Death of a Political Plant (15 page)

“Our very thought, Mrs. Eldridge”, he said. “Come on and sit down again. You’ve been through a terrible experience here, and I don’t want you to get faint or anything, especially since you tell me Mr. Eldridge is out of town.”

“An accidental death,” she murmured, liking the sound of the words. Resuming her seat on the couch, she crossed her arms on her stomach and hugged herself to keep from trembling. “I wonder why the Mougeys, who are thoughtful people, didn’t think about the danger of that bronze bird.”

“They might have,” said Geraghty, “if they’d had small children. Otherwise, people put the darndest things in their yard and call it art. He could just as well have killed himself on the statue of the child, too. Her hand sticking out that way is another lethal weapon, to say nothing of that deer’s hind leg, kicking out back the way it does.”

“Detective Geraghty, I’d be so glad if it’s an accident. This has made me feel so guilty.”

“Guilty?” he asked, frowning. “Why?”

Her words came out awkwardly, through trembling lips. “He was an old friend, and I kicked him out of my house and made him move here. Otherwise, he would be alive right now.”

He shook his head. “You’d best not take on the blame for this, Mrs. Eldridge—it’s not your fault. And right now, help me if you will. We want to be thorough and rule out other possibilities beyond the obvious one of an accident. You call him Jay McCormick, but he has identification in his wallet that says he’s John McCormick.”

“That was his given name.”

“And he’s from Sacramento. Know what he was doing here?”

“He was writing something, I don’t know exactly what. He’d been in Washington for about five months on this project. I’m not sure who he was writing for—maybe himself, or maybe for the newspaper he used to work for out there, the
Sacramento Union
.” In fact, she thought to herself,
if I ever get my strength back, I’ll call that newspaper myself and talk to the editor.

Geraghty looked at her dubiously. “Five months? Seems to me that’s a long time to work on one story.”

She raised her shoulders in a semblance of a shrug; it was easier than talking.

Geraghty sighed. “Okay: Let’s look at it from another angle. If this man wasn’t even from the Washington area, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to think that he had enemies here. As far as you knew, was that true?”

“I’m not sure about that. Actually, he seemed sort of paranoid, trying to avoid somebody. Just yesterday, he said if people were to hunt him down, they would be ‘suits.’”

“
Suits
.”

“Yes, you know, ‘suits.’”

“‘Suits.’ Okay,” and he wrote that down on his pad.

“He wasn’t worried about the stranger.”

“The stranger?”

She told him about the dark-clothed man who intruded in her yard, and how she disposed of him and called 911, as well as about the big gray car that appeared to be surveilling the cul-de-sac.

Geraghty’s eyebrows went down in a frown. “So you’re sure you don’t know what Mr. McCormick was writing about?”

Louise remembered the daily frustration she had felt because she had no idea of what jay was pouring out on his computer. “He wouldn’t tell me, and we’re—we were—friends. I think it was one of two things: something political about the upcoming presidential election; or something about the Supreme Court brouhaha about prisoner rights that’s got people excited out there on Constitution Avenue. He used to be very big on investigating death row crimes.” She looked down at her hands sitting helplessly in her lap and felt the tears coming again. “He was a very good man, Detective Geraghty.”

The big detective had the good grace to say nothing, and let her cry in peace, merely handing over his worn linen handkerchief for her to dry her eyes.

Several other officers had been scouting around the yard and now had entered the house to begin looking for evidence; among them was Detective Morton, and at the sight of him, Louise wished she could disappear into the couch. She couldn’t handle Morton right now. He was Geraghty’s partner, and a man whom Louise had learned to dislike. Maybe it was because he had actually believed Louise might have murdered her Channel Five colleague. He had dark hair, a well-boned face, and a muscular upper body, so that from the waist up one might have thought him the perfectly formed man, but appended to his long trunk were a pair of short legs. This gave him the scary aspect of a monster; she had an inkling Morton knew it, and tried to live up to it in some perverse way.

“What did you find back there, George?” called Geraghty. So it was George Morton. And to her he said, “Detective Morton is second in command on this investigation. Just wanted you to know that.” Morton doubled back and, without greeting Louise, whispered something in Geraghty’s ear.
Then he impassively gazed at her, his expression saying, “Here again, are you, Mrs. Eldridge? Well, with me, you’re guilty until proven innocent,” Morton was the rudest cop she had ever met, and unfortunately, she had met quite a few since moving back to the Washington, D.C., area.

“Hello, Mrs. Eldridge.”

“Hello, Detective Morton.” Then he disappeared into the bedroom area of the house.

Geraghty, left with the job of overcoming the bad resonances of the other detective, pulled himself forward in his chair to bring himself closer to where Louise sat on the couch. Detecting 101, she figured: Make nice with witnesses from whom you need information. “Uh, you say this McCormick was writing a story. What was he writing
with
? We’ve searched the house, and we found a computer upstairs in the bedroom, all nicely covered and shut off. Do you mean that one?”

“That’s probably the Mougeys’ computer. I doubt that jay would have used that. He had his own; it was small and black. Not very fancy. Some generic brand. He always kept it with him wherever he slept.”

“We checked the guest room on the first floor, where he appeared to be staying. The door was wide open, and there was a mess of coffee cups and dirty clothes all over the place. A pile of typewriter paper. But no computer, no disks, not even a typewriter, or scraps of paper with writing on them. How do you think that happened?”

The enormity of it hit her: Jay didn’t die a simple accidental death by losing his balance after polishing off a bottle of Richard Mougey’s wine. He was murdered.

“It’s futile,” she said faintly, looking at Geraghty.

“What’s futile?”

