The Rose Conspiracy

by Craig Parshall

  “What do you mean?” Blackstone asked.

  Julia pulled a single piece of paper out of her pile and held it in front of her.

  “Do you have the criminal incident number for the District of Columbia investigation into the Langley murder?” she asked. “I don’t mean the FBI investigation number—I am talking about the DC police report number.”

  Blackstone nodded. “I’ve got it in my notebooks,” he said. Then he got up and walked over to the bookcase where he had a line of black notebooks, each with the name and case number of Vinnie’s case typed on the label on the spine. He pulled one out of the stack and flipped through it. After a few minutes he called out the case number.

  Julia looked down at the piece of paper she was holding.

  “It matches,” she murmured.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  Julia handed Blackstone the single piece of paper.

  He looked at the top and noticed the seal of the District of Columbia Police Department at the top. Directly under it, it read, “Evidence Inventory.” Then a date. The date was the day after the Langley murder.

  And in a line under the category “Description of Item” were the words “one drinking glass.”

  “A District of Columbia police report tucked away in a huge pile of FBI evidence records,” Julia said. “Which is interesting enough in itself. But the bigger deal is the more obvious point…I think we’ve just found the missing drinking glass you’ve been looking for.”

  Julia’s eyes were wide and expressive. She had a big smile on her face.

  “Hey, this is pretty big news,” she said.

  “Good work,” he said quietly. “And you’re right. It is big news. Thanks for finding this.” He had a satisfied look on his face.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” Julia said. “What gives?”

  “You’re correct I’m not surprised,” Blackstone said in a contemplative tone. Then he added, “I wish I was.”

  Then he suggested that Julia head home for the night. Blackstone didn’t take any of the Vinnie Archmont file home with him that night, as he usually did.

  Blackstone was heating up a microwave dinner in his condo when his phone rang. It was the apartment manager.

  “Sorry to call so late,” the apartment manager said. “My kid had a baseball game tonight. What’s up?”

  “I needed to ask you something.”

  “I thought your partner, the lady lawyer I talked to—I thought she got everything she needed from me.”

  “Yes,” Blackstone said. “She did. But I have one more question for you myself. It’s important.”

  The apartment manager said, “Look, I’m kinda tired here and the wife is waiting for me at the kitchen table. And I got my son here…you sure it’s just one question?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Blackstone said. “Just one.”

  CHAPTER 55

  When Blackstone finished speaking with the apartment manager on the telephone, he collapsed on the couch in his condo to think things over. His mind was reeling.

  He was now witnessing the slow, grinding gears of the truth behind the Smithsonian crime begin to fall into place, teeth into teeth, the locking of wheels into wheels. It would be up to him to operate the fearful machinery of justice and then watch what it would reveal.

  Blackstone saw what his job was. Just a few more matters of corroboration, final bits of evidence and information, and then the curtain would rise on the final act.

  He splashed water on his face. He paced. There was the day’s newspaper on the glass-top table. He picked it up and tried to divert his mind for a few moments by catching up on the news. He hurried through the front page, the national news, world news, op-ed page. He tossed them aside and turned to the arts and entertainment section.

  There was an advertisement for a play that was showing at the Kennedy Center.

  He studied it. Then Blackstone looked at it more closely and shook his head. The irony of it was unmistakable. For a split second he even entertained the thought that it was something more than irony. The odds behind these conjoining events intersecting when they did, as he approached the trial on this particular case, seemed to take it out of the category of pure chance. But just as quickly as he considered the hand of fate—or providence—or other similar explanation, he dismissed it.

  He picked up the phone and called Julia’s home number.

  He knew she wouldn’t answer. He was right.

  “Julia, this is J.D.,” Blackstone said. “You’re probably there but not picking up. Don’t blame you, really. Listen, there is something I would like to have you see with me tomorrow night. A play at the Kennedy. Don’t worry—it’s not a date. Consider it another assignment for the Vinnie Archmont case—just a little more entertaining than the other work you’ve been doing for me. Please come with me, if you would. Let’s leave the office about six. We can pick up the dinner over at the Center. Please say yes.”

