To Catch the Moon

Diana Dempsey

Published by Diana Dempsey at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 by Diana Dempsey

This book may not be reproduced in whole or
in part without permission. It is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to others. If
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purchased for your sole use, please purchase your own copy. The
author appreciates that consideration.

Alicia Maldonado exited the Monterey County
district attorney’s office into the high-ceilinged, red-tiled entry
hall of the courthouse, nearly empty on a Saturday afternoon. Her
arms full of case documents, she let the D.A. office’s heavy glass
door slam shut behind her and strode toward the stairs that would
carry her to the third floor and the superior courts, where
prosecutors like her spun tales of true crime to persuade juries to
render just punishment. Which worked most of the time, but as
Alicia knew all too well, not always.

Three in the afternoon and outside the
courthouse it was chilly and overcast, a December wind whipping
down the streets carrying with it the unmistakable whiff of manure
that indicated farm work was close at hand. To the east rose the
Gabilan Mountains, the Santa Lucias to the west, two formidable
ranges that stood sentry over California’s Salinas Valley, trapping
heat in summer and cold in winter and farm smells year-round.
Sometimes the valley was a beautiful place, Alicia knew, especially
in spring when the rich soil gave birth to endless fields of
blue-white lupins and wildly cheerful orange and gold California
poppies. But Salinas itself, the county’s little capital seat,
wasn’t exactly a picture postcard. It was too dull, too dusty and
flat, too much a throwback to the 1940s. And as a street-corner
Salvation Army Santa tolled his bell trying in vain to improve his
take, it was too poor to do much about it.

Inside the courthouse, Alicia mounted the
last flight of stairs and hit the third-floor landing, where a
Charlie Brown Christmas tree strung with multicolored lights held
rather pathetic pride of place. She met the eyes of Lionel Watkins,
a burly black janitor who was as much a courthouse fixture as she
was and had been for so long he was nearing retirement. He paused
in his mopping to shake his head when he saw her. “You at it again?
And on a Saturday?”

“Will you let me in?”

“Honey, don’t I always? Even against my
better judgment.” He leaned his mop handle against a lime-green
wall, a discount color found only in county buildings and VA
hospitals, and without further instruction made for Superior Court
Three, Alicia’s good-luck courtroom. “You always win,” he said. “I
don’t get why you bother to practice.”

“I win
because
I practice.”

“You win because you’s good.” They arrived at
the courtroom door. On the opposite wall hung a hand-lettered sign:
ONLY FOUR MORE SHOPLIFTING DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS. Apparently the
sign had been hung on Tuesday, since numbers eight through five
were crossed out. Lionel selected a key from a massive ring and
poked it at the lock. “At least Judge Perkins is long gone on his
Christmas vacation.” He swung the door open and gave her a
quizzical look. “So when you gonna run for judge again? Third
time’s the charm, they say.”

Annoyance flashed through her, cold and fast.
“I have no idea,” she snapped, and pushed past him into the
darkened courtroom. He raised the overhead lights, chasing the
shadows from the jury box, which even empty seemed strangely
watchful. Alicia turned back around and forced her voice to soften.
“Thanks, Lionel. What’ll I do when you get your pension?”

He chuckled. “Find some other soft touch.”
Then he was gone, the tall oak door clicking softly shut behind
him.

Alicia dumped the file for case number
02-F987 on the prosecution table, then loosed her dark wavy hair
from its plastic butterfly clip and gathered it up again atop her
head, a neatening ritual she went through a dozen times a day,
whenever she stopped one task and began another. She shed the black
jacket she wore over her jeans and white turtleneck. The jacket was
getting that telltale shiny veneer that came from too many dry
cleanings. That was a worry. Clothes were expensive and her budget
beyond shot.

She chuckled without humor. She could barely
afford to maintain a decent wardrobe. How was she supposed to pay
for a campaign? Especially now, when nobody would put up a dime for
a woman considered damaged goods?

Oh, she’d had her golden-girl period, when
some of the top people in her party thought she was the next great
Latina hope. She knew how they spoke of her: well-spoken,
beautiful, star prosecutor, pulled herself up by her bootstraps,
determined to win political office and do a good turn for the
forgotten many who, like her, came from the wrong side of the
tracks. It was PC to the max and a great story, or at least it had
been until she lost. Twice. Then the bloom was off the rose. And
off her.

She threw back her head and gazed at the huge
wall-mounted medallion of The Great State of California. It baffled
her no end how she’d managed to go from promising to stalled in the
blink of an eye. Now she was a thirty-five-year-old shopworn
specimen with a dead-end career and no man in sight, at least none
she wanted. That was sure a prescription for a merry Christmas and
a happy New Year.

Enough already! Get over yourself and
practice the opening statement.
“You’re right,” she muttered.
Before long it would be Monday, nine in the morning, and she’d have
to go to work persuading the jury to convict. She dug into her pile
of papers for the yellow legal pad on which she’d scrawled her
notes. But it wasn’t there.

Damn, she must’ve left it on her desk. She’d
have to go back and get it. She made tracks out of the courtroom
and back down to the D.A.’s office, where she punched in the
numbers on the code-pad door to buzz herself in.

She was partway down the narrow cubicle-lined
corridor to her office when she realized that the main phone line
kept ringing. It would ring, get picked up by voice mail, and ring
again. Over and over. Somebody wanted to reach somebody, badly.

She marched back to the receptionist’s desk
and picked up the line. “Monterey County District Attorney.”

“It’s Bucky Sheridan.” One of Carmel PD’s
veteran beat cops but not the brightest bulb. “Who’s this?”

