The Scarlet Pepper

by Dorothy St. James

  “We’re going to be planting a flower garden in Burberry Park, not attending a garden party,” I reminded her in case she’d forgotten. I had dressed in an old T-shirt and denim shorts that had faded over time. Old. Comfortable. And completely appropriate for renovating a public garden.

  Alyssa frowned as she touched the hem of the flowered sundress she wore. I eyed her strappy sandals. They’d be ruined before the end of the day, not to mention how muddy her feet were going to get.

  “These are the oldest clothes I own.” She sounded truly bewildered that I’d think there was anything wrong with what she was wearing. With a carefree shrug, she hooked her arm with mine and directed me down the stairs. “I don’t think we have time to stand around and debate fashion. I thought you said we were running late.”

  “You’re right. Besides, fashion is a debate I’ll never win with you.” Designer labels were like a second language to her, one that I didn’t speak a word of.

  “Do tell me that your Secret Service man is planning to help out today.”

  “No, he’s not. And he’s not my—I mean he’s not—oh, forget it. Jack’s not going to be there.” My cheeks burned as I remembered how he’d come down to the garden to talk with me. And only me. What had he wanted to say?

  “Interesting,” Alyssa murmured as she watched me too closely.

  “It’s not interesting, because there’s nothing between Jack and me to be of any interest.” I disentangled my arm from hers and gathered the tray of patriotic red, white, and blue wave petunias that were waiting for us on the front stoop. “And you’re driving.”

  As Alyssa drove up to the nearby park, one of the many leafy green oases dotting the city, I spotted a small crowd milling around the park’s periphery.

  Francesca and her close friend Annie Campbell were coordinating the beautification project. Many of the same volunteers working in the First Lady’s garden had signed up to help, including Senator Alfred Finnegan’s wife, Imogene.

  I suspected Alyssa had insisted on tagging along with me this morning because of Imogene’s involvement in the project.

  “You’d better let me out here,” I said. The few parking spots along the park had already been taken. Doing a delicate balancing act with the large tray, I slid out of Alyssa’s little red convertible.

  While Alyssa parked the car, I crossed the road to the park and searched the crowd for Francesca.

  She should have been easy to spot since she nearly always wore pink. This morning, the only person dressed in pink was me in a faded pink T-shirt that had been a freebie at a breast cancer awareness walk.

  Perhaps Francesca had decided to stay home to avoid facing the rumors that had been swirling around her. But if Francesca wasn’t around, that meant Annie Campbell would have to handle all the details on her own.

  Poor Annie. Unlike Francesca, Annie was rather hopeless when it came to plants or thinking for herself. In the First Lady’s garden, Annie served as gofer for the other volunteers. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her put her hands in the soil even once.

  Prepared to take a leadership role in assigning tasks, I joined the small crowd milling about. Oddly, none of them greeted me or appeared at all interested in my flat of wave petunias. Instead, their attention was focused on the yellow police tape that encircled the small park.

  A cold shiver tiptoed down my spine.

  “What’s going on here?” I called out to a police officer who had just finished tying off the last of his yellow tape to a saucer magnolia tree. With a clipboard tucked under his arm, he headed toward an opening in the tape border where another officer stood watch.

  I trotted to catch up to him. “Excuse me,” I called.

  “What?” he snapped, obviously tired of fielding questions from the public.

  “What’s happening here?” I asked.

  “I’m sure it’ll be in all the papers, ma’am,” he said, indicating that I should move away from the police tape. “Please step back. We’ve got work to do.”

  Not one to be easily discouraged, I stood my ground. “I’m supposed to meet with a group of volunteers. We’re planting a community flower garden.”

  He nodded when he spotted the tray of red, white, and blue petunias I was lugging. “You’ll have to do that another day. As you can see, the park is an active crime scene.”

  “Actually, I can’t see anything.” I rose to my tiptoes, but all the action seemed to be happening on the other side of the large bronze statue in the middle of the park. “What happened?” I asked.

