To Catch the Moon (22 page)

She put down the tissue, recovered except for
some residual puffiness around her eyes. “I’m sorry for being
snappish,” she said. “It’s just that everything about this
situation upsets me.”

Well, that had to be true. “I’m sorry,” he
said.

She raised her eyes to his. “You are so
sweet, Milo.” Then she reached across the table and grasped his
hand. Her fingers were unbelievably fragile and soft. Her whole
body was like that, he remembered, a malleable, tender thing he
used to worry he might crush.

She tilted her head to one side, the hint of
a smile on her lips. “Thank you for forgiving me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“I’m just so emotional these days. It’s all
... it’s all of this. Sometimes it’s very hard.”

He nodded, saying nothing. Should he pull his
hand away? She showed no sign of letting it go.

Again she spoke. “May I ask you a
question?”

“Shoot.”

“I’d like to have a few friends over to the
suite tomorrow evening. Would you join us?”

He frowned. Wasn’t tomorrow ...

“I know it’s New Year’s Eve,” she went on
hastily, “and it’s short notice, but ...” Again the tilt of the
head. Again the big eyes. “You don’t already have plans, do
you?”

He didn’t, unfortunately. He had a vague
notion of flying back east for the holiday but didn’t relish the
prospect of another get-together with his brothers and their
families. Obviously there was no hope of seeing Alicia.

Joan was waiting. He was being rude. His
choices were either Joan or solitude, and Joan was an old friend,
an inside source, and newly bereaved. Besides, her friends might be
interesting. “It would be my pleasure,” he heard himself say.

“Wonderful.” She squeezed his hand once more
before she let go.

*

Alicia plucked a cellophane-wrapped
banana-nut muffin from the overflowing basket of baked goods in the
courthouse’s second-floor snack bar. It was a sign of how early
she’d gotten to work that it was still warm. She laid it on her
orange plastic tray next to her apple and coffee and turned to
Louella, behind her in the cash-register line. “I don’t know what
else to tell you,” she said, “but I can’t just drop it.”

Louella shook her head, dubiousness written
all over her features. Squeezed into a white turtleneck with her
blond hair less rigorously straightened than usual, Louella looked
more Norma Jean than ever. “I bet you want me to go to a judge and
get you a subpoena.”

“Can you do it this morning?”

Louella just shook her head again. “What do
you want to see?”

“Credit-card bills and cell-phone
records.”

At that, Louella rolled her eyes. “A dollar
forty-five,” the cashier announced in a bored voice, tapping her
fingernail on her metal register as Alicia painstakingly counted
out the dimes and nickel. Louella paid for her coffee and muffin
and grabbed a handful of paper napkins. “It’s so nice today, why
don’t we eat outside?” she suggested.

The women arranged themselves on a park bench
in the courtyard between the courthouse’s east and west wings.
Boxwood hedges edged the expansive planters, all of them spilling
over with petunias, agapanthus, and birds-of-paradise. It would be
a floral splurge for the county budget were this not Northern
California, where all flora and fauna thrived. They sat with their
backs to Alisal Street, which on this semi-holiday thirtieth day of
December was much quieter than usual.

After a few muffin bites, Louella spoke up.
“What time’s the arraignment?”

“Three.”

“You expecting a lot of media?”

Expecting? No. Hoping for, in one particular
case? “Some,” she said. “Not a full house.”

Arraignments were the least exciting of all
courtroom dramas because they yielded so few surprises. The
defendant and his lawyer went before the judge; the clerk read the
charges; the defendant entered a plea. Most times everybody knew in
advance what that would be.

This afternoon at the appropriate moment,
Jerome Brown would nod at his client, and Treebeard, if he was
talking, would say, “Not guilty.” Then the judge would set the date
for the preliminary hearing, in roughly ten days. If this weren’t
such a high-profile case, the arraignment would be thoroughly
boring. But as it was, a fair number of media would be in
attendance, if only to photograph a manacled Treebeard in prison
orange.

Alicia sipped her coffee. “Jerome called
yesterday to say Treebeard passed a lie-detector test.”

“Wow!” Louella’s tone was fake impressed.
“It’s a wonder they don’t just drop the charges and let him out
this morning.”

