Angel's Advocate

by Stanton, Mary

  “You didn’t, um . . .” Bree searched for a diplomatic way to ask if Montel had eavesdropped. There wasn’t one. “You didn’t happen to overhear anything you think I might need to know?” She lowered her voice. “I think we’re looking at a case of murder, here, Montel. I wouldn’t want you to betray a confidence, but it’s important.”

  “Murder, you say.” Montel folded his bar towel into neat thirds. “Blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “He say something about blood. Into his cell phone. Mad-like.”

  “Mad-crazy? Or mad-angry?”

  “Angry. I would say very angry. He was so mad, he was like to spit.”

  “Was this before he started drinking more heavily than usual?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Montel nodded in a dignified way. “To my way of thinking, that phone call set him off.”

  “And he finished how many Manhattans . . . ?”

  “Four.”

  “Yikes,” Bree said. “Four. And then staggered out of here and went on home?”

  “Well, now, I suppose he did.” Montel smiled gently. “His permanent home, you might say.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to recall who was here that night, offhand? People that knew Mr. Chandler?”

  “Well, now, he come in with Mr. Lindquist, the one that he started his stores with. And his son, George, was here for a bit. But Mr. Lindquist went off to the opera with his wife. George, he drifted off somewheres. Mr. Stubblefield was here. The judge was here, as a matter of fact, and some others I could name. Mr. Chandler did stop and have a word with Mr. Peter Martinelli.”

  Bree wrote the names in her notebook. “But Mr. Chandler wasn’t here with anyone in particular?”

  “No, I can’t say that he was. Spent some time on his cell phone, though, after that one call that made him mad.” Montel frowned disapprovingly. You didn’t do business at the Miner’s Club, and cell phones were a particular anathema. But it was a lead, anyway. She could ask Hunter for Chandler’s cell phone records. And she could check on Peter Martinelli. The name rang a faint bell.

  Bree fished the lemon slice out of her club soda and bit into it. “I may be back to ask more about this, Montel. Thank you kindly for your hospitality.”

  “You’re entirely welcome. You take care, then.”

  Bree went back into the crisp, sunny day not much wiser than she’d been going in. Except that Montel was a shrewd judge of character and hard to fool. Probert Chandler’s drinking the night of his death had been atypical. And a man not used to drinking, on a wet, curving road . . . easy pickings for anyone wanting to cause an accident.

  Except that Skidaway Road wasn’t the quickest route back to the Chandler home. It was the quickest route out to the Marlowe’s on Highway 80.

  Bree didn’t read a lot of detective stories—sometimes she thought she’d be better off in this new career of hers if she did—but she did recall a useful aphorism from a book she’d found abandoned in an airport on a trip out to Hawaii with her sister. The detective was a huge fat guy who never left his brownstone apartment. He had an athletic young assistant, whom he frequently admonished: never theorize in advance of the facts. Which was pretty good advice. So Bree put a clamp on her imagination—John Allen Lindquist murdering his former partner for acing him out of Marlowe’s billions? Son George killing off Dad to get more shares?—and drove out to the fatal bend in Skidaway Road.

  Bree had reviewed the police diagrams of the accident thoroughly. The car had gone off the road opposite a little white house surrounded by a white picket fence. Bree parked her car a fair way beyond the bend of the road, to avoid getting clobbered by traffic headed the other way, and walked back to the spot where it’d happened.

  The guardrail was bent, whether from Chandler’s accident or another, Bree couldn’t tell. She hiked her skirt above her knees and stepped over it. The bank dropped abruptly to a deep swale choked with kudzu. Bree made a face. Four months since the car had gone over the side, and the greenery had grown so rapidly, so ferociously, that there wasn’t a sign of where the car had actually landed.

  “Chiggers,” Bree said aloud. The little bitey creatures would make her legs a mass of blood in seconds. Not to mention snakes, spiders, and who-knew-what lurking in the coils of the greenery. She straightened up with a sigh. If she were smart, she’d come back later, with jeans, rubber boots, and a long-sleeved shirt.

  She narrowed her eyes and squinted, hoping to see something, anything, that would keep her from wallowing about in a mess of stuff that had to contain poison ivy, poison oak—anything.

