The Lincoln drew up to the curb. Dent got out and opened the back door. Bree let Ron precede her as she made the introductions. “Dent, this is Ron Parchese. Ron, this is William Dent.”
Ron ducked his chin in acknowledgment and got in the car.
There couldn’t have been a wider difference between the two men. Ron was dressed with his usual stylish elegance. He wore light gray trousers, a rep tie, and a pale yellow button-down cotton shirt. Dent looked like he’d slept in his uniform. It was more than that, Bree decided. Ron showed himself to temporals occasionally—he was good friends with Antonia and he seemed to like Cordelia Eastburn, the local district attorney. To them, he appeared as he’d first appeared to Bree: a blond, well-dressed professional with a long-term partner and an easy charm.
But Ron had a subdued, shimmery aura. All Bree’s angels did. She had gotten so accustomed to it that she barely registered it nowadays. It was the color of sunlight in a forest. It was very noticeable when he was next to Dent. “Well, for heaven’s sake,” Bree said aloud. Thoughtfully, she folded herself into the back seat.
Ron smiled at her, a little sadly, she thought. He put his lips to her ear. “If he makes it through the program, he’ll get his light back.”
“Do you think he will?” Bree whispered back.
“Depends on him.”
“Where to?” Dent said loudly. The back of his neck was a self-conscious red.
Bree was embarrassed but didn’t have a clue how to deal with it. So she said, “We’re headed to the Municipal Building. Thank you for picking us up. You aren’t needed out at the Rattigan plantation?”
“They’re shooting on Front Street this morning. They brought the vans with the equipment about six, and they’re setting up now. I’ll be back and forth all day. But you need me, just call. I’ll come and get you.” He glanced at Ron through the rearview mirror. Ron gazed out the passenger window, ignoring Dent as thoroughly as Sasha had done. There didn’t appear to be any malice in it. Dent simply wasn’t there, in the same way that temporals didn’t notice Ron or Petru were there, unless the angels wanted them to.
Out
, Bree thought.
The poor guy is Out.
“We’re going to have to loop around Bull and go down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard,” Dent said. “The cops have closed off the west end of Bay.”
“Okay. You can drop us off on the corner. We’ll walk from there.”
He let them out a half block down from the Municipal Building.
Bree loved Old Savannah for a number of reasons, but high among them was the eclectic mix of architectural styles. James E. Oglethorpe had designed the original village as a series of twenty-four squares. Each square was to function as a mini-village, with a village office, a church, or a school among the houses, and a green park filled with trees and flowers in the middle of each square.
In the three-hundred-plus years since her founding, the city had been attacked and ravaged by pirates, damaged in several citywide fires, and occupied by General Sherman’s troops in the Civil War. Each time a part of the city was destroyed, she grew back again. So Georgian homes sat next to Greek Revival churches. French Provincial vied with Carpenter Gothic. Queen Anne held pride of place next to Victorian. Bree’s own favorite style, Southern Colonial, recalled her family’s home in North Carolina.
The Municipal Building was an exception to this charm. A six-story concrete block that just barely escaped being taken for a prison, the building sat uncompromisingly between Montgomery and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. At least the color blended in with the soft Savannah tones of the old city. The block was a yellow gray, which mellowed in the sunlight to the color of milky scrambled eggs.
“You got an appointment? You want me to wait?” Dent asked.
“No thank you. I’m not sure how long we’ll be. And it’s warming up. The walk back will do us good.”
Dent fidgeted with the steering wheel. “You want to set up a time to go out and see Kowalski? Maybe tonight? I’m off duty at four. I checked. Visiting hours are until eight.”
Bree paused halfway out of the car. “Do you think we can risk it? Will he recognize you?”
Dent shrugged. “He’s over ninety. I don’t know if it matters whether he recognizes me or not.” His face set. “I need to talk to him, though.”
“Let me see how the rest of my day shakes out. We’ll go soon, I promise you. I’ll call you.” Bree ducked her head back inside the car to look him in the eye. “Make sure your cell phone’s on.”
Dent muttered something she couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“I said, right. Okay.” He held his phone up. “It’s on.”
She caught up with Ron, and both of them entered the Municipal Building together.
