The Rose Conspiracy (51 page)

Then Blackstone stepped into the conference room with Vinnie and closed the door behind him.

CHAPTER 62

I
nside the conference room, Vinnie was still laughing and crying. She spent several minutes just emoting. Then she praised Blackstone's performance, extolling the brilliance of her defense attorney.

J.D. Blackstone was taking it so much in stride that it almost appeared he had become strangely dispassionate about the outcome of the whole case.

“J.D., darling, you are being so solemn!” Vinnie said. “We have to celebrate tonight…but, I'm sorry—you had some details you said we needed to wrap up. Oh, my, wait till dear Magister Dee hears the good news.”

“Details, yes,” Blackstone said. “Well, let's start with your adoption.”

With that he pulled out the file Tully had given him, perused it for a few moments, and then looked up at Vinnie.

“You gave me the impression you wanted a relationship with me?” Blackstone asked.

“You know I do,” Vinnie said, and she took both of Blackstone's hands in hers.

“Then I think we need to speak the truth—both of us,” Blackstone said and deftly removed his hands from hers.

“Of course,” Vinnie said passionately. “That's got to be number one. And now that you no longer have to represent me in this terrible criminal case, we can spend time on our relationship, darling.”

“You lied to me about being adopted,” Blackstone said.

Vinnie recoiled for a moment before she replied.

“I don't know what you mean,” she said.

“Don't do that, Vinnie,” Blackstone said. “I had the best private investigator in North America check the adoption records of your home state and the national adoption registries. You were not listed anywhere. The fact is, you didn't tell Lord Dee you were adopted until
after
your parents had been killed in the train wreck—making them conveniently inaccessible to contradict your story.”

“Why would I do that?”

“So you could create a name that sounded fatefully significant to Lord Dee, the Freemason philosopher and Theosophist.”

“Significant?” Vinnie asked wide-eyed.

“Yes,” Blackstone said, “your research must have indicated that the word
Arch
has great importance to Freemasons,” Blackstone said. “In Masonic lore, the arch is an ancient symbol of strength. In addition, Masonic writing points out that at the very top of the arch there is the keystone, the critical architectural element holding the arch together. Your choice of a name that begins with ‘arch' was obviously designed to convey the implication to Lord Dee's occult mind that you, Vinnie, would somehow end up being a keeper of the keystone—the key to the ‘philosopher's stone.' That impression would then give you unequaled access to Lord Dee.”

Vinnie was shaking her head a little and smiling.

“So, J.D. Blackstone, the great intellect, has got it all figured out,” she said with a slight smirk.

“Then there's the ‘mont' part of ‘Archmont,' Blackstone explained. “The word
mont
means ‘mount.' To the Freemasons, their entire metaphysical myth is built on their interpretation of the building of Solomon's Temple—a temple built on what is now called the Temple Mount. By taking the name ‘Archmont' you could not have picked a more clever entrée into Lord Dee's confidence, Vinnie. Superbly done. So the name was perfectly suited to endear you to Dee. That, plus your obvious flirtatious beauty and your resemblance to Vinnie Ream enabled you to play out Dee's fantasy that the two of you were some latter-day version of Vinnie Ream and Albert Pike, simply transplanted spiritually into another century.”

Vinnie was smiling and eyeing Blackstone closely.

“But then there's the problem of Detective Victor Cheski,” Blackstone said.

“Who would have figured him to be such a villain?” Vinnie said, not taking her eyes off Blackstone.

“Yes,” Blackstone said, “the villain. And now, unless you do some fancy, very quick footwork, that villain, Victor Cheski, is going to start pointing the finger directly at
you.
”

“Me?” she scoffed.

“Come on, Vinnie,” Blackstone said with a chuckle. “He's been your secret boyfriend. I know that now. Your apartment manager gave me a perfect description of ‘your boyfriend,' the detective. But I had my suspicions. That was simply the capstone. The ultimate proof. The first overpowering evidence was the mailing label on the back of that crime magazine dealing with the Beltway snipers. As you know, it was addressed to Victor Cheski in care of the DC Police Department. Very sloppy of you, Vinnie, and your boyfriend to leave his magazine in your closet.”

“Can't a woman have more than one lover?” Vinnie said with an enticing smile.

“Yeah, but then there's the whole have-your-lover-the-detective-shoot-at-your-lawyer thing. I have a hard time with that.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Vinnie said shaking her head. “You have to believe me. When I told him about you going horseback riding, I didn't think he was going to try to kill you.”

“Can I really believe that? At that point, the Court of Appeals had just decided I could tell my experts and cocounsel about the Langley note,” Blackstone said. “Obviously, you both were concerned that the note was getting leaked out and might find its way to Lord Dee and spoil your whole scheme—oh, by the way, interesting technique, having Cheski use a white truck and an AK-47 to try to get rid of me, so the further distribution of the Langley note would be slowed down as you asked the court for more time to retain a new lawyer, giving you and Cheski enough time to complete your scheme.

“And Cheski's method in doing the whole Beltway-sniper kind of scare all over again using a white box truck in case there were witnesses,
that was good…except, as you know, in the John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo sniper shootings in 2002, even though the initial reports mentioned a white box truck, those two killers actually used a blue Chevy Caprice and a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle. But the effect created by Cheski in my shooting certainly kept the focus off him and was neatly calculated to look like just another random, crazy, publicity-seeking, copycat sniper shooting—all over again.

