Death of a Political Plant

by Ann Ripley

  None of the rules applied this morning. She made the Perennial Plant Society women a fluffy omelet with watercress and black raspberry jam on the side, and brewed a big flagon of kona coffee. She had become quite fond of these women, and they loved her kona coffee. They were the ultimate in guests, intelligent, witty, and helpful. They had cleaned up every sign of the late party and given up talk of taking down trees. She drove them to the Huntington subway station, where a train would whisk them to central Washington, D.C., in ten minutes. This time, she used her aromatically enhanced station wagon. “This car is proof that I’m a serious gardener,” she joked.

  “Our bags are back there where the manure goes, I suppose,” said Barbara, with mock suspicion in her voice.

  “I hope no little remaining particles adhere to your luggage, but one can never tell.”

  “Don’t worry, Louise,” said Donna. “We all have cars like this. Not one of us is a priss.”

  When they reached the station, she promised she would keep in touch, and as they embraced each other, she almost felt as if she were bidding good-bye to sisters. If she had had sisters, she doubted that she would be as compatible as with these three opinionated characters, who in the end were as open-minded as they seemed bossy at first.

  Once she was home again, there were touchy matters to resolve after she gave the house a quick once-over, which was easy, since her guests had remade their beds and cleaned the bathrooms. It was Thursday already, and more than a week since Tom Paschen had pressed her on the issue of an environmental program. She needed to call him at the White House and give him the mixed message from her producer: Channel Five might do the program, and then again it might not. It would all depend upon what kind of magic Rachel the writer could do with the script. Louise was counting on the thin, intelligent Rachel, who spun words so well, to uplift such a program into a lofty theme of environmental preservation without the sticky political strings attached. Otherwise, she could see Franklin Rawlings being a major source of trouble.

  It wasn’t easy to get through to the President’s chief of staff, but after a ten-minute wait, she heard his voice on the line. “Louise, tell me you’ve succeeded.”

  “Well, not one hundred percent.”

  “Aw, you can do better than that, I know you can.” He paused, and Louise wondered if he wasn’t looking through sheaves of papers involving much more important matters than whether or not Gardening with Nature would do the show. “Uh, look, Louise,” he said, “I find a little hole in my schedule tomorrow. I’ve got lunchtime free. How about coming here and we’ll grab a bite in the White House mess? No, wait. Better still, since I have to be at the Rayburn Building at ten for a hearing on the budget, maybe you’d like to eat in the Capitol. We’ll meet there, and another newsperson might join us. Then, we can hop the underground train and go to the members’ dining room. You might like that: It’ll give you a chance to scope out people like Goodrich and his men. I hear they lunch there a lot. And I’ll give you a copy of the President’s bill.”

  And you will twist my arm, thought Louise. She said, “That would be great fun.” She would enjoy contact with the political center of Washington, but she didn’t want to get herself boxed in by the hard-driving chief of staff, since Marty had not yet given the nod to a program he had jokingly titled “Wilderness Regained.” This was touchy business: Paschen was pushing her one way on this issue, and Franklin Rawlings the other way. They were like animals scrapping for a bone that had already been picked. Was a Channel Five program that powerful? If she handled this wrong, she would injure her reputation at Channel Five forever, and Marty Corbin’s as well.

  Pouring the last of the leftover kona coffee into a cup, she stood in the kitchen and considered her next action: Giving the fish a morning feeding, and talking to jay. In the bright light of morning, the whole episode involving Jay McCormick and Gil Whitson and the fish seemed ridiculous. How much was she required to tolerate for the sake of an old friend, who was a friend that she had only known for one summer? She impatiently gulped the last of the coffee, rinsed the cup, and headed out to do her unpleasant task. First, she changed into her gardening clothes.

  As she went out the front door with a plastic container of fish pellets, she guiltily examined the two flats of perennials sitting on the porch. With her metal-toed boot, she shoved them closer to the front door so she wouldn’t forget to plant them. As for this fish brouhaha, she would make short shrift of it. Most likely, Jay had finished his story last night and felt free to get drunk; that would account for his reckless behavior.

  Then she remembered Richard Mougey’s fabulous wine collection, and groaned; some of Richard’s bottles were worth hundreds of dollars. She only hoped Jay hadn’t plucked out one of those. Tonight, all would be well because Jay could move back to her house and stay out of trouble on his last night in the Washington area.

  The cul-de-sac in late morning was a pool of sun, the neighborhood, deserted. Thankful that no strangers lurked about today, she walked slowly into the Mougey yard and saw Jay’s old car tucked back in the driveway behind a huge viburnum bush. The man had not wanted to be seen once he reached Sylvan Valley, although he certainly poked about Washington a lot.

  She went up to the front door, which had a sideways orientation like her own, and rang the bell. With a finger, she straightened the elegant little wreath of dried pastel flowers that hung on the door and rang again. Even if he drank too much last night, she doubted he would sleep this late. Walking to the back of the house, she could see the koi pond shimmering in the distance. It was set in an elaborate planting area of which several bronze statues were the accents. One, at pool-side, represented a crane with his foot-long bill in the air. Another, set ten feet away near the edge of the woods, was problematic for Louise: a young girl with her hand thrust out in the air, swaying to some unheard music. It was a kind of poor man’s Degas. Still a third was the one Louise was most uncertain about: a bronze deer, hooves thrust out and leaping up as if it were escaping through the woods toward Nora’s house.

  Was this deer politically correct? Wouldn’t the onslaught of deer that was overpowering the United States be here soon enough, without replicating the animal in bronze? The over-populated animal was doing millions of dollars of damage to gardens and crops, plus aiding the spread of Lyme disease; it was just a matter of time until this metal deer was joined by dozens of real ones.

