The Rose Conspiracy (29 page)

“Agreed.”

“Lastly,” Blackstone continued, “I still need to belabor the obvious—if it will help Vinnie's defense and assist in proving her innocence, and if I have any credible basis at all, I won't hesitate to point the finger at you. To implicate you personally in the Smithsonian crime. Do you understand that?”

There was a pause before Dee responded.

“You have,” Lord Dee said, “rather thrown down the gauntlet with that, haven't you?”

“I prefer to use a slightly more American metaphor,” Blackstone countered. “I've just fired off a warning shot. A little like the battles of Lexington and Concord. Consider yourself, Lord Dee, having been put on notice.”

Blackstone knew that the government prosecutor was still considering Lord Dee to be the unofficial and unindicted chief suspect, the hidden conspirator behind the murder of Horace Langley. Dee's possible complicity was clear now that Blackstone had read the grand jury testimony of detective Victor Cheski about the meeting in Scotland where Lord Dee
was not only a featured speaker, but was also accompanied by Vinnie. Coupling that with Dee's unabashed obsession with the Booth diary pages, Blackstone couldn't deny the logic of such a scenario.

“Notice taken,” Lord Dee responded in a chilly tone.

“So, what would you like to talk about?” Blackstone asked.

“The Horace Langley note,” Lord Dee replied bluntly. “That is what I want to discuss.”

“How fascinating,” Blackstone began.

But Dee jumped in to continue.

“I know the judges have now ordered that the note can be distributed from you to others.”

“Yes, but I'm afraid that the Court of Appeals gave me a very short list. And you're not on it.”

“I would have assumed,” Dee said, “that you would have had ample time to think up a creative solution to that dilemma.”

“Lately, I've been very short on creativity.”

“When can the contents of the Langley note be made available to me?” Dee said, persisting.

“I can't say. Maybe after the trial. Maybe never.”

“I'm wondering,” Lord Dee said, “how I can effectively persuade you to rethink your answer to that.”

“You can't,” Blackstone shot back.

“Put some thought into that, I urge you,” Lord Dee said, bringing the short conversation to an end.

Then Lord Dee added something that surprised Blackstone with its audacity and clumsiness.

“Certainly hope you will be on the mend soon,” Dee said coldly. “Sorry to hear about your hospital stay. Goodbye.”

If that had been a threat, then Blackstone questioned why Dee would have uttered it in a telephone conversation that could have been recorded without his knowledge.

He called Frieda and Julia into his office.

“Was there any mention of my shooting incident in the newspapers. Anywhere? Radio? Internet?”

They both shook their heads.

“Which surprised me,” Julia said. “I would have expected something
to get out, considering the fact that you are involved in a very high-profile case right now.”

“You're both sure?” he asked again.

They both nodded.

“So, how would Lord Magister Dee know that I was in the hospital?”

“Uh-oh,” Frieda said, a little embarrassed.

“What does that mean?” Blackstone asked.

“I just mean that…well,” Frieda began. “I think when Colin Reading called…I may have mentioned that you had just gotten back to the office from the hospital…meaning, you know, your visit to physical therapy.”

Suddenly, what had started out as another piece of evidence potentially implicating Lord Dee in dark misdeeds, this time in the attack on Blackstone, fizzled out without drama or fanfare, like a glowing ember in the rain.

“From now on,” Blackstone said wearily, “no personal information about me or Julia being given to anyone.
No information.
”

They both nodded.

“Now, did either of you tell anyone outside this office that I might be horseback riding on the day I got shot?”

They both assured him that they hadn't and they were certain about that.

After Frieda left Blackstone's office, he asked Julia to stay and brief him on some things.

“What do we know from Tully about Senator Collings?”

“Here is what he told me,” she said looking over his notes. “First he did an inside-the-Beltway investigation into Collings. Talked to staffers, lobbyists, fellow members of Congress. News reporters. Then he headed to the Ozarks. Tully called this report in from a small town in Arkansas. He said this information was gleaned only at great personal risk, namely, and this is a direct quote—‘having to endure lunches and dinners in several greasy spoons specializing in pork barbecue while trying to find out from Senator Collings's former neighbors what really makes this guy tick.' ”

“Tell him I can recommend a good gastroenterologist,” Blackstone cracked. “So, give me the thick on Collings's ‘tick.' ”

“Well, first, he says that there are no big scandals involving the Senator lurking under the surface down in his hometown.”

“Fair enough. What else?”

“He did what he called a ‘360-degree' check on any connection between Senator Collings and all of the main players in your case, namely—Vinnie, Lord Dee, the primary law enforcement investigators, and Horace Langley. Of course you already know that Collings is on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian, so he had a passing acquaintance with Langley, but nothing of significance.”

“No ties with Lord Dee?”

“Zero,” Julia said.

“So,” Blackstone said, “we are still trying to find out why Collings has tried to put the heavy hand down on Henry Hartz's prosecution of this case. Why did he insist that Hartz keep the contents of the Langley note secret?”

“How about this?” Julia suggested. “Maybe just trying the preserve the good name and reputation of the Smithsonian, and, of course, all those on the Board, himself included.”

