Flowerbed of State

by Dorothy St. James

  “She was vibrant, a shooting star.”

  I poured the heated water into the French press. Then after swallowing a couple of pain tablets with a glass of tap water, I joined Lorenzo at the small maple kitchen table. He’d folded his arms over his rumpled shirt and had tilted his head back slightly. His eyes were closed.

  Had he fallen asleep? I glanced at the clock on the stove. It was half past three in the morning. He must have been exhausted. I knew I still needed several hours of sleep before I could reasonably expect my mind to start functioning on all cylinders.

  So I didn’t try to think. I simply sat at the table with Lorenzo sharing his grief.

  Five minutes passed. And then ten.

  My muddy backpack was still on the kitchen table where I’d carelessly dropped it. The mud had dried and crumbled into a small mound.

  Hadn’t Alyssa recently complained about the amount of dirt I brought into the house? Soil, not dirt, I’d tried to explain to her. But she refused to acknowledge the difference.

  I cleaned up the mess and then reached into the backpack. The mystery novel I’d been carrying around hadn’t fared well from having spent the day in a soggy bag. Its pages were water stained, its cover slightly warped. But the promise of a mystery to be solved on its pages and justice demanding to be served called to me.

  I hated feeling timid in my own skin. Heroines like Miss Marple knew how to keep a calm head on their shoulders despite their constant encounters with danger. And here I was shivering in my satin robe after a coworker—a man I wanted to consider my friend—unexpectedly showed up in the middle of night in search of comfort. And answers.

  What would Miss Marple have done?

  She’d do what any good friend would do. She would help him, of course.

  I quietly stood and retrieved two coffee mugs from the cabinet.

  “Did you see him?” Lorenzo asked. His eyes were still closed and his head tilted back as if in slumber.

  “Yeah.” I filled the pair of mugs with the fresh coffee. “I saw him, but I don’t know what I can tell you that would be helpful. I didn’t get a good look at him.” I placed a mug on the table in front of him and then fetched a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “The FBI, D.C. Police, Secret Service, and everyone else with a badge in the D.C. area are all using the information I gave them. Believe me, they want to find this guy as badly as you do.”

  “I understand that. But still—”

  “Do you take sugar?” I asked.

  He waved the sugar bowl away. After pouring a healthy serving of milk into his coffee, he took a sip.

  “But you saw him, Casey? You saw the monster who killed Pauline?”

  I remember seeing a shoe. A black-and-white shoe with a lightning bolt on one side.

  If only I could remember his face. Did I even see his face?

  “I don’t know what or how much I saw,” I admitted. “It’s all hazy.”

  I looked away. I couldn’t bear to watch his hopeful expression dissolve into disappointment. I’d already seen that happen with the Secret Service agents and then the FBI and the police. “Maybe when my head heals, I’ll be able to remember more.”

  Lorenzo shifted uneasily. His shoe bumped my foot.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  I moved my foot and instinctively glanced under the table to make sure my legs weren’t intruding on his space.

  “I can’t wait, Casey. You need to remember it now. Think. Any bit of information might be helpful,” he insisted. “I need to know what you know. You might have seen something that would identify him.”

  Like his shoes.

  His black-and-white lightning bolt shoes.

  Shoes exactly like the ones on Lorenzo’s feet.

  Why would Lorenzo be wearing the killer’s shoes?

  He wouldn’t. Not unless the killer and Lorenzo were one and the—

  In a panic I jumped up and grabbed the first thing that came to mind. A knife.

  A satisfyingly large butcher’s knife. I liked the weight of it in my hand.

  “What are you doing?” Lorenzo asked as I whirled toward him, the knife pointed menacingly toward his chest.

  “Um . . . um . . .” What did I think I was going to do with the knife? This was Lorenzo, for heaven’s sake. “Oh, you know me. When I get nervous, I garden.”

  “With a butcher’s knife?”

  Right. That didn’t make sense.

