Death Gets a Time-Out (12 page)

“Did you ever go to the hospital?” I asked, holding my breath and hoping for medical records.

He shook his head, and I sighed in disappointment. I looked at him intently. Was this just a convenient story, made up to shift the blame to his father, or was it the truth? I couldn’t tell.

“What happened after he hit Chloe?” I asked.

“He threw her out. That’s when she went back to the center.”

“Was that a typical response for him? Throwing her out like that?”

“Yeah. You should have seen how he lost it way back when he found out I was using. And then the rest of them were freaking out, too.”

“The rest of them?”

“The CCU ministers. They had this huge powwow to figure out what to do with me. I mean, can you imagine? The Very Reverend’s son, a cokehead? They never could have lived that down.”

“Why not? I mean, I understand that the CCU is opposed to drug use, but wouldn’t your father’s parishioners have understood? Maybe it would have made him more human to them.”

“They don’t want him to be human. He’s supposed to be closer to God than they are. It’s not just that the CCU is against drugs. My father is supposed to be a healer. He cures people of drug addiction. And homosexuality. And depression, and just about anything else. You pay for the program, and you’re cured. They guarantee it. If Polaris couldn’t heal his own kid, then why should other people pay him to heal them?”

“I don’t get it. How can the CCU possibly guarantee a cure?”

He shrugged. “If you fail, then it’s your fault. You weren’t pure enough. You weren’t committed enough. God saw through your pretense. Work a little harder. Take a few more classes. Pay some more money. You’ll be cured in time.”

“Did the congregation ever find out about you?”

“Only once I got clean. Then my dad and the other ministers billed it as a CCU success story. My recovery was attributed to CCU, not to three months of rehab.”

“And Chloe?”

“Same thing. Chloe was the poster girl. Polaris laid his hands on her, brought her to God, and she was transformed.”

“So it would have looked terrible if it had gotten out that her cure didn’t last.”

“Right.”

“So he kept it a secret from the CCU?”

“Yeah.”

“Here’s something I don’t understand. Why did he take her back? Was it just to hide what happened from the CCU?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know why. I mean, I never thought he would. When he threw her out, he sounded like he hated her. But she was back a few days later. And she was the same old Chloe.”

“What do you mean? Was she using?”

He nodded. “More than ever.”

“What about you, Jupiter? Were you using again?” I said.

He began chewing on his lip again. Then he nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Cocaine?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“For how long?”

He shrugged.

“How long?” I repeated.

“I never really stopped,” he said. “Neither of us did.”

I stared at him. “Never?”

He shook his head.

“You were using as soon as you got out?”

“Almost. I was sober while I was waiting for Chloe, all the way to the day I picked her up from the hospital.”

“The day you picked her up?”

He shrugged.

I leaned back in my chair and raised my hands up. “Wait a second. Are you telling me that Chloe started using again on the very day she got out of rehab?”

Jupiter shrugged. “It’s not really that uncommon, you know?”

He explained that Chloe had instructed him to have a line of cocaine waiting for her in the car on the day he picked her up in Ojai. He’d cut it on the dashboard, and the two of them had snorted and buzzed their way down to San Marino. Their relationship, defined as it was by a shared addiction, and sex, had taken a brief hiatus while he was in Mexico, recovering from Chloe’s transfer of her affections to his father. It picked up again when he came home. This time, however, there was a twist. Jupiter satisfied the craving for the drugs that Chloe’s position as Polaris’s wife and partner in his ministry made it difficult for her to acquire on her own. In return, she satisfied his craving—for her. Sex for drugs. So it went, for almost four years. And then one day Chloe was dead and Jupiter was folding laundry at the L.A. county jail.

I looked over at Al, whose lip was curled in a disgusted sneer. Jupiter had just confirmed all his worst expectations of drug users. I knew Al had figured this guy for a liar and
a weakling from the moment we first met him. I had felt sorry for Jupiter; I still did. I didn’t think he was weak, just not as strong as his disease. However, I’d forgotten that trusting someone in his situation wasn’t wise. I was going to have to remember that, from now on.

