Death Gets a Time-Out Read online

  Lilly caught my eye, and waved. I waved back. Stacy looked over at me. “Are you ever going to introduce me to her?” she asked.

  “To whom? Lilly?” I pretended innocence but I knew exactly what Stacy was after—a client. I had gotten to know Lilly Green when she made her acting debut in one of Peter’s slasher movies. My husband made his living writing screenplays that appealed to teenage boys and pretty much no one else. They starred cannibals and mummies, supernatural serial killers and bloodthirsty ghouls. Lilly had played a lovely young victim who turned into a homicidal walking corpse. Despite the part my husband had written for her, we became friends. She’d won an Oscar for her next film, and gone from B-movie starlet to full-fledged star. We’d remained close, but I have to admit that I’d grown a little uncomfortable around her. She tended to be surrounded by a retinue of managers, publicists, and assistants, and even though she was still the same, unpretentious woman who picked up Ruby every Wednesday and took her along to riding lessons with her own girls, because Ruby had once mentioned that she liked horses, it was hard for me to figure out how to interact with her. Maybe it all came down to my uncomfortable suspicion of my own motivations. Was I Lilly’s friend because I liked her and had things in common with her, or was I her friend because I liked being friends with a movie star? I didn’t really know the answer to that question.

  “Introduce me,” Stacy said, already halfway out of her chair.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you have to promise me you aren’t going to try to poach her from her agent.”

  Stacy looked shocked, wounded, but I knew better.

  Lilly had shaved her head for her most recent role, the Oscar-friendly tale of a mentally retarded woman with breast cancer, and the hair had just begun to grow back. If anything, her shorn skull highlighted her almost luminous beauty. Next to her, Stacy, who always looked so impeccable, so perfectly put together, seemed a pale contrivance. After Lilly and I rubbed cheeks in an approximation of a kiss, I stroked the top of her head. “You have a mohair head,” I said, and she laughed, although it seemed to me that it wasn’t quite the belly laugh I was used to getting out of her. One of my favorite things about Lilly was how she invariably cracked up at my jokes. Peter says I’ll like anyone who thinks I’m funny, and it’s probably true. Although he’s wrong that that’s the only reason I married him; it was just as important that he makes me laugh.

  I introduced Stacy, and Lilly politely shook her hand.

  “So, what are you doing here?” I asked. “You hate parties.”

  She shrugged.

  “Lilly’s being honored tonight,” Stacy said. “Didn’t you look at the program?”

  “Honored?” I asked.

  “For dying of breast cancer on screen,” Lilly said. “I guess they couldn’t find a woman what was really sick to drag up onto the stage.”

  “You’ve performed a profound service,” Stacy said. “Raising people’s consciousness, increasing awareness. You certainly deserve the award.”

  “Maybe,” Lilly said, although it didn’t sound like she really believed it. I had to agree with her. Looking around the room, I wondered how many of the women were struggling in anonymity with the horrible disease from which Lilly had only pretended to suffer. Didn’t they deserve acknowledgment more than she did? After all, when the cameras stopped rolling, she went home. The black cloud never disappeared from their skies.

  “So, what are you up to, Juliet?” Lilly asked. “Still solving murders?”

  I smiled uncomfortably. “Not murders.” I shifted my weight. My feet had begun to ache in their too-tight shoes.

  She cocked an eyebrow at me quizzically.

  “Go ahead, tell her,” Stacy said, prodding me in the side with her elbow. “Juliet’s become a private eye!”

  I blushed. I was still a little embarrassed about my new career. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it—on the contrary, I was absolutely in love with the job. I’d finally succumbed to the entreaties of my good friend Al Hockey, whom I had met when I was a federal public defender and he was an investigator in the same office. We’d worked on a lot of cases together, and we stayed friends even after I quit to stay home with my kids. When Al hung out a shingle as a private investigator, he asked me to join up with him. As happy as I was with my new identity as sort-of-working-mother, I had the nagging sensation that there was something almost ridiculous about turning my fundamental nature as a nosy snoop into a career.

