The Viognier Vendetta wcm-5 Read online

  “I remember.”

  “Look,” she said, “be honest. Rebecca would either have to be incredibly dumb or incredibly blind not to know what was going on, especially if she was one of Asher’s trusted advisers. His protégée.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s say you’re right and Rebecca did take the money,” I said. “What if she only took enough to get lost, change her identity, and set herself up somewhere she wouldn’t be found? Rebecca was fundamentally a casuist. At least she was when we were in school.”

  “English, please?” Kit said.

  “A person who uses reasoning to solve a moral problem,” I said. “Casuists decide what to do based on ethics—except they consider the circumstances of each situation before they make their decision. So stealing may be wrong, but taking enough money to live on because you need to disappear after turning in your boss for bigger stealing is okay because that’s the greater good.”

  “Phooey. Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Kit said.

  “I’m not justifying it,” I said. “Just explaining it.”

  Kit wiped her fingers on a napkin and looked cross. “Why didn’t she just give you the damn papers or external drive or whatever it is? Why have this cloak-and-dagger scavenger hunt? It’s ridiculous.”

  “Because she needed to make sure she could pull off her disappearing act first. Otherwise, she’d be hanging a noose around her own neck,” I said.

  David had leaned back with his arms folded across his chest as he followed our back-and-forth discussion like he was watching a tennis match.

  “Feel free to jump in at any time,” I said to him. “With your two cents.”

  “I grew up with five sisters,” he said. “I know when to keep my mouth shut.”

  “He waits to weigh in until after all the blood is spilled,” Kit said. “Less messy.”

  David flashed a brilliant knowing smile as she reached for another doughnut.

  “Eating comforts me in times of stress.” She made a face at him. To me she said, “What I don’t understand is why they haven’t found her body yet.”

  “I still believe Rebecca’s plan was to disappear,” I said. “What I don’t know anymore is whether someone got to her and she really is dead.”

  “I heard she might have been pregnant.” David spoke up finally.

  “Are you serious? I didn’t know—” Kit turned to me. “Luce? You knew?”

  “Her mother told me.”

  Kit exploded. “Pregnant! That changes everything. Who’s the father?”

  “It might be Harlan Jennings,” I said. “They were having an affair.”

  Kit snorted. “Harlan and Rebecca. Oh, my God, poor Ali. Though our Senate reporter always said he had a roving eye. But a baby—wow. You never know about some people, do you?”

  The Pope book was in my carryall. I got it out.

  “Rebecca left me this. Well, not this book exactly. The D.C. police have the copy she gave me.” I opened it to the epistle to Richard Boyle. “I got a chance to look at her copy when I talked to Detective Horne. She marked a couple of passages.”

  David took the book and Kit moved closer so she could read over his shoulder.

  “What’s this supposed to be?” she asked after a few minutes. “A clue?”

  “I guess so. If it isn’t, we’re really lost.”

  David rubbed his chin. “If it’s a place, it sounds like she’s referring to a formal garden. You think she left something there?”

  “Wherever it is, it has to be in D.C.,” I said.

  “Dumbarton Oaks? Hillwood? The Botanic Gardens? There’re a bunch of gardens in this city,” he said.

  “I’d been thinking it was around one of the monuments. But Dumbarton Oaks is in Georgetown,” I said. “Rebecca disappeared for a few hours after she left me at the Vietnam Wall to pick up the Madison wine cooler in Georgetown. She spent some time at Harlan’s place and left.”

  “Where’s Harlan’s place?” Kit asked.

  David consulted his notes. “Thirty-second Street, a few houses down from the intersection of Reservoir Road. I parked near Dumbarton Oaks when I went to check it out.”

  “So she could have walked there,” I said. “It would have only taken her ten, maybe fifteen minutes to drop something off.”

  David sounded eager. “The timing would be right, wouldn’t it?”

  I nodded. “My mother took me to those gardens when I was little. There are several fountains, I think.”

