Private Investigations
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Jean Barrett
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13
Chapter One
It fronted on Royal Street, and it had just about everything an old building in the historic district is supposed to have—lacy wrought iron balconies, shutters at the long windows, gas lanterns. A dream of a place, Christy would think whenever she returned to it. Ordinarily, that is.
The carriageway that tunneled through the building framed a view of the courtyard. Whenever Christy emerged from the dim passage, she would find herself delighted all over again by the fountain and vines and tubs of flowers. Ordinarily, that is.
The old converted slave quarters were at the rear of the courtyard. Christy occupied the small structure, her agency on the ground floor and her apartment tucked above it on the second level. It was a cramped arrangement, but, hey, this was the French Quarter and rents were high. So she would count herself lucky that the regular tenant, in a hurry to take a job overseas, had subleased the place to her at an affordable rent. Ordinarily, that is.
But not this afternoon. This afternoon Christy was oblivious to all this quaint charm—which she was in danger of losing anyway, reasonable rent or not—because the only thing she had time for as she stormed across the courtyard and through the door marked Hawke Detective Agency, was the image inside her head of Dallas McFarland sinking slowly in a bottomless pool of quicksand.
The office was silent. But since her assistant, Denise, was bouncing and swaying happily at her desk, Christy assumed that the jazz music she relished was pouring through the radio plug stuck in her ear. Fond though Christy was of the woman, she didn’t consider her much of an assistant. However, as Denise was a retired bus driver with an adequate pension, she was willing to work cheap. This was because she had a regrettable longing for P.I. excitement, the kind of action that was in short supply lately at the agency, a situation Denise frequently grumbled about.
The radio plug came out of her ear with a jerk as Christy slammed over to her own desk and slumped in her chair.
“Uh-oh. Looks like the Prince of Darkness beat us out of the running again.”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” Christy snapped. And then, surging to her feet, she proceeded to do exactly that as she prowled from one end of the small office to the other with Denise’s gaze solemnly following her. “I didn’t like the idea anyway! A controlling father wanting to spy on his daughter just because he thinks her boyfriend is no good and up to mischief! All right, so he’s a rich father, and we needed the money!”
“Uh-huh.”
“But a contest like that? Come on, it’s dumb! I shouldn’t have agreed to it!”
“Uh-uh.”
“I mean, why didn’t he just pick one of us, instead of pitting us against each other?”
“Maybe he gets his jollies that way.”
“And McFarland—McFarland just loved it!”
“Sure, he’s bad.”
“Got that right! Arrogant, unprofessional, no principles!”
“And one sexy dude.”
Christy rounded on her traitorous assistant. “What is it with you and the women in this town and that man? That—that bottom-feeder!”
“Guess by that you don’t want to hear what happened here while I was out to lunch. Guess you’re in no mood for it, huh?”
“What?”
“That the answering machine got itself full up with messages, the fax machine is spitting faxes all over the place, the computer is loaded with e-mail and they’re all from your mama in Chicago lookin’ to hear from you.”
“I see. And all this happened while I was gone. Could it be possible, Denise, that you had a longer lunch hour than you planned?”
Denise thought about it. “Could be. Us full-figured gals need to keep up our energy.”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything else on one of those machines. Like maybe someone needing to hire a P.I. with money no object?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“In that case…” Christy returned to her desk and reached reluctantly for the phone. She hated having to call her mother, knowing exactly what she was going to hear before she heard it. No way around it.
She dialed home, or what used to be home for her, which was the main office of the Hawke Detective Agency founded by her mother and father back in Chicago.
“Hawke Agency.” The familiar voice was cheerful, efficient. It belonged to her mother, Moura Hawke, the energetic doyenne of both the family and its agency, which had branches throughout the country operated by Christy and her four siblings.
“It’s me, Ma. What’s up?” As if she couldn’t guess.
“A celebration, my darling. I hope. Did you win the Bornowski case?”
“Afraid not, Ma.” Oh, how humiliating it was for Christy to admit her defeat. She was twenty-six years old and still regarded as the baby who had to be protected from the big bad world, still fighting to be recognized by her family as a P.I. in her own right.
“Oh.” The eagerness faded from Moura’s voice. “I suppose it went to McFarland?”
“Looks like it.”
“I’m sorry.” There was a pause, and then Moura’s tone became very gentle. Christy realized what was coming. “The thing is, I’ve been doing all the accounts for the first quarter, and…well, basically, sweetheart, you don’t have a quarter.”
“I know, Ma. Things have been a little slow.”
