Murder in the Garden District (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries)

by Herren, Greg

  “You were afraid of your husband?”

  “Does that surprise you? It’s why I bought the gun in the first place.”

  “Had he been violent with you?”

  She looked down and nodded. “Only when he was drinking,” she said quietly. “Anyway, it wasn’t too long after that I heard the first shot.”

  “What did you do then?”

  She raised her head and looked me in the eyes. “I was terrified. I called 911, then opened my door and looked out—to try to see what was going on. Alais and Carey’s doors were closed, and I could see the front door was open. The house was silent. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. But I couldn’t just stay there. I was about halfway down the stairs when I heard the second shot. I ran the rest of the way, and saw Cordelia in the drawing room with a gun in her hands. And then I saw Wendell. I think I may have screamed.” Her body shook for a moment. “And then the police came,” she whispered.

  “Did you know it was your gun?”

  She smiled weakly. “The police told me later. My initials are engraved in the handle.” She shook her head bitterly. “Obviously, Cordelia took it to frame me. Why else would she use my gun? There are enough guns in the house to hold off the Yankee army. She probably never thought I’d get downstairs fast enough to catch her in the act. The gun would have my fingerprints on it, wouldn’t it? My guess is that she was going to shoot him, drop the gun, and then pretend to find the body. Unfortunately, I got downstairs before she could finish setting me up.”

  She refilled her glass from the sweating pitcher of iced tea on the table between us.

  Cordelia had said that Janna told the police it was her gun. I decided to play along and see what else she had to say.

  “Mrs. Sheehan—”

  “Janna,” she interrupted me. “Cordelia is Mrs. Sheehan. I’m just plain Janna.”

  “All right, Janna.” I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “It wasn’t very smart to go downstairs. You should have stayed in your room until the police came.”

  “Good thing I didn’t. If I hadn’t caught her in the act, I’d be in a cell right now.”

  “You didn’t think to at least take a weapon with you? If there are so many guns in the house—”

  She took another drink. “I looked for my gun but it wasn’t there. So I took the fireplace poker from my room.”

  That made even less sense. I changed tack.

  “You and your mother-in-law didn’t get along?”

  She barked out a harsh laugh. “Cordelia was delighted when her son married a nobody. She welcomed me into the family with open arms.” She viciously crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “But seriously, it was a year before she finally stopped referring to me as ‘Wendell’s mistake.’ She had big plans for the Crown Prince. This Senate race was just the start. She thought that I’d embarrass him somehow. Like I was too stupid to be nice to everyone and keep my mouth shut about policy. Please. It wasn’t my fault he lost the mayoral race, no matter how much she blamed me for it. My role was to look pretty and smile a lot, play the adoring wife. And I did it well.”

  “Your husband stepped out of public life after serving one term as attorney general, and didn’t return until the 2006 mayoral race. Why was there such a long break in his political career?”

  “Grace died. His first wife. Alais’s mother.”

  She took another cigarette from the pack, looked at it, and returned it to the pack.

  “He never talked about it, I never asked. All I know is she died, and he left politics for a while. Around here, sometimes it’s better not to know things.”

  That was interesting. “How long after she died before he married you?”

  “Four or five years, I think.”

  She looked past me and stood up. I turned in my chair and saw a teenager walking across the lawn toward us, his head down, as though he was fascinated with the white Air Jordans on his feet. He appeared to be about thirteen or so, tall and gangly, his arms and legs barely skin and bone ending in enormous feet and hands in an oversized Coldplay T-shirt and a pair of long checkered shorts that almost reached his knobby knees. His hair was so blond it looked white, and he had the same pale skin as Janna. I suppressed a grin. I’d been tall and skinny when I was that age. As he climbed the steps into the gazebo, I noticed the white down on his bare legs and a rash of pimples across his cheek. He stared at Janna, his lower lip sticking out in an angry pout, towering over her as I had over my own mother at that age. Like Janna, he had dark circles under his blue eyes.

  “It’s time for swim practice, Mom,” he mumbled, barely audible. “Grandma says it’s not a good idea.”

  He didn’t acknowledge my presence with so much as a glance.

  “All right, Carey.” She nodded to me. “Carey, this is Chanse MacLeod, the investigator your grandmother hired.”

  “How do you do.” He still didn’t look at me. “Can I go to practice, Mom?” he mumbled, a plea in his voice.

  Her jaw tightened; her lips compressed into a tight line that she forced into a big smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

  “Fortunately, she’s not your mother. It’s fine with me. It’ll do you some good to get out of the house. Go.”

  His face lit up. “Thanks, Mom!” He bent down and kissed her cheek, and was gone in a rushed tangle of arms and legs.

  She watched him go. The smile on her face didn’t fade until I heard the door to the main house slam behind me. She turned back to me, her eyes flashing angrily.

  “Cordelia thinks we should lock ourselves up to mourn properly. Carey’s thirteen and I’d rather he spend a few hours in the pool with his mind on something else than mope around this house.” She gave me a rather ugly smile. “He’s my son, no matter how much she wants to forget that.”

