Death Gets a Time-Out (13 page)

“Because Daddy never looks at the price tags.”

No wonder we never managed to save enough in our house fund actually to buy a house. My darling husband was spending his entire income on miniature flared jeans with unicorns embroidered on the seat, and pastel-colored, high-heeled
sneakers. “You know, Ruby, it can be
fun
to look at the price. Isn’t it neat when we get a bargain?”

Ruby looked at me with a combination of disgust and pity, and flicked disdainfully at the pile of fleece sweatshirts and miniskirts I’d plucked from the sale rack.

“These are
preschool
clothes. In kindergarten we have to wear jeans. And belly shirts like this one.” She held up a metallic green scrap of fabric that she’d somehow managed to smuggle into the dressing room with us.

“Belly shirts?”

“You know, the ones that show off your belly button.” Were the other kindergarten mothers really letting their daughters go to school looking like lip-synching nymphets from a Destiny’s Child video?

I looked at the price tag and gasped. “I’m not spending forty dollars on half a shirt.”

“That’s okay. Daddy will.”

“No he will
not
.” Special time. What a delight. “I have an idea,” I said, faking a smile. “How about we get some lunch?”

By the time we’d finished eating, Ruby and I were friends again. Maybe it was because I made no objection to her chosen meal of French fries and a chocolate milkshake.
Au contraire
—I shared it with her. In my first trimester, I try to consume as much sugar and fat as possible. They’re the only things that don’t make me feel like vomiting.

Ruby had no school because of one of the many in-service, out-service, parent-teacher, teacher-teacher conference-meeting-seminar days that her school instituted specifically to destroy any hope I had of getting in a decent day’s work. I could afford to blow my morning on outfitting a miniature Las Vegas street walker, but I’d received a summons to appear that afternoon before Raoul Wasserman himself to update him on the status of our investigation, and so some arrangements had to be made. I’d never managed to find a decent babysitter after one disastrous early attempt, so I’d tried to prevail upon Peter to reschedule his own afternoon meeting. He had reminded me that studio executives don’t take kindly to last-minute cancellations, and my suggestion that he take
Ruby along had been greeted with a gasp of horror. He had asked me if I really thought he should remind the money men that he was old enough to have a kid her age. Peter harbors a neurotic fear that there are hordes of postadolescent screenwriters yapping at his heels, eager to steal his ideas and take his assignments. Given the glorification of youth culture endemic in Hollywood, where nineteen-year-old film school dropouts get million-dollar multipicture deals while middle-aged Oscar winners can’t get a job lettering cue cards, his paranoia may not be that unreasonable.

Al was working a fraud investigation for a new client, a courier company convinced that its employees who were out on disability and workers’ comp were actually shirkers. He was due to spend the next few days following burly men and women around with a camera, waiting for someone to pick up a heavy box, or go windsurfing, or do cartwheels on the front lawn. Meeting with Wasserman was my responsibility, anyway. It was the least I could do, since in about seven months I was going to be even more nonexistent a partner than I already was.

So Ruby came with me. I packed a bag with gel pens and black paper, a Walkman with two hours’ worth of story tapes, and enough gummy worms to choke a flock of robins. I ignored the glare of the receptionist, and cleared a few glossy magazines off the coffee table in the waiting area outside Wasserman’s office. I laid out Ruby’s supplies and poked the straw into her juice box.

“Okay, honey,” I said. “I’ll be back in half an hour. When the big hand is on the six.” I pointed to the ornate clock hanging on the wall over the receptionist’s head.

“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“Just ask the nice lady. She’ll tell you where to go.” I smiled at the receptionist, a sour-faced young woman with short, spiky hair dyed platinum blond. A silver chain dangling across one of her eyes connected the ring in her nose to the one through her eyebrow. Ignoring me, she flicked open a compact and examined her goth makeup in the mirror. She pushed aside the chain and scraped an invisible trace of
kohl out of the corner of her eye with a long pinkie nail polished in black with a tiny, silver death’s head appliqué.