  “Really? A detective?” Lilly asked.

  “Well, an investigator. I don’t have my license yet. And it’s only part-time,” I said. At the time Al had made his offer, I’d been slowly going crazy. I know there are women who skillfully and happily manage the transition from full-time, productive member of the work force to stay-at-home mother. I’ve met them in the park. Those are the women who swap homemade Play-Doh recipes and puree their own babyfood from organic produce they grow in their backyards. I’d rather be forced to eat the Play-Doh than make it. And I honestly can’t remember the last time I served a vegetable that didn’t come out of my freezer, unless pickles count. Don’t get me wrong. I love my kids with a ferocity that sometimes scares me. I love their dirty little faces and stubby toes. I love the absurdly funny and piercingly insightful things they say, and the way they tangle their fingers in my hair when I lie down with them to take a nap. But the prospect of spending an entire day alone with them fills me with dread. Keeping two people with a collective attention span of three minutes entertained for an entire fourteen-hour day is a task that makes Sisyphus’s look like playing marbles. Half the time I feel like hiring a nanny and getting my bored, frustrated, rapidly expanding butt back to work as a lawyer. I spend the other half convinced that there’s a point to being there day after day, hour after hour, driving from playdates to piano lessons, doing endless loads of very small laundry, and clinging to sanity with one exhausted fingernail. Al’s offer seemed like a way to do both—be with my kids, and do some work that didn’t involve very short people and a very dirty house.

  I had initially suffered from the delusion that it would be a breeze to work part-time while the kids were in school. However, I hadn’t yet ever managed more than a forty-five-minute workday. By the time I dropped Ruby and Isaac off at their two different schools, and ran whatever errands were absolutely critical to the continuation of our existence as a family, I had exactly enough time to make two phone calls or write half a letter before I had to race off to pick them up again. So far Al had been remarkably patient with my glaring absence from our joint venture, although he had taken to calling me his invisible partner.

  Lilly narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. “What kind of work are you doing?”

  “Criminal defense work, primarily,” I said. “Lawyers hire us to investigate their cases. You know, take pictures of the crime scene, track down witnesses, that kind of thing. And we’ve done some death penalty mitigation work, too.”

  “What’s that?” Stacy interrupted. “How do you mitigate the gas chamber?’

  “We dig up what we can on a defendant’s background to help the lawyer convince the jury that executing him wouldn’t be fair. You know, like if he was an abused child, or was really nice to his grandmother. That kind of thing.”

  Lilly stood up and grabbed my arm. Her face was flushed and beads of sweat stood out on her upper lip. “I need to talk to you,” she said in a low voice.

  “Um, okay,” I said, taken aback by her vehemence.

  Lilly glanced quickly around and met Stacy’s eye. She bit her lip. “In private,” she muttered.

  Stacy raised her eyebrow and smiled stiffly. “I’ll see you back at our table, Juliet,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Green.” But Lilly had already started to hustle me across the ballroom floor. I stumbled along, doing my best to keep from looking as though I was being dragged against my will.

  “Hey Lilly, ease up,” I said. “I can barely walk in these shoes.”

  She dropped my arm. “Sorry,�
�� she said. We’d come out into the hallway outside the ballroom. We were on the second floor of the hotel on a kind of mezzanine, looking out over the opulent lobby. The hall was empty except for a short line of women standing outside the ladies’ room. A dumpy woman in a viciously patterned, skin-tight gown looked over at us. Her eyes widened and she jabbed an elbow into the side of the woman standing next to her. A ripple ran through the line, and within seconds everyone was either staring at Lilly, or very obviously and carefully not staring at her. I had a sudden insight into what Lilly’s life must be like. These women were all in the movie business, and even they were incapable of treating her normally. How much worse must it be out on the street?

  “Let’s go in here,” Lilly said, opening a door into an empty room and pushing me through. It was another ballroom, although a much smaller one. She pulled two chairs off a stack against the wall and motioned me to sit down.