“It's just a good thing for me that Cheski wasn't more proficient with the AK-47, a notoriously inaccurate weapon for long-distance shooting—and a good thing also that I was riding a good horse. But as I thought about it more, in my hospital room, who else but a DC police detective who was actually working in that department in 2002 and remembered those sniper shootings would be a better candidate to cook up a simulated copycat shooting?”

“Alright,” she said with a laugh, “let's see how very clever you really are—why would Victor Cheski, if he is my lover, sabotage the recording of my jail-cell phone call? That would mean I would have no way to counter the testimony of this Shelly Hollsaker, who would testify that she overheard me making self-incriminating statements on the phone.”

“Simple,” Blackstone said. “Cheski figured you would panic and call him when you were arrested. And he was right. So when he heard you had been picked up and were on your way to the federal detention center, he made the call to the DOJ to make sure no recording was done. The fact is, you
did
make incriminating statements—and those statements were made when you called your lover boy, Victor Cheski.”

“And our ‘scheme' that you keep mentioning,” Vinnie said, “that would be what?”

“To bilk Lord Dee out of twenty million dollars. That was the plan all along, I'm sure. From the very beginning, twenty million up front for the Langley note. That part never changed. Even after you were charged criminally in this case, the two of you decided to still pursue the plan, and so Cheski fired off a letter to Lord Dee offering the Langley note and mailing the letter from Savannah, the birthplace of the American version of speculative esoteric Freemasonry, just for dramatic effect. You would be unable to collect on the second twenty million, of course—but then you never figured on getting that second payment anyway, because that
would require that you then produce the actual John Wilkes Booth diary pages. And of course, you wouldn't want to do that, would you?”

Vinnie smiled again.

“Maybe not,” she said.

“No, obviously not,” Blackstone added. “Because the Booth diary never contained anything that Langley wrote in his phony note,
did it?
”

“I guess not,” she said.

“No,” Blackstone said. “Because that cryptic poem in Langley's note was not copied from the Booth diary at all. It was in fact a construct set up by you and Detective Cheski, but actually authored by Horace Langley himself, the scholar on seventeenth-century English history as well as the American Civil War. You gleaned from Lord Dee the details of his cherished theory on alchemy and the elusive elixir of prolonged life, a theory which was fed by his crazed desire to find some occult, magic cure for his incurable condition of corticobasal degeneration.

“So you passed all that information to Horace Langley, who desperately needed some quick cash to pay off his gambling debts and avoid a scandal. Langley thought up the clever note, supposedly derived from the Booth diary, but which in reality was custom-built to appeal to Lord Dee's esoteric fantasies. With a coded message that Dee would have little problem deciphering. But there was another problem—if anyone read the actual Booth diary pages that had just been discovered, they would realize there was nothing metaphysical about them…nothing whatsoever about alchemy or any golden tree or any rose crystal. By the way, what
was
in the Booth diary, anyway?”

“Oh, just Booth's ranting against the North,” she said with a sneer. “And complaints about his own situation. That's about it. Victor has it stashed away somewhere.”

“So the plan was,” Blackstone continued, “to fake a robbery of the Booth diary so that Horace Langley's note would look like the only evidence of it that was left, right?”

“ ‘The best-laid plans,' as they say…” she said.

“Then someone came up with the very nasty plan of not just faking a robbery,” Blackstone explained, “but actually killing Langley, then stealing the Booth pages and upping the shares the two of you would
get when it was suggested to Lord Dee that the Langley note was now for sale. After all, Detective Cheski had confidential access to the note in his investigation, and Dee's declining health made it impractical for him to be willing to wait for the note to finally be made public. But then something very unexpected happened—you actually got indicted and charged as a conspirator in the crime.”

At that point, it was like a switch had flipped. Vinnie started yelling and swearing about Horace Langley, and in between her string of profanities, complaining about why in the world he had to enter into his journal his dealings with her about the Booth diary, and why he made an entry in his computer log that he had given her the pass code to the side door.

Blackstone nodded, as he was now hearing the same kind of complaints Vinnie had made in her jail cell call to Cheski, statements partially overheard by Shelly Hollsaker.

“Was Langley trying to destroy me from the grave?” she screamed out.

Then she settled down.

“What's done is done,” she said. “The point is, where you and I go now from here on. First, I'm a good student. I remember what you told me when I first hired you. Everything we just discussed is protected by attorney–client privilege, right?” she said.

“Right you are,” Blackstone said. “Everything up to now. So what happens with Lord Dee from this point on?”

“Well, now that the spotlight is on Victor, I suggest we make hay. As soon as I get processed out of jail and released today, we can get my passport back from the court clerk, and you and I can beat it over to Lord Dee in England. You have a copy of the Horace Langley note we can use, right?”

“Sure,” Blackstone said. “Why?”

“So, darling man—with just a few more details to work out in terms of strategy, of course—you and I get the note delivered to Lord Dee and pick up our twenty million dollars before someone leaks the note to the media. What else?”