  And she found it. There was a huge scar in the trunk of a weeping willow not forty yards from the embankment. The kind of scar made by a car crashing into the tree. Bree hesitated a long moment, cursed herself for a coward, and started down.

  Something moved in the grass. She paused, then took a step forward . . .

  Into cold. Into cold that bit at her bones with crocodile teeth. Into a wind that carried death and decay like a trophy. And a sound like a jackhammer tearing up the earth.

  Bree stepped back, cautiously, and the vision ebbed. She stepped back again and stumbled over a smooth round object that she knew hadn’t been in the grass before.

  It was a paperweight. It was made of Lucite, and it contained the distinctive Marlowe’s logo, an elaborate ‘M.’

  Bree picked it up. Waited. Heard nothing, felt nothing. Whatever it was, whoever it was, was gone.

  She checked her watch. It was past time to keep her appointment with Madison Bellamy. But first, she’d go back to the office and pick up Belli and Miles. She wasn’t going anywhere without the dogs.

  Not anymore.

  Eleven

  A faithful friend is the medicine of life.

  —Ecclesiasticus 6:16

  “I don’t really know how long the media’s going to keep an interest in the case,” Bree said in response to Andrea Bellamy’s repeated question. Madison’s parents lived in a large, expensive new home just off the Sweetlands golf course. The floors were composition bamboo. The walls were painted in deep fashionable colors like iron ore gray and grasslands green. The kitchen, where they sat, had an overwhelming array of Smallbone cabinetry, black granite countertops, and stainless steel Viking appliances. The coffee arrived hot and properly milk-infused from a built-in cappuccino maker.

  “Decaf, unless you prefer something else.” Andrea placed the cups on a place mat that coordinated with the deep green walls, then sat across from Bree at the kitchen table.

  “This is fine.”

  Andrea regarded her with frank, interested eyes. She was a little too thin, with well-cut brunette hair and a dermabrasion-smooth complexion. “So you’re Bree Beaufort,” she said chattily. “We’ve read about your family, of course. Your aunt Cissy’s quite the thing at the Miner’s Club.”

  “You know her, then?” Bree asked politely.

  “Me? No! We haven’t applied for membership. I’m not sure we could afford it—and I don’t think they’d let us in anyway. Mason,” she added, “my husband, is in plumbing. You meet any plumbers at the Miner’s Club?”

  Bree ignored the edge to her voice. “I don’t spend a lot of time at the club.” She smiled, opened her briefcase, and took out her pen and yellow pad for taking notes.

  Andrea cocked her head. “Huh! I hear Madison. Too bad. I was looking forward to some good gossip about the inner circle.” She rolled her eyes dramatically.

  “I’d have to disappoint you, there.”

  Andrea smiled tightly. And she looked snubbed. Bree, remembering her father’s caveats about attitude, added cravenly, “But if I had any, I’d be happy to pass it on.”

  “There’s my girl,” Andrea said in an artificially up-beat voice as the back door to the kitchen opened. “You made good time, honey. I hope you didn’t speed! We’ve got an officer of the court sitting right here waiting to talk to you!”

  Bree got to her feet as Madison came in. She was a slim, well-exercised kid with lo
ng red hair that had been well cut and artfully highlighted. A high-rise T-shirt exposed her flat stomach. She wore three small earrings in each ear, and had a small butterfly tattoo on one ankle. She looked just like the hundreds of teenaged girls that swarmed over the Oglethorpe Mall on Saturday afternoons. A nice kid. A well-grounded kid. Not a kid who’d participate in the robbery of an eight-year-old Girl Scout.

  “Say hello to Bree Beaufort, Madison.”

  “How do you do, Ms. Beaufort?” Madison flipped her hair back with one hand, took a bottle of water from the Sub-Zero, and sat at the table, at some distance from her mother. “You’re here about Lin and the business at the mall?”

  “In a way,” Bree said. “I read the statement that you gave the police about the incident. You were pretty clear that Lindsey stopped the car on an impulse, and that neither you nor Hartley Williams had time to stop her.”

