Death of a Political Plant

by Ann Ripley

  “I’m glad to hear Janie’s improving. All in all, I think she’s having a great time, don’t you, Chris?”

  “Yeah,” he said, lazily waving a hand in the air, “but I sure miss her, though I don’t know if she misses me. She has a bunch of new friends. Maybe we’ll even get to meet them.”

  “That sounds ominous,” said Bill, raising his eyebrows in mock concern. “Does that mean they’re coming here!”

  Chris laughed. “I don’t know, Mr. Eldridge. Maybe, knowing Janie.”

  Her husband was crouched on the sofa, spending the few minutes before the program started by busily flipping through the TV channels, the remote cocked at the TV set as if he were holding it at gunpoint. Bill had flashed a game on the sports channel and then rapidly moved to another channel. Chris sat forward with a jolt, barely controlling his torment, wanting to rip the wielder from his host’s hand and go back to sports. Louise concealed a smile. This desire for control of the remote must be a gender thing.

  Bill’s nonchalance tonight must be a cover-up, she thought. Tomorrow he would leave for Vienna. He had made her jittery when he informed her about the trip: it required secrecy on both his part and hers. He was dealing with the theft of nuclear materials by eastern European Mafia types organized in a worldwide ring. Apparently he had some crucial information to communicate to the International Atomic Energy Association. That was all she was permitted to know: She was to avoid telling anyone where he had gone or when he would return, and to be suspicious of strangers. Living on the edge again, she reflected, wasn’t much fun.

  They heard the front door open and soon were joined by their elusive houseguest.

  Louise was perplexed by Jay. He had made himself into a virtual hermit since he arrived on Tuesday, sticking to his room after breakfast, sometimes slipping out in the afternoon and not returning until late: behavior that bordered on the rude. He didn’t even join them for a minute or two in the evening to talk; it made her wonder if he wasn’t in worse trouble than he was telling her.

  She sometimes caught snatches of his conversations with Charlie Hurd, the mannerless research assistant. In these overheard snippets, the strain in her friend’s voice betrayed the high level of tension under which he was operating. Although she was only hearing one side of the conversation, it was clear that Jay was pleased with the information he got from the young reporter, but was having demands put on him by Charlie to reveal the full extent of the story. But what story?

  And Jay was about to commit the mortal sin of house-guests: overstaying his welcome. Her next guests, the perennial plant people, were due Tuesday, and she had told him this. But when she saw him as he came and went from die house, he would mention leaving next Friday: He was obvious not only to time, but also to her personal timetable. Was she about to have an embarrassing confrontation with her dear old friend?

  What was most disconcerting to Louise were Jay’s evening prowls, although Bill had urged her to ignore these nocturnal wanderings. They could hear him foraging around through the woods, bumping into bushes and trees. Once, Louise was convinced she heard him poking around in the toolshed, and Bill teased her that she was afraid he was putting her tools out of order. Probably he was just an insomniac. He drank coffee at a heavy rate, and brought home big containers of it from fast-food places.

  But what hurt the most was the way he had cleverly barricaded his room, so that any attempts she might have made to snoop into his possessions or into his writing were thwarted. It was embarrassing to know he thought of her as a sneak: On the other side of his door, he had piled a heap of clothes, probably dirty ones, for he never requested the use of the washer or dryer, and she would have had to shove the whole bunch out of position to open the door. Even so, in the crack that was available to her, she could see discarded food wrappers and paper cups strewn on the desk alongside a slim black computer.

  What a frustrating man! To think she might have married him!

  “Hi, folks,” he said now, looking sheepish. Hoping, Louise suspected, that the charming, Irish, crooked smile he sent her way would assuage her feelings. For try as she might to feel otherwise, she felt … neglected.

  Louise introduced him to Chris. In an effort to explain his absences, Jay said, “I’ve been writing, as you know, and going off to spend all the time I can with Melissa. Trying to keep things on track.”

