To Catch the Moon

by Dempsey, Diana

  Treebeard waited till she had the door open and was nearly outside in the corridor.

  “I am innocent,” he said, “and I saw who did it.”

  That stopped her. She halted with her left hand holding the door ajar. “What did you say?”

  He looked at her, and this time she saw something new in his dark eyes. A flicker of something genuine. “I said I saw who did it.”

  She waited a moment, then slowly walked back into the room, letting the door ease shut behind her. She pulled her thick spiral-bound notebook out of her purse and sat down, pointing her pen at his still gyrating knee. “All right, I’ll listen. But stop that goddamn thing with your leg because it’s driving me crazy.”

  A few gyrations later he stilled. She opened her notebook to a clean page. “Take me back to the night of the twentieth.”

  *

  Milo felt as if he were floating in a cotton cloud. He was perfectly, deliriously comfortable. Somewhere far away a bird sang, trilled really, a high-voiced little bird that went on for a time and then stopped. Sing, sing, sing, stop. Sing, sing, sing ...

  Slowly, with great reluctance, he climbed out of semiconsciousness. He flipped onto his back and linked his hands behind his head. The bedroom’s blackout drapes were pulled shut, though in the center where they met he glimpsed a thin vertical line of white light. What time must it be? he wondered. Not late. He never slept late. And here in California he would wake even earlier, because he was still running on East Coast time.

  It occurred to him that Joan must still be asleep. The suite was silent, her bedroom a few yards beyond his closed door. Briefly he shut his eyes, relieved he’d had the presence of mind to resist her charms the night before and opt for the second bedroom.

  Just hold me, she had said, after dinner and conversation, when it really had been time for him to go. Can you understand I don’t want to be alone tonight?

  He had half understood, half been wary. Even if her marriage had been less than perfect he could only imagine how bereft she must feel on the night she buried her husband. Yet he knew from experience that it was unwise to take anything Joan said at face value. Invariably she operated with some kind of agenda. What was it with him?

  Seduction, at least partly. She’d gone off to change into a peach-colored negligee that left little to the imagination. At her urging he’d sat next to her on the sofa, watching the fire die in the hearth. There was no denying she was an attractive woman, especially when she was nearly undressed. Naturally she had relaxed into the crook of his arm, and naturally he had toyed with the notion of taking her where clearly she wanted to go.

  But he’d restrained himself. The fact was, Joan was not the woman he wanted to be with. He might have his ignoble moments, but he was not such a cad he’d use her as a substitute.

  He sighed. Alicia, Alicia, Alicia. She was an enigma, wrapped in a delectable shell.

  He wasn’t giving up on her yet. He had little experience pursuing women—usually they fell at his feet—but he had to admit there was a certain thrill to the chase. If she wanted to make him work for it, fine. It wasn’t exactly hard labor.

  What time must it be? Milo forced himself out of bed, then pulled on the trousers and shirt he’d heaped on the floor. He tiptoed out into the hall and paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the blindingly strong light flooding in through the south-facing French doors. This was the first time since he’d been on the Monterey Peninsula that it was genuinely sunny.

  His mind began to work faster, with more agility. What time was it? His gaze raked the room, settling on an ornate clock resting on the fireplace’s white marble mantel. He strode toward it, only to look at its devilish gold hands, then have to look again, to convince himself what they revealed.

  It was just past 7:30. His flight for San Diego left San Jose at nine. San Jose was an hour’s drive north in the best of conditions, and these were hardly those: he needed to shower, shave, dress, and check out of his hotel before he hit the road. A different hotel from the one in which he was currently standing.

  Shit and double shit. He could not miss an interview because of a woman, particularly one with whom he had a tortured past and who just so happened to be the widow of his current story subject. He would never live down that kind of mistake again. O’Malley would climb to the roof of WBS’s thirty-story headquarters and shout, Pretty-boy Pappas! to the Manhattan sky.

  Milo stood in Joan’s gorgeous suite, rendered considerably less glamorous by the detritus of dinner congealing on the small linen-draped table, and wondered what to tackle first. Then the damnable trilling started up again and this time he recognized it for what it was. Not a bird but his cell phone, nearly suffocated between the plump pillows of the love seat. Milo fished it out, then he punched TALK. “Pappas,” he answered firmly.

  Long, relieved breath, which Milo recognized as belonging to Mac. “Whew, man, I’m glad you picked up. I was really starting to worry. Look, we had to go on without you. I must’ve tried your cell a dozen times.” Mac paused for an explanation.

  Which Milo had no intention of providing. “Where are you now?” he asked instead.

  “About fifteen minutes south of San Jose airport. We’re running a little late, have to return the rental car and check the gear.”

  “Do you know anything about later flights?”

  “There’s another one just before eleven.”

  Milo could make that. His mind began to tick off the practicalities. “Okay, how about this. I’ll book a driver to San Jose. When you and Tran get down to San Diego, shoot all the B-roll, then set up for the interview in the guy’s office. I’ll cab it from the airport and get there as fast as I can.”

  Brief silence, then, “That’ll work.”

