Murder in the Garden District (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (17 page)

“Who are you and what do you want?” I said threateningly.

They raised their hands in the air.

“Please put the gun down, Mr. MacLeod. We’re Federal agents.”

They looked the part, with their dark suits over white shirts, buzz cuts and reflector sunglasses.

“Toss me your ID,” I ordered.

They glanced at each other, then reached inside their jackets and tossed their leather wallets at my feet. Keeping my eyes and gun on them, I picked one up.

I lowered the gun. What had I done to warrant watching by U.S. Marshals?

“Come on in, have a seat.” I unlocked the front door. “Can I offer you something to drink?”

They shook their heads no.

“I’m Special Agent Palladino,” said the one with dark hair. “This is my partner, Special Agent Harrison.”

We shook hands.

“I assume this isn’t a social call,” I said, sitting at my desk and tossing their badges to them.

“I’m afraid not, Mr. MacLeod,” Palladino answered. “We’re here strictly as a courtesy. If our superior knew we were talking to you, we’d be in trouble.”

Harrison, the red-haired agent, started to say something, but closed his mouth at a glance from Palladino.

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“Several years ago, you encountered a professional killer named Vinnie Castiglione. Do you remember him?”

I’d known him as Zane Rathburn, and he’d been very good at what he did. He was a master of disguise, assuming other people’s identities and getting close to his victims. Once the victim was dead, he’d disappear without a trace. He’d been contracted to kill a New Orleans judge presiding over an organized crime case. I’d put the pieces together and proved he killed a member of the judge’s family. He had successfully passed himself off as a gay man in his early twenties, and fooled me and a lot of other people for a long time. There was no telling how many deaths he’d been responsible for during the course of his career. As I recalled, Federal prosecutors cut a deal with him, in exchange for his bringing down a bunch of organized crime figures. It had galled me at the time. No matter how hard they tried to convince me—and Venus and Blaine—that it was “for the greater good,” we hadn’t bought it. Vinnie Castiglione was a killing machine. If anyone deserved the death penalty, it was he. At the very least, Vinnie belonged behind bars.

“I thought Vinnie was in the witness protection program,” I said.

“He was,” said Palladino. “He disappeared several weeks ago.”

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that some bad guys tracked him down and fitted him for cement shoes.”

“Some people never really adjust to the program,” Harrison said apologetically.

“As I recall, at the time I told you people it was a mistake.”

I didn’t try to hide my sarcasm.

“I appreciate your attitude more than you know, Mr. MacLeod,” Palladino said blandly. “We didn’t make that decision. We just did our job. Castiglione didn’t fit the program at all. He complained constantly. He argued with one of his neighbors about the dog barking. The day Vinnie disappeared, the neighbor’s wife came home from shopping and found the dog—and her husband—dead in the backyard, killed execution style. And Vinnie was gone.”

Palladino handed me a piece of folded paper from one of his jacket pockets. It was a computer printout of a wall covered with newspaper articles and photographs from the
Times-Picayune
and culled from online news websites—all about me.

“He’s the one who shot at me this morning,” I said. “He’s in New Orleans and he’s after me. That’s why you’ve been watching my apartment.”

“We had a tip that he’s in New Orleans, and we’ve been trying to keep an eye on you for the past few days. He has a grudge against you, Mr. MacLeod. A grudge that’s turned into an obsession. We found his fingerprints in a house on the other side of the park. He holed up there for at least a week.”

My temper flared. “And you waited until now to warn me? I guess I should consider myself lucky he missed this morning!”

“He’s been flushed out of his hiding place. He’s probably long gone.”

“You think he’s evacuated?” I asked rhetorically. “He wouldn’t want to get wet in all that rain. Somehow, I don’t feel reassured.”

“We’re going to catch him, Mr. MacLeod—you don’t need to worry about that. I’m sure you’re safe now. But we think it might be a good idea for you to lie low for a few days.”

I opened the front door. “Get out of my house,” I said.

I slammed the door behind them as they left.

If I’d noticed the U.S. Marshals staking out my house, Vinnie couldn’t have missed them. They were camped practically beneath the windows where he was hiding. And if Abby could tell they were Feds, Vinnie sure as hell knew.

So why did he wait until this morning to take a shot?

I didn’t believe that Vinnie Castiglione had left town. He would keep trying until he got another chance. I had to be on my guard.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I texted Abby to go home.

The front windows were already boarded over, and someone was optimistically writing
Ginevra go away!
in spray paint on one of them, when I arrived at Allegra Gallery. A soft, round man with a reddish face and graying hair brushed in a futile attempt to cover a deeply receding hairline supervised a staff crating prints. He wore a seersucker suit over a pale blue shirt topped with a dark blue bowtie.

“I’m looking for Kenneth Musgrave,” I said as I approached them.

The man interrupted what he was doing.

“I’m Kenneth Musgrave,” he said, looking up. His eyes were watery and his skin looked damp, despite the frigid air-conditioning. “How can I help you?”

“My name is Chanse MacLeod. I’ve been hired by Cordelia Sheehan—”

He cut me off. “Come to my office.”

He asked a reedy blonde with severe black glasses to take over, and gestured for me to follow him.

“Have a seat,” he said.

He poured two glasses of wine from an open bottle on a gold tray perched on a bureau behind his desk, beside a seersucker fedora. He handed me one and downed the other, then poured himself a second glass.

“Mrs. Sheehan hired me to look into her son’s death,” I said, holding the glass in my right hand without drinking.