  Desperate, I grabbed the closest thing at hand, a pineapple Alyssa had purchased a few days earlier and had left sitting out next to the bread box. The knife’s sharp blade made a satisfying thunk as it cut through the top of the pineapple, freeing its bright green top. I raised the stalk of spiky leaves in the air as if it were a trophy. Bits of bright yellow pineapple flesh clung to it.

  “I’m going to grow this pineapple top.”

  His brows crinkled. “Right now? In the kitchen?”

  “Yes. Why not? They make great houseplants, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  Well, I didn’t care whether he believed me or not. The knife wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t feel safe with those shoes in the room with me.

  “Are they new?” I asked, while pretending to concentrate on removing the bottom whorl of leaves on the pineapple stem, careful not to damage any of the roots that had already started to sprout. One by one I plucked off the lance-shaped leaves, my hand never straying far from the knife. “I’ve never seen you wear those shoes before. Have you had them long?”

  “These things?” Much like Gordon had earlier, Lorenzo frowned at his feet as if he needed to see which pair of shoes he’d pulled from his closet that morning. “Oh, right. Pauline bought them for me last week.”

  “Were you wearing them when you came to work yesterday morning?”

  “Yeah.” He thought about it for a moment while still staring at his feet. “Yeah. I haven’t been home since I found out about . . .”

  “Of course not.” This was the same Lorenzo who’d wear a dark green gardening apron and mud boots to protect his clothes whenever he worked out on the grounds. My gut tightened. “Pauline gave them to you. How were things between the two of you the last time you saw her?”

  Alyssa’s statistic that most motives for murder were personal came back to me like a slap in the face.

  Did Lorenzo and Pauline have a lover’s quarrel? Did an argument push him to attack Pauline? He’d admitted that she sometimes made him feel crazy. How crazy?

  “How were things between us?” He shrugged his sagging shoulders. “I never knew. She kept me on edge all the time.” A ghost of a smile loosened some of his tension as he kept his gaze latched on the black-and-white leather shoes.

  I had to turn away. I couldn’t bear to look at those shoes.

  I reached for the knife again. “Did the two of you have an argument?”

  “No. Pauline just stopped by my apartment with the shoebox wrapped in shiny silver paper. I wasn’t expecting her. I didn’t even know she was in town. She’d do that sometimes. Just buy me a gift out of the blue like that. The next day she had to leave again. That was the last time I saw her.”

  “She left town often. Why?”

  “Her job. I hated that job. It took her to New York City almost every week for months now. She was an accountant for the Treasury Department, you know. She’d been investigating the books of several large banks. It took up most of her time. Such a waste.”

  “Her work was important to her?”

  He made a rude sound. “Married to the job, she liked to say. I was hoping to change her mind and convince her that she had room in her life for her career and a husband. But she didn’t want to hear it. Too ambitious for her own good, perhaps. I don’t know. She told me she didn’t want to be tied down. She made marriage sound like punishment. All she cared about lately was those lists of numbers she carried around with her on her laptop.”

  “Sounds like you were jealous.”

&nb
sp; He sat back in his chair and gazed at me, his dark eyes hard and untrusting. “I suppose at first I was,” he finally admitted. “She’d come back from New York bragging about having lunch at some fancy restaurant with that rich Richard Templeton guy.”

  “Really? Richard Templeton, the banker?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice.

  “Yeah, that’s the guy.” Lorenzo grimaced. “Or partying all night with the Keller twins. Who wouldn’t be jealous of that?”

  “It sounds as if the two of you had been growing apart.” I’d experienced that a time or two myself. Hearts slowly growing cold. The flame dimming. It was a painful experience. But had it led Lorenzo to murder?

  “I’d thought Pauline and I were done.” A faint smile returned. “I’d just started getting used to the idea that she’d moved on, but she dropped by last Friday and gave me these shoes. And she stayed the night. I loved her, Casey. She really knew how to—”

  “Whoa, whoa. That’s enough, Lorenzo.” Too much. I didn’t need to picture a coworker in that way. What I needed was to get him back on track. “So after that surprise visit she went to New York City? Did you see her when she returned to D.C.?”

