Murder at Ford's Theatre - Margaret Truman [14]
She hadn’t been wearing a watch; at least it wasn’t on her wrist when Dr. Ong had stripped her down. No purse, either. A set of keys, tissues, two folded blank checks, an American Express card in her name, a pocket comb, breath mints, some loose change, and sixty-six dollars in folding money in her jeans and white sleeveless cotton vest she wore over her blouse.
“What are you thinking, man?” Johnson asked.
“Huh? Oh, sorry. Daydreaming. I was thinking I’d like to know where she got all that jewelry.”
“Maybe her daddy in Florida.”
“You don’t get rich teaching agriculture in college, Mo.”
“Hell, he paid her rent.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Daddy’s little girl.”
“Daddy’s little dead girl.”
“Maybe Senator Lerner was a daddy, too. A sugar daddy.”
They fell silent, their thoughts the same. Solving a murder was tough enough without having a powerful U.S. senator in the middle of it.
CHAPTER FIVE
“CLARISE? It’s Mac Smith.”
“Hello, Mac. I’m sure you’ve heard.”
“Yes. Quite a shock. I thought Annabel might be there with you.”
“She is.”
His wife came on the line. “I was just about to leave,” she said.
“Glad I caught you. Still want me to come by?”
“No. I’ll meet you at home.”
“Is Clarise coming for dinner?”
“As far as I know.” He heard Annabel ask Clarise the question. “She’ll be there. Drinks at six okay?”
“Perfect. Hurry home.”
ANNABEL HANDED THE PHONE back to Clarise and resumed her seat across the desk from the theatre’s producing director.
Like her husband, Mackensie, Annabel had also been an attorney, a divorce lawyer. And like him, she’d packed up her practice one day to pursue a lifelong love of art, particularly pre-Columbian art. With Mac’s unbridled support, she opened a pre-Columbian gallery in Georgetown, an aesthetic success from the start to be sure, but only marginally profitable. But that wasn’t the point. The Smiths were financially comfortable from their lucrative former law practices, and were blissfully free to pursue more altruistic pursuits: the gallery; for Annabel, being part of D.C.’s arts community; and for Mac, teaching law and lending his vast legal experience to nonprofit activities.
Although Annabel’s friendship with Clarise Emerson was not of long duration, it was close, having become more so over the past few years. As often happens, they’d met through a mutual friend—in this case, a friend in very high places, Dorothy Maloney, America’s first female vice president.
The veep and Annabel had become friendly when Maloney was a four-term congresswoman from Los Angeles, and the House’s most vocal proponent of the arts and government funding for them. Dorothy’s husband seldom ventured to Washington, preferring to remain in Los Angeles to manage a successful real estate business, and the congresswoman had become part of the Smiths’ social circle.
Once the Nash administration was up and running, its lovely vice president took the lead in lobbying Congress for arts funding—as well as lobbying the president for Clarise Emerson to head the NEA. They’d been friends since college in their native Los Angeles; Clarise had produced Dorothy’s campaign TV spots, and the congresswoman had pushed through legislation benefiting Clarise’s favorite California nonprofit arts organizations. That this quintessential quid pro quo friendship moved to Washington—America’s leading city of mutual back-scratching—when Clarise took over the leadership of Ford’s Theatre seemed only appropriate, although there was more to their relationship