The Scarlet Pepper (18 page)

“No, I wouldn’t want to do that.”

She patted my hand. “I want you to be my eyes and ears in the garden and report back anything you learn or
find
. The sooner the police catch whoever killed Griffon Parker, the better I’m going to sleep at night.”

“I—I—” My heart pounded with excitement. She did want my help.

“If you hear any new whispering about the Dearings in the garden, I hope you’ll let me know about that as well. John stubbornly refuses to distance himself from Bruce, so I need to make sure I’m in a position to protect him. I need to know what’s going on with them. You helped me this past spring. I trust your instincts and your ability to keep confidential matters confidential. Can I trust you to do this for me?”

How could I refuse her, a worried mom-to-be and First Lady of the United States?

“Of course you can count on me,” I said. She simply wanted me to ask a few innocent questions, questions I needed to know the answers to as well.

I
T
wasn’t as if I planned to do anything that would put my life in danger. I would ask a few questions. As the First Lady had aptly pointed out, Griffon Parker’s murderer had access to at least the White House garden. This also meant the murderer had to be either one of the gardening volunteers, a pool reporter, or a staff member. What else could explain the appearance of that suicide note?

Although I felt confident the Secret Service would be checking and rechecking the background of everyone present at the photography session, I was equally convinced the murderer, whoever he or she may be, would have a clean background…save for a secret Griffon Parker had been on the verge of exposing.

Which brought me back to Francesca.

I closed my eyes and sighed.

Francesca was too smart to be so obvious. Why would she kill Parker in the same manner that we’d planned for the murder mystery dinner when too many of her friends already knew the details? Apparently we weren’t nearly as
discreet as I’d hoped. Everyone—Jack included—seemed to know all about how we’d been planning the perfect murder.

Dig a hole and push me in, because I was about to die from embarrassment.

But I had to wonder, did everyone who had been working in the garden before the fake letter showed up actually know the specifics of our planned “perfect murder” for the dinner party or was that information known to just a select few? That was the first thing I needed to find out. Luckily for me I had the unique advantage of daily contact with nearly everyone who had been on hand during the photo session.

Asking a few carefully worded questions about a charity dinner party Francesca and I had been planning shouldn’t make the killer nervous.

I kept following that line of thinking as a means to console my troubled conscience as I left the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and returned to the scene of “Casey’s great fertilizer bomb debacle.” That was what the Secret Service agents were now calling the false alarm if the two agents I’d overheard laughing outside were any indication. The center hallway had been cleared, leaving no trace of the earlier excitement.

Francesca had also vanished, a rather irritating talent of hers. I hoped she wasn’t wandering the halls unescorted. I had been her escort and was responsible for her. I didn’t think the Secret Service would appreciate hearing from me with another problem so soon.

After asking around, I discovered Francesca and Wilson Fisher had started talking and had hit it off. Fisher confirmed he’d escorted Francesca to her husband’s office.

With that under control, I headed back to the grounds office. Gordon and Lorenzo stood at the door waiting for me.

“Gordon.” I held my hands up in front of me like a shield. “Don’t say anything. I honestly didn’t know the fertilizer would set off alarms and trigger a bomb scare.”

“The grounds office is getting quite a reputation,” Lorenzo
said. “Before you started work here, we happily flew under the radar.”

“Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing,” Gordon added, bless his tender heart. He tested out a grin. “On the upside, we’re gaining a reputation for being a bit dangerous. Maybe the kitchen staff will think twice the next time they want to try and take over our storage room.”

In the silence that followed, Gordon turned a meaningful glance in Lorenzo’s direction.

Lorenzo cleared his throat a couple of times. “Casey, I apologize for not telling you about the meeting. I should have given you Seth’s message before our lunch meeting started.” His voice was unusually subdued. “Is there anything I can do to help you prepare for Wednesday’s harvest?”

“The harvest,” I sighed. “The Secret Service confiscated all of my notes and lists of things that need to be done.”

“You mean this list?” Lorenzo picked up the overstuffed file folder from my desk.

“Where did you get that?” I snatched it from him and flipped the folder open. Everything was there, including my five-page to-do list.

“Jack Turner dropped it off a few minutes ago,” Gordon said. “He thought you might need it, so he made sure to get it back to you ASAP.”

“Thank you.” I hugged the folder to my chest. “I’ll have to think of a way to thank Jack as well.” It was nearly five o’clock, and it would take several more hours to get through the list of things that needed to get done today. “I hate to ask you to stay late, but I could use help with—”

“Don’t worry about the time. Let me have a look at what needs to be done.” Lorenzo held out his hand as he stood stiffly beside my desk. I handed over my notepad and pointed out some of the more challenging tasks. With a nod, he ripped off the top two pages from the notepad. “I’ll get these done before I leave tonight. First chance I get tomorrow, I’ll take care of getting the rest of that fertilizer out of storage.”

“And properly disposed of?” I asked.

“I’m not a novice,” he shot back. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Hand me a page from your to-do list as well,” Gordon said, grinning as he watched Lorenzo shuffle back to his desk and pick up the phone. “Seth being Seth, I’m sure there are a million last-minute additions.”

“Not quite a million,” I said, ripping off another page from the to-do list, feeling thankful that I’d taken thorough notes about what needed to be done. “Just let me know if you have any questions.”

I took a seat at my desk, picked up a pen, and read the first item on my now mercifully shortened to-do list: Deliver a copy of the kitchen garden specs to the First Lady’s social secretary as well as a copy to Frank Lispon, the White House press secretary.

