THE house in which Katrina Wakefield lived and for which Edward Maws paid the mortgage was a regal, three-story pile in the style marketed by Realtors as “Country Manor.”
It was 10:00 A.M. the following day, a Friday. Mona knew Wakefield had kids, so she’d waited until they were sure to be at school. She walked up the path to the oak door. Inside, she could hear a vacuum cleaner running. She rapped the brass knocker. The vacuum cleaner fell silent. A peek window opened, and a woman’s face appeared. Mona gave her name and asked for Katrina Wakefield. The window closed, and a moment later the door opened, revealing the owner of the face—a stout woman with a professional vacuum cleaner strapped to her back—and a thin, sweaty blonde in activewear, who looked like she had just stepped from a hot yoga class.
“Yes?” said the blonde.
“Ms. Wakefield? My name is Mona Jimenez. I’m a lawyer. Would I be able to have a word with you?”
“Is this about my ex-husband?”
Mona picked up an Australian accent.
“Yes,” said Mona.
Katrina Wakefield looked unhappy. “My least favorite topic,” she said.
She invited Mona in.
Katrina Wakefield led Mona through a vast foyer, around which spiraled a grand staircase, to a beautiful and meticulously decorated living room with a row of french doors opening onto a veranda and, beyond that, a lush and what appeared to be endless garden. She dispatched the woman with the vacuum cleaner to the “fitness room” to tell “James” that she was finishing early today.
“My personal trainer,” she explained. Mona gave a little smile. Katrina Wakefield opened a bar fridge in the corner of the room and pulled out a bottle of coconut water. She offered some to Mona, which Mona declined. Wakefield poured herself a glass, took a big breath, and sat down opposite Mona.
“Before we start, do I need to call my lawyer?”
“I’m not here representing your ex-husband, if that’s what you mean,” said Mona. “Quite the contrary.”
“Okay. Because, no offense, but I’ve seen quite enough lawyers for one lifetime,” said Wakefield. “What can I do for you? Is Edward in trouble again?”
“I represent—represented—a young asylum seeker who was being held at the detention center in Paradise—”
“That’s the one out in the desert, right? The one Ed has the catering contract for?”
“Yes. Last week, my client died inside the center. I am trying to find out what happened to her exactly.”
“Wait a second. Was she the one bitten by a snake? The one that’s been in the news?”
“Yes.”
Wakefield looked genuinely upset. “How frightful,” she said. “I grew up on a sugarcane plantation in Queensland. There are a lot of snakes where I come from. It’s a terrible way to go. But what’s this got to do with Ed? Or me?”
“Well, this is where I thought you might be able to help me, Ms. Wakefield—”
“Katrina.”
“Katrina. I’ve been looking at the BSCA to see if they could’ve done more to try to save Carmen, my client. I noticed an unusual payment to your husband’s company, AmeriCo.”
“Unusual?”
“Unusually large. I asked Mr. Maws if he could explain it, but I feel he was not honest with me.”
Katrina laughed. “What a surprise,” she said.
“I thought you might be able to tell me what the payment was for.”
Katrina Wakefield shook her head. “I can’t, I’m afraid. I mean, I know Ed has a contract to supply the prison with food. If they’re paying him for anything else, I don’t know about it.”
“Can I ask how you met?” said Mona.
“He owned a restaurant in Santa Monica. I got a job as a waitress there. I’d just arrived in the country.”
“The Dining Room on Wilshire?”
“Yes. He was a decent bloke then. Although knowing what I know now, he was probably fucking all the other waitresses, too.”
Mona remembered Maws’s leer in his office. “I understand that this house is in your name—”
“Too right!”
“—and that the court decided that Mr. Maws has to pay the mortgage on the house, in addition to a substantial alimony.”
“You know a lot, don’t you?”
“I assume it’s the money he receives from the BSCA that allows him to afford all that?”
Katrina took another sip of coconut water. “Frankly, I don’t care where he gets the money as long as he pays it. But yes, the prison contract is his big earner.”
After a pause, Katrina said, “You know he was spending a lot of money before we got divorced, right? Not just after?”
“Do you know what for?”
“I do, unfortunately.”