“
W
HAT
are the odds of the prosecutor finding out the gory details about our client and his stepmother?” Al asked. I handed him a napkin, and he mopped up the grease on his chin. He took another huge bite of his French dip and mumbled something.

“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” I said, trying to keep from looking as nauseated as I felt. I picked at my own soggy roll. This pregnancy was really going to be a bummer if it made me lose my appetite for Philippe’s. We’d stopped at the downtown culinary institution for a late lunch after our meeting with Jupiter. Al and I are in full agreement that the only way to get the stink of jail out of our clothes and hair is to cover it with something even smellier. Like the odor of roast beef
au jus.

“I said, are you going to eat your macaroni salad?”

I pushed it across the narrow, scarred, wooden table. Al shoved a heaping forkful in his mouth and followed that with beet-red, pickled egg. I stared for a minute at his grinding jaws and then leapt to my feet and ran as fast as I could
across the sawdust-strewn floor, dodging through the crowd of municipal employees in ill-fitting suits, construction workers in dirty overalls, and the occasional nattily dressed politician. I made it around the model train exhibit to the ladies’ room just in the nick of time. Lucky for me there was no line. There rarely was. Male customers outnumbered female by about four to one at Philippe’s. On occasion, I’d found myself to be the only woman in the place, other than the waitresses in their starched uniforms and little white caps.

After I lost what little of my French dip that I’d managed to swallow, I stood in line for a baked apple. As I put my money down onto the metal tray the waitress extended—the woman who makes your sandwich at Philippe’s never lets her hands touch the contaminated surface of your dollar bills—I I felt her eyes appraising me.

“How far alongare you?” she asked. She looked, like all the other women behind the counter, like a refugee from the 1950s. Her faintly blue hair was rolled into a bun and tucked up under the white frilly cap that perched on the top of her head. Her lipstick was drawn on just a bit larger than her actual mouth and her eye shadow was a shade of sea-green that I’d begun seeing on the teenagers who shopped on Melrose Avenue. I didn’t think the waitress was expressing the same ironic retro-chic as the kids who shared her taste in makeup.

“Seven weeks,” I said. “How did you know I was pregnant?”

“I saw you running for the bathroom. It’ll pass in a few weeks.”

“Let’s hope so.” I took my apple and went back to Al.

“What’s with you?” he said.

“I’m pregnant.”

He paused with the remains of his sandwich halfway to his lips. “Really?”

“Yup.”

He crammed the sandwich into his mouth, chewed twice, and swallowed. “Congratulations,” he said.

We sat for a moment in silence, while I took a few bites
that seemed more sugar and melted butter than fruit. I handed the rest to Al, and he made short work of it.

“What’s your plan?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How long are you planning on working?”

“As long as I can, I guess.”

He nodded, looking a little troubled.

I rested my head in my hands. “I’m so sorry, Al. Really I am. I know I’ve been a lousy partner. I’m always late. I don’t even make it to work half the time. I can’t imagine how I’m going to manage with a new baby in addition to everything else. I completely understand if you want to fire me. Really, it’s okay.”

He shook his head. “I can’t fire you.”

I raised my face. “What?”

“You don’t work
for
me; we’re partners. I can’t fire you.”

“Oh. Well, I understand if you don’t want to be my partner anymore.”

He sighed and popped another crimson egg in his mouth. Whole. He chewed noisily, and then swallowed with an audible gulp. I willed my stomach to settle.

“I’m not worried about
that
,” he said.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“I’m not bothered by your schedule. In case you haven’t noticed, we have barely enough work to keep us both working part-time. Once you have the baby, you’ll do stuff at home for a while. On the computer. Whatever. I’m not worried about it. We’ll work it out.”

Relief flooded me. I had been so sure that Al would dump me and find someone whose workday wasn’t dictated by the exigencies of carpools and playdates. Truth be told, I couldn’t really understand why he hadn’t. Whatever he said, I knew it couldn’t be easy dealing with me and my schedule. But I wasn’t going to press him too hard. I loved this job. I made a vow to myself to be better organized, to be a better partner, to somehow limit the wrench a baby was going to throw into the already shaky works of my burgeoning career as a private investigator. “Thank you so much, Al. I promise I’ll figure
it out. Like you said, I’ll work from home or something. And we’ve got over six months before I’m going to need to worry about any of this. I’m going to put in six really good months.”

