Free Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) by Margaret Truman Page A

possible that
she
had been one of Blaine’s young women too…? He put the notion aside, but it was there—to be, he realized, followed up if necessary. The shock she felt at the sudden death of Blaine would, of course, be deepened if she’d been intimate with him… He looked at her… she was not like Marya Kalisch or Judy Pringle. She was a damn sight prettier, and younger. Thewhole world was still open to her, she was receptive and fresh and—
    “Do you have any idea who killed him?” she asked, breaking into his thoughts.
    “Afraid not. It looks like a long by-the-numbers investigation.”
    “I’m sorry it’s fallen in your lap,” she said.
    He shrugged. “It’s not exactly my kind of thing.”
    “My father has complete confidence in you—”
    “I appreciate that… and try to relax, Lynne. You look a little beat yourself. Just leave it to supersleuth.”
    He said it with a straight face, and then they both allowed themselves a smile and a moment’s letdown from the tension.
    ***
    “This is not finished, you understand.” The FBI man Walter Locke scowled over a list in his hand, marking out typographical errors with a Cross pencil. “There’s still a lot of work yet to be done—”
    “I understand that,” Ron said. “And I appreciate your coming up with what you have as quickly as you have.”
    “We’ve got his home telephone bills from the Watergate apartment, our copies of the telephone logs and appointment books from his State Department office. We used the past four months as a preliminary basis. Later we’ll have to go back more months, but using the past four months we have a list of two hundred eighteen names. Of those we can positively identify all but twenty-seven. They’re all people he obviously had business with.”
    “Do you include Judy Pringle and Marya Kalisch inthe twenty-seven or the hundred ninety-one?” Gabe Haddad asked.
    “We include them in the twenty-seven,” he said. “We know who they are, but their business with the Secretary of State is not apparent.”
    “What in the world do you mean by ‘positive identification’ then?” Gabe asked.
    “We mean we know who the person is and why, probably, he talked to the Secretary of State. Among the twenty-seven are some people we know but we don’t know—aren’t certain—why they had telephone conversations with the Secretary of State. For example, here’s the name Diego Lopez-Ortiz. He’s the ambassador from Costa Rica. It seems apparent that he would have business with the Secretary of State and reason to receive a call from him. We’ve listed him among the hundred ninety-one. On the other hand, on April 24 he received a call from Barbara Lund, and later that day he returned her call. Barbara Lund is a dancer at a place called The Blue Lagoon, which is where he called her. We know who she is, but we’re not certain why he called her. Oh, sure, I know, with all the stories going around now we
think
we know why he called her, but we could be wrong. Diplomacy works in strange ways, I hear. Anyway, that’s why she’s in the twenty-seven.”
    “Do the names suggest anything?” Jill Keller asked.
    “We might be curious about the number of times some of the names occur,” said Locke. “For example, during the four months before his death the Secretary of State made or received fourteen calls from an Inoguchi Osanaga. Osanaga is the accredited correspondent for the
Honshu Shinbum
. We know who he is, but why did the Secretary talk to him so often?”
    “Are there any names you can’t identify at all?” asked Gabe.
    “Several. Of course we’ve only begun to look. We identified the ones we know so far simply by checking the telephone book and other available references. But there’s one that’s especially interesting—a man named Philippe Grand called Blaine repeatedly over the past four months. Blaine always returned his calls. No one knows who he is.”
    “Have you asked Mary Burdine, Blaine’s