I also noticed that someone had left a sticky note on my desk with a barely legible “Lispon’s office” scrawled on it.

“Did you put this here?” I asked Lorenzo. “Do you know what it could mean?”

Lorenzo shook his head and grunted. Gordon didn’t know about the sticky note, either. “Francesca and Fisher did pop in looking for you. Ambrose passed by as well. Perhaps one of them left the note,” Gordon offered.

After e-mailing a copy of the press packet I’d put together for Frank, I started to wonder if the note meant that Frank needed to see me. He might have had questions.

I
had questions for him.

Had he known the details of Francesca’s perfect murder? He’d been in the garden shortly before the fake suicide note appeared. It could have dropped out of his pocket. Griffon Parker must have been a constant thorn in Frank’s side with Parker’s string of damaging “investigative” reports. Had Frank snapped and silenced Parker permanently?

Also, with all the work we’d been doing lately with the harvest plans, I couldn’t remember when anyone had checked on the plants in the West Wing. The poor leafy darlings were probably in desperate need of water or a trim or something.

“I’ll be back in a half hour,” I announced. I gathered up the hard copy version of the press packet and a small watering can and headed off toward the West Wing.

FRANK LISPON’S OFFICE DOOR WAS CLOSED,
which surprised me. The press secretary preached and practiced an open-door policy.

His office served as a clearinghouse of information for the press who covered White House affairs. This time of day, late afternoon, was his busiest time, when reporters would put their finishing touches on stories for the six o’clock news or the late edition of Internet sites and newspapers. Both his cell phone and office phone would be buzzing with calls and text messages as requests poured in for last-minute details or clarification on statements made earlier in the day.

This evening, with the end of the daily budget meetings, I’d expected his office to be packed with staffers helping to disseminate information.

Occasionally Frank would pop into the Press Briefing Room unannounced for an impromptu Q&A session if some important news was unfolding. Hoping to find him in there, I headed back down the West Wing’s carpeted hallway.

Bruce Dearing lumbered toward me.

“Just the lady I need to speak to.” His voice rumbled. “If you want to have any kind of career in Washington, you’re going to have to start schooling what you say to people around here, especially before you spout wild accusations about me and my wife. Do you understand me? Stay out of matters that don’t concern you.”

“I haven’t spouted anything that wasn’t true, and I assure you that I have not gone out of my way looking for trouble. It keeps finding me.”

“Come now, Ms. Calhoun. You have a reputation for sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.” He wagged his
meaty finger in front of my face. “Understand this, missy, that pointy thing has no business anywhere near my affairs.”

My nose wasn’t pointy. I’d been told more than once it was button shaped. And he had no right telling me where I should or shouldn’t be sticking that particular cute-as-a-button appendage.

“You’re wrong,” I said. Two words I was certain he rarely heard. “When you and your wife suggested to the police that I was responsible for Griffon Parker’s death, all of this”—I gestured with the watering can—“became my business. I’m not going to let anyone destroy my reputation. Not even you. And I’m certainly not going to let a killer escape justice.”

We glared at each other like a pair of feral cats squaring off to fight. Although Bruce Dearing, with his decades of connections in this town and a reputation for acting as both a kingmaker and an executioner, scared me, I knew I needed to stand my ground or I’d find myself plowed under by his political wrangling.

He puffed out his already rounded chest. “This isn’t a war you want to fight.”

“I agree with you there,” I said with a grin, which seemed to surprise him. “I don’t want to fight anyone.”

“I don’t understand you, Casey Calhoun.” He shook his head, making his thick jowls dance. “Tread with care around my family.”

“Again, I agree with you. I’m only trying to protect what’s mine. I wasn’t at all pleased to be grilled by the police this morning, especially when they’d been fed half-truths. So I suggest you turn what you’ve just said back around and apply it to yourself. If you stomp through my flowerbed, I can’t say I won’t do the same.”

He barked a gruff laugh. “I see why my wife likes you. You’ve got a spine. It’s amazing how many don’t around here,” he said as he ambled down the hallway. “The spineless…God bless them. They’re damned easy to climb over.”

*  *  *

DESPITE BRUCE’S WARNING, I WAS STILL DETERMINED
to find and talk with Frank. After all, someone had left his name on a sticky note on my desk. When I stepped into the dark blue Press Briefing Room, with my watering can in one hand and press packet in the other, the dozen or so journalists spread out in the theater seats and hunched over laptops all looked up at me like they’d spotted a tasty morsel on a sparsely stocked buffet table.

“Oh. You’re one of the gardeners,” said Simon Matthews, a twenty-something young man with thick glasses and a laptop that looked as if it had come from a spaceship. He sounded disappointed.

“I am.” I held up the watering can. “Have you seen Frank Lispon?”

“Check in the zoo,” Matthews answered and went back to typing furiously on his laptop’s keyboard.

The zoo, or cube zoo, was what journalists called the cramped cubicles and tiny offices in the adjacent press corps offices. I’d seen it only once: on the efficient, but overwhelming, tour the chief usher had given me on my first day at the White House.

At the back of the Press Briefing Room, past the bank of electronic equipment the television and radio crews used to broadcast press conferences, I found a door tucked into a corner that opened up into the bustling press corps offices.

With so many people talking, on phones and to each other, I couldn’t imagine how anyone managed to concentrate in here. After a quick look around, I spotted
Media Today
’s new solo reporter, Kelly Montague, in a small office near the door. She was talking so loudly on her BlackBerry cell phone I had no choice but to listen in on her half of the conversation while I searched for the press secretary.