Avenging Angels (13 page)

Bree hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the scandal when it hit the media, but she recognized Jameson from the photo Petru had downloaded from the
Wall Street Journal
archives. He was a heavyset, self-satisfied-looking man in his early fifties. Dark hair was slicked back from a balding forehead. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles perched on his fleshy nose.

“Kind of a belligerent-looking lower lip,” Ron observed. “Actually, a scary-looking guy altogether.”

The next few photos showed Jameson, in handcuffs, being shoved into a police car by a poker-faced plainclothesman. The expression on his face wasn’t self-satisfied at that point; it was murderous. Bree skimmed the newspaper articles detailing the charges: fraud; illegal conversion of a securities instrument; that old standby, insider trading; and illegal transfer of funds.

“Was he in jail when O’Rourke died?” Bree asked.

“As a matter of fact, no,” Petru said. “He bounced in and out, as new sets of charges were brought by various jurisdictions. The FBI investigation into securities fraud was perhaps the final blow to this man. That carried the heaviest sentence. The picture here”—he tapped the arrest photo—“was taken the day after the client’s demise.”

Bree set the Jameson file on the right-hand side of her desk.

“And here is a collection of information about the Parsalls.” The file Petru handed her was several inches thick. “They are heavily involved in society matters, you understand, so there is much written gossip about them.”

Harriet and Freddy “Big Buck” Parsall were third-generation oil, from Texas. Harriet was a familiar type to Bree, who was a born and bred Southerner herself. Many of her mother’s friends still went in for big hair, lots of red lipstick, and toothy, prosthetics-enhanced smiles. Harriet favored expensive print dresses with full skirts, and in each of the photos Bree rifled through (in
People
,
USA Today
,
Redbook
, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
) she wore uncomfortable-looking spike heels. She looked good-natured, in that genial Southern way, despite the fact that her feet had to be killing her. A half dozen women Bree’s mother Francesca entertained to tea every six months or so looked just like Harriet. She played bridge, drank oldfashioneds, and must have visited a very good plastic surgeon more than once.

“Big Buck” was big and broad and looked like a shouter. A good six inches taller than his wife, he favored string ties, cowboy boots, and deer hunting. He was a Texas Aggie, a member of the university’s second-string football team in his undergraduate days.

And he was flat broke after a lifetime of trust fund money.

“Wow,” Bree said. “He lost everything?”

“So it seems,” Petru said. “He has been petitioning his brothers to support him and Madame Parsall, to no good effect, as yet. But that very large house in River Oaks?”

Bree paged down to a photograph of a sprawling mansion.

“It is up for sale at a distress price.” Petru leaned across the table and tapped his summary with a blunt forefinger. “You will note the bar brawls in the gentleman’s background.”

Bree skimmed the charges in Parsall’s arrest records. Menacing with a deadly weapon. Assault with a deadly weapon. Battery. Some of it dated back more than twenty years. “A Texan with a temper,” she said. “Any of these charges actually turn into recorded felonies?” (Bree had discovered that Petru’s investigations were not limited to institutions that existed in the here and now. But they were accurate, nonetheless.)

“None,” Petru said. “And the menacing with a deadly weapon—a twelve-gauge shotgun, by the way—occurred in a very public place.”

Bree raised her eyebrows in inquiry.

“Outside Mr. O’Rourke’s arraignment.”

“And official charges were never filed?”

Petru shook his head solemnly.

“So he called in a few favors, our Mr. Parsall.”

“Which may not be as forthcoming, now that he has lost his patrimony.”

A cynical view, especially from an angel. But probably true. Bree stacked the Parsall file on top of the Jameson file. “We’ve got two great motives so far. Next?”

“Mr. Russell O’Rourke, Junior.”

This file was slim, and depressing. “Fig” O’Rourke was nineteen, going on twelve. He’d graduated at the bottom of his prep school and flunked out of his freshman year at NYU, and his employment was listed as Administrative Manager, Transitional Services. It looked like he mainly booked air tickets and cruises for his mother. He belonged to a country club, but his chief activities seemed to be drinking and playing poker. He seemed to have no friends, no skills, and very little interest in the world around him, except for a minority share in a movie production company located in California. “A college acquaintance,” Petru said, when he saw that Bree paused to take a second look at that. “Who appears to be interested in only the checks that support her experimental movies.”

