Defending Angels Read online

  GABRIEL STRIKER PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS 140 TAYLOR, CHATHAM SQUARE

  No phone and no e-mail address. But Chatham Square was just off Forsyth Park and the address should be easy to find. Historic Savannah had twenty-four village squares, laid out by the city’s founder, James W. Oglethorpe, almost three centuries ago. Bree wasn’t sure how she felt about James W. Oglethorpe. On the one hand, he laid the foundation for one of the most beautiful cities in the United States. On the other, he banned lawyers, Spaniards, and spirituous liquor from the new colony. Bree figured that for the first fifteen years of the colony’s life, Savannah suffered from a huge number of unrighted wrongs, chief among them the lack of the comforting solace of a good stiff drink and paella. Things got a lot better after Oglethorpe sailed back to England.

  The squares were beautiful. Most were landscaped parks with statues, fountains, and tons of flowers. Houses, churches, schools, and a boutique business or two surrounded them all. Savannah had burned at least three times in her tumultuous history, and each time they rebuilt the city, a new architectural style joined the survivors. So the district was a heartbreakingly lovely mix of Georgian, Federal, and Regency. Colonial, Victorian, and an occasional Art Nouveau. Bree wondered what kind of office Gabriel Striker occupied. You could learn a lot about somebody from the way they chose to live.

  She drove around Chatham Square twice before she found 140. The house was a converted three-plex. Originally a center entrance Georgian design, a flight of matching steps was built on either side of the raised front porch. The steps led to 136 and 138 on the second level. Apartment 140 was located in the basement. The entrance was tucked back from the street, at right angles to the square, almost hidden by a live oak draped with Spanish moss. As Bree approached, she could see that the building backed onto a garden surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. The steps leading to the front door were brick; she paused in the middle, and leaned over to run her hand over the fence panels. It was hard to see in the dim light from the sconce, but she would have known that pattern anywhere: spheres so elegantly cast that they seemed to have a life of their own.

  The front door was painted a dark, heavy red. There was no bell or buzzer. There was a doorknocker, though. It was a design she’d seen before, too; a pair of justice scales cupped by heavy bronze wings.

  Striker didn’t keep her waiting long. He opened the door and stepped back to let her in. Bree gestured at the scales of justice. “I see,” she said, “that I am expected.”

  The first thing Bree noticed about Gabriel Striker’s office was the swords. Five of them hung one on top of the other on the wall behind his desk, with the longest at the bottom, and the shortest at the top. They were very old. Bree didn’t know why she was so sure they were antiques. They were polished to a dull sheen. The blades were straight and true, with a blue tinge to the steel. Maybe it was the jewels set into the hilts; none was faceted in the way artisans cut jewels within the last two hundred years or so, but instead were rounded lumps of red, blue, and green. The bottom sword was at least six feet long; the top less than twelve inches.

  “Pretty impressive,” she said. “But who would be tall enough to dink around with the one at the bottom? They’re ceremonial, I suppose?”

  “Quite the contrary,” he said. “Please sit down.” He waved at the wooden chair in front of his desk. Bree took a cautious look around before she actually sat. The floor was of scuffed and untended pine. A worn carpet remnant of an indeterminate color covered about a third of it. The fireplace on the end wall was bricked up and a wooden box of old newspapers sat on the tiled apron. A reading chair and a standing lamp sat in the far corner, and that was it. A cheap plastic blind covered the window facing the street. There was a half-open door to the right of the fireplace; Bree saw the edge of a stove and the top of a refrigerator. He worked here; she wondered if he lived here, too.

  Gabriel was dressed in a pair of worn jeans, some kind of a dark pullover, and tennis shoes. His desk was bare except for a mug filled with pens and pencils. He sat behind it and propped his feet up on the top. “Well,” he said. “Here you are.”

  “Here I am.” Bree leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. “I’d like the answers to a couple of questions about the Skinner case.”

  He nodded.

