Death Gets a Time-Out (21 page)

“Maybe a week,” I said.

He sighed. “Okay. I can handle that. A week.”

“But now we’ve got work to do,” I said. Jupiter and I made a list of every teacher he’d ever had who thought he was a decent student, every person he’d been close to who thought he was a decent human being. We carefully listed every job he’d ever worked, from his stint as an usher in a movie theater in high school to the Mexican surf shack he worked in during his escapes to Baja, to the computer game companies that had expressed interest in his designs. Finally, when I was confident that I had the names of absolutely everyone who would have a remotely kind word to say about him, I stacked up my papers and buckled them up in my briefcase. Jupiter began to rise from his seat, but I put out a restraining hand.

“There’s something else we need to talk about,” I said.

He sat back down and looked at me, his eyebrows slightly raised.

“Lilly told me about what Chloe was doing to her. About
the blackmail. And she told me that she asked you for help.” Jupiter grew very still, except for his fingers, which were spread out on the tabletop. They trembled, tapping the Formica. Suddenly, he clenched his fists and shoved his hands into his lap.

“You don’t need to tell me anything,” I said. “I’m a part of your defense team, and what you say to me is confidential, but at the same time, I have certain obligations. I’m sure Wasserman told you this, but I’ll say it again. A defense attorney is an officer of the court. As such, we aren’t allowed to put testimony that we know is perjured on the stand. Let me explain what that means. If you tell me something, like, for instance, if you tell me that you killed Chloe . . .” He opened his mouth to object, but I raised my hand. “This is purely hypothetical. If you admit something like that to me, then your options will become limited. If you choose to take the stand, Wasserman will not be allowed to have you testify that you were innocent of the crime. A lawyer can present testimony that he doesn’t personally believe, but he’s forbidden to present testimony that he knows for certain is a lie. So if you tell him, or me, that you did it, you won’t be able to testify that you didn’t. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

“Understanding what I just explained to you, is there anything you want to tell me about what happened between you and Chloe?”

He chewed his lip. “I didn’t kill her. I’m going to tell that to the jury. I didn’t kill her.” He looked up at me. “I’m not just saying that because of what you told me. It’s true. I didn’t kill her.” He stared into my eyes unflinchingly.

“Was she blackmailing Lilly?”

“Yes. I mean, that’s what Lilly told me, and I’m sure it’s true. She wouldn’t lie.”

“Why did you tell me that you didn’t know how Trudy-Ann died?”

He blushed. “Because . . . you know. For Lilly.”

“But you do know, of course.”

He nodded.

“Did you see it? Did you see Lilly shoot her mother?”

“No. I was looking for Lilly, I think. I was in the hallway when everything started happening. I remember seeing some stuff, mostly just the blood, I guess. And the sound of everybody screaming.” His voice faded away.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“No, not really. I was really little. I don’t remember very much from Mexico at all. I remember Lilly, though. I loved her so much.”

“Do you still?”

He nodded. “She’s my sister, you know? Even if our parents were only married when we were little kids. She’s my sister. She’ll always be my sister.”

“Did you confront Chloe about what she was doing to your sister?”

“I tried to. When we were lying out at the pool together. I told her she had to stop blackmailing Lilly, but she just told me that I was in over my head, and then she laughed at me.”

“And then what happened?”

He paused, and a dull red flush crept up his neck. “Then she . . . she got up and went into my bedroom.”

“And you followed her?”

He nodded.

“To have sex?”

He nodded again.

“Did you talk any more about Lilly when you were . . . done?”

He shook his head. “No. It felt, I don’t know, wrong or something, to keep talking about it. You know, while we were in bed. I knew I had to talk to her. I mean, I promised Lilly I would get her to stop. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it there, in bed. I guess I figured I’d talk to her about it later.”

“And did you talk to her about it later?”

He shook his head. “There wasn’t any later. She was killed before I had a chance to see her again.”

I believed him.

I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe that Jupiter had killed Chloe in a fit of rage after she’d refused to stop blackmailing Lilly. I wanted the murder to have taken place like that, because then Wasserman could argue that it was an unpremeditated homicide, carried out under the influence of emotion or provocation. Premeditation is a necessary part of first-degree murder. Without it, the murder is at worst second degree, and not subject to the death penalty. Presenting the argument would also allow the defense to introduce evidence of Chloe’s scheming behavior, her flouting of the law, her lack of anything resembling a sense of moral decency. I wanted Jupiter not to be innocent, but to be guilty of that lesser crime, because the other possibility was intolerable to me. The idea that my friend Lilly was guilty of murder was unacceptable. But I believed him. God help me, I believed that Jupiter Jones was innocent.

W
HEN
I got home that afternoon, I found Lilly sitting at my kitchen table and my husband lying on the floor at her feet.

“Am I interrupting something?” I asked, trying to pretend a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

“I found him like this,” Lilly said, and laughed.

I looked at her closely. Was she a murderer? I shook myself. Of course she wasn’t. She was my friend. I would know if she were capable of murder. Wouldn’t I?

I crouched down next to Peter. “Are you okay, honey?”

“My back gave out,” he whined.

“Where are the kids?” I asked.

“I brought Patrick, one of my nannies,” Lilly said. “He took all the kids to a café on La Brea to get steamed milks.”

“Oh. Great.” I smoothed Peter’s hair away from his forehead, and he winced. “Do you need anything?”

He moaned.

