Flowerbed of State (17 page)

She’d stopped at the edge of the grass, clasped her delicate hands together, and pressed them to her chest. As her gaze swept the park, tears welled up in her oversized eyes. She buried her face in her hands.

I crossed over to her while digging around in my backpack for the package of travel tissues I’d hoped had survived yesterday’s dip in the mud. “Are you okay?” I asked the woman and handed her a—thankfully—dry tissue.

She raised her head from her hands. Her heavy eyeliner had not smeared, despite the tears streaming down her cheeks. Sniffling, she accepted the tissue. “She—she died here,” her voice warbled.

“Pauline.” I handed her the entire package of tissues. “You knew her?”

She nodded. Her shoulders shook as she cried even harder.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, not sure what to say or do to comfort her. If she’d been a friend, I would have pulled her into my arms. Heck, if this had been my hometown of Charleston, I wouldn’t have thought twice about hugging a stranger. But since she didn’t know me and I didn’t know the mores of this city, I wasn’t sure what would be acceptable. “It must have been quite a shock for you,” I ended up saying.

“No.” She blew her perfect nose on the wad of tissues in her fist while fighting off a new wave of tears. “No, it wasn’t a shock. Not at all. I knew he’d kill her.”

M
UCH to my horror, the woman started to cry again. Not just dainty tears, but noisy, messy sobs. And I didn’t have any more tissues to offer her.

I glanced over my shoulder at the gardening crew. They were packing up their equipment. Sal gave a small wave before hurrying away with a wheelbarrow.

“Please,” I said and lightly touched the sobbing woman’s arm. “I think you should sit down.”

She nodded tearfully and followed me to a park bench under a willow oak. I’d purposefully selected a bench that put the crime scene behind us. We sat in silence watching the traffic rush by on H Street.

“I’m Casey Calhoun, assistant gardener for the White House.” I drew a fortifying breath and gently explained how I’d discovered Pauline’s body.

“Then—then you work with
him
?” She wiped her nose with the wad of tissues in her hand and turned her large eyes toward me. “You know how obsessive he is.”

“Who?”

“I’d warned Pauline not to play games with him, but she’d laughed at me, told me I had no sense of adventure, no imagination. Personally, I think she liked making him crazy. I think she liked the attention when he’d started to stalk her.”

“Who?” I asked, more forcefully this time.

“Lorenzo Parisi, of course.” A spurt of fresh anger stiffened her voice. “He killed her.”

I drew back as if she’d slapped me. “No, I can’t believe that. He’s a good guy and a great gardener.”

“Then you don’t know anything about him.”

“Perhaps you can help me understand. Perhaps you can tell me about Lorenzo and Pauline’s relationship?”

“Oh, I can tell you everything, all right, because I lived with it. Pauline was my roommate.”

She introduced herself as Isabella Cordray and, in between crying jags, described how she’d met Pauline. Isabella had recently graduated with a master’s degree in architecture and had taken an internship at a well-known D.C. design firm. She’d found Pauline through a “roommate wanted” notice Pauline had posted on the Freedom of Espresso Café’s bulletin board. The two women had immediately bonded.

As I listened to Isabella’s recounting of her two-year history of sharing an apartment with Pauline, I couldn’t help wondering about Lorenzo’s role in this story. Isabella clearly disliked him.

“They’d been dating for about a year now. I never understood what she saw in him. Too slick for his own good. Too handsome. Too sure of himself. And much, much too arrogant. You know him, you know how he is.”

When she looked to me for confirmation, I made a noncommittal sound that seemed to please her.

“About three weeks ago Pauline told Lorenzo they were over, that she’d moved on. Took her long enough. I told her to leave him after their first date, but she rarely listened to me. I thought at the time, good riddance. But the jerk kept turning up like a bad penny.

“He’d call. He’d drop by our apartment in the middle of the night, even when she was out of town. I knew from the first moment I set eyes on him he’d be trouble. I have good instincts when it comes to men. It’s like a fifth sense.”

“You mean you can taste them?” That seemed odd.

“Taste? I don’t understand.”

“The fifth sense is taste.”

“No, no. Not that.” She waved her dainty hands in the air as if she was trying to erase her words. “I mean I can tell when trouble’s brewing before it happens. Which sense is that?”

“The sixth sense, I believe.” I had to bite my lower lip to keep from smiling. “Did Lorenzo ever threaten Pauline? Did she seem scared of him?”

“I don’t think the devil himself could have scared Pauline. Like I said before, I think she liked the attention.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture Lorenzo, scorned lover, as a killer. Though I’d worked closely with him for the past three months, how well did anyone know a coworker? Could he have struck out at Pauline in a fit of passion?

I didn’t think so. And even if he had, it still didn’t explain why he would have attacked me.

Besides, the man I saw in the park, the man with the odd silver briefcase, had been wearing a baseball cap, something I’d never seen on top of Lorenzo’s head.

I rubbed my bruised temple. There were too many details about the attack I needed to remember. As I’d told the police, the FBI, and the Secret Service, I couldn’t remember seeing Mr. Baseball Cap—or anyone else—attack me. All I could remember seeing was that one black-and-white leather shoe with a lightning bolt down one side.

“Lorenzo told me that Pauline had visited him a week or so ago and given him a gift, a pair of shoes. Do you know anything about that?” I asked.

“I don’t doubt that it had happened. He’d stopped coming over lately, probably because I’d threatened to call the cops on him. Pauline hated that. She liked the attention he gave her.”