  “Are they close?”

  Her voice softened. “I’ll give her that, she treats Carey like he’s blood. She always has. It’s his mother she has a problem with.”

  “How long were you and Wendell married?”

  This time she lit the cigarette. “Wendell wasn’t Carey’s father, if that’s where you’re going with this. Wendell adopted him after we were married.”

  “And Carey’s father?”

  “Carey’s father has nothing to do with this. That’s ancient history, and there’s no need to dredge it all up again.” She blew smoke at me. “I was nineteen, and we weren’t married. We’ll just leave it at that.”

  I was curious why Janna didn’t want to talk about his biological father, but changed the subject. I could have Abby get a copy of Carey’s birth certificate.

  “So, what was so important that night you had to talk to Wendell about?”

  “My marriage was a mess,” she said harshly. “If there was any way I could have, I would have left him and gotten a divorce. The marriage had been over for several years. But Wendell—and his mother—worried about what it might do to his campaign. A divorce might hurt his attacks on the Metairie whoremonger if he didn’t have a loving wife at his side. And the campaign was the important thing, you know.”

  “You didn’t need their permission to get a divorce,” I pointed out.

  Her eyes flashed. “That’s true. I signed a prenup—Cordelia saw to that—so I would get nothing in a divorce.” She seemed to deflate. “How could I fight them for my kids with no money? A few months ago, I packed some suitcases and checked into the Monteleone, to figure things out. She came to see me and ordered me to come back. She told me if I tried to get a divorce, if I ruined his chances at this Senate seat, they’d fight for full custody of the children. I couldn’t abandon the kids like that, Mr. MacLeod. No matter how bad it was for me here, I had no chance in court against them. They have the money, the power, and the connections. I’d never see my kids again. And I would never leave those kids in their hands. Look at the great job Cordelia did with Wendell. She wasn’t going to be in charge of my kids. So I came back.”

  “You’re close to your
stepdaughter?”

  “I couldn’t love Alais more if she were mine.”

  She pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it.

  “If Wendell had his way, Alais would be up at Ole Miss right now. I stood up to him, convinced him she needed a semester off. He didn’t care about her, he never did. And Cordelia? Alais was a girl, useless to her and her plans. Cordelia is hopelessly old-fashioned. Even with Mary Landrieu in the Senate, it never occurred to her that Alais could go into politics. Not that she wanted to.

  “I was stupid to think they’d let me go. And I know my saying that gives me a motive—I couldn’t get a divorce so I had to kill him, right? But I didn’t kill him. Cordelia did. And no matter how hard she tries to pin this on me, she can’t. Because the truth is she killed him. I saw her with the gun.” A weak smile played at her lips. “And won’t the truth set me free?”

  I debated with myself about telling her that Cordelia had hired me to throw suspicion elsewhere. Surely Janna must know this. But then why act as though she didn’t? I decided to keep playing along.

  “When did you and Wendell start having problems?”

  Janna unfolded her arms and looked over my shoulder. “When I married him, it was like an old movie, you know? The secretary marries the boss and lives happily ever after. But those movies never show what it’s like after the wedding. There’s a reason why that doesn’t happen very often in real life. Men from the Garden District shouldn’t marry janitor’s daughters from Hammond. True love doesn’t conquer all. That’s for fairy tales, lies they tell little girls. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t belong here. But when Wendell loved me, I could deal with the snide looks and snubs and whispers. I could even handle Cordelia.”

  She drummed her fingernails on the table. “Cordelia hated me from the moment I arrived in her precious house on the Avenue, the miserable old bitch, no matter how much I tried to fit in. It took about four years for me to realize that Wendell married me precisely because I didn’t, to rebel against his mother. The more I changed—the more I learned about spoons and forks and how a Garden District wife is supposed to act and behave—the less he liked it. Do you know what he told me once? If I’d wanted my wife to be a lady, I would have married the real thing.”

  The pain in her eyes was difficult to bear, so I looked down at my hands. “And it eventually became physical?” I asked softly.

  “About three years ago, when our marriage began to fail, he became abusive. At first it was emotional—insulting me in front of people, demeaning me in any way he could think of—and then it became physical. Four months ago, he came home drunk one night, and we argued. He called me every name in the book. And then—” She grabbed the edge of the table. “He raped me.”

  She held up her right hand. It was shaking. A tear rolled out of her left eye and slid down her face. She took a deep breath, wiped her face, and went on.

  “He also sprained my wrist. That’s when I left. After Cordelia forced me to come back, I bought a gun and began taking lessons at the firing range in Metairie. That wasn’t going to happen again. Ever.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “We can finish this another time.”

  She had the grace to give me a weak smile. “Thank you,” she said, touching my hand. “But no. It helps to talk about it.”

  I reached for her hand, but decided it might not be appropriate to take it. “Then please take me through it, every detail. You said you were waiting up for him that night. You had something you wanted to talk to him about?”

  “I had some news for him I’d been putting off for several days, but I knew I couldn’t keep it from him forever. Especially not in this house. I’d decided to wait up for him, no matter how late he was, and talk to him. In spite of everything, I still loved him. I know that sounds crazy.”

