Death Gets a Time-Out (26 page)

“What did he say?”

She shrugged and passed a hand over her short hair. “He cried.”

Raymond snorted in disgust, and I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

Lilly smiled ruefully. “Archer’s always been a good crier. The problem has always been figuring out whether the tears are real.”

“And do you think they were?” I asked over Raymond’s dismissive grunt.

Lilly shrugged again. “Who knows. It doesn’t really matter, though, does it?”

“And you really don’t think he could have been the source of Chloe’s information?” I asked.

Lilly shook her head. “I know Archer, and I know what he’s capable of.”

When I left Lilly’s house, I replayed in my mind the complicated and devastating story she’d told me. I also wondered at my own ability to compartmentalize. Lilly was a suspect in Chloe’s murder. Perhaps the most obvious suspect. Yet there I was, carrying on as if my friend were absolutely innocent. I hoped she was. I wished fervently that the killer were someone else. Someone like Polaris. Or Archer. Anyone would be preferable to Lilly.

T
HE
mother half of my working mother identity took precedence the next day. Isaac had come home the day before with a note pinned to his backpack. In flowery script, complete with smiley faces and misspellings, his preschool teacher informed me that I was delinquent in my volunteer duties, and thus was expected in class the next morning. The note had the tone of a cheerful jury summons, and I experienced the same trepidation as I had in junior high school when being called into the principal’s office. The summons further instructed me to be prepared to officiate at a lice check, but since I refused to believe this could be anything but a typo (Rice check? Mice check?), I was utterly unprepared when Ms. Morgenstern handed me a comb and a pair of latex gloves.

“You can usually find the nits in the hair over the ears or at the nape of the neck,” she said with a cheerfully condescending smile.

I stared first at the picture of the terrified louse stenciled on the comb and then up at her face. “Nits?” I could hear the quaver in my own voice.

“Little baby lice,” she said. “Look for eggs, or the little critters themselves. I’d start with Madison if I were you. And Colby. The two of them have been scratching all week.”

Since when had lice become a routine part of the academic experience? When I was a kid, nobody had lice. Or at least kids growing up in the New Jersey suburbs certainly didn’t. Maybe those New York children had heads full of creepy crawlies; those same children who were gnawed on by rats while they slept. But not us; not the kids who rode their Big Wheels down wide sidewalks past manicured lawns. And now, here I was, picking through the fragrant, shampooed locks of a class full of Travises, Hunters, Jacksons, Sadies, and Maxes, looking for insects. I couldn’t help but wonder if Ms. Morgenstern drafted me specifically because she knew I spent my working hours searching out the human equivalent.

The return of my morning sickness at the very thought of vermin infesting the scalp of my cosseted little boy and his passel of overly indulged friends caused me to be more thorough than I might have been otherwise. I ran the comb through the kids’ hair and diligently lifted up each and every strand, terrified I would actually see a louse laying its eggs and wriggling its little legs. I was undoing Fiona’s braids when my cell phone rang.

“How close are you to a newsstand?” Al said as soon as I’d answered the phone.

“Oh no.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“Read me the headline.”

He cleared his throat. “
LIKE BROTHER LIKE SISTER
—” he began.

“Okay, I get it,” I said. “I’ll call you back.” I was still holding on to Fiona’s head. I let her go and walked over to Ms. Morgenstern. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and handed her the combs. “I’ve got to go.”

She opened her mouth in protest, but I shook my head. “It’s an emergency.”

She pursed her lips and then widened them into her ubiquitous smile. “We’ll expect you back next month.”

I nodded and found Isaac. He was in the playhouse, wearing a pair of purple high heels. And a set of Viking horns. I kissed him goodbye.

My cell phone rang again while I was standing in line at the Quikmart, paying for the tall stack of
Daily Enquirers
I’d pulled off the rack. It was Lilly. And she was hysterical.

“Did you see it?” she screamed. “They know everything. Everything!”

