Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (26 page)

I could feel a sick feeling forming in the pit of my stomach. “And just where exactly did Jeph find it?”

She had the decency to blush. “He hacked into Robby’s e-mail account.”

“What?”

It came out much louder than I intended; any number of other patrons stopped talking and turned to stare at us. I felt my face turning red, and made an apologetic gesture. After a few moments, they turned back to what they were doing.

“Sorry, boss, I know you don’t like us to do that, but what was the harm, really?” She whispered in a rush, “You know the cops are going to go through his computer, and they’re going to find it just the way we did. And you know what date this e-mail was sent?” She leaned back triumphantly. “Last Thursday. It was sent to him in the morning, and he opened it, downloaded the file, and read it Thursday afternoon. And it came from a lawyer.” She slid a Post-it Note across the table to me. “That’s his name and office number.” She looked at my plate. “Are you going to eat those eggs?”

I slid the plate across the table. “I should put you over my knee and spank you.”

“That’s just gross.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “And that would give Mona a reason to kill him. If Jonny wasn’t entitled to any of the money from the settlement—because of the wording—and she could be legally liable for defrauding Robby and Lorelle—I mean, I doubt it ever occurred to her that the way this settlement was worded would ever come back to bite her in the ass, you know? This is the kind of quibbling about wording and legalities that a lawyer would jump on, but your average housewife wouldn’t.” Her eyes glinted. “I had to explain it to you, for example, and you know more about the law than the average citizen.”

“Thanks for that,” I replied sourly. “So, you’re saying she killed Robby and has disappeared so the cops can’t find her.” I shook my head again. “I don’t know, Abby.” I scratched my head. “None of it makes any sense in the first place. She could have taken care of Jonny with the money
she
had in trust. She didn’t need to share the settlement with him—and why the big need to keep it from him?” I drummed my fingers on the table. “Then again, if she didn’t have a trust set up for Jonny, Robby and Lorelle would want to know why not—and eventually he’d want to know, too. So, maybe it was all just easier for her? I don’t know if I buy that.”

She nodded. “Chanse, her husband
died.
After he was dead there wasn’t any need to keep anything quiet anymore—and she never remarried. What does that tell you?”

“It tells me you’re speculating without any evidence.”

She rolled her eyes. “Which tells me
you
aren’t a woman. Women aren’t like men, in case you’ve never noticed. Women, as a rule, don’t have sex just for sex’s sake—we take it a little more seriously than that. Women generally only have sex with men they love—”

“Which totally explains singles bars.”

She made a face at me. “That’s different. Mona O’Neill was married, quite happily from all accounts, and was a devout Catholic. She wouldn’t have an affair because she needed to get laid, Chanse, or just for some good sex. She would fall in love with another man, that’s the only way she’d do it. And if she kept this all quiet for twenty years, there had to be a reason.”

“He’s married?”

“I don’t know.” She put a forkful of eggs into her mouth and moaned in ecstasy. “How the hell do they manage to make the food here so damned good? The married man thing seems so 1950s to me, you know? People get divorced left and right these days, so I can’t imagine all the need for secrecy.” She shrugged. “Sure, there might be a scandal, but does anyone really give two shits about that anymore? And I can’t imagine things were that much different twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years ago a sex scandal would kill a politician’s career,” I pointed out. “Now you can pay hookers to dress you in diapers and you don’t have to resign.”

“True.” She spread grape jelly on her toast.

“We also don’t know for sure that Mona had an affair,” I pointed out. “No evidence—we’re just making assumptions. We don’t know Jonny wasn’t Danny’s child.”

She made a face at me. “Okay, Mr. Expert Private Eye—have you gotten any other facts besides Mona’s missing and her son was murdered?”

I was about to make a snide remark when my cell phone started ringing. I glanced down at it.

Morgan Barras Calling.

“MacLeod,” I answered.

“Mr. MacLeod, this is Morgan Barras. I was wondering if you were free around eleven this morning?”