  “No need to explain to us, Jay,” said Bill good-naturedly, then zeroed in on the program. It was hosted by Jack Lederle. Louise knew Lederle, because his independent PBS news show was produced in one of the studios at WTBA-TV. Though his news staff operated in a separate studio and a rarified and separate world, she and Lederle sometimes met in the halls, at which times he would quippishly ask her, “And how does your garden grow?” She would reply just as quippishly, “Great, with the aid of blood meal and green sand.”

  Tonight’s program was an in-depth look at the two presidential campaigns. Lederle tagged the campaign as “one of the most scurrilous in the history of American politics.” He profiled the principal players, including the President’s campaign chief and Tom Paschen. Louise was bemused to hear about some of the chief of staffs more famous political stunts, which had become public lore.

  “Bill,” she whispered to her husband, “isn’t it ironic that Tom Paschen used to be considered the bete noire of politics, and now these people are doing him one better.”

  He looked at her sagely. “The difference is, Tom has a line he won’t step across; these characters don’t.”

  The focus shifted to Franklin Rawlings and Willie lip-church and Ted French. There was taped footage showing the three men clustered together like the proverbial insiders, in the confines of Goodrich’s campaign office in Washington. Louise couldn’t help thinking of the trio of Watergate figures, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Mitchell. Innuendos and charges against the President were touched on briefly, including a tabloid piece purporting to tell of the peccadillos of the popular Mrs. Fairchild.

  Chris, sitting forward now in rapt attention, said, “They’ve even gone low enough to smear the President’s wife: what creeps.” Then came the mention of the most serious charge of all, Fairchild’s alleged responsibility for the murder of a file clerk back in the early 1960s, to cover up his part in the assassination of the president of South Vietnam. The word cover-up electrified Louise, for she remembered the way Nixon was brought down for lying about the Watergate affair.

  “Womanizing, maybe” murmured Bill. “Excessive drinking, probably. But that last one sounds like bullpucky to me. Well, Jay, what do you think of that story?” Jay stood at the door, leaning against the door frame, a bland expression on his face.

  “It’s pretty bad stuff, especially that charge about knocking off the army clerk,” He looked at Bill warily. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go in and do a little more work tonight.” He waved at Chris. “Nice to meet a friend of Janie’s.”

  Louise watched him disappear through the dining room. What a strange reaction for a man who had been as attracted to political events as a dog was to a bone. What had happened to him over the years? And what was he writing there in his room, anyway? She suspected that, in spite of his seeming indifference, it could be politics. Or maybe it was about the bitter argument currently splitting the U.S. Supreme Court about overturning prisoner rights: That would be right up his alley.

  With Bill leaving Sunday, she would be left to say the unpleasant words to their difficult guest. She would have to inform him he was being kicked out of his digs in just three short days. How did one put that tactfully?

  Eight

  ONE THING ABOUT NORA RADEbaugh, no matter how funny something was, she rarely laughed: If one could get a smile out of Nora, that was considered the maximum reward. The smoky woman with the handsome looks so attractive to men, and who had loved her share of them, according to stories, had become one of Louise’s close friends.

  When Louise came to call on this Tuesday morning, Nora, wearing striped
bib overalls, was on both knees in her backyard herb garden. She was doing some serious weeding and pruning of the plants; an aromatic cloud of released herb oils surrounded her. More enchanting, Louise thought, than any perfume. Nora looked up and pulled the black earplugs out of her ears and let them fall down around her neck; they were attached to a tape player that made a lump in the breastbone pocket of her overalls. “Buon giorno” she said, a playful light in her eyes as she sat back on her haunches.

  “Sorry to bother you when you’re working,” said Louise.

  “No bother. I’m refreshing my Italian while I weed my fretty chervil and rosemary. Ron and I leave tomorrow for our trip to Tuscany.”

  “I just have a little news. Wanted you to know I’m moving a houseguest over to the Mougeys’.”