“I know,” I murmured into the phone. I looked down at the cover photograph. It must have been taken right after Lilly had first shaved her head for her recent film, and her fragile skull filled almost the entire front page. They’d caught her without her usual wide and friendly grin; her mouth was twisted in an unfamiliar scowl. The newspaper had done its homework. The article contained a detailed description of Trudy-Ann’s death, and Lilly’s role in it. Everything was there—her mother’s relationship with Polaris, their life at the Topanga commune and in Mexico. There was a photograph of Dr. Blackmore with his hand to his face, refusing to be interviewed, and a sidebar detailing his theory of recovered memory of childhood trauma. They’d even included descriptions of papers he’d published in which he analyzed the case of a patient he referred to as “Little Girl Q.” Little Girl Q had accidentally caused the death of her mother and then repressed all memory of the event. Through intensive work with Dr. Blackmore, she had recovered her memories, and as a result become an emotionally whole individual who did not need the assistance of narcotics to handle her emotional pain. The newspaper left it up to the reader to assume who Little Girl Q really was.

There was also a full rehashing of the Chloe Jones murder, although the paper stopped just short of accusing Lilly of being involved. Nothing in the article was libelous as far as I could tell, but it certainly left the impression that Lilly’s violent past and Chloe’s violent end were not likely to be merely coincidental.

The descriptions of Lilly’s history, life, and troubles were intimate and detailed—how could they not be? Archer had told the newspaper everything he knew.

“I’m going to kill him!” Lilly screamed.

“Please don’t say that out loud, Lilly,” I said. I tossed some money on the counter and ran out of the store. I got in my car and locked the doors. Once I was safely away from prying ears, I tried to hush her tears. “It’s going to be okay.”

“How? How is it going to be okay?” She was no longer shouting—her sobs strangled all the volume out of her voice.

“Remember what Beverly said,” I murmured. “It will be hard, but you’ll end up okay. You’ll pull through. I promise.”

Lilly just cried harder. I leafed through the rest of the magazine. It was liberally sprinkled with photographs of Archer looking handsome, concerned, put upon. The long-suffering husband of a violent, irrational woman. Near the back was a small photograph of Beverly, standing in front of the state house. I skimmed the paragraph under her picture while murmuring words of comfort to a sobbing Lilly. Beverly and Raymond had survived the debacle relatively unscathed. They were, according to the paper, supportive and nurturing parents who had taken in a damaged and aggressive child and done their best with her. At some point, I knew Lilly was going to be grateful that they had been spared.

“Do you want me to come over?” I asked.

Lilly hiccupped. “No. I want you to go talk to Archer. Find out how much they paid him for this. I want to know what selling me out was worth to that son of a bitch.”

“Does that really matter?” I asked as gently as I could.

Her voice turned cold. “Yes. It matters. It matters to
me
. Can you do this one thing for me, Juliet? Can you?”

I tamped down my hurt feelings. Lilly was devastated, and enraged at Archer, at the newspaper, at the world. She didn’t mean to lash out at me.

“Yes, of course I can,” I said.

A
L
met me at Archer’s house, a hypermodern monstrosity looming over its neighbors in a somewhat seedy part of Beachwood Canyon. “This will be fun,” Al said as we climbed the long flight of stairs to the front door. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was being sarcastic.

To my surprise, Archer answered the door. “Well, what do you know,” he said, flashing a tight, grim little smile. His dark hair flopped in his eyes, and a mottled flush crept from his neck up to his cheeks. He held the door halfway closed with his hand.

“Can we come in?” I asked pleasantly.

“No. I don’t think so,” he said.

Al stepped forward. “Sir, we’d like to just ask you a question or two, if you don’t mind.” He was using his cop voice, all professional courtesy and just barely contained menace.

Archer flushed a deeper red, and his fingers tightened on the door.

We stood like that, at a standoff, for another moment.
Then I said, “Lilly wants to know how much they paid you.” I kept my voice benign—almost friendly.

He paused for a moment, and then shrugged. “I don’t care if she knows. Five hundred thousand.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Wow.”

Archer smirked, no longer quite as embarrassed. It was as if the sheer quantity of cash had given him a kind of confidence. “That’s not all,” he said.

Al and I waited.

