The Rose Conspiracy (15 page)

He walked in the door and a chime sounded. There were tables
decoratively filled with pottery, busts, and figurines. There were a few historical personages caught in bronze. One was a bust of Abraham Lincoln.

A few moments later Vinnie poked her head around the corner from a back room. She had an artist's apron on, her sleeves were rolled up, and her hands were stained with gray clay.

“J.D.,” she said brightly. “I am so glad to see you. How is my very brilliant lawyer?”

“Not happy,” he barked out. “And when I am not happy that makes me feel less than brilliant.”

“What's the matter?” she said taking a few steps toward him and tossing a tight curl away from her face coyly.

“You,” he said sharply.

“Me?” she said with a little pout on her lips. “Don't be such a big, bad, angry old man. I like you much better when you're happy.” Then she put her hands on her hips like she was doing a Shirley Temple impersonation.

“Do me a favor,” Blackstone said. “Cut the Betty Boop baby-doll act.”

Vinnie flinched a little at that. Then she dropped her hands to her side and closed both of her eyes, and tilted her head slightly to the side and gave out an overblown sigh.

“You can leave now,” she said quietly. “I was very peaceful and calm before you came here.”

“Peaceful is where you are heading,” Blackstone barked back. “Unless you start cooperating with me and responding to my calls and e-mails. Permanently peaceful is the place where the AUSA is trying to put you—if you are convicted, they'll lead you from the death-row section of the prison to a table where they will strap you down and put an IV full of poisons into your veins. Then you'll get real peaceful. Is that what you want?”

“No,” she said quietly.

“Alright then, let's talk.”

“Let's go into the back, where my studio is,” she said.

He followed her into the back room, which had a skylight and several large work tables, and a manually operated pottery wheel for throwing pots. There was a smaller table, higher than the others, with a clay bust
on it, with what looked like a work in progress. There was something familiar about the face that was the subject of the bust.

There were two wooden chairs, and Blackstone sat down in one. Vinnie wiped her hands and pulled the other chair up so close that her feet were in between his.

“I am all yours,” she said with her hands in her lap.

“First question,” he asked. “Why have you been avoiding me?”

“J.D., dear, I haven't. I've been busy with several art shows. Two in the Midwest. One in New Mexico. Besides, that's why I hired you, to manage my case. I trust you completely, J.D. Really. I put myself totally into your hands. Body and soul.”

He felt her foot touching his so he scooted his feet under his chair.

“I appreciate your trust—” he began, but she cut him off.

“Not only my trust, but Magister's too.”

“Lord Dee?”

“Right. He called me to let me know that the two of you had met in England. He said you were every bit as smart as he had figured. He was quite impressed.”

“So,” Blackstone said, “you were too busy to return
my
calls, but you took his?”

Vinnie threw him a wounded look and said, “That's not fair. Please, J.D. dear, don't say that.”

Suddenly Blackstone had the sinking feeling that their attorney–client conversation was devolving into a minor spat between a couple on a date that was not going well.

“Let's keep this objective,” Blackstone shot back. “I ask the questions. You answer. So here goes—first question. Why do you and Lord Dee dress like two long-dead figures from the 1800s? Your hairstyle like a nineteenth-century artist. His beard and hair, his whole look, is patterned after Albert Pike.”

“I told you my mother named me after Vinnie Ream.”

“So what? Does that mean you have to play her like you're trapped in some permanent Halloween party? Why not change the routine? How about doing Cinderella or Wonder Woman next time you play dress-up?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I think you do.”

“All I know is that I believe Magister Dee when he says there is a spiritual link between the four of us—between Albert and Vinnie in the 1800s and Magister and me today—and I can't explain it. But I feel, somehow, very deeply, that it is true. So I do my hair up like Vinnie Ream. Is that so terrible?”

“And Lord Dee pays your bills and pays for this studio. And keeps an eye on you like his own personal trophy. Is that so terrible?” Blackstone said mockingly.

“Why are you being so mean to me, J.D. dear?”

“Why don't you tell me
everything
you know about the Booth diary pages, and Lord Dee's desire to get them?” Blackstone asked.

“I don't know anything more than I've told you already—”

“You're lying.”

“And you're being terribly hurtful.”

“Did the fact that you were hired to sculpt Horace Langley have something to do with the Booth diary?”

“No…I just don't know. I can't answer those things. You'll have to ask Magister.”

“Oh, I intend to. Now, last question—why were you
really
with Horace Langley on the day he was murdered? And don't tell me it had anything to do with your sculpting him. I know, because I've read the FBI reports. They interviewed one of the guards who cleared you to visit Horace Langley the day he was murdered. You weren't carrying any art supplies. Nothing.”

“Okay. I'll tell you one thing. You're right, I didn't sculpt him on that very last visit. I was going to see him for something else.”

“Something else, like doing a dry run?” Blackstone said harshly. “Maybe checking the keypad security code he had given you before you met with him, just to make sure it worked? So that later that evening you could give the code to the assassin, who then slipped into the building after hours to put some bullets into Langley and take the Booth diary?”

