Web of Evil: A Novel of Suspense (25 page)

Ali reached out and covered her mother’s hand. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Edie returned. “But knowing you were out there with all those bullets flying…” Edie shook her head. “Oh, my. I was terrified.”

“So was I,” Ali admitted.
And with good reason,
she thought.

Edie stood up. Her freshly poured cup of coffee was already gone. She could drink coffee hotter than anyone Ali knew.

“Is there any food in the house?” Edie asked, nodding toward the big house where none of them had stayed. “The pool house fridge has coffee and a bottle of ketchup but that’s about it.”

“Probably,” Ali said, “but I don’t know for sure.”

“I’ll go check,” Edie said. “Chris was still asleep on the couch when I came through the living room, but I know we’ll all feel better if we have a decent breakfast under our belts.”

Vintage Edie Larson,
Ali thought.

Once Edie was in the house, Ali continued scanning the various online news Web sites. There were three that included pictures of Dave dragging her away from the Alero during the rest area confrontation. The captions on two of those identified her as an “unidentified carjacking victim.” In the third, the usual suspect and journalistic busybody LMB, the blogger at socal copshop.com, identified her by name in the caption of a particularly unflattering photo. In it, Ali looked downright ghastly.

Knowing that some of her cutloose fans were bound to see the photo and worry, Ali decided it was time to face up to her blog and write something about what had been going on.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM
Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Ali was starting to slog her way through the mail when Chris, still limping, ambled out onto the patio. His hair was standing on end. The way he looked reminded her so much of how he had looked as a child that it made her heart melt, and it took real effort on Ali’s part to keep from leaping up and hugging him.

“Where’s Grandma?” he wanted to know.

“Making breakfast,” Ali answered.

“Great. I’m starved.”

Chris stretched and headed for the kitchen. As soon as he opened the back door, Ali caught a whiff of her mother’s baking coffee cake wafting through the air. Ali followed her son’s lead. Then, once she was inside the house, she heard the sound of a hair dryer coming from the living room, and she followed that as well.

Wielding a whining hair dryer, Edie stood over the bird’s-eye maple credenza in the front entryway. Nearby, a mound of bulging black plastic bags lay stacked by the front door.

Ali spoke to her mother three times before Edie noticed her. She switched off the noisy hair dryer and then turned her hearing aids back on.

“What are you doing?” Ali asked again.

“I asked your father what to do about this water mark,” Edie said. “Someone must have put a vase down without wiping off the bottom. Dad says to try the hair-dryer routine first. If this doesn’t work, he says I should bring it home and he’ll refinish the top for you there. Or else Kip will. Dad says he’s pretty good with his hands.”

As far as Ali could see, the ring wasn’t getting much better, but she appreciated her mother’s effort more than she could say.

“And I got rid of the old dead flowers,” Edie added. “They were falling all to pieces, dropping petals everywhere, and stinking up a storm. Hope you don’t mind.”

Ali didn’t mind at all. She was delighted to find that the bouquets that were to have marked Paul and April’s wedding had been swept away in the flower-clearing operation along with all the condolence bouquets. The catering tables and chairs had been collected and stacked at one end of the living room.

“Your yard man,” Edie said, nodding toward the chairs and tables. “He helped me with that. What’s his name again?”

“Jesus.”

“Yes, that’s it. Jesus. He said he needed to finish doing something out front, but that as soon as he’s done, he’ll come collect the bags of dead flowers and put them on his compost heap.”

Of course,
Ali realized.

Jesus had come back to reclaim his job, just as she had asked. Crime scene tape aside, he must have been the one who had repaired and reassembled the broken gate.

“He said I should tell you that the lawyer you sent him to was very good.”

Right then, with Marcella Johnson’s big touchdown on the scoreboard, Ali was glad to hear that another of her many attorneys had turned out to be a positive for someone.

“Good,” Ali said. “As much as I’m paying in legal fees at the moment, it’s only fair that we end up with decent representation and a few wins on our side.”

