To Catch the Moon (18 page)

From a hundred yards away, the Monterey
County Adult Detention Center made Alicia think of a public high
school in a down-at-the-heels municipality. A single-story, solidly
built concrete structure rimmed by a sad-looking lawn, its parking
lot was filled with the kind of seen-better-days cars owned by
people who barely made it from paycheck to paycheck. People like
teachers and, apparently, prison employees. When Alicia’s own
silver VW got closer and the compound’s tall barbed-wire fence and
windowless expanses came more clearly into view, she could no
longer have any doubt that this was no educational institution.

At least not in the traditional sense.

She met Jerome Brown in the anteroom. He was
decked out in the loafers and tweed jacket he favored, though this
being a Saturday his button-down blue dress shirt was open at the
neck. His small-lensed tortoiseshell glasses gave him the look of a
fashion-conscious black professor well on his way to tenure. Alicia
wore a turtleneck, boots, and a black skirt, forgoing the jeans she
preferred on the weekend. No denim was the rule for prison
visitors. Otherwise the civilians would look too much like the
inmates and could find themselves getting shot at in the event of a
jailbreak.

“Hey, Alicia.” Jerome held out his hand.
“Thanks for coming. Especially on a Saturday.”

As if she wouldn’t, weekend or not. She was
dying to hear what Treebeard had to say. “Sure,” she said mildly.
“Have you spoken with your client today?”

“Not since last night.”

“You still think he’ll talk to me?”

Jerome shrugged. “What’s he got to lose?”

What, indeed? No doubt Jerome had told
Treebeard that the D.A. practically had him drawn and quartered.
But still, it was hardly standard procedure for defendants to get
chatty with the prosecutors maneuvering to convict them. It
happened only in highly unusual circumstances, for example when
defense counsel thought such a conversation might blow a case wide
open.

Both attorneys stood at the anteroom’s
reinforced security glass to go through the ID-approval rigmarole,
then after being tagged with bright orange badges were buzzed into
the sanctum sanctorum. Alicia had the willies, as usual. It didn’t
matter how often she visited jails. It didn’t matter how in her
prosecutor’s heart she completely believed that the vast majority
of people who found themselves serving time deserved exactly what
they got. She still hated them. The misery that seemed to pervade
the very walls, as if they held the silent screams of a thousand
men. The unnatural quiet and stale, poorly ventilated air; the
jarring, unexpected clang of buzzers and bells; the unbreachable
chasm between the two rotating populations of guards and
inmates.

Down one long fluorescent-lit corridor, then
down another. Alicia began to feel she was in a maze. Her boot
heels clattered on the Crayola-green linoleum, buffed to such a
high sheen that it gave back her own reflection. Her nostrils
picked up the competing odors of heavy-duty cleaning chemicals and
the sweat of unhappy men living in far too close proximity.

Finally they arrived at an interview room, as
cheerless as everything else. A metal table surrounded by a few
folding chairs was centered beneath a bare hundred-watt bulb
dangling from a cord. The room was equipped with a two-way mirror
they would not use that day.

Alicia had gotten up at dawn to prep. She’d
given Penrose a heads-up, knowing he would neither object to the
interview nor want to conduct it himself. What? On a Saturday?
Interrupt his massage or his tee time or whatever other round of
pleasure he’d scheduled for himself? Not a chance. Though he hadn’t
come up with a single question to add to her list—she doubted he’d
even read it—he did insist she e-mail him a full report by five
o’clock that day. Chances were excellent, though, that he wouldn’t
read it till Monday.

Finally Treebeard appeared, accompanied by a
guard. Alicia took one look at him and thought,
slam-dunk
,
all over again.

Some people were just easier to convict than
others. Alicia knew that virtually all you had to do to put some
people behind bars was to get them in front of a jury. It sure
looked like Treebeard fell into that luckless category. Nobody cut
a good figure in prison orange, or sporting manacles at their
wrists and ankles, but few looked as scrofulous as Treebeard did.
His beard was scraggly and uneven, and it seemed like his
chin-length dark hair hadn’t had a run-in with shampoo since the
turn of the millennium. As the guard shuffled him toward a chair
and he collapsed noisily into it, his entire demeanor screamed
surly
.

