Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (23 page)

“I—”

“You can be honest with me. I have no use for platitudes.”

“When people disappear, Mrs. O’Neill, they usually disappear because they don’t want to be found. From everything I’ve found out about your mother-in-law, there was no reason for her to walk away from her life and her family. So it stands to reason that she’s dead. And all the blood in her car—”

“But it wasn’t
her
blood.”

I paused. “I beg your pardon?”

“Those cops—they said the blood in her car wasn’t hers. It was the wrong blood type.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stared at her for a few moments while scenarios ran through my head—none of which made a lot of sense.

“So it’s possible she’s still alive.” Celia O’Neill went on like I wasn’t goggling at her like a simple-minded fool. “But I can’t think why she’d just disappear.”

“You said Robby had an argument with her?”

She nodded. “They used to fight all the time. Every once in a while he’d find some great investment opportunity and would try to convince her to invest. Mona controlled Jonny’s trust fund, and she had her own investments. She always said no, and Robby would always get mad. He felt like she babied Jonny too much.” She shook her head. “He really didn’t like Jonny. He never told me what he had against his brother, but he literally hated him.” She shuddered. “I never could understand how someone could feel that way about a family member. I mean, my oldest sister’s a bitch from hell, but I don’t hate her. Not the way Robby hated Jonny.”

“Could it have just been sibling rivalry?”

“Maybe, I don’t know.” She covered her face with her hands. “I know it sounds like my marriage was a complete failure—but it wasn’t. We were really happy. I loved him. I didn’t care if we lost the house, filed bankruptcy, had to put the kids in public school. But he wouldn’t—” Her voice choked off in a sob. “I guess that’s all in my future now, isn’t it? But we’ll be fine.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She got control of herself and gave me a weak smile. “It’s okay. I have to get used to the idea that he’s gone.”

“What are you going to do?”

She shrugged. “There’s a life insurance policy—we both had one. And I know he had another one through the office.” She looked away from me. “I probably should apologize to Ross—that’s his boss.”

“Can I ask you one last question, and then I’ll get out of your hair?”

She bit her lower lip and nodded.

“I’d been told that Robby was really interested in Jonny’s fighting career?” I made it a question, and raised my eyebrows.

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s true. He didn’t like Jonny, but when he thought his brother had a chance to make it big…” She shook her head. “He thought Jonny should sign with the casino where he fought, and that Mona was holding him back.”

I stood up. “Thank you for talking to me, Mrs. O’Neill. I’m really sorry for your loss.”

She walked me to the door, and opened it. “You sure you don’t want to have some more coffee, wait out this storm?”

“Thanks, but I need to get going.” I shook her hand. “A little rain never hurt anyone.”

Constance Street was now under about a foot of water. I opened the umbrella and splashed down the walk. The water in the drainage ditch was washing over the walk, and my feet were soaked as I sloshed through the fast-moving dirty water to the driver’s side of my car. I unlocked the car and closed the umbrella, getting drenched again before getting my door closed. I drove down a block.

Jonny’s car was sitting out in front of the ramshackle shotgun house.

Jonny himself opened the door. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his basketball shorts hung from his narrow waist. “Dude, get in out of the rain.” He flicked on the light switch and I stepped into the house, shivering.

“How you doing?” I asked as Heather gave me a look. She pushed herself to her feet.

“I’ll leave you two to your business.” She shuffled out of the room, both hands pressed against the small of her back.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said.

Jonny nodded. “Thanks, man.” His eyes were red. “I can’t get over it, you know? Thanks for helping me out the other night.” He closed his eyes and his lower lip trembled. “I hope I don’t ever have to identify another body, man. I can’t get the image of his face out of my head.”

“I just talked to your sister-in-law. She mentioned you and Robby didn’t get along?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” He didn’t look at me, just kept staring at his hands. “I mean, we were like sixteen years apart in age. We just didn’t have a lot in common.”

