Death of a Political Plant (17 page)

L
OUISE HAD BEEN RAISED IN A
home with a stubbornly honest father and mother. Straightforwardness was honored, and lying was out of the question. But that was more than two decades ago. Since then, ambiguity, indirection, and just plain lying had come to seem less odious in her eyes. After her exposure to Bill’s world as an undercover agent, she began to think of lying as a pragmatic tool. Agents, after all, had the “right to
lie,” provided it was “in the best interests of the United States.” An agent’s wife could not help but yield to this culture.

Bill had occasional troubles melding an ethical personal life with his job as a spy. Now, the scum of prevarication and deceptiveness had splashed onto her, and she didn’t even recognize it as wrong, except at certain moments. Sometimes, when she sat in the Presbyterian service on Sunday and listened to her minister talk about honesty and truth, she could make the fine distinctions, and her heart would cry out for the simple, good old days of her youth, when black was black and white was most definitely white.

Now, she sat in the gloom of the family room, with the wind outside pulling in a major storm, whipping the trees and throwing small debris against the windows. It seemed only appropriate that it should storm on the day that Jay was found dead.

She was locked in the house all by herself, safe from everyone but herself. Crucial evidence sat in a folder on her lap and she knew the honest thing to do was to turn these papers directly over to the police.

But her past all came together. The police’s misreading of evidence that had put her in jeopardy in the recent past. Her growing penchant to handle every situation for herself. And a looser personal standard.

These were the reasons she was going to tuck these papers away for a few days until she had a chance to think about who killed Jay McCormick. After all, what was the alternative? She could picture the stolid Morton querying her on the folder: “How do I know you didn’t put these papers there yourself? When did you find this? Why didn’t you know they were
there?” By the time he was done, she would feel as if she were the perpetrator.

But that wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. The police might not take this evidence seriously, for it reeked of anonymity. Her friend’s murder could go unsolved if the police discounted it, and that was what she was afraid they might do.

Clutching the folder, she got up, unlocked the door, and went out to the toolshed, the wind battling her all the way. There, she took a shovel from its place and went to the garden. If Jay could hide evidence, so could she.

She needed Jay’s story, and hoped against hope he had made a backup disk and left it somewhere around their property. Starting with the house and then moving to the addition, she searched in every nook and cranny, including in her and Bill’s plastic disk containers, and behind pictures. Remembering her friend’s nightly peregrinations around the outside of the house, she knew she should check the yard, too, and was grateful the rain had not yet started. With the wind buffeting her, she made a thorough search, hoping to find any little clue, even a bit of disturbed mulch, that would indicate someone had hidden something.

She even wandered down to the bog garden with its robust skunk cabbages still flourishing and eager for rain, their golden spathes glittering whenever brief rays of sun shone through. No, it was too swampy for anything other than a bullfrog to be hidden here. Returning to the front yard, she looked longingly across the street. Yellow police tape still surrounded the Mougey property. She had to get over there and search, but how and when?

Her cordless phone rang and she pushed the “talk” button. “Hello?” No one responded, and then there was a click. She stood dead still. The click confirmed the fear in the back of her mind: Just by being Jay’s friend and by giving him room in her house, she was more involved in his death than she had been willing to admit.

The enormity of being mixed up in another murder made her feel faint, and she headed for the Stonehenge bench that Bill had fashioned for her out of three thick flagstones. Sitting with shoulders drooping, phone still in hand, she felt a sense of entrapment. It wasn’t fun, being scared first in her own backyard and now in her front yard only twenty feet from a suburban street. In a few moments her strength had returned and the faint feeling began to subside. She tucked her phone away in its pocket and walked slowly back to the house. That’s what she got for carrying a damned phone anyway: not a measure of safety, as some women thought, but an opportunity for crank calls from God knows whom.

As if to mock her, it rang again as she was entering her house. The wind slammed the front door closed behind her and she jumped in alarm. Furious now rather than frightened, she barked into it, “Give your name, coward.”

“My name is Martha Eldridge, and I’m not a coward. Hi, Ma. What’s the matter, are you on the rag?”

“Oh,
GOD
,” said Louise, and went over and sank down on the living room couch. “Martha, darling.”

“Ma, don’t say ‘Oh, God.’ You sound like Diane Keaton in a Woody Allen movie. Come on, I know what’s wrong. I knew the minute I heard a story on the noon news report about a murder there. The words ‘violent death,’ ‘northern Virginia,’ and ‘fishpond.’ It was all I needed to figure that you could be involved. And then there it was, a mention of where
they found the body, the backyard of a house in ‘trendy Sylvan Valley’ Why, Ma?”

Another rebuking child. Her nineteen-year-old sounded like a stern judge in a courtroom, and Louise felt very much like a defendant. “Martha, it was none of my doing, I swear. I simply discovered the body. They didn’t put my name in that story, did they?” If the radio news had used her name, that may have been the reason for the crackpot phone call just now.

“Your name wasn’t mentioned. So who is this guy John McCormick? It rang a faint bell, but I couldn’t remember. Isn’t he one of your old beaux?”

“Yes. Don’t you remember the time you and Janie asked me if there were other men in my life besides your dad? And I told you about some sweethearts, including Jay.”

