To Catch the Moon

by Dempsey, Diana

  The room was hushed except for the crackle of the fire in the grate, where one log broke and tumbled into another. “I understand,” he said. “You don’t need to say more, Joan.”

  She looked up into his dark eyes. “You always did understand me, didn’t you, Milo?”

  She watched him frown and step away. Mistake. Too much, too soon. His voice took on a businesslike tone. “I should warn you, I’ll have to make it an early night. I have a plane in the morning—”

  “Of course.”

  “—down to San Diego, and I still need to prep for the interview I’m conducting and—”

  “Of course,” she repeated, then put what he had said out of her mind. She led him to the small table that had been laid for two and lifted the bottle of California Syrah that had been breathing for the last hour. “Will you have some wine?”

  He looked hesitant but then said, “I’ll have a glass.”

  She bent her head to hide a smile, then poured the wine and handed him a glass. They toasted wordlessly. “Remember the trip we made out to the wine country?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “How you wanted to get massages, even though it was past six on a Saturday night ...”

  “Of course, it was too late for Auberge to arrange anything.”

  “I must’ve called a dozen spas before I finally found one that would take us.” He grinned. “I tipped them like you wouldn’t believe. Where was it? St. Helena?”

  “Calistoga, wasn’t it?”

  He crinkled his eyes, then shook his head. “I don’t remember. It was fun, though. That dinner was wonderful, too.”

  “At Tra Vigne. Yes, it was.” She sipped her wine, which wound a pleasantly warm path down her throat. “But lots of times were wonderful with you, Milo.”

  Again he frowned. “Well, that’s all in the past, Joan.” Then he walked away from her, toward the French doors that faced the sea.

  She stared at his strong, sure back, forcing herself not to cross the room to lay her head against its comforting breadth. Slowly, slowly. “I want to tell you something, but I probably shouldn’t, tonight of all nights.”

  He turned his head slightly, so she could see his profile. “Tell me what?”

  “I have regrets, Milo.”

  Silence. Then, “About what?”

  “I regret that I left you,” she told him, and watched his brows arch with surprise. And pleasure, too, didn’t she see pleasure there? “My marriage wasn’t happy.” He began to protest but she quieted him. “I know I shouldn’t say it, especially tonight, but I can’t stop myself. Can’t I be honest with anyone?” She began to cry. “I’m putting up a front with everybody. Can’t I tell anybody the truth? Can’t I tell you?”

  He turned to face her, and through her false tears she saw what looked like genuine concern on his face. “Don’t you have anyone to talk to, Joan?”

  “No, I don’t,” she lied, and threw in a sob for good measure. “There’s no one I can really trust.”

  He set down his wineglass and came toward her. He didn’t quite bundle her into his arms like she hoped he would, but he did stand very close and make little consoling noises. “You can talk to me, Joan,” he said, and she wanted just to collapse against his chest.

  Why had she left him? The truth was, she didn’t think he’d give her what she wanted. Much as the demands grated sometimes, she knew she liked a big, public life. She liked what came with celebrity: the envy, the surreptitious glances, the being in the center of things. She knew from the beginning that Daniel wanted to run for governor, and she knew that with her father’s backing he would win. Just as she had been a governor’s daughter, she would be a governor’s wife. That was a life she understood, and could have thrived in, if Daniel had given her her due, as her father had given her mother.

  But Milo? Back when they were dating he was a low-level TV newsman. He wasn’t a public figure in the same way. Who would know who his wife was? Who would care?

  “Daniel’s dying reminds me of losing my father,” she told Milo. “You know how much I loved Daddy.”

  This time she felt Milo’s arms come around her. Finally. She sank against him, sobbing softly, losing herself in the constant beat, beat, beat of his sure heart. Only after a long time did she pull away, and when she did Milo held out a handkerchief so she could mop her face. “Feel better?” he asked.

  She sniffled, the handkerchief wadded around her nose, and nodded her head.

  “Better enough to eat?”

  She laughed, then had to cough, choked by her own sobs. “But it’s probably cold by now.”

  “I’ll call down and have them send up something hot. And meanwhile ...”

