by Mary Stanton
Bree wondered if there was going to be yet another restaurant in Savannah she’d have to avoid. She decided not to risk it. She stood up, waved at the waiter, mimed signing the tab, and then pointed to Lewis, who looked startled. “Thank you for breakfast, Lewis. And the advice. You’ll excuse me. I’m late for an interview.” She kissed her father and Cissy and then turned on her way out of the dining room and said loudly. “Just so you know, I am absolutely confident that I’m going to win this one.”
The salesmen in the corner could chew over that for a while.
Ten minutes later, in the Bay Street office, she wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t know how we’re going to win this one, EB.” She dropped her coat in the corner, marched around the desk to the screen, and folded it up flat in two energetic jerks. She propped it against the wall. “There. Now we can discuss this thing without having to holler through wicker.”
EB picked up her steno pad and settled in with a practical air. “What should I do first?”
“I have to file a request to remand Jillian into medical custody. She was in pretty bad shape yesterday, but I couldn’t convince the prosecutor’s office to send her to the psych ward. They did agree to get her evaluated this morning. E-mail my father’s office and ask for a sample document, fill it in, and then file it at the courthouse. I also have to file a motion to dismiss, but that can wait until later this week. Jillian will be arraigned and a decision made by the judge to turn her over for trial. The motion hasn’t got a chance, I’m afraid. The evidence against her is too strong. But I have to try. The problem is, I can’t file a motion without a rough idea of our defense tactics.”
“You mean the plea?”
“Exactly. We have a couple of choices: innocent because she didn’t do it; innocent because she did do it, but she was out of her mind and wasn’t responsible for it; innocent because somebody else did it.”
EB had been scribbling away. She dropped her pencil. “Did she kill Mr. White?”
“I don’t know.” Bree rubbed her forehead with both hands. “But if she did, it wasn’t her fault. That much I do know.”
“Maybe you should ask her?”
Bree shook her head. “Not yet. Maybe not ever. What time is Allard coming in?”
“Another ten minutes.”
“Okay. I’m going to take him down to the Pirate’s Cove so you can start making phone calls and generating documents. First: I’ll need written permission from him to access Jillian’s medical records, all of them. Second: I’ll need background checks on Charles Martin and Alicia Kennedy. Call the same firm my father used to investigate White. Their work was impressive.”
“They got an impressive price tag, too. Are you going to get a retainer check from Allard Chambers?”
“He doesn’t have any money. We can apply to the state . . .” Bree stopped her pacing. She really missed Petru. But she had faith in EB. “There’s not enough time. You’re pretty good on the Internet, too. Do a global search on Martin and Kennedy and see what comes up. Narrow it down to any way that either one of them made the news in the last five years—Martin in Texas, and Kennedy in New York. We’ll see where we want to take it from there. Don’t spend a lot of time on it—I need you to do something else today, if you can.”
She perched on the edge of the visitor’s chair and frowned at the floor. “Cissy’s housekeeper’s been with her a long time. Her first name’s Lindy. I need to know how that knife got out of Cissy’s kitchen and into Prosper White.”
EB’s face glowed so brightly, it looked as if she’d been plugged in. “You want me to question her!”
“I do. Find out when she first missed it. If she did miss it. Find out if there’s any connection between her and the Chamberses, Martin, or Alicia Kennedy. And see if anyone was in her kitchen in the past three weeks who shouldn’t have been there.”
“Got it.”
Somebody knocked at the office door.
“That’ll be Professor Chambers.” EB turned to her computer. “Requests for records, first. You bring him back here after you two talk; I’ll have everything ready for him to sign.”
“Thank you, EB.” She looked up as Allard Chambers walked in. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket, a tie, and chinos and carrying a plastic grocery bag. “You’re dressed up this morning.”
“I stopped by the Chatham County Jail to leave a few things off for Jillian. They wouldn’t let me see her.” He swung the bag. “They wouldn’t let me drop this off, either. It’s just some shampoo and a few energy bars.”
