Death of a Political Plant (25 page)

Then she looked around suspiciously and said, “I can’t trust anyone.” Her eyes opened wider in alarm and she pointed to the glasses. “That’s why I wore these.”

“Hop in right now.”

Melissa hurried around the car and got in the passenger seat. Then she gave Louise a long look.

Louise smiled at her. “You sound a little frightened. Is everything all right at home?”

Melissa let out a sharp breath. “As all right as it can be. Nobody’s hurting me, if that’s what you mean. My mother’s always real nice to me.”

Louise stretched out a hand and touched the girl’s thin arm. “First, I want you to know how terrible I felt when your dad died.”

The pale eyes turned to her in anguish, and tears formed and fell onto her cheeks. “He didn’t just die, Mrs. Eldridge. He was killed. I know it. Someone was after him and they got him.” All of a sudden her thin shoulders began to shake. Louise reached over and hugged the girl in her arms and held her tight. After a few moments, Melissa stammered, “I’m sorry. My dad told me to be strong, that we would start a new life together. And then he went and got killed.”

“And you think he was afraid he would be killed by someone?”

The plaintive eyes looked at her. “No. He thought they would beat him up or run him out of town and swipe his work.”

“His work. You mean, his story.”

“Yes. It was the best story he’d ever had, that’s all I know about it. He swore me to secrecy. I’ve been sneaking out to
see him for months now, ever since he got that custody decree. I’d come here to the park, and he’d pick me up. He wanted to stay close by, because he was afraid my mother would take me away somewhere.”

“Take you away for good?”

“Yes. He was scared stiff. And he had his reasons. She got me a passport, and hers was always ready. It was like a threat, that she’d move us to England or maybe Ireland. She even bought a house there. It’s a real cool house; I really wouldn’t mind living there, if Dad had been with us. She even had me pack my fall and winter clothes in a suitcase and keep them in the closet.”

“And you told your father this, of course?”

“Yes, and that drove him nuts, which is just what Mom wanted, I think.”

That’s pretty mean

The girl’s gaze dropped to the hands in her lap. “But you don’t understand. My mom loves me. I hurt her feelings when I got up there on the witness stand and told the judge who I wanted to live with. My mother cried, and my mother never cries.” Again, her voice choked with emotion.

“You told the judge you wanted to spend most of your time with your father?”

“It wasn’t that I hated my mother. But life with my dad is so much better.”

Louise stared bleakly out into the tall forested neighborhood and wondered how she would feel if Martha or Janie renounced her. “It’s a hard thing for you to have had to do, making that kind of choice.”

She gave Louise a hunted look, like a small animal. “They fought over me for years. It was terrible. And now look what’s happened.”

“But you love your mother. And now you’ll live with her.”

“I guess so. Except I don’t completely trust her. She’s said too many things about my dad that I know are not true. And now she’s even started locking me out of her bedroom, like I was a spy. Not that she’s mean or anything—she stayed home the whole morning comforting me.”

She peered at Louise closely again, as if to be sure this new person wasn’t going to be another disappointment. “My father told me that once you and he used to date. And that you and Bill would be my friends forever if anything ever happened to Dad.”

“Indeed we will. We will do anything for you that we can. But your mother will take good care of you.”

“I know. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do what my Dad wanted me to do.”

“Which was what?”

The girl reached into her overalls pocket and pulled out a computer disk in a Ziploc bag. She handed it to Louise. “To give you this if anything happened to him. It’s his backup disk. Every time he saw me he gave it to me and then he’d take it back the next time. It had his new writing on it. And I would take it and hide it in the tree outside if my mother was home. If she wasn’t home, I would hide the disk in my room where the maid doesn’t clean. Last week, I think Mom finally figured out that I was meeting my dad, which I’d been doing for months.”

Louise fingered the disk and felt its precious quality, as if it were the Rosetta stone. This was the key to Jay’s murder. A great weight seemed gone from her shoulders, for though she may have inadvertently put Jay in danger by sending him from her house, at least now there would be some redemption for
her. She could help make his story public. And by doing so, perhaps make some sense out of the loss of her friend.

