She was smaller than he remembered. Slighter. Paler. She walked beside her mother, who cut the same aristocratic figure she always had. Both women wore black from head to toe. Joan sported no jewelry and only the subtlest trace of makeup. To Milo’s eyes she looked frail and tragic, as though she might shatter at any moment.
She was a few feet away. For some reason he stood up. The motion must have caught her attention, because her gaze traveled in his direction, and her eyes met his. There was a flicker of recognition, then a small smile. She held his gaze for so long, with such intensity, that Milo knew his fellow journalists noticed. He sensed their surprise, then their envy, and was overcome with discomfort and a strange foreboding.
He hadn’t wanted to see Joan, and now he had. Or more to the point, she had seen him.
*
It was shortly after noon on Friday, unrelievedly blustery and rainy. Alicia was working her way through both a ham and cheese sandwich and a crime-scene report when her desk phone rang. “Maldonado,” she answered.
“Pappas.”
His calling was both good and bad. Good because she loved hearing from him; bad because she loved hearing from him. “What can I do for you?” she asked, her standard opening gambit for business calls.
His voice was cheery. “You can give me a sound bite!”
She frowned. Outside her window two older women she recognized from the Public Works Department trudged up Alisal Street in bright raincoats, their arms linked, their heads bent, their umbrellas held low to fend off the wind. That’ll be me and Louella in a few years, she thought. Hell, that’s pretty much us now.
“Alicia? Aren’t you familiar with the term?”
“Sorry.” She’d forgotten to say something. “Of course I am. But why aren’t you calling Penrose?”
“Anticipating that you’d ask that very question, I already did. But your boss apparently keeps banker’s hours, because he’s gone for the day. The press officer put me on to you.”
That was true. Alicia clicked on a new e-mail telling her to expect a call from one Milo Pappas, WBS News, New York. She was cleared to talk to him on camera. That was both good and bad. Much as career advancement required exposure, TV cameras made her nervous. And she didn’t care to probe too deeply into her nervous system’s reaction to certain male television correspondents.
She cleared her throat. “When do you want to do this?”
“ASAP. I need to file the piece in two hours.”
“What’s it about?”
“Daniel Gaines’ funeral. Your job is to say something pithy about the murder investigation.”
“Where do you want to do it?”
“We could do it quick and dirty on the courthouse steps.”
She arched a brow. Quick and dirty was certainly one way to do it with Milo Pappas. She could think of others. “I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes,” she told him.
The interview was over in a heartbeat, and thanks to the downpour was conducted not on the courthouse steps but in its entry hall. The cameraman and sound guy wired her up, Milo asked a few questions, she answered them, then the cameraman and sound guy unwired her.
Milo drew her aside while his crew packed up their equipment. “You know”—and he gave her that smile that lit up both his mouth and his eyes—“I’m glad your boss takes such a lackadaisical approach to his work. Otherwise I would have had to interview him and would’ve missed seeing you.”
She stared at him. He could say anything and any woman in the world would believe him. That was probably what he’d built his career on. “You’re certainly full of compliments.”
“I can’t help myself when I’m around you.”
“Will you stop laying it on, Milo?” She couldn’t help it. This guy was too smooth for words. She crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you want from me?”
He looked taken aback. “I was hoping you’d join me for dinner.”
He could not possibly be asking me out. “You’re still trying to pump me for inside information?”
He raised his hands, all innocence. “I won’t ask a single question about the case.”
Fat chance. She could see the scenario play out in her head as though it had already happened. Mr. Slick would do what he’d done at Mission Ranch, start out by being all warmhearted attentiveness. Then after a few glasses of wine he’d bring the conversation around to the investigation. If the last time was any indication, before long she’d cave. It humiliated her to admit it, but he’d dazzle her and she’d cave. I can’t do it.
The simple fact of the matter was that she was at too much of a disadvantage when it came to Milo Pappas. He had everything—money, celebrity, and, as a result, power. She was a county employee slaving away for a fool D.A. and barely making it from one paycheck to the next. She desperately wanted what Milo had but she didn’t have it. And by the looks of things she never would.
And it pissed her off that he would use everything in his arsenal to get what he wanted from her. He’d use his looks, his fame, his charm, and now dinner at a snazzy restaurant she could never afford on her own. He probably did that with all women. Well, she wasn’t all women, and if he didn’t know that already he was about to find out.
“Look, Alicia.” He edged closer to her then, probably because she hadn’t said yes yet, and his voice got softer. He was inches away, breathtakingly near. “I like you. I’d like to get to know you. If we don’t discuss the case it’s not verboten, is it?”
Even as she tested the words I like you to see if they carried the ring of truth, “There’s an issue of appearances,” she heard herself say. When did she ever talk like that? For once in her life she actually sounded like a lawyer.
He frowned. “Somehow you don’t strike me as somebody who worries too much about what other people think.”
Oh, but she did. She had to. She was a woman and she was Latina. So far she’d been smart enough not to do anything to jeopardize her professional reputation. Why should she start now? For a man who would soon be long gone? While she was working on the very case that could propel her career to a whole new level?
But she couldn’t expect him to understand that. Not the ambassador’s son.