“It was good of you to try,” Bree said kindly. “Mrs. Billingsley is going to make up a few documents for you to sign. While she’s doing that, can I take you to breakfast?”
He blinked. “Breakfast.”
“Some food will do us both good. There’s a café right around the corner.”
He kept his replies to a minimum as she escorted him down the elevator and across the street to the Pirate’s Cove Bar and All Night Restaurant. Yes, he’d slept all right, considering. As for her fee—he had five or six hundred dollars in an emergency fund; he’d stop by the bank and get her a check.
“We can wait on that for a moment.”
He waited courteously while she seated herself in the booth, and then sat across from her. “It’s good of you to take this on, Athena.”
“We have to talk about our approach to the defense.”
“Is there one?” he said unhappily. He covered his face with his hands. “If there was any justice, I’d be sitting in that holding pen, not my wife.”
“Is this an admission of guilt?” Bree asked drily. There wasn’t time for this. She bit back the words “man up” and forced herself to be patient.
“What? No. No. Of course not. You should have seen her thirty-five years ago. She was beautiful. Smart. Witty. You young women don’t know what it was like back then, for women like Jillian, especially in the male-dominated professions like archeology. It was unheard-of.”
Bree thought about Margaret Mead, who had indeed had a tough row to hoe. And the only one who made a point of recalling Jillian was a PhD archeologist was her husband.
“Jillian always said she had to be twice as smart as a male to get exactly the same kind of consideration. You know what they say about academe anyway, right?”
“The politics are so vicious because the reward is so small?”
“I think that’s what started it. Her mania. I didn’t recognize that it was an illness at first. I blame myself for that. When she”—he cleared his throat—“started in on the male graduate students, I retaliated along much the same lines. If you know what I mean.” He stared at his hands. The waitress set a carafe of coffee on the table and then slapped menus in front of them. He looked up at her. “You wouldn’t happen to have an egg-salad sandwich.”
“Sure thing.”
“Fine for me, too,” Bree said absently. She hadn’t eaten any of the breakfast at the Hyatt. She regretted it.
“So I got help for her later than I should have. If I’d known, our marriage wouldn’t have taken the hits that it did. But we managed. We looked for the Cross for twenty-five years after we lost it. She was with me on each and every dig.”
The first discrepancy. Bree reached for her yellow pad, then thought better of it. “You lost the Cross? The newspaper article said it went overboard with Martin Schofield.”
He looked puzzled. “The news . . . Oh! You found a copy of the article about the accident. I’m impressed.”
“It’s an Internet age,” Bree said.
“Well, that’s what we thought, initially. But, ah, it turned up. It wasn’t in the box of artifacts that went overboard after all.”
The waitress set the sandwiches down. Chambers took a couple of bites.
“Where was it?”
“The Cross? Oh. Jillian was in charge of measurements, taking photos of it, the sketches,” he waved his hand airily. “Documentation’s critical when you’re doing scientific research
. Turns out she still had it. Didn’t give it to poor Schofield at all.”
“But then?”
“Well, we had a volunteer with us—I told you about her yesterday. Leah. Leah Villiers. A law student, in between semesters. Very good at her job. Unusual face. Not the kind of face you forget easily. Leah was the one who reminded Jillian the Cross was still in the lab. So we locked it up, didn’t want to take a chance on losing it this time. But we did, of course.”
The sandwich was tasteless in her mouth. Bree set it down. “You said that Leah left the dig when you all broke up to come back here. Did she take the Cross?”
“Leah?” He looked astonished. “Never. She wasn’t . . . No. No, she didn’t. If you’d known her, that question just wouldn’t occur to you. It was a sneak thief, most likely. There was quite a black market for antiquities, you realize. Still is. Istanbul isn’t a third world country by any means, but there’s a great deal of poverty. So we kept an eye out, Jillian and I, every year we went back to the dig.”
Bree put her hand in her pocket and touched the pine box. “How important is the Cross?”