  “Any of them defunct?” Kit asked. “‘With here a fountain, never to be play’d.’”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I said. “I’m sure the gardens are open today.”

  “Whoa!” David held up a hand. “It’s cherry blossom season and those grounds are going to be overrun with visitors. I’ve got a friend who works at the museum there. Let me call her and see if we can get in when it’s closed to the public. We need to keep this off the radar, especially if all three of us show up looking like a posse.”

  He made a call and left a message.

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll have to wait and see what she says.”

  I finished my coffee. “So which of you is covering the opening of the Asher Collection tonight?”

  Kit and David exchanged glances.

  “Neither of us,” she said. “Change of plans. It’s now closed to the press and it’s being billed as a private event.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Yesterday,” David said. “If it turns out that collection was acquired with dirty money, it’s only a matter of time before the library announces it’s no longer accepting the Ashers’ donation. They’re already backing away. In the meantime Tommy Asher paid to use the Great Hall. They can’t pull the plug on that.”

  “You’re going, right, Luce?”

  I nodded. “With Mick Dunne.”

  “I’d give anything to be a fly on the wall,” Kit said. “It’s going to be a hell of a party now. Asher better have food tasters on hand. I’m sure there are a lot of people who are ready to do him in. Take notes, will you?”

  Someone’s phone rang.

  “Mine,” David said and answered. “Yo, man. What’s up?”

  He flipped to a clean page in his notebook and began scribbling.

  “Right. Thanks. I’ll be there. I owe you, man.” He hung up. “They just pulled a body out of the Potomac. Not sure if it’s male or female.”

  I reached for my coffee cup on the parapet and knocked it over. It was empty and I caught it just before it fell off the bridge into the creek.

  David leaned over and squeezed my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything. Maybe it’s not her.”

  Or maybe it was.

  Chapter 23

  From the moment Mick and I walked up the sweeping granite staircase of the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building, I knew this evening was going to be about money and not philanthropy. Last Saturday at the Pension Building gala the Ashers had been honored like royalty. Tonight the beautiful Italian Renaissance–style library, with its paintings, mosaics, and statuary depicting mythology, legend, and flesh-and-blood icons of poetry and literature, could not have been a more ironic setting to mark the beginning of Tommy Asher’s fall from grace.

  As the saying goes, success has a thousand fathers but failure is a motherless child. Mick and I joined the queue to pass through security and enter the Great Hall as the streetlights came on for the evening and, on the other side of First Street, the floodlit Capitol dome looked timeless and serene. While we waited on the stairs I overheard snatches of conversation that made it clear many of tonight’s guests were clients of Thomas Asher Investments—those who desperately needed reassurance that all was well and everyone else who knew the game was up and wanted their money back.

  I’d learned which camp Mick was in an hour earlier on the drive from Atoka to Washington
. He still believed in Tommy Asher. I also found out why: The alternative was too terrible to contemplate. In the cocoon of his sleek black Mercedes listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane on the satellite radio, I discovered the real reason Mick had asked me to be his date tonight, why he’d been so persistent—the early morning phone call the other day. He needed me as a business partner. Would I buy the grapes from the ten acres he’d planted and bottle the wine under a new label? The price, he promised me, would be a steal.

  “Why?” I’d asked. “This fall would be your first harvest. After all you’ve been through for the past three years, why not make your own wine?”

  “I don’t have the head for it. Takes too much of my time and energy. I need to choose between horses or grapes.”

  Even I knew that was a Hobson’s choice for Mick. Riding, hunting, polo, and raising horses were in his blood. Growing grapes and making wine had been part of the romantic fantasy he harbored of becoming a gentleman farmer, until he found out how much work it was, how tedious the chores—and, unlike horses, that it wasn’t terribly glamorous or exciting.

  “Does this have anything to do with investing with Tommy Asher? How much have you lost, Mick?”

  He kept his eyes focused on the road. “More than I’d care to say. Simon tells me it’s going to be okay if I sit tight. Not to be like the folks who panicked after the NASDAQ bubble burst in 2000 or Black Monday back in ’87. Wait it out and ride it up again. He says in six months it’ll all be tickety-boo and everyone who bailed will be holding an empty bag.”