“Now,
that’s
what I’m worried about,” he said, interrupting me.

“What?”

“Look, Juliet, I don’t want to have any repetition of what happened when you were pregnant with Isaac.”

I assured him that I had no intention of getting shot again—recovering once from a C-section and a bullet wound at the same time was once too often even for me. He replied with a grunt.

“No, really. I’ll be careful.”

He shook his head. “I’ll believe
that
when I see it.”

Rather than argue with him, I decided to answer the question he’d asked before I’d made my elegant sprint across the room. “If Jupiter doesn’t tell the prosecutor about his little sex-for-drugs arrangement with Chloe, I don’t honestly see how it can come out at trial.”

“Unless she told someone else.”

“True.”

“You think he did it?” Al asked.

“What, the murder?”

Al nodded.

For all that Jupiter had lied to us about his drug use, I still had an oddly unshaken belief in his innocence. Maybe it was because of Lilly, maybe because of my own stubbornness. It’s not like I have an infallible instinct for evaluating the truth. I just didn’t think he could have done it. “Jupiter says he didn’t kill her. And given what he told us about Polaris, I’d put my money on the father, rather than the son, wouldn’t you?”

Al shrugged. “That’s if the son is telling the truth.”

It wasn’t unusual in our partnership for Al and me to wait this long to have a conversation about our client’s guilt or innocence. When we’d worked together at the federal public defender’s office, we’d learned to avoid the subject altogether.
The few times it had come up, Al had quickly grown disgusted with my willingness to consider the possibility that the guys we were defending hadn’t committed the crime of which they were accused. Al was wrong—I wasn’t naïve. I knew as well as he that our clients were, by and large, guilty. I simply believed that as the one person in the system whose job it was to be on their side, I owed it to them to have some faith. So if my client told me he thought he was delivering a pound of flour wrapped in a black plastic bag to a one-eyed Hell’s Angel named Snake, rather than the half a kilo of premium-quality Afghani heroin the cops found on him, then that’s what I believed. Or at least, that’s all I would admit to believing. I just wasn’t cynical enough to present a defense to a jury in the morning, and then denounce it to my colleagues as nonsense in the afternoon.

“You met Polaris. Don’t you think he seems like a more likely suspect?” I said.

Al raised his eyebrows. “I’m not the one who thought he was . . . what did you call him? Compelling?”

I blushed. “I never said I thought he was a good guy, or anything. He’s just got some . . . I don’t know. Power or something. That doesn’t make him more likely to be innocent, or Jupiter to be guilty.”

Al snorted. “What about Jupiter’s positive DNA test?”

“Consensual sex.”

Al shook his head. “Anyway, it’s hardly relevant. We’re not gathering evidence for the guilt phase. Just the penalty phase. Next step?”

“Don’t we have to report in to Wasserman’s office at some point?”

“That, my dear, is a job for you,” he said, getting to his feet.

“For me? Why?”

“Because you’re the lawyer. You know how to talk lawyer-talk. I’m going to go back to the office.” He ignored my smirk at this glorified description of his garage. “I’m sure I can find something else to keep me busy. Your friend Lilly
may be rolling in dough, but I doubt she’ll stand for us double-billing her forever.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “Lilly watches her money, and this isn’t a two-person job.”

“
I
don’t like clothes shopping with you. I like shopping with Daddy,” Ruby said as I disentangled a sweatshirt with a sequined collar from her copper curls.

“What’s wrong with shopping with me?” I made my voice sound nonchalant, but really my feelings were hurt. This was our special time. The time I’d set aside just for Ruby, per the instructions in every parenting manual I’d ever read. She was supposed to treasure these moments of my undivided attention. I’d been promised by those pediatricians and psychologists who seemed to be primarily in the business of inducing feelings of guilt and failure in overextended mothers like me that special time was the glue that would hold the rest of our lives together.