To Catch the Moon (29 page)

That surprised him. Then again, he could
easily imagine how at some point during the prior night Joan might
have decided she wanted no interruptions.

Joan looked up at him, a plea in her
childlike blue eyes. “I don’t want to deal with this right now,
Milo,” she murmured.

“You’re completely right,” he told her. “In
fact, you shouldn’t.” He grasped Joan’s elbow and was surprised to
find that she was trembling. He turned toward Alicia. “I’m sure
Joan will answer any questions you have, repetitive though they are
bound to be, but only when she has a lawyer present. Call later to
make an appointment.”

He began to steer Joan toward the short
corridor that led to the bedrooms. But in a heartbeat Alicia was
standing right beside them and had Joan’s other elbow in her grasp.
“Joan is going to talk to me right now,” she said.

Joan’s lower lip trembled. “No.”

Alicia’s voice was low, cajoling. “You want
to tell me the truth this time, Joan? You’re better off telling me
the truth.”

“This is insane.” Milo pulled on Joan, but
Alicia didn’t release her. Joan was like a rag doll being fought
over by two warring children.

“I’m warning you.” Alicia had raised her head
and was talking to him now in that same low, commonsense tone. “In
fact, I’ve already warned you. Do not interfere in a criminal
investigation.”

“Joan is not a suspect!” He shouted it rather
than said it but no longer cared. “We are rapidly getting to the
point where I will encourage her to file harassment charges against
you and the entire district attorney’s office. You back off or I
swear she’ll do it.”

Alicia looked from him back to Joan, as if he
were a pesky annoyance not worth bothering about. “Tell me the
truth, Joan. Because I have proof, incontrovertible proof, that you
went back to Carmel the night your husband was murdered.”

By now Joan was crying. Plump tears ran down
her pale, pale cheeks, whipped into irregular trails by Joan’s
vehement shaking of her head. “No,” she was saying, “no ...”

Something in Milo’s mind registered that
Joan’s reaction wasn’t quite right. She should be angry. Yet if
anything she seemed petrified. Curious, he released her elbow, just
as Alicia did the same. Then Alicia pulled a document out of her
manila envelope and waved it in Joan’s face. Milo had the
disconcerting sensation of being the odd man out, as if the women
before him were the only characters in this impromptu drama who had
starring roles to play.

“I’m giving you one last chance,” Alicia
said. “Not only do I have an eyewitness who puts you back at your
house the night Daniel was murdered, I also have proof in black and
white. Proof any jury would believe. Now do the smart thing and
tell me the truth.”

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.

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.