Defending Angels (16 page)

“He didn’t drown in the sea,” Liz said, after a long minute.

“He didn’t?” Bree said.

“He didn’t drown in the sea.” Liz shivered, although the heat of the sun was winning the battle with the air-conditioning and the sunroom was warming to an uncomfortable temperature. Her eyes widened until the whites surrounding the pupils were visible. Her voice was barely above a whisper, and for the third time, like an incantation:

“Skinner didn’t die in the sea.”

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth?

—The Sign of the Four
, Arthur Conan Doyle

“He drowned in the sea alright,” Ron said cheerfully. He placed the autopsy report faceup on Bree’s desk and settled himself cozily on the corner, the edge of his buttocks smack on top of her file folders. “Seawater in the lungs, or what was left of them, anyway.”

“What was
left
of them?” Bree said.

Ron waved a large manila envelope in the air. “I got the autopsy pictures, too. It’s amazing how fast Chatham County can move when the dear departed is hugely
importante.
”

Bree looked at him. It was amazing, as a matter of fact. She decided she didn’t want to inquire too closely about Ron’s methods. She extended her hand for the envelope. Ron held it just out of reach. “Trust me. You don’t want to see them.”

“I’m not squeamish,” Bree said impatiently.

“Well,
I
am, dearie, and when I got a load of these, I almost tossed my cookies. Somehow, the poor old guy got tangled up with the boat motor after he fell into the water and splooey. Big mess.”

“Splooey?” Bree echoed. She was creeped out. She eyed the manila envelope. Large spiders made her feel creeped out, too. And she could force herself to deal with them. She grabbed the envelope and slid the photos onto her desk. Very ugly. Very. And in full color, too. “Ugh. But they were still able to claim he drowned? There was enough of the body left to ... um ... check on?”

“Oh, yeah. No question about the cause of death at all. Take all that stuff home. It’ll make very nice bedtime reading.” He smacked a second report on top of the photos, for which Bree was thankful. “Police interviews with the son and his wife.”

“I’m impressed,” Bree said. “How did you get those out of the police department?”

“This stuff will be a matter of public record after the case is officially closed, so why not?” He wriggled his eyebrows. “Of course, it was a lot easier with the help of the famous Parchese charm.”

Bree picked up the police report. It’d been signed by a Lieutenant Hunter. The transcribed interviews with Skinner’s son, Grainger, and Grainger’s wife, Jennifer, were clipped to the back.

“I can give you a summary, if you want,” Ron said chattily. “Even if you don’t want. It’ll save you the reading time. Skinner was in the bow of the boat, where he usually sat. They were becalmed and they were headed back to the dock under power. Now, according to doctor boy ...”

Bree raised an eyebrow. “Doctor boy?”

“The son, Grainger. He’s a doctor. Anyhow, according to Grainger, Dad’s sipping a diet drink, clutches his chest, and topples into the sea. Doc yells at his wife to bring the boat about and runs to get the grappling hook. He’s fishing for Dad while Mrs. Doc ...”

“Jennifer,” Bree said, as she leafed through the report.

“Our Jennifer,” Ron agreed happily, “runs over the poor soul with the motor, accidentally, of course. So she gets hysterical, Grainger manages to drag the body on board—that’s these hook marks in the back in this photo here.” He flipped through the photos until he came to the relevant one. Bree wanted to close her eyes, but didn’t. “Anyhow, Grainger SOS’s the Coast Guard, which shows up in about two seconds flat. Everybody’s screaming and crying and carrying on except, of course, our victim, who is unable to, and there you are.”

“Wow.” Bree took a deep breath and then a long sip of coffee.

By the time she’d gotten back to the office, it was late afternoon. Petru was out at the library. Lavinia was somewhere about upstairs, with Sasha. She hoped the dog didn’t like the taste of lemur. Ron had bounced to his feet in gleeful welcome when she’d come through the front door and into the reception room. He had fresh coffee waiting, too. The place was already beginning to feel like home.

Bree paged through the photos again, and rubbed the back of her neck. “I just can’t see it,” she said finally. “Let’s assume that our client’s right. Skinner was murdered. The obvious, in fact, the
only
suspects are Skinner’s son, Grainger, and his wife. How do we even begin to prove it? They alibi each other.”