  With glossy brown hair falling gracefully over her face, Nora looked up at Louise, her amusement just barely detectable in the faint smile around her mouth. “Grazie,” she said, in a low, throaty Italian accent. “I’ve been watching your friend come and go for a few days now and wanted to meet him. He’s very attractive. Un buon uomo. Irish, perhaps?”

  Louise laughed and crouched down beside her neighbor. “Irish as the Blarney stone: Jay McCormick. But let me warn you: he’s not very sociable. Too busy with his, uh, writing and so forth. I’ve been feeding the koi while the Mougeys are gone, and Mary said to use the house if we needed it, and we do—we’re overflowing with guests.”

  Nora stopped her work and slid to a sitting position on the ground, thoughtfully waving the weeder still clutched in her hand as if she might give Louise a good spanking with it.

  Her admonishment was gentle: “My dear, is there no end to these houseguests?”

  “But they insisted on staying with me.”

  Nora became more direct. “Maybe it’s time you learn that you have a life of your own. You deserve some privacy. What are you doing with your life, Louise?”

  “All the company were relatives—both sets of parents, cousins, second cousins. And as for Jay, he was a surprise. I haven’t seen him in twenty years and certainly didn’t expect him to drop in. And the people coming tomorrow, well, that’s all business-related; it will do me a lot of good.”

  “It will?” Nora actually chuckled, in total disbelief. “I see you racing back and forth to work, then running out again to shop, coming back loaded down with groceries in your arms. Giving parents yard tours and taking them on excursions to the Capitol. Taking toddlers for walks in the neighborhood…” She pointed to Louise’s lean arms, revealed by her brief T-shirt. “Look at you: You’re even losing weight. Are you really Superwoman?”

  Louise sank down on the grassy spot next to Nora. As usual, her perceptive poet neighbor had gotten right to the nub of things. “I’ve had a lifetime of experience with house-guests, Nora. It’s just something you have to put up with if you’re a foreign service officer’s wife.”

  “Like bearing the stigmata, perhaps?” Again, those smile lines near Nora’s mouth had deepened.

  “Kind of,” Louise agreed good-heartedly. “Now, London, that was positively the worst. Let me tell you about London.” Then she reeled off what she could remember of those two hectic years living on North Row in Mayfair in an apartment larger than the Eldridges required. The youthful friends of friends of theirs, dirty, tired, and hungry, with backpacks strapped on their bodies, ringing the doorbell at midnight after having made their way from the continent or Scotland. American politicians. Friends and former friends and relatives who hadn’t been heard from in years.

  “You mean you let them all in?” Nora’s dark eyebrows went up in astonishment. “Didn’t they even phone to warn you they were coming? Why didn’t you just tell them to go elsewhere?”

  Louise airily waved a hand. “Oh, you don’t do that in the foreign service. In the first place, you’re getting free lodging. Anyway, that was our arrangement. Since the American taxpayer is footing your housing costs, you can’t turn away any American from the door. Of course, we had foreigners, too.”

  “I can believe anything.”

  Louise remembered well some of the European figures, contacts of Bill in his undercover activities, some undoubtedly ex-criminals and enemies of one state or another, dropping in and holing up for a few days in the back bedroom. Like jay was doing right now. “These were old friends or associates of Bill’s, some of them people making a change to London, who didn’t want to move into one of those little efficiency apartments they give to singles.”

  Nora was smiling now. “And I suppose you cooked for them all. Where did you shop, the food halls of Harrods?”

  “That was hard,” Louise admitted, her arms aching even as she remembered the bulging plastic carryalls she would manage in either hand after visiting Selfridge’s or Marks & Spencer. “No American woman has the right arm and hand muscles to survive it,” she added wryly. “Actually, only British women, and they train for years to do it. I finally broke down and hailed taxis.”

  “It must have been nice to live in London.”

  “Quite wonderful, really, but dangerous, because of the IRA bombs.” She decided not to tell Nora that Bill had nearly been killed by a bomb planted under a car on his route to work. It was too unpleasant and personal a memory. “We had an enforced busy social life, of course, but the girls flourished. They went to British schools. I took a history class, and volunteered with the other wives to help needy children.”

