Angel Condemned

by Mary Stanton

  The camera was angled about 45 degrees, so Bree’s view of Jillian was distorted. She was painfully thin. She wore a long, baggy print dress that looked as if it was made of cotton and a puffy ski jacket. Her feet were in thick socks and heavy sandals. She carried a paper bag over one arm, the kind with paper handles.

  The doors to the yellow bus opened silently, and people began to stream out onto the driveway. Jillian gestured at them, and they lined up at the side of the bus. Jillian went down the line, dipping into the shopping bag.

  “What’s she giving them?” Ron said.

  “Tomatoes, squishy fruit, whatever,” Bree said. “The parking lot was a mess.” She leaned back in her chair. “Look at her posture, Ron. She’s clearly the organizer here.”

  Allard pulled the two signs from the back of the Fiesta and leaned back against the car, glancing frequently down the driveway.

  “Waiting for Channel 5, I bet,” Ron said.

  He was right. As soon as the Channel 5 van pulled up and Felicia Fairfax got out with her microphone and her cameraman, the protestors went into action. Allard handed the smaller sign—the one that read PROSPER PROSPERS WHILE INNOCENTS STARVE—to Jillian. He hoisted his sign up. His mouth moved. Jillian prodded the homeless people lined up at the bus with her sign, and they began to chant in unison.

  “They’re saying ‘thief, thief, thief,’” Bree said.

  The stretch limo pulled around the yellow bus and parked directly in front of the museum steps. Charles Martin got out, along with several other people.

  Bree stopped the DVD. “Do we have a list of who came with Martin?”

  Ron pulled a manila file off the top of the stack. “Four people: Martin’s assistant, along with a member of the Bowie Museum board in Houston and her husband. Martin’s girlfriend is the one in the sable hat.”

  “This is in black and white.”

  “Sable as in fur,” Ron said. “Don’t tell Antonia. Anyhow, the only person who’d met White before was Martin. Everyone else seems to be along for the ride.”

  “Good. We’ll set them aside as suspects for the moment,” Bree tapped the Play button, and the footage moved forward. “And there’s the four of us, coming out of the building.”

  They both watched as Bree came out of the front doors. She was several steps ahead of the others. Cissy crowded on one side of White; Alicia clutched his opposite arm.

  “I don’t look skinny,” Bree said. “No matter what anybody says.”

  The security guard and the girl from the kiosk came out behind them. The guard stopped, looked at the crowd, and put his hand on his pistol. Martin caught sight of White, lifted his hand, and started toward the front steps.

  Jillian lifted her sign. She shouted. The crowd of homeless people surged behind her, and they rushed the steps.

  “There,” Bree said. “Look. It’s Martin who moved me out of the way.”

  She saw herself stumble a little. White was completely surrounded by the crowd.

  “Look!” Bree said. “Cissy’s been pushed to the side. There’s at least one head between her and White.”

  “It’s Alicia Kennedy.”

  White went down in a melee of bodies.

  Bree stopped the DVD and reran it. She reran it again. And again.

  The actual killing wasn’t visible. Bree didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry.

  “The Channel 5 people were too far away to get anything,” Ron said. “Look. The camera guy never left his post in front of the news van.”

  She let the rest of the video run. There was a short moment of chaos, once White was down. The recruits from the City of Light raced for the safety of the bus. The security guard talked frantically into his cell phone. Fairfax pushed closer to the body. Cissy fell to her knees. Alicia Kennedy threw herself across White’s body. Charles Martin stood still for a moment, then pulled out his cell phone. The Chamberses, husband and wife, stumbled back and stood together. Jillian clutched Allard’s arm, her eyes wide. Allard looked shocked. The jackets they both wore were spattered with dark splotches. Bree saw herself move people away from White’s body, then lift Cissy to her feet and turn her over to Charles Martin. She knelt at White’s side and pulled open his suit coat.

  She remembered knowing instantly that he was dead.

  “Ugh.” She hit the Stop button, then Replay.

  “Are we looking for something specific?”