  She went to the back door and knocked. The only sound was the squawking of some big birds. She looked up and saw they were crows.

  Doubling back the way she came, she headed for the pool, wondering whether or not the fish had digested their dinner scraps. The path to the pool was lined with a stylish variety of grasses, tall, medium, short, striped, the fountain grass showy maroon with tassels. Mary’s landscaper had done a polished job, just a little too pat for Louise’s tastes, for each little combination was repeated several times along the path.

  She was ten paces away before gaps in the landscaping allowed her a glimpse of the pool itself. In preparation for feeding the koi, she took the lid off the pellets and walked closer. All the fish, probably two dozen of them, were busy on the bottom of the pool.

  Down there, bobbing against the bottom, was a body, with the fish busily dodging in and out, nibbling on its face and head.

  She knelt at the edge of the pool and peered into the blood-pinkened water. She recognized the light hair, the shirt and pants, even the worn loafers that remained on his feet: Jay McCormick, her friend, her houseguest; the man with the graceful body and pale skin and pale eyes whom she had held in her arms and cherished a lifetime ago.

  The four feet of cool water had kept him looking quite lifelike, and he had not even lost the color in his skin. The tender parts of his face, his eyes, and the area around his eyes and his mouth, had been bruised and reddened by the nibbling fish. But the largest concentration of them were engaged at the back of his head, and she feared to see what was there. Reaching down and splashing t
he surface of the water, she cried, “Get away!” and flung the fish pellets far into the center of the pool.

  They retreated swiftly toward the food, streaking the pool with color. Unmolested now, Jay stared up at her through his bruised and eaten eyes. A pale billow of pink still emanated from his head, and she knew there was a terrible wound there that had killed him.

  For a long moment, she could only stare, but soon a dizziness swept over her, and she sat back on the flagstones. Now there would be no closure, no respite from the guilt she felt for hurting him twenty years ago, and for failing to connect with him again when he came to her house for refuge. No father to take an eager Melissa back to her home in California. And no answer, perhaps, to the mystery of what he was doing here in the first place. She pressed her cheek to the flagstones and cried as if her heart would break.

  Fifteen

  DETECTIVE MIKE GERAGHTY GAVE her a long look. It was sympathetic, but firm. It was a look that said, “I know you and like you, but if you know something, you’d better come clean.”

  She didn’t really care what Geraghty was thinking, what anyone was thinking. She had the air of detachment of someone coming out of an anaesthetic. The detective and the other policemen had found her in the Mougeys’ living room, and she could tell by their expressions they were worried about her. “Is this woman flipping out?” they were probably thinking. For she was slumped on the fawn-colored silk couch, staring fixedly and meaninglessly at the Mougeys’ antique Queen Anne highboy. Since then, she had straightened up, but was still too weak to engage in a normal conversation.

  Yet Geraghty was inexorably there, sitting in the upholstered chair placed at a right angle to the couch. He had taken his notepad out and placed it on his large knee; his pencil was poised and ready. As a defense mechanism, her mind focused in on Geraghty, seeking anything to delay having to think about Jay’s ghastly corpse beneath the water. The big detective seemed to have lost weight, down from the stratospheric poundage of a truly heavy man to perhaps only two hundred pounds; this brought out a certain Irish handsomeness. Nor did his usually florid face above his curly white hair seem so red, but more healthful-looking, with the blue eyes vivid and sparkling and lacking the old bloodshot quality.

  “Did you hear me, Mrs. Eldridge? I’m talking to you. And you’re lookin’ at me, but you’re daydreaming.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She had slumped like a baby in a car seat, so she straightened herself again.

  “So you found this house wide open and you phoned us. Tell me you haven’t touched anything.”

  “I haven’t touched anything.”

  His words hurt. They were too personal, too cynical, as if she were a rookie cop who was a bit of a screwup. That was because she and Geraghty had been thrown together twice before. Both times, they had found a personal affinity with each other, always marred by the fact they were involved in the tense business of murder investigations. In fact, the last time, she had been one of his prime suspects.

  It was hard to completely forgive the big, white-haired detective for all those misunderstandings from the past, but his marblelike eyes were full of kindness. “Now, Mrs. Eldridge, this has been a terrible shock for you. I know you could have nothing to do with this, and I just want you to tell me, nice and slow, everything you know, with no holding back.”

  Holding back, and not being believed by the police, were the twin pitfalls of her previous experiences with this man. “I have always tried to cooperate with the police,” Louise said in a voice that even to her reeked of self-righteousness.

  “Umm. Well, just as long as we get off on the right track this time, and don’t get crotchety with each other. So, let’s get started. To your knowledge, who is the man in the pool, and just how did you come to be over here to find him?”

  Her answers were mechanical. She told Geraghty almost everything, of how she knew Jay McCormick and of how he’d stayed at the Eldridge house for a week. She spoke of his writing and of his daughter in Washington and the situation with his ex-wife, Lannie Gordon. She told him why Jay had to move out and why she came here this morning, to check on him and to feed the koi. As she talked, she looked out the far living room window and saw a quick gleam of sunlight on bronze. It suddenly struck her that what happened to Jay could be nothing more than a macabre accident. She got up and walked over to the window to look out. “You think this is murder, don’t you?”

  The detective had followed her across the room and stood behind her, as if protecting her from something. He said, “Not necessarily.”

  “But Jay’s death could have been an accident. He could have fallen against that whooping crane out there, gashed his head, and fallen into the pool.”

  “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.