Death Gets a Time-Out (6 page)

I shoved a notebook and a miniature tape recorder into my oversized, beat-up leather bag and slung it over my shoulder. “I’ll be back before dinner,” I called to Peter as I clomped down the stairs to my car.

“You forgot to buy coffee! Pick some up on your way home,” he yelled after me and then, a moment later, “I love you!”

That’s what it’s like when you have two kids—the “I love yous” are all too often an afterthought. As I drove down the block, I punched my home number into the cell phone.

“Hey, honey?” I said when he answered.

“What?”

“Let’s go on a date tonight. Can you call around and see if you can find a sitter?”

“Why? Is there something in particular you want to do?”

“Not really. I just want some one-on-one time with you. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. I’ll get the sitter.”

“I love you, Peter.”

“I love you, too, babe.”

Feeling like I’d done at least a little something to keep my marriage from turning into a business arrangement devoted solely to the raising of children, I headed across town to the freeway to Pasadena. Al and I had arranged to meet in front of Polaris Jones’s house. Polaris had grudgingly agreed to talk to us, but only on Saturday, the one day he was neither working at the CCU offices nor preaching before the television cameras. The CCU had its own cable network, and they shot a week’s worth of sermons every Sunday.

Miraculously, I’d left the house a little early, so I had enough time to pull into a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and pick up a pound of Peter’s favorite Fair Trade Organic Blend. As I was heading back to my car, I passed a pharmacy, and paused. Was indulging my neurotic anxieties sufficient justification for wasting twenty bucks? I stood in the street and stared at the window display of a woman’s slender thigh. The money would surely be better spent on magical cellulite disappearing cream. And why were they so expensive anyway? Because the world is full of apprehensive women like myself, who are willing to spend the money to assuage their nerves. Finally, I went inside and bought the pregnancy test I still couldn’t quite believe I needed. Figuring that this probably wasn’t going to be the last month in my life I would let myself be tortured by a false alarm, I bought the double pack.

I drove through San Marino’s winding streets, flanked by high fences and intricate entrance gates, and wondered if every person who lived in this expensive and exclusive neighborhood had an income higher than the gross national product of most Central American nations. I found Al parked in front of Polaris’s pale pink mound of a Mediterranean villa. He was leaning against the side of his four-door gas guzzler and staring up at the house. He’d slicked back his hair with the pomade he used on special occasions, and for special clients. The tracks of the comb were visible from where I sat in my car. I could swear I could already smell the cloying
citrusy perfume. If he’d slathered on his usual Brut, I was definitely not going to be able to make it through the interview without losing my lunch.

“Is it a wedding cake, or is it a house?” I said when I’d parked my car and joined him. I inhaled, tentatively, and breathed a sigh of relief. Lemon hair gel, yes, but thankfully no miasma of cheap cologne.

“What do you figure? Three, four million? More?” Al said.

I shrugged. “I haven’t any idea. The real estate market depresses the hell out of me.”

“Why? You two buying a house?”

“Someday.” We were going to have to if I really was pregnant. There was no way five of us could squeeze into our duplex apartment. But that was the last thing I wanted to tell Al. I wasn’t even pulling my weight in our business now. I couldn’t imagine what a terrible partner I’d make with a brand-new baby. I pushed the thought out of my mind. I wasn’t pregnant. I couldn’t be. I simply did not have the time.

We strolled to the front door along a path that meandered through what looked to be an acre or so of Japanese rock garden. Someone had raked swirling designs into the fine, white sand. I resisted the urge to trace my initials in between the stones.

Polaris Jones had, as Al later put it, lawyered up. In a big way. One of his blue-suited representatives greeted us at the door, and there were two more waiting for us in the solarium where the Very Reverend received us.

The sun poured through the walls of windows in the long, narrow room. Large, brightly painted Umbrian pots planted with ferns graced the four corners of the room, and rows of tubular and vaguely erotic orchids drooped along one wall. The man himself sat in a tall, white, wicker chair, wearing a caftan. It was long, white, and elaborately embroidered with sparkly blue thread. I’d never seen Polaris, either in the flesh or on television, but his picture regularly adorned the ubiquitous CCU billboards, and from what I could tell, the Jesus robes were a standard uniform. He had a high forehead with
long, thinning hair, and his thick, black eyebrows looked like they should have met in the middle over his beak of a nose. I was sure he plucked them. He wore white leather Birkenstock sandals, and his long, manicured toenails were buffed to a shine. There were gold bands inset with tiny diamonds on the second toe of each foot. I had a hard time wrenching my eyes away from those pampered feet—the sight of the talon-nails was making me sick all over again. I just can’t stand long toenails. Never have been able to. Polish them all you want, a long toenail is still a claw at the end of a calloused and horny foot.

