The Rose Conspiracy Read online

  “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

  At 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.”

  “Well?”

  “So I’ve got a name for you—Senator Bo Collings. You know him?”

  Now he had Blackstone’s full attention.

  “Senator from Arkansas?” Blackstone said.

  “That’s him. He’s on his fourth term, something like that. Permanent fixture in Congress. Like the statues in the Rotunda. Approval ratings in his home state around 70 percent, so the guy’s got permanent job security.”

  “How is he involved in this thing?”

  “I know somebody who knows somebody who works in Hartz’s office,” Tully said. “They tell me that there was a call that came to Henry Hartz from Senator Collings personally. Right before Hartz filed his motion to keep you from sharing the contents of the Langley note with anyone else on the face of the earth.”

  “Wow—that’s pretty thin, Tully.”

  “Hey, stay with me here,” Tully blurted out. “It turns out that the good senator sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. From what I hear, he leaned real heavy on prosecutor Hartz, basically telling him that if Hartz didn’t file his motion then Senator Collings would make sure that his legal career would end up like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe.”

  “Okay, now the fog clears.”

  “One more thing,” Tully announced proudly.

  “Let me guess,” Blackstone said. “Bo Collings, senator from Arkansas, is a Confederate sympathizer?”

  “Oh, way better than that. The guy’s a Freemason. Finding that out was the toughest part of the assignment, by the way.”

  “Any connection between Senator Collings and Lord Dee over in England?” Blackstone asked.

  “I checked that—nothing came up yet.”

  “Can you use your source to get me a meeting with Collings?”

  “Sorry,” Tully said with a tone of finality. “The well’s completely dry on this one.”

  Blackstone thanked Tully, and after he hung up the phone he buzzed Julia to come in. After they talked over a few of her cases, he got to the point.

  “Do you know anybody in Senator Bo Collings’ office?”

  “J.D., why are you asking me? You’re the one with all the connections on the Hill. You’ve represented how many of them over the years? At least one U.S. senator and two congressmen by my count.”

  “Yeah, but no one close to Collings. Besides, the senators I know are all on the opposite side of the political aisle, including the ones I know on Judiciary, where Collings is ranking member.”

  “Well, I do know a woman lawyer on Judiciary. She and I were fairly tight back when I was in the Office of Legal Counsel for the Agency. Not exactly gal-pals, but the two of us worked together on some common issues that came up during Judiciary Committee hearings. Besides that, her dad and mine knew each other while serving in Vietnam.”

  “Call her ASAP,” Blackstone said. “I need a face-to-face with Collings.”

  “Tall order. Hard to do, as you know.”

  “Then tell her I’d even settle for a polite ambush. I just need to courteously get into Senator Collings face somehow.”

  Three hours later, when it was early evening, Julia swept into Blackstone’s office.

  “Done,” she announced with a little tilt to her head, the same way she’d do when she was telling Blackstone about her latest victory in court.

  “Great—when, where?”

  “Not a regular meeting,” she explained. “This is going to be a stand-up deal, on the run. Collings has a vote on the floor tomorrow. You will meet him on his way to the Senate chambers.”

  “What’s the vote on?”

  “The farm bill,” she said.

  “Tell me more.”

  “Oh, gee, what else did she tell me?” Julia was thinking out loud. “I think there’s a nongermane rider some senator attached to the bill, a bill for protecting horses from abuse during rodeos. Somebody’s pet issue. But it kicked up a little dust during floor debate, I guess. Anyway, that’s all I know.”

  Julia was still standing in the doorway of his office. She leaned against the door frame, crossing her legs a little nervously, then brushed something off her skirt and glanced down, trying to look nonchalant.

  After a few seconds of silence Blackstone smiled and asked her a question.

  “How’s life?”

  “Is that a professional or a personal question?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s not try to cubbyhole it. Just want to know how you are doing.”

  “I’m doing fine,” she said.

  “Fine. That’s one of those words, a kind of idiom that is perfectly meaningless,” Blackstone said. “Spoken by people who don’t want to commit to really telling you something.”

  “Okay, I am exceptionally fine. There, how’s that?”

  “Alright,” Blackstone said, “you win. I won’t pursue it.”