  In her apartment, Julia was curled up on her couch, watching TV, in her pajamas. Her cat was asleep next to her.

  She listened to the voice-mail message from Blackstone. She heard her answering machine go silent when the message was ended. She wiped her eyes. Then she breathed heavily and shook her head in ambivalent dismay.

  When Julia arrived at the firm the next day and clicked on the lights in her office, she saw something sitting on her desk.

  She walked over to her desktop and saw a floral arrangement wrapped in paper. She opened up the paper, revealing a vase with six red roses in it.

  There was a note attached. It read, “Julia—Please forgive my ham-handed double entendre with the six roses. And please forgive other things too. Hope you can make it tonight. J.D.”

  Stapled to the note was an advertisement ripped from the newspaper. It announced the “last night, at the Kennedy Center, for Ben Jonson’s acerbic and witty satire The Alchemist.”

  Julia took the note and the newspaper ad and walked into Blackstone’s office. His desk was covered with several trial notebooks, which he was reviewing as he prepared for the Vinnie Archmont trial. He looked up when he noticed Julia.

  “So we leave at six?” Julia said casually.

  “Yes,” Blackstone said. “They have that convenient dinner spot inside the Kennedy, the Roof Terrace. I thought we’d eat there before the show.”

  “That makes sense,” Julia said. “And I thought the half-dozen roses were clever. Six roses…‘rose of 6’ and all that.”

  “I just wanted to set the tone for tonight’s theme,” Blackstone said.

  Julia smiled, nodded, and headed back to her office.

  Then Blackstone buzzed Frieda.

  “Connect me with Lord Dee’s personal secretary over in England, would you?” he asked.

  A few minutes later Colin Reading was on the line.

  “I need to arrange a private meeting with Lord Dee,” Blackstone said.

  “Actually,” Reading said, “Lord Dee just arrived back from some meetings he had in Quebec. I know he is booked solid.”

  Blackstone didn’t miss that.

  “I understand,” Blackstone said. “But Vinnie Archmont’s criminal trial is just a few days off. There is something I need to speak to him about. It’s very urgent.”

  “All I can do is try to pass the message on to Lord Dee,” Reading replied. “No promises are being made, regrettably.”

  “Agreed,” Blackstone said. “I’ll be in my office for the rest of the day.” After that conversation, Blackstone got up, walked over to the door of his office and shut it.

  Two hours later, Blackstone received a call from Lord Dee himself.

  It was a short conversation, lasting less than five minutes.

  When it was over, Blackstone shot a quick e-mail to Frieda, giving her some instructions for the day and asking that he not be disturbed. Then he sent an e-mail directive to Jason with a short list of additional persons to be subpoenaed, some of them for the first day of Vinnie’s trial. Some
of them would be required to bring documents and records with them.

  As he looked at the subpoena list, he realized he was looking at the pivot point of the entire legal defense for Vinnie’s case.

  When six o’clock came, he tossed on his sport coat and strode into Julia’s office.

  She was already standing in the doorway of her office, purse in hand. She had changed into a gorgeous dress. Her glasses were off, and she was wearing her contacts.

  “I took the Metro over this morning,” she said. “That way we only have to worry about one car.”

  Blackstone smiled and led her out of the office, holding the door open for her, and the two of them walked to his Maserati.

  Less than an hour later, sharing a casual dinner with Blackstone at a corner table in the Roof Terrace Restaurant on the top floor of the Kennedy Center, Julia took a minute to look out through the glass wall and survey the lights of Washington DC. She could see the lights of the Lincoln Monument, and the illuminated outline of the Washington Monument with its blinking light on top of the tall obelisk.

  “I checked out Vinnie’s petition for name change she had filed,” Julia said. “After you and I talked, my interest was piqued.”

