Crown of Thorns (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  I grabbed his earring, yanked, and tossed it on the floor.

  I relieved him of Maddie as he screamed and clutched at his ear.

  After the first few moments of shock, he raised his other fist, still squealing with outrage.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Not worth it.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” he said, teeth bared. Blood dripped down the hand he held to his ear.

  “How’s it going to play on the news tonight? Big strong security guard gets taken by unarmed girl. Other guard tackles man holding sick baby.”

  His jaw dropped as he tried to think it through. “Give the baby to someone else,” he said. “I’m ready for you, man.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Think you’re safe, hiding behind a baby?” He reached for me.

  Which I’d been expecting. It was a simple, fast move, spinning sideways out of his reach, grabbing his pinkie and pinning it back almost against his wrist.

  “Go,” I said. He stood on his tiptoes in agony. “Take the others down the hall and give us some privacy.”

  **

  I held Maddie and sat beside Angel and the security guard who was still fighting for air. I left enough space between us that she wouldn’t feel threatened.

  “I like that pinkie move,” she said. “Maybe you can teach it to me. Where I live, that would be good to have.”

  “It’s easy enough,” I said. “I can teach it.”

  “What’s your name, mister?”

  “Nick.”

  “Angel Starr. I’d shake, but this ain’t the best time to be real polite.”

  I nodded. “And this is Maddie, right?”

  The little girl cradled in my arm clutched one of my fingers. She still hadn’t opened her eyes.

  “Maddie,” Angel said. John Nesbitt’s head lay in her lap, his mouth gasping like a fish. “She’s seventeen months old. She needs help.”

  “Come on, man,” John Nesbitt croaked for my benefit. “Enough chitchat. Get her off me.”

  Angel squeezed her legs around his neck hard enough to shut him up. John Nesbitt’s eyeballs began to roll upward, showing a frightening percentage of white.

  “Might want to ease up,” I said. “If he dies, he’ll make a lousy hostage.”

  “Oh,” Angel said, looking down on the top of John Nesbitt’s head. She opened her legs slightly, and John gulped for air.

  “Maybe let go of the hair, too. I’m thinking you’ve done enough damage.”

  “What about Maddie?” Angel said, refusing to unclench her fist’s grip on his hair.

  “A doctor will look after her. I’ll make sure of that.”

  “Lots of men lie.”

  “I’m sorry you understand that already. But I’m going to make sure your sister can stay in the hospital as long as it takes for her to get better.”

  “What about how much this rent-a-cop said it will cost?”

  John Nesbitt squirmed. Angel tightened her hold again.

  “I’ll pay,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I can afford it.”

  “I don’t know if I believe you,” Angel said. “See, my problem is this. Once I let go of this guy, I got nothing. Maybe you’re just making a promise so I’ll let go.”

  “How long were you thinking of holding him?”

  “I want a doctor to look at my sister. Until then, I’m keeping this pen close enough to bust his eyeball.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” John Nesbitt groaned.

  “No? You saying I can’t do it?” Angel pressed harder with the pen, almost breaking the skin of his tightly closed eye.

  John Nesbitt cried out.

  “Sure you can do it,” I said. “But it would be a dumb move. Pop his eyeball, then no one gives your sister help. And thing is,

  I gave you my word that doctors will help. Your end of the deal is that you trust me. That’s the way friends work.”

  “Friends?” Angel said. “I don’t know you.”

  “But we’re kind of the same.”

  A squint of suspicion. “How?”

  “Maybe someday I’ll have a chance to tell you where my mother grew up. Close to where you live.”

  Her squint of suspicion deepened. “Who told you where I live?”

  “The cabbie talked about your part of town,” I said, hoping it was a good enough recovery.

  “That don’t make us friends,” she said, relaxing her face somewhat, but not the grip of her legs around the security guard’s neck. “There’s plenty of people there I gotta watch out for.”

  People, I assumed by the coldness and distance of her voice, which included me. I needed a way to bring her back.