  I perched on the crushed velvet seat and poked at the matching curtain draped along the wall. “I haven’t seen this much mauve since my cousin Dara’s bat mitzvah reception at Leonard’s of Great Neck.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. What’s going on, Lilly? Is everything okay? Are you okay?”

  “I have to talk to you about something,” she said, worrying the silk of her skirt with agitated fingers. I cringed, sure she was going to tear through the gossamer fabric. The dress probably cost more than my monthly rent. This kind of anxiousness just wasn’t like Lilly. She was not a nervous person—she had always exuded the kind of serene confidence specific to very beautiful, very successful women, even when it had looked like her career might begin and end with movies in which her heaving breasts were mauled by flesh-eaters.

  “Sure, fine, but don’t tear your beautiful dress, okay?”

  She let go of her skirt and clasped her hands, as if that were the only way she could keep them under her control. “I want to hire you,” she said.

  I blinked in surprise. “For what? We don’t have any experience doing domestic cases. Not that we couldn’t do one, it’s just that we haven’t really done that kind of work. Yet.” Lilly’s ex-husband, Archer, had taken her for a rather remarkable amount of money when they’d divorced, and I figured she was trying to get some of it back.

  Lilly ran a hand over her shorn head and looked around the empty room, as if searching for concealed paparrazi and gossip columnists. “It’s not a domestic case. It’s a criminal case.”

  I leaned back in my chair and looked at her. She had knotted her hands together so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  “No one can know about this, Juliet.”

  “I’m still a lawyer, Lilly. Everything you say to me is in confidence.” I waited.

  After a moment she seemed to steel herself. She nodded once and looked up at me. “I want to hire you to help in a capital murder case.”

  I couldn’t help it—I gasped. “Capital murder? Who? What case?”

  Lilly paused again, and then finally said, “Jupiter Jones.”

  I felt a rush of something that I’m embarrassed to say was a lot like excitement. The rape and murder of Chloe Jones, the very young wife of the Very Reverend Polaris Jones, founder and leader of the Church of Cosmological Unity, had sent the entire city of Los Angeles into a tailspin. Mrs. Jones had been found raped and murdered in her San Marino home. For a while all of Southern California had been engulfed by paroxysms of terror, convinced that some new Manson Family had come to town. Movie stars decamped to their Aspen and New York lodgings. One televangelist crackpot made the national news by insisting God was exacting revenge for our city’s hedonism; the Chief of Police blamed the city counsel’s assertion of limitations on racial profiling; and the newly elected and xenophobically insane mayor insisted that the influx of illegal immigrants was responsible. When Jupiter Jones had been arrested for the crime, there had been a collective sigh of relief, and then a buzz of titillated horror because the culprit was the victim’s own stepson.

  I leaned forward in my chair. “What do you have to do with Jupiter Jones?”

  Lilly bit her bottom lip and narrowed her eyes at me, as if to assess my trustworthiness. Finally, she spoke. “He’s my brother.”

  My mouth gaped open in what surely must have looked like a caricature of astonishment—or a wide-mouth bass on a hook. “What?”

  “Well, my stepbrother,” she said, twisting her hands.

  “How is it that the papers haven’t managed to get hold of that piece of information?” It certainly seemed like something The National Enquirer might have been interested in printing. I could write the headline myself. CANCER STAR SISTER OF OEDIPAL MATRICIDE.

  “I pay people a lot of money to keep things like that out of the papers. Anyway, my mother and Polaris were together years ago, when Jupiter and I were really little.”

  Now I was really confused. “Your mother? Your mother was married to Polaris Jones?” Beverly Green, Lilly’s mother, was the first woman Speaker of the California Assembly. I could write that headline, too. POLITICAL POWERHOUSE LINKED TO NEW AGE CULT LEADER.

  “Not my mom. I mean, not Beverly. Beverly is my stepmother. My real mother was married to Polaris Jones. A long long time ago.”

  “Your real mother? Who is she? Where is she?” I asked, putting my hand over the knot Lilly had made of hers in her lap.