The front door opened, then shut. A familiar shuffle-
thump
sounded in the living room. Ron hopped off the desk, stuck his head out, and caroled, “Yoo-hoo! We’re in here!”

Bree rose to her feet automatically as he came in. Petru was older, lame, and it seemed not only rude but arrogant to sit while he was standing. The one leather chair was obviously too deep and slippery for him. Ron dragged a straight-back chair into her office, set it by her desk for Petru, then surveyed the small space with his hands on his hips. “If you don’t mind my saying so, your taste in used furniture is pitiful. Just pitiful.”

Bree looked up. She was reading the transcription of Jennifer Skinner’s interview with Lieutenant Hunter. A small, tattered, worn Oriental carpet sat on the floor. The brown leather reading chair was so worn in places that the hide of the leather showed through. The floor lamp’s glass green shade was scratched with a weird set of parallel lines, as if somebody had drawn their fingernails along it. “My uncle did make a point of telling me NOT to use his office furniture in his will,” she admitted. “But I’m on a budget. I can either pay your salary, Ronald dear, or go shopping at Roche-Bobois. So I had them brought over. You pick.”

“That was not a matter of good taste, perhaps,” Petru said apologetically. “But more of a wish that you might avoid the legacy.”

“What legacy?” Bree asked sharply.

Ron went “tsk” and shook his head.

“His law practice, you mean?”

Petru looked at her over the rim of his spectacles. “The legacy of the cormorant.”

“If,” Bree said, with more patience than she thought she had, “I ask you for details, what are you going to say to me?” She held her hand up in a peremptory gesture. “Nope. Wait. I’ve got it. There’s some people that run, some people that hide, and some people that jump right in when the times get tough. Is that it?”

“That is it,” Petru said.

“Well, you can just bring that old legacy right along,” Bree said tartly, “because I can tell you right here, right now, Beauforts don’t run from anybody.”

“Ha-ha,” Petru said with a glum air.

“Ha-ha?” Bree said. “What does
that
mean?”

“It means you know nothing of the sort about yourself until you know much more than you know right now. That is what ‘ha-ha’ means.”

Bree felt herself getting very Southern, which as Payton the Rat knew to his cost, was a very bad sign. “As I live and breathe ...” she began ominously.

Ron clapped his hands together. “People, people!” Then he added in a diplomatic tone, “I expect we’ll
all
know when it’s time, so let’s not let the fur and feathers fly. Now let’s get back to the point here, Bree. This room needs a bit of livening up. As a matter of fact, you
and
the room need a bit of livening up. The braids were a stroke of genius, did I tell you that? But there is much, much more to be accomplished.”

Bree got a tight rein on her temper and held on. “If you don’t mind my pointing it out, one of the things to be accomplished here is the successful conclusion of this case.”

“Too true,” Ron said unabashed. “I guess we can set aside the decorating thing for a while.”

“I guess we can. Because that’s what we’re here for, right? Our clients. We’re advocates. Champions. Because one of the
other
things Beauforts do is win for our clients. In as courteous, just, mannerly, and smart a way as is humanly possible.”

“Humanly,” Petru echoed. “Very good.” He set his stick on his knees and applauded.

“So let’s take a look at where we are with the Overshaw case, shall we?”

“You were saying that the only two people who could have murdered Mr. Skinner were his son and his daughter-in-law, but that there’s no way to prove it,” Ron said promptly. “Which looks like a big loss as far as Ms. Overshaw’s concerned.”

“Do you believe her?” Petru asked abruptly.

“Do I ...” Bree stopped herself in mid-sentence. “Do I?”

“Because, if you do not believe her, you must return that check,” Petru said firmly, “and turn her case over to someone who does believe.” For a moment, he looked as stern as Professor Cianquino had, when Bree expressed those same doubts about Liz Overshaw’s sanity. He cleared his throat apologetically. “I do not think we need to make a judgment on whether or not this is murder. I do think we owe Ms. Overshaw the professional courtesy to believe in her cause.”