Slow? They had ground to a halt, and both of them knew it. The other phone in the office rang and Denise answered it. Christy paid no attention. She was too busy being heart-broken. She had done everything but promise her firstborn to convince her parents she was competent enough to open her own branch of the agency, and now she was on the sharp edge of losing it.
Moura had a suggestion. “Eden has a break between cases. What if she came over from Charleston and just sort of helped you to—”
“No!” Christy loved her family, Eden included, but she was damned if she was going to let her sister rush to New Orleans to try to save her agency for her. If she had to go down, she would sink on her own, thank you very much.
“Then what about Devlin?” Moura said, offering Christy’s eldest brother.
It was Denise, bless her, who rescued Christy. She had lowered her own phone and, with a lot of head-bobbing and eye-rolling, was signaling Christy to take the call.
“Absolutely not. Look, Ma, I have to go. There’s a call for me on the other line. I think it may be a new client. Love to Pop.”
“But I haven’t told you yet what your father—”
“Later, Ma.” She hung up and eagerly whispered to Denise, “Is it a potential client? Do I get a miracle?”
“Now how’d I know if he is or isn’t? But you’d better pick up. He sounds serious. Real serious.”
Christy snatched up her phone, stabbed in the other line, greeted the caller with a brisk, “Christy Hawke speaking,” and felt her heart lurch in her breast as the mellow male voice, from a past she thought she had buried, spoke to her earnestly.
“It’s me, Christy. Glenn.”
“How are you, Glenn?” Now how did she manage to sound so cool when her heart was still misbehaving?
“Not so good, actually.” He seemed surprised that she could ask such a thing. “I need to see you, Christy.”
“Personal or professional?”
“Professional,” he said.
Should she resent him for contacting her like this? No, she decided, she had made peace with that particular episode in her past, forgiven him long ago. “Are you in trouble, Glenn?”
He paused. “Maybe.”
“Like to tell me about it?”
“I think we need to get together as soon as possible.”
Christy could appreciate his wish for a meeting. Clients rarely wanted to discuss their problems over the phone. “I’m free right now.” Oh, boy, was she free. “Do you know where my office is?”
“Uh, yes, but my lawyer doesn’t want anyone knowing I’m worried enough to consult a private investigator, and if I’m seen going into your office…”
A lawyer? Just what kind of trouble were they talking about here?
“Look,” he went on, “I’m already downtown. It was…well, necessary for me to be here.” Was there an implication in that she was supposed to understand? “So if we could meet somewhere….”
“Name it.”
“The Café Du Monde?”
“Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be there.”
“See you then. And, Christy?”
“Yes?”
“The circumstances being what they are, I appreciate your willingness to offer your services.”
Was that something else she was supposed to understand, she wondered as she put down the phone. She didn’t, of course, but in fifteen minutes she hoped to. Denise was ready to pounce as Christy got to her feet.
“We got us a client?”
“I think so.”
Denise grunted her satisfaction. “Maybe finally get some action around here. Where you goin’?”
“Upstairs. I need to change before I meet him.”
“Must be some real important dude. Must be somebody you got to impress.”
“Never mind.”
Drat the woman and those shrewd jet eyes of hers, Christy thought as she tripped up the narrow stairway to her tiny apartment overhead. It was just like Denise to practically accuse her of wanting to look as attractive as possible when Glenn saw her again after all these years. All right, that’s just what she wanted to do and she was a pathetic fool for caring. So what?
So what if Glenn Hollister had a wife now and was a father, as well, though she’d heard his marriage was foundering? And so what if he’d dumped Christy for the elegant Laura Claiborne, an episode which had left Christy’s heart grievously scarred? Yeah, so what?
She didn’t have an answer for that reckless so what until, about to burrow into the battered old armoire for an outfit guaranteed to please, she caught her image in the long mirror on the door. There was Christy Hawke in long shorts and running shoes, her honey-colored hair crammed under a Cubs baseball cap. Okay, so that much of Chicago was still a part of her. But, hey, it wasn’t her fault. If New Orleans ever got itself a team, she was willing to switch her loyalty.
The brim of the cap shaded a piquant face and a pair of aquamarine eyes that defiantly said, “Here I am. This is what you get.” So why was she getting ready to turn herself into some kind of baby doll? Forget it. Whatever dumb torch she might once have carried for Glenn Hollister, he would have to take her as she was.
And so much for all those so what’s, she concluded as she firmly closed the door of the armoire, grabbed her bag and headed for the stairs.
