The Rose Conspiracy Read online

  But that is when Blackstone noticed a redheaded male law student standing up and raising his hand.

  The professor of modern criminal law and policy spotted him, cleared his throat, and nodded for him to speak.

  “Professor Blackstone,” the student began. “Today is the last class of the year.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Delbert,” Blackstone shot back. “You’ve mastered the mysteries of the Gregorian calendar, I see.”

  “Well, Professor,” the student continued. “You had promised us that on the last class period you would submit yourself to questions from the class. Personal questions.”

  A few students were tittering.

  Blackstone’s face contorted with an overblown expression of pain.

  “Fine. Okay,” he said with resignation. “But I control the time. You have five minutes. Mr. Delbert, you have showed some admirable boldness here today. Make note of that, students. When in doubt in the practice of law, when lacking in favorable law or strong facts to successfully plead your case, just rely on audacity—it works every time.”

  Several of the students were laughing.

  “So Mr. Delbert, you have the first shot.”

  “Okay,” he began with a smirk. “Well, in that case we were to have read for today, Hamdi v. Rumsfield, in the opinion authored by Justice Scalia, he quotes the great eighteenth-century British jurist, Sir William Blackstone. I have heard that you are related to him. Is that really true?”

  “Yes,” Blackstone said. “Much to the mortification of the rest of his descendants I’m sure.”

  More laughter.

  A female law student in the first row raised her hand, fighting back a grin.

  “What do the ‘J’ and the ‘D’ stand for in your name?” she asked and then quickly sat down.

  “The ‘J’ was my father’s idea. It stands for Justinian, the emperor of Rome in the 500s. His claim to fame, among others, was the Corpus Iurus Civilis. You know it as the Justinian Code. The first codification of the laws of Rome into one unified system. That’s the kind of name you’re stuck with when your father is the Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and a former President of the American Bar Association.”

  “How about the ‘D’ in your name?” the female student asked.

  “That one came from my mother. She was a music lover. It stands for a Hungarian composer whose name even I have a hard time pronouncing.”

  “Hungarian?” someone in the class repeated out loud.

  “Yes,” Blackstone continued. “You see, I am certified ninety-five percent English. That’s the part that makes me so obsessively and coldly analytical.”

  Then he took a long, dramatic pause.

  “And my other five percent is pure Gypsy.”

  Then he leaned forward to the microphone at the lectern, until his mouth was right up against it, and cocked his eyebrow dramatically.

  “And that’s the part that makes me dangerous.”

  The entire class was laughing now.

  While a few corners of the class were still chuckling, the law-school secretary entered the hall and scurried to the podium with a pink note slip in her hand. She quietly apologized for the intrusion, gave Blackstone the note, and whispered, “It’s from Frieda, the secretary at your law firm. She said it was urgent.”

  Blackstone glanced down at the note. It read, “Please come to the law office as soon as your class is over. It’s about a new murder case.”

  CHAPTER 3

  After class, J.D. Blackstone jumped into his Maserati Spyder convertible and motored over to his law office, a twenty-minute drive away in Georgetown. He walked quickly past the desk of Frieda, his secretary, who was on the phone. Frieda hurriedly put the person on hold, and then snatched up a slip of paper and shoved it at Blackstone.

  “J.D.,” she said, “urgent message. New client. She is coming in momentarily.”

  “Maybe you ought to have Julia take her,” he said. “I need to get back to the college within the hour. We’ve got our dreaded faculty meeting for the fall semester, cleverly held at the beginning of summer just to torment us…”

  “Can’t do that. Julia’s in court. You’d better read the note.”

  Blackstone glanced down at the phone message slip.

  It read,

  A woman named Vinnie Archmont called. Says she is “target” of grand jury. Smithsonian Institution criminal case. Wants to meet ASAP.

  “It’s the investigation,” Frieda whispered, “into the murder of the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Langley…and the theft—”

  “Of the John Wilkes Booth diary pages,” Blackstone interjected, finishing her sentence for her. “Yes, I do read the papers, Frieda.”

  Then he added, “Vinnie…what kind of name is that for a woman?”

  Frieda shrugged.

  “Fine,” Blackstone said. “I’ll see her. When?”

  “She should be here any minute.”

  Blackstone disappeared into his office. He leafed through his mail. Mostly magazines. A few of the legal trade papers, the two Capitol Hill dailies, and the latest issues of Scientific American, Philosophy Monthly, several current events publications, Psychology Today, and the Southern Poetry Review.

  His intercom buzzed. It was his new client on the way in, Frieda said.

  The door opened.

  A woman in her early thirties stepped in. She was uncommonly attractive, with deep, dark eyes and a kind of chiseled beauty that still managed to retain a softness to it. Almost a young, girlish look. She was dressed in an artist’s smock, blue jeans, and red cowboy boots.

  But her hairstyle was an eyeful. Her hair was jet black and configured in a kind of Gone with the Wind motif, complete with cascading ringlets, like Scarlett O’Hara. Blackstone was smart enough not to comment on a woman’s hair—unless it was to give a glowing compliment. Which he was not about to do.

