He frowned, confused, and thought that maybe he really was dead after all. Angela’s killer was the elderly, silver-haired lady from the Starbucks coffee shop on Balboa Island. Her hand was trembling as she lowered the gun. “When I bought this, I took a course in care and maintenance,” she said. “It included eight lessons in loading, targeting, and firing. I never ever thought I would actually shoot someone with it.”
“Who are you?” Michael’s voice was barely a whisper.
The sound of it seemed to awaken her, as if she was just emerging from some daydream, or maybe a nightmare. She hurried over to kneel down beside him.
“Oh, my dear, that looks bad.”
He looked up into her pale blue eyes and saw her concern.
“Who are you?” he asked again.
For a moment she avoided his gaze, before turning her eyes directly to meet his. “I’m Doobie,” she said. “I thought maybe you might need some help.”
Chapter Forty
The Orange County Superior court in Santa Ana stood back from the road in Civic Center Drive, behind a screen of trees and bushes. A modern building of concrete and glass. Reflecting that, the courtroom itself seemed to lack the gravitas of many older courts — buildings which owed more in architecture and design to the influence of the Europeans.
But the hearing itself had been grave enough. The subjects under discussion — fraud, theft, and murder. Being decided here was what culpability, if any, could be placed at the door of Michael Kapinsky for the murder of Janey Amat, and the subsequent shooting of Angela Monachino. As well as whether there were sufficient grounds to charge him in connection with the theft of more than three million dollars.
Michael had been dreading it. After five weeks of recuperation from his stabbing, he had finally been deemed fit enough to go before a judge, and the stress of it seemed to make his shoulder ache all the more.
Now, as his legal team walked him from the courtroom, he could barely believe that, finally, it was over. He was still shaking. His legs felt weak. His attorney, Jack Sandler, slipped a triumphant arm through his and leaned in to whisper, “It’s finished, Michael. Relax. You’re home free.”
But not entirely. The judge had ordered that as soon as the sale of Michael’s property in Dolphin Terrace was completed, $3,183,637 of the proceeds were to be sequestered pending an inquiry into where the money had come from and into Arnold Smitts’ connections to the mob. The good news was that no one, either officially or unofficially, believed that Michael had stolen it. So he was off the mob hook as well.
The only thing, it seemed, that everyone agreed upon was how foolish he had been. And the judge had not been slow to pass comment on the subject.
Gillian MacCormack sat in the hall outside the courtroom, a sixty-seven-year-old lady in a grey tweed suit, sandwiched between a young lady lawyer sharply dressed in black and an older, male assistant. She stood up, filled with trepidation, as Michael emerged, pale and relieved. And for a moment their eyes met.
She had told police that when she and Michael exchanged RL names in SL, she had taken the first available flight from Sacramento to John Wayne airport, Orange County, a mere fifteen-minute taxi ride away from Newport Beach. Her instinct had been that he was in imminent danger and might need her help. Which had turned out to be extremely prescient. Of more concern now, it seemed, than even the shooting of Angela Monachino was how she had managed to smuggle a gun on board her airplane. To the consternation of the federal aviation authorities and Homeland Security, she had told them quite simply that she had wrapped it in a pair of camisole knickers and packed it in her check-in bag. Her lawyer made the point, quite validly, that she was unlikely to have been able to access the hold and retrieve the gun during the flight.
An enquiry had, however, been launched and was likely to take several months to complete.
She held Michael’s gaze for a few brief moments. She was very petite, with a remarkably smooth and unlined, elfin face, and the bluest of blue eyes that seemed to penetrate his very soul. Her luxuriant silver hair was tied back in a ponytail. They had barely spoken in the weeks since the shooting. And although he owed her his life, his overwhelming emotion on each occasion they had met, was embarrassment. And humiliation at the recollection of the confidences they had exchanged, the intimacies they had shared. He was not sure he could ever forgive her the deception. She was, after all, thirty-five years his senior.
He didn’t linger, or meet her eyes for more than a few seconds, acknowledging her only with the merest of nods, before allowing his legal team to steer him away toward the door and the Californian sunshine that split the sidewalks outside.
But even as he felt the warmth of it on his skin and turned his face toward the sky, he felt an ache of regret deep within. For the fundamental truth was that he missed Doobie Littlething.
Gillian MacCormack’s attorney took her by the elbow and led her toward the courtroom. In a sense her situation was the graver of the two. It was she who had pulled the trigger, she who had taken a life. And the court would decide today whether or not she was to face charges of manslaughter.
Chapter Forty-One
All the doors in the house were open. A warm breeze blew through it from the ocean. Michael sat on the terrace staring at the chess board on which he had so often done battle with Mora. Every piece stood in its starting square, ebony facing ivory in an eternal stand-off. And he knew that he would never move these chessmen again.
He looked up as a squat, square man in blue overalls appeared at the open door. “You want me to pack that now, sir?”
Michael nodded and got up to let the removal man wrap and box the chessmen and board and free up the table and chairs to be taken out front to the truck. Virtually everything was gone now. The boxes packed all those weeks ago. The furniture. He had donated a lot of it to charity. After all, it would take much less to furnish the small apartment he had taken for rent further along the coast. He would still have his beloved sea-view and a small balcony where he could sit out and read, but a single man required less space and less baggage.
He had decided not to go back east. He had got too used to the sunshine. It would be hard to return to the cold, grey winters of New England.
He wandered now through the empty house that he and Mora had once animated, and knew that finally he had reached a place in his life where he felt able to move on. He had quit his job, and had no idea what the future might bring. But there would be no more looking back.
“You want us to pack up your computer stuff?”
Michael turned to find another removal man regarding him quizzically. “No, that’s alright. I’ll be packing it in the trunk to take to the apartment myself.”
“Okay, sir. Well, that’s us finished for now. Have a good day.”
“Sure. You, too.”
When they had gone, he went through to his office. There was no chair. So he lifted his computer and monitor carefully down to the floor and squatted in front of it with the keyboard in his lap. He would check his email one last time before dismantling it all. There were a couple of mails from his lawyer, another from the bank, one from Sherri, who was holding him to his promise of fifteen percent. In the end she had sold the property for just under four million, so she had earned her fee.
He dealt with them all, and was about to shut down, when his eye fell upon the Second Life icon on his desktop. It sent a tiny shard of regret deep into his heart.
He had said goodbye to his lawyers outside the courthouse in Santa Ana, and then stood for several minutes before deciding to go back in. The public benches were almost empty when he slipped into the back of the courtroom to listen to the proceedings. Gillian MacCormack had been sitting with her back to him, unaware of his presence. Legal arguments on both sides were presented to a judge who knew she was just going through the motions. No one had wanted to charge this genteel sixty-seven-year-old with anything, never mind manslaughter. After all, her timely intervention had saved a man’s life. And so, in the end, the judge had found that there was no case to answer, and she was free to go.