THE CAFE DU MONDE was located on the river in the old French Market, which had once supplied the city with fresh fruits and vegetables. These days, the long colonnaded structure contained shops, most of them serving the tourist trade. The place was close enough to Christy’s office to permit her to reach it on foot, but just far enough away to put her curiosity about Glenn Hollister into overdrive as she walked there.
That curiosity was at maximum speed by the time she arrived and stood searching the outdoor tables. They were crowded with the usual tourists hunched over beignets and café au lait. Christy was still looking for Glenn when he appeared suddenly at her side.
“I don’t deserve this,” he said out of nowhere in that kind voice that had always been a pleasure to hear. “Not after the way I let you go.”
She turned to face him and realized immediately that she had probably made a big mistake. He was slender, fair-haired and had a face that could still soften her heart. Oh, yeah, not just probably but definitely a mistake for her to be here. On the other hand, with the wolf at her door….
The moment deserved something brilliant, witty, but all she had to offer was an inane, “Helping people is what I do, Glenn. Uh, where can we—”
“I have a table over here.”
He conducted her to a shady corner and tried to seat her so that she faced the view. But since that view was of the nearby Jax Brewery, the scene of her recent defeat, Christy preferred to take a chair looking inward.
When Glenn had settled across from her, and they had ordered coffee neither of them wanted, Christy treated herself to a second examination of the man who had once meant—well, if not everything to her, pretty close to it. And she decided all over again that, yeah, he still looked good. He also looked like hell, which was something she’d missed the first time around. There was a grimness in the little smile he directed at her, a haunted expression in his eyes.
“The circumstances being what they are,” she said, leaning toward him. “That was what you said on the phone. Does that have an explanation, Glenn?”
His gentle gray eyes widened in disbelief. “You don’t know? How is that possible when it must be all over the news?”
She’d been so busy fighting Dallas McFarland for possession of Brenda Bornowski that she hadn’t watched a newscast or read a newspaper since early yesterday. And, of course, Denise couldn’t have told her anything. All Denise ever listened to was her beloved jazz. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I’ve been out of touch. Just how bad is it, Glenn?”
“Laura,” he said, referring to his wife. “She’s dead, Christy. And I’m about to be charged with her murder. That’s how bad it is.”
Beneath her shock, Christy felt a rush of affectionate sympathy for him. But it was one of those “What can I say? What do I say?” moments. The waiter helped her. He arrived to serve their coffee, giving her a few seconds to marshal her thoughts.
By the time he retreated, she’d found her tongue.
“Glenn, I’m so sorry. How awful for you. Your little girl—”
“Yes, this is going to be very hard on Daisy. She knows her mother is gone, but she’s too young for the loss to really mean anything yet.”
Christy faced a tough question, but it had to be asked.
“Glenn, did you—” She couldn’t bring herself to say it, but she didn’t have to. He understood.
“No, I didn’t kill her, Christy. And the cops haven’t accused me of her murder. Yet.”
“But they suspect you of being involved, huh?”
“Oh, yeah, I know they do. I could feel it and my lawyer, who was with me when they asked all their questions, agrees that I may be this far from being arrested.” He held up thumb and forefinger a scant inch apart. “That’s where we were before I called you, with the police.”
“What makes you their chief suspect?”
“I guess it’s no secret our marriage was in trouble, that we’d been fighting a lot lately, mostly about money. And also—” He hesitated, reluctant to impart the rest.
“I have to know everything, Glenn.”
“Yes. Well, Laura’s best friend talked to the police. She told them she’d been worried about Laura, that she’d been acting frightened about something. When she’d asked her about it, Laura said it was me, that she was scared of me, and another friend backed up this story. Which is crazy. You know me, Christy. You know I’d never threaten anyone, least of all hurt them. But the police—”
“No, it doesn’t look so good, does it? But come on, Glenn—”
He cut her off with a swift, “I know what you’re going to say, that the cops are thorough, that they’ll look at every angle before they bring a charge. But how can I trust them to do that if they’re already convinced they have Laura’s killer, that all they have to do now is collect enough evidence against me?”
“Meaning,” she said slowly, “you want me to try to prove your innocence.”
“Yes. Will you?”
She appreciated his faith in her. But a case like this, aside from the obvious problems, presented another slight difficulty. The police did not appreciate P.I.s investigating their crimes. She’d have to be careful about that.
Have to? Whoa, when had she said yes? She hadn’t. But no didn’t look like much of an option, not with those lost gray eyes pleading with her across the table. Not with the memory of her mother telling her that her earnings this past quarter totaled to a nice round zero.
