Death Gets a Time-Out (8 page)

I frowned. “No, it’s not sexual. At all. He’s just . . . he’s just hard not to look at. When he looks at you, that is.” I shook my head, frustrated at my inability to pinpoint the exact nature of the man’s appeal. “Anyway. I’m thinking our next step needs to be the rehab center. We’ll get information on Jupiter’s drug habit. How hard he worked to kick it. That kind of thing. I’ll bet there’s at least one shrink at the center who can testify on his behalf.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Al said. “When can you head up to the Ojai Self-Absorption Center? Monday?”

“The Ojai Rehabilitation and Self-Actualization Center. Yeah, Monday, I guess. I’ll leave a message for the director letting him know we’re coming. We can get on the road as soon as I drop off the kids.”

Suddenly, I remembered what I’d found out sitting on Polaris’s throne. I didn’t say anything, though. I wasn’t ready to believe it myself, let alone tell my partner. I could only imagine what a pregnancy was going to do to my productivity, such as it was. And when the baby came, well, I’d be completely useless to Al. It was just so frustrating. Here I was, beginning to get something of a life back for myself, and this happened.

After Al left, I sat behind the wheel of my car for a few moments, debating whether I wanted to take the coward’s way out and tell my husband over the telephone, or if I should go home and make my announcement in person. I felt the saliva gather in the corners of my mouth. I opened the car door, leaned out, and threw up on the elegantly appointed streets of San Marino. Nice. First I had to go up to my elbow in Polaris’s toilet; now I was either going to have to find a hose somewhere, or leave a delightful little calling card on his curb. My cell phone rang as I was wiping the sweat from my forehead.

“Don’t come home!” Peter said as soon as I answered the phone.

“Why not?”

“Because I found a babysitter, but her mother won’t let her stay out past eight. Meet me at Off Vine in half an hour.”

“Who’s the sitter?”

“Bethany, from next door.”

“Peter! Bethany’s like twelve years old!”

“No she’s not. She just turned fourteen. And you should see her—she’s grown up a
lot
in the past couple of months. She looks like Pamela Anderson.”

Was
that
what he was doing while I was driving carpool? Scoping out the local teenage girls? “I missed the section in T. Berry Brazelton where he says that you should judge a babysitter by her breast size.”

“Juliet, give me a break. She’s
fine.
Her mom is right next door. Just get your butt over to the restaurant. We haven’t had an evening without the kids in I don’t know
how
long. Let’s have some fun, dammit.”

Oh well. A cute little restaurant in a renovated cottage in Hollywood was as good a place as any to tell my husband that our lives were in for a drastic upheaval. Again. I slammed my car door, determinedly not looking at the mess I’d made in front of Polaris’s house. It’s biodegradable, after all.

On my way across town, I called Lilly. Her assistant patched me through to her cell phone.

“Hi, Juliet!” she shouted over the sound of traffic. Her freeway was moving faster than mine.

“Hi. Listen. I hate to ask you this over the telephone, but do you mind telling me how your mother died?” There was only the sound of cars on her end, the hiss of a cellular connection. “Lilly? Are you still on the line?”

“Yes,” she said. “There was an accident.”

We already knew that. Why, I wondered, had Lilly used precisely the same inexact words to describe her mother’s death as had her stepfather? “What
kind
of an accident?” Again the only sound in my ear was the hum of traffic. “Lilly?”

“I’m still here. Juliet, I’m sorry. I can’t talk to you about this. It’s too . . . too traumatic.”

“But—”

“No. No, I can’t.” And she hung up.

As I drove the rest of the way to the restaurant, I pondered Lilly and Polaris’s unwillingness to talk about Lilly’s mother’s death. Something had happened in Mexico, but what? And could it possibly have anything to do with Chloe Jones’s murder? But I had my own problems to worry about, and I pushed thoughts of Lilly’s mother out of my mind. I made it to Off Vine before Peter, and sat down at a table on the front porch under the heat lamps, nervously eating my weight in bread. I smeared inch-thick layers of butter on the crusty rolls—For the calcium! Really!—and looked around the empty restaurant. Apparently, Peter and I were the only two people in Los Angeles uncool enough to be dining out at 5:30 P.M. I glumly counted off how many years it would be before we didn’t have to rely on a babysitter to go out for the evening. By then we’d be old enough to qualify for the early-bird special, and would still be eating dinner while it was light out.

