Death Gets a Time-Out (3 page)

“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?”

“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.”

I patted her hand, surreptitiously trying to loosen her grip on my now aching fingers. “I am your friend, Lilly. And that’s just why I shouldn’t be working on your brother’s case. It might be a conflict of interest.”

“Why?”

“Because I would be
his
investigator—part of his legal team—but
your
friend. Don’t you see how that would be weird?”

“No, I don’t. If I can hire and pay his lawyers, why can’t I hire and pay you? I wouldn’t be asking you to
report
to me or anything. I just want you on his defense team so I know for sure that there’s someone there who is going to devote herself to Jupiter. Someone who isn’t doing it just for the money, or for the notoriety.”

I blushed. The frisson of excitement I’d felt when I’d first heard the name “Jupiter Jones” had certainly been because of the notoriety of the case. Every criminal defense lawyer dreams of catching the big fish—one of those high-profile cases that end up on
Court TV.
And I was still, at heart, a defense lawyer. It’s kind of like being Jewish or Catholic. Once you’re born into the religion, you’re doomed, even if you stop going to services. I wanted this case—I wanted it bad. But could I do it? Was it ethical to represent a friend, or the brother of a friend? And did I want to work the hours this case would certainly demand?

“Please, Juliet. I need you. I really need you.”

Lilly had always been there for me, even when I was asking for favors that seemed downright impossible. And she’d stayed my friend, even after she’d become famous. That counted for something, didn’t it? Anyway, who was I kidding? As soon as the words “Jupiter Jones” had left her lips, I was hooked.

“Let me talk to my partner,” I said. “If he thinks it’s okay, and if Wasserman goes along with it, we’ll take the case.”

Lilly flung her arms around my neck. “Thank you so much,” she said.

I hugged her back. “Don’t thank me yet. Let’s see what Al and Wasserman have to say, first.”

“Oh my God!” she said, leaping to her feet. “My award!”

We rushed back into the banquet hall just in time for Lilly to step up to the podium, receive her Tiffany crystal bare torso of a woman with only one breast (could I really have been the only person who thought that was in shockingly bad taste?), and give a gently humorous and profoundly moving speech about the inspiration cancer survivors provide the rest of us. Lilly was a consummate professional. You would never have known, looking at her on the stage, so beautiful that she almost glowed, that, moments before, she’d been pale and frightened, begging me for help.

I’
M
as macho as the next mother, but I am simply not able to get my children dressed, fed, and out the door in the morning while crouched over the toilet seat, vomiting. The morning after I gobbled up all that Gorgonzola cheese and rare ahi tuna, I had to wake up my husband to help me juggle food poisoning and carpool. Peter works at night. Every evening after we put the kids to bed, he takes a thermos of black, bitter coffee into his office and hangs out with zombies and flesh-eating cheerleaders until dawn. Then he staggers to bed, and loses consciousness until noon. That morning, though, he was awakened earlier than usual by the lovely sound of me gagging and crying for help.

Even his toes looked tired. That was the only part of his body visible to me as I lay on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor. “What’s wrong?” he said, his voice scratchy and barely audible. He cleared his throat. The sound of the phlegm rattling around made me heave again, and I bent back over the toilet.

“Are you sick?” he asked.

“No. I’m just cleaning out the toilet. With my face.”

“Right. What do you need me to do?”

I waved in the general direction of Ruby and Isaac.

Half an hour later, when I’d finally managed to splash some cool water onto my face and stagger out of the bathroom, I found the children sitting in front of the TV, eating hotdogs. They were wearing shorts and T-shirts, and their hair stuck out in tufts all over their heads.

“Hotdogs?” I asked my husband.

He shrugged and said, “Dinner-for-breakfast.”

“Shorts? In the middle of winter?”