To Catch the Moon (19 page)

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.

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 roads 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.

She wondered what she and Daniel had been.
Similar in some respects. They both liked to be out and about, at
restaurants or parties or concerts. At some point early in their
marriage, she had noticed they weren’t at their best alone. And
very often Daniel fell into sullen moods she hadn’t understood. It
happened when things weren’t going his way, either with Headwaters
or the campaign. Then nothing would make him happy but work, work,
work, which was very trying.

The far more fascinating question was, How
compatible were she and Milo? Joan tripped lightly up the few steps
to the Gossetts’ entry and rang the bell. She had concluded the
prior night that Milo was as charming as ever, and as handsome.
Perhaps even more so, because now his aura of success was so much
more powerful. He was kind to her, very considerate, though his
refusal to share her bed was a worry.

Didn’t he find her attractive anymore? No,
she decided, that wasn’t possible. Could he be seeing someone? She
frowned, then smiled, her concern fading fast. It wouldn’t take
Joan Hudson Gaines long to beat out any competition. One other
thing she hadn’t liked, she remembered: that he’d left so early to
catch his plane. That didn’t show what she considered sufficient
regard. Still, she would allow him that lapse if he phoned her
early enough in the day. Before eleven in the morning would be
best; between eleven and three was acceptable; she deemed anything
after three to be rude. So what if he had an interview to tape? She
tapped the toe of her high-heeled pump impatiently as she waited
for someone at the Gossett residence to let her in. Well, this
would be a good test of whether Milo Pappas had his priorities
straight.

Finally Henry Gossett himself pulled open his
front door. He wore his suit jacket and bow tie, though in the
privacy of his own home he’d forgone his felt fedora. At least
that. “Good morning,” he said, lugubrious as ever.