Angel Condemned (14 page)

She smiled at Hunter. He flinched as if she’d slapped him.

Cissy trembled with panic. “Bree? Bree, honey?”

Hunter’s voice was cool. “If there’s anything I should know, tell me.”

“No. You go ahead.”
Bastard
.

He flinched again, as if he’d heard her thoughts.

Bree watched as McKenna recited the rest of the Miranda rights. She watched, helpless, as her aunt was handcuffed and led out of the Frazier Museum and locked into a police cruiser.

The TV cameramen were on them like leeches.

And she was damned if she was going to take Schofield Martin’s case without a fight.

“White’s dead. And Cissy’s been arrested.” Ron sighed.

“You
have
had a morning, Bree.”

“I called my father. Royal, I mean. And then I came here.” Bree felt as if she were speaking from a long way off. As if she were underwater.

“Good move.” Ron glanced at Petru and then Lavinia. He put an imaginary cup to his lips.

“Hot tea,” Petru said. “Of course. She has had a shock. I will be happy to brew some.”

“Some of my hot tea would be better,” Lavinia said. “Yours is just that Lipton, Petru. Not what she needs right now.” She got to her feet with a grunt. “I’ll go upstairs and bring it on down. Just the thing to warm her up.” She went softly out of the room.

“Royal Winston-Beaufort will have Aunt Celia out of the holding pen before the sun has set,” Petru said. He reached across the conference table and patted her hand clumsily. “You could not have gone to a better source. And this will free you to concentrate on the client.”

Bree wanted to scream at them:
Did the three of you find some way to get Cissy arrested? How dare you! How dare you!

She met Ron’s wise and understanding gaze. His eyes were the color of the Caribbean Sea. He smiled at her, and the rage, the spite, the fury that consumed her since poor Cissy had been dragged off by the police ebbed a little.

“Sorry,” she muttered. She scrubbed at her face with both hands. “It’s not right to involve my family, Ron. It’s not fair.”

“The Opposition doesn’t recognize right or fair,” Petru said heavily. “Perhaps if you had agreed from the outset to represent Mr. Martin, things would not have come to this pass.”

“Is that what this is about? My God!”

Ron drummed his fingers on the table. “Petru, for heaven’s sake.”

“No!” Bree was so angry she couldn’t sit down. She walked furiously up and down the small conference room. “I won’t be coerced. Coercion can’t be part of the deal. I’m calling a meeting of the whole Company. All of us. Tonight, at Cianquino’s place. Take care of it, Ron. Make sure that everyone’s there. Gabriel included. There has to be a limit. I was born to do this, you tell me? Okay, fine. I’m in. But not my family. You guys have to understand that.”

“All right.” Ron took out his Blackberry and tapped rapidly at the keypad. “I’ll tell Armand right now.”

Lavinia edged into the room, a tray in her hands. “Sit down, child. This fury isn’t going to help get your auntie out of jail or make things different than they are. Have some tea. We’ll all have some tea.”

Bree stopped short, put her hands together, and forced herself to be calm. “Okay. Okay. Thank you, Lavinia. It smells great.” She sat, took a cup of the tea, and sipped at it. Her landlady grew herbs with a flavor unlike anything she’d ever tasted before. The scent had a trace of spice; the taste was of exotic flowers.

She sat down and looked at all of them.

The silence was profound. The air shimmered a little. The angels raised their hands, palms out. Bree closed her eyes and bent her head. Fatigue, anger, and depression slipped away from her, as if she’d shed a heavy coat.

She sat up. “Okay,” she said. Then, “Thank you.”

Ron put his Blackberry on the table. “The meeting’s set for eight o’clock.”

“And it is two o’clock now,” Petru said. “What would you like us to do in the interim?”

“Cissy first. Why did they arrest her?” Any information that made its way into the public record was available to them. Ron would have checked on the evidence the police had for Cissy’s arrest before she’d left the museum.

