Angel Condemned

by Mary Stanton

  Her offices occupied the ground floor of a small white clapboard house that sat smack in the middle of Georgia’s only All-Murderers Cemetery. Her landlady, Lavinia Mather, lived on the second floor. From the various thumps overhead, Lavinia was probably up there, but with angels, you never knew.

  Bree took the card back. “Suite 0 is in the basement. It’s listed on the directory in the Bay Street lobby. The listing wasn’t there this morning. I asked the security guard, and she said that a guy with bad fingernails came in and slotted the letters in about eleven thirty—just about the time the summons was being served on Cissy and Prosper White.”

  “Bad fingernails? That’d be Beazley,” Ron shuddered. “Ugh.”

  Bree suppressed a shudder herself. Beazley’s long, talon-like fingernails were usually caked with an unspeakable substance that smelled liked rotting corpses. She’d never gotten the wind up enough to ask—probably because she was afraid of the answer. “I went down in the elevator, and the offices were locked up tight.”

  “Maybe it’s a blind.”

  “I doubt it, Ron. We knew they had a temporal practice. They represented the insurance company in the accident that broke my leg. I don’t recall the address they listed then, but it sure as heck wasn’t Bay Street. I would have remembered that.”

  “Bay Street is an excellent address,” Petru said. “Perhaps they moved in the hope to attract a better clientele.” He scratched under his thick black beard and peered at the cards in his hand. “I am knocking with three points in my hand, Ronald.”

  Ron picked up his hand and looked at it. He was tall, fair-haired, with bright blue eyes and an impeccable sense of style. Today he was in pressed blue jeans, a crisp white long-sleeved shirt, and a slouchy leather jacket. In sharp contrast, Petru was short, thickset, and favored baggy black suits that smelled faintly of mothballs. Sometimes, depending on the light, it was possible to see the faint gold glow that surrounded both of them.

  Ron set his cards downs with a flourish, placed three of his discards against Petru’s meld, and sat back with a grin. “Insult,” he said. “That’s fifty points for the good guys.”

  Petru muttered something into his beard and then reshuffled the cards. Bree snatched them out of his hand and demanded, “Well?”

  Ron leaped to his feet. “Is there something you want us to do?”

  “Perhaps we could discuss this in further depth?” Bree suggested pointedly. “As long as it’s not interrupting your card game?”

  “It is not a trouble to quit the card game,” Petru said. “I am glad to begin work again. I have been losing to Ronald all week. But this case of yours is a temporal case. Nobody is dead? This is a matter for Bay Street and Mrs. Billingsley. Not us, I think.”

  “This is a matter of my aunt. My mother’s sister. I am very fond of my mother’s sister. I do not want her anywhere near Beazley and Caldecott.”

  “Then of course we will be happy to consult.” Petru got to his feet with an effort and unhooked his cane from the back of the kitchen chair.

  “Good to hear that. Seeing as how both of you are on the payroll.” She paused. “For the moment.” She let the silence that greeted this sally stretch out and then gestured toward the doorway leading out of the kitchen. “Let’s try the conference room.”

  Bree had responded to the ad for the Angelus address because it was amazingly cheap, close to her town house on the Savannah River, and fairly spacious. This was before she knew it was an address that only she and those attached to the Celestial Spheres could actually find. The house dated from the 1820s and sat squarely amid the remains of the cemetery. She rented the entire first floor, which totaled about six hundred square feet, with just enough room for her office staff.

  There was a small kitchen with a humpback refrigerator, a dinged-up porcelain sink, and a linoleum floor that peeled in inconvenient places. Petru’s laptop computer occupied the square kitchen table, and his files and books were crowded into a battered china dresser near the back door.

  The kitchen was off an equally small living room with polished pine floors. Ron’s desk took up one end of the room. A battered leather couch with an old oak trunk that served as a coffee table offered space for clients at the other. At least, that had been the plan when Bree had rented the space initially. The house was hidden from temporals, and so far, only one damned soul had found its way there, and it hadn’t needed to sit down, much less put a cup of coffee on the top of the trunk.

