Ishmael lurched to a stop. His cab needed new shocks, but Lacey was relatively unharmed except for nausea, a reporter’s occupational hazard. She paid the fare and he sped off.
The National Cathedral was one of her favorite places. When Lacey had first come to D.C., Mimi had introduced her to classical choral music concerts there. It never lost its majesty or its ability to leave her in a more serene state of mind, but she’d been surprised when Marcia suggested it. However, as Marcia pointed out, it was the last place anyone would look for her. “Meet me by Woodrow Wilson’s tomb tomorrow.” After a beat, she’d added, “God, I hope that’s not an omen.”
It was pleasant and cool inside the thick stone walls in the early afternoon. Lacey stood in the appointed alcove beside Wilson’s sarcophagus. Light streaming in from the stained-glass windows played along the stone columns and marble floors.
Sweet-looking white-haired docents wearing identical purple caps steered people into tour groups. The tiny senior tour guides proved both efficient and knowledgeable. Lacey made way for a Northern Virginia garden club, mostly cheerful-looking seniors eager to explore the secrets of the Bishop’s Garden and view the rouge-colored blossoms decorating the redbud trees. Following the tour, they would take in a civilized tea at the top of the tower and admire one of the best views of the city.
Lacey had scarcely given a thought to her outfit, but it was serviceable: basic black skirt and hose, and a deep-violet fitted sweater and matching jacket. Comfortable and colorful. She liked to be easy for a source to spot.
Lacey heard approaching heels clicking staccato. The weather was not quite warm enough to merit Marcia Robinson’s outfit: a yellow sundress abuzz with a flying-bees pattern, straw hat, and sunglasses. Spring had worked its spell on Marcia, who was straining against the media prison cell she had created for herself. This was not the sober gray-suited New Marcia. This was a woman who, it was said, represented the moral black hole of an entire generation. But if today’s garb was any clue, somewhere inside this young woman lurked Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Maybe Marcia wanted to be anybody but the girl on the front page, the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes, the terrible child who corrupted other congressional staffers, as well as some White House interns and a few of the underage pages, both male and female. Congress was eager to use her as a symbol of all that had gone soft in America’s core, its very soul rotting. Marcia was a product of Generation Why, as in “Why did we produce these people?”
“I’m supposed to be at the dentist.” She smiled the now familiar toothy smile. “Lacey Smithsonian. Is that a real name?” Lacey nodded. “Gee, I thought it was made up, to go with the ‘Crimes of Fashion’ thing.”
“No. Just my luck,” Lacey said. She held out her hand, which Marcia shook.
Marcia was delighted by her escape from the legal entourage and the rest of the media circus. “You’re the one who wrote ‘Never Wear Pink to Testify Before the Special Prosecutor. ’ ”
“Guilty.”
She looks younger like this, without all the sophisticated clothing.
“That prick—my attorney—made me memorize it. He kept yelling, ‘Be a grown-up! No pink, no Pollyanna!’ ”
“He didn’t.”
“Swear to God. He hands it to me all marked up with Hi-Liter and comments all over the margins. He told me, ‘If you can’t manage to look innocent, try for a little dignity.’ Can you believe it?”
A high-powered Washington lawyer who charged hundreds of dollars an hour was taking Lacey Smithsonian’s word for what his clients should wear to court.
“Your lawyer quotes me? I’d get a new lawyer!”
Marcia giggled, a giggle that turned into a snort. Lacey caught the mood and laughed too.
A sharp-eyed docent glared at them. Chastened, they moved out into the warm sunshine near the Herb Cottage and strolled beneath the evergreen bowers. In the Bishop’s Garden the tulips burst out in vibrant reds, yellows, and oranges against a stone wall. Grape hyacinth made itself welcome around the base of a statue of the Prodigal Son. It smelled of spring. But the subject was death.
A man in a tan suit wearing sunglasses and a repellent gray and lime-green tie reclined on a bench. Maybe it was Brooke’s warning, but Lacey wondered if he could be watching them while appearing to read
The Post
. She told herself not to be paranoid. Nevertheless, she moved Marcia out of hearing distance.
