The Reporter (19 page)

“So why were we ‘exclusive’ on this one?” she asked.

“Who the hell knows?” Pete growled. “I guess they figured because you’re ours, that made the story our ‘exclusive’—did you
see the chyron ‘Home of Channel 6 news reporter Maxi Poole’?”

“Great!” she groused. “I’ll have to move.” She meant it. “Look, Pete, I’m going to the vet’s to see my dog; then I’ll be at
my house to fend off the vultures and protect what’s left of my property. I’ll try to stay out of all the other stations’
live shots, since they don’t sign my checks.” With the telephone receiver tucked under her chin, she was pulling on the assortment
of Richard’s clothes that he had set out for her.

“Maxi,
are
you okay?” Pete asked, knowing the bravado was her way of getting through this.

She took a deep breath. “Not really, Pete. I’m devastated over Carlotta, I’m aching for her son, I’m worried about Debra Angelo
and Gia, I’m terrified that my dog will die, I’m exhausted, and… and I’m scared.”

Maxi found Yukon curled up on the floor of a small cage lined up with several others in a foul-smelling hallway behind the
treatment rooms, cages that held yelping, whining, ailing animals. She was told by a woman at the front desk that Dr. Sullivan
had gone home—Dr. Brice would be in to update her on her dog’s condition when he was finished examining an arthritic Great
Dane.

Maxi knelt on the floor and lowered her head to Yukon’s level. He was lying on his side, bandages wrapped around his throat
and upper body, his only movement the heaving of his chest with his labored breathing. His big, mournful brown eyes gazed
out through the slats of the cage at Maxi.

The day-shift vet walked into the hallway. He was very young, very tall, very skinny, had very short dark hair, and wore huge
black-framed glasses that were much too big for his face.

“How’s he doing?” Maxi asked him, without getting up from the floor.

“I’m Dr. Ray Brice,” the doctor said, kneeling down beside her, putting his hand through the bars and stroking Yukon’s head.
“He’s doing okay, but he’s had a rough time. His surgery was more
complicated than we’d anticipated, and those crime-lab techs demanding specimens didn’t help. He’s getting antibiotics for
infection, and we’ve got him on heavy sedatives so he won’t move around and rip his stitches.”

“Is he out of the woods?” Maxi asked.

“Can’t promise that, Ms. Poole,” the doctor said. “We’ll be watching him carefully for a few days.”

“He looks so… so lonesome, cooped up in this little cage,” she mused. “I didn’t expect—”

“What
did
you expect?” Dr. Brice asked.

“I don’t know…. I thought—”

“I’ll bet I know,” the vet put in with a smile. “You expected old Yukon to be sitting up in bed in a private room, munching
doggie treats and watching game shows.”

“Yes,” she said, realizing that she was being silly. “And I expected that his doctor would stay by his side night and day,
and never go home to his wife and children.”

“Yeah,” Brice said wistfully, “they all do. Dr. Sullivan is the Marcus Welby of veterinarians, and instead you got me, the
Ichabod Crane.”

Maxi stood up and extended her hand. “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve cheered me up—you don’t know how much I needed that.”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “I saw the news this morning.” She’d completely forgotten that the private life of Maxine Poole had
probably been the subject of half the breakfast table conversations in Southern California.

“What can I do for my baby here?” she asked, looking solicitously at Yukon.

“You can go about your day, think good thoughts for him, and call us later this afternoon. Meantime, we have your number—if
anything changes, we’ll call you.”

“Thanks, Doc.” She smiled, feeling reassured that Yuke was in good hands.

* * *

Maxi drove slowly by her house to assess the situation there. News trucks were parked all over narrow Beverly Glen Boulevard
on both sides of the road. Her gate was open, and one of its hinges had been ripped off, causing it to list drunkenly against
the wood slat fence. Peering inside, she saw a strip of yellow crime-scene tape blocking off the walkway, and a police officer
snapping photos of the ground behind it. Outside the tape, news crews camped on her front lawn, talking, smoking, drinking
coffee. Cable was strewn everywhere, tripods dug into her flower beds, Styrofoam cups littered her grass.

She had borrowed a New York Yankees cap that she’d found in Richard’s apartment. Pulling the visor low on her forehead, she
wondered if she could somehow get inside her own house without being noticed. Not a chance. These were news people. She kept
moving.