Alicia had done her homework. She’d read up
on Treebeard’s history. John David Stennis was a sixties radical
who never adjusted to the end of the decade of love. While the
college friends who’d once protested at his side eventually laid
down their signs and morphed into leaders of government and
industry, he retreated into California’s forests and made their
preservation his cause. That was admirable in many respects, but
somewhere along the way Treebeard became his own worst enemy. He
traded argument for histrionics. He grew to hate the system so
much, he could no longer figure out how to fight it. As his hair
lengthened, so did his rap sheet: a motley assortment of minor drug
infractions and illegal protests. And as his ineffectiveness grew,
so did his cynicism. People came to dismiss Treebeard either as a
kook or a lost soul, and Alicia couldn’t say she disagreed with
either analysis.

“Good morning,” Jerome said, which elicited a
grunt. Treebeard trained his eyes on the floor. “This is Deputy
D.A. Alicia Maldonado,” Jerome went on, “who I told you about. I’m
hoping she can help us.”

The guard removed the manacles and left the
room, indicating he’d stand by in the corridor. Treebeard began a
fast gyration of his right leg, his knee bobbing rhythmically at
nanosecond intervals. He had a barrier of resistance around him
that was almost palpable.

“Are you willing to talk to Ms. Maldonado?”
Jerome asked. “Tell her what you told me?”

Treebeard still said nothing, still refused
to look at either of them. He kept up the knee bob, a motion Alicia
found remarkably irritating.

“You know, I am here to help you,” she told
him.

At that he raised his dark eyes to hers.
“Bullshit.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“You want me to believe a D.A.? How stupid do
you think I am?”

Alicia leaned forward to rest her elbows on
the table. “Let me tell you something about prosecutors. We’re out
to get at the truth more than we’re out to get convictions.
Personally, I have zero desire to put an innocent man behind
bars.”

Again his eyes dropped. He shook his head as
though not one word she said could possibly be believed. His leg
continued to gyrate. “Bullshit,” he repeated.

“I consider Jerome a good judge of
character,” she went on. “When he calls me late on a Friday night
and says his client’s got something I gotta hear, I believe him.
You know how many people in this facility have told Jerome they’re
innocent? Probably every last one of them. But when you said it, he
thought it might actually be true. You want to tell me about
that?”

Treebeard just shook his head. Silence. Then,
finally, “It’s all bullshit,” he said again.

“Fine, that’s it.” She clattered out of her
chair and grabbed her purse from the floor. Out of the corner of
her eye, she saw Jerome shut his eyes and rub his forehead. “You
know what’s bullshit, Treebeard? Spending my Saturday doing this. I
could be out shopping or getting in a workout. I’m outta here.”

Treebeard waited till she had the door open
and was nearly outside in the corridor.

“I am innocent,” he said, “and I saw who did
it.”

That stopped her. She halted with her left
hand holding the door ajar. “What did you say?”

He looked at her, and this time she saw
something new in his dark eyes. A flicker of something genuine. “I
said I saw who did it.”

She waited a moment, then slowly walked back
into the room, letting the door ease shut behind her. She pulled
her thick spiral-bound notebook out of her purse and sat down,
pointing her pen at his still gyrating knee. “All right, I’ll
listen. But stop that goddamn thing with your leg because it’s
driving me crazy.”

A few gyrations later he stilled. She opened
her notebook to a clean page. “Take me back to the night of the
twentieth.”

*

Milo felt as if he were floating in a cotton
cloud. He was perfectly, deliriously comfortable. Somewhere far
away a bird sang, trilled really, a high-voiced little bird that
went on for a time and then stopped. Sing, sing, sing, stop. Sing,
sing, sing ...

Slowly, with great reluctance, he climbed out
of semiconsciousness. He flipped onto his back and linked his hands
behind his head. The bedroom’s blackout drapes were pulled shut,
though in the center where they met he glimpsed a thin vertical
line of white light.
What time must it be?
he wondered. Not
late. He never slept late. And here in California he would wake
even earlier, because he was still running on East Coast time.