Mona must’ve looked puzzled because Katrina elaborated, “He was spending hundreds of dollars a week on hookers. He is what people here call a ‘sex addict’ and what people back home call a ‘dirty dog.’ You want to know how I found out? He gave me herpes.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that,” said Mona.
“Not as sorry as I was. My gynecologist told me that herpes means creep in Ancient Greek. My gynecologist has a dark sense of humor.”
“And all the money he was spending back then, where was he getting it? Before he made the deal with the BSCA, I mean,” asked Mona.
“He was taking it from the restaurant. We were making decent money back then. Not like now, but still, we were doing well. But we kept running out of cash. I was doing the books by then, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. Now I know. I still don’t know how he found the time to do it. Do you know how time-consuming it is running a restaurant? Anyway. When he got the catering deal, that’s when the big money started flooding in. And that’s when he really let loose.”
“What can you remember about the deal?” asked Mona.
“I was pregnant with our first child. One day in the middle of my first trimester, Ed comes home from a boozy lunch and says we’re selling the restaurant and setting up a catering operation. I said that didn’t seem like a wise idea. We had worked hard to get the restaurant to where it was, and it was finally going well. But he was adamant. He told me that we would make ten times what we were making with the restaurant. ‘We’ll be in a different league,’ he said. He said he’d worked out all the details already. I had morning sickness all day long, I had trouble thinking straight, so I didn’t put up much resistance. But I was worried. He had this look about him. A weird spark.”
She finished her coconut water and poured herself another before continuing, “Turned out, he was right. We sold the restaurant, he set up the catering business, and right from the start, we started making buckets of money. I mean, an absolute fortune. Within a year, we left our little apartment in Santa Monica and bought this house. Ed wanted to live near where he grew up, near his parents. And he wanted Archie—our son—to go to the same school he went to, Saint Ignatius, which is just down the road.”
“Were you involved with the new business?” asked Mona.
“No. Archie was born, and I was busy looking after him. And then Vanessa, our daughter, came along, so that was it for my career. You have children?”
Mona shook her head.
“Well, I had no idea what was happening at the company, and I didn’t really have the headspace to know, I was so busy with the kids,” continued Katrina. “All I knew was that Ed was bringing home truckloads of money. I guess I figured, well, this is what’s supposed to happen in America, right? People make loads of money fast? I suppose I could’ve tried to find out more, but why would I? I was busy with the kids, I had a beautiful house, my life was perfect. Then one day, my gynecologist told me I had herpes.” She shook her head.
Mona asked, “Katrina, in January of 2016, your ex-husband starting making frequent trips to Tijuana. Do you know why?”
“Yes. That’s when he started the catering business. He said he had to go to Mexico to see his ‘suppliers.’” She put air quotes around suppliers.
“His last trip was in August of last year. Do you know why he stopped going?” Mona held her breath. Was there a link with Carmen?
“Yes. Because one of his ‘suppliers’ gave him herpes.” Katrina laughed cynically. “Do you know what bareback means? In Mexico, Ed was paying women extra for unprotected sex. Apparently, hookers here insist on condoms, and that just wasn’t good enough for Ed. That’s how he got herpes. I got diagnosed in August last year. When he found out I had it—and that he’d given it to me—he stopped going. At least, he said he did. I don’t know. I kicked him out of the house straightaway. We were divorced within a year.”
She slipped into a moment of reflection.
“You know, he wasn’t always like he is now. When he was getting the Dining Room off the ground, he worked really hard to make it work. I think to prove to his father he could do it. His parents are conservative people. Catholics. His dad was an engineer. Anyway … the money changed him. For one thing, he started working less. For another, he became showy. Like he was trying to make an impression on people, especially his father. I think that’s why we bought this house. We never needed six bedrooms, you know. Even Michael thought it was over the top. Have you spoken to Michael yet?”
“Michael?”
“Michael Marvin? The CEO of BSCA? He was the one who came to Ed with the catering contract. Michael’s the one you should talk to. He and Ed are old friends. In fact, they were at Saint Ignatius together.”
Mona asked in what she hoped was a composed tone if Katrina had an address or phone number for Michael Marvin. The sweaty blonde put down her coconut water and reached for her iPhone. Then a thought occurred to her.