The municipal courts had been in session for an hour or more, and the huge open foyer was jammed with people. A few young mothers pushed baby carriages. Middle-aged couples in jeans, sweatshirts, and flip-flops wandered around in a bemused way. A couple of lawyers in suits acknowledged Bree with a wave. Guards in the dark blue uniforms of the combined Chatham County and Savannah police forces stood against the walls, wary, their hands near their gun belts. Bree tossed her briefcase onto the moving belt at the security gate. Ron drifted past the gate and stood waiting at the elevators. So he wasn’t making his presence known this morning. She’d have to remember that if she ran into anyone she knew.
The elevator was full, and she edged herself to the back. A couple of secretaries got out on the sixth floor. One of them held the door for Bree, who shook her head, smiled, and said, “Forgot something downstairs. Thanks anyhow.” She waited while the doors closed and the car proceeded up to the seventh floor.
The doors whooshed open. Bree was greeted by the familiar sign, with the winged scales of justice in the middle of the great gold seal.
CELESTIAL COURT OF APPEALS
She followed Ron down to the heavy oak doors labeled RECORDS and into the cavernous space beyond.
Bree had developed a decided fondness for the Hall of Records. The huge room looked like a monastery (although for all Bree knew, it
was
a monastery). The walls were of cut stone, cemented together with thick mortar. The vaulted ceiling soared high overhead, buttressed by thick, enormously wide oak beams. The Gothic-style stained glass windows let in little light. The angel scribes, each dressed in the coarse brown robes Bree thought of as typical monk garb, stood with quill pens at waist-high oak desks. Flaming torches were fastened to the stone pillars with fat bands of wrought iron. The whole huge room was illuminated by an evenly distributed mellow glow, like the light around Ron. Bree couldn’t identify the source, but it generated a very restful feeling.
“If it isn’t Parchese himself.” Goldstein bustled out from between two desks. “And Bree. It’s good to see you, my dear. It’s been a while.”
“Antonia and I went home for the holidays.”
“Glad to hear it.” Goldstein was short, round, and a little untidy looking. A fringe of black hair surrounded his otherwise perfectly bald head. “Got a new case on?”
“I think we do.”
They followed him down the flagstone aisle to the very back of the room. The back wall was covered with thousands of wood cubbyholes, each containing rolls of parchment. A chest-high counter of a burled wood divided the wall from the rest of the room. Goldstein flipped up the hinged flap set into the counter and let himself inside. “I’ve been away myself, you know.”
“Really?” Bree said with interest. Did he go home for the holidays, too?
“I’m at home here,” Goldstein said in response to her unvoiced thought. “No, I was away on a task that should bring joy to the heart of your colleague here.”
“You’re not computerizing!” Ron exclaimed. “Will wonders never cease?”
Goldstein’s lower lip jutted out. He looked like a balked baby. “How did you guess?”
“Because this operation is so behind the times, Goldstein, it isn’t funny. At some point you’ve got to give up and slog on in to the twenty-first century.”
“Don’t give me that, Parchese. You didn’t guess about the computers. You knew.”
“Okay. I give. It was an agenda item for Vatican IV. I got an e-mail.”
“Hm. There
is
considerable pressure to modernize, as you call it.” He cast his eyes upward in a pious way and remained respectfully silent for a long moment. “However.”
“I knew there’d be a however,” Ron muttered.
Goldstein folded his hands over his considerable belly and gazed benevolently at them. “I am resisting. I will resist until I am reassigned. I like it this way. How may I help you?”
Bree jerked to attention. The whole records room was very peaceful, almost lulling. It’d be easy to go off in a doze here. “Yes, of course. We have a client who’d like to file a Request for Appeal. Consuelo Bulloch.”
“Bulloch,” Goldstein mused. He turned and ambled down the row of cubbyholes. “Bulloch, Alexander . . . Bulloch, Alexander II . . . Ah. Here we are. Bulloch, Consuelo.”
He brought the parchment back and laid it on the counter.
Bree picked it up and unrolled it. “Well, well,” she said after a moment. “This is very interesting.”
Ron looked over her shoulder. “How was she sentenced?”
“She’s in the first circle, for a millennium. The charges are third-degree treachery, third-degree malice, bigotry in the fourth degree . . .” She looked up. “Nothing about murder.”
