Avenging Angels (24 page)

“I get off at five thirty,” he said, encouragingly. He sat down at the opposite side of the table and dared a quick glance behind him. “Can’t sit here too long, before my manager comes out looking for me, but maybe long enough to exchange phone numbers?”

Bree realized her mouth was open. She closed it. Antonia was right. She was far, far too involved in her work. She’d been out of things way too long if she couldn’t recognize a pickup line when she heard it.

Not only that, now that she took a good look at him, this guy was really cute. Although definitely not much over twenty-three, which was pretty flattering. She smiled happily at him. “Sorry. I would be flirting with you like mad if I had the time, but I don’t. I was just checking on a couple of friends of mine that may have been here yesterday.”

“Oh. Huh. Too bad for us both, huh?” He bounced up cheerfully. “Let me know if you need anything. Ketchup?”

Bree poked dubiously at the sweet potato fries that accompanied the sandwich. “I think I’m fine for now. But I do want to know if you had an older couple here yesterday. The guy’s about fifty, maybe sixty. Cowboy boots, string tie.”

“The Texans,” he said. He made a face. “Those are the friends you were looking for?”

Bree looked at him a little warily. “Not friends, especially. I’m actually trying to establish an alibi.”

He leaned in a little closer. “For you or for them?”

“Them.”

“So if I say they were here, they won’t get dragged off and maybe water-boarded by the CIA?”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“Didn’t see ’em.” He grinned. “Make the call. And I want to watch.”

“Really,” Bree said. “It’s important.”

He sighed. “They were here, all right. Guy knocked back five double Scotches.”

“Five? Wow.” Bree thought about that. If Parsall had actually drunk all that, would he have been sober enough to kill Eddie? Or maybe he drank all that to forget that he had killed Eddie? “You have a time frame for me?”

“They came in about two. By the time I got off at five thirty—I told you I get off at five thirty, didn’t I?”

“You sure did,” Bree said.

“By five thirty the guy was well into the bag. And the wife wasn’t much better off.” He cocked his head. “Didn’t I see you on TV earlier today?”

“Me? I don’t think so.”

“Not you
live
. You on tape. It was some old footage they were running about that kid that swiped the money from the Girl Scout. But it was about some body found at your house.”

“Lindsey Chandler?” Bree had endured more than a few press interviews in the middle of that particular case. The station must have kept the footage and rerun it when Eddie’s body was discovered at her front door.

“You’re Bree Beaufort!” He pointed his finger at her. A couple of the people sitting at the bar turned around and looked at them. “And you’re the lawyer that has that dog with you all the time, right?” He leaned over and peered under the table. “Yep. There he is. Is this cool, or what? Hey, boy. How’s it going?”

Sasha responded with a courteous “whuff.”

“And they found that cop’s body in your front hall yesterday night. That’s who you are.” His face brightened. “You think those Texans had something to do with the cop murder?”

“Not if they were here from two until five thirty.”

“ ’Fraid so,” he said sympathetically. “And they buzzed in straight from the airport. One of my friends works the front desk and he said they brought eight pieces of luggage for a weekend stay.”

“They’re planning on leaving soon?”

“Monday morning, or so I hear.” He leaned forward and said in a near whisper, “They’re already driving the staff nuts. Especially ‘Big Buck.’ We call him Big Pri—”

Bree cleared her throat.

“Yeah, well, you get my drift.” He extended his hand. “Name’s Brian. And I already know who you are and where to find you. But you don’t have my phone number yet, although it’s very, very available.”

“Thanks, Brian. I’ll think about asking you for it.”

“You need me as a witness or anything, you just give me a call.”

“I’ll do that.”

He glanced down at her uneaten sandwich. “Anything else I can get for you? Glass of wine, maybe?”

“Not right now.” Parsall’s whiskey was already sitting uncomfortably in her stomach. “I’m waiting for somebody. Very tall. Swedish blond—a guy,” she added hastily, seeing his hopeful face. This guy must really need a date. “A Dutchman. If he comes in looking for me, please let him know I’m here.”

She’d finished the sandwich and was seriously considering an order of bread pudding when Rutger VanHoughton walked into the bar.