  I doubted that. Boo-hoo was more like it. “And you believe him?”

  “Yes.” He still didn’t look at me. “I do.”

  I wondered whom he was trying to kid—himself or me?

  “What about the grapes, Lucie? It’d make sense for you to do this, especially since the land sits on our common boundary.”

  I couldn’t think straight.

  “I need to talk to Quinn,” I said.

  “Can you give me an answer soon? If you turn me down, I’ll go elsewhere, love. Not a threat, but I just need to know.”

  He must need the cash urgently or he wouldn’t press me so hard. Maybe he was in danger of losing the horses, too.

  I could have told him the last thing I wanted was to expand since we had our own new varietals, like the Viognier, that we were just beginning to introduce. But maybe I could use Mick’s proposal to tempt Quinn to stay on. He’d know I couldn’t handle something this big on my own. Like Frankie said, it was an ill wind that didn’t blow somebody some good.

  Mick and I spoke no more about this or about Tommy Asher for the rest of the drive into D.C., but when the music slid into Billie Holiday crooning “Stormy Weather” in her haunting, raspy voice, he reached over and savagely punched the button, turning off the radio.

  He parked behind the library on one of the residential streets and we walked to the Jefferson Building. On Wednesday, when I’d met Summer Lowe at the Capitol, I’d entered through the basement carriage entrance. Now the enormous bronze doors at the top of the main staircase, which were usually closed for security reasons, had been thrown open in honor of the evening’s event. Light from the two large outdoor candelabra at the head of the staircase and a golden shaft of light spilling onto the plaza from inside the building gilded the long line of guests in tuxedos and evening dresses as though we were one of the carved marble friezes gracing the exterior of the building.

  “I need a drink,” Mick said after we shed our coats in the vestibule where, from every corner, statues of the Roman goddess Minerva, patroness of knowledge and protector of civilization, watched us. More irony. I wondered if Tommy Asher would share any new information tonight or if he’d continue to stonewall his clients. The only person he was protecting now was himself.

  We walked through a marble archway into the Great Hall. I’d been here before, but I gathered Mick had not because he stopped, openmouthed, in the middle of the room and stared. A docent tried to hand him a glossy brochure with a black-and-white broadside cartoon depicting the burning of Washington and “The Asher Collection at the Library of Congress” written in swirling calligraphy on the cover. I took the brochure and thanked her.

  “First time here, huh?” I said. “It’s pretty spectacular.”

  “Reminds me of the opera house in Paris. The Palais Garnier. Have you ever been?”

  “I’ve only seen it from the outside when I used to visit my grandparents.”

  “It looks like this on the inside.”

  A waiter with a tray of glasses offered us drinks. Mick took two champagne flutes and handed one to me. I took a sip. It wasn’t Krug.

  “Shall we look around?” I said. “The library owns a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. And we ought to go upstairs to see the Asher Collection.”

  Mick nodded. “Crikey. Look at everyone, will you? Every woman is dressed in black, except you. All the men in tuxes. I feel like I’m at a bloody funeral.”

  My gown was the color of spring sunshine. He was right. Everyone else was wearing black.

  I slipped my arm through his. “Let’s not get into metaphors, shall we? You brought me here. Now at least go see the exhibit with me.”

  Two marble staircases on either side of the Great Hall swept up to the second-floor galleries. At the foot of one of them a small knot of people had gathered in a semicircle.

  “What do you bet Tommy’s at the center of that scrum? I wonder where Simon is?” Mick said.

  “He’s there,” I said. “On the stairs by the statue.”

