Joan was mute and sniveling, the towel askew on her head, her hands clutching ineffectively at the air, unable to reach Milo because he’d backed away a step or two. “I have nothing to say,” she got out finally, which was when Alicia shook her head, as though with profound regret.
Her voice was low and steady. “I have here the record of your MasterCard purchases for the month of December. On the twentieth, the night your husband was murdered, when you claim to have been at Courtney Holt’s house in Santa Cruz, at 9:46 PM you purchased gasoline at a Shell station in Carmel, only a mile from your home.” She paused. “Did you gas up your Jaguar before or after you killed your husband?”
“I didn’t kill him! I didn’t kill him!” Joan was shrieking now, her arms flailing, the towel off her head and toppled on the floor, her blond hair wet and straggly. “All right, all right, you really want to know? I drove back to Carmel and stood outside my own home and spied on him, because I was sure he was having an affair with that bitch of a campaign aide of his, Molly Bracewell! And I wanted to catch him in the act! I wanted to prove it!”
Alicia just watched. Milo watched, too, though he felt himself in a sort of daze, as though a movie he’d seen a dozen times suddenly took off in a new and unexpected direction. She lied to me, she lied, his mind kept repeating. She went to such pains to tell me she stayed in Santa Cruz, that she needed “time to think.” How much she regretted being away because she might have been able to stop the murder. And all the while she was lying.
Again he’d been tricked. Again he’d been duped. And for what? For the woman before him, who had become a caricature of a hysterical female, a woman in a movie madhouse, unable to speak coherently for the sobs racking her body. Through the haze that enveloped him, Milo understood that the revulsion he felt for her was nothing compared to what he felt for himself.
“Are you happy now? Are you satisfied?” Her face was mottled several sickly shades of white and pink. “Have you embarrassed me enough?”
“A man has been murdered,” Alicia said. To Milo’s eyes she appeared completely unperturbed. “Seems to me your being embarrassed is beside the point.”
Joan went on sobbing, as if in a world of her own. Alicia looked at him. “Someone’s at the door. I heard knocking. It’s probably the coffee you ordered.”
“Should I get it?”
“I don’t see why not. I’ll move her”—Alicia indicated Joan with a cock of her chin—“into the other room.”
Mito forced himself to the entryway, finding it a small relief to engage in this pointless task. This time he looked through the peephole, and this time indeed it was room service. A tall young man bore a silver coffee service on a tray hoisted high above his shoulder, as if he were weaving a path through a crowd of diners. Milo let him in.
“Sorry it took so long.” The waiter swept into the suite and deposited the tray on the coffee table between the sofa and love seat. “Everyone in the kitchen is so preoccupied with the news this morning, orders are moving slower than usual.” He looked up at Milo. “Should I pour?”
“No. Thank you.” Milo was puzzled. “What do you mean, preoccupied with the news?”
The waiter’s brows flew up. “The bombing. You haven’t heard?”
A rush of cold shivered through Milo’s body, as if the French doors had blown open to let in the chill off the sea. “No,” he said slowly, “I haven’t.”
“Oh, it’s terrible.” The waiter edged away, shaking his head. “It looks like another terrorist attack. Down at the Rose Bowl. Something like six people dead and fifty injured. It’s terrible,” he repeated, before sprinting the few steps to the door. “Nobody can believe it. Sorry, gotta go.”
Slam of the door. The waiter was gone. Milo was alone.
He stood motionless in the gorgeously appointed suite, sunshine spilling through the floor-to-ceiling French doors in the harbinger of yet another glorious California day. Where was his coat? Where was his cell phone?
It didn’t take him long to find the foyer closet, to reach inside his overcoat pocket to extract the tiny blue Nokia cell phone, and to note that it was turned off. That last didn’t come as a surprise. He knew before seeing it that it would be turned off, and he knew by whom.
