Murder in the Garden District (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries)

by Herren, Greg

  I didn’t have to wait long for Abby.

  I’d taken a table right inside the front door, and had just enough time to order a Coke when I saw the wreck of an Oldsmobile she shared with her boyfriend, Jephtha, shoot past on St. Charles. I couldn’t help but grin. The car was a disaster. It was almost twenty years old, with a cracked windshield and dents all over it. The driver’s side rearview mirror was missing, and at some point had been painted with defective paint. It looked like it had the mange. Jephtha had inherited the car from his grandmother, along with her house in the Irish Channel. Despite looking like it would fall apart if you breathed on it, the car ran extremely well. Less than five minutes later Abby walked through the front door.

  Abby was a pretty girl. Originally from Plaquemines Parish, she’d moved to New Orleans after the flood and started dancing at the Catbox Club on Bourbon Street. That was where she’d met Jephtha, who had a weakness for erotic dancers. They were both in their early twenties. Jephtha was a computer whiz with a criminal record whom I kept on retainer; he could literally hack his way into any system. If I needed information and didn’t really care if it was obtained legally, I put Jephtha on it. Abby danced to pay her way through the University of New Orleans pre-law program, where she was one semester away from graduating. She was hoping to get into the Tulane Law School once she finished. When I’d asked her to help me with some research, she was so fast and efficient at it that I’d encouraged her to get certified as a private eye. She was a godsend. She loved doing all the tedious things that bored me, and I was more than happy to farm them out to her. She enjoyed tinkering with disguises. She’d done theater in high school, and had taken a course at UNO in stage makeup. Several times she’d shown up on my doorstep in a disguise and I hadn’t recognized her. She was dressed to impress today, wearing a nice pair of navy blue slacks beneath a red silk shirt exposing a tantalizing glimpse of her impressive cleavage. Her hair was all one color for a change, dark brown.

  I’d had reservations about working with someone, having got used to toiling along by myself since leaving the police force. She had obliterated those reservations in no time. The whole arrangement was going so well I was beginning to dread the day she decided to go out on her own. She was a natural snoop. Plus, she could always make me laugh. She gave me an impish grin as she slid into the chair across from me.

  “This wig is driving me crazy,” she said. “It’s too fucking hot for wigs. Besides, you haven’t even seen the new color I just changed it to. Reddish with blond streaks.” She winked. “Like Paige.”

  “So why cover it up with a wig?” I had to ask.

  She had a lot of them. She’d explained to me once that wearing wigs was easier than dying her hair. She’d added with a lascivious grin, “It gives the spenders at the Catbox Club the illusion of a different girl, to spice things up a bit and loosen their wallets.” She made a lot of money dancing there.

  “I was interviewing a retired police detective, and I didn’t think he’d take me seriously if I showed up looking like a stripper,” she explained. “I was torn between professional lady detective and innocent young girl, but I decided to go with professional woman. After all, I don’t get too many chances to wear this outfit. And this brown hair goes well with it, don’t you think? More so than the red.”

  She blotted her forehead with her napkin as our waitress materialized. Abby ordered a Coke and two slices of pepperoni pizza. I ordered the same, figuring I could work off the trans fat at the gym, and waited until the waitress left before speaking again.

  “A retired police detective? What are you on to?”

  She placed her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her fists, beaming at me.

  “Ah, Chanse. I am so good at my job. You should give me a raise.”

  She always asked for a raise when she’d gotten her hands on something good—and it was amazing how Abby always came up with good stuff.

  “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  The waitress placed Abby’s Coke in front of her. She took a big swallow, and waited until we were alone.

  “I’ll start at the beginning. First of all, there wasn’t anything interesting in Barbara’s background before she married Roger Palmer. Born and raised on the West Bank, went to UNO and dropped out. She met Roger at an opening at the art gallery where she worked. They had a rather whirlwind courtship. Did you know Roger Palmer was significantly older than Barbara?”

