The Wicked Wife (Murder in Marin Book 2) (7 page)

“Hello, Holly, put Rob on the line,” Sylvia Stokes, the society page editor for
The Peninsula Standard
, a sister publication which covered the neighboring towns of Tiburon and Belvedere, chirped far too loudly after what for Holly had been a long Sunday night of partying with friends before returning to the daily grind of her job.
   

Holly rolled her eyes. “Hold on, Sylvia. I’ll see if he’s available.” Making sure her hand completely covered the phone’s mouthpiece, she turned to Rob and in a loud whisper said, “Rob it’s one of your brilliant community reporters, Sylvia Stokes. Do you want to take it, or should I tell her you’re out today getting a lobotomy?”

“Very funny. Give me the phone and get back to work. The early page proofs for the Sausalito edition are due on my desk in two hours, remember?”

How could she forget? What a shame. Holly was dying to know what scoop had caused the guarded excitement in Sylvia’s voice. Sylvia’s local social news and gossip columns detailed the lives of many of Marin County’s wealthiest residents.
 

She’d never admit to Rob that she had the least bit of interest in the lives of the rich and famous. It gave her some degree of solace that, as the production manager for all of the
Standard
’s weekly editions, which covered Marin County from Sausalito to Ross Valley, she was always the first to know the latest and greatest gossip, even before their community editions hit mailboxes.

“Sylvia, what have you got for me?” Rob said in his usual clipped tone. In fact, with four different local editions to put out every week, he, like Holly, was always in a hurry.

“Just the biggest social story of the year!” Sylvia took a deep breath, then declared, “I’ve gotten an invitation to meet Willow Wisp at the Adams mansion in Belvedere on Saturday afternoon!”

“Great,” Rob responded. He’d take Sylvia’s word for it that this was a big deal. In fact, up until a few days before when his wife Karin had shown him a gossip item in the county’s daily newspaper, the
Marin Independent Journal
, he had had no idea that there was such a person as Willow Wisp.
 

“What the heck is a Willow Wisp?” Rob asked.
 

Awed by his apparent ignorance, Karin shook her head. “She’s a famous model with her own perfume line and…”
 

When Rob replied with a distant stare and a soft “Oh,” Karin knew she had already reached the limit of her husband’s interest.
 

The
IJ
’s blurb written by its society editor, Sally White, was short and sweet: “Belvedere billionaire William Adams has been seen in the company of Marin County native and international superstar model, Willow Wisp. Rumors are flying among San Francisco’s smart set that the two of them are an item with William and Willow sightings in many of the city’s top spots. When I know more, you’ll know more!”
 

Now that Willow was on Sylvia’s radar, Rob’s competitive nature kicked in. “Wow! I’m glad you got invited. So, what’s the problem?”
 

“The paper comes out on Friday, but the gathering is on Saturday! Obviously, I can’t report on something that hasn’t happened! I’m worried that Sally White will cover it in the
IJ
’s Sunday edition.”

Keeping a weekly newspaper relevant frequently required inventing quick solutions. Rob was adept at juggling deadline problems he faced with every one of his editions. The most daunting of which came last year with the murder of a minor Sausalito celebrity, Warren Bradley, forever memorialized in the local culture as “the Gossiping Gourmet.” Warren, who had also been one of Rob’s corps of volunteer community reporters, was discovered slain hours after
Sausalito Standard
had gone to press. Rotten timing such as that was an inescapable reality in the weekly new business. Rob knew, however, that the paper’s greatest strength was to go much deeper than what was presented by daily newspapers and up to the minute radio and television coverage. As Rob repeatedly told Holly, “the dailies get to report the who, how, where and when, our job is cover the why.”

Rob only needed to think for a moment before replying to Sylvia’s question. “Do a short background piece on Willow—superstar model, glamorous life and career, etcetera—and mention the anticipation surrounding the upcoming party. Then get a few quotes from some of your socially connected gal pals about the upcoming event, and tease the reader promising complete coverage of the party in your column of next week.”

“Wonderful, Rob! Will do!”

“And one other thing Sylvia: avoid being at all critical of these two or their party—at least for now.”

“I wouldn’t
dream
of it Rob!”

“Good, because if those two get married and it’s the social event of the year on the Peninsula, you want to be on their invitation list. Your real value is to be on the inside covering this for all of us who won’t get an invitation.” He paused, then added, “Even better, ingratiate yourself to Willow. Being new to town, she’ll appreciate your friendship, and you’ll appreciate the chance to be first in line for the stories those two will likely generate in the months and years to come. If that happens, Sally at the
IJ
will be reading
you
for your leads.”

“As always, Rob, you’ve been so helpful.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said, and then clicked off.

Later, when Holly brought Rob the page proofs for the Sausalito edition, she teased, “I didn’t know you were into the celebrity scene!”

“You mean, that billionaire Adams and his girlfriend, Willow Tree?”

“God, you’re such a Neanderthal! It’s not Tree. It’s
Wisp
.”

Rob shrugged. “Willow Whatever.”

Holly sighed wistfully. “I think it would be fun going to that party. It never hurts to rub elbows with the rich and the beautiful.”

“Call Sylvia and see if you can tag along. Maybe Adams will dump Willow Wisp and start chasing after you.”