“You made your point.”

“Those tests are meaningless. You know that,
Alicia.”

Alicia said nothing. While the public seemed
to think a lie-detector test was a good barometer of guilt or
innocence, the judicial system had never been convinced. Because a
polygraph could be fooled by an accomplished liar—which described
many an accomplished felon—most often the results were inadmissible
in court.

Still, Alicia was unwilling to dismiss these
particular test results as meaningless. Not definitive, certainly,
but perhaps indicative?

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight.”
Louella half rose from the bench to swipe the last of the muffin
crumbs off her trousered lap, then sat down again. “Basically,
there are three things you want me to do. First, interview this
Harry McEvoy who lives on Twelfth, find out if he’s a kook or
really did see the widow Gaines in front of her house the night of
the murder. Despite the fact that she told us she was in Santa Cruz
and that we’ve got eyewitnesses who put her in Santa Cruz for
dinner that night.”

“Right.”

“Then, assuming McEvoy has all his marbles,
you want me to go to a judge and get a subpoena for Joan Gaines’
credit-card bills and cell-phone records.”

“Right.”

“And last but not least, you want me to check
out who lives just south of the Gaines house. See if by some chance
one of the residents happens to be a height-impaired female who
gets her kicks out of trotting up and down the passage between the
two properties in the dark. Have I got it so far?”

Alicia turned to regard Louella. “Do you have
to be so sarcastic?”

“Let’s just say I feel it’s my duty as your
colleague and friend to remind you that given the evidence it is
crazy to think that somebody other than Treebeard murdered Daniel
Gaines. ‘I’ve been framed,’ he says? Honestly, Alicia, how many
times have we both heard that?”

“And it’s never true,” she murmured.

“No, it’s never true. Or one time in a
million it’s true. And do you understand that it’s especially crazy
to think that the person who framed Treebeard is Joan Gaines?”

A trio of sheriff’s deputies walked past in
their olive-green uniforms, guns in their holsters and
walkie-talkies in their belts. They would agree wholeheartedly with
Louella. They would think she was crazy, too.

Yet she couldn’t get past it. Treebeard’s
story was plausible. It had the heft of truth. She could visualize
it happening the way he described, picture him pushing open the
Gaines’ front door, imagine him stilled by the house’s eerie quiet.
Sure, he didn’t have the letter, and couldn’t identify the phantom
woman, but both those lapses could be explained. And it still
didn’t feel right that Treebeard would have murdered Gaines with
his own arrow, left an array of physical evidence at the scene,
then fled the county believing he wouldn’t be caught. Now,
that
was crazy.

“Do you understand,” Alicia said, “that my
gut just bothers me on this one? Do you understand that?”

“Yes. I also understand that your gut has
been pretty accurate in the past.” Louella leaned closer and
lowered her voice. “But as I said before, Alicia, the problem is
that this time your gut bothers you for the wrong reason. You’re
trying to pin this on the wife for the wrong reason.”

“The old ‘Alicia resents rich women’ thing,
is that it? ‘Alicia thinks they have it so easy and she has it so
hard.’ ”

“Well, is that so far off?”

The question hung in the sunny, warming air,
though it required no answer. Louella was right on the money,
Alicia thought, smiling grimly at her own pun. Women like Joan
Gaines did have it a hell of a lot easier and Alicia did resent it.
They didn’t have to worry about the progress of their careers, for
the simple reason that they didn’t really have to work. They didn’t
have to watch every dime, or pack every spare dime off to family
members to keep them in rent and groceries. They didn’t have to
grow old living from paycheck to paycheck, every passing year
amazed to discover that despite all their efforts, they were still
in the same pit they were in the year before.

So she did have a chip on her shoulder. Fine.
That damn Milo Pappas was right. But what the ambassador’s son
didn’t realize was that anybody else in her position would have
one, too.

“I know you’re looking for a big hit,
Alicia,” Louella murmured. “I know you need one to run for judge
again. And you’ll get it, eventually. But I’ve got to tell you,
it’s not this. It is not this.”

It has to be this. I need it to be this.
I’m running out of time.
But instead she said, “Can you believe
tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve?”