“Jesus and I were having a bit of a communication problem,” Edie continued. “As you know, my Spanish isn’t all that good and I had my hearing aids turned off because the hair dryer was so loud, but I think he said a friend of his is coming over a little later. He mentioned her name, but I didn’t quite catch it. Olivia maybe?”

“Elvira?” Ali asked. “My old cook?”

“That could be it. I just didn’t hear him properly.”

They had finished their breakfast of cheese baked eggs and coffee cake when the doorbell rang. When Ali went to answer it, she found that the bags filled with dead flowers had magically and quietly disappeared. She opened the door to find Elvira Jimenez standing nervously on the front porch.

“Why, Elvira,” Ali exclaimed with pleasure. “How good to see you again. Come in.”

Elvira hung back. Ali went out and gave her a welcoming hug.

“I should not have come,” Elvira said.

“Of course you should have,” Ali said. “Our other cook just left. If you’re not working somewhere else, maybe you’d like your old job back.”

Chris appeared in the doorway. When Elvira saw him, her face broke into a broad smile, and she allowed him to lead her into the house.

“You’re too skinny,” she told him, patting his belly affectionately. “Someone needs to give you more cookies. And tortillas.”

Chris took her into the kitchen, where Elvira sniffed the air. Nodding appreciatively in the direction of the coffee cake, she held out her hand to Edie Larson.

“I believe I have met you other times when you were here,” Elvira said.

“Yes,” Edie agreed. “It’s nice to see you again. Won’t you sit down?”

Elvira looked uncomfortable. Her eyes slipped from one face to another, finally coming to rest on Ali. Elvira shook her head and remained standing.

“Jesus said I should come,” she said at last. “And his niece. She said the same thing.”

“I’ve spoken to Andrea,” Ali said, hoping to find some common ground that would ease Elvira’s obvious discomfort. “She’s a nice girl.”

Elvira’s dark eyes bored into Ali’s. “A nice girl?” she asked.

“Of course,” Ali said.

“Some people would not call her that—nice,” Elvira ventured. “She got pregnant once when she wasn’t married. She had to have an abortion.”

Ali shrugged. “Those things happen,” she said. “It’s important to the girl it happens to and to her family, but it’s not important to the rest of the world.”

“But it is important,” Elvira said urgently. “It’s a sin—a mortal sin.”

Ali saw at once that she had stepped into something. So did Edie.

“It’s considered a mortal sin by some people,” Edie said kindly. “And I, for one, happen to agree with you.”

Elvira smiled wanly. Then she reached into her threadbare cloth bag and pulled out a worn leather wallet. From it she removed a photo—a wallet-sized photo—of a newborn baby with a knitted pink cap perched on top of her head. Elvira handed the photo to Ali, who studied it for a moment. The baby had dark hair and fair skin, but there was something striking about the eyes.

“My great-granddaughter,” Elvira explained. “My granddaughter’s daughter.”

Of course, the baby wasn’t pretty at all. She was in fact wrinkly and more than a little ugly, but there are times when white lies are not only acceptable, they’re downright necessary.

“Congratulations,” Ali said, handing the photo on to Chris. “She’s very pretty.”

Chris glanced briefly at the photo and then, in turn, handed it along to his grandmother. Edie took one look at it then settled heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs.

“Oh, forevermore,” she breathed. “Not another one!”

“Another one?” Ali asked. “What you do you mean?”

“Don’t tell me you can’t see it!” Edie exclaimed. “This child has her father’s eyes. She looks exactly like Paul Grayson.”

T
he story came out gradually over the course of the next few days while Ali went about the job of handling Paul’s funeral. It had to be done and since there was no one else to do it, Ali did. Fortunately, April’s father came forward and insisted on handling April’s final arrangements. Ali was relieved to learn that he wanted nothing at all to do with a joint service. That meant Ali didn’t have to worry about giving Fred Macon of the Three Palms Mortuary any more business, either.

But Ali did have to worry about Jesus Sanchez, who finally came forward and told her what he knew—and far more than Ali wanted to hear. He told her about how his niece, without his knowledge, had come to a party at the pool house. Paul had served drinks to Andrea and several of her young friends and then had taken advantage of the situation when Andrea was too drunk to see straight. When Andrea had turned up pregnant, Paul had paid for her abortion and given her money over and above that as well. He had also promised her father, Jesus, that it would never happen again. But it had—as everyone now knew—with Elvira’s young visiting granddaughter, Consuela.