“Alicia. What’s up?”

“I gotta talk to Penrose.”

She had to laugh. As if D.A. Kip Penrose were
ever in the office on a Saturday. He was barely there on weekdays.
“Bucky, you’re not going to find Penrose here. Try him on his
cell.”

“I have. All I get is his voice mail.”

“Well, he’s probably got it turned off.” That
was standard procedure, too. “Anyway, what’s so desperate? What do
you need?”

Silence. Then, “We got a situation here,
Alicia.”

She frowned. It was at that moment she
realized Bucky didn’t sound like his usual potbellied, aw-shucks
self. “What do you mean, a situation?”

“I’m at Daniel Gaines’ house. On Scenic, in
Carmel.”

“
The
Daniel Gaines?” Something niggled
uncomfortably in her gut. “The Daniel Gaines who just announced
he’s running for governor?”

“He’s not running for anything anymore.” By
now Bucky was panting. “He’s dead.”

*

“A minute back from commercial.”

From his perch at the anchor desk, Milo
Pappas nodded at the warning from the floor manager, who stood
half-hidden in the shadows in the cavernous Manhattan studio where
the
WBS Evening News
was taped every evening at six-thirty.
This being a Saturday, it was the flagship broadcast’s less
illustrious weekend edition. But it was
Evening
all the
same, and hence a new feather appeared in Milo’s journalistic cap
every time he broke from his
Newsline
correspondent duties
to fill in as anchor.

Milo skimmed the lead-in to the last piece,
all he had left to read save the promo for the Sunday-morning
interview show and the good-bye. He was proud of himself. Despite
his initial nervousness he hadn’t bobbled a single word, managing
to project the approachable yet authoritative demeanor WBS sought
in its anchors. Millions of Americans from Kennebunkport to San
Diego were watching, but Milo was far more aware of the handful of
top WBS management scrutinizing his performance from their weekend
homes on Long Island and in the Hamptons.

Suddenly he heard the director yammer in his
earpiece. “We got an urgent bulletin, Milo—we’re killing the last
piece. You need to ad-lib it. Ninety seconds max. We’re getting
hard copy out to you”—and indeed just as the stage manager gave the
thirty-second warning, a young female production assistant ran into
the studio bearing wire copy—“so go to the good-bye whenever you’re
ready and we’ll close out with a bump shot. You know the Daniel
Gaines story, right?”

Milo’s heart thumped against his rib cage. He
certainly did know it, though truth be told he was far more
intimately acquainted with Daniel Gaines’ wife than with the man
himself.

“Fifteen,” the stage manager announced.

Milo grabbed the wire copy and struggled to
grasp what he couldn’t believe he was reading. The “Dewey Beats
Truman” headline notwithstanding, urgent bulletins seldom got
anything this big completely wrong.

He raised his eyes to the lens, addressing
Evening
’s director in the control booth. “You’ve got
confirmation?”

“From the police department in Carmel,
California, where the guy lives.” The director paused, then,
“You’re sure you can handle the ad-lib, Milo?”

He felt a stab of irritation. “Watch me.”

Then, “Ten,” the stage manager intoned,
“four, three ... we’re on the wide shot—”

Two seconds before the director shifted to
him straight up on Camera One, Milo raised his gaze to the lens,
willed himself to keep his composure, and began speaking.

“We have an urgent bulletin tonight out of
Carmel, California. Police there have confirmed that Daniel Gaines,
who just last month announced his bid for governor of California,
today was found dead in his home, the victim of an apparent
homicide.”

Milo surprised himself with how calm he
sounded, as if to him this were no more than just a shocking news
event, as if he didn’t have years of personal history with the
people involved.

“Gaines was a newcomer to politics,” he went
on, “but he gained a national reputation as chief executive of
Headwaters Resources, a timber company that’s won praise for
preserving the so-called old-growth forest. Political insiders say
Gaines also profited from his tie with the California-based Hudson
family. Two and a half years ago”—Milo would never forget the date;
it was seared in his memory—“he married Joan Hudson, the only child
of late California governor and U.S. senator Web Hudson.”

And
, Milo added silently, allowing
himself one beat to look down from the lens and take a single
sustaining breath,
the only woman who ever kissed me off and
never looked back.

*

Joan Hudson Gaines veered toward the stairs
that would carry her to the second floor, away from the cops who
had invaded her home, her slight body pitched forward as if that
would get her there faster. Once inside the master bathroom she
slammed shut the door and flipped on the light switch. Then she saw
her face in the mirror. Mottled skin, too-shiny eyes, blond Medusa
hair. She snapped the light off and collapsed onto the
mausoleum-cold porcelain of the Jacuzzi tub, rubbing her temples,
trying to make her head not spin.

She must control herself. It was a mistake to
let the cops see her so upset. She did the right thing to escape
upstairs, away from their prying eyes. She should have done it
earlier.

What a horrific day! If her father were here,
he’d fix it. He’d make those cops stop tromping through her house
as if they owned it. But he was dead, too, he couldn’t help. And
her mother had chosen this exact weekend to go to Santa
Barbara.

Why were the cops so slow to collect their
evidence? A petrifying notion shot through her, a thought that
wouldn’t leave her alone. What if they considered her a suspect?
All those questions they asked! Why had she been in Santa Cruz last
night? Why had she gone without her husband, only a few days before
Christmas? Had she called him? Why not?

She raised her chin defiantly, though her
pouty lower lip trembled. She’d told them only what she wanted to
and not a word more. Why in the world should she? She was a
Hudson.