  A brick fireplace was built against the long wall facing the cemetery. Above the fireplace was a painting of The Rise of the Cormorant, a horrific scene of a sailing ship in a fiery storm, with passengers drowning in the roiling waves. Bree hated the picture. Like her condemned clients, it was part of the legacy of celestial practice of her birth father, the man she’d always known as Great-Uncle Franklin. She couldn’t burn it, bury it, or smash it with an ax. She had considered all three.

  The remaining space on the ground floor was given over to a dining room used as a conference area and a small bedroom that she’d converted for her own use with Franklin’s own desk and chair. The front door opened into a tiny foyer, with a stairwell that featured a parade of brightly painted Renaissance angels marching up the wall to Lavinia’s rooms on the second floor.

  Bree led the way into the conference room. She sat at the head of the table in a chair that faced away from the room’s back window, since the view outside was depressing. A dying Spanish oak with an open grave beneath it dominated the backyard. The grave had once contained the corpse of Josiah Pendergast. Bree didn’t know what had happened to the body and was afraid she was going to find out every time she had to work late and leave the office after dark. The other graves had decaying headstones that identified murderers long sent to their own particular circle of Hell.

  Despite Lavinia’s frequent efforts at gardening, the entire cemetery was filled with decaying leaves and the reek of foul decay, even in high summer.

  “Coffee?” Ron asked brightly. “I’ve got some doughnuts left over from this morning.”

  “Not right now. Sit down, please, both of you. I want to know if we have a case or not.” She handed the Summons and Complaint to Ron, who skimmed it and passed it along to Petru. Petru read it carefully, folded it up, and shook his hand. “I do not believe so. Nobody is dead.”

  “I don’t think so, either,” Ron said promptly. “Beazley and his beastly friend have the right to a temporal practice, if that’s what you’re asking. Just as you do with the Bay Street office. We all have to pay the bills somehow. And a temporal practice means temporal clients with real-time cash. As for this Allard Chambers and his wife, Jillian? Temporal, as far as I can see. They’ve got a real address on Whitaker. I’ve gone by the store myself. Doesn’t look too prosperous. Which would explain why he’s reduced to the likes of Beazley and Caldecott. I mean, so far they’re batting zero with us in the Celestial Courts. I can’t imagine that they do any better in the Chatham County Courthouse.”

  Bree frowned. “Why haven’t they shown up in a temporal practice before this?”

  “Perhaps Goldstein has interceded,” Petru said. “You and Ronald petitioned the Celestial Courts for better communication with your clients, did you not? Perhaps the establishment of this office for the defense is a step in that direction.”

  “Maybe.” Bree leaned back in her chair. She’d been operating on an adrenaline surge since her run-in with Payton. Back here in the Angelus office, the only place she felt truly safe, she was suddenly aware of how tired she was. She wanted go to bed and sleep for a week. “Cissy’s going to marry this guy Prosper White. All of a sudden, we’ve got two demons . . .” She thought about Barlow. “Maybe three?”

  “Not demons, precisely,” Petru said.

  “Whatever they are, they aren’t fully human, and they aren’t nice, and they’re involved with the plaintiff. I don’t want any member of my family to come anywhere near what we do here.”

  “This is highly u
nderstandable,” Petru said. “Perhaps you should go and see this Chambers to determine if there is a level of threat.”

  Bree tried to think of a bigger violation of the canon of ethics than contacting a plaintiff without the plaintiff’s lawyer present. Embezzlement, maybe. Or hand-delivering your own client’s written confession to the DA. Petru was studying for the Georgia Bar Exam. This didn’t augur well for his success.

  Petru caught her scowl. “Not in your capacity as an attorney, of course. He has a shop specializing in antiquities? Go and look to purchase one thing or another. Watch him out of the corner of your eye. You may be able to sense if he is a threat from the darker side of the Sphere. Take Sasha with you. That is what your dog is for. Today is Monday, I believe, so Sasha is at home with Antonia? He should accompany you to the shop.”

  “As a demon sniffer?” Bree smiled a little at that. Sasha was a cross between a Russian mastiff and a golden retriever and the gentlest soul in Bree’s universe.

  “T’cha! Sasha is an adept, if you will,” Petru said. “He will sense danger, if there is any. This visit, it is not, I agree, a strictly proper thing to do. But if this were my sister Rose? I would not let such deter me. I could not.”

