Death Gets a Time-Out (22 page)

“Well, it could,” I said.

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows, waiting. I continued, “It could help, if what you’re arguing for isn’t just second-degree murder. You could use it to present a defense of innocence.”

Wasserman stopped his pacing. “Innocence?” he said, as though the very idea that his client might not be guilty of the crime were anathema to him.

“Yes. Jupiter has said all along that he didn’t commit the murder. These allegations of blackmail seem, to me at least, to lend credence to the idea that someone else killed her.”

He stared at me incredulously. “Isn’t Lilly Green a close friend of yours? Are you seriously suggesting that I mount a defense that she killed Chloe?”

“Yes, Lilly’s my friend. And Jupiter is my client. I’m not suggesting that you pin the murder on Lilly, necessarily. Anyone who cares about Lilly might have done it. Her husband, her manager, her agent, her parents. Anyway, you don’t necessarily need to pick a suspect. You could present the jury with a whole host of potential killers.” I knew as well as Wasserman did that it is always better to give the jury a coherent and believable story, and that that generally requires a specific suspect. But I couldn’t bring myself to suggest that he convince the jury that Lilly committed the murder. Something else occurred to me. “Maybe Lilly wasn’t the only person Chloe was blackmailing. If she did it to Lilly, she may well have done it to other people. One of them might have killed her.”

Wasserman sat back down on the edge of Valerie’s desk. I could see that he wasn’t convinced by any of my possible scenarios. He still believed Jupiter to be guilty, and if anything, the information I’d given him had served only to affirm that belief. At the same time, he was a good lawyer. He was responsible and thorough. He knew he couldn’t just dismiss what I’d told him as at best unhelpful and at worst damaging, even if that was what he believed. His obligation to his client required more. “Are you willing to investigate this? Both Ms. Green’s story, and the possibility of any other potential blackmail victims?” he asked me.

“Of course,” I said.

He paused and looked at me.

“For free?” he said.

I swallowed. Al was going to kill me.

“We can’t exactly expect your friend to pay us to explore
the possibility that she is a murderer,” Wasserman continued.

He was right. It would be absolutely unethical to charge Lilly for this part of the investigation.

“For free,” I agreed. And sighed.

I
had to rush to make it to the obstetrician’s office on time. When I’d been pregnant with Ruby, Peter had come to absolutely every OB appointment. He’d held my hand through pelvic exams and blood tests, gazed adoringly at the screen during the ultrasounds, taken copious notes during the labor and delivery classes. When I was pregnant the next time, with Isaac, he had been there for the ultrasound appointments, and even joined me at the midwife’s office a few times, though he left his notebook behind. This time, I had a feeling that I was going to have to beg if I wanted him there at all. I called him from my cell phone on my way across town.

“Meet me at the OB’s office in ten minutes,” I said as soon as he picked up the phone.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, an edge of panic in his voice.

“No, no. I’m fine. I just want you to be there.”

He groaned. “Oh, honey, do you mind if I give it a miss? I have a ton of work to do today.”

“Yeah. I mind.” I looked at my watch. Eleven forty-five. “You have to be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Sweetie, you don’t need me. You’ve done this a thousand times before.”

“I have not.” I punctuated my sentence with the gas pedal, and the car jerked forward. I hit the brakes, just missing rear-ending a cherry-red BMW that was stopped at a traffic light. “I’m having my CVS today. And they might have to stick this huge needle in me. I need you there.”

“Okay. Okay. It might take me a little while, though. I’m not dressed.” Of course he wasn’t. I couldn’t remember the last time Peter had managed to shed his bathrobe before noon. I knew the man wasn’t lazy. He worked hard every night. He had for as long as I’d known him, but somehow the thought of him in his pajamas in the afternoon still gave me just the tiniest flash of irritation. Maybe it was because his schedule almost always gave him a full night’s sleep, and mine almost never did. And my maternal state of perpetual sleep deprivation was only going to get worse when the new baby came.

It took Peter almost an hour to get to the doctor’s office, but I was still sitting in the waiting room, quietly seething, when he rushed through the door. Before I had time to blast him for keeping me waiting, he scooped me up in a hug.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said, bussing me on the cheek and collapsing in the seat next to me. “Mindy Maxx called right as I was heading out the door.”