“The preliminary paperwork is in,” Ron said. “It doesn’t look good. The circumstantial evidence is pretty strong. She had means and opportunity.” Motive, as all of them knew, was not a strong component of a police investigation. The police tended to leave motive up to the prosecutors. “The murder weapon is a walnut-handled boning knife from a matched set in her kitchen.”

Bree pulled out her yellow pad. “Okay. So we check out who had a chance to steal it.”

“A list of suspects would be helpful first,” Petru said. “I can begin research on those who might have done this immediately.”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. What else, Ron?”

“She was at the scene, of course. Standing right next to him when he was stabbed. They’ve taken her coat to examine the spatter marks. That report hasn’t been filed yet.”

“There was blood all over her coat,” Bree said. “All over everyone else close to him, too.”

“They’ve taken a lot of clothes into evidence. From Charles Martin, Allard Chambers, Jillian Chambers, Alicia Kennedy. And some guy named Lloyd Dumphey.”

Bree stopped taking notes. “Lloyd Dum-what?”

“D-U-M-P-H-E-Y. He’s employed”—Ron’s grin was a little sour—“as a paralegal at Beazley, Barlow & Caldecott.”

“Somebody from Caldecott’s office was there?” Bree digested this in silence. Then she nodded at Petru. “Ha! There’s our list of suspects. Preliminary, anyway. Start with Dumphey, please.”

Ron picked up his Blackberry. “Unfortunately, there appears to be an eyewitness.”

Bree took in a deep breath. “Let me guess. Alicia Kennedy?”

“Yes. She says . . .” Ron squinted at the screen.

“Here, take these.” Petru took his spectacles off. “These are readers.”

Ron sighed and fitted the bows carefully over his ears. “Mortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Lavinia chuckled. “I could have tole you that, you asked.”

“Let’s get on with it, please,” Bree said impatiently. “Could you read the Kennedy statement aloud?”

“There’s a lot of not very pleasant stuff about your aunt. But the relevant part is this:

“That is
not
the Cissy I know,” Bree said. “That’s utter nonsense.”

Ron took the glasses off and handed them back to Petru.

“She’s lying,” Bree said. “And it’s not hard to figure out why. She hated Cissy.”

“Will she tell the truth?” Lavinia asked. “That don’t sound awfully good.”

“A good defense attorney can make mincemeat of Alicia’s statement,” Bree said with more confidence than she felt.

“It’s pretty clear why Lieutenant Hunter had to take her into custody,” Ron said. “You can’t be angry with him for that.”

“No,” Bree admitted. “I can’t. I’m not.”

“That’s right,” Lavinia said softly. “Save the righteous anger for the cruel and the liars. And spread mercy around like mulch in a weedy garden.”

“Mulch,” Bree said. “I’ll try and do just that. But I think we should pull up a couple of weeds while we’re at it. Petru, we’ll need a case file. If you could begin with Bullet Martin and his family, we’ll be able to get a better handle on the client. Then I’d like you to concentrate on the Cross of Justinian. You may have to consult sacred sources as well as the profane. I’m beginning to be mighty suspicious of this thing. Ron? You and I will have to pay Goldstein a visit tomorrow. My mother and father will both be in Savannah within the hour, and I have to get home. In the meantime, I need everything you can get from the police file, including the statements of both Allard and Jillian.” Her cell phone shrilled, and she took it out of her pocket and flipped it open. “There’s Mamma. I’ve got to go.” She slung her coat over her shoulders. “I’m going to have to pay a visit to Caldecott and Barlow. I’m very interested in the mysterious Mr. Dumphey. I’ll want to discuss that with Armand this evening before I do. I may need Gabriel with me. I’ll see you all there? Tonight at eight?”

“May the Light travel with you,” Petru said unexpectedly. “We will be there.”

“Oh, lord, lord, this is a pickle.” Francesca sat in the rocking chair next to the fireplace in the Beaufort town house. Her red-gold hair was disheveled. She wore an elegant bronze silk pantsuit with a coffee-colored blouse. It looked as if she’d slept in her clothes. Bree had never seen Francesca like that before. “They wouldn’t let me see my own sister, Bree.”