VanHoughton had the kind of presence that made heads turn. He wore a double-breasted navy wool suit, a rep tie, and a striped shirt with white collar and cuffs. A gold watch so expensive even Bree didn’t know the name of it was on one wrist. He caught sight of Bree almost immediately. By the time he’d made his way over to her table, Brian was at his elbow, menu in hand.

“No food,” VanHoughton said. “A dark beer. Guinness will be fine.” He leaned back in his chair, totally at ease. “Miss Beaufort? I am here, as you requested.”

“Thank you.”

“You look rather serious. Having a hard time of it, with Tully’s little investigation?”

Bree didn’t know a great deal about VanHoughton, but she read the financial papers, and she knew the basics. His father had made a respectable fortune in concrete right after World War II. Rutger had gone to Oxford, then the London School of Economics, and then returned to Holland to grow the respectable fortune into billions through a series of perfectly timed acquisitions and mergers. He wasn’t married, but all of the tabloid press pictures of him showed him with two or three beautiful women at his side, and one or more beautiful men. Bree thought there was very little this man didn’t know about human nature. The trouble was, she knew nothing at all about his.

Rather than answering his question directly she said, “Have you known Tully long?”

“I knew Russell before I knew Tully. But yes, I would say so. We first met over a deal I was doing in Brussels fifteen years ago.” He moved his hands off the table when Brian set the stout in front of him. “Russell handled some of the financing.” He smiled. His teeth were large and square. “We hit it off, Russell and I. And then I met Tully and the three of us hit it off extremely well.”

Bree folded her napkin into a neat square, trying to size him up. “Do you think Russell was murdered?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have always thought so.”

“Do you have any concrete evidence, or is it just supposition?”

He cut her off before she finished. “Of course I have no evidence. If I had, I would have turned it over to that poor schmuck.”

“And which schmuck would that be?” Bree asked.

“You are inferring that there are quite a few floating around this case?” He laughed. “You are correct of course. The so-awful Big Buck is a big schmuck, I believe. And the wife. Harriet.” He shuddered delicately. “And there is poor Fig, of course.”

Suddenly, she was dispirited. She wouldn’t want to sit down to dinner with any of the people in this case. “Do you suppose any of them was once a nice little kid?”

“If that is a very indirect question about whether man is born bad or made bad, I can’t answer that. On the whole, I believe genetics determines a great deal more of our character than we are ready to accept. As far as Fig? He was never a nice little boy. But you will find that out for yourself when you sit down and talk to him. As for the Parsalls? I think perhaps Buck has made a series of decisions that have had a bad effect on his character. The first of which was to marry the oh-so-repellent Harriet.” VanHoughton gave a very European shrug. “Who is to say?”

Bree wasn’t about to get into a discussion over free will in a bar on Drayton Street, no matter how upscale the bar or the Dutchman. But she did appreciate the fact that VanHoughton was as subtle as she’d guessed him to be.

VanHoughton’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, but he said, affably enough, “The schmuck I referred to in this case is the poor deceased policeman, Eddie ‘the Ninja’ Chin.”

“Tully sued the NYPD to get him to stop investigating. I have an idea why, but I’d like your thoughts on the matter.”

“Do you think Tully killed him?”

This startled her. “Good grief.” She thought hard. “No. No, I don’t. I may have at one time. But I don’t think so now. I’ve been wrong before.”

“I doubt that she did, myself. She is certainly capable of it. Tully, as you have already determined, is a woman who seeks her own vengeance. She wanted Eddie out of the way, and your legal system provided a tidy way to accomplish that. And you have to remember, too, that Chin’s effort seriously impeded a pursuit of the real murderer. With all of the attention focused on Tully, there was none directed to finding out who actually did it.”

“Had you seen or talked to Eddie Chin since he arrived in Savannah?”

“Our very own Oriental Don Quixote? No. I did not see him. He did leave a call for me on my cell phone. I rather suspect he left the same call on more phones than mine.”

She stared at him. “You’re not kidding, are you? He called you?” Then: “I don’t suppose . . .”

“That I saved the message? Of course I did.” He pulled his cell phone from his suit jacket, tapped at the screen, and handed it to Bree.

Eddie’s voice came through loud and clear. It was high, excited, and tense:
I know how you did it. And I’m coming to get it. Two o’clock at the visitors’ center.