It occurred to him that Joan must still be
asleep. The suite was silent, her bedroom a few yards beyond his
closed door. Briefly he shut his eyes, relieved he’d had the
presence of mind to resist her charms the night before and opt for
the second bedroom.

Just hold me
, she had said, after
dinner and conversation, when it really had been time for him to
go.
Can you understand I don’t want to be alone tonight?

He had half understood, half been wary. Even
if her marriage had been less than perfect he could only imagine
how bereft she must feel on the night she buried her husband. Yet
he knew from experience that it was unwise to take anything Joan
said at face value. Invariably she operated with some kind of
agenda. What was it with him?

Seduction, at least partly. She’d gone off to
change into a peach-colored negligee that left little to the
imagination. At her urging he’d sat next to her on the sofa,
watching the fire die in the hearth. There was no denying she was
an attractive woman, especially when she was nearly undressed.
Naturally she had relaxed into the crook of his arm, and naturally
he had toyed with the notion of taking her where clearly she wanted
to go.

But he’d restrained himself. The fact was,
Joan was not the woman he wanted to be with. He might have his
ignoble moments, but he was not such a cad he’d use her as a
substitute.

He sighed.
Alicia, Alicia, Alicia
. She
was an enigma, wrapped in a delectable shell.

He wasn’t giving up on her yet. He had little
experience pursuing women—usually they fell at his feet—but he had
to admit there was a certain thrill to the chase. If she wanted to
make him work for it, fine. It wasn’t exactly hard labor.

What time must it be? Milo forced himself out
of bed, then pulled on the trousers and shirt he’d heaped on the
floor. He tiptoed out into the hall and paused to allow his eyes to
adjust to the blindingly strong light flooding in through the
south-facing French doors. This was the first time since he’d been
on the Monterey Peninsula that it was genuinely sunny.

His mind began to work faster, with more
agility. What time was it? His gaze raked the room, settling on an
ornate clock resting on the fireplace’s white marble mantel. He
strode toward it, only to look at its devilish gold hands, then
have to look again, to convince himself what they revealed.

It was just past 7:30. His flight for San
Diego left San Jose at nine. San Jose was an hour’s drive north in
the best of conditions, and these were hardly those: he needed to
shower, shave, dress, and check out of his hotel before he hit the
road. A different hotel from the one in which he was currently
standing.

Shit and double shit
. He could not
miss an interview because of a woman, particularly one with whom he
had a tortured past and who just so happened to be the widow of his
current story subject. He would never live down that kind of
mistake again. O’Malley would climb to the roof of WBS’s
thirty-story headquarters and shout,
Pretty-boy Pappas!
to
the Manhattan sky.

Milo stood in Joan’s gorgeous suite, rendered
considerably less glamorous by the detritus of dinner congealing on
the small linen-draped table, and wondered what to tackle first.
Then the damnable trilling started up again and this time he
recognized it for what it was. Not a bird but his cell phone,
nearly suffocated between the plump pillows of the love seat. Milo
fished it out, then he punched TALK. “Pappas,” he answered
firmly.

Long, relieved breath, which Milo recognized
as belonging to Mac. “Whew, man, I’m glad you picked up. I was
really starting to worry. Look, we had to go on without you. I
must’ve tried your cell a dozen times.” Mac paused for an
explanation.

Which Milo had no intention of providing.
“Where are you now?” he asked instead.

“About fifteen minutes south of San Jose
airport. We’re running a little late, have to return the rental car
and check the gear.”

“Do you know anything about later
flights?”

“There’s another one just before eleven.”

Milo could make that. His mind began to tick
off the practicalities. “Okay, how about this. I’ll book a driver
to San Jose. When you and Tran get down to San Diego, shoot all the
B-roll, then set up for the interview in the guy’s office. I’ll cab
it from the airport and get there as fast as I can.”

Brief silence, then, “That’ll work.”

It would. Setup alone for a
Newsline
interview, with its high production values, could easily take a
half hour. What with the other shooting Mac and Tran would be able
to do minus their correspondent, Milo would barely be missed.