In addition to the three lawyers he’d seen fit to have present at our interview, there were also two other men in the room, both of whom wore simpler versions of Polaris’s robes. One had a groomed snow-white goatee, and the other was smooth-shaven. By the set of Al’s jaw, I could tell that he was doing his damnedest not to smile.

We were offered drinks and I sipped gratefully at the sparkling water into which I’d squeezed a healthy squirt of lime. The tang of the fruit kept my nausea at bay. Al flipped open his notebook and nodded at me. I opened my mouth to ask Polaris how it was that he came to be married to his son’s girlfriend, and suddenly I had an overwhelming need to pee. I excused myself, much to Al’s disgust and the others’ confusion, and headed out to the front hall. One of the caftan-clad assistants pointed me toward a small bathroom. I shut the door behind me and spun around, confused. There was a pedestal sink with gold fixtures and a white and gold armchair, but no toilet. After a few befuddled moments, I realized that the seat of the armchair cleverly concealed a commode. I unbuckled my pants and then glanced at my purse. It wouldn’t take more than a minute, I convinced myself.

It took more flexibility than I had to keep from sprinkling all over my hand. There was just something strange about the angle of that throne toilet, and the ridiculous foot pedestal didn’t help. It was absolutely not my fault that I ended up dropping the plastic wand into the toilet. So much for
saving the second test for another month. This time I kept a viselike grip on the handle. A few minutes later, I was enthroned on the armchair, willing one of the two pink lines to disappear. How had this happened? Peter was so overworked and exhausted he could barely remember my name. How had he managed to knock me up?

Finally, I shook myself and got up. I couldn’t spend the day in Polaris’s bathroom, pondering my unplanned pregnancy. And I was pretty sure that if there were a private eye’s handbook, it would strictly prohibit leaving intensely personal items strewn about an interviewee’s bathroom. I had to get the pregnancy test out of the toilet. I’d become something of an expert in toilet extraction during Isaac’s flushing phase. After successfully removing from my own toilet a plastic fire engine, my toothbrush, countless Barbie doll heads, a pair of socks, half an apple, six two-inch hussars in full battle dress, a Gundum, a spatula, a length of Hot Wheels track, and other things too numerous either to mention or recall, one wouldn’t have thought that rolling up my sleeves and fishing around in Polaris’s would have made me quite so sick.

I was a bit distracted, to say the least, when I returned to the solarium. I smiled apologetically at Al, and took my little tape recorder out of my bag.

“Lovely bathroom,” I said. “You don’t mind if I tape-record this, do you? I have the world’s worst memory. Two kids.” Three. Three kids, God help me.

One of the attorneys put a warning hand on Polaris’s shoulder. “We’d prefer just to have a conversation at this point. Should we feel a more formal interview is in our client’s interest, we will arrange that. With Mr. Wasserman, of course.”

Of course. Not with us lowly investigators. I sighed and put the recorder away. I hoped Al could take better notes than I.

“I’d like to thank you, Mr. Jones—” I began.

“Very Reverend,” the smooth-shaven CCU aide interrupted. I turned to look at him and he bobbled his head up and down. Then he beamed an unctuous smile at his boss.
“The proper title is ‘Very Reverend,’” he said. Polaris inclined his head in a gracious nod. Proper? Why wasn’t I surprised that these men in their bathrobes had an elaborate etiquette with which they expected us to comply?

“Right. Reverend Jones.”

“Polaris,” the aide said, his moon-face still creased in the beatific smile.

“Excuse me?”

“
Very
Reverend
Polaris
,” he said.

