Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries)

by Herren, Greg

  I’d said sure, and he’d given me her address and phone number.

  That was all he knew, but he was still upset, and not really in the mood to head back home yet. I hung out with him and kept him company over another beer before putting him in a cab and sending him home.

  I hadn’t come up with anything, and finally had come home around one in the morning to find Rory sound asleep.

  I glanced at my watch. Sandestin was about a four- or five-hour drive—and it was just now ten o’clock. I doubted she’d gotten up early with the kids—Jonny said they’d had three and the youngest was around four—and packed everything up to head back to New Orleans. I decided to check around noon to see if they’d arrived back in town.

  I printed out the notes from the computer and reread them several times, but still nothing really jumped out at me.

  It was possible that the whole thing was simply a coincidence, but I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence.

  Mona O’Neill was last seen on Thursday night around ten o’clock; her eldest son was shot to death either that night or the next day.

  No—I shook my head—there had to be a connection.

  I walked into the kitchen and turned off the coffeemaker. I wasn’t getting anywhere, so maybe a visit to Lorelle O’Neill Nesbitt was in order.

  I took a shower and got dressed.

  The sister, Lorelle, lived just over the parish line in Old Metairie, just off Metairie Road. I took I-10 out there and exited at City Park / Metairie Road, turning left and driving under the highway. Old Metairie was the only part of Jefferson Parish where New Orleans snobs would consider living, and it was easy to see why. With the massive trees, graceful houses, and lush green lawns, it looked as though Uptown had somehow been magically transported over the parish line. I found the street the Nesbitts lived on and turned left. Their big house was about halfway down the block—a graceful two-story plantation style house built out of red brick with large white columns. The large lawn was immaculate, almost completely shaded by the massive trees. There was a beige Volvo parked in the driveway. I parked at the curb, walked up the driveway, and rang the doorbell.

  Lorelle O’Neill Nesbitt had, unlike her late brother, aged rather gracefully. There were some lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, but her chestnut brown hair was free of gray and was cut short in a pageboy style that framed her round face, giving it depth. She was wearing a pair of purple LSU sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Her eyes were red from crying or lack of sleep (or maybe both) and she was wearing very little makeup. She looked a little harried. “Yes?” She gave me a weak smile. “May I help you?”

  “I’m sorry for not calling first, Mrs. Nesbitt, but my name is Chanse MacLeod—”

  “You’re the detective Jonny hired,” she cut me off, nodding. She stepped aside and gestured with her left hand. “Do come in, I’m having some coffee in the kitchen, and you’re certainly more than welcome to join me if you like.”

  The living room the front door opened into was tastefully furnished and enormous. A huge television set dominated one side of the room—two boys were lying in front of it playing some kind of video game that apparently required shooting people and blowing things up. There were large lamps, a long couch, and several reclining chairs scattered about the room with end tables arranged around them. The walls were devoid of any kind of artwork or even family photographs. The boys didn’t look up as I followed her through the room into a large, well-lit chef’s kitchen Rory would have cheerfully killed for. She poured me a cup of coffee and directed me to sit at the island. I sat on a large bar stool and sipped the coffee. It was really good. “I’m really sorry to bother you at a time like this,” I said, putting the coffee down. “Do you mind answering some questions?”

  She made a small, defeated gesture. “Now’s as good a time as any,” she said. “My mother’s disappeared and my brother’s been murdered—when would be a good time to talk about it?” She gave me an ironic smile, slightly amused, and I liked her better for it. “Besides, my husband’s at his office. I kept the boys home—they were supposed to go over to a friend’s for the day, but as you can see”—she gestured back toward the living room—“it’s not like they’re taking their uncle’s death particularly hard.” She glanced over at the clock. “And one of the other moms is taking them to baseball practice later on. I wasn’t going to let them go—but what’s the point? I might as well get them out of here and let them have some exercise—at least that’s something.” She looked at me. “It’s not like they were close to their uncle or anything. Hell, he was my brother and we weren’t particularly close, for that matter. We’ve barely spoken in years.” She rubbed her eyes. “I guess I’ll have to get used to talking about him in the past tense.” She looked at me. “We were close when we were kids, but we drifted apart after Dad died.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s normal—we had our own lives to lead, but I wish we could have stayed close, you know?”

  “What exactly happened to your father? Jonny mentioned he was killed on the job, but didn’t really go into a lot of detail about it.” I took out my notepad and uncapped a pen.

  “Well, he was barely a year old when it happened, so he never really knew much about it. It wasn’t something Mom liked to talk about, understandably.” She stared into her coffee cup. “Dad worked at the docks, for Verlaine Shipping. He was a longshoreman—he’d worked there since he was a teenager. He was helping load some really heavy machinery when one of the cables broke and he was crushed to death. It was a closed casket funeral.” She looked out the window. “I was in my junior year at Sacred Heart. Mom pulled me out of class that day. I’ll never forget it. She was crushed, just crushed. But the Verlaines were very good to us.”