Bree stared at him for a moment, then said slowly, “Because if we believe in her cause, we’ll be able to act in her best interests. You’re absolutely right, Petru. And I’ve been very wrong. I’ve let the fact that I don’t like the woman get in the way of looking at this case with her eyes.” She let the silence in the room elapse. “Okay,” she said finally, “here’s what we’re going to do. Ron? I want you to find Mr. Skinner’s personal secretary and interview her.”

Ron frowned. “You mean that incredibly tacky blonde who lives on the top floor of the Skinner building?”

“No, no, no. That’s Chastity Mc-whosis.”

“McFarland,” Petru said punctiliously.

“Yes. I mean his actual secretary who kept his daily schedule. Liz Overshaw should be able to tell you where to find her—that’d be a blessing and a half. I’d like to set up an hour by hour ... no! A minute by minute calendar of his last two days on this earth.”

She looked down at the mass of data Ron and Petru had collected. “Next thing we do is go through all this stuff with a fine-tooth comb. We look for discrepancies, for unexplained facts, items, actions. Petru, if you can make up a chart, or a time line, or something that can give us a snapshot of Skinner’s life, it’d be terrific.”

“And what are you up to, then?” Ron asked.

“Interviewing the suspects, one by one. I’ll start with Grainger.”

“Do you think they’ll let you waltz in and interrogate him, just like that?” Ron said in admiration. “Oh, Bree. That
is
nervy.”

“Jennifer was a few years ahead of me at Miss Cho-ate’s in New York. And I know her little brother. If I fudge the reasons a little bit, I think I can get in to see her. I’ll schedule that for tomorrow afternoon, if I can. And first thing in the morning, I’m going to track down Carlton Montifiore at one of his construction sites.”

“Excellent,” Ron said, “but set
both
those meetings up for the afternoon. If you do, we’ll have time to do a little shopping in the morning.”

Bree slapped her hands flat on her desk. “Ron! What’s all this hoo-rah about the way I’m dressing?”

“You are
not
showing yourself to the best advantage.” He narrowed his eyes in what he probably believed was a tough-guy way. “I just want to ask you one thing: Do you have anything other than black and white in your closet? Just one leetle teeny bit of color?”

“Jeans,” Bree said promptly, “and a blue and white Duke University tee.”

Ron flung his hands up in a “see what I mean” gesture. “Silly me. Just the thing to wear to court, of course.

Sweetie, you’re about to take on some of the most powerful families in Savannah with this Overshaw case. Now there’s two ways to dress to impress. One way is to wear tennis shoes, T-shirts, and tattered jeans to the White House. You can get away with that if you’re say, Steve Jobs. The other is to dress like you’re the president of a small South American republic. With confidence. With authority. You need a
presence
.”

Bree looked down at herself. She’d been busy all her adult life; busy in law school, busy at the family firm, even busier now that she was setting up her own practice. And every time she picked up a copy of
Vogue
or
Oprah
in the dentist’s office, she was thoroughly cowed by the kinds of decisions a person had to make to look totally cool. Looking elegant and sophisticated was a full-time job. She’d decided the fewer choices the better. Her closet had five expensive Armani pantsuits in gray, black, and steel, and two dozen Eileen Fisher silk tees in various shades of white. This made it very easy to get dressed for work. And boring.

She looked at Ron and asked sweetly, “Which South American republic would you suggest?”

“You’re pissed off at me,” he said instantly. “Oh, God. I was just trying to help.”

“I am not pissed off at you. I appreciate it. The sentiment, that is, if not the way you expressed it. I’ll put it on the It’s-Saturday-With-Nothing-to-Do list.”

“It’d better be this Saturday,” Ron said promptly. “You can’t make your debut at the Mansion dressed like a mortician.”

“I don’t look anything like a mortician!”

“And your mother agrees with me.”

Bree stopped in mid-yell. “You’ve talked to my mother?” She clutched her head. “And my mother thinks I dress like a mortician?”

“Of course I’ve talked to your mother. You don’t think this open house of yours is going to arrange itself, do you?” He resettled himself on the corner of her desk. “What a peach your mamma is, Bree. And she agrees with me. About getting you tarted up. First thing is to find a sensational dress for the party. Do you have any idea who’s going to be there?”

“No,” Bree said. “I don’t. And how did you get hold of my mother? And how do you know who’s coming to the party?”