Blowout

deal with, but he looked tired. Maybe I’m reading too much into it now. You want me to see something and so I’m trying too hard to cooperate with you.”
    “But you don’t think so?” Ben asked.
    Slowly, she shook her head. She looked up at the gray sky. “It’s going to rain soon. I wonder if it will turn to snow again. I hope not. Everything becomes such a mess.”
    Callie said, “Fleurette, why are you scared?”
    “Scared? Me? I’m not scared.”
    “Yes,” Callie said slowly, “you are. On Sunday, I could see it very plainly. You are scared. Why?”
    Fleurette looked off toward the Lincoln Memorial, then back again at Callie. “Look, two people close to me have been murdered. If you saw any fear in me, it’s because of that.”
    “Nothing else?”
    “No, nothing else. I’d sure tell you if there were.”
    Ben said, “Bobby Fisher—one of Justice Alto-Thorpe’s law clerks—”
    “Yeah, I know the little creep.”
    “He said you and Danny went out to lunch on Friday. You didn’t mention that to us.”
    “That’s because we only walked to the corner together. Danny was in a mood, preoccupied, snarly—I suppose it makes sense now—but then I thought, Danny, you’re such a pain sometimes. I’d heard about a shoe sale at Maximillan’s, not two blocks away. I dumped him and went shoe shopping.”
    “Bobby said you two had your heads together, a real chummy conversation,” Ben said.
    “No, that’s Bobby being a creep again. He probably wanted you to focus your attention on someone else. He disliked Justice Califano, probably because he and Alto-Thorpe weren’t on good terms.”
    “Bobby Fisher and Eliza—what did you think about that? You knew he wanted her to go out with him?”
    Fleurette shrugged. “Oh that. Fact is, Eliza couldn’t have cared less. Bobby didn’t really come into her line of focus, you know what I mean? She put up with him. What she really wanted to do was drop-kick him out of the building.”
    “Do you think Eliza really disliked Bobby that much? Do you think he hated her because she kept turning him down?”
    “Who knows? When he finally ran out of there on Friday, she looked at me, rolled her eyes, and said, ‘Well, maybe that’s the last time I’ll have to tell him to take a hike.’ ”
    “So she never really took him all that seriously.”
    “No,” Fleurette said. “The only person she took seriously was Justice Califano.”
    “So what did Danny say to you before you told him you were going shoe shopping?”
    “Nothing really, just something like ‘Women and shoes, that’s all you think about.’ Then he said he was going to see a foreign film with Annie that night, that he had something going—listen, Danny was always on the make. Usually whatever he said didn’t mean anything.”
    “Except this time it did, didn’t it?” Ben said.
    Before Ben and Callie left her by the Vietnam Wall, next to her uncle’s name, Ben remembered to ask Fleurette what color her toenail polish was last Friday. She looked startled, then laughed. “It’s called ‘I’m Not Really a Waitress Red.’ ”
    Callie said to Ben as they drove away, “I wonder if her father makes the pilgrimage here every year like Fleurette does.”
    “Somehow I don’t think so. After all, he wasn’t six years old when he first came here.”
    “She’s scared, even though she denies it.”
    “Yes, I think you’re right.”

CHAPTER
26
    G EORGETOWN W ASHINGTON , D.C.
F RIDAY EVENING
    “S EAN ATE MORE spaghetti than you, Callie,” Savich said, eyeing her plate. “You need more Parmesan? Garlic bread? How about more of Sherlock’s Caesar salad? It’s the best. I taught her how to make it myself.”
    “No, I’m fine, truly. It’s so nice to go off our pizza diet. It’s been a very long week.”
    “Your mom is having her potluck tonight with her friends?”
    Callie nodded to Sherlock, who was cutting into a beautiful apple pie.
    Simon Russo, Lily’s art broker fiancé from New York, was sitting back in his chair, hands over his lean stomach. He was looking at Savich’s sister, and there was such sweetness in his look that Callie gulped. She had listened to them talk about No Wrinkles Remus, Lily’s political cartoon series that The Washington Post had picked up, about Sarah Elliott’s paintings, one of which hung over the fireplace in the living room, but of course, the conversation always returned to Justice Califano and Danny O’Malley.
    Savich served the