“First circle,” Goldstein said. “That’s like temporal traffic court. Hardly worth your while.”
“Now, now,” Ron said. “We never turn away a client. Rather, we haven’t yet.”
Bree rolled up the parchment. “Good grief. Well, we have to proceed on the assumption that’s she’s innocent, right?”
“Florida Smith doesn’t agree,” Ron said. “She’s doing everything she can to pin Haydee’s murder on Consuelo.”
“She sure is.” This was a pickle. What if Consuelo had murdered Haydee? Bree could hardly investigate a case that might land her client a tougher sentence. Mitigating circumstances might help reduce the sentence. Get her into Purgatory, perhaps, which was a lot cooler. No manual labor, either. Perhaps her client would settle for that. “Goldstein, could we have the other Bulloch files as well?”
“Have they retained you as counsel?”
“Well, no. But the information might help us with our current client’s case.”
Goldstein tramped back to the cubicles, brought two more rolls of parchment, and handed them over. They were slimmer than Consuelo’s.
“And the file for Haydee Quinn?”
Goldstein sighed.
“Please,” Bree added.
Goldstein trudged back down the aisle with a put-upon air. His sandals slapped heavily on the stone floor. The roll he brought back was slim, too. “Anything else?” he asked. “Maybe the file on Idi Amin, which is all the way to the end of the row? And then on Xerxes II, which is all the way to the
other
end of the row and a back file, to boot?”
“If you got yourself a good IT system,” Ron began.
“Hey!” Bree said. She had unrolled Alexander junior’s parchment while the two angels squabbled. She flipped it around so that the other two could see it. “All this says is ‘Pending.’”
Goldstein made a “so what?” gesture.
“There’s nothing in this file but his personal data and this big fat red stamp that says . . . ‘Pending.’ ” Bree’s voice rose in frustration on the final word. She made an effort to lower it. “Alexander died in 1978. After working in a bank and having three kids. How come he hasn’t had his Judgment Day?”
“Obviously, there are some unresolved temporal issues,” Goldstein said. “When they’ve been taken care of, he’ll be eligible for disposition.”
“Where is he now, Goldstein?” Bree demanded.
“Limbo is as good a description as any.”
Bree unrolled Alexander senior’s file. “This one says ‘Pending,’ too. The poor guy’s father! He’s been dead a long time, too! He hasn’t had his Judgment Day, either? Why aren’t these folks guaranteed the right to a speedy trial?”
Goldstein opened his mouth to speak.
Bree held up her hand. “Stop right there. I know what you’re about to say to me, Goldstein, and I don’t want to hear it.”
Goldstein said it anyway. “What is time to an angel?” Then, “Limbo’s not so bad. I can think of a lot worse places to twiddle your thumbs. You don’t start to serve time until the sentence comes down.”
She eyed Haydee’s file with misgiving. She unrolled it. She said, “Oh hell,” which sent a rustle of disapproval around the room. She held out the parchment for Ron’s inspection.
“ ‘Pending,’ ” Ron read aloud.
“That poor woman was stabbed to death in 1952 and her soul hasn’t been disposed of yet!” Bree slapped the files together and then used them to smack Goldstein on the head. “I’m filing a complaint.”
Goldstein took a prudent few steps backwards, out of Bree’s reach. “What kind of complaint?”
“Not a complaint,” Bree said. “Forget the complaint. The issue of time is a nonstarter. I can see that right away. I’m filing a petition.”
Goldstein backed a few steps farther away. “Like your other petition? The one that demanded, what was it—‘the right to direct and unambiguous communication between counsel and client’? Good luck with that one!”
“Tell me you’re not snickering,” Bree said in an ominous way.
“No, no, no,” he said hastily. “You won’t hear the slightest snicker from me. Actually, Bree, I admire your revolutionary spirit.”
“You do, huh.”
“Just as long as it doesn’t go too far. After all . . .”
He
was
snickering, Bree thought furiously.
“Revolution has been known to be carried to excess. I refer you, of course, to case file 1.1 in the
Corpus Juris Ultima.
”
“Case 1.1,” Bree said. Her memory for famous temporal case precedents was a lot better than her recall of celestial ones. “Oh,” she said flatly. “Right.”