  I set Maddie on the floor between my legs and leaned forward and began to roll up the bottom of my pant leg. Angel watched silently, curious. She saw my black dress sock, stretching up my calf. My hands obstructed my view of what I did next, but it was a movement like someone fumbling blindly with shoelaces. I pulled off the lower half of my leg. With the shoe still on the foot.

  “Cool,” Angel said.

  I was hoping she’d see it that way. She seemed like a girl who would not impress easily, and a false half leg was my best and only trick. An unlikely positive resulting from the car accident that had nearly killed me when I was eighteen.

  I held up my prosthesis. “What if you keep this until a doctor looks at Maddie? I mean, someone gives you half his leg when he makes a promise, it’s got to be a serious promise, right?”

  Angel giggled, for a moment like the little girl she was. “Right.”

  I set my prosthesis on the floor and slid it to Angel. “Nurse?” I called to the woman at admitting. “You’ll make sure a doctor examines this girl’s sister? I’ll cover everything.”

  “But . . .”

  From my wallet, I took out a credit card. I flipped it across the space onto the desk, grateful it landed neatly.

  “Nicholas Barrett,” the nurse read off the credit card. “As in the Barretts?”

  I nodded. A wing of the hospital was named after my family.

  The nurse shrugged. “I’ll still need a driver’s license and I’ll have to pre-authorize.”

  Pre-authorize. Which was a good indication of what my family name was worth without any assets to back it. I tossed my license onto the desk. The Bambi nurse studied it and studied

  my face to make sure it was a match.

  “New Mexico?” She frowned. “Back here to visit?”

  “Long story,” I said, glad the nurse didn’t appear to be a subscriber to the Charleston Post and Courier. A few months back I’d been front-page news for a couple days, then day by day faded farther and farther back into the local section, then, mercifully, disappeared.

  “Really long story,” Angel added. She grinned at my surprise, giving John’s head a quick yank to let him know she was still paying attention to him, too. “Grammie said the only way I’ll find a way out of our neighborhood is if I get educated. I read the newspaper every day, front to back. I remember your picture. Is all that stuff about your mama and those other people true?”

  “What was there was accurate.” Charleston journalists seemed to possess a substantial part of the Southern sense of honor; they were more than a cut above the vultures who clawed their way to positions at a national level. “But not all of it made the papers.”

  “Nick Barrett,” Angel repeated. She stared at my face for several moments. “Nick Barrett.”

  As if coming to a decision, Angel dropped her pen, released her grip on John Nesbitt’s hair, and stood. John Nesbitt rolled over onto his stomach. He pushed to his knees and crawled away from Angel with a final backward glance to make sure she wasn’t going to attack him again.

  Angel crossed the small space to stand in front of me and gravely presented my prosthesis to me.

  “Maybe someday you can tell me more,” Angel said. She picked up Maddie and held her close, smiling as she cradled her sister. “About yo
ur leg. And your mama. I don’t forget anything

  I read. She did come from my part of town.”

  Seeing that smile transform the beautiful cocoa skin of Angel’s face, once again I felt guilt that I was here simply because I had been following her, because I wanted something from her.

  “Hey,” she said, as if it had just hit her, “maybe you can help me with something else. That way I can pay you back for this doctor stuff.”

  “Not necessary,” I said. “I actually intend to spend my half brother’s inheritance. That makes me happy because he hates to let go of it.”

  “No, I want to pay you back.” she said. “At home, I got this weird old painting. With Maddie getting sick, I knew I needed some money. So yesterday I showed it to a couple of old bags on King . . .”

  She paused, studying my face again. I kept it deliberately blank. Felt guilt in doing so.

  “. . . anyway, I know it’s worth something because it got them excited, but they wouldn’t make a deal. I’ll bet because they think I’m too much of a kid. But you could get plenty for it. I mean, being respectable and all.”

  “Not many people have called me respectable,” I said, my guilt compounded at her eagerness to involve me with the antique that I was pursuing without her knowledge. “You can tell me about it after the doctor looks at Maddie. Deal?”

