Defending Angels (22 page)

“... which are quite clear, Ms. Beaufort; any information you turn up in the course of an investigation of a crime should be turned over to us.”

“By ‘us’ do you mean the Chatham County Police Department? Or the folks who get together for whiskey juleps after work?” This reference to the powers behind the throne was a calculated one; if the Skinners had sent him and meant to intimidate her, they had another think coming.

Anger flashed across his face so quickly she wasn’t sure she’d seen it. But had she enraged him because the establishment sent him? Or because he thought she
was
the establishment? Winston-Beaufort, Montgomery had been around since well before the War Between the States; if he’d gone as far as looking up her work history, he would have known that, too.

“Why don’t you just flat out tell me what you want, Lieutenant? We can save ourselves a lot of time.”

He rubbed his hand across his mouth with a weary gesture. Bree felt a stab of compunction. No city paid its policemen and women enough. It was hard work, among hard people, and she had more sympathy than she cared to admit for the force.

“Let me get you a cup of coffee before we get down to it. And do you have a first name other than Lieutenant?”

There was that faint smile. “Sam. And a cup of coffee would be welcome.”

“Will you come on into the kitchen, then? I won’t have to worry about slopping coffee all over those clothes Ronald brought home for me.”

His eyes ran over her body, coolly appraising. “You’re looking for something to shine down the opposition at your open house? That ought to do it.”

Bree looked down at the red dress, embarrassed. She glanced at him; there was a faint smile in his eyes. She smiled back, and for a long moment, the air held promise.

Bree turned on her heel and went to the sink. She ground coffee beans, put them into the automated coffee-maker, and filled the tank with water. By the time she’d accomplished these small, familiar tasks, her embarrassment receded. She sat down at the kitchen table across from him, composed and guarded.

“I got a call today from someone in the mayor’s office. You seem to be conducting your own investigation into Benjamin Skinner’s death, Miss Beaufort.”

“Please call me Bree,” she said with just the right amount of friendly distance. “Are you warning me off talking to Grainger and Jennifer Skinner again?”

His eyebrows went up. “Am I warning you off? No. Would the ...” he hesitated, then said, “individual who called me from the mayor’s office like me to warn you off? Sure. But doesn’t matter to me who you harass during this digging expedition. Although, I’ll tell you this; if you keep poking around, it’s going to affect the quality of your practice here in Savannah. That’s no concern of mine and you look like a smart woman to me, so you probably already know that. If you find anything out that’s relevant to this case,
that
concerns me a great deal.”

“It doesn’t matter to you who I harass, as you so tactfully put it?” Bree said. She was nettled. “Are you that sure of your job? Much less any future promotions in the hands of your superiors in the force? I’ve only been practicing law for a few years, Lieutenant, but I already know how things work. Guys who refuse to play ball at crucial times don’t get back in the game.”

He shrugged. “Why is this a concern of yours?” “Because I’m representing the interests of my client,” she snapped. “If the police investigation is compromised in any way ...” The look on his face, dangerously angry, made her stop in mid-sentence. “I’m sorry,” she said immediately. “I didn’t mean to imply anything crooked.”

“Sounded as if you were headed that way.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked at her, as if weighing her worth to him as an ally. “You saw Grainger and Jennifer Skinner this afternoon.”

“I did,” she said, although he hadn’t made it a question. “And Carlton Montifiore this morning.”

“I’d like you to repeat the gist of the conversation.”

She did, and quite well, too, even if she did think so herself. Her summary was accurate, focused, and accomplished with just enough skepticism to let Hunter know she didn’t believe a word of the Skinners’ story. She left out the part about the cold and the watcher in the garden.

“They claim there was a witness to the accident?”

Bree set a cup of coffee in front of him, put the sugar and creamer at hand, and sat down at the table. “Douglas Fairchild, yes. They didn’t offer any explanation as to why he hasn’t come forward until now. My guess is, they heard Liz had retained me to look into the murder and they cooked this up among themselves to verify their story.” She traced invisible circles on the tabletop with an impatient fingertip. “Can I ask you something, Lieutenant? Do you think Benjamin Skinner was murdered?”

