Dutch and Gina: The Power of Love (14 page)

LaLa smiled.
 
“So you figure I should have forgiven Crader and snatched him up a long time ago?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.
 
You have to make that call, La.
 
All I’m saying is that I’ve paid attention to Crader McKenzie.
 
He’s a flawed man, yes, he is.
 
But he’s a good man, La.
 
I’m sorry, but he is.
 
And even good men mess up sometimes.”

The door opened and Christian Bale, carrying his own cup of coffee and a briefcase, entered the First Lady’s lair.
 
“Good morning, ladies!” he said cheerfully as he took his seat at the conference table.

“Why are you so chipper this morning?” Gina wanted to know.
 
Christian, like LaLa was one of her aides.
 

“Why wouldn’t I be chipper?” he replied.
 
“My father-in-law is a man I love and admire.
 
My mother-in-law is a woman I love and admire.
 
One of my closest friends, you LaLa, is somebody I love and admire.
 
And my wife. . .” He smiled.

“Your wife what?”

“Gives me good lovin’, honey,” Christian said in such a sister-girl way that both Gina and LaLa leaned over laughing.

“You have changed so much,” LaLa said after the laughter died down.
 

“Jade’s changed.
 
After the president talked to her, she seems to be more. . .”

“Lovable?” LaLa said and Christian grinned.

“There ya’ go,” he said.

The buzz was heard on Gina’s desk.
 
Christian, still smiling, walked over to the desk and pressed the button.
 
“Yes, Marge,” he said.

“Tell Mrs. Harber that the Attorney General is here to see her.”

Christian, surprised, looked at Gina.
 
Gina nodded.

“Send her in, Marge,” Christian said into the intercom.

LaLa looked at Gina.
 
“She’s new, right?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t even met her yet.”

“Me, either,” Christian said as he walked back toward the conference table.

The door to the office was opened and Primrose Grier, the president’s new attorney general, walked in.
 
LaLa and Christian had seen her on television and knew her to be a tall, imposing woman, but the TV, they both privately thought, did her a disservice.
 
This woman was well over six feet tall, slender but curvaceous.
 
She wore huge heels, a pant suit with a long, flowing, matching coat, and she carried a Blackberry and what they could only describe as a walkie-talkie.
 
She was a dark-skinned African-American, full lips and nose, and with almond shape dark eyes that were as big as quarters.
 
Her hair was long and straight down her back and her makeup was minimal.
 
Calling her beautiful wouldn’t work at all because beauty wasn’t the main thing she projected.
 
She oozed strength, and power, and fierceness.
 

Gina had said that Dutch loved surrounding himself with unique women.
 
This woman, LaLa noted, certainly fit that bill.

“Good morning, Mrs. Harber,” Primrose said as she walked toward the conference table.
 
Christian looked from the woman to Gina.
 
The president selected the most exotically attractive women he’d ever seen to be on his staff, and it didn’t seem to bother Gina at all.
 
He could only pray that someday Jade would have that kind of confidence in him.

“Hello, Prim, love that suit.”

The comment seemed to catch Primrose off guard.
 
She was loaded for bear.
 
She hadn’t expected any compliment.
 
“Thank-you,” she said as if she was unaccustomed to small talk.
 

“Would you like some coffee or juice or something?”

“No, ma’am, I’m. . . not here for that.”

“Understood,” Gina said, staring at the Attorney General.
 
“Have a seat.”

Primrose seemed almost flustered about nothing, LaLa thought.
 
Then thought again.
 
A woman that size, and that fierce, was accustomed to being in control.
 
But Gina controlled this room.

“Yes, ma’am,” Primrose said and took a seat at the conference table.

“I’m not sure if you know my two assistants.
 
This is Loretta King, and my son-in-law Christian Bale.”

Gina Harber looked far too young to be calling some grown man her son-in-law.
 
She was only thirty-seven herself.
 
But Prim wasn’t the type to mind other people’s business.
  
“Nice to meet you both,” she said.
 
Then she looked at Gina.

Gina was nobody’s fool.
 
The Attorney General didn’t visit her unless some craziness was going down.
 
Gina was trying to rack her brain as to what offensive thing she could have said or done since their return from the Virgin Islands.
 
“What’s happened?” she asked.

“It’s the president, ma’am,” Primrose said.

Gina’s heart dropped.
 
“The president?
 
What about the president?”

The desk intercom buzzed again.
 
Christian hurried to answer it.

“He’s currently being detained by the San Francisco police about an incident that occurred overnight.”

“Christian,” Gina’s secretary chimed on, “please tell the First Lady that the National Security Advisor and the president’s political director are here to see her.”

