?”

  “Perhaps we should recruit a professional,” Petru suggested. “In my country, there are many unemployed persons from the KGB who would be ke-vite anxious to help. This is not so true here, perhaps. Has anyone recommended a good private eye?”

  Everyone at the table looked expectantly at her. Bree thought of the card Professor Cianquino had given her with a flash of irritation. It was time she started making her own decisions. And Gabriel Striker was a little too bossy for her taste. This was her case, her client, her employees. “Let’s see how well we do on our own first.”

  “You want to find out about those Pendergasts first thing,” Lavinia said. “Hm, hm. There’s bad blood in that family.”

  “Excellent suggestion,” Bree said, with false enthusiasm. Positive reinforcement was a management technique she intended to use a lot, to help offset the lousy pay. And since Lavinia seemed to have joined the staff for free, she might as well roll with it. “But we need to gather some facts first. We need to get the coroner’s report and everything the police have on the case. Ron, perhaps you can take care of that. And Petru, I’d like you to research Skinner himself. We need a complete picture. Google him. Start with magazine articles, books, newspaper stories, and make a list of his relatives, business partners. Pay special attention to anyone he’s annoyed. There’s a ton of lawsuits. He spent half his life in court either being sued or suing somebody else. Concentrate on the big cases, within the last year. Take a good look at those he won. I’d skip over anything with a corporate plaintiff or defendant. Murder’s usually a personal thing, and I doubt that anybody on the board of Pepsi-Cola, for example, would be out for Skinner’s blood for real. If you need any case references, go online with Lexis and hunt them up. We’re looking for connections between Skinner and our four main suspects. Fairchild, Montifiore, Stubblefield, and Chastity McFarland. And Google those guys, too.”

  Ronald made neat notes into his BlackBerry. Petru scrawled on a legal-sized yellow pad in cryptic Russian.

  “I’m going to tackle our suspects, one by one,” Bree said. “So if you guys come up with anything urgent ...” she waved her cell phone. “Call me, okay?”

  “Anything else, ‘ma-am’?” Ronald asked, giving her a mock salute.

  Bree nodded. Her parents had called that morning, with a whole raft of suggestions about the open house for the firm the following week. Ron could take care of most of them while she was out sleuthing around. And she’d been worried about having enough work to keep Petru and Ron busy full time.

  “Oh, my. You do look grim,” Ronald said. “Nothing real to worry about, I hope.”

  “It’s my mother.”

  Petru looked extremely mournful. Bree didn’t want to ask him why. She was sure Russians had strong feelings about their mothers, along with everything else.

  “She put a notice in the business journal about the opening of the practice.”

  “So we may be getting new clients?” Ronald said. “Excellent. That’s nothing to be grim about.”

  “Of course not,” Bree said. “I mean, that’s the idea behind announcing a new practice. It’s the invitations to the open house.”

  “What invitations?” Ronald asked. Then, as the penny dropped, “Oh! Is that terrific or what! A party!”

  “It’s for next week. The tenth. From five to seven, and I will want to introduce you all, of course. My mother’s booked 700 Drayton.”

  “The Mansion at Forsyth Park!” Ronald said. “Is this exciting or what!”

  “So please, everyone, put it on your calendars.”

  “I’ll have to see about flowers and food, of course,” Ronald said. “You know, my own mother’s absolutely delighted that I left Dillard’s for a more professional career. But I still have the designer’s touch, Bree!” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. “You leave all of that to me.”

  “I’d love to leave it all to you,” Bree said frankly. “Use Savannah Designs for the florist. Talk to the party guy at 700 Drayton about the food. Knowing my mother, we should probably plan for sixty guests. And if there’s nothing else?”

  “Y’all want me to tell you about those Pendergasts?” Mrs. Mather said. “You got that Josiah laying in wait everytime you walk out that door.”

  Bree smiled at her and said kindly, “Let’s the two of us sit down later today, Mrs. Mather.” She glanced at her watch. “I have an appointment with Liz Overshaw at eleven. Okay, guys. Here we go.”

  The headquarters of Skinner Worldwide, Inc., occupied fifteen of the floors in the twenty-story Skinner Tower in Atlanta. But from what Bree could gather, most of the top executives in Skinner’s organization had followed Skinner’s example and bought or built vacation homes on Tybee Island. “Most of the key decisions,” Liz Overshaw said as she led Bree into her sunroom, “are made in the bar at the island country club.” She pointed at a wicker chair facing windows that overlooked the shoreline. “Sit down.”

  Bree sat. Sunshine flooded directly into her eyes. She got up, moved the chair at an angle, and sat down again. Liz’s house was old, built in the Southern Plantation syle with a wraparound porch and gray clapboard. The interior had a hasty look, with an indifference to color and style very much like Liz herself. The bones of the house were good, though, and the view of the Atlantic was superb.

  Liz looked even more unkempt than she had when Bree met her at Professor Cianquino’s. Her face was sallow. Her short, graying hair was swept back with a carelessly tied scarf. She wore a baggy pair of trousers and a light pullover top with the sleeves shoved up past her elbows. She paced up and down the length of the sunroom with short, agitated steps and shot a malevolent glance at Bree. “I thought I made it clear that I didn’t want to be bothered wit
h this until you had some results.”

  “I’m not going to ask you about ...” Bree hesitated a moment. In for a penny, in for a pound. So she said bluntly, “... the haunting. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the case or what I can do for you.” Unless, she added to herself, you’re crazy as a bedbug and this whole thing’s an exercise in nuttiness. “So let’s set that aside.”

  Liz’s shoulders relaxed a little; her restless pacing slowed.

  “But I’m going to need some background material before I can go any further. And we can get on a little more efficiently if you wouldn’t mind sitting down.” She smiled. “I’m gettin’ dizzy just watching you wear a path in the carpet.”

  Liz looked at her feet with a bewildered air. There was a dun-colored love seat at right angles to Bree; she sat in it abruptly, as if somebody had shoved her.

  “Maybe a little coffee would help things along?” Bree suggested. “That nice housekeeper who let me in probably makes a pretty good cup.”

  Liz stared at her. A shadowy smile lit her face, and for a moment, Bree caught a glimpse of the pretty woman she must have been twenty years ago. She turned her head over her shoulder and shouted, “Elphine! Coffee!” She ran her hands through her hair and leaned back with a sigh. “Satisfied? Can we get on with it?”

  Bree took a yellow pad from her briefcase and prepared to take notes. “Let’s start with some possible business enemies. You’ve been with Mr. Skinner a long time, haven’t you? Were you closely involved in his affairs from the beginning?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Bree shrugged. “I won’t know until you tell me. But I’m walking into this absolutely blind, Liz. I’ve been thinking about how to wade into this case. If the police believe Mr. Skinner died of drowning secondary to a heart attack, there’s not going to be a lot of forensic evidence against it. So I’ve sent for the coroner’s report, the autopsy, and the rest, but it’s all going to scream ‘drowning secondary to a heart attack.’ Don’t you think?”