  I was all too familiar with the Verlaine family of Verlaine Shipping. I’d done some work for them around the time of Hurricane Katrina, and it wasn’t a fond memory for me. They had believed their money put them above the law—and for the most part, they’d been right. Percy Verlaine, the family patriarch, had been rotten through and through—and while I’d never been able to prove it, I believed he’d had his own son-in-law murdered. He’d certainly had his niece locked away in a mental hospital for over thirty years. But he’d died—heart failure—and the only surviving Verlaine was his youngest son, Darrin. I’d heard somewhere he’d sold the company and left New Orleans.

  Good riddance.

  “It was like the whole world had turned upside down,” she went on. “There was life insurance, of course, and there was some other kind of insurance—I don’t know what all, but the company also gave Mom an awful lot of money. I don’t know how much it all came out to, but I know she paid off the house, set up college accounts for all of us—we might not have been able to go to college if not for Percy Verlaine. Well, we would have, but it would have been a lot harder. I would have had to work my way through, and thanks to them, I could just focus on my schoolwork.” She got up and refilled our cups. “Jonny didn’t go to college, of course. He flunked out of de la Salle, and Mom gave him the money to buy that terrible little house for him and that awful girl he married.”

  I hadn’t exactly been a big fan of Heather myself, but I was getting a little tired of everyone running her down. “What exactly is the problem with her? Jonny mentioned that your mother had an issue with her, too.”

  “Jonny’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, Mr. MacLeod. He’s a very sweet boy, but he’s really not terribly smart. He thinks he is, of course, but some of the scrapes he’s gotten himself into—Mom had the patience of a saint. I don’t know what I’d do if one of my boys turned out like him, but I wouldn’t be as forgiving as Mom, I can tell you that.” She sat back down, stirring sugar into her coffee. “Mom spoiled him, maybe babied him a bit much, who knows? But he was her baby, and there was a big age difference between him and me and Robby, you know, and then Dad died, and so Mom had to raise him on her own…and Robby and I were both out of the house in a couple of years, so
it was just the two of them. He was never much of a student, was always on the edge of flunking out. Then he got into this fighting thing.” She shook her head. “I went once, you know—it was horrible. I didn’t want to, but Mom said I needed to support Jonny.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll never go again—and I don’t care how much money Jonny can make doing it, or if he becomes a world champion or whatever. I won’t go, and I won’t watch it on television. It was so—animalistic and brutal.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “Why would anyone want to do that? Get paid to be violent? I don’t understand it—it was like something out of ancient Rome. The crowd was screaming for blood, it was horrible.” She said the last in a whisper.

  “What does that have to do with Heather? He was fighting before he met her, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, well, you know he only married her because she was pregnant.” She made a face. “Yeah, Mom told me she was just some groupie who had a thing for fighters, she used to go with another one of them, and she hooked up with Jonny when the other guy wouldn’t marry her. She’s just trash, and she got pregnant and he married her and Mom bought that house with his college fund. I tried to talk him out of it, tried to talk Mom out of buying that house—that horrible little house, have you seen it? But Jonny won’t listen to anyone. Try to tell him he’s wrong—he’s so damned stubborn and used to getting his own way.” She sighed. “Jonny, I guess, has a lot of potential. The promoters think he can be a world champion or something, I don’t know, but he supposedly can go far, make a lot of money doing it. I didn’t want to know anything about it, like I said, it was just too barbaric for me, you know? Mom talked about it a lot, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t listen. When she would tell me about it, all I could think about was my baby brother getting all of his teeth knocked out or his brain scrambled. Mom was supportive of it all.”

  “What about your brother? You said you two weren’t close anymore. Was he supportive of Jonny’s fighting?”

  “They always say you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead.” She got up and refilled my coffee cup. “Well, I’ve always thought that was stupid, you know? Like dying changes the fact that Robby was an asshole while he was alive? And that wife of his.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Robby and Celia both thought—I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t say.” She started drumming her fingernails on the table. “Look, it’s not like I didn’t do my research into all of this, you know. When Jonny started fighting, I looked into it all. I’m not stupid.” She ran a hand through her hair. “It’s not like boxing, you know, where someone can make millions. These guys—the top guys might make six figures, but the majority of them don’t make shit. They risk their bodies, risk brain injury, and for what? I don’t get it. But Robby—Robby thought Jonny could be a star, a champion, one of the big-money fighters. That asshole Morgan Barras sold Mom and Robby and Jonny all a line of bull.”

  “Morgan Barras? The billionaire?”

  She made a face. “Yeah. I don’t know, I didn’t want anything to do with it, you know? Maybe they didn’t care if Jonny’s brains got scrambled, but I did.”

  I pulled out my copy of the cashier’s check from Morgan Barras. “So, could this check have been a down payment of sorts?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe.”

  “Why do you think your mother has disappeared?”