“Trying to find a simple answer to jay’s death. It wasn’t an accident; it had to be murder. Jay McCormick guarded that computer and his writing with his life, and that’s apparently what he did last night.” And then the tears began to fall again.

T
HE LINEN HANDKERCHIEF ENDED UP
in a wet ball before her tears finally stopped. She looked around and began to take in the activity around her. Mike Geraghty still sat near her, solid and silent. Morton bustled back and forth, growling fussy directions to patrolmen who were helping search the house.

In an economy of motion, Geraghty caught Morton’s eye and with a tip of his head signaled him to come over. When
he did, the lead detective tilted his head meaningfully toward Louise. The master of nonverbal communication.

Morton nodded.

Louise looked at the two of them. “What—”

“George here is going to walk you home,” said Geraghty. “You’re pretty shook up.”

“Really, there’s no need to do that.”

Geraghty tapped his pencil against his big knee and gave her another close but kindly look. “Mrs. Eldridge, you may have seen death before, but it’s different when it’s somebody you care for. You’re white as a sheet, and you look like you have about the strength of a … a wet noodle” Not given to colorful speech, he flushed with surprise at his own words. “Well, something like’ that. All I know is that you need to go home and rest if you can, especially since I need you to come into the station to talk again later.”

He straightened up in his easy chair: no more forays into the world of metaphors and similes for him. “You’ll talk to Detective Morton, because I’ll be working on another case. I’d like you to make it there by four, if you could.”

She proffered the soaked handkerchief. “I’ll have to launder it for you.”

He cocked his head a little, as if to say, “Keep it.”

She and Morton left the Mougey house together, and for a wild, whimsical moment she wondered if Geraghty had done this on purpose so that the two of them could become more compatible. Not friends, just not venomous enemies. Morton picked up speed crossing the front yard, and soon she found herself two steps behind like a Japanese wife, trotting to keep up with him. How could those short legs move so fast? He sped across the cul-de-sac and up her front path. Once on the front porch, he turned to her with a knowing look, then
turned back and tried the door. “Aha,” he said, “just like I figured.” The door was open, the way she had left it. He shook his head in angry disapproval. “You go around this neighborhood leaving your house wide open?”

“Sometimes.”

“How long you been gone—an hour? Anybody could have walked in here: a rapist, a murderer, a thief. Better stay behind me.” He entered the house, his hand on his gun, and looked in every room and closet before he was satisfied.

Then he returned to the living room, gave the antique furniture a suspicious look, and shook his head again. “Mrs. Eldridge, I know this is a nice neighborhood, but it isn’t that nice.” He cocked his thumb toward the Mougey house. “Now just look what happened over there—plus you know what happened to you a coupla other times. Would you please put your house key in your”—lie waggled his finger hopelessly at her, standing there in her compartmentalized shorts and T-shirt—“well, somewhere in those shorts. And lock up when you leave the house!”

With that he stomped out. She ran after him and called, “I’ll do that, Detective Morton, I promise.”

He had heard her, for he turned his head and shot back an expression of total disbelief: “Huh!”

So much for trying to communicate with the man.

She went inside the house and stood stock-still in the middle of the living room. Her stomach churned, her head ached; she felt utterly miserable. If only Bill were here, or janie, or one of her close neighbor friends, Nora or Mary. She longed to share her grief with someone. Even her newly acquired P.P.S. friends would have sympathetically listened. In fact, they probably would have thrown themselves into investigating the murder, whether she wanted them to or not.

Her first task was to call Mary and Richard, and tell them a dead man had shown up in their fishpond. She went to the Rolodex and found the number for their Caribbean villa; she needed to phone the police station with the number, for they, too, would call the Mougeys. A housekeeper answered and informed her they had taken off for an overnight sail with friends. Louise didn’t want to leave the macabre message with the woman. She would leave it to the police.

Wandering inexorably toward the kitchen, she didn’t know what made her feel worse, the guilt or the sorrow. When she sighted a sweet bun sitting on the counter, she realized part of it was hunger. Munching the bun, she went to the refrigerator and took out the last of the leftovers from Barbara’s dinner and popped them in the microwave. Taking her food to the patio, she sat at the glass-topped table and ate, thinking over the situation in which she found herself.

She had to get rid of her guilt, which was piling up inside her like a thunderhead. But how? It was guilt for being annoyed with Jay because he was a lousy houseguest and because he kept all his secrets to himself. Guilt for sending him away in the first place, when he would have been safe with her. But it was too late for guilt and for throwing herself down on the ground again and crying. What she needed to do was to think.

She had sent him across the street on Tuesday evening, and it had taken him only a little more than twenty-four hours to end up dead in Mary Mougey’s koi pond. “Oh, Jay,” she murmured. “Why?” What had happened since he left her house? Before he went, she had told him of the mysterious man who had skulked around Dogwood Court earlier in the week and he had been undisturbed. But she had not mentioned the big gray car. Would that have been a warning to him?

Tuesday evening, when her plant people arrived, Louise
had seen Jay leaving in his old car, looking almost as if he were wearing a disguise. Where was he going then, back to watch his ex-wife’s activities, or somewhere else that was more dangerous? She had been working Wednesday and didn’t see him at all during the day, and only heard about him that evening from Gil Whitson.

Gil. She suspended a forkful of food in midair, as she conjured up the memory of that angry man standing in her living room Wednesday night. She tried to remember the details of what Whitson had said that night. He had barged back into the party like the proverbial bull in the china shop, ranted back and forth, and made a spectacle of himself. He was almost incoherent with rage over the way Jay was treating those fish. He had even explained himself in an incoherent fashion, stuttering and stumbling about for words.