“Oh, okay.” I could hear the snort of disgust that Al was having a hard time suppressing. “Thank you, Very Reverend Polaris, for taking the time to speak to us. We’d like to extend our sympathies to you, both for your wife’s tragic murder, and for your son’s status as a suspect in the case.” Polaris nodded regally. He had yet to say a word. “As your attorneys no doubt advised you, we have been engaged by your son’s attorney, Raoul Wasserman, to investigate the case, and Jupiter’s life, to determine if there are any factors in his situation, his background, that might mitigate against the imposition of the death penalty.” I guess I tend to become a bit stiff when confronted with priests in toe rings and bathrobes. While I explained our job to the man, I tried to get a read on him. He sat very still, gazing at a point somewhere above my head, as though his concerns lay on a more ethereal plane. Or perhaps I was being ungenerous. He had, after all, lost his wife and, effectively, his son in a particularly horrific and gruesome manner. “Do I understand correctly that you have not yet decided whether you will support the imposition of the death penalty in the event that your son is found guilty of the crime?” I asked.

Polaris wrenched his eyes away from the ceiling as though the effort was almost too much for him. “My son is most assuredly guilty of murdering my wife,” he said sternly and sonorously. I couldn’t help but stare at him, startled. His tone of voice may have rung of a very reverend something or other, but his pronunciation was pure Brighton Beach. I hadn’t heard a Brooklyn accent that thick since the afternoon bridge game at my Bubbe’s retirement home. “As far as the
death penalty goes . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged his shoulders.

I waited for him to continue, trying to assimilate the idea of a Brooklyn-born leader of a New Age religious cult, but the moon-faced minion spoke up instead. “It is not the role of terrestrial beings to determine when another’s time on this plane shall pass; only our astral guides may decide such things,” he said, and then grew silent under Polaris’s glance.

The other robed aide took over for his less circumspect colleague. “But clearly there are extenuating circumstances here.”

The attorneys, obviously not eager to have Al and me witness the rift in the CCU leadership, requested that I limit my questions to Jupiter’s life and relationship with his father. That was fine with me. I didn’t really care whether or not the CCU opposed or supported the death penalty. My only concern was with acquiring enough information of Jupiter’s background, life, and personality to allow Wasserman to make an effective mitigation argument. I decided to save my questions about the love triangle between Jupiter, his father, and Chloe for later, and asked Polaris to talk to me about Jupiter’s childhood.

“If you seek to comprehend the path my son chose, and the reasons for his personal catastrophes and for the horror he has inflicted on me, you need look no further than his mother,” Polaris said, the formality of his diction contrasting oddly with his Brooklyn accent. His voice was Harvard and Yale, filtered through Flatbush Yeshiva. And yet, strangely, there was something soothing about it—it was neither harsh nor discordant.

Jupiter’s mother was, according to Polaris, responsible for her son’s behavior, his drug use, for everything up to and including the murder of his stepmother. “I should have sought refuge from that wretched woman the first time I found her sleeping on the floor of my house in Topanga,” he said.

“Topanga?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “My search for enlightenment
took me many places.” Topanga Canyon is a strip of road that winds through the Santa Monica mountains from the Valley, and spills out to the Pacific a little north of Malibu. During the 1960s and into the seventies, Topanga was a psychedelic paradise. Women, naked under flimsy gauze gowns, nursed infants in the parking lot of the grocery store; bearded men directed traffic according to a soundtrack playing in their own heads; and communes raised marijuana as a cash crop, although most tended to smoke up any profits before they were realized.

“What were you doing there?” I asked.

“Very Reverend Polaris’s activities are hardly relevant to your inquiries regarding his son,” one of the lawyers said.

I could have argued that they were, in fact, very relevant, but we all knew that Al and I were there on sufferance—Polaris wasn’t required to talk to us at all. If he wasn’t willing to answer questions about his life, there wasn’t anything I could do to make him.

“Was Jupiter born while you and his mother were living in Topanga?” I asked.

Polaris turned to look directly at me, for what I suddenly realized was the first time. His eyes were dark and piercing. He merely nodded his head, but under his gaze, I began to grow conscious of a subtle force to his personality. Even in the face of his incongruous accent and the robes, toe rings, and vaguely astrological trappings of his cult, Polaris had a kind of magnetism. When he looked at me, I had the eerie but not entirely unpleasant feeling that he was looking inside me. That he could
see
inside me. I’d never felt anything quite like it before. I not only felt like I was the absolute focus of his attention, but I felt compelled to make him the focus of my own.