  The officer glanced around the cordoned-off area and then back at me. He shrugged. “Apparently some guy offed himself.”

  “In the park?”

  He nodded.

  I was about to ask for more information when Annie Campbell hurried toward me. Her shiny red hair bounced with every agitated step. Her dark purple silk sundress was as stylishly inappropriate as Alyssa’s cute outfit. “Casey! There you are. And you brought the flowers. Aren’t they pretty? I already called the ladies and told them that we needed to reschedule. I didn’t have your number, or else I would have called to tell you not to come.”

  “Really? I thought I gave all the volunteers my cell phone number.”

  “Did you? Oh, well, I just got a new cell phone and lost most of my contact numbers. If you give it to me again, I’ll be sure to take better care of it. You can trust me on that.”

  “Oh, I trust you,” I said to boost her confidence. She always seemed so unsure of herself and apologetic of her shortcomings. “As soon as I find a place to put this tray, I’ll give you my cell phone number. Do you know what happened?”

  “Not really.” She grabbed my arm. “I think we’ll be able to see better around the corner.”

  I let her lead the way around the periphery of the park even though I should have gone back out to the street to look for Alyssa. She must have parked the car by now.

  “Have you spoken with Francesca?” I asked as we followed the yellow police tape.

  “Several times. She even called early this morning to say that she was feeling under the weather. I have to be honest with you; I think she backed out because of what Pearle and Mable were saying yesterday. I’m supposed to have dinner with her tonight. I hope to find out what’s going on then and help her make a plan for damage control.”

  “You’re a good friend, Annie. I’m glad she has you.”

  Annie lowered her head. “I hope I can do enough.”

  “I hope so, too. When I saw Francesca last night, she sounded distraught about the article Griffon Parker is going to write. But she wouldn’t tell me anything about it. The longer I spent with her, the more it seemed as if she was coming…unhinged,” I said, remembering the strange way she’d kept running and hiding.

  “Francesca? Unhinged?” Annie adamantly shook her head. “She’s the most levelheaded person I know. She knows how to handle the press. I’m sure it’s the whispering behind her back about what may or may not be ‘the scandal of the decade’ that’s getting under her skin. Francesca and Bruce are as honest as you can get in a political couple. There’s no way that Parker fellow could have anything of substance on either of them.”

  “I don’t know about that. Even if it wasn’t ‘the scandal of the decade’ Parker knows how to make it sound as if it is that terrible.” That was what he did when he went after me this past spring.

  “Oh, here we are.” Annie pointed across the yellow tape. She’d been right; we could see what was going on much better from this street.

  Beyond the yellow tape, police officers worked as an efficient team around the base of the park’s centerpiece bronze statue. An older man sat slumped on a marble step at the statue’s base. He seemed oblivious to the activity buzzing all around him. His head was bowed as if he’d fallen asleep.

  “Even Media Today can’t get away with printing out-and-out lies,” Annie reminded me. “Before going into politics Bruce used to work as a trial lawyer. He gave my late husband his f
irst job at his law firm. At the first whiff of libel, Bruce will sue, and the newspaper editors know it.”

  “I hope so. Even though Griffon Parker is a snake, his stories seem to sell papers,” I said, feeling my face heat. “He’s won plenty of awards for his investigative reports. I hate what he does and who he hurts. He’s a weasel. A weed. A sorry excuse for a human being. And—”

  “Dead,” Annie finished for me.

  Chapter Five

  Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

  —JOHN ADAMS, THE 2ND PRESIDENT OF

  THE UNITED STATES

  “DEAD?” I squinted at the policemen working diligently within the taped-off area of the small park. “What do you mean Parker’s dead?”

  Annie gestured toward the statue of some long-forgotten hero and the man slumped at its marble base. The man—not the statue—was dressed in the same tweed suit Griffon Parker liked to wear. His stark black hair was slicked back in a style that had long lost favor. His long narrow nose and leathery skin reminded me of Parker.