  “And entertained houseguests.”

  “Yes.” They lapsed into silence.

  Finally, Nora said, “You’ve come so far with your career. You could take another big step: Complete your emancipation from your old life by learning how to say ‘no’ to prospective houseguests.”

  Louise laughed. “I don’t know, Nora. That old life isn’t even over, you know. But as for turning away unwanted visitors, I agree. I have to be more firm.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for your Jay McCormick, but of course I can’t see much because of the woods. Is he a friend of yours, or friend of Bill’s?”

  “An old college chum of mine.” A chum who had disappointed her, for after that first couple of sentiment-soaked hours in Joe’s Raw Bar, they had exchanged no more private reminiscences, and at this rate, with him hopelessly distracted with writing and daughter Melissa, they never would. “He doesn’t need attention. He very much wants to be left alone. I just didn’t want you to think anyone had broken into Mary’s house.”

  Nora stood up, voluptuous even in her grimy overalls. Her face had become solemn, almost drawn. “I hope you will be surrounded with people. Do be careful, won’t you?”

  There was something unsettling in the woman’s eyes. “Nora, you’re not having one of your premonitions of danger?”

  Nora slowly nodded her head. “I’m afraid I am. What its focus is, I’m not sure. I only beg you to tell me that you’ll take care.”

  Louise promised she would, and bid her good-bye. Her neighbor, with her mysterious powers of extrasensory perception, had warned her once before, and she had ignored that warning.

  She wouldn’t do that this time, she told herself.

  She hurried back across the street; she had little time to finish some last-minute work in the garden. Popping in a few mature nicotiana plants was her very last project before the perennial people arrived. Later, she would have the unpleasant task of gently shoving Jay McCormick out of her house into his new quarters across the street. At the moment, however, he and his car were gone, and she had a little reprieve.

  First, she needed to put out the trash containers for the weekly pickup this afternoon. Bill’s job, normally. The holly-shrouded garbage area concealed two big cans residing on a rolling cart. She took the cart by the handle and gave it a good tug, and then screamed at what she uncovered.

  Crouching behind the cans was a man.

  “Oh, God!” she cried, and jumped back.

  He rose slowly from a crouch, but kept his knees bent and held his hands out to either side,
like a karate expert moving into position for an attack.

  “What are you doing in my yard?” she snapped. “Are you snooping in our trash?”

  Stocky, with black hair and olive skin, the man wore dark glasses, a dark turtleneck, and a sports jacket. Trendy for New York, maybe, but out of place in Sylvan Valley. And what she noticed next made her mouth fall agape: the large bulge in one side of his jacket. Had it not seemed ridiculous in the bright light of a day in the northern Virginia suburbs, she would have sworn he was carrying a pistol. In fact, she realized he was, and her nerves clanged to attention. Adrenaline rushed through her body, and she tightened her grip on the trash cart.

  “Lady,” he said in an oily tone, “you won’t believe this, but I’m in real estate.”

  There was more than a touch of hysteria in her frightened laugh. “You’re right, it’s hard to believe you,” she said, and eased the trash cart back a little, to familiarize herself with its weight, perhaps to use it as a shield in case he pulled the gun.

  As if her worst fears were being realized, his right hand had moved over toward the bulge in the jacket. Not in her wildest dreams could she imagine anyone wanting to kill her, at least not lately. “Why don’t you just get out of here,” she demanded shakily.

  He was inching toward her, smiling, still with his hand in a ready position. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “Why don’t we call it a draw?”

  “Why don’t we not!” she shouted, and rammed the cart right at him, and with one motion upended it. The tops flew off the two cans; a stream of papers, plastic peanuts, catalogues, and plump garbage bags cascaded over him. She didn’t wait to see more, but heard him cry out in shock as she raced around the addition and into the house. With clumsy fingers she turned the lock and stood inside the door, trembling. All was quiet in the world outside.