  She was holding the law firm’s standard client information sheet, which she handed to Blackstone. He took it, glanced down at it, and then shook her hand. He took a few seconds to study both of her hands, and then smiled and motioned to the chair where she sat down across from his desk.

  Blackstone looked over the form. In the blank for “occupation” it said simply “artist.” Her studio was listed at an address in the “Torpedo Factory” in Alexandria, Virginia, a stylishly renovated former armaments warehouse dating back to World War II, now converted to boutique art studios and galleries.

  He studied her as she smiled brightly. She was grasping one more piece of paper in her hand, carefully folded, which looked like a letter with an envelope.

  “I’m here because of this,” she said holding up the letter and envelope. But Blackstone didn’t move to take them.

  “Clients usually think they know why they are here,” Blackstone said. “But I find that most of the time they don’t. Not really.”

  Then he continued, tapping the client sheet he was holding, “You say here that you are an artist. By the way, are you an athlete?”

  “Dear no,” she replied with a little giggle. “Why?”

  Blackstone ignored her question and probed further.

  “Don’t lift weights, do gymnastics, anything like that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He took in her entire frame with a long glance, then he spoke up.

  “In that event, I presume you are a sculptor. Right?”

  She laughed.

  “That’s right,” she replied with surprise. “So you must be familiar with some of my work.”

  “No, not at all,” he replied.

  “Then how did you know?”

  “Observation. You are a petite woman, yet you have powerful, deeply veined hands. The kind of hands that result from kneading clay. You have your makeup done professionally, yet you don’t any have nail polish on. And I notice you have what appears to be modeling clay under one of your fingernails. Your artist’s smock is a little dingy and worn—it is a working piece of clothing for you
. But I don’t see any watercolor, acrylic, or oil paints on it. So you’re not a painter. All that leads me to say you’re a sculptor.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said with another big smile.

  Blackstone motioned for the letter, which she quickly gave him. Her countenance changed almost as if on cue. Now she had a frightened, confused look.

  The letter was on the letterhead of the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. It was announcing that Vinnie was the “target” of an ongoing federal grand-jury investigation into “crimes occurring at and in The Smithsonian Institution, including murder and theft of federal documents.”

  “This is all a huge mistake,” she began.

  “I hope for your sake that you’re right.”

  “This is serious, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Killing a federal official like Horace Langley is a capital offense.”

  Vinnie had a puzzled look.

  “That means that the prosecuting attorney could ask for the death penalty.”

  The dark-haired beauty was speechless.

  “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Blackstone replied, trying to be consoling. “This is merely a target letter. It doesn’t mean you’ll get indicted. And it certainly doesn’t mean you are going to get convicted. It may mean absolutely nothing…or it could mean something. Depends on what you tell me about your involvement in this thing.”

  She paused a moment before she spoke. Then she started to explain.

  “I knew Horace Langley,” she said.

  “How well?”

  “Professionally.”

  “Define that.”

  “I was with him,” she said with a stunned look on her face, as if finally realizing the depth of the trouble she was in, “there in his office…with him in the Smithsonian, at the Castle, the day he was murdered.”

  CHAPTER 4

  J.D. Blackstone wasted no time digging into Vinnie Archmont’s relationship with the Secretary of the Smithsonian. She said it was strictly professional. On the surface, it seemed to fit.

  She said she had received a commission from a nonprofit foundation to sculpt Horace Langley’s likeness. The two of them had had several sittings, all of them in the Castle. She had been working on a clay model of his head and shoulders. The plan was to then complete that, fire it in her kiln, and use it as the prototype for the final bronze version. All of the sittings had been in Langley’s ornate personal office. The last one, on the day of the murder, was in that same office.

  Blackstone buzzed Jason, his paralegal, and had him pull up the schematics of the building off the Internet. In a few minutes, Jason scurried in with a printout.

  “Right here,” Vinnie said, pointing to a section of the cutaway diagram of the Castle, “that’s where we met the day he was killed.”

  “In that last session, did anything unusual happen?” Blackstone asked.

  Vinnie scrunched her shoulders, pursed her lips, and shook her head “no.”

  Blackstone saw the body language. It was screaming, I’ve got more to tell you but I don’t feel comfortable. He decided not to press it. Not yet.

  “So tell me,” he asked nonchalantly. “What is the big deal about the John Wilkes Booth diary?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why was it worth murdering someone?”

  Vinnie was thinking that one over.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Horace Langley was shot to death. The Booth diary pages were stolen. That’s what the newspapers said. So I ask you again, what in the world could have been in that diary?”

  More shoulder-scrunching from Vinnie.

  “Look,” Blackstone said. “Maybe you had better come back when you want to really talk to me about what you know.”

  “I haven’t lied,” she said, trying to manage a smile.

  “Yeah, that’s a good start. But what we need here is complete candor.”

  After a few more uncomfortable seconds Vinnie spoke up.

  “I heard that you had lost your wife and daughter in a car accident.”

