Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries)

by Herren, Greg

“I didn’t ask for this meeting,” I retorted before I could stop myself—and then it struck me. Why had he asked me to come?

  He wanted to know what I knew, and if it was a threat to him.

  “I’d heard that you were asking questions about me, Mr. MacLeod, and I usually find it much easier to answer those questions myself.” Again, the ghost of a smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. “But I now find that this is a colossal waste of my time.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “You remember the way to the elevator, don’t you?”

  I rose, and walked to the door. I paused, and looked back. “You know, would you mind answering one more question for me, Mr. Barras?”

  He gave me a bored look. “Yes, what is it?”

  “The one thing I don’t understand is, why did you buy Cypress Gardens from Luke Marino?”

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I thought it was an excellent investment opportunity.”

  “A storm-damaged apartment complex being run by a non-profit organization providing housing to low-income families.” I tilted my head to one side. “Somehow I doubt that. And you’re a stockholder in Global Insurance.”

  “I own a lot of stock in a lot of different companies.”

  “Maybe you instructed Global not to pay out on Luke’s claim so you could get a better price on the place?”

  He took another drink of his Scotch, and was it my imagination, or was his hand trembling just a little bit? “I won’t deny that Cypress Gardens came to my attention because of the Global Insurance connection, and maybe I got a better deal on the place than I would have if Global had paid out the claim, but I am not involved in the day-to-day business of the company, Mr. MacLeod. That wouldn’t exactly be legal, now would it?” He sipped the Scotch again. “One thing that I thought was rather odd, though—it might be of interest to you.”

  “And what might that be?”

  He licked his thin lips. “I have been trying to get Jonny O’Neill in my promotion for months now, Mr. MacLeod. He’s been doing fights at my casino in Mississippi, but his mother was resistant. She didn’t think I had her son’s best interests at heart.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’m always interested in my investments, Mr. MacLeod.” He waved his hand. “Jonny has star potential, but that foolish woman didn’t see it. She thought I was going to exploit her son. I offered her the rather generous signing bonuses several weeks ago, and she practically spat in my face. You can imagine my shock last Wednesday when she called me and asked if the offer still stood. I said, of course, and she came by the next day to sign the contracts and pick up the checks.” He shrugged. “Curious, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe she just changed her mind.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “She seemed to be doing that a lot last week,” I replied. “She changed her mind about letting Jonny sign with you, she changed her mind about testifying for Luke Marino—”

  “She changed her mind about testifying?” His face didn’t change, but his tone had altered a little bit.

  I nodded. “She notified his lawyer she was going to change her testimony. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  His face remained impassive. “Why would I?”

  I stood up. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Barras.”

  He stopped me as I started out the door. “Mr. MacLeod?”

  “Yes?”

  “That check you showed me?” He licked his lips again. “As I mentioned earlier, there were two of them—one for Mona, and one for Jonny.”

  I frowned. Had Mona given Jonny his check? He hadn’t said anything about getting a windfall.

  Then I remembered him saying I got money and handing me the hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket.

  He smiled again. “Mona insisted that both checks be made out to her.”

  I bowed my head and walked down the hallway back to the foyer, my heart racing.

  What happened to the other check?

  Chapter Fourteen

  I stood inside the front lobby of Poydras Tower, watching the cars crawling by in the nonstop downpour.

  Fifty thousand dollars was missing, and so was Mona O’Neill.

  She’d cashed the check on Thursday—the same day her son was murdered and she disappeared.

  “Do you need a cab, sir?” the security guard asked.

  “That would be great, thank you,” I replied without turning around.

  My phone started ringing, and when I pulled it out of my pocket I could see Loren McKeithen Calling on the screen. “MacLeod,” I said, touching the red Accept button.

  “Great news, Chanse!” he blustered in my ear. “The best possible news! Global settled!”

  “Cool.”

  “So it’s over—send me an invoice for what we owe you—”

  “I hadn’t deposited your check yet,” I cut him off. “I’ll e-mail the invoice and drop the check off at your office.”

  “No need—just send the invoice, and I’ll bring you a replacement check by,” he enthused. “We’ll definitely need to celebrate. I should be finished here at the office today around six. Will you be home then?”

  “I can be.”

  “See you then,” he replied and hung up.

  I put my phone back in my pocket and went out the front doors to wait for my cab under the overhang. The wind was blowing rain under it, but it only could get about halfway up the sidewalk—the half closest to the building was dry as a bone. Cars were still driving at a snail’s pace through the rain, and visibility was poor. The water in the gutters had risen up over the sidewalk, and there was at least three inches of water on Poydras Street. The wind had picked up as well. The trees on the neutral ground were bending and swaying. Leaves were being ripped away and outer edges of branches were snapping off, turning into dangerous projectiles. I watched as a woman on the other side of the street struggled to keep hold of her umbrella, which finally turned inside out, her hair getting soaked and ruined in a matter of seconds.

