Flowerbed of State

by Dorothy St. James

  “Yes, if you’ll follow me. I can show you the way.”

  “I suppose.” Brooks wrinkled his nose at his sister. He then turned to me and flashed a devilish smile that took years off his slightly pudgy face. “I hope we bump into each other another again soon, Casey.”

  “Brooks, no.” Lillian forced from behind clenched teeth. “We don’t have time for this.”

  That was the second time Lillian had discouraged her brother from flirting with me. It wasn’t as if I took him seriously. He just seemed like the type who flirted.

  I puzzled over her unfriendly manner as the trio headed up the stairs to the second floor of the East Wing. At the landing, Lillian stopped and turned back toward me. She bit her lower lip and furrowed her blond brows before mouthing, “Watch yourself.”

  THE CONSTANT WHIRL OF SAWS AND BANGING coming through the walls from the carpenter’s shop sounded like an odd symphony in the background of the grounds office. I’d like to say that was why I couldn’t concentrate, but it would have been a lie.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Lillian’s warning. Had that been a threat?

  Also, no one had any news about Lorenzo. How long would it take for the FBI to come to their senses and release him?

  I’d spent the past half hour mindlessly adding Seth Donahue’s latest changes to a sketch plan for the Easter Egg Roll. He’d shuffled around where the various activities—such as the reading corner, the crafts booth, and the hot dog stand—were to be set up so many times that the pink and yellow pastel sketch plan of the South Lawn was slowly turning into an unrecognizable blob of orange ink.

  “Will you be staying through the weekend?” I heard Gordon say a moment before the grounds office door swung open. “You owe me the chance to redeem myself on the golf course. My hand cramped up last time.”

  “I believe I can make time for that. Playing with you always makes me feel like a pro, Gordo.”

  The tall man with the thick brown beard who’d seemed so chummy with Gordon after the presentation entered the office and came to a stop in front of the presentation boards I’d left propped up against the wall beside my desk.

  I jumped up to greet them. Perhaps I could salvage some of the organic gardening presentation. Clearly, the committee didn’t understand what I was proposing.

  “That was an interesting presentation you gave,” the bearded man said to me. “You were certainly asking for the moon and stars in there, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t think—” I protested.

  “Barney,” Gordon said, cutting me off, “meet Casey Calhoun.”

  A line of white teeth appeared from behind Barney’s thick beard. I hoped that meant he was smiling.

  “Barney, as in Barney Vetters?” Who just happened to be the chairman of the Grounds Committee and a leading authority on plant disease?

  He nodded and showed more of his teeth. “Guilty.”

  “I don’t think you understand what I’m proposing. The plans are really very modest. I mean—”

  “You don’t know what you’ve done, do you?”

  “The First Lady directed me to—” I tried to say.

  “You’ve suggested we make wholesale changes to a national treasure, a national treasure that most of the public feels an intimate connection to. You cannot expect the committee to approve such a proposal. It’d be like us recommending the Louvre paint the Mona Lisa’s hair purple.”

  Gordon chuckled. “I’d like to see that, Barney.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming. Barney Vetters, a renowned plant expert, should have known better. He, of all people, should have recognized that the proposed plan wouldn’t visually change the White House grounds, not in any way that the visiting public would notice. I was merely suggesting a more environmentally sensitive way of taking care of the existing grounds.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked with my fists pressing against my thighs. I couldn’t seem to keep my voice from trembling.

  “Go home, Casey,” Gordon suggested. He didn’t look the least bit worried. And why should he? His career wasn’t teetering on disaster. “Get some rest. We’ll talk more about it tomorrow.”

  “What about Lorenzo?” I asked. “Have you heard any news about”—I glanced at Barney—“his situation?”

  “I have. He was released about an hour ago. I told him to go home as well. He’ll be back in the office tomorrow.”

  “So, he straightened everything out with”—I glanced at Barney again—“everyone?”

  “Not completely. We’ll talk more about it in the morning.”

  “We’re heading out to grab an early dinner,” Barney said as he pulled Gordon toward the door. “It was nice to meet you, Casey. Thanks for the laugh this afternoon.” He wagged his finger at me. “Gordo was right. You really are something.”

  “Yeah.” That was just the impression I’d hoped to make.

  Damn.

  Gordon leaned against the doorframe and told Barney to go on ahead without him. “Don’t worry so much, Casey. It’ll work out.”

  “Are you sure?” From where I was standing, without the chairman’s support, the future of the White House’s organic gardening program looked pretty damn bleak. “I only want to do what’s right.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Then why didn’t you support me at the meeting?”

  “I would have spoken up if we’d had any hope of winning the committee’s vote. We didn’t. Not after you made it sound so . . .” Gordon sighed. “Barney’s waiting. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  After Gordon left, I probably should have taken his advice and headed home, but leaving felt too much like giving up. I had to stay. I had to work.