“No, no, don't say that,” Vinnie cried out. “Please don't…it's not true. I was there because Magister Dee asked me to go.”

“To what?”

“To make an offer to Horace Langley…to buy the diary pages…the missing pages he was about to have examined…or, not really to buy them, but to buy the right to inspect them first, before anyone else. That was why Magister's private foundation paid me to sculpt Horace Langley's bust in the first place. To get close to him so I could help Magister negotiate the Booth diary deal. Lord Dee was willing to pay a huge fee to get access to the pages for just a few months, and then would return them to the Smithsonian and to Langley after he was done.”

“Done doing what? What was in those pages that he needed to see?”

Vinnie was just shaking her head back and forth.

“But Langley rejected the offer you conveyed from Lord Dee?” Blackstone said.

“Right,” she replied. “That's exactly what happened.”

“And so, later that very same night he was murdered,” Blackstone said in a tone of somber resignation. “That very thing you wanted to obtain for your mystic soul-friend, Lord Dee, ends up missing. How convenient. And how devastatingly simple for the prosecution to prove motive against you.”

Vinnie didn't respond.

“Are you done?” she asked quietly.

“For now,” he answered.

“Then come with me,” she said, and took him by the hand and led him over to the unfinished clay bust that was on the table.

“Look at this,” she said, and pushed him a little toward it. “Very closely. And tell me what you see.”

Blackstone stared at the face emerging from the clay.

“The bold, sharp eyes,” Vinnie said. “The cheekbones. The angular face. Handsome. Strong.”

Then Blackstone saw what she was trying to describe.
She thinks she is sculpting me,
he thought as he studied the face she had been molding out of the clay. He turned around.

But as he did, she was right there waiting, and she wrapped her arms around him and pulled herself into him, kissing him fully on the lips, passionately.

Blackstone smelled her exotic perfume, and for a moment he disappeared into her soft embrace. Then he pulled away.

“This is a dangerous game,” he said.

“Can't a woman have both a lawyer and a lover at the same time?” she asked.

“Not unless she wants to lose both,” he snapped back.

Blackstone turned and headed through the studio and out into the gallery toward her front door. Then he turned around. Vinnie was standing in the middle of the room.

“It's not just the Civil War hairstyle, Vinnie,” he said. “It's gone far beyond that. You've adapted Vinnie Ream's modus operandi. Your Civil War heroine gained her celebrity status by two primary means—first, her artistic brilliance. I believe you have that too. But second, by her beauty, which she used as a tool of manipulation. By all accounts, she was a brilliant flirt. Stealing the hearts of men she came in contact with. Even beguiling a reluctant senator to vote against removing a sitting President Andrew Johnson from office—perhaps as a payback to Johnson for his having given her soul-friend, Albert Pike, a pardon two years before.”

Then he put his hand on the door handle to leave but paused to add one more thought.

“So, Vinnie, what is the quid pro quo with me? What is it you are trying to get from me?”

“Manipulation? Do you think that's what this is about?” Vinnie asked, her voice breaking a little.

Then she added, “Your logical, hyperanalytical brain just can't conceive that a woman wants you simply because she feels herself slowly falling in love with you…You just can't compute that one, can you?”

Blackstone didn't answer, but turned and left.

While J.D. Blackstone was motoring home, he didn't bother to click on his radio. Or play CDs. He simply listened to the deep, harmonious drone of the engine under the hood of his Maserati and tried to keep his head clear.

Trying to forget the loneliness and the rush of emotions that was drenching him.

And in the midst of all of it, he could not shake the image of Vinnie. Beautiful. Outlandish. Unashamedly flirtatious. Yet hidden.

He knew that thus far in his representation of Vinnie Archmont, he was unable to mount an effective defense, or even form a convincing
theory for her innocence that a jury would likely believe. But beyond that, he felt that he was being pulled, as if by some primordial tug from the planets, out to a deep and very dangerous place. As if he was losing his fight to maintain equilibrium. His will to decide his own fate.

Blackstone was coming to the very private realization that his beautiful client was slowly bewitching him.

And although the top of his convertible was down in the balmy Virginia weather, he thought he could still smell the intoxication of her perfume.

Yet just as powerfully, Blackstone could not master the dread that seemed capable of suffocating him, cutting off his breathing—the dark realization that in his secret longings for Vinnie, he was, in some way, betraying his wife and daughter now nearly as much as he had in their deaths.

CHAPTER 22

A
t his law office, J.D. Blackstone was on the phone with his investigator, Tully Tullinger. Tully said he had some important news about an assignment the lawyer had given him. Blackstone put him on speakerphone so he could keep working while they talked.

“You wanted me to check out the prosecution's insistence that what was inside that Langley note be kept secret, remember?” Tully said.

“Right,” Blackstone replied, half-listening while he sat in front of his computer, answering, one by one, a column of e-mails that had been languishing in his inbox.

“So,” Tully continued, “the question is this—what was the
real
reason Henry Hartz was pushing so hard to keep you from reading the Langley note, and then from sharing it with anyone else. I know you didn't buy the reason they gave in their affidavit. Frankly, neither did I.”