I stifled the flicker of jealousy I always felt at any mention of the beautiful blond producer who had once taken up so much of my husband’s time and attention. “It’s no big deal,” I said, my tone belying my words. “They’re behind. As usual.” He kissed me again, and I smiled despite myself.

Much to my relief, the nurse came to call us before I had to sit through too much conversation about the fabulous project Marvelous Mindy was pitching to my husband, and how smart she was, etc. etc. We went to the back of the office to a room full of medical equipment. We weren’t going to be
seen by my normal physician because the procedure was so specialized that there was only one doctor in the practice who performed it. I followed the nurse’s instructions to remove all my clothes and did my best to drape the tiny paper towel she gave me over my already protruding belly. The doctor walked in while I was still trying to decide which part of my body it was less embarrassing to expose. It was hard to believe the guy had been around long enough to have the opportunity to become an expert in any field other than, say, riding a bike without training wheels. If it weren’t for his bald pate, I would have thought he was about nine years old. When exactly did I get old enough to have physicians who were younger than I?

“How far along are you?” the baby doctor said gruffly, flipping through my chart. “We don’t really like to do this past thirteen weeks.” Bedside manner was clearly
not
one of his specialties.

“I’m only ten and a half weeks pregnant,” I said.

“Hmm,” he murmured doubtfully, looking at the size of my belly.

“I’m just fat,” I said.

“You’re not fat; you’re pregnant,” Peter said. This was the first opportunity he’d had to say that in this pregnancy, but if my previous two were any indication, it was soon to become a mantra.

“Well, the ultrasound will tell us how old the baby is.” The doctor pushed Peter out of the way and sat down on a stool next to the bed. He squirted some gel onto my stomach, and I leapt at the chill. “I’m not going to be able to do this if you keep jumping around,” he said.

Peter opened his mouth to object to the doctor’s obnox-iousness, but I silenced him with a glance. I did, however, make a mental note to let my own doctor know that I wasn’t interested in having this rude kid present in the delivery room when I had my baby. I was about to ask the doctor to stop poking me so hard when he flipped around a monitor that was hanging on an arm along one side of the bed so it faced us.

“Here’s your baby,” he said.

Peter and I gaped at the screen. We’d seen each of our children on the ultrasound when they were
in utero
, but either the technology had changed or our memories had grown dim. We could see everything so clearly. The baby was tiny, curled up like a little shrimp, and its entire body was visible on the screen. Its forehead hadn’t yet lost that early fetal bulbousness, but we could see eyes, a mouth, and a nose that I could swear possessed the trademark Wyeth hook. As we watched, it pushed one little arm up and kicked a leg. I looked over at my husband. His smile was as big as my own.

“Look,” Peter said, “she’s waving at us.”

“She?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s a girl,” Peter said.

“It’s impossible to differentiate at this early stage,” the doctor snapped, but we ignored him.

“Hi, little girl,” I said, tears spilling down my cheeks. For the first time in weeks, Lilly and Jupiter were entirely out of my thoughts. There was room only for this beautiful new baby. And her father.

The doctor moved the ultrasound wand around, and the baby swam out of view. Peter and I looked at each other, and I could see that he was crying, too. He smiled at me and kissed my forehead.

“Your uterus isn’t positioned for a transcervical procedure,” the doctor said. “I’m going to have to punch through your abdomen.”

That hurt every bit as much as it sounded like it would, and I spent the rest of the day recovering in bed. Peter was wonderful. He made me endless cups of tea, and when that proved insufficient to silence my whining, he took the kids out for an hour and returned, arms laden with Rocky Road, jars of hot fudge, and a can of whipped cream. I fell asleep that night with Ruby and Isaac curled up in bed next to me, our faces covered in chocolate, and our dreams full of babies waving hello.

A
FTER
a day in bed, I got back to work, concentrating my investigation on Chloe. I decided to start with the person likely to know the most about her, the person who would, if my own were anything to go by, possess both a clear-eyed sense of her failings and an utterly disproportionate estimation of her talents—her mother. Chloe’s mother lived in Laguna Beach, a small seaside town in Orange County, about an hour south of the city. I’m not sure what I was expecting from the mother of such an unsavory character, but it certainly wasn’t the pleasant woman with graying blond hair who greeted me at the front door of a little blue cottage covered in bougainvillea and shaded by a massive avocado tree.

