“Maybe I wouldn’t have to if the police were more competent.”
“So now you’ve got a gripe against Carmel PD? What the hell’s your problem with them?”
Milo could hear the rising anger in Penrose’s voice. For once he couldn’t blame him. He knew where Alicia was headed with this and it didn’t make much sense to him, either.
She was talking again. “They don’t even mention in the report of their interview that Joan Gaines didn’t actually stay in the Holt house that night. She stayed in the guesthouse.”
“So what?”
“So I’ll tell you what. Given the separation of the guesthouse from the main house, and where she parked her car, she was able to come and go with no one being the wiser.”
Penrose laughed out loud. “I repeat! So what?”
“So she did come and go.”
Silence. Milo frowned.
A second later Penrose spoke again, sounding truculent. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I have an eyewitness who puts Joan Gaines in front of her house at 10 PM the night her husband was killed. When she was supposedly asleep in Santa Cruz.”
Milo reared back from the wall. What?
“She lied, Kip,” Alicia went on. “She lied about her whereabouts. What else do you think she might be lying about?”
There was a long silence. Then Milo heard a loud scoffing sound, presumably from the D.A. “That’s absurd,” he heard Penrose say.
“Louella is deposing the eyewitness right now.”
Another few beats of silence. Then, “Who is this supposed eyewitness?”
“His name is Harry McEvoy. He lives on Twelfth, just a few blocks from the Gaines’ house. He—”
Alicia went on talking but Milo missed it, too busy sliding his reporter’s notebook from his overcoat pocket and jotting down what he had heard, though his hand trembled and he didn’t really believe it. Either Alicia had something wrong or this McEvoy character did. Somebody was confused or lying or something.
“This is crazy!” Penrose, loud and angry. “You know how unreliable eyewitness accounts are!” Milo heard a slamming sound, as if the D.A. slapped his hand down hard on his desk. “We do not need to second-guess Joan Gaines’ whereabouts the night her husband was murdered. She is not a suspect in this case.”
“Well, maybe she should be. Let’s see. Not only did she lie about her whereabouts, but an eyewitness places her at the scene of the murder at the time of the murder. She’s shown no emotion. She’s shown zero interest in the case. She went on a shopping spree two days after her husband was killed. She—”
Penrose interrupted. Perhaps it was because Milo’s heart was thumping, or because crazy thoughts were thundering across his brain, or simply because Penrose had lowered his voice, but for a time Milo did not catch the conversation beyond the wall. When he could again focus, Alicia was speaking.
“Don’t think for a minute that I’m going to back off. I don’t give a damn if the Hudsons are huge donors to your campaigns. I don’t give a damn if you and everybody else in this county is one hundred percent convinced Treebeard is guilty. I am not convinced. And I am not going to let it drop.”
Shuffling noises, as though someone had risen out of their chair. Probably Alicia, getting ready to leave.
“I’ll tell you another thing,” she said, her voice suddenly much clearer. Milo held his breath. She must have moved closer to the duct. “As a prosecutor I feel a very strong duty to get at the truth. People’s lives are at stake here, Kip.”
Her voice grew fainter. She must have moved again. She would probably leave soon. Milo edged toward the door and pushed it slightly more closed, wincing as it groaned with the movement. Then he scooted back to his hiding place in the shadows.
Penrose’s door opened. Milo watched a shaft of light spill across the corridor and into it step Alicia’s shadow. Very clearly now, he heard her again speak. “And FYI, I am not doing this on my own. This morning Louella got a subpoena for Joan Gaines’ cell-phone and credit-card records.”
She stomped off. Milo stood motionless, reluctant to try to slip past Penrose’s open door. Thirty seconds later the shaft of light in the corridor disappeared. He’s shutting off his lights, Milo thought with relief. He’s going. Then he watched Penrose leave, wearing his overcoat and striding rapidly down the corridor past R. Messina’s office.
Milo waited a minute more, then cautiously approached the door. From down the corridor the noise from the party rolled toward him in waves.