Marcia confided that these days she never read the newspapers without a cocktail, and she had promised her mother not to start drinking until after five. Which meant Marcia hadn’t yet seen the latest
Eye Street Observer
story about Angela Woods, the official suicide, suspicion of misdeeds, and her connection to it.
“My lawyer is freaking. He warned me not to read anything at all and to keep my mouth shut.”
“So why are you talking to me?”
“I want a new lawyer,” Marcia said. “Younger and cuter. Plus he’s a publicity pig. I can’t talk, but he can talk and talk and talk.”
Lacey hated to ruin a few minutes of peace, but she too was a product of the media. “You said you were sorry about Angie.”
“I can’t believe that she actually killed herself. I am really sorry.” Marcia swiftly fell off the cloud she was riding. The plump face lost its vitality. The carefully outlined lips curled into a little girl’s pout. “You know, my lawyer, the jerk, says I could go to prison for lying about what I did, for talking, for breathing even. It’s not fair. It’s not like I hurt anyone. Exactly.” Marcia pulled a bottle of Evian from her shoulder bag and took a swig.
“From what I hear, you’re the original scarlet woman, and you lead others astray, starting with your coworkers.”
“As if. For starters, maybe I did encourage a few people to drop their knickers. So what? It’s free enterprise, right?”
The Small Business Committee should be proud.
“But it’s not like I went into it with some far-flung goal of undermining democracy or something,” Marcia declared. “The porno thing—and it was really mild; it was more like art shots—seemed really exciting and fun at first, like putting one over on your parents. All our Web stuff was light, sexy, funny—nothing heavy or weird. So we sell some videotapes and DVDs. No biggie. And such a no-brainer. It didn’t seem so bad. I mean everybody’s a liberal, right? Consenting adults, First Amendment, and compared to other stuff on the Web, it was totally kid stuff.”
“That’s another thing. Apparently some of them are kids. Underage pages.”
“Yeah, but kids are really mature these days, Lacey. They all surf the Net. I started out as a White House intern when I was really young, and the stories I could tell . . . I was beginning to make good money, everyone was. And now my lawyer says my phones could be tapped, the apartment could be bugged. The FBI’s under the bed—that kind of thing.”
It was pretty clear to Lacey why Marcia’s attorney was concerned. Marcia really liked to talk.
“You have no idea how weird and horrible it is to see your friends subpoenaed, flown in from all over to tell the grand jury about you. I mean, come on! I keep expecting to see my ID picture flashed on
America’s Most Wanted
. Me! Public Enemy Number One. With ancient history from high school, you know, who I slept with, what I did. And the press! It’s like having your skin stripped off in little pieces and fed to piranhas.”
Wait till the special prosecutor gets through with you.
“What about Sherri Gold?”
Marcia rolled her eyes. “Scary Skeleton? That’s what we called her. Talk about piranhas. I ruined her life, she says. Sure, she lost her job, but she’s not a joke on
Saturday Night Live
. That’s my gig.”
“Is she really scary?”
“Definitely. She said she’ll get me somehow. I saw her slap an intern silly for opening one of her desk drawers once. Said she was just looking for a pencil, but Scary Skeleton accused her of going through her personal files. It was intense. I mean, Sherri just lost it. I had to break it up.”
“What do you think she’s capable of doing?”
“I don’t know. She’s pretty much a liar, but I don’t know. I’d rather not think about it.”
“Tell me about Angie.”
Angie was easy to talk to, too easy, Marcia told Lacey. Marcia found that between the shampoo and the blow-dry she was spilling secrets like a sinner in confession. She talked about the Web-site scheme, the money, the big guys. No real names, she said, but nicknames and euphemisms that made the players clear. But when Lacey asked for more details, Marcia clammed up.
“What made you go for the makeover in the first place?”
“Someone found my driver’s license picture and blew it up into an eight-by-ten for the tabloids.” Marcia gulped down some more water. “Did you see it? I don’t think I ever looked that bad in real life. I mean all driver’s license pictures are awful, right? But when they blow it up and put it on the front page with headlines like ‘Porky Porn Princess Behind Erotic Web Scandal’ and ‘Would You Buy a Porno Pinup From This Frump?’ It was pretty awful.” A tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away. “My mother said, ‘Marcia, you gotta do something. ’ Do you know what else she said to me? ‘They can’t send you to prison looking like that, Marcia. You don’t look that good in orange.’ Good God, nobody looks that good in orange.”