“Oh, my.”

“An angry young man, however. His prep school recommended a course of psychotherapy. I will add the records to the file if you like. It is a classic case. Hates his poor mother, and was resentful of his father.” Petru looked at her over his wire-rimmed spectacles. “It is fashionable now to decry the insights of my friend Sigmund into the behaviors of such as Fig O’Rourke. But it is clear to me that he was right in many of his comments about temporal behavior.”

Bree didn’t ask which Sigmund Petru referred to. She was pretty sure already.

“Yes. Well. The poor kid.”

“All that money growin’ up.” Lavinia shook her head and went “tsk.” “You’d think he’d be a happy boy.”

“But a patricide?” Bree said. “That’s pretty extreme. He sounds pathetic, not homicidal. Still . . .” She hesitated, then dropped Fig’s file on top of the other suspects.

“And now!” Petru said. “An extremely interesting report, indeed.” With an air of quiet triumph, he dropped the last file in front of her.

“Oh, my gosh,” she said. “This is Eddie Chin’s file.”

“A disgraced and dismissed policeman,” Petru said. “He is on disciplinary suspension for inappropriate investigatory techniques in the case of Russell O’Rourke.”

And so he was. The union was filing to have him reinstated, but for the moment, the Ninja was badgeless, gun-less, and free to stay in Savannah as long as his credit cards held out. Bree paged through the file and set it aside.

“And this”—Petru’s air of quiet triumph was well deserved—“the complete dossier on the suicide and subsequent investigation.”

Bree looked at her assembled staff. “I’m going to read through this, guys. I’ll need about half an hour.”

“We shall wait,” Petru said comfortably.

Bree nodded. What was time, to an angel?

It took more than half an hour because she read through the NYPD file twice. Then she read Eddie’s. Petru appeared to doze. Ron messed around with his laptop. Lavinia buzzed around the room dusting, and humming a small song under her breath. Finally, Bree squared the pages, closed the file cover, and placed it neatly on the left side of her desk.

“We don’t seem to have a case,” she said flatly.

“No murder?” Lavinia said. “The poor soul just shot his own self?”

“First,” Bree said, “the New York City Police Department is one of the best in the world. I mean, every system has flaws, and stupid people, and botched investigations, and corruption, but I’ll be darned if I can see how the investigation fell prey to any of those things. Russell O’Rourke was a suicide.”

“And Lieutenant Chin?” Ron said. “Is he crazy, or what?”

“Well, that’s the second problem. Eddie Chin. And I vote for crazy,” Bree sighed. “Now, maybe I’m jumping the gun. I don’t know. Maybe he’s an ‘or what.’ That is, there’s something he knows that no one else does and for some reason he can’t tell anybody yet. But these”—she tapped the relevant papers—“are his psychiatric interviews, and the diagnosis isn’t real reassuring.” She shot a stern glance at Petru. “I get a little nervous once in a while about the legality of the ways you all get this kind of information.”

“Any data that will end up in the public domain is ours for the asking,” Ron said. “The rules of procedure are quite clear. We are able, I admit, to get it released to us a little earlier than the State of Georgia would like, but it’s all in a good cause, isn’t it?”

“Some of this stuff is really confidential. We’re invading this man’s privacy big-time. On the other hand . . .” She sat up. “The poor guy does seem to be a few light-bulbs short of a full chandelier. Ron? Could you find Sam Hunter for me? I want to take him to lunch again. And Petru? If we could get the complete NYPD case notes on the O’Rourke”—she hesitated—“incident, I guess we’ll call it—I want a complete timeline of the hours leading up to the death. I’d also like as complete a record as possible of the whereabouts of the suspects here. The investigating officers must have put them in with this other stuff.” She tapped the files at her right hand. “Let me know about gaps in any of the suspects’ interviews, and I’ll set up interviews with whomever I need to see. And really, Petru. This was excellent work, thank you.”

It was Ron’s turn to make the noise “t’cha,” so Bree said, “And there’s something you’ll be able to handle better than any of us, Ron.”

“Well, I’m sure,” he said crossly.

“Goldstein.”

“Goldstein?”

“We’ve got the original disposition of O’Rourke’s case, don’t we?”