“You don’t mind showing my daughter the way to the ladies’ room if she needs it, do you?” I asked her. The receptionist shrugged and murmured into her headset.

“Mr. Wasserman will see you now,” she said.

“Okay, Rubes. I’ll be right back. You behave yourself.”

Rubes nodded and put her headphones on. She pulled out a piece of black paper and began drawing with her fluorescent pens. Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, I followed the receptionist’s pointed finger down a long hall.

Raoul Wasserman’s office contrasted sharply in its Spartan décor with the oriental carpets and faux antique furniture of his waiting room. His desk was a vast expanse of burnished steel. It was empty except for something that looked like the controls of a jumbo jet, but might have been only a telephone. He directed me to a couch with a steel back and armrests, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I’d left Ruby with the pierced young thing out in the waiting area. I could only imagine the short work she and her pens would have made of the white leather seat.

I sat down and Wasserman joined me, folding his lanky body into something that looked more like a metal mesh basket than a chair. His knees poked up on either side of him, and when he leaned forward, they were about level with his shoulders. It couldn’t possibly have been comfortable, but his athletic grace made it seem the most natural of seating positions.

“So, Ms. Applebaum, you are a friend of Lilly Green’s,” he said.

“I am.”

He leaned back in his chair, resting his large hands on his jutting knees. “I don’t normally allow my clients to tell me which investigator to hire.”

I felt a tiny bead of sweat forming on my brow. What had I expected? Of course the man was going to resent having been forced to hire me. “I can understand why Lilly’s request
might have bothered you. After all, you surely have investigators you normally use.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I have three investigators whom I employ on a full-time basis.”

This
was
a big firm. Normally, criminal defense attorneys hire independent private investigators on a case-by-case basis. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Wasserman was the most important criminal lawyer in the city, maybe even the state. Of course he had enough investigative work to keep three people busy full time.

“Mr. Wasserman, let me assure you, my partner and I understand that we work for you. My friendship with Lilly is the reason she feels comfortable having me here working on her brother’s behalf, but it will have nothing to do with how I do my job. Our role in this case is to gather information for the penalty phase of the trial, if there is one. That’s what we plan to do.”

He looked at me appraisingly, and I got the sense that he appreciated my deference. “Thank you, Ms. Applebaum. I appreciate that.”

“Please, call me Juliet.”

He smiled for the first time, and it was a broad, friendly smile. Suddenly, he looked more like the amiable basketball player he must have been, and less like the superstar lawyer by whom, I’ll admit, I was pretty intimidated. “The truth is,” he continued, “we have a number of cases that are keeping this office quite busy. I’m happy to have the help. My investigative team has been preparing for trial, but they had not yet begun the mitigation work when Lilly made her wishes known. Your presence frees them up to work on other things.”

I leaned back in my seat and felt myself relax. I hadn’t even realized I’d been so tense.

“I understand from my associate that you were once an attorney,” he said.

Once? Wasn’t I still? I always thought that once you passed the bar, you were a lawyer until your dying day. It was like being Jewish. Or Catholic. You might convert, practice
another religion or profession, but in some inner core of your being, you remained a member of the tribe. “I was with the federal public defender’s office.”

“The practice of law didn’t agree with you?”

“No, it wasn’t that. I left work when my daughter was a baby.”

“Ah,” he said, and nodded with a kind of condescension I recognized so well—it had been a constant theme of the movie industry parties that had come to make life on the fringes of Hollywood so unbearable to me. Before I’d quit my job, I had enjoyed regaling people with my tales of life among the bank robbers and gang bangers. The studio executives and agents had no stories to compare with those, and even the directors and writers were interested—more than one had tried to pick my brain for ideas for a movie. I would still find myself talking to empty air if even a minor television actress walked into the room, but at least among the hangers-on I could hold my own. Once I traded in courtrooms for changing tables, however, I became a pariah. The low moment came when a supercilious female producer who was compelled to chat with me only because of her desire to hire Peter for a project said, “Oh, you’re a mommy! How sweet. I just wish I weren’t so ambitious and successful. It would be so nice to be able to be satisfied with spending the day just playing with my kids.” I stared at her, mouth agape, trying to think of a biting rejoinder, but managed only to come up with, “It’s not all fun and games.” She smiled patronizingly, as if to let me know that although whiling away the hours with a pack of children would be a waste of the abilities and talents of someone like her, she was sure it was a fine life for someone like me. It added insult to injury that I could have worn her black miniskirt as a leg warmer.