“Chief Hartman is closing the case. Accidental death.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

He looked at her impassively.

“Oh, come on,” Bree said. “Why else are you here? Unless it’s to shove me around so that I’ll drop my client and the investigation along with it.” His eyes, she noticed, became flat amber brown when he was angry. “I’ll be absolutely straight with you. I’m convinced Benjamin Skinner was murdered. Not only that, I’m almost sure he was dead before he ever got on that boat. I mean, before somebody put him on the boat.”

Hunter eyed her narrowly. “That’s quite a set of assumptions. Anything to back it up? Other than intuition?”

“Nothing that would make any sense to you,” Bree admitted. “And I know it flies in the face of the facts. You’re sure no one got at the coroner?”

“Bribed Doc Bishop, you mean?” He was obviously taken aback. “Do you know how many witnesses there are at an autopsy? I was there myself.”

“You were? Did you walk away from it with any unanswered questions? Was there anything at all about the condition of the body that didn’t add up?”

He looked at her for a long moment, as if deciding how much to let her into his confidence. Then he said, slowly, “His daughter-in-law backed the boat over the body. Pretty convenient to have the corpse chewed up like that. It makes it possible to hide a number of problems, especially since they had time to haul the body into the boat, make sure any signs of assault had been chewed up by the props, and dump it over the side before the Coast Guard got there.”

Bree made a face.

“Do you sail, Miss Beaufort? You do. Then you know how difficult it is to maneuver a boat like the
Sea Mew
. I’d be surprised if either one of them was sailor enough to do that on purpose.”

“Maybe they didn’t drive the boat over the body. Maybe they just dropped him into the motor.” She shook her head violently. “Ugh. I wish that hadn’t occurred to me. I’m not going to be able to get that picture out of my head for a long time.”

He winced. “Quite an image.”

“But you agree with me? You think there’s something suspicious about this death.”

“I’m not entirely satisfied, no.”

“You don’t look like the kind of man to operate on intuition, Lieutenant. Quite the opposite, in fact. So what’s convinced you this is murder?”

He drained his cup, then rose and put it in the sink. “Thanks for the coffee. You’ll let me know if anything else comes up? You have my card?”

“Wait just a second.” Bree looked up at him, her voice steely. “The only reason to keep information from me is if it’s going to impede the murder investigation. You made it pretty clear that the department’s ready to—what was the expression y’all use? Close the book on this one. Officially, it’s accidental death. And if it’s officially an accidental death, anything to the contrary that you tell is unofficial, isn’t it? So? Spill it.”

He laughed.

“Sit down, please.” Bree patted the seat of the kitchen chair invitingly. “Let me get you another cup of coffee. If you wait just a little bit longer, they’ll be back with the shrimp.”

“Who’s ‘they’? If you’re meeting some of your friends ...”

“Antonia and Ron. My secretary.”

“Your sister works as your secretary?”

“No,” Bree said, exasperated, “the guy who was with her just now. The one who was helping me dress. Ron Parchese.”

“You and your sister were alone when I came in.” His gaze was dark and shuttered.

She stared at him. He looked back at her with an appraising, assessing air that chilled her. A cop look. “You know,” she said uncertainly, “I guess Ron was here earlier and left before you got here. Sorry. It’s been a long day. I didn’t mean to ...” She put as much energy as she could into her smile. “Hey. You’ve eaten at the Shrimp Factory, haven’t you? I shouldn’t wonder if it isn’t the best food in Georgia, practically. Antonia always brings more than a battalion can eat.”

He sat down. Reluctantly, but at least he sat down. This made her guess at a number of things. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. It was Saturday night. He was off duty. No wife or girlfriend, and maybe not many friends, either. He was a Yankee, probably from the Northeast; that flat, clipped accent was unmistakable. And he carried himself like a soldier.

The fact that he hadn’t seen her highly visible, even flamboyant secretary was something that she didn’t want to think about. Not right now.

“You aren’t from Georgia originally, is my guess,” she said as she poured the coffee, “and maybe not from anywhere in the South?”

“Not too hard to guess. I don’t have the accent,” he said.