When I saw Peter’s vintage orange BMW 2002 pull up to the valet stand, I took the pregnancy test out of my purse and put in on his plate.

He bounded up the stairs and gave me a kiss. “Date night!” he said happily, and squeezed me around the middle. I smiled
despite my trepidation and squeezed him back. He plopped down in his seat and reached for his glass of water. The smile disappeared from his face when he glanced down at his plate.

“Surprise,” I said softly, trying to smile. I couldn’t read the expression in his gray eyes. He didn’t speak.

“Kind of a shock, huh?” I asked.

He nodded slightly and gingerly picked up the pregnancy test. “On my plate?”

“Excuse me?”

“You put it on my plate.” He handed it to me. “It’s, like, full of pee.”

“Eew. Right. Sorry,” I said, and stuck the test back in my purse.

“You’re going to save it?” he said.

“I saved both of the others.”

“Huh.”

“What does that mean? Huh?”

“Nothing. Just huh.”

My eyes got hot and prickly, and I could tell I was about to cry. “So I take it this isn’t good news.”

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just . . . it’s just a surprise.” He rubbed at his jaw and exhaled loudly.

“No kidding.” I tore off another hunk of roll and spread the butter with short, angry jerks of my knife.

“It’s just that I kind of thought you had to have sex to get pregnant,” he said.

I glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He smiled weakly. “Nothing, I mean, we’re not exactly doing it all the time.”

“Yeah, well, we’re obviously doing it enough.” I snatched up my menu and pretended to read it.

“C’mon, sweetie,” he said.

I ignored him and studied my menu. “What the hell is a cardoon? And why is it on every damn menu in the city?”

“Juliet. Honey. Look at me.”

I didn’t.

Suddenly, he got up and walked around the table. He
kneeled down next to my seat and took me into his arms. I stiffened, not yet ready to forgive him for feeling the same ambivalence I did. But after a moment, I leaned into his chest and buried my face in the folds of the old flannel shirt he hadn’t bothered to change out of. Then I started to cry.

“Aren’t you happy?” he said. “I’m happy. Let’s be happy about this, okay?”

“You are
not
happy,” I wailed. If there had been another living soul in the restaurant, they would have stared at me.

Peter smoothed my hair out of my streaming eyes and kissed me. “I am. Really. It was just kind of a shock. But I’m happy. Definitely. Are you happy?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wiping my nose on his shoulder. “Didn’t you sleep in this shirt?”

Peter and I agreed to wait until we were sure the pregnancy was going to stick before we told the kids. He tried to convince me that the secret should be kept from everyone else, too, but he knew that was a lost cause even as he made the argument. I’m just not constitutionally capable of keeping my mouth shut about something like that. I’m fully aware of the ludicrous irony of a private investigator who can’t keep a secret. But to give myself a little credit, I’ve never violated a client’s confidence. It’s really only the intimate details of my own life about which I’m embarrassingly indiscreet. My poor long-suffering husband found out about my little problem the hard way. We had been dating only a few weeks when Stacy came to New York on business. One of her clients was performing in a spectacularly bad play off Broadway (Models turned actresses should never, I mean
never
, attempt Strindberg. I think that’s actually a federal law, and if it’s not, it should be.), and Stacy had begged us to come to a performance. She took us out for dinner afterwards to thank us for being the only people in the theater who hadn’t rushed the exits at the intermission. Over dessert she congratulated Peter on his sexual prowess. I believe her exact words were, “Juliet says you’re the best lover she’s ever had.” First he turned red, and then green, and then kicked me under the table.

“Oh, honey,” Stacy had said to my blushing boyfriend, “get used to it. Juliet and I tell each other everything. And I mean, everything.”

I think for a while Peter deluded himself into thinking that it was just Stacy, my best friend, who was privy to all my most intimate secrets, but when he came upon me comparing severity of menstrual cramps with a woman standing in front of me in line at the health food store (she introduced me to red raspberry leaf tea, a truly miraculous substance), he had finally to confront the ugly truth. I can’t keep my mouth shut. He knew before he even suggested the opposite that I was going to tell all my girlfriends, and my mother, that I was pregnant.

“But what if you have a miscarriage? Are you really going to want to have to call everyone and tell them that you’re not pregnant after all?”