“Celia seemed to think that he really didn’t like you.”

A tear rolled down his cheek. “He did.”

“Jonny.” I softened my voice. “He’s dead now, and your mom is still missing. You need to be completely honest with me, okay, or I can’t do my job.”

He nodded. “Robby was always mean to me.” He wiped at his face. “Always. He called Heather a whore when I called him to see if they’d come to the wedding. And the last time I talked to him—” His voice broke. “He told me I wasn’t Dad’s.” He looked at me, pain written all over his face. “That Mom had cheated on Dad, that I wasn’t really his full brother. Why would he say something like that to me?”

Whatever I’d been expecting to hear, it wasn’t that. I stared at him. “Did he say who your father really was?”

Jonny shook his head. “When I asked him, he just laughed and told me to ask Mom.”

“Did you ask her?”

“I called her, but just her voicemail. So I left a message.” He gnawed his lip.

“When was this?”

He chewed his lower lip, and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Thursday afternoon. He came by and wanted me to talk to Mom, get her to let him borrow some money from my trust fund. I said no, and he went off on me.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I punched him and threw him out.” His voice cracked. “The last time I saw my brother I punched him.”

I wanted to shake him, but resisted the urge. “Did you say anything about it in the voicemail?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it. But I didn’t ever want to talk about that. Ever. To anyone.” He looked at me. “You don’t think that’s why Mom ran away, do you?”

“It just might be,” I said and slammed the door behind me.

“That must have been annoying,” Paige said, taking a drink from her bottle of Abita Amber and sighing in delight. I’d just finished ranting about Jonny—a rant that started the moment I opened my front door to let her in.

“That’s putting it mildly,” I replied as I unwrapped my shrimp po’boy. I popped an errant shrimp into my mouth.

The last thing I’d seen as I’d stormed my way out of the dumpy little shotgun house was Heather, standing in the hallway with a self-satisfied smirk on her face.
I told you so.

I’d been more than a little furious with Jonny—it was pretty much all I could do not to strangle him. My phone had begun ringing the very moment I got in my car—it was Jonny. He left a long, rambling, apologetic voicemail, which just made my blood boil even hotter as I listened to it. He kept apologizing over and over for not telling me about the argument with Robby, insisting that he hadn’t thought it was all that important, and no, he wasn’t keeping anything else from me, he swore, please don’t stop looking for his mom.

I deleted it without bothering to answer.

Paige made a face. “Well, he’s what? Twenty? It’s possible he really didn’t think it mattered. Remember what we were like at that age? It’s embarrassing to remember some of the stupid shit we used to do—and besides, cut him a little slack, his mom’s missing and his brother’s been murdered.” Paige took another long drink of her beer and belched rather loudly.

“Always the lady,” I commented as I took a bite of my sandwich and sighed with satisfaction. Paige had called me just as I was pulling into my parking space, still shaking with anger. She’d invited herself over and offered to bring food. I hadn’t realized until she mentioned it how hungry I was, so I agreed and hung up before running through the rain to my back door. When I got inside, toweled off, and changed into dry clothes, I’d called Abby and filled her in.

“You think this changes anything?” Abby had asked.

“We need to find out—see what you can find out about Mona’s distant past.” I hung up and tossed the phone on my bed. I stalked into my office area, turned on the computer, and updated my file on the case as my mind tossed around any number of possibilities while I calmed down.

But I couldn’t help coming back to the possibility that now Mona herself had an even stronger motive for killing her son and disappearing.

Maybe the blood in her car was Robby’s.

“This is nice,” Paige went on, dragging a steak fry through a puddle of ketchup. “It’s been a while.” She sighed as she chewed the fry. “And that’s my bad, I’m sorry. This job—” She shook her head. “Had I known how time-consuming it would be running a magazine, I would have stayed with the paper. But then, I’d probably no longer be with the paper, given the buy-outs and so forth. At least there’s money behind
Crescent City
,
and I don’t have to worry about job security there. For a few more years, any way—until the Internet finishes killing the print industry.”