  But as Julia stood there, looking at him, she knew she had just been lied to. She hadn’t won. Blackstone never just let someone else win. That wasn’t part of who he was. He had said enough now to make her struggle over what his intentions really were. And she had told herself that she wouldn’t play that game with him anymore.

  She was about to leave, but then turned her head, swept some hair from her eyes, and adjusted her designer horn-rim glasses. And she asked him a question of her own.

  “And how’s life with you?”

  Blackstone didn’t look up from his computer. But he took a deep breath before he answered.

  “Messy,” he said.

  Julia was tempted to follow up on that. She wanted to, so much so that she had to fight the powerful urge to keep talking. To get J.D. Blackstone to open up. To connect. Like the two of them had once, in the past, deeply. Intimately. But she fought back against the urge.

  Instead of talking, she pushed herself off the door frame and quietly walked away.

  CHAPTER 23

  The next day Blackstone took a cab over to the Hill. He passed through security in the Capitol Building, and then inside, on the lower level, met a staffer from Senator Collings’s office who had been given the word from Julia’s contact. The staffer had been given the impression that Blackstone was a lobbyist for an agricultural association.

  He greeted Blackstone warmly and led him to the underground tram that ran to just below the Senate chambers. As they whizzed through the tunnel connecting the two houses of Congress and the central Capitol building, the staffer asked a few polite questions about agriculture. Blackstone smiled a lot, but pretended not to hear most of his questions over the noise of the speeding tram car.

  When they came to a halt, the two of them climbed out, along with a few other senators and congressional aides who had been riding with them. Then Blackstone and the staffer headed up the marble stairs.

  At the top of the stairway there was a corridor jammed with middle-aged men in dark suits, pressed white shirts, and moderately pricey silk ties. Most of them had aides standing dutifully by.

  The staffer walked Blackstone through the crowd and approached a large, pear-shaped man in his early sixties wearing a dark blue suit. He had a shock of white hair that was carefully combed and moussed. Next to him was a young aide with a folder.

  “Senator Collings,” the staffer began, “this is—”

  “Blackstone—J.D.—so very glad to meet you,” Blackstone said warmly and shook his hand.

  Senator Collings smiled broadly, but as he did, Blackstone could see something in his eyes that said that he had some vague recognition of the name. And it wasn’t good. But that didn’t stop Collings from keeping the smile firmly fixed on his face as they began talking.

  “Farm bill, important to the USA,” Blackstone began.

  “Yes, of cou
rse,” Collings replied. “We’ll get it passed as soon as we get rid of this ‘horse rider’ attached to it…no pun intended.”

  “None taken,” Blackstone said wryly. “Now, I am a horse lover myself.”

  “And you are with?” Collings’s aide chirped out, happy to do the dirty work for his boss by asking the uncomfortable but all too necessary initial questions about constituency and power and lobby connections.

  “Oh, I didn’t say, did I?” Blackstone responded with a smile. “Now, Senator, I was saying that, myself, I am a horse lover.”

  “I am not opposed to laws protecting animals from cruelty or abuse,” Collings said in a rich baritone voice. “I am real proud of my record on animal experimentation. But this horse and rodeo protection bill simply doesn’t belong on this farm legislation. It needs to be voted on as a stand-alone bill.”

  “And of course, Arkansas, your home state, has its share of rodeos too,” Blackstone added. “Now as for me, I own a six-year-old Arabian. Black as night and as strong a horse as I’ve ever seen. Great endurance-racing animal. You, Senator—I know you are a fan of quarterhorses and thoroughbreds. And you own several of each, I understand.”

  “Yes. Well,” the Senator said looking around and edging himself away. “I’ve enjoyed this chat with y’all, but we’ve got a vote coming up.”

  But Blackstone walked right behind him and kept talking.

  “Now if your best thoroughbred and my Arabian were to face off in a race, I’m sure on the short course you’d win hands down. But on the long stretch, a couple miles or more, my Arabian would leave your horse panting and foaming at the mouth. You see, Senator, I’m in this for the long haul—the long race.”

  Then Blackstone moved up right next to Senator Collings and lowered his voice.

  “I want to know why you are meddling in the Smithsonian murder case, Senator. And why you are making calls to the AUSA who is prosecuting that case, pressuring him to make things harder for me to defend my client. And I intend to ride those questions to the very end until I get some answers.”