  “I can trust you to tell me the truth?”

  He looked a little surprised at that. “Of course. It’s an odd question under the circumstances. Have you been lied to recently?”

  “Have I been lied to?” Bree asked indignantly. She uncrossed her legs and sat up. “I most certainly have!”

  “By whom?”

  Bree noted the “whom.” For all his scruffy appearance, Mr. Striker was an educated private eye, if nothing else. She also didn’t have an answer; no one connected to the Skinner case had lied to her. Everyone had answered her questions. It was the answers that didn’t make any sense.

  “As far as I know, Bree, no one connected with Bennie Skinner’s death has misled you or tried to obscure the truth.”

  “Then what’s going on?”

  He smiled a little. “You’ll have to be a little more specific. I don’t have true answers to open-ended questions. None of us do.”

  Here at least was a question that should have a definitive answer. “Who is ‘us’?” She scowled at the amused look on his face. No open-ended questions, he’d said. This was a lot like the Techniques of Cross-Examination elective she’d taken her third year in law school. “All right. Let me phrase it this way. What’s the one thing that you, Professor Cianquino, Petru Luchet, Ronald Parchese, and Lavinia Mather have in common?”

  “At one time, we were all citizens of the Celestial Sphere.”

  A cult. Bree was surprised at the depth of her dismay. She raised her eyebrow and said dryly, “You said at one time? You aren’t anymore?”

  “No,” he said. Then, so quickly that she almost missed it, a spasm of intense sorrow passed across his face. “Not anymore.”

  “Has it been disbanded? This Celestial Sphere? I don’t recall reading anything about it.”

  “It exists.”

  The quiet certainty in his voice rattled her.

  “Is there someone in charge of the whole thing? A founder?”

  “Not in the sense you mean, no.” He hesitated, not, she felt, to conceal anything, but to make sure that he could find the right words. “It exists. It has always existed. It always will exist. There are those of us who pass in and pass out according to the purpose. Petru, Cianquino, Lavinia, Ron, Sasha—we’re those who have passed out.”

  “And my little dog, too?” Bree said flippantly. This was feeling very much like Oz. Then, since Gabriel Striker looked like the sanest man she’d ever met, even though he was talking absolute nonsense, genuine perplexity temporarily overcame her annoyance. “Passed out? For a purpose? What purpose?”

  “To form the Company. Your company. The Company that’s been created to defend Skinner and others like him.”

  She took a few minutes to think about her next question. “You’re saying all of you have some common purpose in the Skinner case?”

  “Yes.” He smiled, then sat back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “We do. So do you.”

  “What is it? It can’t be to find out who murdered him. There’s a big question about whether he’s been murdered at all.”

  “Somebody killed him. Took him out of this life well before his time.”

  Bree was getting very tired of this. “I’m glad you’re so certain. I suppose he’s been haunting you, too? I’ll tell you something. I’d be a little less skeptical if maybe Mr. Skinner could tell me himself. No reason why he shouldn’t, right?”

  “No reason at all. Ultimately, he is our client of course.” His expression didn’t change, but the gray of his eyes looked ever more silvery in the dim light. “It’s Skinner, and those like him, that we’re here to defend.”

  Bree felt her temper slipping. She held on to it with a mighty ef
fort. “There’s more clients like Skinner? Cordially loathed by everybody while they’re alive? Demanding some kind of justice when they’re dead?”

  “Exactly,” Gabriel said. He looked very pleased. “Skinner’s soul has been sentenced to purgatory. He’s filed an appeal. He claims his actions have been either misinterpreted or that they were legal to begin with.”

  “What,” asked Bree, fascinated despite herself, “has he been convicted of?”

  “Greed.”

  “Greed,” Bree said pleasantly, “of course. Naturally. You bet.”

  “One of the Seven Felonies, as you know.”

  “There’re only seven?” She smacked the palm of her hand against her forehead and answered herself. “D’uh. Sure there are. What could be more screamingly obvious? Pride, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Greed, and the Damn Lazy. And his defense?”

