Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Geoffrey Alexander Gillon’s vanity led him to the frequent public complaint that his real ambition had been to secure something suitable on the nearby tiny street named after his distant ancestor, a complaint that gave Gillon the chance to draw attention to the historical Alex-ander Gillon who had captured three British vessels—two without firing a shot—during the British blockade of Charleston in 1777. Because of the Revolutionary-era Alexander Gillon, Geoffrey insisted that he always be addressed as Geoffrey Alexander, as if Geoffrey feared his continuous references to a famous ancestor might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten. Senator Gillon referred to him as the “other Alexander,” suggesting a closeness that verged on ridiculous, considering the distance imposed by two centuries and a much-fragmented family tree with more than its fair share of scoundrels.

  It was one of Geoffrey’s favorite stories, recounting how the “other Alexander” had bested the even more famous Charles Pinckney during a convention to consider the newly proposed Constitution. Charles Pinckney, as Geoffrey Alexander told each new audience with great animation, had clarified a point of debate by using a lengthy phrase of Latin; Geoffrey Alexander’s ancestor rose to thank Pinckney for his considerable erudition and went on to conclude his own remarks in high Dutch, thereby ensuring that no more Latin was quoted during the entire debate. While the story was only mildly amusing, it served a deeper purpose, allowing Geoffrey Alexander Gillon to subtly remind his audience of his family ties to the shaping of the Constitution.

  “I am surprised to see you,” said Geoffrey Alexander Gillon, rolling his wheelchair out from behind a massive mahogany desk. His office was the entire back half of the second floor of the converted warehouse. Walnut bookshelves lined the long walls. Diplomas, citations, honorary degrees, and separate photos of Gillon with three previous presidents filled the spaces around the bookshelves. The wall at the far end of the office was glass, mirrored to the outside, giving a spectacular panoramic view of the harbor while keeping the privacy within.

  “Helen deMarionne arranged this within the last twelve hours. I doubt you are surprised.”

  “Prickly, aren’t you.” The rubber of his wheelchair tires squeaked on the hardwood floor at his turn around the desk. Gillon continued, crossing the expanse of the office over several hand-hooked rugs until he stopped short of me. “What I meant, as you well know, was that I find it a surprise that you have returned to Charleston.”

  “Worried you’d made a mistake in the legal agreement I signed before I left?”

  He chuckled as if I had meant the remark in good humor.

  During his trial years, Gillon had learned to play it folksy in front of jurors and was unable, or unwilling, to lose his habit of dragging his vowels more deliberately than most. He also favored his own interpretation of the southern look, which, if he had worn a white suit with a dark bow tie, would have made him a replica of Colonel Sanders of KFC. He had a square, heavy head, thick white hair, a mustache almost wide enough to form handlebar curls, a trim goatee, and round spectacles. The decorum of his political office ensured, however, that he did not wear white, but instead a well-pressed gray suit with a rose-colored dress shirt and navy tie.

  He had a file folder in his lap, one that I knew had been there before my arrival, because when I had entered the office, Gillon had been twiddling a pen and had not pulled anything off the desk before approaching me.

  Gillon offered me the folder.

  “Is the fact that you haven’t offered me a chair deliberate?” I asked, ignoring the folder in Gillon’s outstretched hand.

  Gillon’s sudden smile gave me a wide view of thousands of dollars’ worth of porcelain-capped teeth. I saw, too, the powder of makeup on Gillon’s nose. Smelled the wafting expensive cologne.

  “Can’t escape my trial-lawyer habits,” Gillon said. “It’s a real advantage to make the opposition uncomfortable with my handicap. And I didn’t know which way this meeting would go.”

  “Make it easy on us,” I said. “Cut the garbage. Unless you want me parading my handicap too. You do remember it, don’t you?”

  I stared at Gillon until he looked away. He gestured with the folder at a black leather chair behind a coffee table. The sitting area of the office.

  I moved to the chair. Gillon followed with a slow roll of rubber tires. When I was settled, Gillon offered me the folder again. I took it, opened it, glanced at it briefly, and set it down on the coffee table.

  “Yes,” I said. “Your point?”

  “That’s why I am surprised that you have returned to Charleston. By breaking the conditions of agreement, you now forfeit a sizable monthly stipend. And, I might add, leave yourself open to unfiled criminal charges.”

  “You ever offer visitors a cigar?”

  “In a humidor on the bookshelf on my desk,” Gillon said. “While less hospitable than fetching one for you, it would be more expedient if you helped yourself.”

  “Sure,” I said, rising again, “especially since a man with one good leg and half of another is faster than a man in a wheelchair.”

  I found the cigars—Cuban as expected—and a cutter and a silver lighter. I returned to the chair, clipped the end of the cigar, sniffed the fresh tobacco, and twisted the cigar in a slow circle as I lit the end.

  “Obviously you are an aficionado,” Gillon said. “You should enjoy this one. I have friends in Miami and—”

  “The whole cigar image thing is a crock,” I said. “I can’t imagine a fouler way to pollute taste buds. Or anything more absurd than a pack of men using them as weapons of posture.”

