Free Murder in the Garden District (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) by Greg Herren

had company. And if he had anything to drink.”
    She scribbled notes. “I’ll get a photo of him off the web. Anything else?”
    “The two Mrs. Sheehans have been lying to me—and probably to the police. According to his campaign worker, Wendell left the office a good three-and-a-half hours before Janna and Cordelia say he got home. Janna said that he was drunk when he came in, that he drank all the time, he was drunk when he sprained her wrist and raped her. The volunteer said that Wendell was in recovery and going to AA meetings.”
    “Alcoholics fall off the wagon all the time, Chanse. But it’s weird how similar this case is to Roger Palmer’s. Two wealthy and powerful men married to younger women who aren’t from the same class, both men die mysteriously when their wives are pregnant. It’s like Roger Palmer’s death was the blueprint for Wendell’s—except for how the murder was committed, of course.”
    “If Cordelia was involved in the cover-up of Roger Palmer’s murder, why not use the same setup for her son?” I said. “Who’d remember after all this time? Why all the nonsense with Janna’s gun?”
    Abby finished her Coke and signaled the waitress for another.
    “Think about it, Chanse. Suppose it wasn’t premeditated. Even if Wendell ate dinner at the Delacroix like he always did, how long would that take? An hour? Two, tops? There’s still a lot of time unaccounted for that night. Who’s to say what went on in those hours before the gun was fired? The only people who know are Cordelia and Janna—and Wendell, but he’s not talking any time soon—and they’re doing their little finger-pointing shtick. It’s really not a bad legal strategy. Unless one of them confesses, who knows which one really did it?”
    “But Cordelia ordered me to find other suspects, to spare the family name.”
    “Suppose what Janna said about Wendell was true,” Abby said. “Suppose he did rough her up every now and then when he was drinking. Wendell has dinner and then goes straight home from the office. He starts to drink. And the more he drinks, the more abusive he gets, till Janna shoots him in self-defense. But she’s also pregnant. The last thing in the world Cordelia wants is for her grandson to be born in jail. So the two of them come up with a story on the quick. Cordelia wipes the gun, then fires it into the floor to make her story seem right.”
    “Janna tested negative for residue,” I countered.
    “Please. Anyone who watches CSI or Law and Order knows all you have to do is wash your hands in bleach to get rid of that—and the crime lab never tests hands for bleach. That’s why their stories don’t work. They had to think fast, and it was the best they could come up with. They had to call 911, the kids were in the house—Any chance of talking to them?”
    “The women aren’t taking my calls, and anyway I doubt they’d let me talk to the kids.”
    “You can’t not talk to them, Chanse. If someone else killed Wendell, that someone had to be in the house. There’s your pretext, to see if they noticed or saw anything out of the ordinary.”
    “Maybe I should give you a raise,” I said. “You know, we only have their word for it they hated each other.”
    Perhaps there was some friction in the beginning—there was no doubt in my mind Cordelia wouldn’t have wanted Wendell to marry Janna. But in the years since then, they’d lived together in the same house. They’d had to tol’rate each other. Was it impossible to believe they could have become friends? Or if not friends, allies? Janna was stepmother to Cordelia’s only grandchild, and Janna’s son was being raised under Cordelia’s roof. And now Janna was pregnant with Cordelia’s grandson.
    If Wendell was drinking, and violent—there’d be a medical record somewhere of Janna’s sprained wrist to back her story—it wasn’t a stretch to think he could have become a danger to Janna’s unborn child. From there, it wasn’t