Flowerbed of State

by Dorothy St. James

  “Forget the First Lady. You need to get down here.” He took a ragged breath. “Right now, Casey.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Just get down here,” he said and hung up.

  Chapter Five

  LORENZO Parisi, more than the rest of us, seemed to truly worry about appearances. I couldn’t imagine any circumstance where he’d tell me to “forget the First Lady.”

  Something extraordinary must have happened. Something extraordinarily bad.

  I dashed down the low, arching stone passageway underneath the North Portico that led to the offices and workshops. Something must have happened to my presentation boards. Why else would Lorenzo refuse to bring them to the First Lady’s office?

  A flood of water might have poured in from the ceiling, leaving the grounds offices in ruin. There might even be bits of carefully constructed presentation board scattered all over the desks and crushed underfoot on the floor with no regard to how much time I’d put into creating them.

  My heart slammed against my ribs, and my bruised head pounded as I rounded the corner and slid to a stop at the doorway to the grounds offices.

  Two men wearing similar off-the-rack suits, one tweed and the other gray, and red “Visitor” security badges around their necks stood just inside the door. They had the worn-down look of paperback novel police detectives.

  “Lorenzo?” I called, craning to see around the two lugs so deep in conversation with each other they didn’t seem to notice me bobbing up and down in a desperate effort to get past them.

  Lorenzo was slumped in my desk chair, his head cradled in his hands. “Lorenzo? Why did you call me? Has something happened to my presentation boards?”

  No, the boards were exactly where I’d left them.

  “Ah, Ms. Calhoun.” The stouter of the two men, the one dressed in the tweed suit, turned toward me. A slow, cautious smile spread across his wide mouth. “We need to speak with you.” He introduced himself as Special Agent Cooper from the FBI and his taller, thinner buddy with a shaggy salt-and-pepper mustache as Detective Hernandez from the D.C. Police.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked impatiently. I had a meeting to get to.

  “Ms. Calhoun, I’m afraid you’ll have to clear your schedule for the rest of the day.” Cooper, who was several inches shorter than my five-foot-seven-inch height and built like a bulldog, gestured for me to come fully into the office. When I did, he shut the door and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “We need you to tell us everything you saw or heard this morning.”

  “But I thought that’s what I’d just finished doing with the Secret Service.”

  “That may be true. But their duty is to the security of the President and the White House. We’re in charge of investigating the murder. And as of right now, you’re our only witness.”

  “Oh.” That was a problem. I didn’t want to be the only witness. Certainly they could find someone else in the park who’d seen more than I had. “I need to make a call.”

  Using my cell phone, I dialed the First Lady’s office while secretly hoping Gordon or the First Lady would tell me that I was needed at the meeting and that the investigation could wait. Louise Fenton, the First Lady’s secretary, put me on hold to fetch Gordon as soon as I’d explained the situation.

  “Don’t worry, Casey,” Gordon said when he came on the line. “I’ll handle things on this end for you. You know I can explain the basics of the proposal to the committee.”

  “But you don’t have the presentation boards or my notes. And what if there are questions? I should be there. I should be the one giving the presentation.”

  Establishing an organic garden at the White House was pretty much my entire job description. The First Lady had hired me for my expertise in order to implement the plans I’d spent the past three months developing, plans that required the Grounds Committee’s approval. The same Grounds Committee that convened only once a quarter.

  “I agree,” Gordon said. “This proposal is your baby. You should be the one to present it.” He was quiet for a long time. “There are several other items on the Grounds Committee agenda. I’ll work through those, give the basics of the proposal, and then schedule a time for the committee to reconvene before the end of the week when you can be here to explain how you propose we should implement the organic gardening practices.”

  “But—” The chance of shoehorning something into the First Lady’s busy schedule tomorrow or the next day was about as likely as finding a rosebush in full bloom in the dead of winter.

  It wasn’t going to happen.

  “It’s the best we can hope for, Casey.”