  “Deal,” she said.

  She reached into her other front pocket. “I kind of ripped you off with that cell phone. Maybe this will make up for it.”

  That’s when I received the gold Rolex.

  **

  As a kettle on a hot plate brought water to boil for tea, I explained to Glennifer and Elaine what had happened in the hospital. For obvious reasons, I neglected to mention Angel’s reference to the “old bags” on King. Nor did I feel it necessary to include my bullying of the buzz-cut security guard. I’d felt shame and regret as it happened.

  Halfway through my explanation, Glennifer had poured the water in a pot for the tea to steep. When I finished speaking, Elaine examined the Rolex through her reading glasses.

  “It’s a fake,” Elaine pronounced. She took the glasses off the bridge of her nose and wrapped them in a soft cloth and set them on the desk before speaking again. “The seconds go tick-tick-tick instead of sweeping smoothly. To me, that says she undoubtedly did steal the King Charles I portrait.”

  “She’s a scamp and a scoundrel,” I agreed.

  “So you like her,” Glennifer sniffed.

  I grinned and shrugged. “I like both of you, too. Same reason.”

  “Very amusing, Nicholas,” Glennifer said. She poured my tea. “By the way, look closely at your cup.”

  I had it halfway to my mouth. It was gold-rimmed with a pattern on the china that meant nothing to me. I admitted as much, holding the cup without taking a sip.

  “It’s from a set from the Larrabee estate,” Glennifer said. “Given the circumstances, I thought you might find this appropriate. Perhaps that cup was the one that held the poison that killed Agnes.”

  “Delightful.” I set the cup down, tea untouched.

  “We handled her estate,” Elaine said. “She didn’t have a life insurance policy. Didn’t believe in it.”

  “Just like everyone else around her, she didn’t believe she would die is more like it,” Glennifer added. “Poor Timothy. Sent north to that school with barely more than the proceeds from the sale of the house and its contents to provide for him. Virtually abandoned to the world, with only his miserable memories to comfort him. Is it any wonder that he became a juvenile delinquent?”

  Her accent made it seem like she had graced us with the dispensation of her opinion. When either of them spoke, it seemed like they were making a parody of Gone With the Wind. But they had been here in the South almost since it had been written.

  “All of the estate except for the miniature portrait of King Charles,” I said. “Yesterday you could have had that, too, for the twenty grand she asked. You said it would go for fifty at an auction.”

  “Nicholas, ‘twenty grand’ is a gauche expression. Here, we deal in thousands, not grand or k or large.” There was a twinkle

  in Glennifer’s eyes.

  Elaine chimed in. “Nor do we handle stolen merchandise.”

  “Nor,” I said with another grin, “do you call the police on little girls who show up with stolen merchandise. Instead, you talk Willy into following her home from the shop that afternoon to bring back her address. If word gets out you’ve gone soft . . .”

  “Soft? Never!” From up front, Willy joined in with his high-pitched voice. I could picture him at the front window, his hands behind his back, staring at the passersby on King Street. “I’ll testify to that. Not only did I have to walk forever, I ruined my shoes in the rain following that girl back to her horrible neighborhood. Some of the people were so dreadful in appearance that I feared for my life. They stared at me like I was fresh prey to hungry jackals.”

  I refrained from commenting that in Angel’s neighborhood, the sight of a bow tie like Willy’s was as rare as city maintenance crews working on the streets.

  Willy continued from up front. “And Nicky, don’t forget to ask them about the chewing tobacco.”

  “Chewing tobacco,” I repeated, looking back and forth from Glennifer to Elaine.

  “You said Angel requested that you help her sell the painting,” Elaine prompted. “That means you can tell us more about it now? We are very curious, as you well know, to find out who had it before this young girl found it. To have it resurface after all these years . . .”

  “They’re going to hold the baby in the hospital at least one night, maybe more,” I said. “I stayed at the hospital long enough to find out they think it’s pneumonia. Angel asked if I would come back later to talk about it, after the doctors have finished their fussing. I agreed that would be fine, and dutifully returned here to report my progress.”