  “Love and duty,” Ron said suddenly. “You shouldn’t have to face that kind of choice, Bree. Call up Beazley and ask him if it’s okay to take a gander at Chambers before you take on the case officially. You might want to hand off Prosper White to someone else, just like McAllister handed off Chambers to Beazley and Caldecott. Then you can keep an eye on your aunt Cissy without running into any potential conflicts.”

  Bree nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “There’s a phone number on the card, isn’t there?” Ron got to his feet. “I’ll give the Weasel-Beasel a call myself.”

  “If he agrees, ask him either to e-mail or fax the permission to me,” Bree said. “I don’t trust his word. Petru? I’m not sure that you’ll find anything, but if you could get some background material on the law firm of Beazley, Barlow, and Caldecott, I’d be grateful. If I’m going up against them in a court in the state of Georgia, I want to know what we’re dealing with.” She thought a moment and then added, “Ask him about this Barlow, too. I’m almost certain we haven’t run into him before.”

  The two angels left the room. Bree closed her eyes and thought about lunch. She’d had a cup of yogurt at the town house for breakfast and nothing since. At least she was meeting Cissy and Antonia at B. Mitchell’s for dinner at seven. The food was great there. Then she thought about Cissy in the talons of something like Caldecott, with his goat-pupil eyes and his sharpened teeth, and her appetite disappeared.

  Her cell phone beeped. She flipped it open and read the text message:

  OK Winston-Beaufort 2 see Chambers any time/no talk case/Z. Beazley/C U in court

  “Charming.” Bree tapped Save and snapped her cell phone shut. Fine. She had counsel’s permission on record. She’d go see Allard Chambers for herself.

  February in Savannah was chilly, but Whitaker Street was close enough that Bree decided to walk.

  She strode along in the chilly air, an ache in her still-knitting bones. The break had healed exceptionally quickly, but an occasional pain lanced underneath her knee like a red-hot spike, and she felt as if her leg could give way without warning. She picked up her pace, as if trying to outrun it.

  Winter had settled over the city like a silver shroud, veiling the trees and shrubs in the city squares and hushing the noise of the traffic. The sidewalks were damp and uncrowded. The skies were overcast, with a promise of rain to come. Bree crossed Oglethorpe Square, turned left onto Mulberry, right again on Whitaker, and found Antiques and Reclaimables halfway down the street.

  It was located in a two-story, tin-roofed building that had probably been a warehouse in the mid-nineteenth century. The aged stucco walls were streaked with rusty water stains. The white-painted, peeling wooden frames of the doors and windows were spotted with mold. The bottom story was given over to storefronts. Reclaimables was tucked between a hopeful coffee shop and something called the City of Light Thrift Store and Grocery. The second story was faced with a long wrought iron balcony in need of attention from a stiff wire brush. The balcony was divided into three sections, each serving an apartment. The balcony just above Reclaimables held two green plastic lawn chairs, a rusty Weber grill, and a pot of vivid-red geraniums. These items sat in front of a large window backed by a pair of soiled drapes. Someone inside twitched the drapes aside. The hand that held them wasn’t young.

  “You’d think the place would be full of posters for Gauloises cigarettes and resin copies of the Eiffel Tower.”

  Bree jumped. She’d been concentrating so hard on the upper story that she’d overlooked the small man standing in front of the antique shop.

  “The City of Light?” he said with a nod in the direction of the thrift store. “Paris?”

  “Paris. Of course.”

  “It isn’t, though. It’s a Christian sect, dedicated to charitable works. Although one could possibly trace its roots back to Zoroastrianism, which was not a charitable religion at all. Quite the contrary, in fact. Pre-Christian, and characterized by human sacrifice. Which isn’t to say its influence has died out, of course.”

  This flood of interesting, but irrelevant, information made think Bree of Petru, who’d turned didactics into high art. She smiled. “You’d enjoy a conversation with an associate of mine. He’s Russian and very interested in antiquities.”

  “I might, indeed.” He ran one hand nervously through his thinning hair. He was shorter by several inches than Bree, who stood five foot nine in her bare feet. His shoulders and arms were thick. He was dressed for the cold weather, in rumpled chinos, a worn denim shirt, and battered Frye work boots. He looked like every archeologist Bree had ever seen on the Nature channel, down to the wire-rimmed spectacles, L. L. Bean fishing vest, and weathered skin. All he lacked was a bush hat. She pegged his age at somewhere in the midsixties.