  “A little toad-like guy. Do you see anyone who resembles a toad?”

  Ron bent over her shoulder. He smelled like sunshine and peppermint. “Our toad would be?”

  “Mr. Dumphey.”

  “Ah. Dumphey of Barlow & Caldecott?”

  “The same. He’s listed as a witness in the police reports. Aunt Cissy’s met him; hence the description. The only possible place he could have come from would be the bus.”

  Ron shook his head, pulled out another manila file folder, and opened it up. “I’ve got the names of the bus people. No Dumphey here.”

  “Wait a minute.” Bree stopped the DVD and zoomed in on a face. “Would you say that’s a toady sort of face?”

  “The security guard.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ron flipped a couple of pages in the file. “Here he is. Lloyd Dumphey. Employed as a security guard, part-time. His first day on the job was—”

  “Don’t tell me. Yesterday?”

  “You got it.”

  Bree drummed her fingers on the desk. “Well, well. You know, Ron, there’s no rule that says villains like Caldecott have to be smart. And a good thing, too. If nothing else, I have a strong hunch where the Cross is. Would you make an appointment for me, Ron? With Mr. Caldecott and his paralegal. No. Strike that. I’m going over there right now.”

  “Maybe you should take Gabriel with you.”

  “Against Caldecott? That’d be using a nine-pound hammer to drive a halfpenny nail. And Dumphey? Did he look like a demon of the—what did you call it? The really vicious guys. The nephiliam class?”

  Ron’s brightness dimmed, and he said soberly, “You don’t want to joke about them, Bree.”

  “Okay. I won’t. But I’m going over to see Caldecott and his little toady buddy right now.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Nonsense. Why waste the energy?” Every time her angels appeared in the temporal world outside the Angelus Street office, it took a little of their mortal life span from them. She was already concerned about Lavinia, who seemed to be fading before their eyes.

  “At least take Sasha with you.”

  “That I can do.”

  She was out marching down Bay Street in minutes. It felt good to have a clear, unambiguous job to do. Halfway down Bay, Sasha caught up with her. He cocked his head at her in what seemed to be a worried way but trotted along obediently beside her.

  The lobby to the Bay Street office was lightly crowded with people going to lunch. Bree thought about heading up to her own office first but decided it’d be better to tackle Caldecott before he, too, headed out to lunch.

  “Unless he isn’t in at all,” she said to Sasha when they were headed to the basement in the elevator.

  I don’t know.

  “And Dumphey?”

  He’s there.

  “And what’s-his-name. Barlow?”

  No answer from her dog.

  The elevator door slid open. Bree stepped out into the short hallway. The entire Bay Street building had undergone a complete renovation some months before Bree had moved in, and it had been a large and expensive task. One builder had gone bankrupt in the middle of it, and the second had cleared out of Savannah just before the place had reopened. Neither builder had felt the basement needed the kind of attention that had been paid to the upper floors.

  The walls and the floor were faced with twelve-by-twelve industrial ceramic tile. The color was a sickly yellow. Bree had to admit the color might be due more to the cheap lighting than the actual tile. Sixty-watt bulbs were placed at ten-foot intervals along
the ceiling. Bree marched past a janitor’s closet, the furnace rooms, and a supply room before she came to the door labeled BARLOW & CALDECOTT ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW SUITE 0. The bottom half of the door was battered mahogany. The upper half was rippled glass, just like her own office door on the sixth floor. Even the font of the lettering was the same. She put her hand on the brass door knob, threw it open, and strode in.

  Her first thought was that she couldn’t imagine Cissy in the place. A waist-high room divider made of dented and splintered particleboard closed off the paralegal’s desk from the waiting area. Two orange plastic chairs with bucket seats had been placed on either side of a rickety end table. Red plastic roses in a cheap vase sat on top of it.

  Her second thought was that somebody had heard her coming and had scuttled off behind one of the office doors that led off of the little lobby. One door was labeled BARLOW. The other, CALDECOTT. A faint smear of glue beneath Barlow’s sign picked out the ripped-off letters: Z. BEAZLEY.