Wanda Pakulski was beautiful, with full lips and large blue eyes, and clear, pale skin entirely unsullied by makeup. She had a few laugh lines, but she hardly looked old enough to have a daughter in her late twenties. Her hands were broad and capable, with close-trimmed nails, and she answered her front door in her bare feet. Her hair was swept off her high forehead with the kind of turquoise hair clip that is
sold in gift shops on Indian reservations. She was wearing faded blue jeans, and I found it difficult to keep from staring at the disconcertingly massive breasts straining at the buttons of her bright white men’s Oxford cloth shirt. I forced myself to look around the room I had just walked into, taking in the vaguely Southwestern décor and the walls covered in small square paintings of flowers. The painter was clearly heavily influenced by Georgia O’Keeffe. “Are these yours?” I asked, pointing at the walls.

“Yup,” she said. “I’m in a floral phase right now.”

“They’re lovely,” I said, without lying. The paintings were pretty, the colors soft and pleasing, the flowers more than competently rendered.

“Too lovely,” she said, looking critically at a small canvas. “They’re a little bit Hallmark, don’t you think?” She shrugged. “People seem to like them, though. They’re selling like crazy. Come on in the kitchen. I’ve got coffee made.”

“Please, don’t go to any trouble,” I said, following her through the living room into the small, bright kitchen. She bustled around the room, pouring coffee into cups and arranging a few muffins on a plate.

“It’s no trouble at all,” she said.

“I really appreciate your agreeing to talk to me. It’s very generous of you, considering the fact that I’m working for Jupiter.”

She paused and looked up at me. Her blue eyes were dry, but she looked incredibly sad. “You’ll probably think I’m crazy for saying this, given everything that happened, but I always liked Jupiter. He was very sweet to Chloe. I felt so sorry for him when she married Polaris.”

“But you must be very angry with him now.”

She shrugged. “Yes, of course. But somehow I still can’t help feeling sorry for him. Has he said anything? I mean, about why he did it?”

I weighed what my obligation to confidentiality would allow me to reveal. From the very beginning, Jupiter had publicly denied his guilt. That much I could tell her. “Jupiter says that he’s innocent of her murder.”

She sighed. “Yes. I read that in the papers. Is he, do you think? Is he innocent?”

“I think he is,” I replied. “But then, he
is
my client.”

She nodded. “I’ve had such a hard time believing it was him. I just don’t think he could have hurt her. He always loved her. Always.”

I didn’t tell her what I knew to be true. Loving someone and hurting them are hardly mutually exclusive.

“If he didn’t do it, then the person who murdered my daughter is still out there.” Her voice quavered.

“Yes,” I said gently.

“But the police aren’t looking for him.”

“No.”

“Are you?”

That gave me pause. Was I looking for Chloe’s murderer? If Jupiter was innocent, as he claimed, then the best way of proving that was to find the real killer. No matter who that was. I pushed the thought of my friend Lilly out of my mind. “I’m trying to help Jupiter. Any way that I can,” I said.

Wanda nodded. “Let’s go out into the yard.”

She put the cups and plates on a tray and led me out the back door into a perfect, miniature garden. She balanced the tray on a tiny wrought iron table and motioned for me to sit down in one of the two chairs. There were flowers everywhere. Roses climbed the arbor underneath which we sat. The air was thick with the smell of honeysuckle, wisteria petals littered the brick patio like purple confetti, and the flowerbeds alongside the house were a jumble and tangle of pinks and blues, fuchsias and violets, as though someone had dumped bag after bag of wildflower seed. It was all utterly enchanting.

“Is this where Chloe grew up?” I asked, wondering how someone who came from such a beautiful place could have turned out so wrong.

Wanda smiled ruefully and shook her head. “Hardly. When Chloe was a girl, I could never have afforded this. I can’t really afford it now. She helped me buy this place. Or rather, Polaris did. He was very generous with me.”