He polished off his second glass, poured a third and settled into his chair behind the desk. He leaned forward on his elbows, perspiring a bit at the hairline.

“The son of a bitch murdered my sister,” he said, staring into the wine. “I suppose it’s okay to say it now, him being dead and all. I won’t be mourning that bastard.”

It was a peculiar opening gambit for a conversation with a stranger, and it made me suspicious.

“I was under the impression your sister died in a fall down the stairs,” I said, keeping my voice neutral.

“It was no accident. Wendell threw her down those stairs. I warned Grace…” He cleared his throat. “I saw her that afternoon. She was going to leave him.”

Apparently, he’d been waiting for a chance to mouth off about his sister’s death for quite some time. I let the silence grow between us, to see if he would rush in and fill it, glancing around to see what five thousand per month can do.

Kenneth Musgrave’s office reeked of expensive. The soft leather armchair I’d sunk into probably cost more than all the furniture in my apartment. If his huge desk wasn’t an antique, it was a costly reproduction. Black-and-white prints of swamp scenes in gold frames hung meticulously spaced at exact distances from each other on the emerald green walls. A flat screen monitor, computer keyboard and black multi-line business phone sat lonely on the otherwise bare desktop, their only company a little golden tray with business cards neatly stacked in a way to discourage taking one, precariously close to the edge nearest me. There were no papers or folders anywhere in evidence.

Musgrave drummed his fingertips on the desk, getting more and more agitated with each silent, passing second.

“She should never have married him,” he said finally. “Our mother was against it. She thought Grace was making a terrible mistake, and she was right. Our mother had been part of that world. Grace was forced into it growing up, and she hated it.”

“Politics?” I asked.

“New Orleans society. The balls, the
right
charities. All of that nonsense that means so much to people in the Garden District. Grace thought the Sheehans weren’t part of it, that it was just politics. She believed in Wendell. She wanted to help him. I think she believed they could end up in the White House. Wendell certainly thought they would.”

“And you weren’t part of that world? The Garden District society?”

“We had different fathers. Our mother was a Caldwell.”

“Okay,” I said. The name meant nothing to me, although he seemed to think it would.

“After Grace’s father died, our mother married my father—” His already reddish face flushed a bit. “—a nobody accountant from Metairie. It was social suicide. But they loved each other, and they were happy. Her parents never forgave her.”

I noted that he referred to their maternal grandparents as
her parents
.

“Grace inherited a lot of money from her father, and
her
bloodlines were impeccable. The crime of our mother’s second marriage wasn’t held against her. She was Queen of Rex, you know—Grace’s grandparents on both sides pushed her into New Orleans society while excluding our mother.”

Unspoken but implied were the words
and me
.

“Grace hated all the balls and parties, but our mother thought she should do them. She was twenty when she married Wendell Sheehan. She had Alais a year or so later. It was a tough pregnancy, and afterward she couldn’t have another child. That’s when the marriage went south.”

“Then why did she stay?”

“She loved him, I suppose. She never said anything against Wendell, but I could see she wasn’t happy. There were other women. Wendell didn’t keep it a secret. Grace didn’t seem to care about that. If it was good enough for Hillary Clinton, I think Grace felt she could put up with it. She focused her energies on Alais.”

“So, after all those years, why did she finally decide to leave him?”

He emptied the glass and rolled the stem between his fingers.

“I’m not sure. We had lunch that day at Galatoire’s. That’s when she told me she was taking Alais and leaving him. She’d rented herself an apartment and was meeting with a divorce attorney that afternoon. When I asked her why, she said she’d finally had enough. She didn’t want anything from the Sheehans. The money her father left her was more than enough for her to live on the rest of her life. She just wanted out. I told her Wendell might not want a divorce. He was attorney general then, and he was pretty open about running for governor in the next election cycle. She said Wendell had two choices: a quiet divorce or a long, drawn-out ugly one for adultery. I thought she was bluffing. Surely she didn’t want the whole world to know her business. She left Galatoire’s to meet with her lawyer—and died that night. You do the math.”

“You don’t have any proof?”

He smiled slyly. “I knew what I knew.”

“Enough to blackmail him?”

I pulled out the photocopies of Wendell’s checks from my bag and tossed them on the desk. His face turned scarlet as he shuffled through the papers.

“I wasn’t blackmailing him.”

“Then what were the checks for?”

He slid them back to me across the desk.

“Grace left me a trust in her will. Wendell controlled it. I’d had some problems when I was younger, and Grace set it up that way because she was afraid I’d go through the money if I had it. Wendell invested it and paid me the monthly interest on the principle.”

But the checks hadn’t been drawn on a trust account. They were from a discretionary account.

“It’ll be very easy to check into that, you know.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Merely pointing out a fact,” I said. “It is a murder investigation, after all.”

He shifted in his seat.

“What’s to investigate? Cordelia shot him.”

“There’s some question about that. That’s why she hired me.”

“Of course she’ll get away with it,” he said dismissively. “The Sheehans get away with everything. They’re a law unto themselves.” He flashed a nasty smile. “The law is for the common people.”

“Like you?”

“He got away with killing my sister, didn’t he?”

“You seem so certain Grace was murdered.”

He glared at me.

“Alais saw the whole thing. She heard them arguing and opened her bedroom door. Grace came out of her room and Wendell pursued her. He grabbed her at the top of the stairs and started slapping her. She tried to get away. Finally he picked her up and threw her down the stairs. She broke her neck.”

“Alais told you this?”

He spun his chair around, grabbed the wine bottle and refilled his glass.