“You mean his Judgment Day file?”

“That’s the one.”

“We do. We picked it up at the Hall of Records. You were with me.”

“Yes, yes, I remember all that. But do you recall what he was sentenced for?”

“Misdemeanor simony.”

“Profiteering, then. In a small way. Hm.” Bree thought about this for a moment. In its heyday, the O’Rourke Investment Bank controlled twenty billion dollars, globally, and that was a conservative estimate. Of course, what was money, to an angel? Perhaps in the long run, celestially speaking, twenty billion was a mere bagatelle. Which would be a good thing, since his appeal would rest on proving that the misdemeanor hadn’t occurred at all. Or if it did, that it was insignificant when stacked against the good that O’Rourke had done during life. “I’d like the regulations regarding sentencing.”

Ron’s eyes were large, and blue, and they got even larger and bluer. “All of them?”

Bree had a brief vision of a Mount Ararat-sized pile of parchment. “No, no. Just those bits that are relevant to O’Rourke’s sentencing. It’s puzzling me some. O’Rourke appears to be guilty of robbing widows and orphans and then some. But he’s spending eternity in the same way as Benjamin Skinner, who never had so much as a traffic ticket as far as criminal behavior was concerned.”

“Goldstein’s just going to get all condescending over the differences in law between the celestial and the profane,” Ron said. “But I’ll come right back at him about getting a decent electronic database. I mean, there’s more than a few of those clerks with parchment allergies, and what kind of work environment makes you sneeze? Not a very nice one.” He looked quite smug at the prospect.

“Thank you. And before we go much further, I’ll need to have a heart-to-heart with Mrs. O’Rourke. I’d like to see her as soon as I can. Her assistant . . .”

“Danica Billingsley.” Ron nodded. “I’ve got her number, of course. I’ll set up an appointment right away.”

Bree pointed to the door. “Find Hunter for me. Set up an appointment with Mrs. O’Rourke, this afternoon, if possible. Then go tackle Goldstein.”

Ron was first out, followed by Petru.

“Anything
I
can do for us?” Lavinia asked, hopefully.

Bree looked at her landlady with affection. She wore her usual droopy print skirt, with a woolly cardigan wrapped around her skinny frame. Her hair was a soft, wispy white halo around her wrinkled face. Her eyes were bright with intelligence. She hated not having anything to do. Bree looked down at Sasha, who had been sitting at her feet. He got up and wagged his tail in an anxious way.

“I think,” Bree said, “that we’ll all be ready for some shortbread late this afternoon. And Sasha, you can come with me. With any luck, Mr. Sam Hunter will be free for lunch.”

“Nice fellow,” Lavinia said. “Been thinkin’ you might take him on a date, like.”

Bree blinked. “A date? Sam? Maybe. But first, I need to get a better handle on what’s going on with Eddie Chin.”

“Hm,” Lavinia said, with a faint air of disapproval. “You be fair with the man, chile.”

“Good grief,” Bree said. “He’s as interested in this case as I am.”

“For goodness’ sakes, Bree. The man’s also interested in you!”

Men have died from time to time,
and worms have eaten them—but not for love.

—Shakespeare,
As You Like It

 

 

 

“Not you, too.” Hunter balled up the paper bag that had held his chicken salad sandwich and tossed it into the trash bin that stood at the base of Oglethorpe memorial in the Bay Street park. “I’m just getting Eddie to see some sense about this bloody O’Rourke case, and here you bungle in with another crackpot theory.”

“Bungle!” Bree said indignantly. “Crackpot? I had lunch with you and Eddie, remember? Yesterday. And you said—do you mind if I quote you? I didn’t think so. You said: ‘Bree has something unique to offer.’ That’s what you said.” She was so irritated she turned her back to him, folded her arms, and glared down the high bank at the river. Her view was partially obscured by the top two stories of the River Front Inn. The old brick building had been around for close to two hundred years and seen a lot: pirate raids and slave auctions, not to mention skirmishes in two wars—1812, and Civil. A little disagreement between friends was a piffle compared to all that history. She dropped her arms and turned around. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to jump out at you like that. And that’s really the reason why I asked you to stop by for some lunch. That the case doesn’t seem to have much value, I mean. So I don’t know why I ripped up at you like that.”