Paige and I had been close friends ever since I was a freshman in college. We’d met during little sister rush at my fraternity, Beta Kappa. I’d gone back to my room to get away from the drunken debauchery and found her sitting on my bed, smoking a joint. We’d hit it off from the first—it turned out she was doing an undercover report on little sister rush for the student paper, but she kind of liked Beta Kappa and took a bid, ditching the story. She was the first person I’d come out to and had been my beard all the way through college. We’d both moved to New Orleans after graduating—me going to work for the NOPD and she getting a job with the
Times-Picayune.
She’d witnessed a convenience store shooting, written a powerful editorial about it that got her nominated for a Pulitzer prize, and her career had taken off from there.

She’d always wanted to be a novelist and for years had been working on a historical romance called
The Belle of New Orleans.
After Katrina, she put it aside and wrote a memoir about her experiences in the city after the levee failure. She’d offered to let me read it, but I declined—that first year afterward had been rough enough to experience firsthand, let alone relive through someone else’s words. A major New York agent had taken it on, but no publisher had wanted it. She’d sworn she was going to finish
Belle
,
but she never talked about it anymore. I assumed that between her job and the guy she was seeing—Blaine’s older brother Ryan—she didn’t have the time to work on it anymore.

“Do you ever miss being a reporter?” I took another bite of the po’boy. I was curious—when she’d been working the crime beat for the paper she’d always bitched about what she saw every day, and every night she’d come home to drown herself in wine and smoke pot.

“We-ell.” She munched while she thought for a moment. “Yeah, I do sometimes. I miss having my finger on the city’s pulse the way I used to—I mean, I still kind of do, but the magazine is more about the arts, politics, and culture—I don’t really know what’s going on with the working class and the poor the way I used to, you know? I know, I used to always feel like I’d never get clean when I got home every night, and I remember having to drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of pot to anaesthetize myself, and I don’t miss that. And I don’t miss having a city editor breathing down my neck, telling me what I can and can’t write, blah blah blah, telling me I dressed like a gypsy and making fun of me all the time.” She’d had a great relationship with her original city editor, but then he retired. She always called his replacement “that bitch Coralie.” Coralie didn’t appreciate Paige’s unique style of dressing. Right now she was wearing a flowing black silk skirt and a red peasant blouse with full sleeves. She went on, “I do like having some control over what we put in the magazine—and Rachel is so great to work with.” In one of those “New Orleans is a small town” twists, the magazine’s publisher was Rory’s older sister. “Would I like us to focus on some of the social issues in the city, the poverty, the quality of public education? Sure I would. But compared to all the other headaches that came with working at the paper? Nah, I don’t miss any of that shit at all.” She beamed at me. “But I do miss having the time to hang out like I used to.” She ran a hand through her mop of red curls. “And I miss helping you with your cases—that was always a lot of fun.”

I laughed. “You used to always act like it was a huge ordeal.”

“Yeah, well.” She winked at me. “Didn’t want you to take me for granted.”

“I miss having someone who can dig through the archives of the paper for me.”

“Meh.” She shrugged. “Jeph can hack into just about anything, can’t he?” Paige was the one who’d found Jephtha for me. She’d done a story on him—he’d been sent to juvie when he was caught committing credit card fraud online—he’d also hacked into his school’s computer system and changed grades for cash. He was what she considered a classic example of the failure of the New Orleans public school system—this incredibly bright kid with an almost supernatural talent for computer work who’d fallen through the cracks and wound up breaking the law. And of course, with his background, he couldn’t get a decent job as an adult. He was washing dishes in an Uptown restaurant when she profiled him for the paper, and in his free time he was designing computer games, trying to make it big. I’d given him a test assignment—and he’s worked for me ever since. He was still working on developing the games, but he didn’t have to wash dishes in a hellishly hot kitchen anymore.