Death of a Political Plant (24 page)

I
T TOOK A FEW MOMENTS TO RE
cover from the call to the Goodrich campaign headquarters; it was always an effort for her to lie, and worse this time, for her lying had probably done her more harm than good.

With the afternoon waning, she realized she had to hurry on to the next item on her list, namely, the printed question on her notepad,
WHO ELSE KNOWS ABOUT LANNIE
??? Tom Paschen hadn’t given her
much additional information about the woman. She needed to know more. But where to get additional facts?

The answer came quickly to her: Mary Mougey, who knew everyone in the Washington area in a way that was incomparable. Asking people for money, as Mary did, brought out the best and the worst in them, and Louise was certain that the affluent Lannie had been approached to donate money to Mary’s world hunger campaign.

Anyway, it was high time to try to reach Mary in St. Maarten and talk over Jay’s death. The Mougeys should be back from their sailing trip by now. It was cocktail time in the Caribbean; they would surely be at home, for Richard was an exuberant drinker and Mary didn’t mind a few herself.

This would be a dicey call, too. Louise got up from the patio chair and paced the flagstones, phone to her ear. Mary answered. “Oh—Louise,” she said briskly. “Hold on.” Was her neighbor’s voice just a trifle aloof when she found out it was Louise calling? Or was Louise imagining things because she felt so guilty? Was all of this going to come between her and her friend?

But no, Mary’s voice was all graciousness when she returned to the phone. “My dear, sorry for being brusque. I had Detective Geraghty on the other line, and I told him you were trying to get through—we were finished talking, anyway. What a terrible thing to happen! I’m so sorry to hear of your friend’s death…”

Louise quickly explained to Mary how Jay came to be staying at her house in the first place. Then, she launched into an effusive apology, almost as elaborate as the Victorian banquette of flowers at the White House.

“Don’t apologize, my dear; it’s just one of those terrible
things. Detective Geraghty said it could have been an accident, or it could have been … murder. It’s just bad, either way.”

“Oh?” said Louise, not following her.

“If an accident, it has to be Oscar’s fault. If murder, well, then I know you will somehow be involved—and that is not always good, as we both know.”

“Now, just who’s Oscar?”

“Oscar’s the name Richard gave to that dratted bronze bird near the pool. After Oscar Wilde, you know: a silly little association that doesn’t make much sense, actually. I had a feeling that statue was in a bad place. Detective Geraghty did not mention anything of the kind but I wonder if your friend could have borrowed a bottle from Richard’s wine cellar and—perhaps imbibed a little too much.”

How perceptive the woman was. Actually, Geraghty had found a discarded wine bottle in the kitchen trash. She was thankful it hadn’t been Chateau Rothschild, or Louise would owe the Mougeys a bundle.

“It wasn’t an accident, Mary. The man’s computer and disks were stolen, and he was onto a big story. Very big. That’s another reason I called, to ask you about somebody. Lannie Gordon: Do you know her?”

“Oh, Lannie.” The cold but polite tone discounted Lannie and put her in Mary’s spiritual trash barrel. “She’s a hard sell when it comes to charitable giving.”

“But I thought the tobacco people were big givers.”

“Bigger than ever these days. Various individual tobacco companies give up to one percent of their pretax income to hunger programs like ours, plus arts and education. But Lannie is on a different wavelength. She’s working for the tobacco industry as a whole. She’s more interested in who’s getting elected to office. Tobacco’s had a rough go lately, as you well
know, and there’s nothing Lannie would like better than a president who likes to light up a cigarette.”

“Does Congressman Goodrich smoke?”

“I hear he does, and, more importantly, that he’s very sympathetic to tobacco interests.”

“Lannie was Jay McCormick’s former wife. Do you think she is capable of harming someone, an ex-husband, for instance, who has defeated her in a legal suit for custody of a child?”

“Lannie was McCormick’s former wife—and there’s a child involved? How sad for the child. She is not bad, Louise. In fact, I could see liking her if she were associated with someone else. She is just caught up in a business that has its own agenda. She would never get her hands bloodied, so to speak; she has too much to lose. That woman makes close to a million dollars a year.”

Louise did a quick mental calculation: Lannie made about fifteen times as much as she did with her two jobs.

“Thanks, Mary. I felt a certain empathy for the woman myself, though I could see she can be tough as nails.”

“So you’re sleuthing again, Louise. We’ll be back home in a few days, and I’ll be delighted to go out on the detective trail with you. In the meantime, I want to commiserate with you on the loss of your dear old friend. And there’s one more thing I need to talk about.” She paused. “Louise, how can I say it? I hear these lurid accounts from police regarding the body, I mean, Jay. I hate to upset you with them, but yet there are the living to be considered. Uh, Jay floated in my pond all night, I guess, until you found him. The police also gave me some garbled story about hamburger scraps fed to my koi.”

Louise had an intake of breath. Why did they have to mention Jay’s fast-food dinner scraps?

“I’m afraid so.”

“Well, if it isn’t too crass to bring up at a time like this, how have the koi survived it all?”

Louise realized she hadn’t fed the fish all day.

“I think they’re doing just fine,” she answered smoothly. “But just for insurance, I’m going to have a koi doctor look at them and be sure they’re okay.”

Then her call waiting buzzed, and Louise was frankly grateful, for her falsehoods about the fish were stressful. She devoutly hoped that she wouldn’t have to manufacture more of them.