Paul had tried the same program with Consuela that he had used successfully with Andrea. He had offered to pay for an abortion plus a five-thousand-dollar premium. Except Consuela wouldn’t go for it because it turned out she was a good Catholic girl. The trait had skipped Consuela’s own mother and had jumped a generation, going straight from Elvira to her granddaughter. The baby, Angelina, was now a month and a half old.

A few months earlier, Ali Reynolds would have taken some satisfaction in learning that Paul Grayson had been screwing around on April at the same time April had been maintaining her long-term cozy friendship with Tracy McLaughlin. But Ali’s paradigms had inalterably shifted that night out there in the desert—the night when she and her son had almost died. What had been important to her before no longer seemed to matter.

Ali’s concern now, knowing that Consuela’s child existed—that Angelina Rojas existed—was seeing to it that Angelina was properly provided for. Once again she found herself huddling with attorneys, trying to sort out reasonable support arrangements for this baby who could by no means be called a “love” child but who nonetheless deserved to have a very real claim on her father’s assets. And the fact that Ali was prepared to be more than fair—that she was determined, in fact, to be downright generous with her former husband’s assets—made a complicated situation far easier to handle than it would have been otherwise.

The negotiations went forward in utmost secrecy. That was the one thing Ali insisted upon—for Angelina’s sake, until she was old enough to choose for herself. Until she was old enough to ask her own questions and hear the answers.

Edie and Chris stayed until Friday, after the funeral on Thursday. Knowing Ali would most likely be listing and selling the house, they helped her sort and pack. Paul’s clothing—the expensive suits that he had reveled in—went to Goodwill, with the exception of the blue pinstripe Hugo Boss, which Paul would wear in his casket. April’s things were packed into boxes and taken to her father to do with as he saw fit.

Ali herself went through the house, sorting out what she wanted and what she didn’t. Most of it she didn’t. The art would go to an auction house. So would most of the furniture, dishes, and glassware, with the exception of the comfortable leather chair and sofa from the family room and the water-marred bird’s-eye maple credenza from the entryway. Those and everything else Ali wanted, she stacked in the family room until such time as she was ready to call for a moving van. As for the wine cellar? Ali managed to locate a company that specialized in moving fine wines and made arrangements for Paul’s entire collection, racks and all, to be moved to Sedona.

She talked to Dave on the phone from time to time during the course of that week and had offered to come over, but Dave said that wasn’t necessary. He stayed on in Palm Springs at Easy’s bedside, and since Ali wasn’t Easy’s friend, she thought it best not to intrude.

By Monday evening of the following week, Paul was buried and the house was more or less sorted out. Ali had blogged some but not much. She had done enough to let people know she was alive—enough to let them know she was okay. But everything that had happened had left her more traumatized than she would have thought possible, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet—not nearly.

She was sitting in the mostly packed family room, surveying the debris field and having a solo glass of wine, when the doorbell rang. Startled out of her solitude, Ali hurried to the front door, looked out through the peephole, and was delighted to find Dave Holman standing on her doorstep.

“Hello, stranger,” she said, unlatching the security locks and opening the door wide. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m on my way back home to Sedona tomorrow,” he said. “I wanted to stop by tonight and see how you were doing and if you needed anything.”

“How’s Easy?” Ali asked, leading Dave into and through the house.

Dave shrugged. “Out of the woods for now,” he answered. “At least, he’s out of the ICU. That’s major progress.”

“So he’s going to make it?”

“His doctors seem to think so,” Dave said. “And his wife thinks so, too. She says he’s too damned stubborn to die, and maybe that’s true.”

Ali nodded.

“And I hear the grand jury has already started handing down indictments,” Dave continued.

Ali nodded again, but without really knowing what was what. She had spent little time following the stories that had surfaced in the media in the aftermath of the Joaquin arrests at the Pink Swan and Amber’s and Lucia’s deaths in the Palm Springs shootout. Ali found she had scant interest and even less patience left over for people who had allowed themselves to be caught up in Lucia Joaquin’s machinations.