“Sorry.” She kept her voice light. “It doesn’t work for me.”
Then she edged closer to the D.A. office’s glass entryway and watched while he weighed whether to ask her again. There was a very good chance that if he did, she’d say yes this time.
But he didn’t. She could see from the veil dropping over those dark, dark eyes that he decided not to. “I’m sorry, too,” was all he said, then he rejoined his crew and was gone.
Chapter 8
8:15 Friday night. Alicia lay on the couch in the pitch-black living room of her yellow bungalow of a house, watching television and nursing a second glass of cheap red wine. By now she was sick of watching news shows, or more to the point, sick of watching Daniel Gaines’ funeral service covered on news shows. Somehow—she had no idea how, given how long she’d been watching—she’d missed Milo Pappas’s version of the story.
On the street a few yards from her front window, a car sped past, rap music blaring. Next door the Lopezes were fighting, though it didn’t sound like the kind of knock-down, drag-out that would land senora in the ER.
Another Friday night and here she was alone on her couch, though she had only herself to blame. In the end she’d begged off seeing Jorge, claiming fatigue and a headache, and not having to lie about either.
It’s punishment, she told herself, punishment for lying to Jorge, punishment for not caring about him as much as he cares about you, and punishment for thinking twice about Milo Pappas.
Then a chuckle, more like a snort, escaped her. Right. Even after countless years of Mass-less Sunday mornings, apparently she was still loaded with enough Catholic guilt to concoct an idea like that one. As if God meted out punishment whenever it was called for. Neither He nor Earth’s more slapdash justice system could manage that t
rick.
She hoisted her left arm in the air and watched as the tennis bracelet Jorge had given her for Christmas slipped down her wrist to settle at the cuff of her gray sweatshirt, its tiny diamonds winking incongruously against the frayed cotton. It was beautiful. She’d never been given anything like it. She’d thanked him profusely, verbally and otherwise, and he’d flushed and mumbled something about other diamonds in her future.
And what had she given him? A book and a sweater. Granted, she made a lot less money than Dr. Jorge Ramon, but in her heart of hearts she knew lack of funds wasn’t the real reason for her uninspired gift giving.
She let her arm drop back to the couch with a thud, drowned in another thick wash of guilt. Nights like these she believed she mucked everything up. Love life: fake. Career: stalled. Finances: shot. She even judged herself deficient in home decor.
She’d bought this house a year ago, over frantic objections from her mother. Loca! her mother had yelled, loca for a single woman to buy a house! As far as Modesta Maldonado was concerned, a single woman should just bide time until she got married. Didn’t matter if she was sixty years old when her “big day” came. Buying real estate was way too permanent. It was as though—horror of horrors—Alicia was admitting she might never marry.
Then, to make matters worse, Alicia bought on Capitol Street right near the courthouse, so she could walk to work. Loca! her mother screamed again. The neighborhood, to put it nicely, was transitional. The mix of ugly 1960s apartment architecture and run-down California bungalows, with the occasional garbage-strewn, fenced-in lot thrown in, wasn’t exactly pretty. Not to mention there were more shops selling bail bonds than groceries.
But it was the best she could afford. Anybody who thought all lawyers made scads of money didn’t consider those who worked for local government, let alone those who had to support an aging mother and a can’t-hold-a-job sister with two kids by different men. Alicia had scrimped for the down payment and finally been forced to buy mortgage insurance because she couldn’t manage the bank’s usual minimum. Initially she’d had visions of repainting each room in soft pastels. Replanting the garden. Sewing filmy curtains for the windows, which would have been a good way to hide the iron bars. But work intruded, sucking up the hours, and one desperate Saturday, after months of living in empty rooms, she’d raided IKEA and run her credit card up to the limit buying sale castoffs. All she was really proud of were her Navajo throw rugs in desert shades of rust and ocher, and the Frida Kahlo posters plastered to the walls in every room.
Her admiration for the painter approached reverence. Both were of Mexican ancestry and had had tough early years. Yet Kahlo triumphed, despite both childhood polio and a bus accident in which she got impaled by a metal bar. All Kahlo’s short life she suffered by comparison to her husband and fellow painter Diego Rivera, yet was an object lesson in persistence, Alicia thought, radical, strong, and passionate.
What Kahlo went through in the 1930s and ‘40s didn’t seem to Alicia all that different from her own experience. When she started as a D.A., how many times had she gone into court only to have the judge ask if she was a Spanish interpreter? Or a secretary? Or to hear some cop mutter “wetback” when she walked past? It didn’t help that she’d been so very green. She prosecuted the very first jury trial she ever saw. She hadn’t even known which table to claim. She’d stood around till the defense sat down, then meandered to the table they’d left empty. Assumptions of her incompetence hadn’t felt so misplaced back then, and sometimes didn’t even now.
In one swift motion she rose from the couch. Enough wound licking. It was exactly one week ago that Daniel Gaines had been murdered. After the Courtney Holt interview, Alicia had badgered Louella into knocking on a few doors in the neighborhood to try to uncover something new about that night, but as Louella had predicted, it proved fruitless. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
But what if Alicia gave it a go? Not to talk to neighbors but to watch, listen, observe. And not during the day, as Louella had done, but at night, when the murder had actually happened.