  “I knew there was an age difference, but not how much.”

  Barbara had mentioned it a few times, on the rare occasions when she talked about her first husband. I’d never given it much thought. Young women marry rich old men all the time. It was practically a cliché. For that matter, Wendell Sheehan had about twenty years on Janna.

  “Barbara was all of twenty-five when she married him. He was in his mid-fifties, what was politely called a ‘confirmed bachelor.’ What does that tell you?”

  Confirmed bachelor was old New Orleans society code for homosexual. It wasn’t always true, but it was the way polite society acknowledged it without actually saying so.

  “Barbara married a gay man. Interesting.”

  It certainly explained why she’d never had any problems with my sexuality.

  “That’s what I thought, too.” She took another sip of her Coke. “Different strokes and all that. Whatever the reasons were—which we’ll never know—they got married. Roger had never been linked to another woman, at least none that I could find. And four years later, Roger died and left Barbara everything. The house, his money, everything.”

  “What’s so unusual about that? Under Louisiana’s Napoleonic Code she would have gotten half of everything, whether he wanted her to have it or not.”

  “Roger didn’t die peacefully in his bed, Chanse.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He broke his neck falling down a flight of stairs in his house. The story Barbara gave out was that she was at a big fundraising party and came home to find him dead. There were only two problems: no one at the fundraiser remembered seeing Barbara there, and she was having an affair on the side. The cops never could find any hard evidence that she was unfaithful, but tongues were wagging in the Garden District.”

  “And who was she supposed to be having an affair with?”

  Abby licked her lips. “This is where it gets really good. Wendell Sheehan.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “According to the gossips, it had been going on for several years, but it wasn’t like anyone had pictures to prove it. I should charge you combat pay. You have no idea how tedious it is going through all of those old society pages, even if it is fun to read between the lines.”

  Abby slurped down more Coke.

  “Let me backtrack a bit. The accounts made it pretty clear that the police thought foul play was involved in Roger’s death. It was all over the papers for two or three days. When the coroner’s report came back with a judgment of accidental death, the case was officially closed.”

  “And?”

  “It didn’t smell right to me, so I tracked down the lead detective on the case. That’s what I was doing in Kenner this morning. This guy—Archie Barousse—was just happy to have someone to talk to, poor thing. His wife died a couple of years ago, and his kids all moved away. Retired cops are really nice, you know?”

  “I’m sure it didn’t hurt to have an attractive young woman with her shirt unbuttoned asking questions.”

  Abby looked down, and sheepishly corrected the situation.

  “Anyway, he believes that Roger Palmer was murdered, and it was covered up. The mayor ordered him to close the case before the coroner’s report came back, and talk around the station was that the pressure on Mayor Delesdernier came from Baton Rouge. Archie is still bitter about his investigation being shut down before it got started.”

  She leaned across the table.

  “And who was in the governor’s mansion then? That would be none other than the sainted Bobby
Sheehan—Wendell Sheehan’s father.”

  “But Bobby Sheehan and Gaston Delesdernier were enemies. He wouldn’t have done Sheehan any favors—nor his family.”

  “You think it’s all just a bunch of coincidences? Let’s see.” She started ticking things off on her fingers. “Roger Palmer dies in a ‘fall’ down the stairs. His much younger wife is rumored to be having an affair with the governor’s son. The mayor himself orders the investigation closed, under pressure from the governor. And did I mention that five months after Roger Palmer died, his young widow gave birth to a daughter? They were politicians, Chanse. They probably traded favors. You close this investigation and I’ll give you this. That’s how things get done in this state.

  “This is what I think. Wendell knocked up Barbara and Barbara was afraid Roger would show her the front door when he found out. He became inconvenient, and shortly thereafter he was dead. Under mysterious circumstances.”

  “It’s an interesting theory, but there are no facts.”

  I found it hard to believe Barbara might have killed her husband. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it. Barbara never talked about her daughter, Brenda. I heard Barbara’s voice in my head: I owe her.