“Try some of this tea, Mamma.” Bree set a tray with the Limoges teapot and a cup and saucer on the end table beside her mother. She sat on the floor at her mother’s feet. Sasha came and settled heavily at her side, his head on her knee.

“Smells good.” Francesca took a cautious sip. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had anything like this before.”

“You remember my landlady, Mrs. Mather.”

“That nice old African-American woman that visited you when you broke your leg? I do.”

“She grows her own herbs and spices. This is her mix.”

“She ought to package it up and sell it. She’d make a fortune.” She drained the cup, and a little color came back into her face. “I’m not going to be staying with you two. As soon as they let Cissy out of that place, I’m moving on to her house. She’ll need me for a bit. Your father called Lewis McCallen to represent her. Somebody from his office is supposed to be getting her out right now.” She looked restlessly at her watch. “Why does it have to take so much time?”

“It’s just after three, Mamma. She’s been in the holding pen—I mean the place where they keep the new people—a little over four hours. That’s not too bad.”

“You and Antonia are so like us.”

“We are?”

“You surely are. We used to fight like a couple of cats. Drove your grandmother Carmichael stark ravin’ mad. Or so she said. But I’d do anything for my sister. Anything.”

“I know you would, Mamma. We all feel that way.”

“Just like you’d do anything for Antonia.”

Bree reached up and smoothed Francesca’s hair away from her face. “You bet I would.”

“Where is she? Antonia, I mean.”

“At the theater?” Bree looked around, as if expecting to see Antonia materialize at the sound of her name. “You didn’t call her?”

“Me? I thought you did.”

“Uh-oh.” Bree grabbed for her cell phone. “I thought you did. That means she’s going to hear it—”

The front door slammed. Antonia marched into the room, eyes narrowed to brilliant, glittering slits of blue.

“From somebody else,” Bree said. “Hello, Antonia.”

“I would like to know, I would just bloody well like to know, why I have to hear of a family tragedy from a bald, fat, smirking stagehand who should have died from sheer, unmitigated nastiness before he was born.” She dropped her duffle bag to the floor with a thud.

“You shouldn’t have, darling.” Francesca got up and wrapped her arms around her youngest child. “I thought Bree called you. Bree thought I called you. It was an honest mistake.”

“I am always the
last
to know anything in this family.”

“Antonia,” her mother said firmly. “This is not about you. This is about getting Cissy out from under this horrible mess.”

Antonia kicked her bag a couple of feet along the carpet and flung herself on the couch. Francesca sat down beside her. “I told you,” she said grimly. “I told you all Prosper White was a disaster waiting to happen. Nobody pays any attention to me in this family.”

“Well, we’re paying attention to you now, honey. Bree, give your baby sister some of that nice tea.”

“I’d rather have a nice glass of wine,” Antonia said bluntly.

“What a good idea, honey. It’ll settle us all down. I’ll have a glass of wine too, Bree dear.”

Bree looked at her dog. “What do you think, Sasha? Should I get my family tiddly?” She went to the kitchen to get the bottle and two of the largest wineglasses she could find.

“We’ll all go into the kitchen,” Francesca said. “I’m not having you drink wine without something on your stomach, Antonia.”

After a certain amount of motherly tsking over the lack of anything but yogurt, Cheerios, and an aging log of cheddar cheese, Francesca settled them at the table and began to put together an omelet.

“Did Daddy find out anything more about Prosper White?” Antonia drained her first glass of wine and reached for the bottle.

Francesca cracked the eggs against the ceramic bowl with an expert flick of her wrist. “You’ll have to ask him.”

“Did he use an investigator?” Bree asked.

Francesca paused while she whipped the eggs, and tipped them into the pan. “Yes,” she said at last, “we did. But if you tell your aunt, I’ll have your guts for garters.”