“
We
don’t have an accent. You folks from up north do, though. But it’s not just that.” She smiled sunnily at him. “You take your coffee black. All true Southerners take it regular, which means cream and sugar.” She held the cream pitcher up in the air. “You sure?”

He shook his head, and then commented, “Yours seems to come and go.”

Bree raised her eyebrows inquiringly.

“Your Southern accent.”

If Antonia was here, she’d tell Sam Hunter to keep his guard up when Bree went Southern, but she wasn’t, thank goodness. Bree occupied herself with cream and sugar, and watched him out of the corner of her eye. “How long have you been down south?”

“A couple of years. I joined the Marines after undergraduate school and served two tours.”

“That’s long enough to soften those Yankee vowels, if not get rid of them altogether.”

He tipped his chair back, long legs stretched out. He looked amused. More important, he looked relaxed. “Are you trying to flirt with me, Miss Beaufort?”

“I surely am, Sam. My intent, a fell intent, to be sure, is to charm all of the information out of you that I can about the Skinner case. Did you ever meet him? Up close and personal, I mean?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. He has a project over on Liberty.”

“The Pyramid Office Building,” Bree said promptly. “Nearly completed, isn’t it? My uncle’s office space is over there.”

“It almost wasn’t completed ... There was a real disagreement over whether or not to tear the building down or keep the façade and rebuild where necessary.”

“I heard about that.” A cold breeze curled through the kitchen. Bree got up and shut the windows over the sink halfway.

“Fairchild prevailed, over Skinner’s strong objections. And when they began excavating the basement to reset the footers, they dug up a body.”

“A body?”

“A white male, as it turned out, with a hole the size of Topeka in the skull. As I understand it, there was a period in Savannah’s history when people were buried in the most convenient spot—not necessarily a cemetery.”

“That’s true. It was mostly the pirates, I think.”

“Be that as it may, construction was halted until we determined specifics.”

“It was an old body?”

“A very old body. Mid-eighteenth century, as near as the anthropologists at UNC could figure out.” The lines around Sam’s mouth deepened into a grin. “There was some speculation that it was the body of an errant lawyer, who’d managed to sneak into the city despite Governor Oglethorpe’s ban.”

“Huh,” Bree said indignantly. “I suppose you all thought that was pretty funny.”

“Everybody but the lawyers,” Sam admitted. “It was Skinner’s joke, believe it or not.”

“From all I heard, he didn’t have much of a sense of humor.”

“Not as a rule, no. He was a thoroughly unpleasant guy, as a matter of fact. Didn’t seem to give a hang that the holdup might bankrupt his partners.”

“If a lousy personality were a motive, we’d quadruple the current murder rate,” Bree said. The kitchen was getting cold. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, and thought about excusing herself to get a sweater. “How long ago was this?”

Sam shrugged. “Eight, nine months. Very early in the project.”

“And it’s still not finished. And then there’s the Island Dream condo project. Although I think one of Mr. Skinner’s very close friends lives there already?”

“The surgically enhanced Miss Chastity McFarland. Yes, she does. She agrees with you, by the way. She thinks Skinner was murdered.”

“Does she know anything we don’t know?”

“Ms. McFarland’s interest appears to be limited to the state of Mr. Skinner’s personal finances. I talked to John Stubblefield, who’s the executor of his estate. Skinner didn’t leave her a thing. Ms. McFarland had every reason to keep Skinner alive.”

“Oh,” Bree said, disappointed. “So she didn’t bump him off so she could inherit. Does anything at all change for Grainger and his wife because Skinner’s dead?” Bree asked, already knowing the answer.

“That’s a good question. And the answer is that it doesn’t appear to.”

“Does anything change for
anybody
now?”

“He has a charitable trust. Most of the revenues subsidize public television programs.”

“ ‘Brought to you by the good offices of the Benjamin C. Skinner Foundation,’” Bree muttered. “Oh, dear.” She looked around the kitchen a little crossly. “Is there another window open? Aren’t you getting cold? I can count the number of times I’ve had to have the heat on during our winters on one hand. And it’s never been in October.”