“Jay. Yeah, now I remember. He was one of the more interesting-sounding ones. Didn’t you do antiwar stuff together back in the seventies with him, and make out in art theaters?”

“Kissing, only kissing.”

“Oh, yeah? Too bad a guy like that had to be killed.”

“It’s very mysterious, Martha. It could have been an accident, but I don’t think so. I’m so glad you called because I have absolutely no one to talk to about this except the police. The rest of the world has gone on vacation, and your father is in Europe. But home tomorrow, thank heavens.”

“Now listen to me,” said her eldest, with the insightful tone befitting a young woman who knew it all without experiencing much of it, “I want you to promise me right now. Stay out of this one. Just keep your nose clean, as that police detective friend of yours might say. Try to stay alive until Dad comes home. Is Janie there to goad you on, or is she still hammering nails in Mexico City?”

“Janie comes home with your father. And she’s loving pounding nails. Meanwhile, I am perfectly safe. All sorts of police are working on Jay’s death. It was just such a shock, Martha.” The tears threatened to fall again, but she straightened herself on the couch and refused to give way to them.

“I bet you need to lie down. Can you do that? You know you’re always better when you get enough sleep.”

“Thank you, dear, I agree. I need a nap. Now tell me what’s going on in Detroit.”

“It’s fabulous,” said Martha, and Louise could picture her, a tall girl with long brown wavy hair, actually resembling Louise quite a bit except for her father’s blue eyes, her lean frame hunched over the telephone, because Martha never relaxed when the day was still on. For a while, a tireless social butterfly; now, a tireless seeker after worthy causes. “Father Harrington’s a saint, he gives no quarter to assholes, and I love and admire him. I definitely am relinquishing my idea of women’s studies to focus in on urban studies.”

“Oh.”

“Granted, there are still a lot of women’s issues, but I’ll let someone else solve them. It turns out I love big cities and all their problems. I’m reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan and William Julius Wilson: you and Dad ought to read this kind of thing instead of whatever you do read. If we don’t solve the problem of cities, then we can’t do much for America.”

“I agree.”

“Here in Detroit where I am, almost everybody’s black. Mostly poor and black, I might add, and really wonderful people. The only whites are some of us volunteers and Father Harrington. And people are struggling to find work.”

“Are you safe, Martha?”

“My body’s not always completely safe from harm. But
obviously, neither are you in Sylvan Valley. Or at least your old boyfriend wasn’t safe. My mind and spirit are safe, and that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”

After they hung up, Louise reflected on what a wonderful girl her daughter was. She hoped Martha’s physical envelope survived so that she could pursue those dreams.

She decided she would take her eldest’s advice and crawl into bed for a much-needed nap. But then the clock in the living room chimed three and she knew she had to change her clothes and go to the police station and talk to George Morton. First, she went to the refrigerator and took the bucket of earthworms to the toolshed and measured out a wriggling mass, closed her eyes, and chopped them with a butcher knife.

The patrolman at the Mougey house looked at her strangely, but assured her they would throw them in the pool for her promptly at four.

L
OUISE
, S
ERGEANT
J
OHNSON, AND
Detective Morton sat facing each other in the cramped administrative offices of the police station. Johnson, superior officer to both Geraghty and Morton, was a quiet, intelligent black man whom she had met on the Madeleine Doering case.

Louise lost no time in making a clean breast of it; she told them everything that had happened between Gil Whitson and Jay. It was one thing to delay giving police
the ambiguous papers she’d found in the toolshed, but she wasn’t going to keep silent about anyone who might be responsible for his death. In fact, she was even having second thoughts about holding on to the memos.

Since she hadn’t wanted to implicate Gil, she added a strong caveat: “I can’t believe he killed Jay, and if he did, I am sure it was a total accident. He might not have reported it because he was too scared. But that wouldn’t explain Jay’s missing computer—unless he hid everything, computer and all.”

Detective Morton, who was recording her words in a formal statement, said sourly, “No need to draw conclusions about anybody, ma’am. That’s what the police and the courts are for.”

Sergeant Johnson leaned forward and gave her a kindly look, as if to soften Morton’s impact. “We appreciate your input, Mrs. Eldridge. Now, is there anything else that you think might help us?”

“Well, then there’s Charles Hurd…”

“Charles Hurd? And who is he?”

As she described what she knew of the young man’s role as researcher and legman for Jay, the sergeant’s eyebrows elevated. “Seems you know more about Mr. McCormick’s affairs than you first indicated. I suppose we can reach this reporter at his newspaper.”

She nodded. “I guess I should have told you all this before, but I was pretty upset after I found Jay. Sorry.”

“We understand, Mrs. Eldridge. We’ll follow up these leads. Now I need to tell you something. We had tried to contact Mr. McCormick’s former wife, Lannie Gordon, because of the daughter you told us about who has to be informed of the death of her father. When we finally got
through, Ms. Gordon was pretty concerned. She wanted to come and see the body, so she’s gone on her own to the medical examiner’s office, and then we asked her to drop by here to talk to us.”

Closure, Louise supposed. After all, she had been married to the man for fifteen years, and probably sensed he still cared for her.

The sergeant cocked his head toward the interior office window, which had a view through to the hall. “I bet that’s her right now, George. I’ll finish with Mrs. Eldridge, if you want to talk to her.”