  Blackstone was blank-faced and replied simply, “Yes. That’s true. Any reason you bring that up?”

  “Just wondering if it ever made you think about things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Life. Death. Eternity.”

  “I think,” Blackstone said curtly, “you are trying to dodge the point. I think you are hiding information from me. If I am going to be your lawyer, you have to tell me everything. Treat me like a priest. A father confessor. Nothing held back. Absolutely nothing. We have a cloak of confidentiality here between attorney and client.”

  “What do you believe in, Mr. Blackstone?” she asked.

  There was a kind innocence about the way she asked that. Blackstone could see that. She really wants to know, he thought to himself.

  “I believe in the power of human intelligence,” he began, “at least when it is adequately disciplined and harnessed. I believe people can do bad things. I also am firmly convinced that otherwise good people sometimes get blamed for bad things they really did not do. But I stress the word sometimes. The statistics say that the overwhelming majority of people who walk into a lawyer’s office because they have been charged with a crime are in fact guilty of some kind of criminal offense.”

  “I thought you said I hadn’t been charged with a crime yet.”

  Blackstone smiled at that.

  “You’re right. But I was just talking in generalities.”

  “Mr. Blackstone?” she asked.

  Blackstone waited for the point.

  Then she smiled a secret little kind of smile, tilted her head coquettishly, and stood up to leave. “Mr. Blackstone,” Vinnie said, extending her hand to him. “I like you very much. Perhaps I shall have you as my lawyer. We’ll see. But one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t think you can be either my priest or my father confessor.”

  She laughed a little when she said that, and then turned and walked out of his office.

  Blackstone was sitting there, staring at the target letter from the U.S. Attorney’s Office that she left on his desk.

  Vinnie Archmont was beautiful but eccentric. And a little too coy for someone who might be charged with a crime that could send her to the death chamber. On the other hand, Blackstone really didn’t think that was in the cards. Not a chance in a million. Most likely, the federal prosecutor had sent her the target letter to shake her up. To get her to come running to him and start talking so the government could find out who the real perpetrators were. And if that were the case, the feds were betting on the fact that Vinnie had a connection with someone who had a connection with the murder.

  But as he sat at his desk, J.D. Blackstone was not struggling with any of that. What he really wondered about was the question that Vinnie didn’t answer.

  The one about the Booth diary.

  CHAPTER 5

  After Vinnie Archmont left, Blackstone looked at his watch and decided he had missed most of the faculty meeting at the college, anyway. So he dashed down to his black Maserati, gunned his way over to the other side of the Beltway, and turned into a medical complex. He parked and hustled across the lot and through the glass door of a banal-looking medical office.

  The receptionist recognized him.

  “Good afternoon, Professor Blackstone,” she said, then glanced down at her appointment book.

  “I’m sorry,” she continued, “but I don’t think Dr. Koesler has you booked today.”

  “Just tell Jim that his favorite patient is waiting.”

  “I’m not sure if I can help you.”

  “Come on, Ginny,” he said. “I know Jim always takes an early dinner break at this time. He is probably sitting in his office right now, eating chicken salad, reading something unnervingly exciting—like the newest Journal of the American Psychiatric Association.”

  Ginny was about to throw up anoth
er roadblock, when the psychiatrist, Dr. Jim Koesler, stepped across the hall with a Styrofoam container in his hand and ducked into his office.

  Before he could close the door, J.D. Blackstone had sprinted down the hall and wedged his foot into the door.

  “Jim, so good to see you,” Blackstone said with a grin. “Chicken salad again, right?”

  “You know, J.D.,” Koesler muttered unenthusiastically, “you don’t believe in appointments…and don’t believe in knocking. Those are basics in human civility. Maybe you could start with those and then slowly work your way up.”

  Then Koesler paused and looked down at the salad he had placed on his desk.

  “And it’s not chicken,” he said with a wry smile. “It’s turkey.”

  “Turkey! You’re so wild and unpredictable, Jim!”

  “J.D., you help me out in one lawsuit, and as a result, you must think I will indulge your eccentricities forever.”

  “Much simpler than that. Just refill my prescription. And by the way, where does our friendship fit in here, anyway? Going all the way back to our fraternity days in college.”

  “Come on. You know the drill,” the psychiatrist said.

  “Okay. Here it is,” Blackstone began in a rote monotone. “My sleeping habits are minimally controlled with the current medication to the point where I can actually sleep a few hours every night. Without it, I suffer from life-altering insomnia, which also affects my eating habits, my work, and my general attentiveness during the day. I have not experienced any adverse reactions with the drug you prescribed. I am not experiencing any dramatic weight changes or mood swings. I am in touch with supportive people and have not isolated myself in terms of psychosocial interactions. I am not a danger to myself or others. And I deny any suicidal ideation.”

  Then Blackstone grabbed a piece of paper from Dr. Koesler’s desk, scribbled something down on it hastily, and tossed it onto his desk.

  Koesler glanced down at it. It was a stick-man drawing, with the stick-man’s hands on his hips and a jagged frown on his face.