  “No, I never saw her again. I’d called her cell the night before she—” He leaned his head back and pressed his fists against his eyes.

  “You called her?” Had they argued?

  “Yeah. She was still in New York at her hotel. She’d sounded excited yet nervous. But she wouldn’t say what was bothering her. You’ve got to help me, Casey. You were there that morning. You’ve got to help me understand why someone would do this to her.”

  Perhaps if I’d had a full night’s sleep or if my head didn’t still feel as if someone was playing the bongo drums inside it, I wouldn’t have made the promise I’d made to him that night. Even as I spoke the words, I realized the mistake I was making. But that didn’t stop me.

  “I’ll help you, Lorenzo.” I placed my hand on the mystery novel in front of me as if swearing on a Bible. Despite my fears, I vowed to do something that would make the Miss Marples of the world proud. And who knew? Maybe someday people would write novels about me. “I’ll find out why someone killed your Pauline.”

  Chapter Eight

  “HOLD up,” Fredrick called from inside the guard hut as I approached the White House gate the next morning. A moment later, Fredrick, his red hair bright against the robin’s egg blue sky, rushed out of the small white structure. He held up his ruddy hands when I started to wave my temporary security card in front of the reader. “I need you to wait out there.”

  “Is the White House still on high alert from yesterday?” I asked, but Fredrick wasn’t listening.

  Perhaps the banking summit protesters still had the Secret Service worried. I glanced behind me. The Secret Service and police had a larger presence than usual in the park today.

  The protesters, dressed in old, tattered clothes, had also doubled in number from yesterday. Their angry shouts had grown louder, more frantic.

  Joanna Lovell, attorney-at-law, was at the center of them with the hem of her shiny pale blue housecoat flapping. Many in her group waved oversized photo cutouts of the CEOs attending the White House meetings. Slogans such as WHERE’S MY BAILOUT? and CORPORATE GREED: STEAL FROM THE POOR AND GIVE TO THE RICH and THEY TAKE OUR MONEY AND GET RICH WHILE WE LOSE OUR JOBS had been scrawled in bold letters across cartoon moneybags the cutout bankers clutched in their hands.

  “Fredrick? What’s going on? What’s the holdup?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Calhoun—” he started to say.

  “Casey,” I corrected. He’d always called me Casey.

  “Ms. Calhoun,” he said, more firmly this time, his face mottling several shades of red. “I’m not to let you pass until you’ve been searched. Please wait there. I need to make a call.” He started to duck back into the tiny wooden hut. “I’ll try to make this quick,” he tossed over his shoulder, and then was gone.

  I leaned against the iron fence trying to look nonchalant while I waited for Fredrick to return. A West Wing staffer eyed me with caution as she passed through the gate. No one dashed out of the guard hut to stop her, which made me suspect my detention was personal.

  Goodie.

  “Excuse me.” A dark-haired man dressed in a navy blue jogging suit brushed past me as he came through the first gate. He carried a briefcase up to the small white guard hut. “I need to get this to Richard Templeton. He’s attending the banking summit,” the man explained to Fredrick, who’d emerged from the hut to greet him. “I’m Wallace Clegg, Richard’s personal assistant.”

  “I’ll have to make a call,” Fredrick said.

  “Can you do it right away? These are important papers for this morning’s meeting.” Clegg’s voice was strained, like the man was on the verge of a panic attack.

  “Don’t worry. Once I get clearance, I’ll fetch a staffer to carry it to him directly.”

  When Fredrick disappeared into the guard hut, Clegg glanced back at me. He gave a nervous smile. “It’s been one hell of a morning.”

  “Hopefully, it’ll get better,” I replied.

  He nodded. “Hopefully.” His hair was a shiny blue-black. His square features made him look like someone who spent more time in the gym than in a boardroom, like the kind of guy who’d been the star of his wrestling team in college. Not that he was large. But he did seem to be a bit muscular for a CEO’s personal assistant. The ones I’d met in this town tended to be lean, nervous types who looked as if they didn’t get out into the sunlight nearly enough. Instead, this guy was an odd combination of tanned skin, lean muscles, and jittery nerves. “I was supposed to make sure these files were with the rest of Richard’s paperwork before he left the hotel this morning.”