“Melissa, you are incredible. Do you know how like your father you are?”

The thirteen-year-old smiled faintly. “Yeah, we’re both sneaky. You should have seen how I convinced our housekeeper I was talking to my friend. My dad and I are just alike. We used to say that it would be fun to live together. Also, we’re both slobs, not like Mom. We both have the same habit of hiding things. So, between us, we thought we’d have a fine house, all tucked away with hidden objects. And with soda cans and Dad’s coffee cups lying around. And we’d sit around and read books and stuff.”

Then she put her head down and began crying again in earnest.

Louise put her arm around the girl, and she leaned into her chest and sobbed. Louise rested her chin gently against the girl’s soft, curly hair. After a while, when the crying stopped, Louise told Melissa, “I think you had better go home and try to act as normal as possible. I don’t know why, but your mother wants this disk very badly, and you don’t want her to know you gave it to me.”

“Dad told me not to let her have it.” She heaved a big sigh, “Actually, he was still in love with Mom, I could tell, and she loved him, too, at least a little bit. But she would never get back with Dad after he took her to court to get custody of me. Trouble with Mom, she has to win all the time.”

She suddenly noticed the old car she was sitting in, and her nostrils twitched. “This car rules. Dad said you were a really good gardener; it smells like a farm.”

Louise laughed. “It’s what I use until some day I get something
better, like a pickup, for instance. I haul biosolids in this one.”

“He also told me you solved some murders.”

“Yes, I guess I helped, anyway.”

“I wish you could help find out who killed my dad.”

“I’m doing my best, Melissa. I’ll turn his disk over to the authorities. And I’ll also let your dad’s newspaper know that his story is safe. The story might tell us who the murderer is, and it will all be thanks to you.”

The girl looked up at Louise. “Dad was always more interested in his story than in anything else. Except me, maybe. But no story is … worth what happened to Dad.”

Louise’s heart went out to the child; she wished she could take her to her own home in Sylvan Valley. Yet Lannie had been a good mother to her, and her mother was with whom the girl belonged.

So she remained silent, and Melissa began to reminisce about her father. The time she spent with him in California seemed to be the highlight of her life, though she seemed to like her private school and her foreign trips with her mother.

“Sometimes Mom takes me to parties and I have to get dressed up and act as if I were all grown up. Company things, sometimes, and sometimes just things that happen in Washington. Tonight, for instance, I’m supposed to go with her to a big reception for Congressman Goodrich. She said it would help me to get out of the house.”

“So you’re going.”

The girl stared out of the passenger side window. “Oh, sure. Political things are sort of interesting, even though I don’t like Congressman Goodrich, but he’s my mother’s good buddy. I couldn’t get out of it. You don’t know how much trouble it is to get out of things once Mom’s mind is made up.
She either totally ignores me, or she’s all over me like a blanket.”

“Maybe she wants you to like her more.”

“Yeah. As if I could like her as much as a guy who took me shelling on the beach and fishing in the surf. Y’know, I didn’t want to read that story on the disk. Dad said not to, because it could put me in danger.”

“So you didn’t read it?”

“I started to, but then I felt too guilty, so I stopped at the first page. But I think it’s about that Congressman Goodrich.”

“I think it is, too, Melissa. But let’s keep that to ourselves for now, okay?”

Jay’s daughter grinned at Louise, giving her the kind of bright, happy face kids were supposed to have, and which hadn’t been much in evidence with Melissa this afternoon. “I might have something else of my dad’s that you’ll want.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry, I’ll give it to you, but I just don’t want to give up everything I have of his all at once.” She reached a slim hand over and touched Louise’s arm. “But I’ll tell you what it is—a key.”

Louise gave Melissa a little hug good-bye. “Be careful, and don’t forget, you can call Bill and me anytime, night or day.” Then the girl hopped out and waved good-bye and walked quickly toward home, a little bounce in her step, her thin arms stretched out gracefully, as if she were walking on a balance beam. Just a child now, enchantingly innocent, but probably knowing more than she should at the age of thirteen. A child who was trying to cope with loss, but at least knowing she had some friends her father trusted. She headed for an enormous Georgian house perched on the bluff at the edge of the Potomac.
More than a home, thought Louise. This was the mansion of Lannie Gordon.

