Death Gets a Time-Out (4 page)

“Hey, they insisted. When they freeze, they’ll get the message that they should listen to their father when he suggests warmer clothes.”

“Hair?”

“Ruby said it’s ‘Bed-Head Day’ at school.”

“What, did Congress make Bed-Head Day a national holiday while I was in the bathroom? They go to
different
schools. How can they both possibly have Bed-Head Day?”

I went to the kids’ rooms, yanked a couple of pairs of sweat pants out of the drawers, and shoved my squirming progeny into them. I wiped off their ketchup-smeared faces and dragged a comb through their matted heads of hair. I gave up on Ruby’s curls, and just crammed the mass of red under a baseball cap. Then I went into the kitchen. I was suddenly famished. I riffled through the refrigerator and finally settled on some chocolate pudding packs I’d bought for lunchboxes.

“Sweetie?” Peter said.

“What?” I mumbled with my mouth full of pudding.

“Should you really be eating? If you’re sick?”

“I’m starving.”

“I don’t think you should be eating that if you’ve got food poisoning or a stomach flu. How about some clear soup?”

Soup? Soup! “I’m
famished
,” I insisted, and then we stared at each other.

“Oh my God,” he said.

“No. It’s not possible.”

“You’re throwing up. And you’re hungry. At the same time.”

“It’s just not possible. It’s the fish from last night. I’m sure Beverly Hills is lousy with vomiting studio executives this morning.”

He shook his head. “But you’re
hungry
.”

“Look, I’m just not going there. It’s impossible, and that’s that,” I said, and called out to the children to get in the car so that I could drive them to school.

“Hey! That’s
lunch
pudding!” Isaac hollered when he came into the kitchen.

“Don’t worry. I put some in your lunchbox,” Peter said.

“But she’s eating lunch pudding
now
! In the morning!” He stood, hands akimbo, exuding the indignation that had lately become his specialty.

“Don’t be stupid, Isaac. It’s dinner-for-breakfast, remember?” Ruby said, rolling her eyes in disgust. “He’s so dumb!”

“Stop calling your brother names!” I scolded around my spoon. I stuck my finger in the plastic cup and scraped up the last of the pudding.

“But that’s
lunch
pudding!” Isaac said again. “Not
dinner
pudding.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Peter snapped, and stomped off in the direction of the bedroom. I forget sometimes that he isn’t familiar with our regular morning routine of aggressive bickering. By the afternoon, when school’s over and I’m no longer trying to rush them out the door, they’ve usually mellowed into a somewhat more manageable whining squabble.

Ruby complained the whole way about a boy in her class, Jacob, who had been picking on the girls. She had me worked up into a fit of righteous maternal indignation, but when she described how Jacob had trained spiders to attack the girls, and one of them had bitten her friend Malika so badly that her eyeball had to be removed, the kid lost me.

“The thing about lying, honey, is that people stop trusting you,” I said, trying to sound schoolmarmish rather than irritated.

“I’m not lying.”

“C’mon Ruby.”

“I’m not. I’m being
creative
.”

I snorted and was about to blast her when a thought occurred to me. Wasn’t that basically what her father did for a living? Made stuff up? After a while I said, “Maybe you should just
warn
us when you’re being creative.” I looked in the mirror to find her rolling her eyes at her brother. He smiled at her. Isaac thinks Ruby is God. He believes everything she says, likes everything she likes, and does everything she tells him to do. A few months before, I had watched heartbroken as he valiantly gave up
Blue’s Clues
when Ruby informed him it was a baby show. He would still snuggle his stuffed Blue, but only when the commander-in-chief was not around to sneer at him.

After I dropped the kids off, I headed down the highway to Al’s garage, our business’s temporary quarters that lately had begun to seem suspiciously permanent. I found Al sitting at his ancient metal desk, cleaning a gun. He had spread a pale pink dishtowel on the scratched and pitted surface of the desk and laid out an antique pistol. He was polishing the brass barrel and gazing at it lovingly, as though it were a picture of one of his daughters.

“Do you do that on purpose?” I asked.

“What?”

“Play with your guns when I’m coming over. I swear you only do it because you know I hate them.”