“Yes.” I glanced over at Abby, whose eyebrows had gone up. “Where shall we meet?”

“Come to Poydras Tower. The security guard will let you in.” He hung up.

I put my phone down. “I’ve been summoned to go see Morgan Barras. I wonder what this is about?”

“Who knows?” She pushed the plate away, and I signaled for the check. It was almost nine—I had time to do some more follow-up before heading to Poydras Tower. I paid the check and said good-bye to Abby on the sidewalk in front of the café. She offered to give me a lift home, but I decided to walk. The sky was gray and the air felt even heavier than before, but I was pretty certain I could get back to the apartment before the rain started.

I called Lorelle as I crossed St. Charles, watching for errant drivers on their cell phones and not paying attention to the road. “Hello, Mr. MacLeod,” she said, picking up on the third ring.

I got to the point. “Lorelle, I’m sorry to have ask you this, but is there any possibility that Jonny wasn’t your father’s child?”

I could hear her sharp intake of breath on the other end, followed by a deep sigh. “I suppose it was inevitable you’d hear about that,” she said. “No, Jonny was most definitely Dad’s kid. I was hoping to never hear about that again.” She went on to explain that her parents had separated briefly when she and Robby were teenagers. “Robby always thought it was because Mom cheated on Dad, and he never forgave her for it. But it wasn’t true—Dad cheated on
Mom
. And she was already pregnant with Jonny when she threw him out.”

“Well, where did Robby get the idea that—”

“He overheard them arguing and got the wrong impression. Mom never knew—she never knew. I didn’t know Robby thought that myself. If I’d known back then, I would have corrected him.” She barked out a harsh laugh. “I
caught
Dad with his girlfriend. I was the one who told Mom. By the time Robby finally dropped his little bombshell on me, we were in college and he wouldn’t believe me when I tried to tell him the truth. That’s why we weren’t close anymore.” She paused. “How did you find out?”

“Jonny told me. The last time he spoke with Robby, Robby told
him
.”

“Oh, that bastard!” Her voice rose. “If he wasn’t dead, I could just kill him! Poor Jonny—like there’s not enough for him to deal with right now—and thank you for telling me. Is there anything else?”

“Not at the moment—”

She hung up the phone before I could finish the sentence.

Well, I thought as I walked across Coliseum Square, I never really thought Mona killed Robby and went on the run.

One possibility down, a few more to go.

An hour later, I opened my umbrella as I stepped down off the St. Charles streetcar at the corner of Carondelet and Poydras. The rain had started to fall when the streetcar made it around the loop at Lee Circle and was coming down in earnest now. The gutters were already filling, discarded cups and leaves swirling around in the dirty water. Sheets of water washed down the slanted sidewalk down to the gutter. I shivered and crossed the street when the light changed.

As I headed up Poydras to keep my appointment with a billionaire, I wondered what Morgan Barras was really like.

I haven’t had a lot of luck with rich people, if you take my landlady and primary client, Barbara Castlemaine, out of the equation. She’s the exception that proves the rule. It’s been my experience—and I freely admit to being biased—that rich people tend to think the law doesn’t apply to them and they can use their money, and the power it gives them, to pretty much buy their way out of everything. It’s like where their conscience and soul are supposed to be, they have money.

Poydras Tower rose at the corner of Poydras and Rampart Street. An enormous modern tower of glass and steel, a lot of people in the city hated it, called it an ugly eyesore. It didn’t bother me. I think most people hated what it
represented
more than what it actually looked like—a carpetbagger who’d swept into town after a man-made disaster to exploit suffering and make a few bucks. Given the fact that there’d been nothing on the site for years other than some abandoned buildings and a hideously ugly parking lot, I kind of thought the Poydras Tower was an improvement. It wasn’t as tall as One Shell Square, the Entergy Building, or the Benson Tower, and seriously, there’s only so much one can do with steel and glass. It looked modern and new—and that never plays particularly well in New Orleans, either. About three floors up, the building extended out over the sidewalk on every side.

