Angel Condemned (2 page)

“Would you believe the
nerve
of this wormy little bozo Allard Chambers? Bringing a lawsuit against Prosper, of all people?” Celia Carmichael patted Prosper White’s knee with a protective air. She didn’t wait for a response from the other people sitting in Brianna Winston-Beaufort’s law office but ran on like a train with no brakes. “And that
scruffy
little creep who forced Prosper to take the papers, Bree. He was a toad. Not only that—what’d you call him, darlin’?” She turned to the elegantly dressed man seated at her side and batted her eyelashes appealingly.

Celia Carmichael was Bree’s aunt—her mother Francesca’s youngest sister. The family called her Cissy—and until her recent engagement to museum curator Prosper White, she’d been a woman of cheerful insouciance and a certain artless flamboyance. She’d burst into Bree’s office some minutes ago, her face red with indignation, Prosper White trailing arrogantly in her wake.

“He was a process server, Celia.” White smoothed his fingers over his knee, dislodging Cissy’s hand with barely suppressed irritation. “I do wish you’d moderate your voice.”

Cissy’s fiancé was tall and lean. His hair was prematurely white, his eyes blue, and his face had a permanent tan. When Cissy had first introduced White to the family a month ago, Bree had guessed him to be in his late forties, although he looked younger. Cissy herself admitted to forty-five and looked like what she was: a well-cared-for Southern gentlewoman holding off the ravages of fifty-nine with charm and judicious applications of Botox.

“Whatever. This
server
,” she veered off into irrelevancy, “although I can’t think of a restaurant within a hundred miles of Savannah that would take him on as a waiter. The man had tattoos on his tattoos and a gold ring in his nose. Anyway, this person walks right into the gallery and shoves the papers into Prosper’s pocket. Then he grins like a hog on ice and scoots on out. I wanted to slap the smirk right off his mouth.”

Bree murmured sympathetically.

“So I brought Prosper over here sooner than quick. Well, we had one quick stop in between, but I have to tell you, I hustled. What we need, I told him, is the best lawyer in the state of Georgia, who I just happened to be related to by marriage, thank God. And since
he’s
going to be related to us by marriage in less than a week, I knew you’d be even more anxious to help us, Niece. You will, won’t you?” Cissy settled back into Bree’s only visitor chair with a snort, and then added, apropos of nothing in particular, “When
are
you going to get some decent furniture here, Bree?”

Bree couldn’t decide which question to answer first. She wasn’t anxious to take on a case for her aunt’s suspect fiancé, so she decided not to answer that one at all. And she didn’t have a dime to spend on fancy office furniture, so she wouldn’t answer that one, either. She’d bought the essentials when she’d reopened the office a few months ago: two desks, three chairs, and a steel-gray five-drawer filing cabinet from Second Hand Rows, the used furniture store on Whitaker Street. The place looked just fine, as far as she was concerned.

She looked at Prosper White and wondered at the instinctive dislike he’d raised in almost all of the Winston-Beauforts except the infatuated Cissy. The thumbs-down included Bree’s younger sister, Antonia, who normally exhibited no common sense about men at all. Maybe it was the determined air of supercilious contempt. Or his too-fancy shoes. Or the faint drift of cologne that followed him. Bree sighed. Whatever it was, the man couldn’t put a foot right with any of the family. She supposed she ought to feel sorry for him. But he wasn’t a man who invited sympathy.

At the moment, White seemed to have an attitude about her furniture. He slouched in Bree’s saggy leather office chair as if the touch of the worn-out leather was repugnant. Bree’s secretary, EB Billingsley, had dragged the chair out from behind the small screen that partitioned Bree’s desk from the rest of the office space. White also seemed to have an attitude about EB, whom he’d ignored when Cissy had made the introductions. EB was clearly one of “the little people” who didn’t count in the twin worlds of art and commerce.

EB herself commanded her space behind her battered pine desk with her customary air of majestic aplomb. The desk faced the mahogany office door eight feet away. The upper half of the door was made of the opaque glass popular when the Bay Street building went up in 1822. Black lettering read LAW OFFICES B. WINSTON-BEAUFORT, only backwards, if you were standing inside looking out, the way Bree was. Gray wall-to-wall carpeting covered pine floors too gouged and splintered from a former fire to be successfully refinished. The office had one window, double-hung, that looked out over Bay Street. You could glimpse the Savannah River between the rehabbed warehouses that lined the other side of the street, but the sight was so familiar Bree rarely bothered.

“We’re keepin’ an eye out for some nice new office furniture, Ms. Carmichael,” EB said blandly. “But I’ll tell you true, we’ve got so much business comin’ in that Bree hasn’t had time to spit.” This was a fib but a generous-hearted one; EB kept the accounts for this, the Bay Street office, and Bree’s Angelus Street office, too. She knew the dismal state of their finances better than anyone.

“This summons is such a small matter; I doubt it will take up much of your time,” Prosper White said. “I can certainly send it along to my counsel in New York.” He smiled with a glimpse of artificially whitened teeth. “But it’s such a trivial matter I hate to bother them. And Cissy insisted. When Cissy gets her mind made up, I just follow along. If you’d rather I passed the case along to someone else, I’m happy to do so.”

Bree, arms folded, one hip cocked against EB’s desk, paused a moment before answering him. She looked at her aunt, instead.

Like all the Carmichael girls, Cissy was small, with good bones, and an upright, graceful way of moving. But where Bree’s mother, Francesca, was rounded, Cissy was spare, with the wiry body of a woman who spent too much time at the gym. Francesca’s own red-gold hair (refreshed every six weeks at a quiet beauty salon near the Winston-Beauforts’ North Carolina home) was one of the reasons Bree’s father had fallen in love with her. Cissy’s was bright, sun-streaked blonde, the sort of color that demanded her aunt’s frequent trips to plastic surgeons to maintain a youthful image. Or so she claimed. Both sisters had clear blue eyes and soft, musical voices.