  Bree rapped on the lintel of the main door and said, “Hello,” very loudly.

  A faint scratching behind Caldecott’s door was her only response.

  “Caldecott!” she said. “I want to speak with you.”

  “Not here,” came a muffled voice. “Out to lunch. Come back later.”

  Bree looked down at Sasha. “Dumphey?” Without waiting for an answer, she went to Caldecott’s door and pulled it open.

  The security guard from the Frazier huddled behind the battered oak desk. Face-to-face with him, Bree decided that he did look like a toad. It wasn’t so much his physical appearance—which was unprepossessing—as the way his head poked out from his hunched shoulders. She resisted the impulse to holler, “Stand up straight.” Instead, she glared at him. “Mr. Dumphey. I’m Brianna Winston-Beaufort.”

  He looked at her spitefully. For a second, she thought he might spit. “I know who you are.”

  “Then you’ll know what I’ve come for.”

  His eyes were small, beady, and black. They darted from side to side. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mr. Caldecott isn’t here. Mr. Caldecott’s out to lunch. Come back when Mr. Cald—”

  Bree leaned over the desk and grabbed him by the collar. She had never been able to rely on the abnormal strength that had come to her after she’d assumed Franklin’s practice. Or at least, she’d never actually tried to summon it up. She did so now. She pulled Dumphey over the desk and dumped him at her feet. “You took something from my tote yesterday,” she said pleasantly. “It doesn’t belong to you. It was given to me for safekeeping. I want it back.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  Bree hauled him to his feet. He was shorter than she was. She raised him off the floor until she could look him in the eye. “Give it to me.”

  “Mr. Caldecott won’t like it.”

  She shook him. He gurgled a bit. “Mr. Dumphey. I don’t know if you were the one who killed Mr. White yesterday. If you did, I’ll find out. If you had anything at all to do with that crime, I’ll find out. But what I want from you now is the Cross, and if you don’t give it to me right this minute, I will hold you like this until you turn purple and faint dead away. Got it?”

  He nodded in a strangulated way. Bree noted with mild interest that his face was turning red. “I’m going to set you on your feet. Then you are going to retrieve the Cross from where you stashed it and hand it over to me. Got that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She set him on his feet. He put his finger around the inside of his shirt collar and loosened it. Bree focused the power of her considerable will on him.

  Dumphey thrust his hand in his pocket and pulled out the pine box. Bree took it and opened it up. The Cross shone a little in the shadow. She dropped dropped the box in her tote. “I’ll want to see Mr. Caldecott shortly,” she said.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Then Mr. Barlow will do.”

  “He’s not here, either. They’re gone. They left yesterday.”

  “When are they due back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Leave a message for them, please.”

  “Can’t do that, either,” he said fretfully. “If I’d been able to leave a message, I could have told them . . .” His eyes darted toward her tote.

  “That you stole this from me?”

  He shuddered. He had small, oily hands. He clutched her sleeve. “Lissen,” he whispered. “Lissen. Can you do me a favor? Please?”

  Bree fought down her distaste. “What sort of a favor?”

  “Don’t tell him I got it. Don’t tell him you took it. I can just say . . . I can just say I didn’t get a chance to grab it. Please. Please.”

  Sasha nudged her knee. Bree patted his head. “This is the second time this week I’ve behaved badly,” she said to Sasha. “I’m turning into a bully.” She eyed Dumphey. “I apologize for scaring you. And of course I won’t tell Caldecott.”

  “Not Caldecott,” Dumphey hissed urgently. “Barlow. You can’t tell Barlow.”

  “Okay.” She reached out and adjusted his ratty tie, which had come partially unknotted in the unequal struggle. “I’d like you to take a message for me, and I want to be sure you deliver it one way or another. Mr. Beazley was an executor of Prosper White’s estate. Mr. Caldecott represents Allard and Jillian Chambers, who are suing Mr. White’s estate. Partners in a firm can’t do both and still practice in the state of Georgia. He needs to give one of those clients up. I’m suggesting that he turn over all executor duties to Celia Smallwood, who is currently coexecutor. That’s the simplest way out of his current difficulties. Whatever he decides, I want an answer.” She gave Dumphey a farewell pat on his shoulder. He staggered under the weight of it. “Soon, Mr. Dumphey. Soon.”