He had just stepped into the corridor, planning to exit by slipping past the party, when he was abruptly halted by the voice of the last person on earth he wanted to see at that moment.
“Hey!” The voice was female. Commanding. Angry. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Milo turned his head to look into the flaring eyes of Alicia Maldonado.
*
He heard everything. He heard every word. Alicia didn’t need to confirm it. She knew it in the marrow of her bones. The only question was what would he do with what he had learned?
Wrong—there was a second question, she realized. What did she want him to do with it?
“In here.” She grabbed him by the elbow and pushed him back into Rocco’s office, then shut the door behind them and flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights. She turned to face him. “How did you get in?” To her own ears her voice sounded shrill, demanding.
For a second he was silent. Then, “I slipped in while some of your coworkers were coming out.”
She shook her head. “Don’t lie to me, Milo Pappas. I could charge you with felony trespassing.”
“It wouldn’t stick.” He half sat on the corner of Rocco’s desk and crossed his arms over his chest.
He gave no sign of being flustered. She found herself both admiring of his self-possession and irritated by it. “You’re pretty damn cocky for somebody who’s just been sneaking around government buildings eavesdropping on privileged conversations.”
“It’s called reporting.”
“Oh, really? Reporting is getting information any way you can, is that it? It doesn’t matter under what false pretenses?” Something was starting to get away from her. She felt anger ignite in her chest like heartburn. “You don’t follow a single ethical guideline, do you? You’re completely comfortable trespassing and eavesdropping and, oh, let’s add a third category! Trying to seduce the prosecutor so she’ll give you inside dirt when you need it.”
He slid off Rocco’s desk and approached her across the small distance that separated them. His eyes bored into her own. “I did not try to seduce you for inside information. I merely asked you out and you refused me. If anyone should feel insulted here, it’s me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, then turned away from him, his proximity making her thoughts leap in a direction she could neither predict nor control. If any insult existed it was to her own dignity, for that single kiss he had given her stuck in her memory like the heart a lovesick teenager carved into the bark of a tree. Images of this delicious, infuriating man wrapped around her, above her, within her, took delectable shape in her mind, making her heart thud and her skin flush. His kiss came back to her in excruciating detail. What more could that mouth of his do, if she allowed it freer rein?
Stop it. Stop it.
She forced herself to look at him again, and to keep her gaze cold. “What are you going to do with what you heard?”
He seemed to ponder that. He averted his gaze, and his brow furrowed. “I don’t know.”
“I warn you, Milo. This is an ongoing criminal investigation.”
“I am well aware of that.”
“You mess with it and you’re in deep shit.”
“I have no intention of messing with it.”
“What intention do you have then?”
He raised his voice, still not looking at her. “I told you, Alicia, I don’t know.”
She watched him. A muscle twitched in hi
s jaw, which was showing the trace of a five-o’clock shadow. It was puzzling. He wasn’t excited or defiant from his journalistic coup, which she would have expected. Instead he seemed disturbed, profoundly so, as if what he’d learned—that Joan Gaines had lied about her whereabouts the night of the murder—bothered him in some fundamental way.
Then she remembered what he’d told her at the Mission Ranch. He knew Joan Gaines. He knew her family. He had a personal tie.
Not surprising he’d be upset then, though any intimacy between Milo and Joan chafed. He was an ambassador’s son. She was a governor’s daughter. No doubt they attended the same Ivy League schools, dined in the same five-star restaurants, flew to Europe in the same first-class cabin.
The chasm between Alicia and Milo Pappas yawned before her in all of its heartbreaking clarity, an unreachable divide built of money and class and education, all the things that equal-opportunity Americans weren’t supposed to think mattered. But to Alicia they were as real as the nicks on Rocco’s battle-scarred wooden desk, the streaks of dirt on his perennially unwashed windows, the nasty brown stains on his carpet left by the coffee spills of prosecutors past.