  Gabriel grinned at her. He had a perfectly charming smile, and Bree, to her annoyance, found herself smiling back. “He claims mitigating circumstances. That he has, in fact, acted more than once out of disinterested charity and compassion and that the scales of justice will tip in his favor if these actions are taken into account. But the proof lies in the temporal. Therefore, he requires a temporal defense team. The Company.”

  “And that would be all of you,” Bree said. “Of course. All this is screamingly obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t cotton on to this before.”

  The sarcasm bounced off him like water off a duck’s back. “We each have a role, as any good defense team must. Mine is to protect you from physical harm.” The infectious grin lit his face again. “Harm that you’d do to others, as well as the harm others would do to you.”

  Bree felt herself blush. “Thanks,” she said tightly. “But I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. Which is part of the reason for my visit tonight. I haven’t hired you, Mr. Striker. I haven’t recruited you. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want you hanging around my cases. In short, I’d appreciate it if you’d butt out.”

  Gabriel clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Ah. You’re planning on interviewing Carlton Montifiore tomorrow?”

  Bree decided not to answer that. She also decided she’d had it with Mr. Striker’s despotic and condescending attitude. And why was she trying to deal with a crazy man, anyway?

  “It’d be a good idea to let me accompany you.”

  “I thought I was pretty clear about this, Mr. Striker. I’ve got enough on my plate without having to worry about you showing up unannounced. So please take me off your client list.”

  “All right.”

  “All right?” For some reason, Bree thought she would have more of an argument on her hands. “Just like that? All right?”

  He spread his hands in a “there it is” sort of gesture. “It’s your call.”

  “Well.” Bree got to her feet and stood in front of him uncertainly. “Well, okay, then.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and turned to go.

  “You’re going to need me, you know,” he said with an even bigger grin.

  Bree gritted her teeth. “I doubt that, Mr. Striker.”

  “All you have to do is call.”

  “Got it right here.” She picked his business card out of her jacket pocket and waved it at him, then remembered there was no phone listed. Annoyed, she stuck it back in her pocket and stalked to the front door.

  She’d had it. Enough. The inmates were on the streets and running the asylum. She put her hand on the door, then turned back to gauge the effect of her exit.

  He was gone. And the swords on the wall were gone, too.

  Bree slammed home, ignored Antonia’s plaintive questions about where she’d been, and went to bed for the best night’s sleep she’d had in a week. She woke refreshed, focused, and ready to shove the bewildering events of the past few days into the mental category: Stress of Setting Up Shop All by Herself.

  Carlton Montifiore’s pleasant, efficient secretary directed her to the Pyramid Office Building renovation on Liberty, where Montifiore himself had stopped to check on the project’s progress. “The very spot,” she said after she introduced herself to him, “where I’ll be moving in a couple of months.”

  Montifiore looked pleased. “That’s right. You have the judge’s old office on the third floor.”

  The television interview after Skinner’s death hadn’t done justice to him. Relaxed, and clearly glad to be in the middle of the crowd of stone masons, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who scurried around the building site, Montifiore seemed affably open to Bree’s questions, and to have all the time in the world.

  “I won’t take up too much of your time,” she said a little apologetically. “I can see that you’re busier than a one-armed paperhanger.” She made a face; her father’s genial clichés seemed to pounce on her when she least expected them.

  “No trouble at all. I’ve got some of the best crews in the business. There’s not much for me to do other than sign the payroll checks at the end of the week. Would you like me to show you around?”

  “I surely would, Mr. Montifiore.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “It’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? Why don’t you call me Carlo?”

  Bree looked at him inquiringly. “It’s my wife,” he said in an amused whisper. “She’s a little sensitive about the Italian thing. My mamma named me Carlo, and that’s what I am to my friends.” His eyes darkened momentarily. “It’s the outsiders that call me Carlton. Like those goddamn media parasites.” He ran one hand through his thick, dark hair. “Forget that. Let’s take a look at your uncle’s office.”