  He started to tap his foot. We both seemed to be stuck in limbo between the White House outer gate and the inner gate that led onto the grounds. He leaned toward me. “Have we met somewhere before?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know. You do look kind of familiar.”

  “Were you at the—” he started to ask me when his cell phone rang. “Clegg here.”

  He frowned as he listened.

  “I’m at the guard hut. You should get the files right away.”

  He made a face.

  “Yes, Mr. Templeton. Of course it won’t happen again.”

  Fredrick came out and gave Clegg a nod. “It’s all set.”

  “Did you hear that?” he said into the phone. “They’re sending a staffer to come and get it now. I’m going back to the hotel to get ready for our meeting with Senator Pendergast.”

  He smiled then. “Yeah, I’ll keep out of your minibar.”

  He hung up, gave me a nod, and jogged off.

  I drummed my fingers against the iron fence while wondering how much longer I was going to be kept waiting. I had a pile of work to get done, a meeting to reschedule, and I was running late already. Was this Special Agent Jack Turner’s way of punishing me for embarrassing him yesterday?

  Yeah, I was pretty certain that was the case when I spotted him, dressed in CAT team black complete with dark sunglasses and assault rifle slung over his shoulder, striding across the North Lawn toward the gate like an avenging angel.

  My traitorous heart raced at the sight of him. I blamed that on Alyssa’s bad influence. She was right. He was hunky. I mean, if you happen to like men with overbearing hero complexes.

  He stopped on his side of the gate. A slow, self-satisfied smile spread across his lips. Determined not to give him any more pleasure at my expense than necessary, I greeted him as if I’d asked him to meet me.

  “Good morning,” I said brightly.

  Truth be told, I was glad to see him. After the questions Alyssa had raised and Lorenzo’s late-night revelations, I needed a partner to help me weed through the facts. Every good detective needed a capable sidekick. And considering how he’d probably saved my life yesterday, I couldn’t think of anyone more capable.

 
“I see several members of the press are still camped out in Lafayette Park. They’ll have a good day for their broadcasts. It’s supposed to be at least ten degrees warmer today than yesterday. Look at the sky. Just a few wispy clouds. It’s a good day for gardening, too. But I don’t know how much of that I’ll get done. As you can see, I’m running late.”

  I was babbling. But I couldn’t seem to help myself. At least I had enough sense not to ask him how his eyes were faring.

  With my arm propped lazily on the fence, I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “Any new leads?”

  His smile tightened just a touch. “We’ve got the investigation under control.” He opened the gate and gestured for me to follow him around the guard hut to a relatively private spot under a littleleaf linden tree.

  When we got there, he held out his hand.

  I stared at his open palm.

  “Your backpack,” he prompted.

  “Oh.” I handed it over.

  As he unzipped it and started to dig through its contents, I got to thinking. Fredrick was more than qualified to search my bag, so why the personal attention from a CAT agent who had better things to do with his time?

  “How are you feeling this morning?” he asked, his voice softening a touch.

  “I’m okay.”

  He looked up from digging through the backpack. “That’s a nasty bruise on your temple. Have you been losing your balance or feeling dizzy? Experiencing any headaches?”

  “No, I’ve been okay. Though as you can see, I’m coming in late this morning. Gordon insisted.”

  Turner nodded. “Your throat looks better today.” He returned to pawing through my bag. “I’m glad to see that. You could have been seriously injured.”

  Alyssa seemed to think that any guy worth his salt would be turned on by my pepper spray mishap. Perhaps she was right. I did feel a certain tingly vibe growing between Turner and me. He was standing a little closer than necessary. Close enough that his spicy sandalwood aftershave, a clean scent that reminded me of the woods after a spring rainstorm, made me feel a little giddy.