Louise made a U-turn, and as she completed it, she saw the patrol car, its lights ominously flashing. Here it was approaching five o’clock, with about a million commuters in cars going home on Friday night on the nearby GW Parkway. Surely, this patrolman was not going to stop her for wrong-way entry to a quiet neighborhood? But he was, for the way she had been parked was a dead giveaway.

She stopped the car at the side of the road, since he had stopped his opposite. He got out, uniform, boots and all, swaggering over, slapping his ticket pad against his thigh with every other step.

“Ma’am,” he said, “you entered this street the wrong way.” He poked his head into the window and took a sniff. She hoped he didn’t think she was growing marijuana in the back, for the mixed aromas of the residue of her summer gardening were getting fruity.

“Officer, I’m so sorry. I’m not familiar with the neighborhood.”

“Let’s see your license and your proof of insurance.”

“My license. It’s right here in my purse.” With a little fumbling she found it and whipped it out and put it into his waiting fingers. “Insurance,” she mumbled, half to herself, half to the officer, “isn’t that the little two-by-five-inch card among those papers at home that I meant to sort?” She shuffled through her wallet for the card. As he looked on with astonishment, she gave the glove compartment door a good hit with the heel of her hand so it fell open. She rustled around in it fruitlessly.

“Oh, gosh, I remember it now. I did a halfway job the other night. Removed the old card from the car, but failed to
put the new one in the little plastic container full of papers, because something interrupted me.”

“No proof of insurance?” he barked. “Don’t you know that’s a serious offense?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

He gave her a disdainful look. “Ma’am, you better get it together, is all I can say.” He strutted back to his car and got back in it to write the ticket.

She slumped in the car seat, the heat and fatigue of the day closing in on her. It was such an affront, to be arrested for such a trivial offense. Sitting there in her severely wrinkled linen suit, she had a strong sense of having been treated unfairly. She leaned her head back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and tried to control her growing rage. Remembering all those times she was going to take up transcendental meditation, she wished she had done so. Now it was too late.

Because she was too jumpy to relax, she opened her eyes again and looked in the rear view mirror to inspect her general appearance. That was when she spotted Lannie Gordon, pouncing down on her on foot, wearing high heels and an off-white suit that an ordinary woman would wear for dress occasions, but which Lannie donned for her day-to-day activities as a killer lawyer fighting the war for tobacco.

Naturally, Lannie would have driven her car into the neighborhood by the proper route. She apparently was attracted by the police activity a half block from her house and recognized Louise’s distinctive faded brown station wagon. It stood out like Jay’s old jalopy must have, when he dared to enter the neighborhood to rendezvous with Melissa.

Before Louise could adequately prepare herself, the woman was at the driver’s window, plopping her white-clad elbows onto its dirty expanse, then thinking the better of it and removing
them. “What the hell are you doing in my neighborhood?” she asked in a throaty voice.

“Is it closed to the public?” Louise retorted. What was she doing in Lannie’s neighborhood? For once, she couldn’t think of a single lie to cover the situation. She felt like asking what a hardworking person who made so much money and ought to be putting in sixty hours a week to justify it was doing at home before five on a Friday?

Then she remembered: The woman was working again tonight, dragging her young daughter to a big Goodrich affair. Lannie had come home early to get ready for that.

“Are you snooping around my house?”

Louise opened her eyes more widely. “You live on this street? I was having overheating problems with my car, so I pulled in here to give it a chance to cool down. I see you plutocrats have it closed to the bourgeoisie.” She grinned, “just joking, Lannie.”

Lannie wasn’t buying it. She stood there with her arms crossed. “Do you know Melissa? Have you ever met her? Did Jay bring her out to see you?”

Louise could answer some of those questions truthfully. “I promise you, Lannie, that Jay never introduced me to your daughter or brought her anywhere near my house. Now, does that make you feel better?”