  Simon deWolfe stood next to a bronze statue of a slender-armed woman gracing the newel post at the base of the staircase around which the crowd had gathered. The globe of the torch she held glowed like a small moon above his head as he signaled for everyone’s attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, though this evening you have been invited to the premier of the fabulous Asher Collection that Sir Thomas and Lady Asher have so generously donated to the Library of Congress, it is apparent that recent events in the press weigh on the minds of many of you. At this time, Sir Thomas would like to make a few remarks.” His stilted speech echoed in the now silent gallery. I wondered if he had rehearsed it or if perhaps Sir Thomas had written it for him.

  Voices bubbled up from the group as Tommy Asher and his wife climbed the steps, stopping on a landing decorated with a marble frieze of children at play. Simon and Miranda Asher stepped back as Sir Thomas, ravenlike in his tux, began to speak. Behind him the brilliant Mediterranean hues and rich gilding on the vaulted ceilings and walls of the second-floor gallery glowed like the inside of a Fabergé egg.

  “We’re here this evening in this magnificent place—once called the book palace of the American people—for the unveiling of an astonishing collection of maps, paintings, architectural drawings, and documents pertaining to the early history of our nation’s capital, a city built by men who, though they revered classical architecture for its timelessness and beauty, were some of the most visionary and forward-thinking individuals of their time,” Asher said.

  For someone who grew up as the working-class son of a driver to the American ambassador to Great Britain, I noticed for the first time that he’d somehow acquired the cut-glass accent of aristocracy. How much of the man was real and how much was fabricated?

  “Long ago when many parts of the world were unexplored, cartographers wrote ‘Beyond This Point There Be Dragons’ when they didn’t know what lay at the edge of their maps,” Asher continued. “But explorers, men like Columbus and Magellan, were not afraid to venture beyond what was safe and known. They were daring, courageous—bold. Some of you have been with me for years—decades—trusting me in uncharted waters to steer a prudent course for you and your financial future. I ask that you please continue to give me the trust and confidence I have earned many times over as we work through a difficult time where some now fear dragons. Thank you and I hope you enjoy the evening and the exhibit.”

  There wa
s a smattering of applause, barely enough to be polite. Asher looked grim as he surveyed the crowd. Perhaps it was my dress, a splash of sunny yellow in a sea of black, but it seemed to me that Tommy Asher’s gaze lingered on us as we stood apart, next to a bronze bust of George Washington, longer than on anyone else in the room. He leaned over and said something to Simon, who glanced our way as well. Then Asher took his wife’s arm and descended the stairs. I lost sight of him when he plunged into the crowd and it closed around him again.

  “Tommy’s absolutely right,” Mick was saying. “You can’t let a few people running scared turn this into a stampede that will take everyone down with them. If we just hang tough we’ll get through this.”

  I finished my champagne and thought of Ian and his theories and David Wildman who was now poring over Ian’s notes. Who was Mick kidding? Did he really believe Tommy Asher could bluff his way through this firestorm and stanch the outflow of money so his firm wouldn’t go under?

  “You promised me we’d see the Asher Collection,” I said. “How about it?”

  “Sure.” He gave me a quizzical look. I hadn’t been subtle in changing the subject. “Why not?”

  We had just started up the stairs when Simon called Mick’s name.

  “Do we have to?” I said under my breath.

  “His brother is our host.”

  Mick led me down to where Simon waited for us.

  “Tommy spotted you in the crowd, Mick. And your lovely lady. Good evening, Lucie. Don’t you look stunning? I seem to have lost your cousin somewhere in the Great Hall, but she and I would like the two of you to sit at our table for dinner.”

  Simon smiled and kissed my hand as his eyes locked on mine. I felt like a butterfly pinned to a museum display.

  “We’d love it,” Mick said.

  “Excellent.” Simon clapped Mick on the back. “I think Tommy did a lot to calm the waters just now, don’t you? I know you’re going to stay the course, old man. You’ll be glad you did. Tommy’d like a word with you, by the way. You come, too, Lucie.”

  My cell phone rang from the depths of my sequined evening purse. I’d turned off the ringer before Mick picked me up but kept the phone on in case David Wildman called. It must have caught on something in my purse and switched back on. Mick looked pained and a flash of irritation crossed Simon’s face.