“That doesn't follow,” Blackstone snapped back. “Unless the Langley note shows something down and dirty was going on within the Smithsonian, and how can that be? You've read that note. Does anything in it implicate the Smithsonian in anything ugly? Furthermore, Langley's note has all the earmarks of his having simply recorded a portion of something he read in the Booth diary pages—pages authored around the time of Lincoln's assassination. How could any of that be an embarrassment to Senator Collings or the Smithsonian Institution more than a hundred and forty years after that event?”

Julia said nothing.

Blackstone's eyes flashed.

“I'm waiting,” Blackstone burst out, now with his voice, out of nowhere, almost reaching a shout. “Where are the answers here?”

“Perhaps,” Julia replied calmly, “you are upset by the fact that your defense of Vinnie Archmont, thus far, has not seemed to have…well…diminished or defeated the plain facts here.”

“Plain facts?” Blackstone said. Now his voice was faltering a little.

“Face it,” Julia said, now her voice resolute. “The evidence shows, at
least in the field of probabilities, that your dear little Vinnie is probably culpable, in some way, of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiring to steal the Booth diary pages.”

“Is this some kind of feminine intuition thing going on?” Blackstone sputtered.

“I'm surprised at you,” she spit back. “That with all your brilliance you would resort to a base expression of chauvinism.”

“Ha!” he shouted out. “You're a woman. And Vinnie, in case you haven't noticed, is very much a woman. And those two incontrovertible facts are getting in the way of your helping me solve this case. It has clouded your perspective. I desperately need a handle. And right now, I have nothing…nothing…”

“Is that really my responsibility?” she said. “To prove that your slippery, flirtatious, manipulative little sneak of a client is innocent? I don't think so.”

“No, you're right,” Blackstone said with a dark sense of finality. “It isn't. That's
my
job.”

She walked to the door of his office to leave. But she knew there was something else Tully had told her that she had to share with Blackstone.

“One more thing,” she said curtly. “Senator Collings is the president of some obscure Confederate history society.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Yes. The Albert Pike Memorial Foundation.”

CHAPTER 40

B
lackstone was standing in front of the statue of Albert Pike in the Judiciary Square district, at 3rd and D Streets in the northwest section of downtown Washington. During the summer the trees had grown to the point of covering the top of the statue, hiding it from view unless one was standing, as Blackstone was, very close to its base.

Julia's last comment in Blackstone's office had sent him scurrying out of the office, grabbing a cab, and then getting to Pike's statue as soon as possible.

The bronze statue stood eleven feet tall, mounted on a white marble pedestal. The Italian sculptor who created the memorial had also sculpted another figure at its base—this one resembling a reclining Grecian female, who was holding the banner of the Scottish Rite of the Freemasons.

In Pike's left hand was a massive book—his monumental life's work, a book he titled
Morals and Dogma.
The huge tome set both the symbolic and philosophical basis for the ascending degrees that a Mason can aspire to. But the book also did something else. It laid out Pike's complex, opaque religious philosophy, incorporating a crazy quilt of pagan religions, Egyptology, and Gnosticism.

In his preparation of Vinnie's case, Blackstone had obtained a copy of Pike's book but had only read small portions here and there. But he was now more convinced than ever that the “AP” in the first line of Langley's note of the cryptic Booth diary entry must be referring to Albert Pike.

As he gazed up at the statue—with Pike dressed, not in the Confederate uniform he wore during the Civil War as an officer for the cause
of Southern secession, but in nineteenth-century civilian long coat and trousers—Blackstone realized the anomaly of it all. Here was the only Confederate officer ever memorialized in a statue in Washington DC. And not only a Confederate, but a rebel suspected of treason and war crimes.

But there was another symbolic feature in this monument. One that seemed to reach out to Blackstone like the figures in a 3-D screen grasping directly at the startled audience.

There he was, Albert Pike, in all his philosophical pomposity, the grandiose form of a man who spent his life trying to rethink the nature of the world and the essence of its religions. Below him was the servile female figure, like a doting pagan goddess assigned to serve the great figure above on Mt. Olympus. Who was the female at the base of the statue? Was it actually supposed to represent Vinnie Ream, the beautiful sculptress of President Abraham Lincoln and the object of the much older Albert Pike's frustrated affections?

But Blackstone was thinking about his case. About the grandiose and very rich Lord Magister Dee, who fancied himself a kind of contemporary Albert Pike. Which necessarily made Vinnie Archmont the later-day Vinnie Ream. And he was also considering Senator Bo Collings, who headed up a nonprofit foundation whose mission was to preserve the memory and the reputation of Albert Pike.

Suddenly, as J.D. Blackstone was gazing at the two statues he felt a kind of shiver race down his spinal column.

Maybe,
he suddenly thought to himself,
I've had the perspective all wrong. Perhaps everything needs to be reversed here.

He stood before the statue for several more minutes, pondering his revelation.

Then he flagged down a taxi.

He climbed in the cab clumsily with his one good arm, trying not to bang the shoulder with the sling into the car door. When he was in the backseat he leaned forward and instructed the cabbie to wait a moment before leaving that spot.