  “It’s circumstantial, to be sure,” Abby said, “but poor people who don’t have friends in the governor’s mansion get convicted on a lot less than that every day. Anyway, there’s your connection between Barbara and the Sheehans. It was the only thing I could come up with, outside of some associations between Barbara and Cordelia on charity committees and so forth. There’s nothing I can find that would warrant Barbara owing them a big debt of gratitude. Not on the scale of helping her cover up a murder.”

  She finished her second slice of pizza and leaned back in her chair.

  “Alleged murder.” I corrected her. “Nice work, Abby. Type up a report for the file and e-mail it to me.”

  “How’s the Sheehan case coming? Need me to do anything?”

  “There is something. According to a volunteer at the campaign office, Wendell had dinner at the Delacroix every Monday night. Can you talk to the staff? See if he was there the night he died? Find out if he ate dinner alone or if he had company. And if he had anything to drink.”

  She scribbled notes. “I’ll get a photo of him off the web. Anything else?”

  “The two Mrs. Sheehans have been lying to me—and probably to the police. According to his campaign worker, Wendell left the office a good three-and-a-half hours before Janna and Cordelia say he got home. Janna said that he was drunk when he came in, that he drank all the time, he was drunk when he sprained her wrist and raped her. The volunteer said that Wendell was in recovery and going to AA meetings.”

  “Alcoholics fall off the wagon all the time, Chanse. But it’s weird how similar this case is to Roger Palmer’s. Two wealthy and powerful men married to younger women who aren’t from the same class, both men die mysteriously when their wives are pregnant. It’s like Roger Palmer’s death was the blueprint for Wendell’s—except for how the murder was committed, of course.”

  “If Cordelia was involved in the cover-up of Roger Palmer’s murder, why not use the same setup for her son?” I said. “Who’d remember after all this time? Why all the nonsense with Janna’s gun?”

  Abby finished her Coke and signaled the waitress for another.

  “Think about it, Chanse. Suppose it wasn’t premeditated. Even if Wendell ate dinner at the Delacroix like he always did, how long would that take? An hour? Two, tops? There’s still a lot of time unaccounted for that night. Who’s to say what went on in those hours before the gun was fired? The only people who know are Cordelia and Janna—and Wendell, but he’s not talking any time soon—and they’re doing their little finger-pointing shtick. It’s really not a bad legal strategy. Unless one of them confesses, who knows which one really did it?”

  “But Cordelia ordered me to find other suspects, to spare the family name.”

  “Suppose what Janna said about Wendell was true,” Abby said. “Suppose he did rough her up every now and then when he was drinking. Wendell has dinner and then goes straight home from the office. He starts to drink. And the more he drinks, the more abusive he gets, till Janna shoots him in self-defense. But she’s also pregnant. The last thing in the world Cordelia wants is for her grandson to be born in jail. So the two of them come up with a story on the quick. Cordelia wipes the gun, then fires it into the floor to make her story seem right.”

  “Janna tested negative for residue,” I countered.

  “Please. Anyone who watches CSI or Law and Order knows all you have to do is wash your hands in bleach to get rid of that—and the crime lab never tests hands for bleach. That’s why their stories don’t work. They had to think fast, and it was the best they could come up with. They had to call 911, the kids were in the house—Any chance of talking to them?”

  “The women aren’t taking my calls, and anyway I doubt they’d let me talk to the kids.”

  “You can’t not talk to them, Chanse. If someone else killed Wendell, that someone had to be in the house. There’s your pretext, to see if they noticed or saw anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Maybe I should give you a raise,” I said. “You know, we only have their word for it they hated each other.”

  Perhaps there was some friction in the beginning—there was no doubt in my mind Cordelia wouldn’t have wanted Wendell to marry Janna. But in the years since then, they’d lived together in the same house. They’d had to tol’rate each other. Was it impossible to believe they could have become friends? Or if not friends, allies? Janna was stepmother to Cordelia’s only grandchild, and Janna’s son was being raised under Cordelia’s roof. And now Janna was pregnant with Cordelia’s grandson.