  “I just . . .” I heaved a deep sigh. “I just wanted to be there. It’s my job to be there, you know?”

  “I know. Listen, I’ll let you know what happened as soon as the meeting’s over. I’ve got to go. The First Lady is waiting.”

  I ended the call and looked up to find Lorenzo and the two investigators staring at me.

  Heat rose to my cheeks as I realized how coldhearted my single-minded obsession with getting to the meeting must have sounded to everyone else in the room. A woman had died this morning and I was worried about job security?

  In my defense, it’d been easier to worry about the meeting than to shatter into a million pieces over what had happened—or what could have happened—this morning. Someone had died. And someone had tried to kill me.

  Oh, God. I drew a shaky breath.

  I should have stayed at my desk letting the tick, tick, tick of the office clock pick at my nerves while I waited for the meeting time to arrive. Or I could have delayed my trip out to Lafayette Square until a few of the grounds crew had clocked in that morning instead of venturing out into the public park alone. Maybe then all of this trouble could have been avoided.

  For me.

  The woman I’d found in the trash can, she’d still be dead.

  “Do you know who she is yet?” I asked. “The woman I found?”

  The FBI agent nodded. “We do,” Cooper said. He seemed to be in charge. “Her name is Pauline Bonde.”

  At the mention of a name, Lorenzo vaulted out of my desk chair. His hands were shaking as he marched up to me. “What the hell were you doing out there? What was she doing?” he shouted. His face turned a deep red.

  “Now, see here,” Cooper said. “Let’s stay calm.”

  Lorenzo pushed the FBI agent out of his way. “I don’t know what you’re even doing here, Casey.” He threw open the door leading out of the office and disappeared down the hallway.

  I tried to follow. I couldn’t understand what had upset Lorenzo. Was he upset about the murder or the canceled meeting? It felt almost as if he blamed me for what had happened. That seemed terribly unfair.

  Something else had to be going on. Although we’d only been working together for a short time and, well, his solution to almost any problem in the garden was to sprinkle pesticides or a heavy-duty fertilizer on it, I wanted to win Lorenzo over as a friend. And friends helped each other.

  I tried to follow him but was blocked by the tall, hawk-nosed Wilson Fisher as he pushed his way into the office with the stack of paperwork tucked under his arm.

  “Ms. Calhoun, it’s imperative that you fill out these forms.” His hooked nose twitched and his shoulders hunched like a vulture’s. He dropped the bundle of papers on my desk. It landed with a thud. “Im-per-a-tive.” He stabbed the stack with his finger with each syllable. “This form is for employees injured on the job. This form . . .”

  I tuned out the rest.

  “I’ve also included requisition forms for the truckload of mulch you still haven’t filled out,” he said when he got to the bottom of the stack. “All of these must be completed immediately. I expect to see them on my desk first thing in the morning, if not sooner.”

  With that he turned on his heel and, his nose still twitching, marched out of the office.

  “Well, then.” Cooper’s brows furrowed as he watched Fis
her go. “Well. Interesting . . . er . . . fellow. He seems very . . . thorough. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get started.”

  I kept my gaze on the door, not watching Fisher. I’d long given up trying to understand him. My concern was for Lorenzo.

  Cooper cleared his throat when he realized I hadn’t heard anything he’d been saying to me. “Ms. Calhoun, I understand you’re busy, but we really need your cooperation.”

  “Of course.” I tore my gaze from the door and forced myself to listen. “Was Pauline Bonde a White House employee?” If she was, Lorenzo might have known her.

  “No. The victim worked for the Treasury Department. We’re still trying to find out what she was doing in Lafayette Square so early in the morning. Was she heading to her office? Or was she going somewhere else? Do you remember seeing her?”

  When I closed my eyes, I could clearly picture her. But not alive.

