Murder in the Garden District (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (3 page)

Barbara smiled. “Well, well, well. She left that out. Seems like Cordelia’s got herself into a bit of trouble.” She seemed to enjoy the idea.

I wondered what exactly she
owed
Cordelia for. It was obvious she detested the woman.

“But knowing Cordelia, I’m sure she thinks no one would ever think she’d commit murder,” she added.

“You nailed that one right on the head,” I said. “Do you know the widow?”

“Janna? Yes, I know Janna. The poor thing had no idea what she was marrying into. I felt sorry for her. I still do.”

She got up and poured herself another gin and tonic. Mostly it was gin with a bit of tonic splashed in the glass.

“She was what Cordelia and her sort consider a nobody—unsuitable to marry the heir to the throne. She was only in her mid-twenties when she married Wendell. She was one of his secretaries. You could have knocked us all down with a feather when he it happened. I’d always assumed that if he married again it would be Monica Davis—and I’m sure Monica thought so too.”

“And she is?”

“Monica teaches political science at Tulane. She’d been with Wendell for years—some say even before his first wife died. I heard that the two of them had started up again, but that could just be talk. You know how people are—and no one really liked Janna very much, the poor thing.”

“Why not?”

Barbara fixed her green eyes on me. “She was from Hammond, Chanse. She had no pedigree. Her father was a janitor. She was never a debutante, never a maid or Queen of Comus or Momus or Rex. Everyone looked down on her—the same way they did me when I married Roger Palmer. I tried to be nice to her, take her under my wing, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I’m sure Cordelia told her a lot of unpleasant things about me. But I could understand what she was going through, because I’d been through it myself. Until, of course, I married Charles Castlemaine and suddenly had more money than God at my disposal. The power of being richer than they are can never be underestimated.” She gave me a hard smile. “They’re polite to me now, but I’m not one of them. I never will be. And neither will Janna.”

“Do you think she could have killed him?”

Barbara didn’t answer me at first, and when she finally spoke, she didn’t look at me.

He was a horrible man, Chanse, an absolutely horrible man. Every bit as awful as his mother. If Janna did kill him—and I am not saying she did—I’m certain she had her reasons.”

She glanced at her watch.

“Good Lord, I have to get running. I have a meeting in half an hour.”

She rose and walked quickly to the door.

“You can see yourself out, can’t you, dear? And again, I am so sorry.” She winked at me. “I promise to make it up to you.”

*

As I sat in my car waiting for the air-conditioning to kick into gear, I called my research assistant, Abby Grosjean. “We got a job,” I said when she answered. “I need you to find everything you can on Wendell Sheehan, his wife, Janna—hell, anything you can find out about the entire Sheehan family.”

“Wendell Sheehan was killed last night,” Abby said. “It’s all over the news.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We’re working for the Sheehan family.” I looked at Barbara’s house. “I need it as soon as possible. And while you’re at it, find out everything you can about Barbara Castlemaine.”

“The
boss
? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I’d never checked out Barbara before. I’d always considered it an invasion of her privacy. I knew some of her secrets, of course—you couldn’t work as a private eye for someone as long as I’d worked for Barbara without learning some things about her. And from time to time she’d let something personal slip. But I’d never done a background check on her, and now my curiosity was piqued. She obviously hated Cordelia Spencer Sheehan and her son. So why would she do her a favor?

Maybe I should just leave Barbara alone—she might not appreciate the intrusion into her privacy, and she was certainly my golden goose. I’d be up shit creek if I lost the Crown Oil gig, and with Abby on salary now, it wasn’t just me that would be affected.

Then again, Cordelia had something on her—and for Barbara to put up with the dismissive way the old woman treated her, it had to be something really bad. Truth be told, if I was careful, the only way Barbara would find out was if I told her—and I could make that decision later.

As for Janna Sheehan, it would be interesting to meet her. I already felt a little sorry for her—under the best of circumstances, it couldn’t be easy to be that woman’s daughter-in-law.

*

I parked in the lot alongside my house and went into the living room of my apartment on the first floor in the front of the building. Plopping down on the sofa, I called my best friend, Paige.

Paige and I went back all the way to our college days at LSU, which now seemed a million years ago. She’d been a reporter for the
Times-Picayune
until last year, when she’d accepted the job as editor-in-chief at
Crescent City
. In that short time she’d turned the glossy monthly from a barely break-even piece of fluff into a must-read for locals. When she’d been at the
Times-Picayune
, she’d often pulled information from the morgue for me, and while she didn’t have that same kind of access at
Crescent City
, she might know someone at the paper who would do her a favor. She answered on the first ring, breathless.

“Chanse! I can’t talk long—deadline looming. How’s your mother? How are you?”

“Hanging in there, and my mother…”

I hesitated. Paige had been the one to convince me to go to see her in the first place.

“She’s responding to the treatments, but who knows?”

“I’m so sorry… Look, Chanse, it’s really crazy around here right now. Why don’t I stop by later with dinner? Ryan’s visiting the kids tonight.”

Ryan Tujague was her boyfriend. His ex-wife and two kids had lived in Mandeville since Katrina.

“Have you heard about Wendell Sheehan?” she continued, seemingly changing the subject. “He would have to go and get himself killed right before we put the magazine to bed. Everyone around here is wondering if we’ll have jobs tomorrow.”

“What does Wendell Sheehan’s murder have to do with the magazine?” I asked.

 “Do you ever listen when I talk to you, Chanse? The Sheehans own the Crescent City Publishing Group. I mean, he stepped down as publisher in order to launch his Senate campaign, shortly after I came to work here, but he was the one who hired me. Who knows what’s going to happen now, or who’s going to be in charge? I just pray to God it’s not his mother. But she never shows her face here. Rachel’s fit to be tied.”