And I had to admit that while the overhang over the sidewalk might be ugly, it sure came in handy during a downpour.

I walked into the lobby and signed into a visitor’s log at the security desk. The guard, an overweight white man in his late fifties whose blue uniform shirt’s buttons were straining not to pop, didn’t smile. “You’re expected,” he said, standing up and gesturing at me. “Follow me.” He walked over to the glass doors and punched in a code. There was a buzzing sound, and he walked through.

I walked behind him to an elevator. He put a key in a lock pad and turned it. The elevator doors opened silently. “Thanks.” I smiled at him as I stepped inside. He ignored me and walked away as the elevator doors shut. There were three buttons: PH, L, and P. I pressed PH—which I assumed stood for penthouse—and the elevator started rising.

The doors opened and I walked out into an overdone foyer that was astonishing in its tackiness.

Another security guard was sitting at a desk and he picked up a phone, motioning me to stay where I was. He mumbled something I couldn’t understand into the phone before walking over with an electronic wand in his hand. “Raise your hands,” he instructed. I obliged, and he moved the wand rapidly over my body. Once he was finished, he said nothing—just went back and sat down behind his desk again.

The door opposite the elevator opened, and a slender woman in her mid-thirties appeared. She was much shorter than she appeared, given the height of the stiletto heels she was wearing. Her cream-colored silk blouse hung shapelessly on her. Her light brown hair was cut short, she was wearing practically no makeup on her pale face, and the crease in her black trousers easily could slice through skin. She didn’t look like she had much of a shape to her, or that could have just been the illusion her clothes created. “Chanse MacLeod?” she said, forcing the corners of her mouth up into what was supposed to pass for a smile. But her eyes remained cold.

“Yes.” I smiled back at her.

She held out a hand. “I’m Nancy Shelby, Mr. Barras’s personal assistant.”

I shook it. “A pleasure, Ms. Shelby.”

She nodded. “If you’ll follow me, please?”

I followed her through the door into the apartment. There was a long hallway with a really thick white plush carpet with gold threads woven through it. The ceiling was really high, and ornate gold chandeliers hung from it at varying intervals. There was no furniture of any kind in the hallway—no tables or chairs. Art was hanging on the walls, and the occasional large gilt mirror, with no rhyme or reason to the art. There was no theme to it—it was like someone had just bought a lot of expensive paintings and hung them without putting any thought into it. I followed her down the hallway to the door at the far end, and she opened it. I followed her into an enormous room that was as wide as the apartment itself. Three of the walls were glass. To the right, I could see through the rain-streaked glass to the Superdome and Benson Tower, and the river in the far distance. To the left, the bridge to the West Bank was clearly visible. Uptown stretched out in front of me, and there was a door that led out to a large deck area with a swimming pool and a hot tub. The wind and rain was creating whitecaps in the pool, and the hot tub was covered.

A man was standing with his back to me, wearing a suit that looked like it cost more than I made in a year, looking out the window. In his hand, he held a glass with what looked like Scotch on the rocks. He was shorter than I would have thought he would be, and his shoulder-length reddish blond hair looked just as greasy in person as it did on television. His shoulders were narrow, and the suit hung on him like it was a size or two too big.

Nancy cleared her throat. “Mr. Barras, Mr. MacLeod is here.”

He turned and dismissed her with just a wave of his hand.

Without a word she went back out, shutting the door silently behind her.

He walked toward me. His face was reddish, with a thin long nose over thin lips that barely seemed to cover his enormous white teeth. Despite the thinness of his features, he had a round moon face that looked even rounder due to how slender the nose was. I wondered idly if he’d had it fixed. His face seemed rather rigid—and I realized there were no wrinkles and his skin seemed almost plastic.

He was even less attractive in person than he was on television.