This time the silence lasted even longer than before. Then he heard her sigh and saw her rise from her chair. Light flooded the room as she opened the blinds. He screwed up his eyes against the pain of it until his pupils contracted.
Angela’s sitting room, where she conducted her sessions, was an elegant room. Framed certificates and diplomas in almost every imaginable branch of psychology, lined oak panelled walls. A soft leather sofa and armchairs stood among brass standard lamps with green glass shades on a sumptuous, thick-piled oatmeal carpet rising to crimson velvet drapes. She turned back toward him. An attractive woman herself. Thick, straight, blond hair tumbling over square shoulders. A willowy figure. Green eyes that seemed to penetrate the soul. She was not that much older than Michael, he had speculated the first time they met. Mid-to-late thirties, perhaps. But there was no wedding ring. No hint of a man around the house. She was something of an enigma.
She turned back to Michael. “Same time on Thursday?”
“Sure.” He eased himself reluctantly from her sofa and braced himself to face the world again.
He stepped out from the side entrance of her beachfront villa and followed the path to a high gate that opened on to the boardwalk. The houses here had narrow frontages, many of them recently remodelled. But they were deceptively large, and ran back nearly half a block to a wide access lane that serviced two streets of houses laid back to back. A wide expanse of golden, sandy beach stretched away to the cold blue of the ocean, and lifeguard stations raised on stilts were set every few hundred yards to monitor the safety of the crowds who would descend in the summer.
Tall palms and gnarled Joshua trees crowded tiny gardens where outdoor tables and chairs and huge gas barbecues, were still covered over for the season. The boardwalk was almost deserted, except for an overweight woman in a red tracksuit and straw hat walking at a leisurely pace, swinging the hand of her elderly husband. They seemed so relaxed. Comfortable with each other. Walking in silence, hand in hand, enjoying the sun. Michael envied them.
He turned and headed south toward the ferry. He and Mora had often come down here to walk the dog. Taking their time. Heading for the Crab Cooker, where they would frequently buy giant crab claws and homemade tartare sauce to carry back to the house for a lunch they would wash down with chilled, dry California Sauvignon blanc.
The ferry itself was little more than a barge that could carry three or four vehicles at a time across the few hundred yards that separated the peninsula from Balboa Island. Two of them plied back and forth between wooden landing stages. On the peninsula side, a small ferris wheel near the Maritime Museum stood silent, except for the wind fibrillating through the fine web of cable that made up its superstructure.
The shack that rented out boats and arranged parasailing was deserted, racks of sun hats and tee-shirts fluttering in the breeze outside. Michael walked down the ramp to the waiting ferry and sat on the bench beside the pilot’s cabin and felt the breeze in his face as it chugged its way slowly across the channel.
As he strolled down the sidewalk of the island’s Grand Canal, he let his gaze wander along the row of millionaires’ homes, mock mansions built out of plyboard masked by stone facing and stucco and clapboard siding. Each one had its yacht at the door. Fifty-, sixty-, seventy-foot vessels. He and Mora had been among that in-crowd once, popular, on everyone’s invitation list. Their house, after all, stood in one of Corona del Mar’s most sought-after locations, overlooking all the others. But their friends had known that the money was hers, and after she died the invitations to Michael had ceased. He was not, after all, really one of them.
He cut through Balboa Avenue to Marine Avenue and bought himself a caramel machiatto at Starbucks. He and Mora had stopped here for coffee most days. He continued to come regularly with his laptop, an escape from the house. And people still remembered Mora. Retired people in running shoes and sweat pants and baseball caps. Smiles spread across age-spattered faces that had seen too much sun and too many years.
“Hi, Michael, how are you today?”
He guessed that like everyone else they thought he was still rich. Sure, he had a house worth four million — in a healthy market. But he had also inherited an outstanding home loan of three million, which was about all he might get in a sale during this period of economic downturn. And he was rapidly running out of the means to keep up the payments.
Chapter Four
It was a fifteen-minute drive from the house in Dolphin Terrace to the Lido, where the lawyer’s office stood at the end of a wooden landing one floor up, opposite the marina. Michael could smell food cooking in the waterfront restaurants. Fresh fish. Garlic. The warm, yeasty scent of hot bread.
Huge yachts and seventy foot MV’s rose and fell on the gentle swell, tethered to moorings that cost twenty thousand a month to rent.
Jack Sandler was smooth in every sense of the word. He had a voice like velvet, a face shaved to a shiny finish, and a bald head that seemed to have been polished to reflect the sun. Michael guessed that he earned big bucks, even for a lawyer. He had a huge desk, as polished and shiny as his skull, and an unparalleled view over the harbour. He ushered Michael into a seat by the window and sat himself down behind his big desk, peering at his client over orderly piles of files and papers.
“How are you doing, Michael?” he said as if Michael were his best friend. “You’re looking well, my man.” But behind the facade, Michael was certain he must be wondering if his client was going to have the wherewithal to pay the bill.
Michael had no interest in exchanging pleasantries. “What’s the news, Jack?”
“Not good I’m afraid, Michael.” Sandler’s smile seem to fix itself on his face, before finally he allowed it to morph into something like a frown. “Looks like the judgment’s gonna go against you. Best we can hope for is that they’ll accept some kind of a deal and settle out of court.”
Michael had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, like a stone slowly sinking through quicksand. He had seen this coming since the funeral. Mora had inherited her money from her husband, whom she had met when she went to work for his newspaper and magazine publishing empire in San Francisco. Originally she had interviewed for the job as his PA. He told her later she hadn’t got the job because he had known immediately he would fall for her. She went to work at first for one of his executives. But she had still drawn him like a magnet, and he had spent more time in her office than in his own. In the end they had fallen in love. He had divorced his wife, made a settlement, set up trust funds for his kids, and married Mora. They should have lived happily ever after. But just five years later he died from a rare form of brain cancer, and she inherited the company.
For a year she had tried to run the operation as he had, but she hadn’t the heart or the gift for it, and in the end sold up — for a staggering fifty million dollars. Which was when her late husband’s ex-wife and his kids made their first attempt to grab a slice of the cake. On that occasion the courts had thrown out their case, but Mora’s guilt had led her to gift cash to each of the kids, and ten million to the former wife. A mistake. For it had created a precedent, established a recognition by her that the family of her late husband had some entitlement. Certainly more than Michael. Which was the argument they were making now.
The trouble was that Mora had been no businesswoman. She had made a series of bad investments, spent money like water, and what had started out as a small fortune had dwindled to just a few million, most of which was tied up in property. Her stocks and shares provided barely enough income to cover the running costs of the house and pay the home loan.