  “You know, I thought Jonny was overreacting when he called me on Friday morning. I just figured it had something to do with the church. She just couldn’t let St. Anselm’s go. I don’t understand it, never could—I’m lapsed Catholic myself—I send the boys to Country Day.” She made another face. “Mom wasn’t too happy about that, but what good did Sacred Heart do for me? I mean, really. Country Day is a better school, and they don’t try to brainwash the kids there like the Catholic schools do.”

  “Did your mother seem worried, or concerned, the last time you talked to her?”

  “I talked to her last Thursday morning. She was supposed to come over that morning when she was finished with her stupid vigil, but she called and canceled. She was really pissed about the church, and the arrests the day before.” She got up and started another pot of coffee. “But if you want to know what I believed, I thought she was focusing on the church because she was really stressed about the lawsuit.”

  “What lawsuit?” I stared at her. “I haven’t heard anything about a lawsuit.”

  She sat back down, with a sigh. “Jonny didn’t say anything to you about it?” She rolled her eyes. “After Dad was killed, Mom stayed home with Jonny until he started school. Once he was in school, she took a job with Marino Properties. She was a property manager for an apartment complex they owned on the West Bank somewhere. Cypress Gardens, or something like that.”

  “I thought property managers had to live on the premises.”

  She shook her head. “No, she had an office there, and was on call. There was a maintenance guy who lived on the property. The place was pretty much uninhabitable after Katrina.”

  “But the West Bank didn’t flood.”

  “Wind damage, is what Marino Properties was claiming. Roof damage, windows blown out, that kind of thing. The insurance company claims there was only about fifty grand or so that was caused by the hurricane—that Marino Properties is trying to collect millions fraudulently. Mom was going to be a star witness for Marino Properties. She didn’t evacuate, and as soon as she was able, she got over there and looked the place over. Went through every unit, took pictures and everything. The trial is going to start in about a month or so, I think.”

  I stared at her. “Seriously? An insurance company is going to actually allow a Katrina claim dispute to go to court in Orleans Parish?”

  That was so astoundingly stupid I couldn’t believe it. There were very few things New Orleanians agreed on: the Saints, and a hatred for insurance companies and everyone who worked for them.

  “Yeah, Mom thought the insurance company was trying to ruin Marino Properties—that eventually they’d run out of money or something and would have to drop the suit. You know how insurance companies are complete and total scum of the earth.” She laughed. “But the firm representing them was willing to do it for a percentage of the final settlement.”

  “What firm?”

  “McKeithen, Fontenot, and Drake.”

  I kept my face expressionless. I had dealt with Loren McKeithen before; he was an excellent lawyer whose devotion to his clients meant people who weren’t his clients couldn’t trust him. He was also gay, and worked hard for gay rights in Louisiana—which was pretty much a lost cause. “Do you think your mother’s disappearance might have had something to do with this lawsuit?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t see how—insurance companies are scum of the earth, but I doubt even they would go that far. And I can’t believe they’d go so far as to kill.”

  “How much money are we talking about?”

  “I think twenty million, is what Mom said.”

  I whistled. Twenty million dollars was an awful lot of money. “Who was the insurance carrier?”

  “Some local brokerage put the package together—but the main carrier was Global, I think.” She gave me a rueful smile. “I really didn’t pay a lot of attention when Mom talked about it—and she didn’t really talk about it that much. But I know she wasn’t looking forward to going to court, and having to testify, and all that. But she did think Global was trying to cheat Mr. Marino.”

  “Did your brother have any enemies?”

  “Like I told you, we haven’t been close in years.”

  I got out one of my business cards and handed it to her. “If you can think of anything else, give me a call.”

  She walked me to the front door. “Do you think there’s a chance she might still be alive?”

  “There’s always a chance,” I admitted. “But I don’t hold out a lot of hope, to be honest.”

  She nodded. “That’s what I figured.” She wiped at her eyes and closed the door.
<
br />   I got in my car and called Abby. “See what you can find out about a lawsuit—Marino Properties v. Global Insurance.” I filled her in on everything Lorelle had told me.

  Abby whistled. “Insurance companies are bottom-feeding bastards,” she commented. “They won’t pay out unless you put a gun to their fucking heads. I’ll bet you they took her to keep her from testifying.”

  “Abby, there wouldn’t be any point. I’m sure she’s given depositions. If she disappears or is killed or whatever, I’m sure they could have the depositions read into the court records.”

  “I’m getting a law degree, remember?” I could almost see the look on her face. “And a statement doesn’t carry nearly as much weight with jurors as someone testifying in front of them—that’s Basic Courtroom 101, Chanse. Having that deposition read into the record? They don’t listen. Making them read it themselves? That won’t fly.” She sighed. “Jurors like to watch the person testify, see them be cross-examined, make up their own minds if the witness is lying or not. A deposition—especially if it’s from a key witness—well, the opposing lawyers can have a field day with that, you know, and can pretty much put enough doubt on the veracity of the deposition to make the jury disregard it almost entirely—and it’s just the kind of thing an insurance company would do.”