“Vastly important.” The weary man in front of her was transformed. For a moment, she caught a glimpse of the passion that had driven him to his profession. “All artifacts and relics of my period are important. The monetary value isn’t huge—it wouldn’t be like finding an intact Victory of Samothrace or a Nike—but it’s significant. And it doesn’t add a large amount to our understanding of the Justinian Empire—although,” he added, with an attractive air of self-mockery, “you certainly couldn’t prove it by the importance I placed on it in my publications. But it’s a piece of history. Irreplaceable.”
“You said something about it, the first time I met you in your shop. That Jillian thought it was cursed?”
“Ah, well. Poor Jillian. It was one of her obsessions. It may have driven her to . . .” He shoved his plate aside. “I’m not sure what this has to do with our current problems, Ms. Winston-Beaufort.”
Bree decided to come at him from a different angle. “What was Schofield Martin like?”
His eyes slid away from hers. As if he knew where the questions were headed. “Pretty good scholar. If he’d had a little more discipline, he could have made some decent contributions to the field. But he and Jillian got into some wild speculation about the provenance of the Cross and its ritual purpose. I’d say he was easily distracted from rigorous scholarship.”
“What sort of speculation?”
“That it had some religious significance. That it was . . . What did he call it? A key to the gate of the eighth circle of Hell, if you want to be precise. Never mind that Dante didn’t codify the nine circles until seven hundred years later.” He peered at her in exasperation. “What the heck does all that have to do with Jillian’s defense?”
“Hey!” The waitress said. She came out from around the bar at a trot. “You can’t let that dog in here.”
Sasha wound his way to the booth. He turned around, so that his hindquarters pressed into her hip, and stared out the restaurant windows. It was a glowering day, with no sun and a lot of low-lying clouds.
Caldecott pressed his pale face against the glass.
Bree raised an eyebrow and waved her hand at him. There was another shapeless figure in back of him. He was tall, whoever he was.
Stay here.
Bree looked down at Sasha. “Me or you?”
Wait.
“Miss!” The waitress said. “The boss will have my guts for garters if you let the hound stay in here.”
“Is your boss in?” Bree asked.
Sasha lifted his lip in a silent snarl. Caldecott backed away from the window. Not backed away, she thought. He’d been engulfed by something that made him disappear.
The huge shadow moved across the window, smearing the glass with fog.
The waitress snapped her gum. “Who, the boss? No. He don’t come in until five.”
Bree, one eye on the window, dug in her pocket and found the twenty-dollar bill she kept for emergencies. She pressed it into the waitress’s hand. “My dog will be very good, I promise. And we won’t be here too much longer.”
The waitress, whose name tag read DONNA LEE, looked down at Sasha. He waved his tail and then thrust his nose under her hand. “Okay. But no peeing on my nice clean floor, buster.” She ambled back behind the bar and settled onto a stool behind the counter.
Bree turned her attention back to Chambers. “According to the newspaper article I found, Schofield Martin drowned that summer, swept away in a storm.”
“Drowned.” Chambers’s voice was hollow. “Yes.”
“The body was never recovered? The police report from the Turkish government said it was an accidental death. Do you believe that?”
“Okay,” Chamber said, with a kind of despairing cheer. “Okay. I don’t know how you found out. We tried to keep it hushed up at the university, but the poor boy committed suicide. Jillian didn’t mean anything by these little flings. They were a part of her illness. Schofield didn’t understand that. He thought she loved him. He thought they’d go away, together, and when I told him, no, no, she’s done this before, she’s had these flings before . . . The poor boy just couldn’t take it.”
The second discrepancy. “Professor Chambers.” Bree kept her voice low, but she put all the comfort and authority she could manage into it. “I don’t believe Schofield jumped off the Indies Queen on his own. I think he was pushed. I think Jillian pushed him.”
Chambers’s eyes were haggard. “Are you asking me to turn in my own wife?”