  All of his features matched, and yet…

  “That’s not him,” I said, shaking my head. “It can’t be. He’s like kudzu. No matter how hard you work at pulling it out, the darn thing just keeps popping back up somewhere else.”

  “People aren’t plants, Casey. And there’s no sprouting from the roots for him.” Detective Hernandez from the D.C. Police approached from the other side of the yellow tape with his hands pushed deep into his pockets. “Your friend is correct. You’re looking at the infamous Griffon Parker. But don’t go blabbing anything I’ve said just now to the press, okay?”

  A pair of stony-faced medical examiners lifted the body, carefully lowered it into a black body bag that had been arranged on a gurney, and zipped the bag closed.

  Although I didn’t feel any fondness toward the crusty reporter, and I mean none at all, I found his death troubling.

  “What are you doing here anyhow?” Hernandez asked. “Don’t tell me you listen to a police scanner in your free time and run to every reported location hoping to find a crime scene.”

  “I would never do that! I didn’t want to see this.” I rattled the large tray of patriotic petunias to make sure he noticed them. Not that I doubted the detective had missed them. “We’re planting flowers. Or we were.”

  “Bad luck, then,” he said and scratched his mustache thoughtfully.

  “I can’t believe it,” I repeated needlessly.

  The detective shrugged as if he didn’t care what I did or didn’t believe, which only drove home the fact that Griffon Parker had wilted to the point of no return. Never coming back.

  “Francesca?” Why had she been so adamant about talking about the perfect murder plot yesterday?

  “I beg your pardon?” Detective Hernandez leaned across the yellow tape and asked.

  “Did I say something?”

  “You said someone’s name.”

  “Did I? I was just—just muttering to myself.” My head felt icy cold despite the summer heat. Even as I shivered, a bead of sweat formed on my brow.

  Francesca wouldn’t have gone and done something…irreversible. Would she?

  As I stared in horror at the crime scene behind Detective Hernandez, I had to admit that I honestly didn’t know the answer to that question.

  “You may not believe this, but I—I’m not used to stumbling across dead people,” I told the detective.

  “You do seem to have a knack for finding trouble,” he grumbled.

  I’d met the hard-boiled detective three months ago after discovering a dead body in Lafayette Square. I think Hernandez was wearing the same off-the-rack gray suit and ice blue tie he’d worn the first time we met.

  Although he was well into his fifties, he had the trim physique of a much younger cop, if perhaps a bit more worn around the edges. His brown hair, the same rich color as his eyes, was streaked with gray and thinning on the top. To compensate, he sported a thick salt-and-pepper mustache that made him look as if he’d stepped out of the pages of a pulp fiction novel.

  Hernandez, with his keen eye for details and diplomatic style, often found himself in charge of the politically prickly, high-profile cases.

  He was good at his job. Very good.

  I had no doubt that in time he’d use those sharp senses of his to tease out the facts. When he did, would he end up following a trail of evidence back to Francesca?

  And me?

  “You don’t look so good, Casey. You’re not going to be sick, are you?” he asked and backed away several steps.

  “You do look awfully pale,” Annie said. “It’s the heat. You need to sit down.”

  I swallowed hard and shook my head. It wasn’t the heat. I’d spent nearly my entire life tending to gardens in sweltering temperatures. “It’s walking into the scene of a murder that has me feeling…”

  Worried.

  I glanced around, wondering why Alyssa hadn’t returned from parking the car. She would know what to say to Hernandez. Or what not to say.

  “I have no idea why anyone would want to kill Parker,” popped out of my mouth.

  “Off the top of my head, I can name at least two dozen reasons, but I don’t think that’s relevant here. So far there’s no sign of foul play. None at all. I don’t think Griffon Parker was murdered,” the detective said.