Gina’s heart was pounding.
 
If Manny Levine was coming to see her, she knew it had to be something major and something so politically damaging to the president that he couldn’t manage it by phone.
 
Christian didn’t even bother to ask permission when he heard that Manny was with the National Security Advisor.
 
He told the secretary to send them through.

Gina, however, was still so confused it was beginning to infuriate her.
 
“Why is my husband being detained, Prim?” she asked the Attorney General.

“I used that word, but detained is too strong a word.
 
He’s being questioned, although he’s been instructed not to answer any of their questions, because there was an incident that occurred overnight.”

“You told me that already.
 
Please don’t tell me that again.
 
Tell me why is it that my husband is being questioned, detained, whatever the hell you want to call it.”

The office door opened and Ed Drake, the president’s National Security Advisor, and Manny Levine, his political director, hurried into the office.

“Oh, Prim, you’re here, good, good,” Manny began saying as soon as he entered.
 
“How are you holding up, G?” he asked Gina.
 
But before she could even answer he pivoted back to the Attorney General.
 
“I take it you’ve briefed the First Lady?”

“No, she hasn’t briefed the First Lady,” Gina snapped.
 
Then she turned to Ed Drake, a man she respected.
 
“Ed, what’s going on?
 
What’s happened to Dutch?”

Ed walked over to Gina, sat in the chair beside Primrose and across from Gina.
 
He patted her hand.
 
“You remember Liz Sinclair?”

Gina glanced at LaLa.
 
Liz Sinclair and Crader had had a sexual encountered that led to LaLa’s break-up with him.
 
Yet she was Dutch’s friend and just as he didn’t throw Crader under the bus for allowing the situation to unfold, he refused to throw Liz under the bus for unfolding it.
 
He eventually fell out with her, when she came onto him in Brussels, and Gina thought that was the end of that friendship.
 

“Of course I remember Liz,” she said.
 
“What does this have to do with Liz?”

“Liz Sinclair was found dead in his hotel room, Gina,” Ed said.

Gina just stared at Ed.
 
Surely she had heard him wrong.
 
Liz was dead?
 
Did he just say Liz was dead?
 
“She’s
dead
?” she asked, to be certain she didn’t mishear him.
 
Both LaLa and Christian were floored too.

“Yes.
 
She was found dead in his hotel room”

“Oh, no,” Gina said with anguish.
 
“That poor woman.”
 
Then Gina thought about his actual wording.

“In his room?
 
What do you mean she was found dead in his room?
 
Why was she in his room?”

Ed glanced at Manny Levine.
  
And it was obvious that both Ed and the director were too personally attached to the president.
 
They looked to Primrose.

Primrose took it from there.
 
“Apparently he invited her up,” she said.

Again, Gina found herself at a loss for words.
 
This couldn’t be true.
 
Why would Dutch invite her up to his hotel room?
 
And how is it that she ended up dead?
 

“How did she die?” was the only question she could will herself to ask.

“We won’t be certain until the autopsy comes out,” Prim said, “but the police is prepared to make an initial ruling of homicide,” she said dispassionately.
 

“Homicide?” LaLa said in a tone of shock and looked at Gina.
 

Gina could hardly believe what she was hearing.
 
“She was murdered?” she said, her face now a mask of agony.
 
“She was found in my husband’s hotel room murdered?”

“Yes ma’am.
 
Allegedly from some kind of blunt force trauma.”

“But where was he?
 
Is he alright?”

“He’s fine, ma’am.”

“Where was he?”

Primrose
 
looked at Ed Drake.
 

“He was apparently in the room with her.
 
That’s all we gotten from Crader thus far.”

Gina couldn’t think straight.
  
“And she died of a blow to the head?”

Ed nodded.
 
“That’s correct.”

“And she was found, with this injury, in Dutch’s room?”

“In his hotel room, yes ma’am.”

Gina shook her head.
 
This made no sense.
 
“But I don’t understand,” she said, her face a mask of puzzlement.
 
“What was Liz Sinclair doing in his hotel room anyway?”

Ed exhaled.
 
Manny ran his hand through his buzz-cut, spiky hair.
 
He was a man in his fifties, big belly, sloppily attired, and had former Marine written all over him.
 
Political scandals distressed the hell out of him and she could see his distress on full display right now.
 

Ed Drake, on the other hand, was around Manny’s age, was former military too, but hadn’t ditched his training and remained calm under fire.
 
“We don’t have those answers yet, Gina,” he said, patting her hand.
 
“But we will soon, I promise you that.
 
We’ll know the whole story.”