  “You are a wonderful young man,” Elaine said with coquettish breathlessness, returning to the melodrama that gave me the sense they were allowing me into a private game that they had played since girlhood.

  “Yes, always the charmer, aren’t you, Nicholas?” Glennifer played along, arching an eyebrow against the imposing wrinkles of her forehead, a valiant effort to rearrange skin aged almost eight decades. “Women of any age are helpless against you.”

  “Always the charmer.” I said it in the spirit of our little game but felt a deadness in saying it. I would be going back into Angel’s life under false pretenses, using her vulnerability as a weapon against her. “Now tell me about this chewing tobacco.”

  “Pigs will fly first,” Elaine said quite firmly. “Now drink your tea.”

  Chapter 5

  In the early 1600s Italian artists began to paint in a showy, extravagant form that became known as baroque. They painted large-scale works of dynamic subjects—realistic and emotionally intense, using colors and sharp contrasts of light and shadow to heighten the theatrical presentation of their subject matter—often famous historical events, or magnificent altarpieces to demonstrate church beliefs clearly and directly.

  One of the most famous baroque artists was Peter Paul Rubens, who lived in Flanders and obtained many commissions from public and private patrons throughout Europe. Like Caravaggio, one of the original baroque artists, Rubens conveyed drama by placing moving figures diagonally throughout the composition, using strongly contrasting areas of light and shadow, and painting with broken, agitated brushstrokes that emphasized dramatic, exciting action.

  Because he was in such demand, Rubens operated a large studio in Antwerp. Among the crowd of apprentices and assistants was a talented young man named Anton Van Dyck, who made a decision not to compete with his master in the area of historical paintings. Van Dyck left his secure job for Italy, to perfect the art of court portraiture. Events led him to England, where he worked for King Charles I, the hapless king who battled Parliament politically and militarily until his execution for
treason in 1649. While alive and in power, however, Charles I had a fondness for portraits, and Van Dyck was canny enough to adorn the king in lavish costumes and elongate the figure and hands of the king to present him in a more flattering light. Altogether, Van Dyck did some four hundred portraits, most of them large.

  But one, a miniature portrait of Charles I, was with a passenger on the Carolina, a ship that arrived into what is now the Charleston Harbor in April 1670, long after Charles II had been invited back to the throne by Parliament. These early Charlestonians were determined to re-create the cosmopolitan, pleasure-filled world of Charles II’s Restoration England, for Charles II—unlike his father—loved women and drink and horse racing and gambling. In his honor, these newly landed immigrants named their peninsula Charles Town.

  As for the miniature portrait of the stern and politically suicidal father of Charles II, it disappeared and resurfaced many times over the next 150 years, until finally becoming, as part of the winnings in a high-stakes poker game, an official heirloom of the Larrabee family.

  It disappeared one more time, the night that Agnes Larrabee died some sixteen years after the end of World War II, then like a cork in an ocean storm, resurfaced yet again, this time in the hands of that twelve-year-old girl from a bad part of town.

  **

  Retha Herndon remained trapped inside a rough wooden shed on dirt, alongside a rusting lawn mower, a bundled length of garden hose, and a can of gasoline. Evening shadows now made the interior darker than it had been all afternoon, ever since Elder Jeremiah had stopped her and forced her to drive back home, his large truck filling her rearview mirror, its front grill only inches from her rear bumper.

  Just before padlocking her into the shed, Elder Jeremiah had set a dog bowl half-filled with water on the packed dirt inside the shed. For the first hour Retha had refused to drink from it, knowing the bowl sent a message that he wanted her to fully understand. But with humidity and heat inside the shed twice what it was outside, she’d finally succumbed, first flicking out the dead flies floating on top. It was past seven now; the dog bowl had been empty for at least three hours, and Retha licked her lips constantly, futile as that relief was to a thirst that was almost enough to make her groan in anguish.