“Ms. Applebaum,” he hissed the “z” on Ms. with extra emphasis, “the world does not revolve around you. I’ll have you know that I just got this in the mail. It’s a nineteenth-century naval officer’s flintlock boarding pistol. Look at this little bayonet that swings out from under the barrel.”

“Cute,” I said. “I bet it cost you plenty.”

Al nodded conspiratorially and then glanced over his shoulder at the door leading to the house. “Keep your voice down. Jeanelle thinks it’s a
reproduction
.”

“I very much doubt that,” I said, and as if on cue, Al’s beautiful, sweet-tempered wife walked through the door, holding a platter of muffins.

“Hi, Juliet. I baked you two some muffins. Blueberry.” She laid the plate down on the table and ruffled her husband’s remaining strands of hair. Al and Jeanelle might seem to an outsider to be the world’s unlikeliest couple. After all, how many members of a gun-toting, antigovernment militia are married to black women? Al claims his unit is not the only multiracial one in the country, but I have a hard time believing that. Al and Jeanelle have been married for close to forty years. They have two daughters, who get their looks from their mother and their politics from their father. One’s an FBI agent and the other is in law school, hoping to become a prosecutor when she graduates.

“The new toy,” Jeanelle said, picking up the pistol and looking admiringly at the engraved lock and wood handle. It was tough to read her expression.

“Yup. Reproduction.”

“Uh-huh. Impeccable craftsmanship.” She smiled at him and headed back up the two steps leading into the house. “Don’t work too hard, you two.”

“Fat lot of chance of that,” Al grumbled. It had been a slow month for us. There was barely enough to keep Al busy, and I hadn’t billed a client in over a week. If I didn’t bill, then I didn’t make any money, and I wasn’t much thrilled by the idea of sitting around Al’s garage in Westminister for no money.

“I might have some work for us,” I said, and told Al about Lilly’s offer.

“The Chloe Jones murder,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “That’s definitely high-profile. It would get us noticed. Generate some business.”

“Lilly asked me to do it specifically because she thought we
wouldn’t
be in it just for the notoriety. She thought we’d be committed to helping her brother, not to drumming up new business.”

“We can help her brother and help ourselves at the same time,” he replied.

“You don’t think it’s a conflict of interest? My friendship with Lilly?”

He scowled. “Look, let’s let the client decide. We’ll ask the kid if he minds; we’ll ask the lawyer if he minds. If they both give the okay, we take the case.”

I didn’t reply. I was too busy running to the bathroom.

“You okay?” Al shouted at my back.

“Bad fish,” I groaned, crashing through the kitchen and making it just in time.

I
still wasn’t feeling one hundred percent better the next day, but Al had set up an appointment for us to visit Jupiter Jones at the county jail. One of Raoul Wasserman’s associates would be meeting us. Wasserman had, as it turned out, been willing to let us join the investigative team. I suppose Lilly’s phone call telling him that she’d fire him if he didn’t agree might have had something to do with that.

Unfortunately, we were supposed to meet at the jail at nine in the morning, and I couldn’t drop Isaac off at preschool until eight forty-five. I was almost fifteen minutes late, and decidedly frazzled, when I finally hustled into the jail. I found Al chatting up the attorney from Wasserman’s office. Her elegant black suit revealed a long stretch of very thin, very sexy leg. She wore gorgeous, dainty, slingback heels and I had to stifle myself to keep from asking her where she bought them and how much they had cost. I love impractical, beautiful shoes. As the only part of my body I don’t actively loathe, my feet deserve to be rewarded with a pair of Manolos or Jimmy Choos on a regular basis.

The young attorney looked at me appraisingly, and I self-consciously pulled at the hem of my sweater, tugging it over the waistband of the skirt that I’d had to pin closed because the button had popped off long ago. At least I was wearing a nice pair of Stuart Weizman spectator pumps. I maneuvered one foot forward to show them off.

“I’m Juliet Applebaum,” I said, sticking out my hand.

“Valerie Sloan. You’re late.”

I forced a smile. “I don’t think Jupiter’s going to mind. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.”

“I have another appointment at ten-thirty,” she said.

Al discreetly put a warning hand on my arm. I shrugged him off and smiled grimly at the arrogant young attorney. “Well, then, we’d better hurry,” I said.