“Hold on, Mary, I’ll be right back.” When she put the second call on the line, a quavery young voice said, “I’m Melissa McCormick, Mrs. Eldridge.” Louise’s heart leaped in her chest and her feet came off the chair.

She scribbled the girl’s number down on her pad. “I will call you right back,” she promised Melissa. “Don’t go anywhere.” Then she flashed back to Mary Mougey.

“Hi, Mary, I’m back. A friend of mine is a koi doctor—he’s an expert on them. He’ll make sure that yours are nice and healthy.”

“I’ve never heard of a koi doctor. How kind of you, my dear,” said Mary. “See you soon.”

“And Mary, that call on the other line—I think it could be a break in the case.”

“Wonderful. Go for it, Louise! But do be careful.”

S
HE TAPPED IN THE PHONE NUM
ber that Jay McCormick’s daughter had given her. The phone rang only once before Melissa answered. “Hello!” Breathless. A small clattery noise indicated that someone else had picked up another extension.

“Hello—”

“Hold a minute,” interrupted the girl, as if talking to a friend. She was a canny one, just like her father had said.
Louise could hear a pleasant conversation in the background, obviously a smooth attempt to assure the other person, perhaps a housekeeper, to stay off the extension phone.

How did this thirteen-year-old become so crafty? Was it genetic, straight through from father to daughter?

Melissa returned to the phone. Still as if talking to a girlfriend, she said loudly, “It’s cool you called. Gotta see you. Can we get together?”

“Well, I’m in my home south of Alexandria.”

“I—hold on another sec.” Louise could hear only silence, as the girl perhaps checked out to see who might be listening on the phone extensions. Louise remembered jay saying that Lannie and Melissa lived in a huge house overlooking the Potomac.

After a couple of minutes, Melissa returned to the line. “Whew! She’s gone home. The maid, I mean. I live way out in Great Falls. How will we ever get together?”

“Why don’t I drive up right now? It should only take about a half hour.”

“You would do that? That’s cool.”

“Melissa, you have been told about your father, of course.”

“Yes.” The girl’s voice choked. “Mom told me last night, after she visited the morgue to be sure it was him. And now you and I just have to meet. I’m following my Dad’s instructions.”

“He told you about me?”

“Yes. But we can’t be seen together, so let me meet you at the beginning of our street, okay? There’s a little park where you can pull your car in.” She gave Louise exact directions to her house.

“I’ll see you there.”

Louise hopped into her Honda wagon, rolling down the windows because the air conditioning had broken down again. She drove through the crowded northbound traffic of Route One, which was becoming more gentrified each year. The two-hour sleazy motels, the halfway houses, the down-at-the-heels trailer courts, the fortune-teller ensconced in an old house, and even the one-of-a-kind Dixie Pig barbecue restaurant with its pig-graced sign were all threatened by encroaching fancy town house developments. It made Louise rather sad. She liked the diverse character of the Route One strip and hated to see the entire area homogenized, the only people left with whom to interact the upper middle class, who sometimes bored her to tears.

Then she caught the Beltway, filled with Friday going-home traffic, until the turnoff onto the Memorial Parkway that would take her to Great Falls.

Things now had been set in motion. No matter what the police had done or not done, she herself had learned a little more today about the people who might have harmed Jay. And now, through none of her own efforts, but rather through the dead man’s wiliness, she might get a genuine lead from his daughter.

But an uncomfortable feeling kept dogging her. Paul Mendoza, the Sacramento reporter Al Kirkland had mentioned, would soon be contacting her. And she didn’t doubt that other reporters were soon going to make some connection between her and Jay. For one thing, she hadn’t asked the police to withhold that kind of information. And just the words “Sylvan Valley” conveyed memories for the media of the mulch murder. Unfortunately, that severed body had been discovered in leaf bags Louise had pinched from her neighbors for yard
mulch. It was one thing to try to find Jay’s killer, and another to be involved publicly.

She was also quite humble about what she could learn about this affair. For instance, how could she possibly breach the Goodrich campaign and find out which of the three men might have done jay harm: Upchurch, French, or even Rawlings?

Louise turned off the parkway onto a narrow secondary road. This quiet neighborhood, only a few blocks from the parkway, was protected with signs that kept commercial vehicles and most ride-by traffic out, making it into an almost private enclave. Louise missed a turn, and took the next street, although it was one-way and had a DO NOT ENTER sign. She entered anyway, and within a few blocks saw the small, grassy public park Melissa had described. She pulled her car onto the side of the narrow road.

The girl soon appeared, taking her time, playing a role. Laughable looking, really, with her tinted sunglasses that were so huge that they must have been filched from her mother. Her hair was curly and long, a glorious strawberry blond, a combination of Jay’s pale blond and Lannie’s red hair, and her thin face behind the sunglasses was pale and anonymous, like her father’s. Her slight frame reminded Louise of her own daughter Janie about two years ago, before Janie grew taller and rounded out with breasts and hips. The overalls and T-shirt gave Melissa a kind of small scarecrow look.

With rolling hips, she slouched toward Louise’s car like a miniature movie star. Smoothly, she whipped off her sunglasses, only to reveal pale blue, vulnerable child eyes. Then her patina of sophistication abruptly cracked, and she became a kid again. “Mrs. Eldridge, is that you?” she asked timidly.

“Yes. Melissa, I’m so happy to meet you.” Louise extended her hand, and the girl formally shook it.