Rachel Delesdernier was
Crescent City
’s new publisher. I’d never met her, but Paige loved working for her. I decided not to tell her she’d never mentioned Wendell Sheehan to me before, or that Cordelia Spencer Sheehan had hired me, at least not yet.

“I’ll tell you about my mom over dinner,” I said. “It seems like forever since I’ve seen you.”

The job did take a toll on her private life. Paige often worked twelve to sixteen hours a day without time off for weeks on end. It was causing problems with Ryan, as well.

“Plan on me being there around seven. If we don’t have the magazine done by then, heads will roll.”

She hung up.

I grabbed an empty manila folder from the box on the bookcase next to my desk and wrote SHEEHAN on the flap, then opened a new document on my computer. I typed in the pertinent information—date and time hired, rate of pay, client, task—and stared at the cursor for a moment, hearing Mrs. Sheehan in my head.

I want you to look outside my family. My son had a lot of enemies. Of course she did it! But as long as there is breath in my body, no member of this family is going to spend a single night in jail.

Maybe it was my years in the NOPD, but I didn’t like the idea of helping someone get away with murder. It was why I had never considered going to law school. I have very clear opinions about people who commit crimes. You do the crime, you do the time. The notion that there was a separate justice for the rich went against everything I believed in.

But something else was bothering me. Cordelia Spencer Sheehan might be any number of things, but she was not stupid. So why, if she were innocent, would she pick up the gun that had obviously been used to kill her son? Even if she were in shock, as she claimed, it wasn’t natural. The
natural
thing would have been to scream, or go to her child, or even faint. Why on earth did she pick up the gun?

Maybe she honestly believed that despite the evidence, her word would be enough for the police and the district attorney. And maybe she was right. She was rich, powerful and well-respected throughout the state. She was also well connected. Probably she could use her pull to quash the investigation. That was how things worked in Louisiana.

So why hire me?

There was a hell of a lot more here than I was being told. I also wasn’t convinced that what she’d said was true. My instinct was to remove myself from the case. I don’t like it when clients lie to me, especially when the lies are so obvious they wouldn’t fool anyone. They certainly wouldn’t fool the police.

“Stick to the facts, Chanse,” I said out loud. “It’s entirely possible she did exactly what she said she did. Smart people have done stupider things.”

And then there was the Barbara angle. For whatever reason, she
owed
Cordelia, and was using me to pay off that debt. I certainly owed Barbara a lot myself. The least I could do was get that awful woman off her back.

But Cordelia Spencer Sheehan didn’t strike me as the sort who would forget whatever debt Barbara owed her just because I’d taken on this case. Whatever she had on Barbara gave her power over her, and Cordelia Spencer Sheehan enjoyed power and control. She kept her entire family on a leash. Life in that house must be one hell of a freak show.

It was time to get to work.

Janna Sheehan was a beautiful woman, despite the dark circles under her gray eyes. In her early thirties, with long, thick auburn hair, she had clear, smooth skin the color of white porcelain. I could see blue veins in her long throat. She was short, barely five feet tall, with a tiny waist and ample hips. She looked as though she weighed less than a hundred pounds. Given the size of her frame, her breasts seemed almost too large to be real underneath her green Tulane T-shirt.

We were sitting in a gazebo behind the Sheehan mansion on St. Charles Avenue. A ceiling fan whirred overhead, but it wasn’t providing enough breeze to keep me from sweating, and the glass of iced tea wasn’t helping any more than the fan. My shirt was soaked. Janna had led me out here so we could speak without being overheard by anyone. I’d thought it odd, but acquiesced.

She blew a cloud of smoke out of her mouth and gave me a brittle smile. “Of course she killed him,” she said. “But how would I know why? Cordelia doesn’t share that kind of information with me.”

“Just tell me what happened the night of the murder.”

She flicked ash into a green glass ashtray. “I was waiting up for Wendell. He’d been coming home late more and more, saying he was working on strategy and so forth for the campaign. Whether he was doing that or not, I don’t know. I had my suspicions. He often came home smelling like a brewery.” She gave me a tired look. “I didn’t much care one way or the other, but that night I needed to talk to him. I’d been putting it off for a while and it was getting to the point I couldn’t wait any longer. I was in my room—it’s right at the top of the stairs, the first door—and I saw his headlights from my window. I went to the window and saw him get out of the car in the rain. He was drunk again. I got scared and decided it could wait another night.”

“You were afraid of your husband?”

“Does that surprise you? It’s why I bought the gun in the first place.”

“Had he been violent with you?”

She looked down and nodded. “Only when he was drinking,” she said quietly. “Anyway, it wasn’t too long after that I heard the first shot.”

“What did you do then?”

She raised her head and looked me in the eyes. “I was terrified. I called 911, then opened my door and looked out—to try to see what was going on. Alais and Carey’s doors were closed, and I could see the front door was open. The house was silent. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. But I couldn’t just stay there. I was about halfway down the stairs when I heard the second shot. I ran the rest of the way, and saw Cordelia in the drawing room with a gun in her hands. And then I saw Wendell. I think I may have screamed.” Her body shook for a moment. “And then the police came,” she whispered.

“Did you know it was your gun?”

She smiled weakly. “The police told me later. My initials are engraved in the handle.” She shook her head bitterly. “Obviously, Cordelia took it to frame me. Why else would she use my gun? There are enough guns in the house to hold off the Yankee army. She probably never thought I’d get downstairs fast enough to catch her in the act. The gun would have my fingerprints on it, wouldn’t it? My guess is that she was going to shoot him, drop the gun, and then pretend to find the body. Unfortunately, I got downstairs before she could finish setting me up.”