Nor did it take Milo long to ascertain that he had received seventeen voice-mail messages in the last six hours, all of them from WBS personnel. They broke down neatly into calls from Stan Cohen, the domestic news producer, calls from Mac, one call from Tran, and the rest from Robert O’Malley. The final killer call, delivered precisely twenty minutes before, asked him to return as soon as it was convenient to WBS headquarters in New York. Not to bother flying south to Pasadena. Don’t bother, was the exact phrase used with obvious gusto by Robert O’Malley.
Going AWOL was a mortal sin for a newsman. There were worse transgressions, perhaps—blowing up on live air, for example, or standing up in a production meeting to tell the president of the news division to fuck off—but being unreachable, when you had been expressly told to be reachable, when one of the biggest news stories of the year was happening a short flight away, was a career-killing misstep.
In the adjacent room, Milo could hear Joan sobbing, though by now it sounded one degree more restrained. He could also just make out Alicia’s low tones. He considered whether she was getting a confession. It was possible, though by this point he would not even hazard a guess as to how many crimes Joan Hudson Gaines might have on her conscience.
Chapter 15
Alicia pushed through the lunchtime crowd to grab a small Formica-topped table in Dudley’s restaurant. She dumped her stack of canary yellow file folders at what would have been Louella’s place if Louella had been able to break free of her “Happy New Year” workload. That was the crazy thing about the holidays if you were employed in a D.A.’s office. Your work didn’t stop. It just piled up. Now it was Thursday, January second, and everything that hadn’t gotten done in the last two weeks was standing up and screaming Now! Now! Now! Louella would be going nuts for the next month. So would Alicia.
The waitress came by, a mid-forties brunette and Dudley’s veteran. She didn’t bother giving a regular like Alicia one of the plasticized menus. “What’ll it be, honey?”
“How about a BLT? And a Diet Coke.”
“What dressing you want on the salad?”
“I’ll take ranch.”
The woman nodded and moved off, scooping up the handful of coins left on the two-top to Alicia’s right. What a way to make a living, Alicia thought, before she remembered how slim her own wallet was.
No doubt most of Dudley’s patrons were in Alicia’s same leaky boat. Like the man to her left, who looked like retired military, many had seen their best days back in the fifties. That was probably when the mural on the wall opposite Alicia had been painted. It depicted an idealized Salinas Valley, complete with a Norman Rockwell gray Victorian surrounded by a white picket fence, its backdrop rolling hills and purple mountains majesty.
She stared at it, finding it hard to believe that ghastly crimes could occur in such a pastoral setting. It was hard to believe that only twenty miles west, a rich wife might have offed her husband and framed a down-on-his-luck activist for the crime. It was even more difficult to fathom that a handsome, famous network correspondent might have been in on the deal.
The waitress came by with Alicia’s Diet Coke, dispensed in the sort of tall, chunky glass that could survive an industrial-strength dishwasher. A sad-looking lemon wedge floated on the ice, and a thin white paper wrapping clung to the top half of the straw.
Alicia rolled up the paper, her fingertips reducing it to a tiny moist ball. It was one thing to suspect that Joan Gaines might have murdered her husband. It was quite another to think Milo Pappas might be in on it. But one truth Alicia couldn’t ignore: the hollow in her gut when she thought of him in Joan Gaines’ suite. The unshaven, tousle-haired, clearly just-spent-the-night Milo Pappas.
That same gut told her he wasn’t a
killer, but then again Alicia knew she should trust none of her body parts when it came to judging that man. He had too great an effect on far too many of them. All that still functioned with a degree of detachment was her brain, and yet that, too, had trouble pinning him with the crime. What would he get out of it? He would have to have been conducting a pretty torrid love affair with Joan Gaines to get mixed up in murdering her husband.
Despite the drama of the moment, Alicia had noted that Milo distanced himself from Joan PDQ when he heard Alicia outline the credit-card evidence. He had seemed positively stunned. He couldn’t even speak. Not for a second did he dispute it.
Another idea had occurred to Alicia, which in a funny way was balm on her soul. Maybe Milo was using Joan Gaines the same way he’d initially tried to use her as a source of inside information. It was easy to imagine any red-blooded female succumbing. Briefly Alicia closed her eyes. Very easy.