  “Then why . . . ?”

  “Cigars have their uses.” I picked up the manila folder. I held the glowing cigar tip to the end of it and blew gently until flames curled upward around the paper. I held the folder until half of it had blackened in the rising flames, then dropped it on the coffee table.

  “This table is an heirloom!” Gillon sputtered, whacking the flames out with a magazine. “Have you lost your mind!”

  “Just angry.” I ground out the cigar on the heirloom table. “And getting angrier. You’re the first person Pendleton would have called after I visited him yesterday. You know there’s nothing left to give that agreement any power. And you know why I’m angry. So I shall repeat myself. Cut the garbage.”

  Blackened wisps of paper floated in the air between us. Gillon stared in disbelief at the remnants of a fifty-dollar cigar on the coffee table and the circle of burned varnish where I had stubbed the cigar.

  “Fine, then,” Gillon said, raising his head. “No games. Helen called and said you had received a letter that brought you back to search for your mother. Tell me about this letter.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sure Pendleton informed you about the police report that came with that letter. That’s the only thing you need to know. I’m not here to give you answers. I’m here to get answers. About my mother. You do recall my mother.”

  “Now you’re the one playing games. I was robbed, shot, and left to die on the very same weekend your mother ran away. One of those shots hit my spine. This wheelchair reminds me every day of that weekend. And of the fact that more time and resources were spent on finding your mother than on the men who broke into my home and shot me.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I was ten at the time. You were still years away from being the man behind a set of papers that put me into exile.”

  Gillon looked steadily into my eyes. “You were well taken care of. At least I fought them for that.”

  I stared back until Gillon was forced to look away.

  “Tell me about my mother,” I said. “Tell me about that weekend. I understand from Helen that she stopped here to get my trust fund money from you.”

  Gillon did not look up from the buffed fingernails of his manicured hands where they lay flat and still on the thighs of his useless legs.

  “There’s not much I can tell you,” Gillon said. “All I can remember unusual about the afternoon—aside from h
er insistence on getting the trust fund money immediately for reasons that became clear soon after—was the tiny gash on her cheek. I recall it well because I remember thinking it needed one or two stitches to heal properly. And I remember she seemed upset when I asked why she wanted to leave town so suddenly.”

  I hid a shiver of anguish. At his recollection of the gash on her cheek. And why she was upset. That was my secret. And my sin. I would share neither.

  “What seems more strange to me is that you complied with her request,” I said. Helen’s words of the evening before came back to me: “I do know your mother had leverage over the Barrett family. And used it.” “Why would you write her a check for such a large sum? And why on short notice as she demanded?”

  Gillon’s face hardened. “My advice is that you leave this alone. Your mother made her choice when she ran from Charleston. I’m sure she now has regrets, wherever she is. She must wonder whether the money she stole was worth giving up her home, her son, her future grandchildren. But obviously the regrets haven’t been strong enough to bring her back.”

  “You’re still playing games. Helen deMarionne would not have sent me here without a reason. By disappointing me, you will disappoint her. How much does she contribute to your campaign war chests?”

  “Nasty,” Gillon said. “Interested in going back to school? You’d be a great lawyer.”

  “I’m interested in what you know about my mother. Tell me. It will keep Helen happy.”

  “What could I possibly help you with?”

  “My mother’s maid was her best friend. A Gullah woman. She’d know best what my mother was thinking before she ran away. Only she disappeared immediately after my mother left. I’d like to find her now.”

  A picture came into my mind. Ruby. Our maid. Laughing over a cup of tea as she sat with my mother in the kitchen. It seemed they were always laughing together. I hadn’t found it strange because that’s the way it had always been between the two of them.

  Instead of answering, Gillon backed his wheelchair away from the coffee table that separated us. He rolled to the window and looked out over the harbor for several minutes.

  “Indulge me first,” Gillon said. He wheeled around and faced me. Against the sunlight, he was a dark outline, a hunched figure. “The canceled cashier checks of the monthly payments you received, all of them were sent to me to keep on file. For a few years those cashier checks were returned from banks in different places across the world, then one spot repeatedly for another few years. With interest and adjustments for inflation, over two million dollars. What did you spend it on?”

  “What makes you certain I spent it?” I asked. “At the beginning when you actually sent the checks. I haven’t seen one for the last two years.”

  “I only sent what Helen gave me.”

  “She’s broke? The great Helen deMarionne?”

  He ignored my question. “I know you spent it the same way I know you don’t own any real estate or a boat or anything that’s a tangible asset. Until it becomes cash, money leaves a trail, Nick. A musky lion spoor that trackers like me with connections into banks and government can follow like phosphorus footprints under a full moon. Where did all that cash go? Drugs? Women? Gambling?”

  “What I did with it is my own business,” I said. “I paid a high enough price for it.”

  “It has been a long time since any of my indulgences were refused.” Strangely, he smiled. “The Mount Carmel African Methodist Episcopal Church.”

  He answered my unspoken question. “Ruby. You can find her at the church.”

