So, are you being straight with me? About what you’ve told me so far?”
“I have to, don’t I? You’re my lawyer.”
“Still, some clients play games. Particularly about background information. Things they are ashamed of, or embarrassed about. They think those things don’t matter—or that they won’t come out. But in a murder trial everything comes out. And it all matters. Do you understand that, Vinnie?”
Vinnie Archmont nodded to Blackstone across the grey metal table in the jail conference room. She was dressed in a bright yellow prisoner’s jump suit. She looked much different now. Her bright, flirtatious affect was gone. She looked somber and tired, and her Scarlett O’Hara curls were droopy and unkempt.
Blackstone had just spent their time together going over her “life biography.” Vinnie Archmont had an unusual background.
She was raised in Oklahoma by a mother and father who had a reputation for being eccentric. The mother was a flamboyant art teacher in a community college. Her father was a professor of humanities at the University of Oklahoma. He had written some articles which captured the attention, somehow, of Lord Magister Dee in England. The following year the father was invited by Lord Dee to participate in a conference in Scotland. Vinnie’s father accepted, and he took his wife and daughter along. Dee met with the trio, took a liking to them immediately. Later he even invited them to his mansion house outside of London, where they spent the weekend.
There was something vaguely incomplete, though, about the way that Vinnie had described her background with her parents, despite Blackstone’s prodding. He made a mental note about that. Perhaps he would pursue that later.
Over the next two years, Lord Dee and her parents kept in contact. Then he invited them over to England again, at his expense. They spent some of the time sightseeing. Vinnie was nineteen at the time. But the trip ended tragically. She was attending a matinee performance in London while her parents were taking a day trip by rail to the north of England. There was a train derailment and both of her parents were killed.
Vinnie explained how Lord Dee “swept me up, in all my grief. It was a terrible time. But he took me in. Treated me like royalty. Then when I returned to the States, he personally paid for me to finish art school. And it was Lord Dee who financed my art studio in Alexandria.”
Blackstone found all of that intriguing.
“Was there anything romantic—or sexual—between you and Lord Dee?” he asked bluntly.
Vinnie wasn’t surprised at the question. But she seemed assured in her denial that there was anything but deep friendship between her and the twice-divorced Lord Dee. Over the years she was invited to England where she would spend holidays with Lord Dee and his various friends attending sumptuous parties. She also said the two spoke regularly on the phone and connected by e-mail.
Most of Vinnie’s personal time in recent years was devoted to expanding her art studio and working on her sculptures. Her social circle was comprised mostly of artists, or former college friends. They were all from the Virginia, DC, or Maryland area.
She was once engaged to be married, but she said she broke that off. She described her former boyfriend, Kevin, as “kind and considerate, but a little possessive, and not very exciting.”
At the present, she said she wasn’t seeing anyone romantically.
“Are you active in any groups? Church? Civic organizations? Political parties?” Blackstone asked. Vinnie said she was not much of a joiner. The only “group” she was part of, other than a local DC artisans’ group that put on joint art exhibitions, was a neighborhood project that was raising money to renovate a neglected park. She said she went to a couple of their meetings, donated some money, and helped clean up the playground area.
When Blackstone raised the allegations in the indictment of her being part of a “cult” group that planned the execution of Langley and the theft of the Booth diary, she laughed out loud and denied any such thing.
Vinnie admitted that the indictment was correct about Langley giving her the code to the security door. On the day of the murder, when the two met in the late afternoon or early evening, he told her he would be working late that night, and that “she should pop on by if she was bored and wanted to visit,” but should use the private entrance if she did.
Vinnie said that she knew that Horace Langley had some romantic feelings for her. But she never reciprocated. And she noted that his obvious overtures did not affect her professional work in working on his sculpture.
Blackstone was looking over his notes on all of that information, when a question came to mind.
“Just curious about something,” he said. “Why did your parents name you Vinnie? That’s an unusual name for a girl.”
“Actually, it was my mother,” Vinnie said. “One of her heroes was a famous female artist from Oklahoma named Vinnie Ream. That’s who I was named after.”
“I’m familiar with a lot of artists. But I haven’t heard of her.”
“She lived in the 1800s. She sculpted Abraham Lincoln,” Vinnie said, trying to manage a smile.
“Interesting,” Blackstone remarked.
The time was right. He needed to go in deeper, toward the heart of the case.
“What did you mean about the ‘Masonic thing’ when we spoke by telephone?”
She paused. He could tell there was an internal struggle going on inside.
“Just that the way things happened. The interest in the John Wilkes Booth diary and all. Lord Dee is a very high-ranking, thirty-third-degree Freemason himself. He and I talked about a lot of things over the years. In a way, he was a kind of spiritual mentor to me. He had always talked about the importance of finding it. The missing diary pages, I mean.”
“Why did he want to find them?”
“I was never really positive. Not specifically.”
“Well, how about generally?”
She paused and thought about it, then answered.
“I think it had to do with a secret.”
“What kind of secret?”
“He never told me exactly. But he said he would someday.”
Blackstone put down his pen and stopped taking notes, and leaned forward on the conference table, looking into the sad face of the dark-haired beauty.
“I want to know,” he said firmly, “what kind of secret.”
Vinnie shifted a little in the plastic chair. And then she said it.
“He called it,” and then she took a breath. And exhaled. And finished the sentence.
“The ultimate secret of the Freemasons.”