“All right, you’d better tell me the rest.”
He did and within ten minutes Christy had the essentials. How Laura, not for the first time, hadn’t come home last night. How her body, skull split open, had been found early this morning in the old Claiborne cemetery out along the river road.
No, Glenn didn’t know why Laura had this interest in what had once been her family’s plantation, a property now reduced to a house in ruins on a worthless scrap of wilderness. But she’d been haunting the place lately. That’s why he’d driven out there late yesterday afternoon, expecting to find her. He hadn’t, but two witnesses reported seeing him speeding away from the scene in a state of agitation. Why wouldn’t he be agitated, when his marriage had become as rotten as that crumbling house?
That was a particularly interesting portion of his story for Christy. On a personal level, anyway. Glenn was a teacher. That’s how Christy had met him. She’d been attending the University of New Orleans, training for a career in education. Her semester of student teaching had been spent in his classroom where she had learned, after coping with a herd of fiendish sixth graders, that education was definitely not in her future but that Glenn Hollister could be. Maybe. Hopefully.
But before their relationship had a chance to develop into something permanent, Laura Claiborne had come back into Glenn’s life. The Laura who had walked out on their affair several weeks earlier, but had now decided that Glenn was the man for her. And how could Glenn resist a woman so lovely, so enticing and so very pregnant with his baby?
End of episode. And, as it turned out a moment later, end of their meeting at the Café du Monde. There was a lot more information Christy needed from Glenn, but before he could supply it, his cell phone rang.
After speaking briefly to the caller, he pushed back from the table. “Sorry, Christy, but I have to leave. That was Monica’s housekeeper.” Monica being Laura’s sister, Christy remembered. “Monica is expecting me to join her. There are arrangements we have to make.”
The funeral, Christy guessed. She and Glenn agreed to meet again in the morning, then he paid the check and left.
Now what? But the answer should have been obvious to Christy, and it was. She finally had a job—thank God she had a job!—and since there were still several balmy hours of daylight left, why not begin performing it? She knew by then where she wanted to go and what she wanted to see.
Coming purposefully to her feet, she turned her back on the table and hurried away. Neither of them had touched their coffees.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, having collected her vintage Ford Escort from where she kept it parked in an alley behind her office, Christy had crossed the Mississippi to the west bank and headed up the river road.
She knew how to get to where she was going. Some memories had a way of sticking with you, especially the painful ones. Wallowing in her misery after Glenn had parted from her five years ago, she had driven out to the Claiborne plantation. Why? Who knew. Maybe because she had expected to discover in its antebellum splendor, some satisfactory explanation for why Glenn had been so dazzled by Laura Claiborne. All she had found was a lost glory.
And how about today? What did she hope to learn by visiting the scene of Laura’s murder? Probably nothing that the police hadn’t already found and claimed. But you never knew what might turn up. It was a beginning, anyway.
Five years hadn’t helped the property, other than to leave no doubt it had deteriorated beyond all hope of rescue. Christy saw that as she turned off the river road below the levee and bumped along the rutted lane. The Claibornes had abandoned the plantation in the hard times after the Civil War, selling off pieces of the land in the decades that followed. Now all that remained in the weed-choked wilderness were the family cemetery and the crumbling house surrounded by an industrial farm with its ugly storage tanks. So much for the romance of the Old South.
The grove of live oaks shading the place, and where she parked her car, was still magnificent, however. She admired its canopies of new green as she made her way to the cemetery. Better start there, she thought, even though she wasn’t fond of cemeteries.
Yellow police tape marking the crime scene had been stretched along the wrought iron fence that enclosed the plot. The tape belonged to the New Orleans homicide division. Glenn had told her, because of its considerable facilities, it had been requested by the tiny local force to handle the case. Ignoring the tape’s existence, Christy entered the cemetery and wandered among the whitewashed tombs of Claiborne ancestors. Her gaze combed the ground, as if she expected to spy a startling clue overlooked by the police. There wasn’t one, unless you counted a couple of chicken feathers blown up against the iron fence. She didn’t.
There probably hadn’t been much for the police to collect either. She remembered it had rained heavily the night Laura’s body had lain here and that would have obliterated evidence. Her gaze drifted toward the house. She considered the place.
Funny thing about gut-level instincts; when they were reliable, they could be so useful. Christy had those instincts, the kind that served a P.I. very well. Trouble was, they needed to be accompanied by the skills that only came from experience. That, unfortunately, she lacked, which meant her instincts weren’t always dependable. At the moment, however, they were urging her to investigate the house. It was just possible it might produce something other than its ghosts.