  He found their wineglasses and refreshed them, then raised his in a second toast. “To happier times,” he said, and she clinked her glass to his.

  “Happier times,” she repeated, and added silently, I’m happier already.

  *

  On the narrow curving street called Scenic that bordered the bluff above Carmel Beach, Alicia stood in the shadows of the Gaineses’ sleek, contemporary home, its perimeter ringed by fraying yellow crime tape. Her parka provided slim comfort against the sea wind that slapped her face and whipped her long dark hair.

  She’d been there about an hour. Watching. Waiting. Wondering. And seeing absolutely nothing.

  She decided to do one more pass along Scenic, north toward Ocean Avenue, then back again. That would be it. If she saw nothing, she would hightail it back to Salinas. Ocean Avenue was seven blocks away and usually a gorgeous stroll, but at ten o’clock on a Friday night, when she knew a murderer had recently lurked in these very shadows, it was far from pleasurable.

  Alicia raised her hood over her wind-tossed hair and set off at a rapid pace, fists balled in her parka pockets, running shoes crunching on the small stones that littered the asphalt. None of the residential streets in Carmel-by-the-Sea had sidewalks or streetlights, in an attempt to maintain the quaintness both the tourists and the locals loved. Most of the homes that lined Scenic were dark, though in a few she saw the odd purple-blue flicker cast by a television set. Some people still hadn’t turned off their Christmas lights, strings of pretty white bulbs coiled around trees or dripping from shrubbery. To the left, Carmel Beach was deserted, and the ocean a heaving mass of silver, heavy as lead. Occasionally a car whizzed past, always in the middle of the road, as if the driver was a local and knew he wouldn’t encounter another vehicle at this late hour. An older man in blue sweats who smelled of cigars walked past with his dog, a frisky white terrier that seemed to think every bush and tree needed his own particular brand of watering.

  Ten minutes later Alicia arrived at Ocean Avenue, Carmel-by-the-Sea’s cute-as-can-be main commercial strip. Boutiques and bistros lined both sides of the avenue, bisected by an island densely planted with shrubs and flowers. The avenue climbed steadily as it traveled inland away from the bay, forcing eastbound pedestrians into a breathless uphill hike. Save for the wind, which clawed at Alicia’s face, all was quiet and still. Carmel rolled up its sidewalks early even on a Friday night.

  Alicia shivered, feeling conspicuously alone, then turned around to retrace her steps. Over, finished, done. As Louella had proved, it was pointless.

  About a third of the way along Scenic back to her car, she again ran into the older man and his dog. “You still out here, young lady?” He clucked disapprovingly.

  “You’re out.” She pointed at the terrier, energetically lifting a leg over some ice plant. “And excuse me for saying so, but that doesn’t exactly look like a guard dog.”

  “Different thing,” he announced. The terrier strained at his leash in Alicia’s direction and the man walked closer. “And don’t you know we had a murder here just last week?” Another disapproving shake of the head, a What in the world have we come to? scowl.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Alicia tried to sound encouraging. “I did hear something about that.”

  “Mrs. Gaines was out walking that
night, too,” he went on. “Didn’t listen to my advice, either, and look what happened to her. Or to her husband, I should say.”

  What? “Mrs. Gaines? You saw her that night?”

  “Sure did. Saw her when I was out taking McDuff here on his evening constitutional. She was out on the street, just like you. Though”—he motioned back over his shoulder, toward the Gaines residence—“she was back there, closer to her house.”

  I can’t believe this. “Are you completely sure it was Mrs. Gaines? And that it was last Friday night? Exactly one week ago?”

  “Of course I’m sure it was Joan Gaines! We all know who she is,” he snapped. Then he stepped back and his eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Alicia Maldonado,” she told him, and held out her hand. “I live sort of around here. And you are?”

  “Harry McEvoy. Live over on Twelfth.” He shook her hand, his suspicion of her seeming to fall away as quickly as it had risen. “It’s a tragedy,” he added.

  “Yes, yes, it is.” She was almost breathless. Harry McEvoy. An eyewitness. This’ll be enough to get me a search warrant. “It’s ironic that you saw Mrs. Gaines that particular night and that she was just walking around.”

