Murder in the Garden District (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) Read Free Page A

blackmailed and hired me to help her. She’d slept with a pair of underage bodybuilding twins and there were pictures. The whole thing had been a setup. I’d gotten the pictures and negatives back for her and she had put me on the payroll of Crown Oil as a consultant. I did quarterly checks of the security systems at their refineries and other facilities, and made recommendations for improvements. I did background checks of prospective executives and board members, drawing on my contacts and two years’ experience working in the New Orleans police department. She’d also had me check out several men she became involved with later—when you’re the richest woman in the state, you become a target for fortune hunters. In return for these services, she paid me a generous salary, more than enough to support my own investigation business and pay an assistant, considering that she owned my building and only charged me $100 a month rent for an apartment worth $1,200. In addition to the cushy consulting job, she brought me clients. I wasn’t about to upset the apple cart unnecessarily.
    I decided to get whatever basic information I could about the Sheehans and continue making notes.
    “They all lived in the same house?” I asked Barbara. “That must have been uncomfortable.”
    “It’s Cordelia’s house and she wouldn’t hear of them living elsewhere. Everything is Cordelia’s. She controls the money. Wendell had none of his own. I’m sure he hoped she’d die every day of his life. Imagine having that for your mother. I’d hang myself after twenty-four hours in that place.”
    “Did she tell you anything about what happened?”
    “Just that Janna killed Wendell, and she needed a private eye whose discretion could be counted on. She knew about you—that damned Loren McKeithen sent her to me.”
    I felt sorry for Loren for a moment. Barbara would make him pay for this.
    “I’d say Cordelia should be more worried about herself than about her daughter-in-law. She not only handled the gun, she fired it. At least, that’s her story. I take it she didn’t tell you that.”
    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