“How did you happen to go to Stylettos? It’s not the most exclusive salon.”
“No, but Josephine has plans to make it that way.”
“Josephine Radford?”
“Yeah, she’s a friend of my mom’s. She’s going to make her salons really exclusive.”
“What do you mean
her
salons?”
“Oh, there’s this big nasty property settlement between her and Boyd, her ex, that’s still in court. When she gets her share of the salons, she’s going real upscale. Anyway, she recommended this Leonardo guy. Supposed to be hot. Her personal star stylist. But I get there and he’s a no-show. One of those temperamental
artistes
who has to be in the mood to cut your hair? Anyway, the manager—she’s this punkster, with a crew cut and leather girdle, pretty intense—she suggests Angie. Angie turned out to be real sweet. Not spooky at all. And after we did the hair, she suggested new makeup and shaping my eyebrows. Wow! It was radical. I looked completely different. Angie was totally not judgmental and she seemed so eager to help me look good. She was like a really good friend. She just listened. I guess the more nervous I am, the more I talk, the more people tell me to shut up.”
Marcia paused for a breath. “Angie never told me to shut up. And she was so pretty. I used to kid her that she could have had her own photo gallery on the Web site.”
Good grief.
“What was her reaction?”
“She said only if she could be Lady Godiva, with all her hair and everything. But she wasn’t serious, she actually seemed kind of shy.”
“Why did you cancel your last appointment that day? The day she died.”
“I was scared. I told her too much: names of people and places where things happened. I called her that day to tell her that she might get papers making her go to court. I canceled my hair appointment because they were following me everywhere. You know, guys in gray suits, wearing earpieces and sunglasses.”
Lacey looked for the man in the cheap tan suit. He was gone. “ ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you,’ ” she quoted. “Did you tell Sherri Gold you canceled your appointment that day?”
“No. Why would I do that?”
“She took your appointment after you canceled.”
Marcia’s eyes opened wide. “That is so creepy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. She’s just creepy.” Lacey wasn’t convinced that was all. “Angie was upset on the phone when I called to cancel,” Marcia said. “She’d had some fight with Josephine.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know.” Marcia looked away. “Josephine seemed mad that I hadn’t used Leonardo. Maybe it had something to do with that.” Marcia’s lip quivered. “What if it was my fault? I mean, it’s crazy, but what if she killed herself because she couldn’t face the whole thing—the FBI, the cameras, the special prosecutor? What if she had some, like, terrible secret or something?”
“What if somebody else killed her?”
Marcia’s jaw dropped. “Killed her? Oh my God! But why? She wasn’t involved. Not really.”
“Who do you think would want to kill her, Marcia?”
“God, I don’t know. I mean there are lots of people who want to kill
me
. Starting with my mother. But not Angie.”
“Someone cut off all her hair, slashed her wrists, and left her to bleed to death.”
“Her hair? They cut off her hair?”
Marcia reached for her own luxuriant locks and the tears started for real, just as the tour group poured into the garden. Lacey guided her to solitude in the stone gazebo overlooking the Bishop’s Garden. The green buds ushered in a new season, the stone walls harkened back centuries to another time and place. Eventually Lacey and the garden worked to dry Marcia’s tears.
The two women chatted Wednesday afternoon away. Lacey asked Marcia’s permission to publish some of the interview on the record, knowing that once again, this was too hot for the LifeStyle section and would wind up on the front page. Yet another opportunity to piss off that smug Peter Johnson and impress tough guy Trujillo. And baffle Mac.
“Doesn’t really matter. I’m already screwed, aren’t I?” Marcia’s mascara was running down her cheeks.
Lacey handed her a fresh tissue. “With or without me, you’ve already been tossed to the wolves. This way, at least, I can print your side of the story, how you feel about all this.” Marcia found herself nodding. “Of course, your lawyer might object,” Lacey said.
“Screw him.” Marcia blew her nose. Lacey tried not to think about that.
“By the way, Marcia. I’m writing a style piece for Sunday . . .”