Death Gets a Time-Out (34 page)

He nodded. “But I get to ride the scooter. Because I’m injured.”

I looked at the nanny and she nodded. “Okay. You ride the scooter. Just be careful, buddy. Okay?”

A sound in the kitchen caught my ear, and I looked up from my son just in time to see Beverly and Raymond walk out the back door. I caught up with them at the swimming pool. Beverly sat back down on the end of Lilly’s chaise, and Raymond pulled the other one close to his wife and daughter. I stood on the other side of Lilly, awkwardly outside their tight little circle.

“I’m so sorry you had to find out like this, sweetie,” Raymond said.

“What were you doing in Mexico?” I said, my voice sounding harsh and strident, even to my own ears.

Raymond ignored me. “Lilly, sweetie . . .”

“Answer her question, Dad,” Lilly said. She jerked away from her stepmother. “Get off my chair.”

Beverly rose quickly to her feet. I motioned to a table with four chairs on the other side of the pool. “Why don’t we go sit there?” I asked.

“Fine,” Lilly said. She heaved herself out of her chaise and strode over to the table. She yanked the closed umbrella out of its base in the middle of the table and sent it crashing to the ground behind the table. The sound of metal hitting tile reverberated through the air, as Beverly, Raymond, and I walked over and joined her.

The four of us sat down in the iron patio chairs, and I asked my question again, this time keeping my voice low and modulated. “What were you doing in Mexico?”

Raymond answered. “We’d come down a few months before. When the Topanga commune finally broke up. We didn’t really have anywhere to go, and a bunch of folks had already gone down to San Miguel. Not just Trudy-Ann and Artie. A lot of different people had gone down there.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell Lilly that you were there when her mother was killed?”

“We never told anyone. We came back to the States right afterward.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Almost everybody did,” he said.

“We were scared,” Beverly said calmly. “We were all very frightened. None of us knew what the Mexican police were capable of. We didn’t know if they would hold us responsible for having kept the gun in the house. We were afraid we’d be arrested.”

“Why did you bring her the gun, Raymond?” I asked.

He opened his mouth and stared at me.

“It was a gift from her father,” Beverly said sharply.

“A gift?” I repeated.

“Raymond and Trudy-Ann were from Texas. Texans like guns,” she said flatly.

Lilly interrupted. “What happened? What happened to my mother?”

Beverly leaned across the table and clasped one of Lilly’s hands. This time, Lilly let her stepmother touch her. “Raymond and I were in our room, right across the hall from your mother’s, when we heard the shot. We came running in and we found you there. Polaris was taking the gun out of your hands and trying to drag you away from her.”

“That’s not what the other witnesses say,” I said firmly.

“What? What witnesses?” Raymond said.

“Juana,” Lilly whispered. “Juana said I was in the courtyard, with Jupiter.”

“You were, honey,” Beverly answered, stroking Lilly’s fingers. “And then you must have come inside. You were holding the gun when we got there.”

I bit my lip. I knew she was lying, but all I had was Juana’s word. Not enough.

“But you didn’t see me do it,” Lilly said. “Maybe it was Polaris. Maybe he did it. He was there when you got there, right? You said he was.”

Beverly shook her head, gently. “I’m so sorry. I wish that were true. I wish it had been anyone but you. Polaris was taking the gun away from you when we got there. And you were . . . you were . . .”

“You were covered in her blood,” Raymond said, the gentleness of his tone in stark contrast to the harshness of his words. “It was an accident, Lilly. You didn’t mean to do it, but you shot your mother. Just like you remembered you did.”

Lilly began to cry.

“Even if all that’s true, that doesn’t explain why you lied about being there,” I said.

“I told you,” Beverly said, to Lilly, not to me. “We were afraid. We came home to Los Angeles and got things ready for you. Polaris sent you home a little while later. You
weren’t speaking, and then, after Reese had worked with you for a while, it became clear that you didn’t remember anything about what had happened. You didn’t even remember that we’d been there. And somehow Reese didn’t know that we’d been in Mexico. He’d left the Topanga commune before we had, and I guess he just assumed we’d been in Los Angeles the whole time. We let you both think that. We let everyone think that. And after a while the only people who knew otherwise were Artie and Seth. And we knew they wouldn’t give us away. We were afraid. I’m so sorry, darling. But we were just so afraid.”