“No.” Bree sank back. She needed to breathe. “I’m asking you what would be best for her for the rest of her life. I’m asking you if we should consider a plea of not guilty by reason of mental incompetence. If she should be in a place where she can get some kind of treatment for her problems. Where other people, you, for example, can be safe from her.”
Sasha nudged her.
We can go now.
The windows overlooking the street were clear. The fog had gone. No faces pressed in to peer at them. Bree’s heart slowed; there had been something ominous about that tall figure behind Caldecott.
A second shadow darkened the glass doorway.
“Anything the matter, Athena?”
It was Hunter. He pulled the door halfway open, caught sight of her, and motioned her toward him.
“I’m fine, Allard. Look. I’ve got to go to another meeting. I’m pursuing what’s called an alternate theory to the case. It may be that I’ll turn up enough mitigating evidence to convince a jury that someone else killed Prosper White. In the meantime, I’d like you to think about your alternatives for the defense.”
“And my options are?” He lifted his hands. “She didn’t do it. She did it and didn’t mean it. Somebody else did it.”
“That’s right, Professor Chambers. Those are the options in the state of Georgia.” She got up, and put her hand on Sasha’s collar. “Take a few minutes and go sign those documents Mrs. Billingsley has, will you? We’ll be in touch later in the day.”
“I’ve lost her,” Chambers said. “Jillian. She’s gone, isn’t she? Whatever happens next, she’s gone.”
Twenty-two
Outside the Pirate’s Cove, Hunter leaned against the wall, his arms crossed. The bearded face of a pirate on the restaurant poster leered over his shoulder. “You were meeting with Chambers in there?”
“Yes.”
He touched her cheek. “You look sad.”
“It is sad. They’ve been married for thirty-some years. His whole life’s come down around his ears in the last eight months. And he’s lying to me.” She sighed. “Has Jillian been booked for a psych-eval?”
“Today and tomorrow. They put her in the Sampson Clinic. You’re not thinking of using the insanity defense?”
She looked at the street. Savannah in February was blessedly free of tourists, and the sidewalks were open. “Let’s walk a bit.” She tucked her hand und
er his arm, and they started south, to the heart of the old city. Sasha wandered ahead of them, his head up, as if searching for something. Or watching. “What’s the department think?”
“For God’s sake, Bree. We arrested her. She stabbed Prosper White.”
“Let me amend that. What do you think?”
“I interviewed her when they brought her in. But I can’t—”
She nudged him. “Of course you can. You know I’ll have access to the intake interview tapes if the case comes to trial. I’ll tell you what’s bothering me, shall I? I didn’t meet her the day White was killed. You had her and Allard hauled off to the station first thing. But I did get a chance to see the surveillance tapes . . .”
“The surveillance tapes?” He stopped and faced her. “Those were entered in evidence yesterday. How did your office get hold of them so fast?”
“Copies from the museum,” Bree said promptly.
“Copies?”
“Listen.” She tugged him forward again. They had reached Oglethorpe Square. “You’ve seen them, too. It was she, not Allard, who appeared to be the organizer of the protest. And she seemed . . . what’s the phrase . . . oriented times three; that’s it. She knew who she was and what had happened when you questioned her?”
“She did.”
“Have you stopped by the City of Light charity yet?”
“I sent McKenna.”
“I’ll bet you a lunch at Huey’s that Jillian recruited the homeless people. She needed the crowd to get the TV people out there. Right? And again, Hunter, I don’t need to remind you that I’ll find this stuff out in discovery anyway.”
“Okay, yes, you’re right. The demonstration appeared to be Jillian’s idea. The director of the center is a nice old guy named Foster. Not the brightest light in the chandelier but what you’d call a good soul. Jillian convinced him that there’d been a grave injustice done to her and her husband. She’s done a lot of volunteer work with the charity, taking the patrons, clients, whatever they call them, out for picnics, to doctor’s appointments, things like that. The morning of the murder, she handed out twenty-dollar bills left and right to the center residents. Before Foster knew what was happening, they were on the bus headed to the Frazier.”