  So, I reasoned, the check in Mona’s desk had been for Jonny. The other check had been the one she’d intended to use for herself, and she’d cashed it rather than depositing it. The only explanation for that was she intended to give the money to Robby, so he could make good his embezzlements and stay out of jail. Maybe, I reflected, all of this simply had to do with a robbery, pure and simple. The money was gone—but Robby’s body had been left behind, so where was Mona?

  Robby had been desperate. His marriage was crumbling, he was about to go to jail, and he was about to lose everything. Desperate people do desperate things—and threatening to go to court to break Jonny’s trust and access the money, a move that would humiliate his mother and crush his brother, could, horrible as it was, be understood in the context that he was drowning and desperately trying to grab onto a lifeline—any lifeline—to save himself and his own family.

  Mona herself had been in a terrible predicament. No matter how badly things between her and Robby had deteriorated, he was still her son—and no mother would want to see her son go to jail, even if he deserved it. She couldn’t steal from one son to help out the other, so perhaps her decision to change her testimony had been an attempt to get money out of either Global or Luke Marino. But she’d never asked Luke for the money—wouldn’t she have just asked him for a loan?

  And why didn’t she just cash in some of her own CDs or sell some of her investments? Wouldn’t that have been easier and avoided compromising her own ethics?

  And ultimately, she had sold Jonny out to get money from Morgan Barras—at least in her own mind.

  None of this made the least bit of a sense.

  A United cab sloshed through the shallow creek that Poydras Street was turning into and came to a stop in front of where I was standing. I dashed through the rising water, opened the back door, and slid into the seat, slamming the door behind me.

  I still got drenched.

  I gave my address to the driver, who just shook his head. “Man,
I don’t know how close I can get to that, Camp Street’s under water.”

  I sighed. “The corner of St. Charles and Martin Luther King is fine—I can walk from there.”

  When he dropped me off, I paid him, opened the door and the umbrella. St. Charles Avenue crests in the center—the neutral ground with the streetcar tracks is higher than the road, which slants down to the sidewalk in both directions. The water was halfway up my calves, and I fought against the fast-moving dirty water to cross the street. Lightning pierced the heavy gray darkness, followed by an immediate crack of thunder that set off car alarms in every direction—and the stoplights and street lights went dark. The neutral ground was also under shallow water, and my thighs began to ache from the effort of moving my legs through the rising water. The umbrella was becoming more and more useless as I walked, as the blasts of wind drove the heavy thick drops into me, soaking my clothes through and making them cling to my skin. And I knew the closer I got to Camp Street, the deeper the water would be.

  If it isn’t the lowest-lying street in my neighborhood, Camp Street has to be pretty damned close. As I waded across Prytania, I could see through the gloom that people were already pulling the cars up on the neutral ground and on the higher ground of Coliseum Square. I saw an eighteen-wheeler heading downtown throwing up huge waves of dirty water, complete with whitecaps, as it made its way through the flooding street.

  I just put my head down and kept walking.

  I cut across Martin Luther King at the light and paused to catch my breath. I was cold—the wind was getting stronger and colder, and the massive branches of the live oaks in the park were swaying. I could see deep water cascading down my driveway into the swirling mass of water at the foot of my driveway. The sidewalk in front of my house, and my front yard, were already underwater, and I could see the waves being thrown up by cars and trucks lapping against the bottom brick step leading up to my porch. The water was rising even as I watched. Coliseum Street was also under a rising tide, and the longer I waited the worse it was going to be. I splashed across to the park, and my feet sank into the soupy mud, making sucking noises as I strained to extract my feet, one at a time, on my way over to Camp Street.

  By the time I was weaving my way through the cars that had pulled up onto the park to wait out the flooding, I could see that the water was already up to my third step and halfway up the slope of my driveway. It was over my knees as I crossed Camp Street, and holding on to the umbrella was an increasingly difficult struggle with every step I took. But finally I was climbing my front steps, and I could see that my living room lights were on—so at least I hadn’t lost power. I unlocked the front door, pushing it open as I kicked off my shoes. The porch was soaked, and I pulled off my socks and tossed them to the side. I closed the umbrella, put it down, and stepped inside, stripping naked as soon as I closed the door and locked the deadbolt. I ran to the bathroom and grabbed a towel, drying myself off and wrapping it around me as I walked into the bedroom. I slipped on a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants before going back into the kitchen and starting another pot of coffee.

  My teeth were chattering as the coffee brewed—my apartment was freezing, and I slid my house shoes on my wet, cold feet. I poured a cup of coffee and took a drink, letting the warmth flow through me as I walked back into the living room. I grabbed my notebook, sat down on the couch, and pulled a comforter over me as I flipped it open and started reviewing my notes while the computer powered up.

  I plugged my phone into its charger.

  I gnawed on the end of my pen.

  The case didn’t make any sense, and it never had, from the very beginning. It hadn’t ever felt right to me—but it was nothing I could prove, nothing I could put my finger on and say this is it—what the hell.

  The thing to do was go back to the very start and review everything, everything I’d found, everything I’d been told.