I didn’t believe a word of it. I didn’t believe that Lilly had killed her mother, and I didn’t believe that their fear of being held accountable for a crime they hadn’t committed had inspired Beverly and Raymond to hold their silence all these years. But it was obvious that Lilly believed them. Maybe she loved them too much to think anything else. Maybe she was too frightened. For whatever reason, and despite what seemed to me to be a mounting pile of circumstantial evidence, Lilly had clearly decided that they were innocent. I stared at her as she clutched her stepmother’s hand in one of hers, and her father’s in the other.

“Did Chloe know about you?” Lilly asked.

“What?” Raymond said, leaning back a bit.

Lilly squeezed him closer. “Did she say anything when you gave her the money? Did she know that you were in Mexico when it happened?”

I could feel the blood rush out of my face. “What are you talking about?” I said.

Lilly turned to me. “Dad took the money to Chloe for me. I didn’t want to meet her. And I certainly didn’t want to send someone who works for me. Dad offered to do it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that Raymond had made the money drop?” I said angrily.

Lilly shook her head. “I was afraid that if the whole story came out, the police would want to question Dad or something. I was worried about Mom’s reelection. The Republican Party is really gunning for her. God knows what they’re going
to do with all this.” She looked at me beseechingly. “Even if you have to tell Jupiter’s lawyers, you won’t tell them about Beverly and Raymond, will you? We just can’t let people know they were involved. It’s bad enough everybody knowing about me. If they think Beverly was there, if they suspect her of trying to cover it up, it’ll destroy the election for her. It will.”

I wasn’t willing to promise anything of the kind. Whatever Lilly believed, I knew she hadn’t killed her mother, and I also knew there was a chance that one of her parents had. I just shook my head.

Her face crumpled.

I turned to Raymond. “
Did
Chloe know that you were in Mexico when Trudy-Ann was killed?”

“Yes,” Beverly interrupted. “She was blackmailing us, too.”

“What?” Lilly and I said at the same time. I sounded shocked, and I was; Lilly sounded like she’d just found out that the people she loved most in the world had betrayed her, and they had.

“After your father gave her the money, he got a telephone call from her. She said she’d found out that we . . . that we . . .” Beverly stumbled over her words, uncharacteristically. She swallowed once, and seemed to steel herself. “That we were there when Trudy-Ann died. She said she’d expose us if we didn’t pay her.”

“And did you? Did you pay her?” I said.

Beverly’s face was pale, almost gray. A lock of wet hair had escaped the towel and hung lankly over her eye. “Yes. Once. Like Lilly did.”

“How much?”

“She asked for a hundred thousand dollars, but of course I couldn’t raise that right away,” Beverly said, grimacing. “Raymond went back to her. He gave her about five thousand and told her it would take some time to get the rest.” Beverly twisted her mouth into a grimace. “She said five thousand was nothing. Walking around money. She told us we’d better come up with more, and fast. We were going to put the house on the market. That was the only way we could think of to come up with the cash.”

“Oh, Mom!” Lilly said, hugging Beverly.

Her stepmother returned her embrace, patting her on the back. “It’s okay, Lilly. It’s all right,” Beverly said firmly. Something about the way she said those words made me certain she’d repeated them many times during the course of their relationship.

I sat quietly, mulling over Beverly’s story in my mind. Something about the timing bothered me. Chloe hadn’t begun blackmailing Beverly and Raymond until after she’d received that first pile of money from Lilly. Why had she waited? What happened after her first successful attempt at extortion that led her to add new victims? Was it just the blush of success? Or had she only found out about them after she’d already begun blackmailing Lilly?