  I knew where it was. I was in no mood to thank Gillon, so I didn’t. I walked to the door, doing my best to hide my limp. When I reached the door, I stopped. “You’re the one who found me, then. Through the cashier’s checks that you traced.”

  “Yes,” Gillon said from the window. “For another lawyer’s client.”

  “Then you know who sent me the police report and letter.”

  “No. This lawyer insisted on keeping his client confidential. At the time, I did not care. I was well paid for finding you. Something I now regret.”

  “Stirrings of a conscience?” I asked.

  “A conscience is too noble and too foolish,” Gillon said. “Until Pendleton called me after your visit, I had no idea you would receive what you did once that client found you. Those secrets haven’t been buried long enough.”

  I opened the door.

  “Take my advice,” Gillon called to me. “It’s not often I offer it without my extravagant hourly fee. There are men of great power in this city who do not want the past revisited. These men may be old, but their kind of power does not necessarily diminish in tandem with hearing and eyesight and thinning hair.”

  “Men like you?” I asked.

  “Men like me.”

  Chapter 12

  “This chair,” I said. “A recent acquisition?”

  I’d carried it to the back of the antique shop. It was the high-back mahogany chair I’d noticed the day before, the one with talons for feet, each clutching a smooth ball.

  Glennifer was in the act of pouring tea into a fine china cup. Two other cups with matching saucers waited beside it on her desk. I’d arrived a few minutes earlier, much to their unfeigned delight. They each wore a black dress; all that had changed from their appearances the day before were their necklaces. On anyone else, I would have suspected jewels that large to be fake. Not, however, on them.

  “You do have a good eye for antiques, Nicholas,” Elaine said in answer to my question. Pencils stuck out from various places in the netting of her piled hair. She had a habit, it appeared, of putting a pencil in, then forgetting about it as she reached for another from the desktop. “To remember it after all these years away is a remarkable feat of—”

  “Laney!” Glennifer stopped in midpour. “Remember our little talk yesterday? No more information for this young man unless he gives us some in return. If we ran our shop with this same kind of careless regard for value, we’d be even more impoverished than we are.”

  I smiled. “So it did belong to Helen deMarionne.”

  Glennifer sighed defeat and resumed pouring the tea.

  “Glenny?” Elaine asked.

  “Why stop now?” Glennifer answered. “The damage is already done, my dear. He was smart as a young boy and obviously that hasn’t changed.”

  “Helen brought it in two months ago,” Elaine said to me. “Really, we gave her more than we should have, but it’s a fine piece. Unmistakably unique, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I believe,” I said, “that it must have been painful for her to sell it.”

  “Most definitely. We’ve made great profits selling her items over the years, watching her use money instead of bloodline to hold her head high. To that woman, fine furnishings are a way to purchase the heritage she never had. It is my impression they are more important to her than life.”

  Indeed.

  **

  I was thirteen. In the deMarionne mansion. In the dining room. A fan clicked on its bearings above me, its wide, painted wooden blades bleeding away some of the summer heat.

  I was on my knees, trying to pick up the pieces of a Greek statuette, when Helen deMarionne walked into the room. From my perspective so close to the floor, I mainly saw legs perched on red high heels, for she wore a short thin-strapped summer dress. Behind her was Lorimar Barrett, Pendleton’s father. They’d been sitting on a screen porch hidden from the world. He had a crew cut, matching the one in photographs of his brother, the man my mother had married, then betrayed with my conception. Lorimar wore a white shirt beneath suspenders, his tie loosened. He held a glass of bourbon, swirling it against ice and watching me with disdain as Helen interrogated me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It fell,” I said lamely.

  The sound of it breaking against the tile floor of the dining room had brought her in.

  “Obviously it fell,” she said. “And obviously it broke. Do y
ou think collecting the pieces and gluing them together will somehow restore it?”

  “I—”

  “You nothing. That was worth five thousand dollars. Do you hear me?”

  Some of the smaller houses in Charleston sold for less than that. I knew this because Pendleton tracked real estate in an obsessive way. Already, with his father’s encouragement at the Barrett dinner table, he talked about buying slum properties and renting them.

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “I hear you,” I repeated.

  “What I meant,” she said, moving her hands on her hips, “was how are you going to pay for it?”

  She knew what I knew. I did not have a hope of finding five thousand dollars.

  She glared at me, waiting for my reply. My humiliation was completed by the presence of Lorimar Barrett, who merely stared at me with half-lidded eyes and sipped his bourbon.

  Worse, my own eyes flicked in the direction of Helen’s legs, drawn by the tanned skin over smooth taut muscles. I gulped at involuntary pubescent speculations, inappropriate at any time, and certainly not somewhere I would have directed thoughts deliberately in this moment.

  When I lifted my eyes to hers again, she stared directly into my eyes, as if she had read my mind.

  I felt myself blush.

  She spun, swirling that short skirt. “Let’s go,” she said to Lorimar. “We’ll have the maid clean it up. I suppose one shouldn’t expect much from a boy like him.”

  Like that, they dismissed me from their thoughts.

  When the door shut behind them, Claire tiptoed in from where she’d been waiting in the kitchen.

  I was still on my knees, my stomach knotted with shame and anger.