  “But he wouldn’t have—” I started to say, but stopped myself before spouting off anything that might trigger Hernandez’s sharp instincts. He’d learn soon enough that Parker wouldn’t have killed himself before publishing the damaging article that promised to destroy Francesca and Bruce Dearing.

  Hernandez stroked his thick mustache thoughtfully. “Now, Casey. Don’t go putting any crazy ideas into your head. That reporter’s death has the makings of a walk-in-the-park open-and-shut case. You know how rare those are? Very.”

  “The nice young officer on the other side of the park”—Annie gestured to the police tape that ran behind the park’s statue—“said Griffon Parker killed himself. Is that what you think happened?”

  “My officers shouldn’t be making conclusions like that. This is an ongoing investigation,” he said, giving the petite Annie a thorough inspection.

  I quickly introduced the two of them. Annie fluffed her bright red hair as she smiled at the detective. “Annie does volunteer work in the First Lady’s vegetable garden,” I added. “She also organized the group of ladies who were supposed to be planting these wave petunias around the statue today.”

  “Nice to meet you, Annie.” Detective Hernandez reached across the tape. His expression softened as he clasped her hand a moment longer than necessary. I also didn’t miss that he glanced down at her naked ring finger. “I’m Manny. Manny Hernandez.”

  Spots of color rose in Annie’s tanned cheeks. “It’s good to meet you, Manny.”

  I wondered if I should have felt slighted. He’d never invited me to use his first name. “Um…Manny, you can tell us. We’re not the press. What’s really going on here?” I asked. “Griffon Parker was having too much fun ruining other people’s lives to want to end his own.”

  He spread his fingers in front of him as if trying to hold me back. “I’m not hiding anything. It really does look like a suicide.”

  “Then what are you doing here? I thought you were a homicide detective.”

  “I am. It’s standard procedure to do a full investigation whenever there’s a questionable death. We never really know what we’ll find. Although what you see on the surface is usually exactly what happened. And that seems to be the case here.”

  “Oh.” I bit my lower lip. The team of medical examiners had taken away Parker’s body. A uniformed police officer wearing latex gloves bent over and picked up a brown pill bottle from the step where Parker had died. He dropped it into a paper evidence bag. A female officer nearby was dusting the step for fingerprints.r />
  “It’s all standard procedure.” Manny rubbed his mustache again, making it poke out at odd angles. “Procedure that we religiously follow to the letter. I don’t care what Parker wrote in his column last week, the D.C. Police has some of the best professionals out there. We know how to do our jobs, and we care deeply about the public we’re trained to protect.”

  “Parker has been attacking the police department in his column? I’m surprised. I thought he was strictly a White House correspondent.”

  “Oh, don’t be surprised. He’s done it before, usually after getting burned up over a parking ticket or something trivial like that,” Manny said.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’re telling me you haven’t read the articles? If that’s true, I bet you’re the only person in the greater D.C. area who hasn’t.”

  “After what he wrote about me and the unflattering editorial cartoons he’d inspired, I’d stopped reading anything by him.”

  “I read every word,” Annie announced. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Manny or his distinctive mustache. Her shyness seemed to fade away as she met his gaze. “I knew right away what he’d written about the D.C. Police was nothing but bunk.” She reached across the yellow tape to touch Manny’s arm. “Not a month after my husband passed away a few years ago, someone tried to break into my home. The police responded to my call practically before I’d hung up. They took up and charged the thief that same night.” Her fingers trailed lightly up his arm. “I sleep soundly in my lonely bedroom knowing that you are out there protecting me.”

  “I…um…I…” Manny cleared his throat. “Thank you, Annie. That’s kind of you to say.”

  “So the department’s been taking a lot of heat because of these articles?” I asked.

  “Have we ever! Several politicians are calling for the chief’s resignation, which is stupid. Chief Rankin is the best chief we’ve had in years. Came up through the ranks and really knows how to handle the city’s unique quirks and problems. Honestly, I’m not sad to see Parker gone.” He hitched his thumb in the direction of the statue.