Angel's Advocate

Table of Contents

Terrifying Tailgater

One by one, the streetlights went out. And the whirling tower of dark, shot through with a sickly yellow, advanced toward her down the street.

Bree’s dog, Sasha, drew his lips back in a snarl, crouched low, and crept toward the apparition. Bree judged the distance between the thing and the safety of her car. Sasha bounded forward. Bree yelled, “Heel!” in sudden terror for her dog, and sprinted down the sidewalk. The tower of oily smoke grew taller, wider, as if gathering itself for a ferocious charge. Bree flung herself at the driver’s door, pushed Sasha in ahead of her, and jammed the key into the ignition.

The smoke swirled around the windshield. In the midst of the shifting mass, Bree caught a glimpse of a grinning white face.

She slammed the motor into life, gunned the car forward, and left the mist behind.

DEFENDING ANGELS
ANGEL’S ADVOCATE

A TASTE FOR MURDER
A DASH OF DEATH
A PINCH OF POISON
MURDER WELL-DONE
DEATH DINES OUT
A TOUCH OF THE GRAPE
A STEAK IN MURDER
MARINADE FOR MURDER
JUST DESSERTS
FRIED BY JURY
A PUREE OF POISON
BURIED BY BREAKFAST
A DINNER TO DIE FOR
GROUND TO A HALT
A CAROL FOR A CORPSE

THE CASE OF THE ROASTED ONION
THE CASE OF THE TOUGH-TALKING TURKEY
THE CASE OF THE ILL-GOTTEN GOAT

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ANGEL’S ADVOCATE

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / June 2009

 

Copyright © 2009 by Mary Stanton.

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eISBN : 978-1-10105374-4

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A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes.

—
Tour to the Hebrides
, James Boswell

“This seventeen-year-old high school cheerleader stole one hundred sixty-five dollars and twenty-six cents from a Girl Scout?” Most lawyers learned to keep a poker face early on. Bree was no exception. She sat up a little straighter in the kitchen chair, but otherwise didn’t react. “What happened, exactly?”

Bree’s aunt Cissy zigzagged around the kitchen in a distracted way. “Lindsey—that’s the grabber—and a couple of her girlfriends were tootling around the mall parking lot in her daddy’s Hummer. She pulled up to the front entrance, jumped out of the car, pushed the little girl flat, and grabbed the shoebox that had the money in it. Then she got back into the Hummer and buzzed off with the loot.” Aunt Cissy rolled her eyes. “There were a couple of eyewitnesses, including the Girl Scout’s mamma. The teeners thought the whole thing was a hoot. Hung out of the Hummer’s windows, laughing their keisters off.”

Cissy was eight years younger than Bree’s mother, but where Francesca Winston-Beaufort was soft, round, and red-haired, Cecily was blonde and angular. Her sun-streaked hair was courtesy of Fontina, Savannah’s most popular beautician; her wiry frame owed a lot to the gym on Front Street and weekly games of tennis. Cissy hopped onto the blue tile counter that topped the kitchen island and bounced her heels against the lower cabinet. “Thing was, some kid with a fancy cell phone videoed the whole thing, called up WKYR as quick as lightnin’, and you can just bet the sorry mess is going to hit the six o’clock news. Carrie-Alice is just beside herself.”

“And Carrie-Alice is Lindsey the cheerleader’s mother,” Bree said, just to keep the narrative straight. She added a few notes to the yellow pad in front of her. “I don’t think I’ve met Carrie-Alice. She’s a close friend?”

“Not all that close,” Cissy admitted. “But the police called her right there in the middle of our Thursday afternoon bridge game. Carrie-Alice and I were playin’ partners. I was dummy. We were,” she added with a broody air, “about to make a small slam. Carrie dropped the cards and pitched a fit. That blew any chance of a slam.” She leaped off the counter and onto the floor. “So what was I supposed to do? Just leave her all distraught in the middle of the card room at the club? No, sir. I have a niece, I said, who’s probably the best lawyer in Savannah and she can get your Lindsey out of jail quicker than blink.”

Bree raised an eyebrow. “Lindsey’s in jail?”