  It would. Setup alone for a Newsline interview, with its high production values, could easily take a half hour. What with the other shooting Mac and Tran would be able to do minus their correspondent, Milo would barely be missed.

  Barely. No doubt the interview subject wanted his share of the Newsline star’s time and would be more than a little peeved not to get it. This interview would be touchy enough without that dynamic. “Listen, Mac, do me a favor? Make my excuses for me?”

  There was another brief, grudging silence before Mac said, “All right.”

  Mac didn’t need instruction on the “excuses” score, and both men knew it. Mac and Tran would do a song and dance about another piece that was taking up Milo’s time, make it sound like an expose of the highest order, national security and all that, and before long the stood-up interview subject would feel like he had the inside scoop on the biggest story of the day.

  “Thanks, buddy,” Milo said.

  Mac grunted something in response and hung up. Mac was angry at him, Milo knew, both for missing their departure time and for skipping out on some of the work. Call times were sacrosanct in TV news, as deadlines were tight and constant. But as a cameraman Mac was too low on the network food chain to ream a star talent, at least to his face.

  Milo did a quick check of how many cell messages he’d missed. Nine. Seven from Mac, one from his brother Ari, and one from O’Malley. He slapped the phone shut and stowed it in his trouser pocket. He’d listen to them later.

  Again he was immobilized in the lovely suite, this time by indecision. Should he wake Joan?

  It didn’t take long to settle on no. If memory served, she wasn’t good about leave-takings. No, he’d just write a note. He found a sheet of hotel stationery and began scribbling.

  7:30 AM Saturday. Joan, I’m off to catch my flight. It was good to see you last night ....

  He chewed the end of the pen. What else could he say? He hadn’t the slightest idea. And zero time to think it through. Again he put pen to paper.

  Take care. M.

  It was lame but it would have to do. Now to hightail it out of there.

  Back on tiptoe, back past Joan’s closed door, back into his room. He made quick work of dressing, then tiptoed once more
into the hall, the note to Joan clutched in his hand. He knelt by her door and slipped it underneath, grimacing when his knee cracked. Carefully he stood up. Done. He could go.

  “Milo?” Soft female voice behind the door. He halted. “Milo? Are you leaving?” The door opened to reveal Joan, still in her peach negligee, her face pink and confused and dazed with sleep.

  “I have to catch my flight,” he told her.

  She held out her arms. “Say good-bye.”

  For a small woman, she had a powerful grip. “When are you coming back?” she whispered.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No, not tonight.”

  Small sigh of disappointment. “Call me.”

  Damn. He said nothing and tried to pull away.

  “Call me later.”

  “Okay.” What else could he say? This time he succeeded in extricating himself, but she caught him by the right wrist. She pouted—“I’ll miss you”—and held on to his wrist.

  “Really, I have to ...”

  With seeming reluctance she released him. Then she cocked her head and smiled again. “Call me.”

  He nodded, then turned and walked out of her suite. Once outside, he lucked into a cab dropping off a golfer and began to hope his luck might hold. If he made the later flight to San Diego, no one at WBS headquarters in New York would be the wiser. His close call would disappear like fog in the morning sun.

  He found himself relieved to be out in the brisk but gorgeous day, Pebble Beach in late December doing a brilliant imitation of spring.

  *

  Alicia did not find Treebeard a good storyteller. He stopped, he started, he forgot details—or he changed them—and just to make things even more entertaining, he occasionally retreated to surliness and went for a while without talking at all. If he didn’t have such an amazing tale to tell, or if she didn’t have her own doubts about whether he’d murdered Daniel Gaines, Alicia probably would have abandoned the entire exercise. But as it was, she was enthralled.

  They were about an hour into the interview. Alicia and Jerome were nursing bad jailhouse coffee in foam cups. Treebeard had a glass of water. Alicia glanced down at her notes. “So you said that it was on Thursday, December nineteenth, that you received a letter on Gaines campaign letterhead.”

  “Right.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “It said to meet Gaines at his house at nine the next night.”

  “It specified to come at nine on Friday night?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You must have thought getting an invitation to Daniel Gaines’ house was pretty odd. You two weren’t exactly on social terms.”

  “I thought it was weird, yeah.”

  “But you went anyway.”

  “I figured why not? Like the letter said, the guy wants to talk.”

  “Tell me about that.” She dropped her pen and leaned back, her arms crossed over her chest. “What exactly did the letter say about him wanting to talk?”

  “I don’t remember exactly what it said.” Another surly silence ensued. Finally Treebeard squinted into the middle distance, as if that would help him reproduce the letter in his mind’s eye. “It basically said he thought it was time to clear up our differences.”

  “And that made sense to you?”

  Another shrug. “I figured he thought I might really muck things up for him, now that he was running for governor. So I saw it as an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity?”

  “To hammer out a deal. He’d agree to stop logging old growth and I’d agree to lay off him.”

  “He always said his company didn’t log old-growth trees.”

  Treebeard glared at her. “Well, he was lying. They did. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  Alicia tapped her pen against her notebook. “What does the Gaines campaign letterhead look like?”