  Should I have seen her? In my rush to pull the mile-a-minute weeds, had I missed the chance to notice Pauline or the man who must have been stalking her like a spider crawling down a dewy web in pursuit of its prey? Could I have stopped a murder? I shivered.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t see her. I wish I had.”

  He gave a curt nod and then gestured to the nearest chair. “Please, sit down.”

  I sat.

  FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, THE TWO MEN TOOK turns probing and prodding, teasing out details from my memories that had more holes in them than my grandmother’s old lace handkerchiefs. They were persistent as they tried to pry some little gem loose from my fractured memories.

  Like Mike Thatch, they seemed very interested in the banking protestors gathered in the park as well as in the businessman I’d seen carrying a metal briefcase.

  A few hours after lunch, a sketch artist arrived with a sophisticated laptop computer that she set up on Lorenzo’s desk. Lorenzo still hadn’t returned.

  Gordon had. He hovered and groaned as he listened to the retelling of my attack and subsequent discovery of Pauline Bonde’s body, all the while blaming himself, poor sweet man. “I should have been out there with you,” I heard him mutter more than once.

  When the agents took a break to give the sketch artist time to set up her equipment, I cornered Gordon.

  “What happened at the meeting? Were you able to reschedule?” I whispered. “Was Mrs. Bradley upset? How about the committee members? How did they seem? Should I expect another scathing opinion piece against me and my gardening plans to show up in tomorrow’s edition of Media Today?”

  Gordon waved away my concerns. “You have no reason to worry about the Grounds Committee or the missed meeting, Casey. Everything will be fine.”

  “Does that mean you were able to reschedule the presentation?”

  Gordon scratched his chin and looked away. “Not yet. The First Lady’s schedule this week is impossible,” he complained, but quickly added, “She did express deep concern about your well-being. How is your head feeling?”

  “I’ve got a throbbing headache, but I’m fine. What’s going to happen with the presentation? What are we going to do if we can’t reschedule?”

  “I don’t know. The committee insists on hearing the full details.”

  I groaned.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll work out. I just don’t know how yet.”

  I wished I shared his confidence.

  “Have you seen Lorenzo?” Gordon asked. “He never made it to the committee meeting.”

  “He didn’t?” I explained how he’d rushed from the office in a panic. “What do you think happened to him? Where did he go?”

  Gordon, as concerned as I, had no idea where Lorenzo might have gone or what could have upset him.

  We had just started to discuss where we might go looking for Lorenzo when the sketch artist announced she was ready to get started. Unfortunately, with my fuzzy memories she didn’t have much to work with.

  The man I’d seen carrying that silver briefcase was of average height, average weight, with a face that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, and that was if I could trust what little I could remember, which I didn’t. Add to that he was wearing a hat, so I couldn’t tell her anything about his hair or even if he had any.

  “I really didn’t get a good look at him. I was more concerned with pulling the vines out of my flowerbed,” I admitted. “I only glanced in his direction once or twice. And I don’t even know if he’s the same man who hit me. Maybe Special Agent Turner saw him?”

  I didn’t mean to make that suggestion. Hell, I’d already figured it would be better if I kept my distance from the Secret Service for the next couple of days, especially from a certain grumpy CAT agent.

  “That’s a great idea!” The sketch artist’s eyes brightened with the prospect of getting her hands on someone who could actually provide her with a workable description. “He’s trained to remember details.”

  After Cooper made a few phone calls, Jack Turner arrived in the grounds offices. He wasn’t carrying a gun, but that didn’t make him appear any less dangerous. I slid down a little in my chair when I noticed the deep red spidery veins threading through his still red-rimmed eyes. It looked painful.

  He wordlessly took a chair, pulling it as far away from mine as the small room would allow. Unfortunately, though Turner had spotted a man running toward H Street, he’d only seen the guy from behind and at a distance. So while he tried to be helpful, he really didn’t have much to add to my rather vague description.

  Throughout the process Turner impatiently tapped his foot and scowled. I got the feeling he was plotting ways to make my life at the White House miserable. But I was just being paranoid, wasn’t I?