She raised a warning finger in his direction. “You listen to me, Milo Pappas. If I hear that you let a single word of this slip out, you can damn well be sure that I’ll go after you for felony trespassing. And believe me, I’m one prosecutor who could make it stick.”
She walked out then, tempted to flip off the fluorescent lights and leave him in Rocco’s office in the dark. But she didn’t, though part of her ached to lash out at this untouchable man in whatever small way she could manage.
Chapter 13
Shortly before noon on an overcast New Year’s Eve, Joan lay on her back on a massage table in a private treatment room of the Lodge’s spa. Her naked body was draped by a sheet, her eyes were shielded by a hand towel, and her skin was warmed by a fire in a mosaic-fronted hearth a few yards to her right. At her instruction the masseuse was working her horribly tense trapezius muscles. The air was scented with pine, both from the Douglas fir strung with holiday lights in a corner of the room and from the fire; the lighting was dim; and the sound system piped forth a gentle medley of New Age favorites.
She had been wise, she decided, to choose the three-hour Stress Reliever package, though even that had been fraught with tension-creating decisions. Fine, she would begin with the Pebble Beach Water Experience, but which bath additive should she choose? Mineral sea salt, seaweed and aromatherapy, or rose petals? Then which scrub? The Sea-salt Body Scrub, Cypress Pine Exfoliation, or Huckleberry Herbal Body Wrap? Even the choice of massage was daunting. Therapeutic, lymphatic, or Shiatsu?
Joan considered whether she should take the therapist’s recommendation and add the Cranio-Sacral Therapy Session as a fourth treatment. Surely no woman was in more desperate need of balancing her energy and relaxing her central nervous system. Not after the last few days.
It turned out that Headwaters needed serious work. Such serious work that it buried beyond excavation any desire Joan ever had to be chief executive officer.
Going over the books with Craig Barlowe, she had wanted to weep. The debt payments? Enormous. The P&L for the year? Lots of L and not much P. The regulatory constraints on harvesting timber? Tightening constantly. Her compulsion to shuck it all? Growing. Oh, yes, growing.
It was just all so much trouble. It was probably possible to turn Headwaters around, but it didn’t look easy. Being CEO was all well and good, but not of a company that was in such difficulty. What fun would that be? Very little, as far as Joan could tell. It didn’t seem to her that Barlowe, in his capacity as acting CEO, was having such a grand time.
Plus, thanks to Daniel, too much of her money was tied up in that damn company. Thanks to him she was cash poor, which was nearly as bad as being actually poor.
The masseuse dug into a particularly tender area of her nape. Joan winced. “I’m sorry,” the woman murmured, though her pulverization continued at no less pressure.
In a way the pain felt good, though, distracting. Joan freed her mind to roam over the solution she had begun crafting.
She had worked as an investment banker for about eight months after she’d left Stanford Business School. As far as she was concerned, she knew all there was to know about selling companies. So as soon as the holidays were over, she would call the San Francisco I-bankers Daniel and her father had used to acquire Headwaters and talk to them about selling it. Why not? It would free her up in so many ways. Good-bye, corporate headaches. Hello, cash flow.
And she judged this the perfect time. Who would question why Joan Gaines wanted to sell her murdered husband’s company? He was no longer alive to run it. Who would doubt that it gave his widow too many painful memories? Most likely she would even enjoy a certain premium from selling it quickly. She was a new widow: wounded, bereaved, vulnerable. Even hard-nosed businesspeople would be reluctant to drive too tough a bargain. And if they did, she could retaliate by dropping a word or two to the press. Milo would help, wouldn’t he?
Joan knew she could get a lot of mileage out of the young-widow bit. Losing your husband to a brutal murder at age thirty made you sympathetic even if you were from a prominent family. Look at Jackie Kennedy. She’d been able to ride that wave her entire adult life.
Joan fought a rising disappointment as she realized her massage was winding to a close. In the final moments the masseuse signaled the last act by lightly running her fingers in silky, smoothing motions over Joan’s face and neck. Then, unfortunately, she stopped, and murmured some cooing phrases about how Joan should take her time and lie still for a while. She exited the room so quietly that all Joan heard of her departure was the soft click of the door closing behind her.