  If Wendell was drinking, and violent—there’d be a medical record somewhere of Janna’s sprained wrist to back her story—it wasn’t a stretch to think he could have become a danger to Janna’s unborn child. From there, it wasn’t hard to conclude that one of the two Mrs. Sheehans killed him to protect the baby, and concocted their ridiculous, contradictory stories to cloud the issue. I only had Janna’s word that she’d told no one about the pregnancy. If Cordelia knew—if Wendell came home and got violent with Janna—would Cordelia have killed her son to save her grandchild?

  I knew the answer to that—a resounding hell yes.

  “We have to retrace Wendell’s steps that night,” I told Abby.

  “What do you need me to do, boss?”

  She whipped out her Blackberry.

  “Talk to Wendell’s friends and associates. Find out if he went to the Delacroix that night. See if anyone there heard or saw anything. See if he went anywhere else before going home. And find out what his state of mind was. This is a long shot, but see if you can find out who Carey Sheehan’s father was. Janna wouldn’t tell me, and I asked her twice—she reacted vehemently, insisting he had nothing to do with Carey and nothing to do with her.”

  “The lady doth protest too much?”

  “Something like that. Maybe she was having an affair, the way Barbara was. Might as well see if everything in these two cases is parallel.”

  Her fingers flew over the tiny keyboard. She glanced up.

  “You really need to get one of these instead of that tired old phone you use. Anything else?”

  “We need to talk to Carey and Alais Sheehan. They were both in the house that night. Alais isn’t returning to college this semester. She goes to Ole Miss. See what you can dig up on her. Carey had swim practice yesterday. Maybe you could catch him there. May I recommend your schoolgirl look? He’s only thirteen, and hormonal.”

  “You aren’t suggesting I take advantage of a child, are you? That’s sick.”

  “I didn’t say sleep with him. Lift your mind out of the gutter. Isn’t your specialty getting information from men?”

  She closed her Blackberry.

  “He’s a boy, which is like shooting fish in a barrel. And my specialty is getting money from men.�
��

  She slipped the phone into her purse and stood up.

  “I’m off. I’ll get that report to you this afternoon, and e-mail a progress report to you tonight. Thanks for lunch, Chanse. Can I give you a lift home?”

  “I have to stop by Wendell’s office and see if his campaign manager is back yet.” I put two twenties into the little tray the waitress had discreetly slipped onto our table, and stood up. “I take it you’re not dancing tonight? No class, either?”

  “I took the week off. Makes the regulars tip more when you come back. Why do you ask?” We walked out into the blinding heat.

  “There was a car parked on the other side of Coliseum Square from my place last night. Someone was just sitting there. It may have been nothing, but if the car’s there tonight, it wouldn’t hurt to check it out.”

  Her face lit up. She loved doing surveillance.

  “Give me a call if it’s there. Should be a piece of cake. I’ll bring the dogs. No one would suspect a girl walking her dogs, right?”

  I couldn’t help grinning as I watched her walk away. A little more experience under her belt and she was going to be the best private eye in Louisiana. Maybe I should make her a partner.

  *

  The only person in Wendell’s campaign office now was a short, stocky man with reddish-blond hair and a red face wet with sweat, talking into his cell phone. His blue button-down shirt was soaked at the armpits. He waved me into a seat by his desk, looking apologetic. I listened to his end of the call.

  “Uh-huh…yes, I know…there’s got to be another viable candidate somewhere in the state…I always said it was unlikely we’d have both senators from New Orleans…it’s never happened before and you know how those Baptists in North Louisiana are. They hate everything about South Louisiana…they hate Catholics and think New Orleans is Sodom and Gomorrah all over again…I know…a Sheehan would have had the best shot, especially with Cordelia campaigning. She’s only a little less popular than the Virgin Mary…All right…I have someone here. I’ll call you later.”