“I have a book deal.” He paused, clearly for effect. “One point six million bucks. U.S. rights alone.”

“You’re going to write a book?” I said.

“About my life with Lilly. What it was like having to deal with someone like her. Someone with that kind of history.”

Al stepped forward. “And you’ve cleared all this with your lawyers, have you?”

I nodded. “You’d better do that, Archer. Libel laws. You know.”

“Go to hell,” he said, and closed the door in our faces.

Al shrugged, turned around, and stomped back down the stairs. I followed.

“Her lawyers’ll sue him. Try to get a restraining order,” I said.

“Will they succeed?” Al asked.

I shook my head. “Probably not. He can write about his life with her. He can write about almost anything he wants, as long as he doesn’t accuse her of something that isn’t true. It’s only libel if it isn’t true.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Al said.

I nodded. Yes, that was the question. Archer was bound to at least insinuate that Lilly was responsible for Chloe’s death. Would that be libel or wouldn’t it?

I punched Lilly’s number into my cell phone. The phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. She must have turned her machine off.

“The worst part of this is that it rules him out,” I said.

“For the murder?”

“And the blackmail.”

Al nodded. “He certainly wouldn’t risk this kind of exposure if he had that to cover up.”

“Nope,” I agreed.

“So, where to now?” Al asked.

“Wasserman,” I replied. “We don’t have much choice, do we?”

We found the lawyer in his office, the
Daily Enquirer
spread out on his otherwise immaculate desk.

“Al Hockey, I presume,” Wasserman said. Al’s strong hand disappeared into the grip of Wasserman’s oversized fingers.

“You saw it,” I said, pointing at the papers.

He nodded. “It’ll hit the mainstream press tomorrow. They’ll be embarrassed about the
Enquirer
getting the jump on them, so they’re liable to do longer, even more thorough, stories.”

I sighed. “How are you going to use it?”

“Well, we can’t pretend it didn’t happen, that’s for sure. And she’s been painted in a pretty ugly light. The trick is going to be convincing the jury that she acted alone, that our client wasn’t involved.”

“So that’s your defense? That it was Lilly?” I said, although I’d known for a while that it would have to be.

He nodded. “Means I can’t keep taking her money, though, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “Just what my firm needs, another pro bono case. As for you two, you can’t stay on. You can’t accept money from her, either, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to work for free. Not to mention the little ethical dilemma.”

I nodded. I’d known that, too. I could feel Al’s sigh.

Wasserman rose to his feet. “Try to get me a final report as soon as you can.”

Al and I left in matching glum moods. We stood in the parking lot, leaning on his car. “Another paying client bites the dust,” Al said.

This time I did the sighing.

“Tell you what,” Al said. “I’m going to get back to work on that workers’ comp case. You go do what I know you’re planning on doing.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“Finding another murder suspect. Someone other than Lilly Green.”

He sure knew me, did Al. We said our goodbyes. I had just over an hour before school was over, not enough time to go see Lilly, or to go home. I drove to a café across the street from Isaac’s school and found a seat among the thirty or forty young men and women clicking and clacking assiduously on their laptops. The cafés of the city of Los Angeles are always lousy with wannabe screenwriters working on the next
Chinatown
or
Citizen Kane.
Something told me most of them probably weren’t trying to come up with something along the lines of Peter’s masterpiece,
The Cannibal’s Vacation.

I made myself comfortable with a decaf, a piece of coffee cake the approximate size of my head, and my cell phone. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, other than sniff up every tree to try to find someone other than Lilly or Jupiter who might have been responsible for Chloe’s murder. For lack of a better idea, I decided to make good on my promise to Lilly to follow up on Chloe’s mother’s story. Wanda Pakulski sounded a bit breathier on the phone than she had in real life, and I couldn’t help but wonder if her career in adult entertainment had included phone sex.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” I said.

“No, no. Not at all. I was just out in the garden planting a little Japanese maple tree. For Chloe. Once it gets big enough, I’ll put a little bench under it. Won’t that be pretty?”

Whatever the circumstances of her childhood, Chloe had had a mother who loved her, and who clearly missed her terribly now that she was gone.