Wasserman’s smile inspired in me the usual rush of humiliation, and I winced at the thought of the blush that was surely creeping up my neck and face. When was I going to stop being so defensive about staying home with my kids? Why wasn’t it enough for
me
to know that I was a competent, educated person who had made a reasonable, even worthy,
decision? Why did I feel like I needed to prove that to everyone else? The insecurity that now seemed a defining feature of my personality hadn’t been so obvious before I quit my job, when I was getting daily validation of my professional skills and intelligence. Once I became a stay-at-home mother, I lost whatever self-assurance I’d had. Maybe it was because I had serious doubts about my own competence as a full-time mother and had never had any about my abilities as a lawyer.

I reminded myself that I was a fine attorney and an able investigator and mustered up some confidence. I launched into a description of the course of our investigation into Jupiter Jones’s life. I had rushed the kids to bed the night before so that I would have time to type up my notes on my conversations with Polaris, Dr. Blackmore, and Molly Weston. I briefly told Wasserman what we’d accomplished thus far and handed him a stack of impressive reports. He skimmed through them, and as he turned the last page, I saw a little round circle stuck to the back of the document. A
Cheerio.
So much for any appearance of professionalism I might have managed to fake. I reached over and, excusing myself, peeled the remnants of Isaac’s breakfast off the page. Wasserman frowned, and I muttered, “Cheerio,” holding it up for him to see. Then, not seeing anywhere to throw it away, I raised it to my lips. He frowned, and blushing again, I put it in my pocket.

We talked for a few minutes about the investigation, and I managed to redeem myself by providing a cogent assessment of each potential mitigation witness I’d interviewed. Then I asked, “Do you have a trial date?”

“I think we’ll go in about two months.
If
we go.”

“If? Is Jupiter considering a plea?”

The lawyer leaned back as much as his basket-chair would allow. “It’s always a possibility.”

Jupiter had insistently proclaimed his innocence to me, but I knew that it was possible that he would, nonetheless, plead guilty. Virtually everyone pleads guilty, especially if the prosecution has amassed significant physical evidence. The fact that Jupiter insisted he hadn’t committed the murder didn’t
mean he’d necessarily be willing to risk a trial, especially one which could result in him getting the death penalty.

“Have you talked to the prosecutor about a plea?”

He shook his head. “I don’t ever approach them. I let them come to me.” He never approached them? I couldn’t help but think of all the times I’d groveled before the Assistant United States Attorneys, begging for a plea agreement that would spare my clients at least a couple of years. What would have happened if I’d adopted his approach and never went to them on bended knee? Would my clients have fared as well as his did? Or would the prosecutors have thrown the book at them, not even granting the minuscule adjustments that were the usual results of my suppliant beseeching?

“In this case, even if the prosecutors do come to you, they’re not likely to do more than take death off the table. If they’re willing to consider a plea at all,” I said, probably more because I wanted him to know that I knew what I was talking about than because I thought he really cared about my opinions on his chances for a plea bargain.

“Perhaps. It depends on the strength of our case.” He leaned back in his basket.

“Has something come up?” I asked, hoping to hear that there was some exonerating evidence.

“The judge granted our discovery motion, and yesterday we received the victim’s financial information, including bank statements.”

“And?”

“And there are some curious entries.”

“Curious? How?”

“Chloe made a series of large cash deposits during the few months before her death.”

“How large?”

“Two deposits of fifty thousand dollars apiece.”

I whistled. That was large.

“Who were the checks from?”