  She shook her head, and looked down at her hands. She was tearing a paper coaster to shreds. She took a drink from her water glass.

  “I thought my news would change things. If I couldn’t get a divorce, if we had to stay married, I thought surely we could work something out. It would never be what it was before, but we had to be able to come to some kind of understanding.”

  “And what was your news?”

  She went on like I’d not said a word. “It was about eleven-thirty, I think, when his car pulled into the driveway. My bedroom windows open on the driveway, so I saw his headlights. I went to the window and looked out. I watched him get out of his car in the rain, and I could tell he was drunk again. Such an idiot. We couldn’t get a divorce because of how it might look, but he didn’t have a problem risking a ticket every night for driving drunk. If he and Cordelia could just get their minds out of the 1950s they’d have realized that divorce is not a death sentence in politics. Ronald Reagan was divorced, for God’s sake. But a drunk driving arrest? Kiss your political ass goodbye. I might be a nobody from the North Shore, as Cordelia likes to remind me at every opportunity, but I do know that much.”

  “So, he was drunk?” I made a note to get a copy of the autopsy report.

  “Oh, yes. I went to my desk to get my gun, but it wasn’t in the drawer.”

  “So, you knew the gun was gone before you heard the shots?”

  She looked down at her hands. The silence became uncomfortable.

  “Yes.” Her voice was practically a whisper.

  My lips pressed together. Cordelia Spencer Sheehan had just gotten an award from the governor for her work with abused women—and her daughter-in-law was being abused right under her nose.

  “Did Cordelia know about the abuse?”

  “She isn’t deaf, dumb and blind.” Janna’s voice was brittle. “If it weren’t for the kids, I would have gone to one of those shelters she raises all that money for. Maybe I should have. Talk about scandal! But she always reminded me that his career was more important. Think of all the good he’s going to do when he’s in the Senate.” She mimicked Cordelia’s voice perfectly. “He was still a monster.”

  “And when you saw that your gun wasn’t there?”

  “I decided that the talk with Wendell could wait. I didn’t know how he’d react, but I wasn’t going to let myself be hurt again.”

  She sounded resigned, defeated. She took another drink of tea.

  “At that time, did you wonder what had happened to the gun?”

  “I didn’t think about it. All that mattered was that it wasn’t there. I figured Wendell had taken it. That was his style.”

  She looked out over the lawn again.

  “Go on,” I said gently.

  “I turned off my lights and locked my bedroom door and went to bed. Until I heard the gunshot.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “It startled me. I’d fired the gun enough times to know what it sounded like.” She balled her hands into fists. “I got out of bed, unlocked my door and called 911. I was on the stairs when I heard the second shot. I went to the drawing room and saw Wendell lying on the floor with blood everywhere. Cordelia was standing, with the gun in her hands, looking at him. And then she saw me. She dropped the gun and said something about calling the police. I told her I already had, they were on their way.”

  She closed her eyes and shuddered.

  “I checked for a pulse, and there wasn’t one. I went across the hall to the library to wait for the police to show up. That was when I noticed that the front door was open, and there was water all over the floor. I assumed Wendell had tracked it in—it was really pouring outside. But I couldn’t understand why he didn’t close the door behind him. Too drunk, I suppose.”

  “Who else was in the house?”

  “Cordelia, of course, and the kids. They’d gone up to their rooms after dinner. About ten, I went in to say good night to them in their rooms.” She smiled faintly. “Carey had his headphones on, he always does. Alais was already asleep.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “We don’t have live-in help—Vernita, the one who let you in, leaves every day at six—
and ever since Rachel and Quentin moved out—”

  “Rachel and Quentin?”

  “Quentin is Wendell’s cousin, and Rachel is his wife. They moved out about a month ago. Wendell didn’t much care for them, and even though they were in the pool house—”

  She pointed behind me. The small building was just beyond the pool.

  “It was still too close, as far as Wendell was concerned.”

  “And there was no one else in the house?” I pressed.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Do you know where the children were?”

  “They said they were in their rooms.”

  “They didn’t hear the shots?”

  “I assume they had their headphones on. They always do.”

  “And they all had access to your gun?”

  “I never lock my room unless I am going to bed,” she said. “So, yes, they could have. Vernita and the maid who comes twice a week had access to it as well, obviously, whenever they were in the house.”

  “When was the last time you saw the gun?”

  “I went to the shooting range three days ago. When I got back, I cleaned it and put it away.”

  “When you found your husband, did you see or hear or notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Besides my husband’s body? I wasn’t really paying attention. I was in shock. The police found the safe in the drawing room was open—”

  Cordelia hadn’t mentioned anything about the safe. Given her instructions, I found this odd. If the safe were open, there was a possibility that Wendell had caught someone robbing it. But how would a burglar have gotten Janna’s gun? A half-decent lawyer could convince a jury someone else could have killed Wendell, even with Cordelia picking up the gun.

  “Was anything missing?” I asked. “Had the safe been broken into?”