The other possibility, of course, was that Joan and Milo had started seeing each other in the two weeks since Daniel Gaines had died. That would be quick work on both their parts, but Alicia wouldn’t put it past either of them. And if Milo Pappas was falling in love with Joan Gaines, he could damn well have her. Alicia took a swig from her Diet Coke, then slammed it back down on the Formica tabletop, making the ice cubes jump and drawing a raised brow from the military retiree. If Milo Pappas thought a new widow who lied about her whereabouts the night her husband was murdered was a worthy conquest, he didn’t deserve one iota more of Alicia’s attention.
The fire began anew in Alicia’s belly, the fire that demanded she pursue further evidence against Joan Gaines. If anything, now it burned brighter than ever. Clearly the woman was hiding something more than that cock-and-bull story about Molly Bracewell. Alicia’s strategy of confronting her with the credit-card evidence had shocked her into that revelation, at least. Yet Alicia needed more, much more, and time was not on her side. Treebeard’s preliminary hearing was fast approaching, and there was no question he would be bound over for trial. She would be working like a dog to prosecute him. How was she supposed to find time to go after her? Particularly when she had no idea what her next step should be.
Her BLT arrived, with its white-bread toast and iceberg lettuce salad. “Refill on the Coke?” the waitress asked
“Please.”
Dudley’s might not be glamorous, but Alicia kept coming back because it was close to the courthouse, the price was right, and the food wasn’t half-bad. She’d just bitten into one of the BLT’s toasty squares when Kip Penrose strutted into Dudley’s, shaking hands and slapping backs. Alicia shook her head, though part of her envied Kip his easy affability. Everybody was a voter to old Kip, and every outing a campaign stop.
He saw her and walked over. “May I join you?”
“Why not?”
He set his briefcase on Dudley’s worn blue carpet, where Alicia relocated her pile of file folders. He flirted briefly with the waitress, then made fast business of ordering a burger. “Glad I ran into you,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“Something’s come up I need you to handle.” He bent down to pull a folder out of his briefcase and hold it across the small table.
Just what she needed. “Kip, this is hardly a good time.” But she wiped the mayo off her fingers and took the folder, flipping it open to scan the documents inside.
The police report made it look pretty simple. Twenty-nine-year-old Theodore Owens III, no priors from the look of it, brandished a small-caliber pistol at a bar on a Friday night. Apparently he got pissed off seeing a woman he’d dated a few times chatting up a new guy. People were freaked but nobody got hurt. Owens got arraigned in late December and was out on his own recognizance. The cops thought it was misdemeanor brandishing, though it was up to the D.A.’s office to decide. Everything looked pretty much in order until Alicia saw the next court date.
“Kip, the probable-cause hearing is next Wednesday! Why am I just seeing this today?”
“Well, what with the holidays and everything it kind of fell through the cracks.” His burger showed up. “I just didn’t get around to it till now.” He slapped the bottom of the ketchup bottle and a big red blob sloshed onto his beef. “Sorry.”
She shook her head. “Well, I’m sorry, too, but I don’t have time to work this up. I’m going flat-out already, and what with the preliminary hearing for Treebeard so soon it’s going to ramp up even more.” She tossed the folder back at him, where it skidded across the Formica. Kip grabbed it just before it slid onto the carpet. “Give it to somebody else. Give it to Rocco.”
“I am not giving it to Rocco. And don’t throw things at me,” he said, just as he tossed the folder back at her, as if they were playing a legal-file version of Hot Potato. “What’s the big deal? It’s a first offense. There’s no reason to go balls-out on this one. You should just make an offer.”
Kip and his plea bargains. It amazed her. He’d dispense of a case with a casual conversation and a swipe of pen across paper. True, she probably overanalyzed which cases to fight and which to settle. Louella accused her routinely of being idealistic about how the system should work. But she just couldn’t wear lightly the incredible responsibility the D.A.’s office had in deciding which crimes to pursue and which not. She doubted Kip had even bothered to talk to victims when he’d been a prosecutor himself, before he sailed off into private practice.