“How long have you known me?” I asked my husband. “If I have a miscarriage, I’m going to be on the phone crying to every single one of my friends anyway. You can’t get emotional support unless you let people into your life.”

He raised his hands in a gesture of defeat. “But not Ruby or Isaac, right?”

“Of course not,” I said, and wondered exactly how long it was going to be before I slipped up and mentioned it in front of them. Wasn’t Ruby bound to ask why it was that I was spending so much time in the bathroom, throwing up?

T
HE
next morning, Al and I met in the parking lot of Isaac’s preschool. We were heading almost two hours north of the city, to Ojai, and I was running late. When Al pulled up, I was still trying to wrestle my son’s shoes onto his feet.

“Problem?” Al asked, jumping down from his truck.

“No,” I said, gritting my teeth and shoving a squirming foot into a Hot Wheels sneaker.

“Wrong foot, Juliet,” Al said.

I shook my head and scowled at him. “I know that.” I crammed the foot into the shoe and tugged the Velcro strap tight.

“It hurts!” bellowed my son.

“Well, of course it hurts,” Al said. “It’s the wrong foot.”

I grabbed Isaac’s Barbie lunchbox, a hand-me-down from his sister that he, for some reason, adored, and opened my arms to my son. “Jump up, buddy,” I said.

“The kid’s shoes are on the wrong feet, Juliet,” Al insisted again.

I held up Isaac’s legs and waggled them at Al. “No, only one of them is. He’s wearing two left shoes.”

Al laughed and shook his head in disgust. “You let your kid out of the house with two left shoes?”

I made a face. “No, of course not. I told him to go get sneakers. And he did. He got one Hot Wheels sneaker and one Thomas the Tank Engine sneaker. Left ones.”

“And you didn’t
notice
?” I knew what he was thinking.
Jeanelle
would never have made such a mistake. When his girls were small, Jeanelle always made sure that they had the right shoes, and the right clothes, and the right weaponry for any situation.

I shrugged. “Ruby was having a freak-out about her hair. I braided it
wrong.
Again. Because, apparently, I am the worst mother in the kindergarten. Or maybe in the history of kindergartens altogether. Anyway, by the time she stopped screaming, I was grateful just to get out the door. I didn’t notice his shoes until just this minute.”

“I don’t
want
to wear two left shoes,” Isaac wailed. I kissed his round cheek, the only part of him that still retained that baby softness.

“Stop crying, honey. We’ll check and see if the teachers have a pair of shoes you can borrow for the day.”

By the time I got back from signing Isaac in, putting his lunch in his cubby, and helping him put on a pair of chartreuse Chinese sandals embroidered with lotuses, Al was back in his car with the engine running.

“Let’s get a move on,” he said, “or we won’t have time to hit La Superica in Santa Barbara for tacos after we finish interviewing the docs.”

One of my favorite things about Al is his encyclopedic knowledge of every taco stand, noodle shop, mom-and-pop burger joint, and date shake shack in Southern California. The man lives and dies for junk food, but only of the most obscure kind. If there are absolutely no other options, he’ll make do with an In-n-Out Double Double, animal-style, but he’s only truly happy standing at the counter of a Vietnamese
dive in a strip mall in East L.A., say, slurping Pho out of a plastic bowl. When we had worked together at the Federal Public Defenders Office, we had always planned our field investigations around lunch. We’d take pictures of the interior of the bank our client was accused of robbing, interview a teller or two, and then drive back to the office, our chins shiny with the grease of a Cuban
medianoche.
I should have known Al would have planned to hit the best taco stand in Southern California. Too bad it was a cool hour out of our way.

On our way we discussed Lilly’s reaction to my question about her mother’s death.

“Definitely strange,” he said. “But can it possibly be related to the murder?” Then he yelled an obscenity at a passing car. “Did you see that idiot?”

“Who? The eighty-year-old woman in the diesel Mercedes? Yeah, I saw her.”

“The old bat’s going to kill someone, creeping along like that in the fast line!”

“She was doing the speed limit, Al. Maybe Lilly’s mother’s death has nothing to do with anything, but you’re the one who always says there is no such thing as coincidences in criminal investigations. We’ve got a murder, and another suspicious death thirty years ago. It’s certainly possible that they’re related, don’t you think?”