  “I don’t know.” He waved a dismissive hand. “It’s red, white, and blue.”

  “You still have the letter?”

  “No.”

  “That doesn’t exactly help your case.”

  His tone got belligerent. “What do you want me to do about that now?”

  She shook her head. “So what does the stationery look like, Treebeard?”

  “I don’t know! It said ‘Gaines for Governor’ on top.”

  She raised her voice. “You gotta give me more than that.”

  In a heartbeat he was standing up and leaning over her chair, yelling, his face twisted. “You don’t believe I got it, do you? I shoulda known you wouldn’t believe me!”

  “Sit down.” Jerome rose from his chair and pushed on Treebeard’s shoulder, knocking him back a step. “Sit down and calm down.”

  “She doesn’t believe me,” Treebeard muttered under his breath, but he collapsed back onto his chair.

  “She needs details, you know that. Now think.”

  Long silence, during which Treebeard did a lot of shaking his head and muttering. Finally, “Okay, there’s something I remember. It was like the flag, you know? White stars on a blue background, with red and white stripes. And it was like the flag was underneath and the words ‘Gaines for Governor’ were cut out from it. Like all the stars stuff was on the left. And on the right, where it said ‘Governor,’ it was just the stripes.”

  “Okay, good.” Alicia scribbled hastily in her notebook. “I can picture that. Now was it handwritten or typed?”

  “Typed.”

  “And who signed it?”

  Long silence. “I don’t remember. But it wasn’t Gaines.”

  “It wasn’t Gaines,” Alicia repeated.

  “I’m pretty sure it was one of his campaign people.” Finally he threw his hands up. “I don’t know. Some woman. I can’t remember.”

  There was a lot about that letter Treebeard couldn’t remember. But still, there was something about it that had the ring of truth. Alicia consulted her notes. “How did you even get the letter, since you don’t have an address?” That was yet another of Treebeard’s eccentricities. He refused to live indoors. He camped year-round.

  “When I got back to my campsite that day, the letter was stuck to a tree.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean stuck to a tree. Pinned. Like all my other mail.”

  Alicia arched an eyebrow. “You had a bunch of mail pinned to a tree?”

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “Is that a standard way of communicating with you?”

  “People know where I camp. They want to say something to me when I’m not around, they write a note and pin it to a tree. So it doesn’t blow away.”

  Again she tapped her pen against her notebook. “When you got back to your campsite that Thursday, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  “You mean messed up? No.”

  “Nothing taken?” Alicia felt Jerome’s eyes fix on her with a new intensity.

  “You mean did I have arrows there and were any missing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had arrows there.” His expression grew more hangdog. “But if any were gone, I didn’t notice.”

  But one might have been taken. It was possible.

  “Let’s take a break,” she said. “Fifteen minutes.” Alicia called for the guard. Treebeard was warmed up but she wanted him to be fresh when she questioned him about the actual night of the murder. He shuffled out, the guard guiding him by the elbow.

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Jerome said once Treebeard was gone.

  “That this was a setup?”

  Jerome nodded.

  Yes, she was.

  Chapter 10

  Joan had to struggle not to look happy. It wasn’t seemly for a new widow to look happy, especially when she’d just buried her murdered husband the day before. But neither the weather nor Joan’s mood made that easy.

  As was her habit, Joan drove her navy blue Jag convertible at breakneck speed along the narrow road
s that twined through wooded Pebble Beach. Her destination was Henry Gossett’s home, at which she hoped he had both coffee and the living-trust spreadsheets waiting. In a nod to Grace Kelly, she had tied a silk scarf over her blond hair and donned big black sunglasses. In a dismissal of her role as New Widow, she’d put the car’s top down. This was one of those taunting winter days California’s gods occasionally bestowed, so spectacular that residents jettisoned caution along with their overcoats. It looked like April and smelled like April but would not last like April; chances were excellent that the very next day the temperature would drop thirty degrees and the skies would open. So, in homage to the moment’s fleeting beauty, Joan had let decorum be damned.

  She was in such a good mood she wasn’t even angry at Gossett anymore. She’d been livid at him the day after Christmas, when he’d failed to show up at her suite with the spreadsheets, as she had told him to do. Of course, he’d called with some cockamamie excuse, but she’d seen right through him. She suspected immediately that her mother had interceded to keep Gossett from sharing the trust details with her, so she confronted her mother over the phone. Of course, she’d been right.

  Well, Joan thought, mimicking a favorite expression of her father’s, that will not stand! She had informed Gossett in no uncertain terms that she would see the spreadsheets, if not that day, then at his home on Saturday morning. His discomfort at being caught between mother and daughter had been evident, but she could not have cared less.

  Joan arrived at Henry Gossett’s Tudor pile, a structure she considered both dull and perfectly suited to the attorney and his stout wife. Interesting how people paired off, she thought as she abandoned the Jag on the curving sweep of driveway that led to the house, blithely blocking both of the Gossetts’ Mercedes sedans in the garage. Sometimes men and women who were almost carbon copies of each other came together, like her parents and the Gossetts. Sometimes total opposites attracted.