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

secretary?” Ron put in.
    “Yes. She doesn’t know who Grand is.”
    “Does she know who Osanaga is?”
    Locke nodded. “But she doesn’t know why Blaine received calls from him and made calls to him.”
    “What about the home phone?” Jill asked.
    “He didn’t keep a home telephone log, of course,” said Locke. “We have the long-distance bill and are working on that with the telephone company. There’s a name that appears on the State Department logs and also on the apartment telephone bill we have no explanation for either. We’ve identified the man—Jeremy Johnson is United States sales manager for Great Britain-Hawley-Burnsby Motors, Limited. Blaine called him at his home in Virginia, from the Watergate apartment, half a dozen times in the last four months. Besides that, his name is on the logs as having called Blaine or having received calls from Blaine at his Washington office some eighteen times during the same period. The FBI has a dossier on Johnson. I’ve ordered a copy be delivered here. It’s on its way.”
    “Why do you have a dossier on Jeremy Johnson?” asked Gabe Haddad.
    “I’d rather you read the file yourself. I don’t want to draw conclusions, but it’s hard to understand why the Secretary of State would have so many contacts with a man who came to our attention as a possible money launderer.”
    “Clarify
that
,” Ron said.
    “Let the file do it. It speaks for itself.”
    ***
    “I’m worried about something we haven’t even talked about,” Ron said to Jill Keller and Gabe Haddad when they were again alone in his office.
    He was sitting behind his desk, Coke can within reach, in shirtsleeves, feet on the corner of his desk. Jill had settled into a corner of his couch, had kicked off her shoes, and sat now with her legs stretched out on the couch. Only Gabe had not shed his jacket as yet, and he sat in the chair facing Ron, frowning over a page of handwritten notes.
    Ron went on… “He spent a lot of money, have you noticed? He lived at the Watergate—which isn’t cheap. He ate at Le Bagatelle and places like it—all not cheap. He bought art. (You remember the Louise Nevelson in his office is his, not Uncle Sam’s.) I expect we’ll find more expensive things in the apartment. He wore expensive clothes. He gave Judy Pringle and Marya Kalisch expensive gifts—as we’ll probably find he did for others. The Secretary of State earns eighty thousand dollars a year. A professor of history is paid considerably less. Where did all the money come from?”
    “Corruption in the Webster Administration?” asked Jill lazily.
    “I hope not,” Ron said. “I’d like to see this case resolved without damage to the President—”
    “I’ve read the autopsy report,” Gabe said. “Word for word. Gruesome damn thing. We need to interview the pathologists. Personally I don’t see anything in it except what we expected—that Blaine’s throat was cut and he strangled and bled to death. There’s one thing I’d like to know more about, though. Why did the contents of his stomach and intestines include distinct traces of dextroamphetamine?”
    “How much alcohol was in him?” Jill asked.
    “Point zero eight percent,” said Gabe. “He was sober enough to drive a car. I expect, though, he was feeling pretty good.”
    “What’s dextroamphetamine?” Ron asked.
    “A mood lifter,” said Jill. “An upper, as they used to say.”
    “He’d had sex within the preceding eight hours,” Gabe said as matter-of-factly as he could manage. “Since we know it wasn’t with Judy Pringle or Marya Kalisch, we have to wonder who it was…”
    “I want a minute-by-minute of his last twenty-four hours,” said Ron. “
Everything
…”
    A courier delivered the FBI file on Jeremy Johnson. Ron called the British Embassy and asked Christopher McLeod to have dinner with him at Dominique’s while Jill and Gabe scanned the Johnson file.
    “Spooks,” Jill said. “Sneaks. They know a lot about