Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) by Greg Herren

“I guess I’ll have to get used to talking about him in the past tense.” She looked at me. “We were close when we were kids, but we drifted apart after Dad died.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s normal—we had our own lives to lead, but I wish we could have stayed close, you know?”
    “What exactly happened to your father? Jonny mentioned he was killed on the job, but didn’t really go into a lot of detail about it.” I took out my notepad and uncapped a pen.
    “Well, he was barely a year old when it happened, so he never really knew much about it. It wasn’t something Mom liked to talk about, understandably.” She stared into her coffee cup. “Dad worked at the docks, for Verlaine Shipping. He was a longshoreman—he’d worked there since he was a teenager. He was helping load some really heavy machinery when one of the cables broke and he was crushed to death. It was a closed casket funeral.” She looked out the window. “I was in my junior year at Sacred Heart. Mom pulled me out of class that day. I’ll never forget it. She was crushed, just crushed. But the Verlaines were very good to us.”
    I was all too familiar with the Verlaine family of Verlaine Shipping. I’d done some work for them around the time of Hurricane Katrina, and it wasn’t a fond memory for me. They had believed their money put them above the law—and for the most part, they’d been right. Percy Verlaine, the family patriarch, had been rotten through and through—and while I’d never been able to prove it, I believed he’d had his own son-in-law murdered. He’d certainly had his niece locked away in a mental hospital for over thirty years. But he’d died—heart failure—and the only surviving Verlaine was his youngest son, Darrin. I’d heard somewhere he’d sold the company and left New Orleans.
    Good riddance.
    “It was like the whole world had turned upside down,” she went on. “There was life insurance, of course, and there was some other kind of insurance—I don’t know what all, but the company also gave Mom an awful lot of money. I don’t know how much it all came out to, but I know she paid off the house, set up college accounts for all of us—we might not have been able to go to college if not for Percy Verlaine. Well, we would have, but it would have been a lot harder. I would have had to work my way through, and thanks to them, I could just focus on my schoolwork.” She got up and refilled our cups. “Jonny didn’t go to college, of course. He flunked out of de la Salle, and Mom gave him the money to buy that terrible little house for him and that awful girl he married.”
    I hadn’t exactly been a big fan of Heather myself, but I was getting a little tired of everyone running her down. “What exactly is the problem with her? Jonny mentioned that your mother had an issue with her, too.”
    “Jonny’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, Mr. MacLeod. He’s a very sweet boy, but he’s really not terribly smart. He thinks he is, of course, but some of the scrapes he’s gotten himself into—Mom had the patience of a saint. I don’t know what I’d do if one of my boys turned out like him, but I wouldn’t be as forgiving as Mom, I can tell you that.” She sat back down, stirring sugar into her coffee. “Mom spoiled him, maybe babied him a bit much, who knows? But he was her baby, and there was a big age difference between him and me and Robby, you know, and then Dad died, and so Mom had to raise him on her own…and Robby and I were both out of the house in a couple of years, so it was just the two of them. He was never much of a student, was always on the edge of flunking out. Then he got into this fighting thing.” She shook her head. “I went once, you know—it was horrible. I didn’t want to, but Mom said I needed to support Jonny.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll never go again—and I don’t care how much money Jonny can make doing it, or if he becomes a world champion or