“I’m not sure I should,” she said. “Michael’s the school’s most generous donor. I don’t want to get him into trouble. Also, to be quite frank, I depend on AmeriCo, you know. For my income.”
“I appreciate your candor. I’ll be frank, too; your ex-husband has some awkward questions to answer—especially if it turns out that Marvin doesn’t know about the transfer. But this isn’t about protecting Edward Maws or even Michael Marvin. This is about what happened to Carmen Vega.”
Katrina Wakefield pondered this. Mona could almost see her weighing her self-interest against her desire to hurt Ed Maws. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can give you Michael’s number. But I can introduce you to him.”
“That would be fine, too,” said Mona.
“Are you free tomorrow night? Saint Ignatius is having its annual fund-raiser, and Michael will be there. He’s chairman of the school board. I can seat you next to him, if you like, at table 1, right by the stage. I’m on the organizing committee.”
“I would like nothing better,” said Mona.
Katrina smiled, obviously pleased with the compromise she had devised. “Then it’s settled. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Mona got up to leave. A thought occurred to her. “Will your ex-husband be there?” she asked.
Katrina’s face clouded over. “Yes, unfortunately. But don’t worry, he’s on table 28. By the toilets.”
Mona sat in her RAV outside Katrina Wakefield’s Tudor mansion in Yorba Linda and processed what she had learned over the last four days: on Tuesday, she had spotted a suspiciously large payment made by the Border Security Corporation of America to its catering company, AmeriCo; on Wednesday, she had intuited that the boss of the catering company, Edward Maws, had something to hide; on Thursday, she had learned that Maws required a great deal of money to meet his divorce obligations, as well as the imperious demands of his sex addiction; today, Friday, she had learned that Maws had gone to school with the CEO of AmeriCo.
Katrina Wakefield had said that Marvin had brought Maws the contract. Mona remembered the picture of Marvin she had seen in the LA Times, with his white teeth and puffer jacket. Maws was a small-time restaurateur. Marvin was CEO of a multibillion-dollar company and had been nominated by the president to be secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. What did Maws have that Marvin could possibly want?
Mona knew what she should do next. She should take everything she had to the attorney general. What she should do, she thought, is drive straight downtown and see Marius Littlemore, an old friend from law school, now a prosecutor in the AG’s office. She should tell Marius about the 5.8 million, about the lack of a legitimate tender process for the catering contract, and about the fact that Maws and Marvin were at school together. That’s what she should do. Let Marius do his job and investigate the suspicious payment, while she did hers and prosecuted her wrongful death case.
It would be a huge story—the president’s nominee for secretary of Homeland Security accused of corruption. The LA Times would run op-eds.
So why was she still sitting in her car, hesitating? She felt like a teen standing on a bluff, looking down at the lake below. Her friends were yelling for her to jump, but the water was dark. She couldn’t tell if there were hidden rocks. On the face of it, there was no obvious connection between the $5.8 million and Carmen’s death. But what if there was? She knew that if she took what she knew to the attorney general and this thing blew up, in the furor that would follow, Carmen would be forgotten. The story would become about Marvin, about the hubris of the mighty and their inevitable fall. No one would care about a dead asylum-seeker who may or may not have been a Tijuana hooker. The earth is crammed with the bodies of forgotten murdered women. Mona had made a solemn vow to Carmen’s mother. She had to put the wrongful death suit first, to make sure that Carmen’s sister, Clara, lived the life that Carmen never would. She had to fight for Carmen first; only then could she go after Marvin.
Mona decided on her course of action. She would not go to the attorney general today. Instead, she would write down everything she knew, and then she would file it away, ready to send to Marius all wrapped up in a nice red bow. Meanwhile, she would get on with her lawsuit. If it turned out that the payment to AmeriCo had something to do with Carmen’s case, then she would know that she had made the right decision. If it didn’t, if the two things weren’t connected, then she would go to Marius and show him what she’d found. But until she had the answers she wanted, she would obey her gut.
Mona started her car and headed for Neiman Marcus. If she was going to attend a fund-raising ball at an elite private school, she needed something to wear.