Someone else might have been fooled by Ali’s studied indifference to the subject at hand, but not Dave Holman. “What’s going on with you?” he asked.

At the door of the cluttered family room, Dave paused long enough to survey the damage. Then he stepped forward and moved a stack of boxes off the leather couch, clearing himself a place to sit while Ali poured a glass of wine from one of Paul’s most cherished bottles.

“According to Paul’s complicated and computerized grading system,” she said, handing him the glass, “this is a rare five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle Bordeaux. It’s supposed to be top of the line.”

Dave took a tentative sip and smacked his lips. “I don’t think I’ve ever tasted five-hundred-dollar wine, but it’s not bad. Not bad at all.”

They sat for a minute or so in silence. “You still haven’t answered my question,” he reminded her.

“Have you ever read Ernest Hemingway?” Ali asked finally.

“Not my style of reading material,” Dave said. “Why?”

You may not read Ernest Hemingway,
Ali thought fondly,
but if you’re not a character straight out of Hemingway, I don’t know who is.

“I keep remembering a story of his I read once,” Ali continued aloud. “I’m not sure, but I think the title was something like ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’”

Dave took another sip of his wine. “And?” he prodded.

“As I recall, Francis was a big-game hunter who took his bitch of a wife along with him on an African safari.”

“Sounds like fun,” Dave said. “Please tell me the story has a happy ending. Just say the bitchy wife dies.”

“That’s the whole problem,” Ali said. “She doesn’t die. She and her husband have a huge fight—or several of them, more like it. He finally tells her to go piss up a rope. Then he walks out into the bush to shoot his buffalo and his wife kills him.”

“So he was happy between the end of the fight and the time his wife kills him?” Dave asked. “That’s it? That’s his short happy life?”

“Pretty much,” Ali answered.

Dave helped himself to another sip of wine. “Does this story have a point?” he asked.

“Sort of,” Ali said. “Here I was just getting used to the idea that maybe I was wrong about Paul. I was beginning to think that if he was helping Easy catch the bad guys, maybe Paul wasn’t as bad as I thought. Then whammo. Out of the blue I find out he has a brand-new baby, a baby no one—including April Gaddis—knew anything about.”

“All that means is what goes around comes around,” Dave said. “I suppose that’s fair.”

“For everyone but the baby and her mother,” Ali said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

Ali told him.

“You’re doing all this without even the formality of a paternity test?”

“I don’t need a paternity test,” Ali said. “All you have to do is look at Angelina’s eyes. She looks just like her daddy.”

Dave shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I never met the man. I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Ali nodded. “I guess you will.”

“And what are you going to do?” he asked.

Ali waved vaguely in the direction of the goods stacked haphazardly in the family room. “Call for a truck, have this stuff dragged back home to Sedona.”

“You’re not going to stay here?”

“Why would I?” Ali said. “I don’t fit in here anymore.”

“What are you going to do when you get home?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about cutloose?” Dave asked. “I’ve been checking your blog. There’s nothing new on it—hasn’t been for days.”

“I haven’t had that much to say,” Ali said quietly. “For the first time in my life, I’m at a loss for words. I don’t have a clue what I should say about any of this.”

It was true. She had tried to respond to the avalanche of e-mail that had poured in, but her heart hadn’t been in it. Not even when she was writing to people she knew, like Velma T in Laguna.

“Maybe you could try talking about how lucky you are,” Dave suggested.

“Lucky?” Ali asked in dismay. “I’m supposed to be lucky?”

“Sure,” Dave said with a grin. “My ex is still alive and giving me hell. Yours is giving you hell, but at least he’s dead. So no matter what Paul Grayson has done so far, he won’t be doing it anymore.” Dave raised his glass. “So here’s to cutloose,” he said, “because you are cut loose—finally. And here’s to your going back home and going to work. People are waiting to hear from you, Ali, Dave Holman included.”

“Thank you,” Ali said, raising her own glass in return. “Thank you very much.”