Jupiter Jones looked much younger than his thirty years, and drooped over the table as if he were trying to make his lanky body as inconspicuous as possible. His lips were chapped and peeling and he picked absently at them, dropping tiny flakes of skin on the table. I felt the gorge rise in my throat, and I battled it down. The young attorney introduced him to us, and he nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I’m a friend of Lilly’s,” I said, and he finally raised his eyes to mine. “This is Al Hockey.” Al nodded once as Jupiter flashed him a nervous glance. “Lilly wants us to help in your case, to work on your investigative team.”

He mumbled something.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Can you get me out of here?” he said softly.

“Mr. Wasserman is doing what he can, Mr. Jones,” Ms. Sloan said. “We’re going to appeal the denial of bail. You know that. Mr. Wasserman told you that in the letter he sent you.”

Jupiter nodded and ducked his head. I watched him peel another curlicue of skin off his lip. He licked nervously at the bright red dot of blood that appeared. I shot the attorney an irritated glance. Why is it that some lawyers never seem to learn how to talk to their clients? Is it that they are so full of their own importance, so confident that they know
what’s best, that they can’t see the person for whom they work as anything other than an incompetent child, one who needs to be told what to do? I fear I had had something of that attitude myself, when I first started at the public defender’s office. I was full of good intentions, excited about my role as advocate for the underprivileged. It was a bank robber named Malcolm Waterwright who taught me, finally, to see my clients as people, like myself. He was a middle-aged man with a drug habit. I’d negotiated his guilty plea, and basically forced him to accept it. Of course the choice was his, but I made it clear to him that I knew best, and that there wasn’t really any other option. And truthfully, that was the case. There was a mountain of evidence against him, and we certainly would have lost at trial—pleading guilty reduced his sentence. We were preparing a letter for the judge, asking that he be sentenced on the low end of the applicable sentencing range, when Malcolm blew my complacency away. I asked him about his educational background, and he told me that he had a B.A. in English literature—from the same small New England college that I’d attended. I was stunned. Although I never would have admitted it, I had always felt that my clients were somehow a completely different breed of human than I. They were of a different class, a different society, had a different level of intelligence. I stared at Malcolm, overwhelmed by the realization that there but for the grace of God, and a drug habit, went I. I never treated another client the same after that, even the ones like Jupiter Jones who were accused of crimes that I found personally sickening.

“What’s going on, Jupiter?” I asked. “Is someone hurting you?”

He didn’t answer, just chewed on his lips. I could imagine what was happening to him. Rapists have a terrible time in jail. The only people who suffer more abuse are those accused of child molestation. The ones who, like Lilly’s stepbrother, look weak and afraid are in particular danger.

“Jupiter, tell me what’s going on. If you’re in danger, Mr. Wasserman can make an emergency petition for bail. Or at
least request that you be put in protective seclusion.”

He shook his head quickly. “I don’t want to go to the hole.”

Inmates who are in danger and inmates who
are
a danger get the same treatment. They are put in the SHU—the Segregated Housing Unit—where they spend all but one hour of their day alone in a tiny cell. For that reason, more often than not, victims opt to stay in the general population and just deal with the harassment.

“I told you. Mr. Wasserman has already presented a bail application,” Valerie said reprovingly.

Al and I looked at each other, and he made a couple of notes on the yellow pad he’d brought. One of our first jobs would be to find out exactly what it was that Wasserman was doing about getting Jupiter out of jail before he ended up dead, or worse.

I asked Jupiter to tell us what happened, reminding him that we, like his lawyers, were bound by the laws of attorney-client privilege. Everything he told us would be confidential.

“Why don’t you start with the day Chloe died. Did you see her that day?”

Al and I had to lean over the table to hear Jupiter’s low monotone as he described what he’d done the day his stepmother was murdered. It had been a day like most others. He’d slept late, until almost noon. No one was home when he awoke. His father was out, presumably at the CCU center in Pasadena, where he spent much of his time.

“Where is your room?” I asked.

“In the basement,” he replied. “I have kind of an apartment down there, with a bathroom and sort of an office or game room. It’s where I do my work.”