She leaned forward, buried her face in her hands, and moaned. “The lease was in Pauline’s name. There’s nothing stopping the building’s super from kicking me out of the apartment at the end of the month. I know he’ll do it. He hates me. Called me a whiny pain in the ass. And why? Because I’d complained about Lorenzo’s aggressive behavior. I told Bill, that’s the super, I told him that if he didn’t hire a security guard for the front entrance, I’d call the owners and complain. Bill acted all put out about it. Now look what’s happened. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.”

“Have you talked with the FBI about this? Have you told them what you suspect?” I bet she was the one who had convinced Special Agent Cooper that Lorenzo had played a role in Pauline’s murder.

Isabella blew out a sharp breath. “They’re about as dense as Bill. Oh, the agent I’d talked to sounded very concerned and wrote down everything I’d said in his little notebook. He’d promised to look into it. When I called him this afternoon to see if they’d arrested Lorenzo, he assured me they were working diligently on the case. But I could tell from his condescending tone that he’d ignored everything I’d told him. I handed him all the evidence he needed to make an arrest, and he dismissed it.
He dismissed me
. It’s a cut-and-dry case. I don’t understand why they’re dragging their feet.
Men!
”

I envied Isabella’s unwavering certainty about what had happened to Pauline even if it did cast Lorenzo in the role of villain.

I knew from personal experience the turmoil of grief and fear, and—worst of all—a burning need for answers a violent death can cause for those left behind, who have to pick up their own shattered lives and survive. More than three decades had passed since my mom had been taken from me in a violent flash, and the pain still burned in my chest with the same force as the day it had happened.

Last night Lorenzo had seemed shaken and desperate for answers. I knew the feeling. I’d been just as desperate for answers after my mom’s death, answers I’d never been able to find. He’d become like me, a seeker. I had to help him, to clear his name, and to find answers for him.

And for myself.

I needed to understand why Pauline had died . . . and why I was still alive.

I handed Isabella the charm Sal had found. “Have you ever seen this?”

Tears welled up in her impossibly large eyes as she cradled the golden dollar sign in the palm of her hands. “Of course,” she said. “Of course. This stupid thing. She’d come back with the charm from one of her New York trips. She got suddenly coy about the men in her life. But she was definitely seeing someone. I think he gave her this. I bet he’s married. Men are such pigs.”

“So the
P
and
B
on the back are her initials.”

She flipped the charm over and ran her long, slender fingers over the engraving. “Yes. And that’s her cell phone number.”

“Why would she scratch her own cell phone number onto a charm? Did she wear it on a bracelet or a necklace?”

“Neither. She hooked it to her laptop case. I suppose she added the phone number to protect it from loss.” Isabella shrugged her dainty shoulders. “The charm clanked against the case when she walked. I told her that she sounded like a traveling one-woman band. But did she listen to me? She never listened to me.”

I remembered the large flower-patterned bag that had been stuffed into the trash can with Pauline. Was that the laptop bag? And if so, how did the charm get into the flowerbed where I was weeding?

“Wait a minute. The charm clanked against the laptop case? Aren’t laptop bags soft-sided like my backpack?”

“Not Pauline’s. She carried this metal box like spies used to carry in the old James Bond movies.”

“A silver briefcase?” Just thinking about it made my chest tighten.

“Yes, she carried the clanky thing everywhere with her.”

It suddenly hit me. Actually, a
silver laptop case
had hit me. I remembered it clearly now. I saw that silver laptop case out of the corner of my eye right before it slammed against the side of my head. The charm must have broken off from the force of the violent impact. Which meant Mr. Baseball Cap
had
attacked me.

“Why would Lorenzo kill her and steal her laptop?” I wondered aloud. It couldn’t be him.

“Who knows? He’s crazy. Does anything he’d do need to make sense?”

Yes, it did.

Isabella didn’t care. She started to complain about Lorenzo, her apartment’s superintendent, and the police again. I was beginning to get the impression she didn’t get along well with any of the men in her life. I stood rather abruptly and thanked her for talking to me.

I walked back to the flowerbed where I’d been attacked and where Sal had found the charm. I stared at the flowers in the bed as if they could tell me their secrets.

Turner had told me that nothing important had been stolen from either Pauline or me. Had he been lying to discourage me from asking more questions? Or did they not know about the laptop?

The flowers remained silent on the matter. So with the sun at my back, I headed home.

Before reaching the edge of Lafayette Square, a disturbing sight caught my attention. A batch of mile-a-minute vines had invaded a second flowerbed near H Street. The weed’s triangular leaves pointed at me like tiny mocking fingers as their spindly tendrils stretched up, entangling themselves around the length of over a half dozen tulip leaves, slowly but surely choking the plants to death. I slipped off my backpack and found my gardening gloves.

After pulling them on, I dropped to my knees and began the slow process of removing the weeds, roots and all, taking care that I didn’t damage the tulips.

At about quarter to six I was just about finished with my task. Pulling weeds was just about the only progress I could claim so far that week. The tulips seemed to shiver with delight as I freed them from the strangling vines.

I’d stuffed the last of the limp weeds in a paper bag when I noticed Joanna Lovell a couple hundred feet away. She was standing toe-to-toe with the balding Brooks Keller. They were an odd pair, what with Joanna in that oversized pale blue flowered housecoat and Brooks in an expensive suit that had been pressed to razor-sharp creases.

I pulled off my muddy gardening gloves and gave them a shake as I watched Joanna poke Brooks several times in the chest with her slender finger. I was too far away to hear their conversation. But their body language seemed to speak volumes. Brooks leaned in toward Joanna and put his hand on her hip. At first she tensed. But as Brooks continued to talk, her pink lips relaxed into a smile.

Joanna said something and then laughed.

Brooks jerked back. Whatever she’d said, it must have been harsh. The balding CEO’s smile dissolved. He jammed a hand in his pocket and pulled out a white envelope that he shoved against Joanna’s chest.