Obeying her instincts, Christy turned her steps in the direction of the mansion. It really was a pathetic sight. The soaring brick columns that embraced the house on all sides were being eaten away by time and weather. Why had Laura repeatedly been drawn here?
The front door was gone. Boards had been nailed across the gap, but the widest of them had dropped, leaving a yawning hole. Christy didn’t hesitate. Popping through the opening, she was inside the house. Or what was left of it.
Resurrection. That’s what the plantation was called, named after the resurrection fern so common in southern Louisiana. But as Christy passed from room to room, she knew that this house would never be resurrected. It was a gray shell, stripped of everything but the dust bunnies.
Gone were the marble fireplaces, the paneling and carved moldings, the chandeliers, the floor tiles and silver locks. Vandals? If so, they had made off with what must have been some pretty valuable treasures.
Even the staircase was missing and if the outline of it in the peeling plaster on the wall was any indication, it had been a grand affair. But at the back of the house she located a plain service stairway that was still intact. Hey, why not check it all out? Which is why Christy found herself climbing the flight to the second floor where things got a bit more interesting. Or uncomfortable, depending on your point of view.
From behind a door that stood slightly ajar came a rustling sound. Spooks? Mice? Or maybe she was just imagining the noise. Either way, she took the precaution of removing the Glock from her shoulder bag. Of course, getting out of here fast would probably have been the smarter thing to do, but if you were a private investigator…well, you were supposed to investigate.
Semiautomatic firmly in hand, she spread the door wide. Behind it was another narrow flight of stairs leading to the attic. Saying a little prayer, she crept up the stairway, emerging at the top in the hollow vastness of the attic.
She could have sworn those instincts had been trying to tell her something. But, of course, they couldn’t have been because there was nothing to find. No spooks. No wild-eyed lunatic leaping out at her. Not even a scurrying mouse. And she could tell because there was plenty of light. There was a reason for that. The neglected roof had opened up in one corner.
Nor had the damage stopped there, as she discovered when she went to look. The invasive rain had rotted the floorboards under the gaping roof both here and on the floor below, collapsing ceilings and leaving a cavity that dropped from the attic all the way to the first floor. A meteorite couldn’t have fashioned a more perfect shaft.
There was an object above the deep well hanging from a rusted nail on one of the remaining roof rafters. It looked like a small bunch of dried plant material. Herbs of some kind? Leaning forward, Christy reached for it. That’s when the rustling she had heard earlier revealed itself without warning in an explosion of sound and motion.
Suddenly, alarmingly, she came under attack. They swooped down at her, beat at her neck and shoulders, flew at her face. It was like a scene out of that old Hitchcock thriller, The Birds. Except these critters, a colony of swallows nesting up in the shadowy rafters behind her, meant her no harm. They were merely frightened and in a hurry to escape.
Intentional or not, however, by the time the last of them had streamed away through the opening in the roof, they had cost Christy her Glock and her shoulder bag. Her balance as well. She lost that just as her fingers snagged the dried plants, which immediately crumbled to flakes.
The next thing she knew, she was down in the hole itself where the flakes had drifted, hanging by her hands from an exposed pipe once buried under the missing floor. It must have been a gas line that had supplied a chandelier suspended from a second-floor ceiling, though explanations hardly mattered when her precarious handhold was the only thing keeping her from a broken neck.
It was a damn silly situation to get caught in, not to mention absolutely terrifying. The pipe seemed solid enough. Problem was, as hard as she tried, grunting, straining, swinging, she couldn’t manage to pull herself up out of that shaft.
This was serious. Her arms were aching by now, her fingers numb. How much longer could she cling to this pipe before her hands began to slip, before she plunged—How far was it? She made the mistake of glancing down and was immediately so giddy that she closed her eyes. That’s why she didn’t see the long arm that reached down from over her head, didn’t know it was there until a strong hand clamped around her wrist.
Eyes flying open, she issued a little yelp of surprise. The hand tugged, urging her to release her grip on the pipe. No choice but to trust him. She did and was hauled up with such force that when her feet touched firm floor again, they failed to support her.
She staggered, slamming against a hard wall which turned out to be a broad-shouldered body. The body had a pair of arms that caught and steadied her in a comforting embrace. At least it was comforting until, dragging her head back, she looked up and discovered that the pair of lady-killer eyes colliding with hers belonged to the Prince of Darkness.
“You have got to stop falling for me like this,” he said.