  Madison folded her lips together and nodded. “That’s about the size of it. Lin’s, like, prone to this kind of pushing the edge. Nothing huge. But it’s happened before.”

  “Robbing a Girl Scout?”

  Madison shook her head, taking Bree’s flip comment at face value. “Oh, no. But if we’re, like, shopping, she’ll go: ‘Watch this!’ and stick a lipstick into her bra, then go out of the store without paying for it. Or if we’re at school and there’s this tough test she’ll write stuff on her wrists so she can cheat. Like that.”

  “Acting out,” Andrea Bellamy said rather piously. “Madison’s tried to help her. She’s going to be majoring in psychology at Pepperdine, Madison is, and wants to go into social work. She feels, as I do, that she has an obligation to be friends with poor Lindsey. I think her mother and father really appreciate Madison’s influence.”

  Bree bit her lip and scribbled Yikes! on her yellow pad, in very small letters. Then she said, “Have you known Lindsey a long time?”

  “Gosh, yeah. Forever. Since, like, eighth grade, I think it was.”

  “That’s when we decided to send Madison to private school,” Andrea said. “The local schools are so scary, don’t you think? And the opportunities there are . . .”

  “Mom,” Madison said.

  “What, honey?”

  “Maybe you could leave me and Ms. Beaufort to talk alone. Okay?”

  “Honey, I don’t like to feel that there’s anything in your life that we can’t know about. You know how proud I am of the kind of relationship the two of us—”

  “Mom. It’ll be fine. It’s not secret stuff about me that I want to talk about. It’s secret stuff about Lin.”

  Andrea Bellamy looked very much as if she wanted to hear secret stuff about Lindsey Chandler. “Well, if you’re sure . . .”

  “I’m sure. Besides, if Ms. Beaufort finds out something, like, detrimental to me, she has to tell you, right? I mean, you’re the parent. I’m the kid. Who’s in charge here?”

  Bree, concentrating hard on the scribbles on her yellow pad, was pretty sure who was actually in charge here.

  “If you’re sure.”

  Madison reached forward and patted her hand. “I’m sure. I’ll come and tell you all about what’s going on in a bit. Have you done your Pilates yet? You go on and start. I’ll be in to, like, work out with you as soon as we’re through here.” She watched until her mother went through the swinging doors that led to the dining room. As they closed behind Andrea, she got up, crossed the kitchen floor on silent feet, and put her ear to the door. She sighed noisily. “Mom!” She cocked her head, waiting until she heard her mother move away from the door, and then trailed back to Bree.

  “My goodness,” Bree said. “There’s more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?”

  “Yeah, well.” Madison twirled a piece of her hair into a ringlet, and then let it spring free. “She’s not bad, as mothers go. I get along better with my dad, though. He’s a lot more on the ball. And he doesn’t give a hoot about Savannah society or private schools, or being best friends with the Chandlers.”

  “You don’t, either?”

  Madison shrugged. It was the Lindsey shrug. The “I’m seventeen years old and what do you know?” shrug. Then she grinned. “Well, yeah. I guess I do. I mean, it’s better to be rich than poor, right?”

  Not right. At least Bree didn’t think it was right. But she was honest enough to admit she might think a lot differently if she’d been brought up in a trailer park. So she just said, “It depends, I think, on how you handle it.”

  Madison’s eyebrows went up in a look of mild surprise. “Ha. I suppose. Anyway. About Lin. How much trouble is she in, really?”

  “A lot,” Bree said.

  “No kidding? I mean, she can afford the best lawyers, and that. You don’t think you can get her off?”

  Bree gritted her teeth. “If the courts decide she’s broken the law, I’m going to have one heck of a time keeping her out of jail. I don’t care how many Law & Orders you’ve watched, Madison, but in the real world, there isn’t one kind of justice for the rich and another for the poor. And if, once in a great while, it may seem that way, well . . . it’s not that often, that’s all.”

  “You like being a lawyer,” Madison said shrewdly.

  “Yes, I guess I do. And I hate it when people think what I do is for sale.”

  Madison nodded thoughtfully. “Right, I’m cool with that. So, if Lin’s looking at jail time, what can we do to, like, make it community service or whatever?”