  “What did you find out?” Blackstone asked.

  “She filed it recently. Just three years ago.”

  “That would have been after her parents died in that train accident in England?”

  “Yes,” Julia said, wondering what connection Blackstone was trying to make.

  “What did she give as the reason for wanting to change her name?” Blackstone asked. “Usually there is a requirement that the petition for name change give some explanation.”

  “She said it would help her in her professional life as an artist.”

  “What was her name before the change?” Blackstone asked.

  “Wilson. That was the name of her parents. The parents who raised her—and who were killed.”

  “But she didn’t allege anything about being adopted and wanting to reclaim the last name of her natural parents? Nothing like that?”

  “No,” Julia replied.

  She pushed her plate aside and with a half-smile asked him a question. “So you said that tonight would have a theme?”

  “Yes. I’ve orchestrated this very tightly,” Blackstone said with a smile. “Like a Swiss watch. First, six roses, obviously symbolic on several levels. And now this.” And with that, he pulled out the playbill for the performance they were to see.

  On the cover of the playbill it said, “The Kennedy Center presents Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.”

  “I thought Jonson’s name was spelled the usual way,” she said. “You know, Johnson.”

  “It’s actually spelled both ways. I think the playbill’s got it right…but I really don’t know.”

  “So,” she said with a broadening smile, “there actually is something the great J.D. Blackstone, that brilliant and iconoclastic mind, really doesn’t have the answer to?”

  He chuckled and blushed a little.

  “I can’t believe it,” Julia said. “You’re blushing like an adolescent on his first date.”

  Blackstone fumbled with his silverware.

  “Okay, so the question,” Julia said, “was about tonight’s theme. Which is, what? Alchemy? I wouldn’t ever have pegged you for a guy who would give that concept any extra thought, were it not for your uncle’s ideas. So, you don’t believe that stuff, right?”

  “Yes and no,” Blackstone answered cautiously.

  “Oh, this ought to be good,” Julia chided him.

  “First,” Blackstone said, “no, on a factual basis, I don’t accept that stuff—and I also don’t go for the crank theories about the ‘area 54’ alien autopsy, the inside job on the Kennedy assassination, or Loch Ness monster either.”

  “So, where does the ‘yes’ part of the ‘yes and no’ come in?”

  “It’s like this,” he said, looking down at the table that separated them. “I have to shave every morning. As a result, I have to look at myself in the mirror. Every day. As a result I’ve thought about giving up shaving. But I don’t think that’s a logical solution. What I mean is this…in terms of my personal life…I think I need a little alchemy, or something. In other words, I need to take the base things in my life and find a way to extract some gold out of them.”

  The lights blinked overhead, signaling that the play would begin in a few minutes. Blackstone and Julia quickly stood up from the table and hurried down the red-carpeted corridors to their seats.

  Elizabethan-era theater was usually not Julia’s favorite genre. But it quickly became obvious why Blackstone wanted to see this particular play as she studied the playbill’s synopsis of the theater piece.

  Satirizing the mores and foibles of London in 1610, Ben Jonson’s play showed the work of some scam artists who took over a wealthy house vacated during the plague. One posed as an alchemist who tried to use his magic acumen as a means of bilking others.

  In the first act of the play, one of the characters announced boldly, “This is the day I am to perfect for him the magisterium, our great work, the stone.”

  “The philosopher’s stone,” Julia murmured as she sat next to Blackstone.

  As the play progressed, the theme became even clearer, even stunning. A character looked at the audience and declared, “Do you think I fable you? I assure you, he that has once the flower of the sun, the perfect ruby, which we call elixir…In eight and twenty days, I’ll make an old man of fourscore a child.”