  Wilson Fisher’s towering pile of forms taunted me from my desk. I sat and started to plod through them. At least this was one task I knew I could accomplish.

  As I checked boxes and filled out endless lines of data on the forms, questions about Pauline’s death gnawed at me. Why had she lied to Lorenzo? Why would she tell him she’d dined with Richard Templeton when, according to Richard, it wasn’t true? Had she been deliberately trying to make Lorenzo jealous?

  And how well did Lillian and Brooks know Pauline? Had Pauline been too friendly with the bankers she’d been auditing?

  It seemed like too much of a coincidence that someone would murder her on the eve that she was to present her findings to the Congress. I wondered if there’d been something on her laptop that would prove damaging to someone.

  Those questions had wrapped themselves around my brain so tightly that when I read the last sentence on page five of Fisher’s Form 4-AB-56 for the third time, I realized I had no idea what it wanted me to do. Frustrated, I set down my pen and rubbed my bruised temple.

  Filling out meaningless paperwork wasn’t getting me anywhere. I needed to get my hands dirty. I needed to be outside under the sun.

  Since it was nearly five o’clock, I packed up my things for the day, grabbed my floppy straw hat, and headed outside. I always did my best thinking in the garden.

  Earlier that afternoon, Ambrose had sent word to our office that the flowerbed where I’d been attacked was no longer roped off with crime scene tape. Since I didn’t have time to attend to it myself—I rarely had time for the fun hands-on work—I’d asked a few members from the grounds crew to replace the damaged flowers, clean up the elm’s broken branches, and repair whatever damage the reporters might have caused by stomping through Lafayette Square.

  Joanna Lovell, still dressed in that ugly shiny blue housecoat, stood at the head of the banking protesters. She shook a cardboard cutout of Brooks Keller as if she were trying to kill it, while several in her group cheered.

  A new protester had set up next to them in front of the North Lawn. His camouflage hat pulled low on his head, he sat in a lawn chair with a handwritten sign propped up in his lap that read, EVERY AMERICAN DESERVES A SAFE WORKPLACE. He nodded in my direction as I passed.

  Nearby,
Connie was talking to a group of high school kids, showing off her antinuclear weapons posters. Tourists snapped pictures of every inch of the White House North Lawn and Lafayette Square as uniformed Secret Service agents stood by their cars parked on the closed-off Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. A pair of U.S. Park Police officers rode ten-speed bicycles through the park as they kept a vigilant watch for trouble.

  On the other side of the park, the National Park Service’s three-man, one-woman grounds crew was finishing their work. An unbroken border of ruffled tulips and grape hyacinths waved happily in the late afternoon sun as if nothing had happened.

  The elm’s branches had been neatly trimmed back. In time the young tree would heal and would eventually grow to match the splendor of the older elms in the park. The scars left on its trunk, however, would forever mark the place where Pauline had died.

  Sal Martin, a man in his late sixties, who acted and dressed as if he still lived in the swinging seventies, was raking in a small pile of mulch around the drip line of the elm. The heavy gold chain he wore around his neck jingled with each pull of the rake. He stopped when he saw me approach and propped his arm on the rake’s handle as if he’d sidled up to a bar.

  “Glad you moseyed your way o’er here, Miss Casey,” he drawled. His heavy Texas accent always managed to startle me. If I closed my eyes, I could picture a man wearing chaps and a dusty old cowboy hat, not gold chains underneath his olive green park service uniform that looked two sizes too small. “Found this ’ere bauble buried in the flowerbed o’er yonder. Been thinking you must have dropped it.”

  He handed me a golden, diamond-studded charm with a broken clasp.

  “Thank you,” I said, frowning at the unfamiliar piece of jewelry. The charm, shaped like a large dollar sign, had diamond chips embedded in the double slashes bisecting an elaborate scrolling S. I turned it over and found P and B professionally engraved on the back. Underneath the letters someone had scratched in a phone number with a D.C. area code.

  P and B? Could the charm have belonged to Pauline Bonde?

  “You mean you found this near the elm?”

  “No, ma’am.” He pointed across the park to the bed of pink tulips where the killer had left me. “Found it plumb o’er there.”

  “I see. Thank you again, Sal.”

  “My pleasure,” he said and winked. With his hips swaying to a funky beat only he could hear, he returned to his raking.

  I was still puzzling over the charm—if it had fallen off Pauline’s bracelet or necklace, how did it get across the park and into the flowerbed? That’s when I noticed a young woman in her mid-twenties standing at the edge of Lafayette Square.

  She wore a heavy cream wool sweater over a black turtleneck. Jeans hugged her waif-thin body before flaring like trumpet flowers at the bottom. A long black canvas tube I’d seen architects use to carry their plans was hanging from a strap over her shoulder. Her bleached blond hair tumbled in loose curls over her shoulders. Thick black eyeliner made her large eyes appear to occupy over half her face, like those paintings of sad children that were popular in the seventies.

  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.”

  Chapter Twelve

  MUCH 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.