One of the live trucks was coming toward her. It was her own station’s; she could make out the Channel Six logo painted on
the sides. As the cumbersome van approached, she could see Richard Winningham in the passenger seat, with his cameraman driving.

When they’d pulled alongside, Greg Ross rolled the window down and Richard mouthed, “Go up past Briarwood and take a left
on Nicada. We’ll meet you right around the corner—we’ve got a plan to get you in.” Then they rolled on past.

At work, they called Richard Winningham the “crime dog,” and they called Greg Ross, his cameraman, the “crime pup.” Greg was
twenty-six, with boyish good looks and wavy blond hair that fell to his shoulders. His usual dress was surfer clothes—Richard
kidded him that he looked like he had time-traveled from the sixties. But he was tough, bright, expert with a camera, and
fearless in the trenches. The two were a good team. Maxi was waiting for them when they pulled around the corner.

“Hi,” Richard said as he approached her Blazer. “These
goons—excuse me, our esteemed colleagues—are staked out, expecting to get you on camera. Even if you refuse to stop and talk,
they’ll yell questions at your back as you drive in, and you’ll be at the top of every newscast on the air tonight. Do you
want that?”

“God, no,” she said. “That’d be awful!”

“Yeah, especially in those clothes,” he said, grinning. She looked down at herself in Richard’s bicycle pants and huge denim
shirt, his argyles jammed into her Nikes, and his baseball cap pulled down over her eyebrows. “Not exactly proper business
attire,” she agreed. “So what’s the plan?”

He told her he would walk into her front yard and tell everybody that he’d just talked to Pete Capra on his cell phone, and
Maxi was already at work, so she wouldn’t be back here until after the Six O’clock News tonight. A few of them would figure
out that it was probably a ruse, but even if they hung around, she’d be able to use her zapper to get into the garage while
he distracted them. They would definitely not be expecting Maxi Poole in a beat-up old truck dressed in Salvation Army gear,
he told her. And the Blazer had tinted windows, so she wouldn’t be seen clearly. By the time they realized it was her, if
they did, she’d be inside.

“They’ll hate you for this,” Maxi said, “and you’ve got to live with them on the street.”

“Nah.” He laughed. “They’ll give me points for it.”

She looked at her watch: 8:40. The police crime lab crew was already inside—she had given one of the officers a key last night
in case she had to stay overnight with Yukon. She waited for about a minute before following the news van back to the house.
When she tooled past her own gate, she saw the newsies gathered around Richard, listening to him. She opened her garage door
with the remote control in her Blazer, scooted inside, and zapped the door shut behind her. Made it.

She slipped through the kitchen and into her living room.
An officer was dusting surfaces for fingerprints, another was photographing the front door locks and the alarm system.

“Find anything significant?” she asked.

“Maybe,” said one who’d introduced himself as Delaney. “We photographed some footprints we’re pretty sure were made by the
intruder. And we’ve got shots of footprints at the Nathanson house where the Ricco woman was murdered. We’ll see if they match.”

“What do you think?” Maxi asked.

“Can’t tell, and even if we could, we wouldn’t. It’s not up to us to release any information, especially to you folks.”

“Off the record, I swear,” Maxi entreated.

“Off the record—and I’ll hold you to that, Ms. Poole—I’m betting we have a match. And I think you’re lucky to be alive.”

D
ebra Angelo watched the morning news with a mixture of fascination, horror, and relief—fascination that frail, unbalanced
Meg Davis might actually be a vicious killer, horror at the realization that all the time the woman had spent lurking near
her house, Debra’s own family could have been targets, and relief that this high-profile arrest should take the heat off
her.

And Maxi could have been
killed!
She’d been trying to get Maxi on the phone since she heard the news, but had only reached her answering machine.