Alicia felt adrenaline kick into her veins, battling the wine for dominance. Action was always good, she told herself, far better than sitting alone in the dark.
She ran to get her parka.
*
Everything in Joan’s suite was in order, ready for Milo Pappas to arrive.
Joan smiled to herself. And arrive he would, though it had taken some arm-twisting.
She’d tracked him down on his cell phone when she got back from the cemetery. It was so good to see you today. It gave me such comfort to see a friend. He’d sounded cautious, so she started crying. Will you have dinner with me? Tonight of all nights I don’t want to be alone. She’d heard the hesitation in his voice, she’d sat through the litany of excuses, but she hadn’t let any of it dissuade her. Come after you file your story, she’d urged him. We’ll keep it simple, eat here in my suite. Of course, eventually he’d agreed. Who could refuse a woman in mourning?
She was very pleased with herself. Tonight she didn’t even miss being in her own home; she knew there was nothing like a hotel suite for entertaining a man. It was more immediately suggestive than a home, somehow; more mischievous. Maybe it was because the bedroom was never more than a few steps away.
Not that she and Milo would end up in the bedroom, not that night anyway. She was in a testing stage with him. Was he worth her while? He’d always been wonderfully considerate, but would he still be? And while in the past he’d seemed to understand their relative social levels, would he be confused by his network-news success and presume to think he was her equal?
Even if she weren’t just testing him, Joan strongly believed in making a man wait for sex, usually until he was nearly beside himself with desire. Three dates at a minimum; personally she was much keener on six, just to prove how much value she put on herself and give the man in question a standard to shoot for. But though she had no intention of sleeping with Milo that night, she wanted him to want to sleep with her. She wanted that badly.
It was so delicious to be desired, and she hadn’t been for ages. Daniel had gotten bored so fast and so thoroughly that she’d been both shocked and humiliated. By now she’d had all she could take of chastity. She was primed for a real man—particularly a successful, handsome, prominent man, whose devotion she could flash like a badge of honor. It was yet another way, perhaps the most important way, for a woman to exhibit her superiority among women. She Who Nabs The Best Man Must Be The Best Woman.
Yet it wasn’t clear that Milo was The Best Man. The name Pappas didn’t exactly show up in the social register. It really was such a shame he wasn’t the British ambassador’s son. Still ... Joan closed her eyes and ran a hand down her naked throat, her mind traveling back to their time together. She shivered. In some ways, Milo Pappas could not be bested.
She forced herself to gather her wits and perform another check of the suite. The staff had done a superior job getting it in order, sparing no detail on the dinner for two set on a small linen-draped table in front of the fireplace. She only hoped their professionalism would extend to keeping their mouths shut about Joan Hudson Gaines requesting such arrangements on the very night her husband had been buried.
She’d made sure she was turned out as carefully as her surroundings. She fingered her floor-length black crepe Gaultier, which could safely be described as a cross between lingerie and evening wear. It swirled dreamily around her naked legs and was cut low on her small breasts. In an effort to banish Daniel from memory—both hers and Milo’s— she’d stashed her wedding and engagement rings in the safe. And remembering that Milo disliked a heavy hand when it came to makeup, she wore only mascara and lip gloss. What with the fire’s glow and her own excitement, she hardly needed more.
She gazed at her reflection in the French doors that overlooked the surging black sea. The shining glass mirrored the tiny pinpricks of candlelight behind her that flashed like fireflies. They reminded her of summer
, summer on the East Coast, where the air was hotter and heavier than it ever was in California. It was in that swollen atmosphere that she’d known Milo the first time.
The suite’s buzzer sounded. Remember, she told herself, you’re soft and sweet and vulnerable. She strode to the door, then pulled it open and stepped back to allow Milo to enter. Seeing him in the flesh she felt such a jolt she nearly forgot her game plan. In many ways he was just as he had ever been: a tall, commanding figure with intense dark eyes, hair curling lightly over the back of his collar, five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw like a cocky show of testosterone. Yet so much time had passed, he was also new to her, just the tiniest bit mysterious. He shed his overcoat and tossed it over the back of the sofa, as she’d seen him do in other rooms a dozen times before. Yet he was a different man than he had been all those other times, and she was a different woman.
“Thank you for coming,” she told him.
He turned to face her. Six feet separated them, the air between dancing with an electric charge she was almost surprised she couldn’t see. “I’m sorry about Daniel,” he said.
She cocked her head. I’m not. “May I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“I’d rather not talk about Daniel. It’s so horrible, so...”
His brow furrowed. “I understand.”
“It’s just that I’m so wrapped up in it all the time. If it’s not on the news I’m getting calls from the campaign. Or from Daniel’s family. Or from Headwaters. Or from the lawyers or the D.A. It’s ...” She shook heir head. He stepped closer and she raised her eyes to his, feeling his breath on her face, taking in the manly scent of him. She had always reveled in the difference in their height, that he could make her feel so small, so feminine. Daniel was tall, too, but not so powerfully built.
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