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“She called you?” Yuki pulled back, her face flattened in surprise.
“She called Joe. I picked up his phone.”
Claire got up from her chair, wrapped her arms around me, squeezed the tears right out of my eyes.
Yuki went on as if I weren’t crying, as if Claire weren’t beaming stop signs at her with her eyes.
“Did you ask Joe about this?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He admitted it?”
I shook my head no.
Cindy reached across the table and clutched my hands.
Yuki said, “So, just to make sure I’ve got this right, Joe denies the affair.”
“He’s lying about it, yes. So I kicked him out of the house.”
Claire said, “Honey, what did this woman say?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t talk anymore.
Cindy let go of my hands and gave me a wad of paper napkins stamped with MacBain’s logo: the planet Earth whirling through a sudsy amber sky.
I sobbed into the napkins. It was disgraceful. It was pathetic. I couldn’t stop crying. Yuki shook my arm like she was a terrier and my arm was a sock doll.
“Lindsay, do you think it’s serious? Maybe it just happened and he can get you to forgive him.”
By then Cindy had typed Freundorfer into her iPad and pulled up the benefit story. She held up the candid photo of Joe with his mistress looking adoringly into his face.
“Oh my God,” Yuki said. “Oh, Lindsay. I’m going to be sick.”
I loosed some fresh tears and then all of us were crying. It seemed a little less pathetic when we were all wet together, but still: Joe was having an affair, my baby and I were alone, and I wanted to die. Before I could drown myself in root beer, my blinking phone rang.
Was it Joe?
No. It was Brady. He was with Conklin.
I hugged and kissed my friends, then fled down the stairs.
Chapter 72
I PARKED THE Explorer behind Brady’s unmarked sedan on the north side of Ivy, a one-way residential street in Hayes Valley dotted with trees and lined with ordinary single and multifamily houses built so close together there was no space between them.
Jacobi’s brown, shingled house was at the far end of the block, and although he had a garage that took up the ground floor, his black Hyundai SUV was parked on the street.
Jacobi had a black SUV — like half the law enforcement officers in California.
Brady and Conklin got out of the unmarked and Conklin got into the Explorer beside me.
Brady stooped down by the window, said, “We’ve had a team on him all day. He came in about an hour ago. Lights went on. He’s probably in for the night.”
“I take it you didn’t catch him killing anyone?”
Brady ignored my tone. “You and Conklin do four hours. Narcotics will spell you at eleven. If he leaves the house, call me.”