  “She . . . she died. When I was five. I don’t really remember her. We were living in Mexico then—my mother and me, and Polaris. Except he wasn’t Polaris. Back then his name was Artie. Jupiter lived with us, too. And a bunch of other people.”

  I raised my eyebrows. She shrugged. “It was kind of a commune, I guess. We all moved back here after my real mother died. I moved in with my dad and mom—I mean my stepmother. Artie and Jupiter came around a lot when I was younger, but after Artie became Polaris and The Church of Cosmological Unity got to be such a big thing, my parents really didn’t have much to do with him. My mom had been elected to the Board of Supervisors by then, and I guess she figured it would look bad if she were associated with all those CCU nut jobs.”

  I could certainly understand that. It was hard not to be aware of Polaris Jones’s church. Certain parts of the city were liberally sprinkled with navy blue billboards, painted with silver stars and Polaris’s benevolent visage, and the stern warning that our extraterrestrial ancestors were watching our every move, and finding us wanting. I could never understand how anyone could be taken in by such an obviously ludicrous theology—not that I knew much about it—but I knew the CCU had a massive campus out in Pasadena, packed with disciples spending thousands of dollars on classes that would earn them the points necessary to achieve Primal Infinitude. Periodic newspaper exposés about its shady financial dealings seemed to have little effect on the CCU’s popularity. I think even the Scientologists were getting a little concerned about the thousands of seekers of enlightenment bypassing their Celebrity Center in Hollywood and heading out to Pasadena.

  “I don’t get it, Lilly. Why do you want to hire me? What do you want me to do?”

  She grabbed my hands in hers and squeezed tightly. “I want you to help Jupiter. They’ve charged him with capital murder, and I can’t bear the idea of him on death row. I don’t remember much about Mexico or my mom, but I do remember Jupiter. Neither of us spoke Spanish, so we were each other’s only playmates. He was littler than I was, maybe two years younger or so. We did everything together. We even slept in the same bed. Honestly, when my mother died and I came to live with my dad, I missed Jupiter as much as I missed her.”

  “Does he know you’re trying to help him?”

  She nodded. “He called me from jail right after he was arrested. Artie—Polaris—won’t speak to him. I guess that’s understandable, but Jupiter doesn’t have any money of his own. He lived with Polaris and Chloe. I hired his lawyers, and I’m paying them, but that’s a secret. Nobody knows that except them, Jupiter, and me. And now you.”

  “Who did you hire?”
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br />   “Raoul Wasserman.”

  I whistled. I’d met the famous defense attorney only once, when we were arguing motions before the same judge. He’d swept into the courtroom like a queen bee surrounded by a swarm of busy little associates. He was empty-handed, which I soon realized was because one of the worker bees was carrying his briefcase for him. Another had hold of his cell phone. Wasserman must have been six foot five, at the minimum. I found out from Peter that in his day Wasserman had been one of the greatest Jewish basketball players ever to play in the NBA, not that there’s a whole lot of competition for that title. He had thick black hair swept high off his forehead, and a quiet voice that nonetheless managed to resonate throughout the high-ceilinged room. Even the judge deferred to Counselor Wasserman, pushing his motion to first on the docket, and nodding and smiling throughout his oral argument. The poor U.S. Attorney who had the ill luck to argue for the government seemed to concede defeat before he even began, and it took only a few moments for the judge to exclude all the evidence that Wasserman wanted out of the case. The legend and his coterie buzzed out of the courtroom, leaving the rest of us defense attorneys feeling suddenly shabby and ill-prepared. We all lost our motions that day.

  “If you’ve got him, why in heaven’s name do you need me? I’m sure he’s got a team of investigators working the case already.”

  She squeezed my hand harder. “Maybe. Probably. And he’s the best, I know he is. But I don’t trust him. He’s . . . I don’t know. Slippery. I need someone there to make sure he’s doing what he’s supposed to. You’re my friend, Juliet. I know I can trust you.”