Joan resumed her contemplations, reluctant to disrupt the pleasant stupor in which she found herself. She imagined her life after she sold Headwaters for every last cent it was worth. Shedding the company would free her from having to live on the Monterey Peninsula. More and more she thought of it as a backwater. For one thing it had virtually no desirable men. Who was it who said that Carmel was for the newly wed and the nearly dead? It was so, so true. All the resident males were either aged or married, and usually both. The dregs were struggling poets or artists, and she’d lost interest in that category a decade before. No, Los Angeles and maybe San Francisco were much better bets.
Of course, she had to have a better idea what to do about Milo. At the moment she had no idea, though the notion had traipsed across her mind that he might provide some useful … shall we say, release that very evening. After all, it was New Year’s Eve. What healthy thirty-year-old woman didn’t have sex on New Year’s Eve? Surely the holiday gave her leave to dispense with her usual “Make him wait” calendar.
She chuckled to herself, entranced by her own cleverness. What a brainstorm to tell him she was having friends over! She knew that would make him much more likely to accept her invitation. Obviously he was hesitant to be alone with her. But he’d get over that fast enough. She’d make sure of it.
He could be so delicious, she remembered. The things he did, with such gusto ...
She squirmed on the massage table, recalling one particular ministration in exquisite detail. Daniel hadn’t done that to her in eons. Maybe it was the Greek thing again.
Joan smiled a private smile in anticipation of the evening ahead. Ethnicity might have its drawbacks when it came to the social register, but clearly it had its place in the bedroom.
*
7:30 on New Year’s Eve. Alicia sat on her mother’s living room couch—the plastic that usually covered it temporarily removed in honor of the holiday—and watched Modesta Maldonado, in her best Christmas housedress, bend down to hold a tray of deep-fried cheese-stuffed jalapeno peppers tantalizingly close to Jorge’s nose.
“Andale, Jorge, prueba otro,” she said, her wide face positively beaming. Nothing Modesta Maldonado liked better than having a real live man in her living r
oom eating her food, especially one who might marry her eldest daughter.
Jorge winked at her mother. “Con mucho gusto.” He reached for the biggest, Cheez Whiziest popper, and her mother’s smile widened even further. How her face had enough room to hold that big a grin, Alicia had no idea.
Well, she might not be in love with her boyfriend, but her mother sure was.
From her perch at Jorge’s side, Alicia tried to think what in this house had changed in thirty-five years. Now she had nieces and nephews, that was different, and of course her father was gone, but the living room looked much as it had when she was a kid, and no doubt it would look the same still on the day Modesta Maldonado went to claim her heavenly reward.
Alicia both loved this house and hated it. It was where she had started, yet she often feared it would be where she’d end up, too. Certainly she was the one writing the checks to keep it going. Yet at the same time it gave her great satisfaction to know that her father would be proud of her. She hadn’t let the family down.
Tonight it was a raucous scene, the living room full to bursting with people and noise and furniture. People because there were nine Maldonados plus Jorge: herself, her mom, her two sisters, the one husband, the four kids. Noise because no one ever seemed to shut up and both the TV and stereo were on. And furniture because the prior summer Alicia had bought her mother a living room set from IKEA, but her mother had refused to get rid of any of her old stuff, worn though it might be. Who knew if she might need it someday? she asked, and that was the end of that. To Alicia it was yet another mysterious working of her mother’s mind.
Then there were the Christmas decorations, starting with the silver foil Christmas tree with the red and green balls hauled out every year from the garage to be stood next to the television. The plastic reindeer that most people would put on their lawn but which stayed inside because of the high likelihood that outside they would be stolen. The Nativity set too large to be contained beneath the tree, so that the myrrh-bearing wise man was forced to stand right next to a reindeer.
To Catch the Moon Page 19