Louella drooped against the back of the
bench. “Don’t remind me. I’ll ring in another New Year sitting with
my parents drinking Asti Spumanti and watching
Rockin’ New
Year’s Eve
on TV. It makes me feel as old as Dick Clark.” She
sighed heavily. “I did turn down a date, actually.”

“Really? With who?”

“You know Tom in the Water Resources
Agency?”

“The one with the beard? He’s kind of
cute.”

“Kind of.” Louella grimaced. “But I don’t
know, I just couldn’t say yes. It’d be like setting the bar for New
Year’s Eve too low, like I’d never get it up again afterward. At
least now I can maintain the fantasy of having a fabulous date. You
know what I mean?”

“Unfortunately, I do.”

“How’s Jorge, by the way?”

“Fine.” Alicia poked the last of her muffin
segments into her mouth. Was she imagining it or was there
something odd in Louella’s voice when she asked that question? Like
she was trying a little too hard to be offhand? But she had no time
to think about it because of what Louella asked her next.

“You’re not that excited about him, are
you?”

It was pointless lying to Louella. “There’s
just no fireworks.”

“You want
fireworks
?” Louella just
shook her head. “Geez, at this point I’d settle for a flare.” She
glanced at her watch. “I should get back.”

They collected their cellophane wrappers and
foam coffee cups and tossed them in a garbage bin near the bench.
“So will you do something else for me?” Alicia asked.

Louella halted. “You have got to be
kidding.”

“Will you get me a list of the Gaines
campaign staff? And a sample of their letterhead stationery?”

Louella just shook her head. “You’re crazy,
you know that, Alicia? You’re crazy when it comes to Jorge and
you’re crazy about this.”

“But you’ll do it?”

Louella just threw up her hands.

“Thanks. I owe you one.”

“You owe me about
ten
.”

*

For a variety of reasons she rarely cared to
probe, Joan hated going into Headwaters’ Monterey headquarters.
This morning her aversion was even stronger than usual, a palpable
thing that threatened to wrest control of the Jag’s steering wheel
and return her forthwith to the Lodge. She forced herself to exit
Highway 1 at Munras Avenue and head due north into the heart of the
city, less glitzy but more historical than Pebble Beach or
Carmel.

Monterey was to the West Coast what
Gettysburg was to the East. It was founded in 1770 by Spanish sea
captain Sebastian Vizcaino, who promptly erected the first of
California’s four presidios on the bay, then teamed up with Father
Junipero Serra to convert the heathen natives to Catholicism. It
was California’s first capital under Spanish, Mexican, and American
rule, and where the state’s constitution was ratified.

When Daniel and Joan’s father acquired
Headwaters from its Idaho founders, Daniel relocated most of the
company’s executive operations to Monterey, leaving only a skeleton
staff in Boise. Later, for both convenience and symbolic value, he
chose Monterey as the site of his campaign headquarters.

Headwaters was housed not far from the
Presidio in an enlarged adobe whose original foundation dated back
to 1817. In the heady early days of her marriage, Joan threw
herself into its renovation. At a certain point, though, she gave
up, sick to death of placating the History and Art Association.
Daniel hired a preservationist to finish the job but never let Joan
forget that she “dropped the ball,” as he put it. Headwaters soon
took its place on the list of what her family considered Joan’s
incomplete projects.

She turned onto Pacific. In front of her was
the marina; the blocks ahead were jam-packed with tourists heading
for Cannery Row and the aquarium. The unseasonably warm air was
heavy with the smell of fish, an aroma Joan detested.

She closed the window and cranked the Jag’s
air conditioner, hating life. What in the world would she find in
Headwaters’ books? Daniel had wreaked absolute havoc with her
father’s living trust. What might he have done with Headwaters,
which now represented a huge chunk of her wealth?

The only potential saving grace was that
unlike her father’s trust, Daniel hadn’t been running Headwaters
alone. Far from it, in fact. The primary day-to-day manager was a
man named Craig Barlowe, the chief operating officer. Barlowe was
one of Daniel’s Wharton cronies—a boring one, Joan always thought,
one of those cookie-cutter business-school types—but Daniel always
seemed high on him. Then there was the board of directors, though
Joan knew it was packed full of Daniel’s sidekicks from
private-equity days and not really much of a watchdog.