Cissy’s first husband had run off with his executive assistant some fifteen years ago. Bree’s memory of Cissy’s ex-husband was spotty. Ash—what was his last name? Smallwood, that was it—had been a heavy-set guy with reddened cheeks, a fondness for bourbon sours, and political views to the right of Attila the Hun. The family hadn’t liked him much. Cissy hadn’t, either, and nobody was too surprised when he lit off for California after he’d made a very generous settlement on her aunt. Since then, Cissy had happily dated every eligible bachelor in Georgia over the age of thirty-five. She hadn’t bothered much about a second husband.

Until now.

Prosper White was Ash’s antithesis: tall, skinny, and with buzz-cut prematurely white hair. Bree had never seen him wear anything but slim black suits; crisp, open-collared white shirts; and those sleek Italian shoes. He drank martinis (sparingly) and seemed to have no political views at all. He looked just like what he claimed to be: a museum curator from New York City. He certainly acted the part.

He was as different from Ash Smallwood as chalk from cheese, although the Winston-Beauforts didn’t like him any better. Bree felt very sorry for her aunt. She might even be persuaded to feel sorry for Prosper White, and she hoped he wasn’t as arrogant and uncivil as he seemed. But she really didn’t want to handle his lawsuit. She was short-tempered these days. Keeping civil would be an effort.

Bree gave her aunt an affectionate smile and turned to White. “The thing is, criminal law isn’t really my strong suit. You might do better referring the case to your people up north. Or I’d be happy to refer you to somebody here.”

“Not your strong suit?” Cissy said. “That’s a hoot! You got that Chandler child off! You solved four murder cases bam-bam-bam! And you’ve only had Uncle Franklin’s practice open for a few months!”

White scowled. “This is a criminal case? You’re telling me there’s a jail sentence attached to a possible conviction? This flap is over my acquisition of a magazine cover, for God’s sake. And he wants damages!”

“Did I say criminal?” Bree said, hastily. “I’m very sorry. I misspoke.” Her biased opinion of White’s character was another reason to steer clear of his case. Her job was to be an advocate, not a judge. “I’m a specialist in tax law. I should have said that I’m not an expert in torts. Most lawyers in Georgia are more experienced in tort law than I am. Is this a criminal case? No, of course not.”

“Nonsense. Uncle Franklin believed you could handle anything, from torts to tarts,” Cissy said confidently. “That’s why he left you his practice.”

“Absolutely,” EB said loyally.

“Uncle Franklin was an optimist,” Bree said, “but thank, you Aunt Cissy.”

Nobody in the room knew just how much of an optimist. She’d taken over Franklin’s civil practice, as he’d requested in his will. It was why she’d come to Savannah last October in the first place. What she hadn’t known then, she knew now. Franklin’s other practice, the criminal one, was carried out from the office on 66 Angelus Street, where Bree handled appeals cases for souls who had been condemned to Hell.

Celestial jurisprudence turned out to be a lot less process-laden than the human/temporal one, but the beings she had to deal with—from the Opposition’s prosecutors to the Divine Justices themselves—were an intimidating crew even to Bree, who was no pushover. In the last four months, Bree had handled four such clients with the help of her Angelus Street staff, five angels appointed by the Celestial Courts.

The last case had taken a lot out of her, and she was tired to death. She wasn’t sleeping well. She’d lost another dress size. A car had tried to run her over, and she’d broken her leg. Despite her doubts about Prosper White, he did deserve the best advocate she could find for him, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t up to it. Not without a couple of weeks off somewhere sunny.

“Let me see if I can get Marv Welch to give you a hand, Aunt Cissy. He’s the best civil litigator I know. And he’s not suit-happy, either. If this can be settled with a few phone calls, he’s the man to do it.”

“Fine,” Cissy snapped. She pressed her lips tightly together. She cleared her throat. Then she said, “You want to shove this off on some stranger? No problem. No problem at all.” She adjusted the cuffs on her blue-striped cotton shirt, tugged her short beige skirt over her knees, and slung the strap of her tote over her shoulder. Her legs were as tanned as White’s face. She got to her feet and said stiffly, “Sorry to bust in on y’all like this.”

EB cut her eyes at Bree with a disapproving frown and said soothingly, “Now just hang on a minute, Ms. Carmichael. You sit right back down. Of course Bree wants to help her auntie.”

EB had a large, rambunctious family. She held decided views on family loyalty. A middle-aged African-American woman who’d left school in the eighth grade to have the first of her five children, EB had come to work for Bree very recently, just after her last child graduated technical school. She wasn’t, she told Bree at her job interview, having any more part-time jobs waitressing, housecleaning, and cooking. She’d signed up for an online secretarial course, and she was going to make something of herself or die trying. She’d taken to Bree’s temporal practice in a New York minute. It’d taken her less time than that to make Bree part of her extended family. EB lowered her chin and peered at Bree over her wire-rimmed spectacles. “Isn’t that right, Bree?”

Bree gave it up. EB would never let her hear the end of it if she sent Cissy somewhere else. Come to think of it, Cissy wouldn’t, either. “Certainly. If you’re sure you want me, Cissy.”

Her aunt sat down with a sigh of relief. “Of course I do. Thing is, I’d purely hate to have strangers poking around in our personal business.”

Bree hoped her distaste for both Prosper White and his lousy case didn’t show. “I may need to get an expert in tort law to give me a hand. You okay with that?”