  He didn’t look possessed, evil, damned, or otherwise part of the darker areas of Bree’s life as a celestial advocate. He looked like an archeologist shopkeeper on the verge of going down for the count.

  “You are Professor Allard Chambers?”

  His pupils widened, momentarily changing his eyes from washed-out blue to black. “The last person who asked me that, in that tone of voice, with that sort of specificity, was a process server.” His voice remained cordial. If it hadn’t been for his eyes, Bree wouldn’t have known he was angry. “But you don’t look like a process server. You look . . .” He shoved his glasses up his nose with one forefinger and peered at her. “You look like one of those statues of Athena the old Romans erected in imitation of the Greeks. Perfectly proportioned. Straight nose, broad brow, level gaze. You’re too slender for your height, though. The Greeks wouldn’t have approved. But the hair! More Norse than Greek, that white blonde. Hm. At a guess, I would say you’re a lawyer? Here on behalf of that load of codswallop Prosper White?”

  Bree raised her eyebrows. Chambers smirked. “I see my guess was an accurate one. Come in, please, to the shop. We can talk there more comfortably.”

  A bell over the door lintel rang loudly as she followed him inside.

  The shop was a mess. That was the first thing to strike her. The second was the smell: a papery, moldy, very pleasant odor that was somehow familiar. Bree placed it, suddenly. Her family home smelled like that. Plessey had belonged to the Winston-Beauforts for more than two hundred years. It was the scent of age and history.

  Reclaimables was long and narrow, perhaps sixty by twenty, with sixteen-foot ceilings. Cheap pine bookshelves stuffed with books, stacks of moldering magazines, narrow boxes, and a jumble of pots and other small objects lined the side walls. The uneven floor was covered in stained indoor-outdoor carpeting. It might have been hunter green, once. But maybe not. Three oak-framed, waist-high display cases ran down the center of the aisle. The glass fronts were smeared with th
umbprints. Careless stacks of clay artifacts spilled from the interior shelving. Bree caught an occasional glimpse of bronze and silver metals among the piles.

  “There’s a couple of chairs in the back where we can sit, Athena.”

  “It’s Brianna Winston-Beaufort.” Bree dug into her tote for a business card as she followed Chambers to the back of the shop. He stopped at his desk—which was bare except for a laptop and a landline—and shoved a stack of catalogues off the desk chair onto the floor. “Have a seat, Athena.”

  Bree had only been practicing law for four years, but the first three and a half had been in her adoptive father’s office in Raleigh, and he’d taught her well: the guy who stood had a psychological advantage over the guy who sat. She settled one hip on the edge of Chambers’s desk and laid her business card on the cover of the laptop. Chambers looked bemused for a second, and then he sat in his office chair.

  “I have your attorney’s permission to come by,” Bree said. “But I have to ask you if you’re sure you’re comfortable talking to me without him. And we can’t discuss the particulars of your case with Prosper White.”

  “Zeb gave me a call. Said it’d be fine.”

  “Zeb?”

  “Zebulon Beazley. Interesting name, isn’t it? I’m wondering if his background includes one of those fundamentalist sects that adhere to a strict interpretation of the Christian Bible.”

  “I don’t know,” Bree said. “I wouldn’t be surprised, though.”

  “Dirty fighter,” Chambers said with cheerful spite. “Kind of lawyer who’ll stand a lot of heat. Just who you want in the rough-and-tumble of a court case. I’m a lot more comfortable with him and Caldecott than that sniveling piece of work at Marbury, Stubblefield. Payton? Payton McAllister? Reminded me of a grad student I once had that plagiarized part of his thesis. Anyhow, Marbury’s the biggest firm in town, so I thought they might be cheaper. I was wrong about that, too. Bastards have already e-mailed me an outsize bill, and they only turned me over to Beazley this morning.” He patted his vest pocket and pulled out a well-used briar pipe. “Bad habit, I know. D’ya mind?” He didn’t wait for her polite demurral but fished in another pocket for his tobacco.