  “Show mitigating factors,” Bree said. “You know what those incidents might be?”

  “Stuff that shows she was, like, fated to rob the little kid because she didn’t know any better.”

  Bree rubbed her knuckles along her bottom lip to conceal her smile. “Yep. Things like that.”

  “Hm.” Madison leaned back in her chair and took a long drink from her water bottle. “Okay. Her parents were, like, very distant and strict. But it wasn’t because they were all that strict themselves. It was because they didn’t like her.”

  Bree sat up, pleased at the insight—Madison was going to be a very good social worker if she decided that should be her career—and it confirmed her own feelings about Carrie-Alice as a parent. John Lindquist had told her more than he realized. But there was a big gap between parental coolness and parental abuse. And Bree had read enough about bad kids to know that the most devoted parent could be pushed to the edge. Royal had been most insistent about the need to be impartial when you evaluated witness statements. So Bree did her best. “Any real reasons for that dislike?”

  “I don’t know. She can get on your nerves, no question. But her folks were older when they had her. My mom’s, like, thirty-five, you know. She had me when she was eighteen. Lin’s mom was forty when she was born and her dad was, like, even older.”

  Bree, facing thirty, suddenly felt ancient.

  “So maybe you should talk to the brother and sister. See what their take is.”

  “I intend to.” She set her pencil down and took a deep breath. “Madison—did you know her father very well?”

  “Mr. Chandler? You’ve got this ‘serious issue’ look on your face, you know. You think he was, like, having sex with her? No way.”

  Bree felt older than ancient. She felt positively Methu selahian. When did seventeen-year-old kids get this knowledgeable? “Well, that’s one good thing,” she said feebly. “There’s something about him, though. I keep feeling if I can get a handle on him, I can get a handle on why Lindsey’s such a problem kid.”

  Madison shrugged. “Her folks don’t like her. A lot of kids at school don’t like her. Sometimes I don’t like her much myself.”

  Bree didn’t respond for a minute. Then she said quietly, “That’s pretty callous, isn’t it?”

  Madison flushed bright red. “I guess.”

  “So. Now that your mom’s not in the room, do you want to tell me anything about drugs?”

  “Not me,” Madison said. “No way. A little weed now and then, you know, marijuana, but nothing else. I
swear.”

  “I’m not concerned with your defense, Madison, I’m concerned with Lindsey’s. If you tell me she’s not on something, I’ll tell you to your face you’re a liar.”

  Madison bit her lip.

  “Well?” Bree said impatiently. “I’m checking hospital records, with the school, and if she’d got a juvenile record, I’ll find that, too. So you might was well tell me what you know. It’ll show up in the blood tests.”

  “She goes around with this guy,” Madison said reluctantly. “And he’s sort of known for it, drugs and that, I mean. So once in a while she takes maybe an upper or two. No big deal.” She gazed at Bree, her eyes candid. “If she’s on something stronger, I don’t know a thing about it. Honest. Lindsey, Hartley, and I, we spend, like, practically all of our waking moments together. At school, after school, on weekends. We’re in this band together, you know?”

  “The Savannah Sweethearts, sure.”

  “And we go on trips out of state together. If she were taking serious drugs, I’d know about it. And I haven’t seen a thing.”

  Bree rubbed the back of her neck. Madison’s hot denial had a truthful ring. And amphetamines might account for Lindsey’s behavior the first time they’d met at the Chandler place. “Okay. That’s it, then. I may have some more questions for you later . . . and I’m certainly going to have to depose you before we go to trial, but I can’t think of anything else right now.”

  “What are you going to do now? Is Lindsey, like, condemned to the joint, or what? Is she ever going to get back to school? And that Mrs. Chavez decided not to press charges. So that has to count for something, doesn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t matter if Mrs. Chavez presses charges or not—what matters is what the district attorney’s office wants to do.”

  “Golly. So she’s in the soup.”

  “Maybe. I’ve got a couple more things up my sleeve,” Bree said with more confidence than she felt. “I’ll have to talk to Hartley again. Maybe she’s noticed something you haven’t.”