  BY THE TIME WE WERE FINISHED, I FELT SO wrung out and achy I went straight home, took the maximum recommended dose of extra-strength painkillers, and crawled into a hot bath with the intention of floating in a cloud of lavender-scented bubbles until summer.

  But oh, despite the thick pillows of steam rising from the lavender-perfumed water in the antique claw foot tub, the hot bath did nothing to wash away the chill that had crept into my bones. I shivered and sank a little deeper, submerging all but my nose in the water’s warm embrace.

  The gloriously renovated bathroom blended antique charm with modern luxuries such as towel warmers and radiant floor heating. The bath sat at the top of the stairs on the third story of the 1890s three-story brownstone where I lived in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. It was just two miles from the White House. Most days I walked to and from work.

  My roommate, Alyssa Dunn, and I rented the upper two floors of this architectural treasure. The landlord had given us a reduced rate in exchange for my promise to revive the property’s long-neglected garden. I had plans to bring it back to the height of nineteenth-century elegance.

  “Casey? Are you home?” The bathwater covering my submerged ears muffled my roommate’s already gentle voice. “Casey?”

  I sat up and sucked in a quick breath as the water clinging to my skin quivered in the sudden chill. “In the bathroom,” I called.

  “I brought home gado-gado salad.”

  “Really?” I reached for my towel and, rising like Venus from the ocean, wasted no time drying off. As I pulled on a floral pink satin pajama set, a decadent gift from Aunt Willow, my mouth watered at the thought of devouring the Indonesian vegetable salad of potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, cucumbers, and boiled eggs drenched in a spicy peanut sauce.

  I loved it. Alyssa didn’t. She must have purchased my favorite dish in hopes of bribing me.

  Now don’t misunderstand me. Alyssa, who hailed from bustling New York City, was the perfect roommate. I loved her to pieces. She always paid her half of the rent on time. She kept the apartment meticulously clean. And as a congressional aide to the elder statesman Senator Alfred Finnegan, also from New York, her hours at the office tended to run longer than my own.

  But her idea of getting back to nature was watching a wildlife documentary on TV. And like the senator wh
o’d employed her, she was somewhat ruthless in everything she did. So the fact that she’d brought home my favorite peanut-buttery Indonesian dish had me wondering. What did she want?

  “I saw on the news there was some excitement at the White House this morning. A mugging-turned-murder in Lafayette Square? Finny seems to think there’s more to the story than what the reporters are saying,” Alyssa said as I entered the kitchen.

  She leaned over a white take-out box and plunged a large serving spoon deep into the box’s depths. Her shoulder-length black hair fell over her face like a curtain.

  Her suit—very similar to the one she’d picked out for me, except hers was black and mine was gray—still had that fresh from the dry cleaners look despite the long day she’d put in at the senator’s office.

  She was about my height, five years younger, and constantly complaining about the fifteen extra pounds she’d gained since moving to D.C. three years ago.

  She glanced up from the gado-gado she’d been spooning onto two plates from the take-out box. Her light brown eyes filled with expectation. “I don’t suppose you know more about what happened than what’s being reported on the news, do you?”

  “Hmm, that smells delicious,” I said. The cozy kitchen with its soaring ten-foot ceilings soaked up the exotic peanut and coconut scents. My stomach gurgled in happy anticipation. I took two forks from the silverware drawer and napkins from the holder next to the microwave.

  “Good Lord.” Alyssa dropped the serving spoon. It clattered on the counter as she lunged toward me. “What happened to you? You look as if you’ve been in a fight.”

  “The Secret Service asked me not to talk about it.” I grabbed a plate of the gado-gado salad before she could hold it hostage.

  “Ah-ha! Then you do know something,” Alyssa crowed. “I told old Finny that you’d know. You’ve got a nose for finding things out. I bet no state secret goes unnoticed at the White House now that you’re around.”