  Fact: Robby O’Neill had embezzled money, had committed a crime. His employers were willing to simply fire him and not press charges if he returned the money he’d taken. He needed about fifty thousand dollars. He’d threatened to go to court and expose his mother as an adulterer and his brother as a bastard to get the money in Jonny’s trust fund—but Lorelle claimed it wasn’t true, so Mona would certainly have known it wasn’t true, that the threat was empty. DNA tests were expensive and took a while, but that’s all it would have taken—and Robby didn’t have the time to wait. So, why would Mona have cared?

  The only plausible reason she would have is if it were true.

  So, Lorelle had either lied or simply hadn’t known the truth.

  Why would Lorelle lie?

  I looked at my phone and thought about calling her, but decided there was no point. If she’d lied, she was hardly going to admit to it over the phone.

  But if she had knowingly lied about Jonny’s parentage, well, maybe she had lied about other things as well.

  I flipped through the notebook to my notes from Lorelle’s interview.

  And there it was. At the time, it had gone right past me—I had no reason to think anything was odd about it.

  Lorelle had said: Morgan Barras had sold Mom and Robby and Jonny a line of bullshit…Robby and Celia both thought—I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t say.

  Yet Lorelle had said she and Robby weren’t close, barely spoke. She and Jonny had also said that Robby wasn’t close to their mother. I thought back—no, come to think of it, Jonny hadn’t exactly said that—he said that Robby thought he was “better than us.” At the time, I’d just assumed he’d meant all of them.

  But what if he’d just meant himself and Heather, and not their mother?

  I shook my head. But what reason did Lorelle have for killing her mother and her brother? Somehow, I couldn’t see her committing either crime. She was a suburban soccer mom.

  But I’d never checked her financials.

  I got my phone and called Jephtha. “Chanse!” He answered. “Dude, I’m glad you called—sorry, I’ve been meaning to call you.”

  I bit my lower lip. “Did you find out something important?” I somehow managed to say in a calm and clear voice. I could clearly hear a computer game running in the background.

  “I’m sorry,” he replied, and I knew he was—he always was. “But you know, I was working on this new game I think is going to be huge and I forgot to call you and I was going to pass it on to Abby but she went out while I was working on the game and she hasn’t come back yet—” He paused. “You know, that’s kind of weird. She said she’d only be gone about an hour or so, and it’s been a lot longer than that and she hasn’t called.”

  “What?” I looked at the clock. It was almost one. I’d left Abby before nine. “What time was it when she left?”

  I could almost see him thinking. “Well, she woke me up at a little after nine, asked me if I wanted breakfast. I got up, and when I got out of the shower, she was on her computer—I got some coffee, it said it was nine forty on the coffeemaker, but Abby has that set about twenty minutes fast, and then she jumped up and said she had to go check on something, and she’d be back in an hour—so she’s been gone almost three hours and she hasn’t called.” His voice began to sound worried.

  I sighed. “It’s probably nothing—it’s raining pretty hard and the city’s flooding, she’s probably just riding it out somewhere.”

  “You’re probably right.” He sighed. “But usually she calls, you know?”

  “What was the information you had for me?” I interrupted him, trying to get him back on track.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.” I could hear papers rustling around, and the computer game went silent. “Here it is. I would have e-mailed it to you but I know how you are about stuff—” He stopped talking.

  Which meant he’d hacked into a website or a computer. “Who’d you hack into?”

  I heard a sharp intake of breath.

  “Jeph?”

  “Chanse—I’m really worried about Abby.”

  I sighed, g
etting a little annoyed. “Jeph, we talked about that—like I said, she’s probably just riding the flooding out somewhere.” As though to emphasize my point, thunder roared loud enough to shake my house. I got up and walked over to my front door, peering through the blinds. It was even darker outside than it had been—and the water was now up to the top of the fourth step. I bit my lip.

  The water never went higher than the fifth step, at least I’d never seen that happen in all my years in this apartment. The pumping stations were already at work, and even if the rain kept up, by that time the pumps would be working at full capacity and the water would start receding. Coliseum Square was full of parked cars—and there was an abandoned car at the corner of Melpomene, sitting in water halfway up its doors. I shook my head in sympathy. I’d gotten caught in a flash flood shortly after I moved to the city, and it had taken about six hundred bucks to get my car running again.

  And the musty smell had never really gone away.

  “This is what she was looking at before she left this morning.” His voice was trembling.

  “How could she have been looking at something on your computer? You said she was at hers.”

  “Our computers are networked.” He launched into a long technical explanation that made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, but the bottom line of it was the document he was looking at had been looked at since he’d originally downloaded it at three in the morning, and the IP address was Abby’s computer.

  I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle him. “What the hell is it, Jeph?”

  “I didn’t think it was all that important, just thought it was kind of curious,” he said defensively. “But if she was looking at it—”

  “Get to the fucking point!”

  “You know Barney Hogan?”

  “What about him?”

  “I thought I’d check his financials, you know—Abby had mentioned he was like one of the last people to see Mrs. O’Neill alive, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he was about to lose his bar—he was behind a couple of months to the bank—and now he’s not anymore.”