  “ ‘Flower of the sun’—‘perfect ruby’—even the reference to the elixir,” Julia whispered excitedly to Blackstone next to her. “It’s as if old Ben Jonson has heard about the very same ‘rose of 6,’ the red flower from the ‘elixir tree’ imbedded in crystal that Horace Langley’s note talked about—and that John Wilkes Booth wrote about in his diary. Maybe your uncle’s interpretation was right after all.”

  Blackstone glanced back at Julia and nodded. Even he was impressed.

  “Okay, I have to admit,” Blackstone whispered back, “the similarities between the ‘ruby flower elixir’ reference in Ben Jonson’s play produced in 1610 and the Langley note that copied the Booth diary…” Blackstone hesitated to say it.

  But he finally did.

  “The similarities are incredible.”

  CHAPTER 56

  So you’re being very quiet,” Julia said as they walked to Blackstone’s car from the Kennedy Center after the play.

  “The premise of The Alchemist seemed hauntingly familiar,” Blackstone said.

  “No question about it,” Julia said.

  “A few decades after the first production of Jonson’s play,” Blackstone said, walking slowly next to her, “you then have Elias Ashmole, the Gnostic leader of the speculative Freemasons in England—you will recall my uncle talking about him—Ashmole, tutored by occult followers of alchemy, is then pursuing seriously himself the claims of esoteric alchemy. And his pursuit was obviously continued by Dr. Robert Plot, the professor of chemistry who was the first curator of Ashmole’s museum. It is clear that there was a group of these occult believers in the seventeenth century who really did believe they were on the cusp of some titanic discovery. And it is also clear that this wild chase for the key to physical immortality had gone on for centuries before them—perhaps for millennia.”

  Julia was listening carefully. Then she spoke up.

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Blackstone said. “What does all this tell you? I mean, in a very personal, private way. What do you feel about all that, in the quiet corners of your brain?”

  “Is this a test?” she said laughing.

  “Sort of,” Blackstone replied.

  “Well, at least you’re being honest,” she replied. “Okay. Well, you know I had religious training in the Catholic Church as a child. I suppose that always has some influence on your view on what you might describe as the ultimate is
sues.”

  “So where do you stand on immortality? On life after death—all that,” Blackstone shot back.

  “Wow,” she said with a sigh. “I thought you knew where I stood on that kind of thing, given our prior relationship…and intimacy. I thought we had talked about this.”

  “We never discussed it,” Blackstone said.

  “Are you sure?” Julia asked.

  “Yes, positive,” Blackstone replied firmly. “Believe me, I would have remembered.”

  “Alright,” Julia said, venturing ahead after a moment of hesitation. “I believe there is a God. I do struggle with the faith question. But given that there is a divine force out there somewhere, that would mean there is a spiritual dimension. And if there is a spiritual plane to existence, then immortality…eternal life…those kinds of things would be feasible.”

  “Sounds logical enough—if we assume your premise, that is. About God.”

  “And where do you stand on the issue?” Julia asked, as they reached his car in the parking ramp.

  Blackstone paused to reflect before he answered. “I think,” he responded quietly, “that Ben Jonson’s play explained it pretty well. Two main realities. First, there is historical proof of a consistent yearning, from some part of the human psyche, that crosses geography and culture and time, some part of being human that wants to reach out to the eternal—the spiritual—to achieve some kind of immortality. So as a result, we get the alchemists, and the esoteric philosophers, and the Freemasons, as well as the more traditional clergy and religionists.”

  “Okay, that’s your first ‘reality,’ then. The thirst for the spiritual. The eternal,” Julia said. “So, what’s the second?”

  “The reality of human greed and trickery,” Blackstone said. “Jonson’s play satirized it as comedy. But he was being very accurate in pointing it out.”

  Then Blackstone added a thought.

  “I think those two forces—immortality and greed—may be closer to us in Vinnie’s case then we have any idea,” he said.

  Julia gave him a funny look. Startled and probing.

  “But how do you separate the one from the other? Spiritual truth from trickery,” Julia asked, “without mixing them up, or being entirely cynical? How do you do that?”