Her lawyer, Marvin Samuels, had phoned earlier this morning. He and Debra were due at sheriff’s headquarters in downtown Los
Angeles at ten, but as soon as he’d learned about Meg Davis’s arrest, Samuels called Mike Cabello to challenge the detective’s
reasons for questioning his client. He was told they would table the session, for now. When he was notified yesterday that
they wanted Debra for questioning, he’d asked why they were calling his client in on the Carlotta Ricco murder. He reminded
Cabello that Sheriff’s Homicide had managed to come up with nothing on Debra Angelo in the Jack Nathanson case, and that the
county was courting a wrongful-arrest suit as it was, not to mention civil charges for destroying her livelihood. Cabello
told him that whoever killed Carlotta Ricco had sailed right through the locked front door, so they would be talking to everyone
who had keys to the Nathanson house, including cleaning help, gardeners, and other service people. Debra had a key, and she
knew the Nathansons’ alarm code. She said it was in case she ever arrived there to drop Gia off before anyone in the household
got home—rather than keep her daughter waiting outside on the doorstep, she could take her inside and sit with her.

Debra had told Samuels that the Nathansons’ key usually hung on a hook in her kitchen, near the garage door. When Bessie would
drive Gia to her father’s house, she, too, always took that key with her. And, in fact, Jack had had a key and knew the alarm
code to her house, too, for the same reason.

She jumped when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Daugherty, the principal at Gia’s school, sounding even more rigid than usual.
It was necessary that she come to the school immediately and take Gia home, the woman told Debra in icy tones. Westview could
no longer accommodate her daughter.

“Please, Mrs. Daugherty,” Debra tried, “this is the worst possible time for Gia to have more changes in her life. Tell me
what happened, and I promise I’ll see that she does better.”

“It’s too late,” the woman responded. “Please come in immediately and pick up your child. She’s sitting outside my office,
she’s crying, and she is not welcome back in class.”

Sensing she’d get nowhere on the phone, Debra told the woman that it was a forty-minute drive from her house to the school,
and she would leave right away.

Now what?
Debra thought, as she drove through Malibu canyon toward Westview Elementary. She could tell from Mrs. Daugherty’s tone that
she would have to muster all of her powers of persuasion to turn this one around, but she was pretty sure she could pull it
off. Again. Ridiculous as it seemed to her Italian mentality, movie stars were this country’s royalty, and she might as well
take advantage of it.

Debra pulled into the parking lot. The school looked more like a country club, she considered, as her gaze traveled to the
tennis courts, the Olympic-size swimming pool, the high-tech playground, the performing arts theater. She walked up the stairs
and down the long corridor to a door marked PRINCIPAL, and went inside.

Gia was sitting on a bench against the wall of the outer office, head down, one pink sneaker on top of the other, tears streaming
down her cheeks. She looked very small in her regulation pleated plaid skirt and navy blazer, white shirt, and white socks.
Debra sat down on the bench beside her.

“What happened, Gia?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me
nothing,
young lady,” Debra fumed. “Tell me exactly why I’ve been called here.” Gia started to cry again.

Mrs. Daugherty’s assistant appeared at the doorway and beckoned the two inside. The principal sat behind her desk, imperious
in a severely tailored gray suit with a white ruffled blouse, her dyed black hair pulled up in a knot. She peered down at
them through wire-rimmed glasses, and Debra had a palpable sense of how intimidated Gia must feel. “Please be seated,” Mrs.
Daugherty said crisply, indicating the two chairs in front of her desk.

“Tell your mother,” she addressed Gia, “what you did to Susan Kostner in class this morning.”

Gia lowered her head. Debra looked from one to the other, waiting. I
can’t make her talk,
she thought dismally.
Let’s see if this poker-faced harridan can.

“I hit her,” Gia said in a small voice.

“And would you tell your mother
why
you hit her, Miss Nathanson?” Mrs. Daugherty pressed.

“Because she said dirty things to me,” Gia whimpered.

“What dirty things?” Debra asked her daughter.

“I said I wanted to play with her at recess, and she said she wouldn’t play with me,” the girl responded weakly. Debra’s heart
was breaking. Of course Susan Kostner didn’t want to play with her. Given Gia’s misanthropic behavior, she didn’t wonder that
other children shunned her.

“And so you slapped her across the face!” Mrs. Daugherty snapped. She turned to Debra. “Parents entrust their children to
us, to teach and to safeguard while they’re in our care. We can no longer expose them to unprovoked attacks by your daughter.
At the very least, she puts us in danger of lawsuits,” the woman intoned. “Furthermore, she thrusts her classes into disarray,
destroying the kind of climate in which teachers are able to teach and students are able to learn. We can no longer tolerate
her behavior.”