“As near as makes no difference. The police took her down to the station on Montgomery after they caught up with her. Impounded the Hummer and for all I know, impounded Lindsey, too.” She shook her head. “Well, now, I’m a liar. The kid’s back home, come to think on it. Carrie-Alice hared off down after her and I hared off to find you.” Her aunt narrowed her bright blue eyes. “I would have met up with you at your office, but damned if I couldn’t find it, Bree. And I’ve lived in Savannah pretty near all my life. Just where
is
Angelus Street?”

“I’d come home for lunch anyway,” Bree said evasively. Very few people knew that the only clients who could find 66 Angelus were the dead ones. The law firm of Beaufort & Company had another office on Bay Street for those clients currently among the living, but renovations were still in progress after a deadly fire. Bree offered her usual diversionary fib: “Mamma might have told you the Angelus Street office is temporary until Great-Uncle Franklin’s old offices are ready for me to move into. Anyhow, it’s much more comfortable here.”

“Here” was the family town house overlooking the Savannah River. It sat at the end of a row of rehabbed brick buildings, two stories above the cobblestone-lined River Walk. Bree loved the location. She could clatter down the steps, with their wrought-iron rails, and walk to the brick bulwarks of the centuries-old wharf and her favorite shops in less than three minutes.

“I hardly think you’d want to meet Carrie-Alice in the kitchen instead of a nice professional-looking office,” Cissy complained. She shook her head. “Whatever. I guess you can get on out to Carrie-Alice’s place on Tybee Island just as easy.” She reached over, twirled Bree’s yellow pad, and wrote down an address and phone number. “Be best if you followed me there. I’ve got a late afternoon massage over at the spa.”

Bree needed new clients, but she wasn’t wild about representing a kid who’d ripped off an eight-year-old Girl Scout. “I’m sure the family lawyer is well equipped to handle something like this. If not, I can give her a refer ral to an attorney better suited to criminal law than I am. I’ll be happy to meet with Carrie-Alice and tell her so. And what’s the family name, Aunt Cissy?”

“Chandler.”

Now that was interesting. “As in Probert Chandler? The drugstore king?”

“Marlowe’s. That’s the one. Pots of money, of course, which is another reason I thought about you right off. It can’t be easy starting out all on your own. And it’s a case that will get you a lot of attention. I was thinking about a defense, Bree honey. Probert’s been dead less than four months and here his little girl is stealing cookie money in broad daylight.”

“I heard something about Chandler’s death. He wasn’t very old. Late fifties, I think?”

“Fifty-eight. Car accident,” Cissy said with a shake of her head. “All by his lonesome on Skidaway Road in a rainstorm.” She flung her hands wide. “Clearly—
clearly
the child is suffering from some kind of displaced grief.”

“Delayed some, too, since it happened four months ago,” Bree said. She remembered the accident, now. It had made international news, the way anything Probert Chandler did. Marlowe’s Drugstores, Inc., had annual revenues that rivaled the GNP of a small South American nation. Probert Chandler was famous for building the megacor poration up from a nothing drugstore located in Portland, Oregon. That, and for his unpretentious lifestyle. The car he’d been driving when he went off Skidaway Road to glory was a Buick.

Cissy beamed. “This kid’s case is just the sort of thing that can put you on the map, lawyer-wise.”

Bree tapped her pen against her teeth. She didn’t want cases that got her a lot of attention. She had her hands full with the weirdness of her current caseload. The last thing she needed was a spotlight on the activities of Beaufort & Company. On the other hand, at least some of her clients had to be alive and ready to pay reasonable fees. She looked down at her feet, where her dog, Sasha, lay curled up, nose to tail. Somebody had to keep him in kibble and the office rent paid. Not to mention keeping up with the pitifully small salaries of her secretary and paralegal. And that somebody would be her. But she said, “The Chandler family’s got lawyers up the wazoo, Aunt Cissy. I don’t see what I can bring to the party.”

Cissy put her hands on her hips and snorted. “You’re kidding me, right? Is this seventeen-year-old teenager going to relate better to you, or some middle-aged, potbel lied banker type who’s only interested in protecting the family name? You’re twenty-eight and gorgeous. You’re somebody she can
talk
to, Bree.”