O what a tangled web we weave.

—Sir Walter Scott,
Marmion

 

 

 

“ ‘I know how you did it. And I’m coming to get it.’ ” Petru repeated the message, then folded his hands on his cane and dropped into a broody silence.

“Did you manage to get the cell phone records?” Bree felt she’d been plugged into an electric socket. The recording of Eddie’s phone call was a huge break in the case.

“I did.” Petru held up a sheaf of paper. “The police have downloaded his cell phone. These are the numbers.”

They were all in Bree’s small office. Lavinia sat in the battered old recliner in the corner. Ron perched on her desk and peered over her shoulder. Petru stood in front of the desk, leaning on his cane. She spread the sheets across the desk. “We’ll start with numbers from Tuesday on, shall we? With call durations of, say, thirty seconds or less.” She started to read. Then, baffled, she looked up at Petru. “There have to be forty calls here, all within the space of an hour yesterday morning, and all lasting about thirty seconds! What’s going on?” The penny dropped. She sat back and said, “Oh.”

Petru nodded. “Yes. He called everyone possibly connected to the case. With precisely the same message. In the hope that this would flush out the actual perpetrator.”

“Trolling,” Lavinia said. “Like a fisherman with a big old net.”

Bree bit her lip in frustration. “And you say Sam Hunter has this printout?”

“Of course. If not . . .”

“Right. We wouldn’t have it. We’re only allowed information that will pass into public record.” She smacked the desk with her fist. “Hell!”

The ensuing silence was disapproving, but short.

“I mean, ‘Nuts!’ I guess.”

“He’s a smart killer, this one,” Lavinia observed. “We catch him, there’ll be a new grave all ready out back.”

Bree put her hands over her eyes and leaned her elbows on her desk. “Let’s think about this. Eddie set up a meet. At the visitors’ center, which is smart, because it’s right on the riverfront next to the Hyatt and it’s always hugely busy. But the killer called him back, obviously, to reset the time and place, since the police weren’t called to the scene of a shooting in broad daylight. Or we would have known about it.”

“So there should be a return phone call, from the killer,” Ron said. “Let’s have a look.” He ran his finger down the page of numbers.

Bree got up. “I don’t think so. The killer wouldn’t have wanted Eddie to set a trap, or alert somebody like Hunter. Eddie would have had half the Chatham County police force lurking in the bushes. No. I think Eddie got there and somebody handed him a note. Or somebody else met him and lured him away. Eddie was a smart cop, but it’s pretty clear he was obsessed with this. He may have been so eager to move the case along that he abandoned the usual precautions. I’ve wondered all along why he didn’t keep Hunter in the loop.”

“No one really b’lieved him, though, did they?” Lavinia’s voice was soft.

“That’s very true,” Bree said.

“So he gets, perhaps, this note from the killer. And it says something like: ‘Go to the underpass at the electric company,’ ” Petru said. “Or, ‘Come down to the docks by the river.’ Yes. I can see that our clever killer would think in just this way. But how are we further along? We do not know what happened as a result of all these phone calls.”

Bree realized, suddenly, that this promising lead had petered out. She got up. “We’re almost back where we started.” The room was too small and too crowded. She had to get out, to move. Then she sat back down again. She needed mental energy, not physical.

“At least I’ve made a good start on tracking his movements his last day,” Ron said. “He’s renting a room in a little house at the north end of Abercorn. It’s on the second floor and the proprietor’s bedroom is right under his and the insulation isn’t all that good, so she knew when he was there and when he wasn’t. She heard him making phone calls Wednesday morning, one right after the other, and now it turns out we know what that was all about. He went out about ten. I tracked him to the coffee shop on Broughton, and he had a couple of black coffees. The girl behind the counter remembers him because he was so restless. Up and down out of that big chair that sits under the window. Exactly like you’re doing right now.” He smiled at her. Ron saved that smile for occasions like this one, when she was wound up or overexcited, and it acted like a dose of Prozac, only quicker. Bree felt herself relax slightly. She sat back down. Ron patted her head. “And then I left the trail and came back here when you called this meeting. But I’ll pick it up again in the morning. We may find out where he went and who he met, and solve this case after all. But I don’t think we should try to do it all tonight.”