She snorted. “He wouldn’t have to chase very hard, I’ve always had a soft spot for anyone on the
Forbes
list of the world’s wealthiest people.”

“That’s my Holly—one eye on romance, one eye on the bottom line.”

“A billion dollars can buy a whole lot of happiness.”

Rob nodded. “After I got off the phone with Sylvia, I looked up Adams online. According to
Forbes
he’s got about twenty-four billion. Hell, with that kind of money he could buy the
Standard
!”

“I’m guessing it would take a lot less than twenty-four billion—how about twenty-four bucks?”

“Holly, every deal is negotiable. Let’s just say the number is north of twenty-four dollars, and south of twenty-four billion.”

For both Rob and Holly, each week was a never-ending treadmill of putting out multiple editions of community newspapers that contained the same twelve center pages, with a four or eight-page wrap that varied, depending on weekly content and advertising. The front page of each local edition headlined and contained news of that particular community. Additional taxes, library expansions, school bond measures, road closures and infrastructure improvements made up the bulk of their stories. This was news that residents could find nowhere else.
 

The war between two nations on the other side of the globe might be dominating the twenty-four hour news cycle, but a proposal to increase school taxes, or close a beloved neighborhood park was the news most people were truly concerned about.

Holly had worked as Rob’s editor and production manager for a little more than six years, having taken over for Karin when she and Rob decided to start a family. Together, they worked between fifty and sixty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, taking off the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and one week between the final days of July and the first days of August. Other than that, they were always busy. As Rob often said, “The news must go on.”
 

While his group of community stringers was essential to the paper’s continued success, Rob’s close relationship with the county’s top police investigator, Eddie Austin, often proved invaluable to the paper’s real ongoing success.
 

Like Rob, Eddie was a Sausalito native. The two men, who had known each other since kindergarten, became inseparable from the time they were teammates on Tam High’s basketball team. Both served as each other’s best man: Eddie, when Rob married Karin, also a Sausalito native; and Rob, when Eddie married his sweetheart, Sharon, who grew up in Tiburon. The age of Eddie and Sharon’s only child, Aaron, landed right in the middle of the ages of Rob and Karin’s six-year-old boy, Micah, and their four-year-old daughter, Alice.

At thirty-seven, Eddie and Rob even had a somewhat similar physical appearance. Both were of Portuguese/Irish descent, with dark hair and light colored eyes, and stood six-foot tall. Their most noticeable difference was Rob was thinner and Eddie somewhat broader and stronger. The other difference being their choice of professions: Rob choosing to pursue a degree in journalism at San Francisco State, while Eddie pursued a major in criminal justice at the same school.
 

It was Eddie’s brilliant investigative work that cracked the Bradley homicide and gave Rob the inside track in providing the kind of in-depth coverage that the community craved regarding this mysterious murder. Without Eddie’s inside tips on the case, Rob’s reporting efforts would have been overwhelmed by the San Francisco Bay Area’s better-staffed and financed radio, television, and daily news outlets.
 

Best of all, Rob’s coverage of the Bradley murder—one of the most bizarre events in Sausalito’s checkered history—landed Rob a feature story in the
New Yorker
that helped make him one of the best known journalists in the county.

When Rob originally purchased
The Sausalito Standard
nearly a decade earlier, he quickly realized that the weekly paper’s only real chance at achieving an even modest level of financial success was to put out three additional community editions in Mill Valley, Belvedere and Tiburon, called the Peninsula, and Ross, Kentfield and San Anselmo, collectively known as Ross Valley.

On the inside back page of all editions, Rob included a community column that included such local society news as marital engagements, weddings, births, graduations, and major career advancements.
 

Social news was also an essential part of the mix. For many readers, this was the first item that they turned to every week. Who was entertaining the staff of the British Consulate at their Ross home? Who was going through a messy divorce in Mill Valley? What couple just returned from a long anticipated dream vacation? What proud family had twins that were both just accepted to Stanford?
 

Of course the comings and goings of celebrities were always of interest. Sylvia, for example, covered the news of Robin Williams moving back to Tiburon, the town he first lived in as a teen. Later, she interviewed neighbors after his tragic death there.
 

In Sausalito, Warren Bradley had traded more heavily in pure gossip, both benign and malicious. On the other hand, Sylvia was a social butterfly with no taste for creating the web of biting comments that Bradley enjoyed spinning each week.
 

After Warren’s death, knowing that his biting comments about many of his neighbor’s significantly increased the number of suspects in his brutal slaying, Rob made himself a promise to watch more closely what his community columnists were actually writing about their neighbors.

Rob, as is the case with so many community newspaper publishers, had no funds to compensate his corps of community reporters. In truth, however, the arrangement was a win/win for both writer and publisher: giving the reporter a prominent place in his or her community, and giving Rob a needed aspect of local news coverage that he could not otherwise afford.
 

Sylvia’s, husband, Jack, was a financial analyst working for the University of California system, which had two huge institutions in the area, one in San Francisco, and the other in Berkeley. They lived a comfortable life in a home they had purchased in Belvedere in the late 1970s. At age fifty-eight, her weekly columns,
Belvedere Buzz
and
Tiburon Talk
, were as close to achieving her dream of becoming a journalist as she would likely ever come.