  Seventeen

  EB looked up from her computer as Bree walked in the door. “There you are. I was just about to call you. You got Sasha with you? Good.”

  “Is Lewis McCallen here?”

  “Nope. We aren’t fancy enough for him. Walked in. Took a look around. Said he’d do better in his suite at the Hyatt. Wanted me to come along to give him a hand. Said he couldn’t count on the secretarial services from some temp agency.”

  “Oh, dear,” Bree said. She tried to squash her immediate reaction: dismay and resentment in equal parts. “That’d be a great opportunity for you, EB. Lewis McCallen is the best criminal defense attorney in the state. His partner’s even better. You’d learn a lot.”

  “So he told me.” EB tried to look indifferent. It didn’t work very well.

  Bree knew EB was flattered by the offer. Bree cleared her throat with some difficulty. “It’s okay, you know. If you want to go.”

  EB’s smile was a little smug. “Anyway. He brought by the investigator’s report on Prosper White’s background. Your daddy hired some firm out of New York City to do it.”

  Bree tossed her coat on the floor and sank into the visitor’s chair. “Did you read it?”

  “Sure did.” EB handed over a three-ring binder.

  “Anything we can use?”

  “There surely is. You’ll see. I used that yellow highlighter.”

  Bree looked at the first page index: “Family/Early Years”; “Academic History”; “Employment History”; “Financials”; “Criminal Record”; “Marriages/Relationships”; “Businesses, Failed”; “Businesses, Successful”; “Known Associates.” She flipped immediately to “Criminal Record”: two bad-check convictions and a ton of parking violations.

  “Look at the marriages. Man had a past,” EB said disapprovingly. “I checked the names in the report with the witnesses you talked about this morning. There’s one name that jumps out at you like a pig in church.”

  She flipped to the marriages. White had been married twice before. Yellow highlighter splashed across the second name. “Whoa,” she said. “White was once married to Charles Martin’s sister? And she died?”

  “White inherited the whole shebang. She was rich, too.” EB frow
ned as heavily as Bree had ever seen her. “Killed in a car crash. That man was in the car with her. He walked away. She didn’t.”

  Bree’s heart constricted. For a moment, she needed to breathe. “He was Aunt Cissy’s heir.”

  “Yes, he was. And he used some low-life lawyers nobody’d ever heard of to do it, too. That ought to tell you something. How long you think your auntie would have lasted after they got married?”

  “It’s bad, EB.”

  “Not as bad as if he weren’t horizontal in the county morgue this very minute.”

  “True. So. Charles Martin moves up on the suspect list.”

  “There’s more,” EB said. “It’s about those Chamberses. You see that index tab for academics? It’s green. Prosper White was a student of Allard Chambers more than thirty years ago.”

  “He was?”

  “Chambers flunked him. The class was called Roman Antiquities—AD 400 to AD 1000.”

  Bree flipped through the pages. The investigating team had done a thorough job, although not as thorough as Petru’s. White’s school transcripts were there. The course description was there. EB had highlighted Chambers’s name. A short description of White’s exposure of the fake cross was there, too. Petru needed to see this. It offered some very promising leads. “I’m going to take this report with me, EB. If that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure is. I got an e-file from those investigators. Made checking off our suspects’ names a lot quicker. Why anybody uses paper nowadays is a mystery to me. You want to know what else?”

  “There’s more?”

  “Uh-huh. That there report’s not the only thing that made my eyes pop open this morning. Things are moving on this case at a pretty good clip. Way things are going, I’ll bet you’ll get this murderer locked by Thursday. Friday at the latest. Which is why I told Lewis McCallen thank you very much but no thank you after I thought on it. I’m staying right here makin’ sure you crack this case.”