“Even if I did decide to make an offer,” she said, “I don’t have time to get ready. I’d have to do it Monday.”
“So today’s Thursday.”
“So that doesn’t give me enough time to talk to everybody.”
“So talk to whoever you can and leave the rest.”
She was about to object again when he threw down his burger and said, “Alicia, just do it! Cut a corner for a change, like everybody else. You’re getting this case and that’s the end of it.”
Why the hell was he being so insistent about this? Usually he backed off when she put up a fight. It was weird, yet at the same time it was Kip-like for him to drop the ball and then expect her to run it for a touchdown.
She wiped her lips with the paper napkin, clattered out of her chair, and grabbed her file folders, Kip’s included. “Fine,” she told him. “But you’re buying lunch.”
*
Joan decided that all things considered, she had dodged a bullet New Year’s Day.
She drew this conclusion as she sat at the antique writing desk in the suite’s study, more of an alcove, really, adjacent to the bedroom. She had risen early that morning—it couldn’t have been a second past eight-thirty—and immediately did her workout, had a little breakfast, and went to the spa for her manicure and pedicure. Then she’d pulled a suit out of the closet, because she intended to go into Headwaters that very day. It was all part of feeling efficient and businesslike, a woman very much in control of her life, and rather a stark contrast to how she’d felt twenty-four hours before.
Joan laid down the slim silver Tiffany pen the Lodge provided as a writing instrument and shuddered, remembering the petrifying stretch of New Year’s Day when that Maldonado woman had appeared at the suite, entirely without warning. What a horrible time for her insidious accusations to be flying, what with Milo present to witness every millisecond of the exchange. But though Joan was deeply embarrassed at how overwrought she had become, the more she thought about it the more she believed that she had acted exactly right. She’d revealed just enough to explain away the one piece of supposed evidence that presumptuous creature thought she had. True, Joan was caught in a lie about returning to Carmel the night Daniel was murdered, but what wife in her predicament wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing? What wife would freely admit that she suspected her husband of cheating? What wife would willingly lay herself open to the humiliation that entailed, especially with the husband dead and absolutely no good to come of the revelation?
No, any reasonable person would completely understand and accept what Joan
had done; it was all in the name of protecting the reputation of a marriage; and it would be an outrageous leap to claim that Joan’s lying about one thing meant she was lying about another, far more serious thing. No, as her father would have said, that will not stand!
Joan reveled in the intoxicating rush that followed of feeling competent and powerful. It was time for her to take care of Alicia Maldonado once and for all, and she had a good idea how to do it. She would take an extra precaution as well, just to be safe. She lifted the phone and punched in Henry Gossett’s home number.
The antique housekeeper answered. “Gossett residence.”
“This is Joan Gaines. May I speak to Henry, please?”
“Mrs. Gaines, he’s at his office. Would you like that number?”
“I already have it.” Joan managed a perfunctory “Thank you” and hung up, slightly peeved. She glanced at the Ebel watch circling her wrist, a platinum band with diamonds ringing the pearl face and winking on every hour except XII and VI. It was only quarter past noon on the very first working day of the year, and yet Gossett, that old moose, had beaten her into the office. She punched in his direct line there. “Henry,” she said, after dispensing swiftly with the requisite New Year’s greetings, “I need you to retain the services of a criminal defense attorney.”
Silence. A heavy, clearly shocked silence. Then, “Joan,” he said, his tone as lugubrious as ever, “are you in some difficulty you wish to discuss?”
“I am in no difficulty whatsoever,” she told him. “I am simply requesting that you put a criminal defense attorney on retainer on the extremely slim chance that I should require his services. I have received a few visits from a prosecutor working on Daniel’s case, a woman who clearly does not understand who she is dealing with. It might set her straight to see that I am taking steps for my own protection. I would rather err on the side of prudence,” she told Gossett, knowing that phrasing would warm the cockles of his geriatric heart.
To Catch the Moon Page 22