I looked across the table at Raymond, who was resting his head in his hands. And then it hit me.
Raymond
had happened. First Chloe threatened to expose Lilly’s role in her mother’s death. Then Lilly sent Raymond to deliver the money. And suddenly Chloe added another victim to her blackmail roster. Could it be a coincidence? Or might Raymond have had something to do with his wife’s blackmail? Then I remembered what Chloe had told her mother. She’d been excited about knowing something about someone that that person didn’t even know. I’d assumed she was talking about Lilly’s fragmented memory of the killing. But what if what Chloe knew, what she’d found out halfway into her blackmailing scheme, was not that Lilly had killed her mother, but that she
hadn’t
. I stared at Raymond, wishing I could tell the truth just by looking at him. Then I looked over at Beverly. Her expression was one of perfect concern for her daughter. She held Lilly’s hand pressed up to her chest, close to her heart. Was
she
telling the truth, I wondered? What did Chloe know about Beverly? Was it simply, as the consummate politician had said, that Chloe threatened to tell the media that she’d been there in Mexico? Or was there something even worse? I looked from Raymond to Beverly, and back again. Had one of them committed murder?

T
HERE
was no room for me and my suspicions in that tight family circle. I took my leave, gathering up Isaac on my way out. In the car, I called Al and left a message on his voice mail. I told him what I suspected, and asked him to call me back as soon as he could. Then I went to see Wasserman. I hadn’t been able to convince Lilly that her parents were implicated. Maybe I could convince Jupiter’s lawyers that they had a defense available to them that didn’t involve incriminating Lilly. Valerie greeted me in the reception area of the offices wearing the most beautiful maternity outfit I had ever seen. The pants were boot-cut and black, and showed off quite obviously the fact that her legs were still as long and slim as before she’d entered the realm of the hormonally challenged. She wore a matching black jacket cut with a little flare around her hips, and her vibrant, sapphire blue top looked like it had been spun from spiders’ webs. It clung to her high, round breasts and the barely noticeable bulge of her belly. I gazed longingly at her black Prada boots, and then stared down at my own maternity outfit. I had on a pair
of overalls and a white T-shirt. The overalls could no longer button on the sides, and the T-shirt rode up above my swollen belly. That morning, when I’d realized that you could see large swathes of unclothed skin through the gaping sides of my overalls, I’d pulled on a flannel shirt of Peter’s and wore it open, like a jacket. I really had to go shopping.

Valerie gave me a pitying smile, which was at least better than the disdain with which she’d treated me when we first met. She waited while I set Isaac up with a pile of pens and paper, and then took me back to her office. She listened, mouth agape, to my update of the case.

“Holy shit,” she said when I was finally done.

I smiled. I had actually broken through her composure. “Yup.”

“We’ve got to talk to Wasserman.”

The boss, it turned out, was skiing in Aspen. But he had his cell phone on him. As we talked, I imagined him schussing down the side of a mountain as he barked questions into his telephone headset.

“All this crap might have nothing to do with Chloe’s murder,” he said when we had finally tracked him down.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I informed him, giving him Al’s pet theory. Al always says that if two things look related, then they are. There are no coincidences in criminal investigations. I’d come to believe that myself. “I mean, think about it. Chloe was murdered, and by the way she was blackmailing two or three different people? It’s got to be connected.”

“On your right!” he shouted suddenly.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Nothing. Look, none of this proves your friend didn’t commit the murder. Or that our client didn’t, for that matter.”

I shook my head in frustration. “Maybe not, but it sure complicates the prosecution’s case, don’t you think?”

“On your left!”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Tell you what. You’re back on the
payroll. Get me enough to ask for a continuance.”

“You don’t think you can get one based on what I’ve already uncovered?” I knew the answer to that. All I’d really managed to find out was that Chloe was a bad apple and that the case might or might not relate to a death in Mexico thirty years before. And that
that
death might or might not have been an accident. I had plenty of suspects but not enough hard evidence to convince the prosecutor to dump its bird in the hand to chase one of those winging around the bush.

Wasserman grunted. “Okay, that’s better. Chair lift. Here’s what I’m thinking. Maybe the Reverend’s good for it.”

“Exactly, Raoul. That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Valerie interrupted, leaning toward the speakerphone. She looked up at me in time to see my expression, and flushed just a tiny bit.

“It might be Polaris,” I said. “But Beverly and Raymond have already lied about so much; why should we believe them when they say they didn’t kill Trudy-Ann?”