  “Yup. Seemed to be waiting for something. Couldn’t believe when I heard on the radio the next day what’d happened.”

  “I can imagine.”

  The terrier pulled furiously at his leash and Harry McEvoy followed. “You go straight home now, young lady,” he called back over his shoulder.

  “Yes, yes, I will.” She was trying to process this new information when her cell phone rang. She pulled it from her parka pocket and flipped it open. “Maldonado.”

  “Sorry to call so late, Alicia. It’s Jerome.”

  “Jerome! This is a surprise.” Jerome Brown was a thirty-something star in the public defender’s office. Somber and well-spoken and earnest, he was like a black James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He single-handedly put paid to the notion of public defenders as lousy attorneys. Alicia had long thought that all their trial experience, plus the fact that they had to take on every case that walked through the door, made many public defenders very good lawyers indeed. “So what’s up?”

  “I’ve been assigned to Treebeard.”

  “Are you kidding?” This was not good news for Penrose. It hadn’t even started yet and it was already crystal clear who the bright light in this courtroom drama was going to be. “Have you told Penrose yet?”

  “Come on, Alicia.” Jerome laughed in a way that said, Why would I bother telling Penrose anything? “Anyway, I spent the last few hours with Treebeard and he finally started talking.”

  “That’s good news, right?”

  “Turns out it’s very good news.” He paused. “That’s why I’m calling, Alicia.”

  She frowned. “What are you telling me, Jerome?”

  “I’m telling you that you have got to hear what Treebeard has to say.”

  Chapter 9

  From a hundred yards away, the Monterey County Adult Detention Center made Alicia think of a public high school in a down-at-the-heels municipality. A single-story, solidly built concrete structure rimmed by a sad-looking lawn, its parking lot was filled with the kind of seen-better-days cars owned by people who barely made it from paycheck to paycheck. People like teachers and, apparently, prison employees. When Alicia’s own silver VW got closer and the compound’s tall barbed-wire fence and windowless expanses came more clearly into view, she could no longer have any doubt that this was no educational institution.

  At least not in the traditional sense.

  She met Jerome Brown in the anteroom. He was decked out in the loafers and tweed jacket he favored, though this being a Saturday his button-down blue dress shirt was open at the neck. His small-lensed tortoiseshell glasses gave him the look of a fashion-conscious black professor well on his way to tenure. Alicia wore a turtleneck, boots, and a black skirt, forgoing the jeans she preferred on the weekend. No denim was the rule for prison visitors. Otherwise the civilians would look too much like the inmates and could find themselves getting shot at in the event of a jailbreak.

  “Hey, Alicia.” Jerome held out his hand. “Thanks for coming. Especially on a Saturday.”

  As if she wouldn’t, weekend or not. She was dying to hear what Treebeard had to say. “Sure,” she said mildly. “Have you spoken with your client today?”

  “Not since last night.”

  “You still think he’ll talk to me?”

  Jerome shrugged. “What’s he got to lose?”

  What, indeed? No doubt Jerome had told Treebeard that the D.A. practically had him drawn and quartered. But still, it was hardly standard procedure for defendants to get chatty with the prosecutors maneuvering to convict them. It happened only in highly unusual circumstances, for example when defense counsel thought such a conversation might blow a case wide open.

  Both attorneys stood at the anteroom’s reinforced security glass to go through the ID-approval rigmarole, then after being tagged with bright orange badges were buzzed into the sanctum sanctorum. Alicia had the willies, as usual. It didn’t matter how often she visited jails. It didn’t matter how in her prosecutor’s heart she completely believed that the vast majority of people who found themselves serving time deserved exactly what they got. She still hated them. The misery that seemed to pervade the very walls, as if they held the silent screams of a thousand men. The unnatural quiet and stale, poorly ventilated air; the jarring, unexpected clang of buzzers and bells; the unbreachable chasm between the two rotating populations of guards and inmates.