  The Pyramid was built of cobblestone badly in need of repainting after two hundred years of Savannah’s semi-tropical weather. The huge oak beams that formed the building’s skeleton had been rotted away due to a combination of damp and that scourge of Southern architecture, the termite. Carlo led her up a broad marble staircase that reached from the ground floor to the fifth and highest floor of the building.

  “We had to strip off the whole face of the building, replace the wood framing with beams, and put the cobblestones piece by piece in the original pattern.” He stopped in the third-floor stairwell and opened the door to the hallway for her. “After you.”

  Bree stepped into the hallway. The terrazzo floors had been sandblasted clean. The pecan paneling had been stripped, sanded down, and refinished to a glossy sheen. The air smelled pleasantly of raw wood, fresh paint, and some piney astringent. Carlo led the way down the hall past thick old office doors topped with rippled glass. He came to a halt in front of number 7. “Here it is. Now this looks pretty good, but we’re not going to get a C of O for another couple of months. So you’ll be in your temporary office space for some little time yet.” He stepped back, to allow her to open the door herself. “You knew there’d been a fire in your uncle’s office? That he died here before he could be rescued.”

  Bree paused, her hand on the heavy bronze doorknob. “Yes,” she said briefly.

  Carlo drew his eyebrows together in a slight frown. “Very odd, it was. Intense. Killed him instantly.”

  Bree shook her head. “We never did hear how it started.”

  He shrugged. “Fire department couldn’t get a handle on it. Nobody seemed to know. Kept itself to this room, thank God.”

  Bree hesitated a moment, and continued on inside. It may have been her imagination, but a faint smell of ash and rotten eggs hung on the air. An aftermath of the fire? The room was small—no more than fifteen by fifteen. A single, double-sashed window looked out over Liberty Street. His desk was gone, of course, and so were the glass-fronted barrister’s bookcases that lined the far wall. Bree lost herself in thought. She remembered the office well. She could almost see her uncle’s stooped and kindly figure, sitting behind the heavy oak desk in his old red leather chair.

  And now, as she stood in the middle of the office, she felt something else: desolation, betrayal, an overwhelming fear. Then, with a sudden, horri
fying blow, she felt the pitch and sway of her nightmare ship beneath her feet. The percussion of deadly wings beat above her head. The screams of the dying filled her head. She clapped her hands over her ears and bit her lip to keep from screaming.

  A battle had been fought here.

  And Franklin had lost.

  Carlo touched her arm. “You okay there, Bree?”

  She pinched her nose to keep the tears from falling, then took a steadying breath. “I miss him,” she admitted. “He was very old, you know, and past his time, Mamma said.” She breathed in with a sort of hiccup. “But what’s that mean? His time. Past his time. I wished he’d lived forever.” Tears welled up and rolled down her cheeks.

  “Well.” Carlo cleared his throat and looked at his feet. She’d embarrassed him. She put the backs of her hands under her eyes and took another deep breath. She was losing it. And in front of one of the most influential men in the city. “Sorry. Now, about Ben Skinner ...”

  “I know Liz is convinced that someone did the old guy in,” Carlo said wryly. “The sooner that’s cleared up the better. What is it that you need to know?”

  Bree took him through her list of prepared questions. Yes, Skinner had hit the roof over the change in the design plans for the Tybee Island site and yes, his rage had been directed at the innocent and guilty alike. He’d threatened to pull all his project business from Montifiore Construction, and yes, that would have put a significant hole in Carlo’s business. “We took care of most of his projects here in Georgia,” Carlo admitted, “and the old bastard had a way of getting under my skin, no question about it.” He guided Bree out the office door and down the marble staircase that led to the bottom floor. “But the Island Dream project had the right kind of financing behind it and the project itself wasn’t in jeopardy.”