  Down one long fluorescent-lit corridor, then down another. Alicia began to feel she was in a maze. Her boot heels clattered on the Crayola-green linoleum, buffed to such a high sheen that it gave back her own reflection. Her nostrils picked up the competing odors of heavy-duty cleaning chemicals and the sweat of unhappy men living in far too close proximity.

  Finally they arrived at an interview room, as cheerless as everything else. A metal table surrounded by a few folding chairs was centered beneath a bare hundred-watt bulb dangling from a cord. The room was equipped with a two-way mirror they would not use that day.

  Alicia had gotten up at dawn to prep. She’d given Penrose a heads-up, knowing he would neither object to the interview nor want to conduct it himself. What? On a Saturday? Interrupt his massage or his tee time or whatever other round of pleasure he’d scheduled for himself? Not a chance. Though he hadn’t come up with a single question to add to her list—she doubted he’d even read it—he did insist she e-mail him a full report by five o’clock that day. Chances were excellent, though, that he wouldn’t read it till Monday.

  Finally Treebeard appeared, accompanied by a guard. Alicia took one look at him and thought, slam-dunk, all over again.

  Some people were just easier to convict than others. Alicia knew that virtually all you had to do to put some people behind bars was to get them in front of a jury. It sure looked like Treebeard fell into that luckless category. Nobody cut a good figure in prison orange, or sporting manacles at their wrists and ankles, but few looked as scrofulous as Treebeard did. His beard was scraggly and uneven, and it seemed like his chin-length dark hair hadn’t had a run-in with shampoo since the turn of the millennium. As the guard shuffled him toward a chair and he collapsed noisily into it, his entire demeanor screamed surly.

  Alicia had done her homework. She’d read up on Treebeard’s history. John David Stennis was a sixties radical who never adjusted to the end of the decade of love. While the college friends who’d once protested at his side eventually laid down their signs and morphed into leaders of government and industry, he retreated into California’s forests and made their preservation his cause. That was admirable in many respects, but somewhere along the way Treebeard became his own worst enemy. He traded argument for histrionics. He grew to hate the system so much, he could no longer figure out how to fight it. As his hair lengthened, so did his rap she
et: a motley assortment of minor drug infractions and illegal protests. And as his ineffectiveness grew, so did his cynicism. People came to dismiss Treebeard either as a kook or a lost soul, and Alicia couldn’t say she disagreed with either analysis.

  “Good morning,” Jerome said, which elicited a grunt. Treebeard trained his eyes on the floor. “This is Deputy D.A. Alicia Maldonado,” Jerome went on, “who I told you about. I’m hoping she can help us.”

  The guard removed the manacles and left the room, indicating he’d stand by in the corridor. Treebeard began a fast gyration of his right leg, his knee bobbing rhythmically at nanosecond intervals. He had a barrier of resistance around him that was almost palpable.

  “Are you willing to talk to Ms. Maldonado?” Jerome asked. “Tell her what you told me?”

  Treebeard still said nothing, still refused to look at either of them. He kept up the knee bob, a motion Alicia found remarkably irritating.

  “You know, I am here to help you,” she told him.

  At that he raised his dark eyes to hers. “Bullshit.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You want me to believe a D.A.? How stupid do you think I am?”

  Alicia leaned forward to rest her elbows on the table. “Let me tell you something about prosecutors. We’re out to get at the truth more than we’re out to get convictions. Personally, I have zero desire to put an innocent man behind bars.”

  Again his eyes dropped. He shook his head as though not one word she said could possibly be believed. His leg continued to gyrate. “Bullshit,” he repeated.

  “I consider Jerome a good judge of character,” she went on. “When he calls me late on a Friday night and says his client’s got something I gotta hear, I believe him. You know how many people in this facility have told Jerome they’re innocent? Probably every last one of them. But when you said it, he thought it might actually be true. You want to tell me about that?”

  Treebeard just shook his head. Silence. Then, finally, “It’s all bullshit,” he said again.

  “Fine, that’s it.” She clattered out of her chair and grabbed her purse from the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jerome shut his eyes and rub his forehead. “You know what’s bullshit, Treebeard? Spending my Saturday doing this. I could be out shopping or getting in a workout. I’m outta here.”