“Peter told me about the baby,” Lilly said. “Congratulations.”

I resisted the urge to kick my prone husband while he was down. I was the one who got to tell my friends about the pregnancy. And even if Lilly counted as one of
his
friends, she was still my client. “Thanks,” I said.

“I was just saying how much I admire you guys, going for three,” she said. “I could never handle it.”

“Neither can we,” Peter said, and moaned again. This time I did kick him, but softly and just with the toe of my shoe. He howled.

“We’ll be fine,” I said.

“How do you know that?” he said, leaning up on his elbow. “I mean, we can’t even handle the two we have. We’ve had like one night out alone in the past six months. We’re always running from place to place, and half the time we end up not showing up on time. How many times have we been fined by the preschool for picking Isaac up late? And let’s not even talk about the money. You’re barely earning anything, and who knows if I’ll get another movie after this one. We don’t have enough time or money for the kids we have, let alone another one!” With that he sank back down onto the floor.

I stared at him and felt tears pricking at the back of my eyes. “Are you saying you want me to get rid of it? Have an abortion?” I whispered.

“No,” he groaned. “I’m just freaking out. I’m allowed to freak out, aren’t I?”

“I’m freaked out, too,” I said. What I really wanted to tell him was that it was
my
career that was going to go down the toilet,
my
life that was going to be torn apart again. He’d pretty much go on as before, working, and spending time with the kids when he could. Sure, the financial burden rested on him, but every other part of it was squarely on my shoulders.

“I’m pretty freaked out, myself,” Lilly said. “Not about your baby, obviously. But everything has just gotten too much for me. This whole thing.”

I glanced down at Peter. She followed my gaze.

“I told Peter everything,” she said.

I hoped he had done a good job of faking ignorance. I mean, Lilly probably knew I was confiding in him, but technically I was supposed to keep professional confidences even from my husband.

“I came by to cry on your shoulder, and Peter’s been giving me some great advice on everything. On Archer, in particular.”

“From down there?” I said, pointing at him.

“I have incredible clarity from this position,” my husband said.

“Good to know,” I said.

“Peter said I should take some time away from Archer, and from Jupiter and everything else. To kind of clear my head.”

I nodded.

“I have an offer from an advertising agency in Japan. Peter says I should take it. Take the girls and get out of town for a couple of weeks.”

Great. Now my husband was instructing suspects in my murder investigations to leave the country.

Lilly flung her feet off the table and stood up. “I’m going to go round up the kids and head home. I’ll drop yours off on my way. Tomorrow, if I can put it together, I’m getting all of us on a plane.” She bent down over Peter and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks, buddy. You’re a good friend.”

He smiled, and then groaned again.

I walked Lilly to the door and came back into the kitchen. Peter was standingin front of the open refrigerator door, staring at the contents.

“How’s your back?” I asked.

He placed his palms on the small of his back and leaned back. “Better. I got hungry.”

I rolled my eyes. “You want to talk about this whole baby thing?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We’ll work it out.”

“Yeah,” I said. But would we?

I
spent the next two weeks overwhelmed with work, following up on the lists that Jupiter and I had made of people who knew him. I drove around the city, interviewing school teachers and Boy Scout troop leaders, neighbors and distant relatives. I talked to CCU members whose children Jupiter had babysat when he was a teenager, and even to two windblown surfers who had taken lessons from him down in Mexico. I interrogated his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor and his therapist. I concentrated on creating a dossier on Jupiter, and did my best to suppress my fears about Lilly. Thankfully, I didn’t have to see my friend. She had left for Japan as promised, to shoot a series of commercials for Suntory beer.

Wasserman engineered Jupiter’s release to the Ojai center, which made my life a lot easier. I could call Jupiter with questions and for follow-up information, and could relax a little, knowing he was being waited on by pool boys and not tortured by oversized inmates looking for a girlfriend.

Every few days, I prepared a thick packet of witness statements for Wasserman and dropped them off, along with the
tapes I made of my interviews. I never saw the man himself. Valerie and I compared belly sizes and swollen ankles, and I ignored my responsibility to tell Jupiter’s defense lawyers about what I’d discovered about Lilly. Finally, however, the guilt overwhelmed me.

I was in Valerie’s office, listening to her describe, in excruciating detail, the size of the needle that had pierced her abdomen during her last obstetrical appointment, when Wasserman poked his head in her office door.

“Honestly, the thing was the size of a meat thermometer. Richard looked like he was going to faint. He was more afraid than I was,” Valerie was saying.

“What are you ladies chatting about?” Wasserman asked.

“Uh, CVS,” Valerie mumbled, a flush creeping up her neck. “It’s a test for genetic problems. Like an amniocentesis, but you do it earlier.”

“I’m having mine this afternoon,” I explained, “and your associate was doing her best to terrify me in anticipation.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Girl talk.”

Valerie’s face turned a mottled red, and I could imagine the calculation going on inside her head. Just how much extra work was she going to have to put in now, to remind her boss that she was a competent professional? Criminal defense is a brutally macho field of practice. It’s where the most aggressive men end up, the ones with the most to prove. It’s also a field with more than its share of dinosaurs—lawyers who much prefer to see a woman holdinga stenographer’s pad and not a litigation briefcase. A woman defense lawyer has to work double time to prove that she’s as tough, as determined, and as ruthless as the men around her. Being pregnant adds an extra burden. It’s hard to be one of the guys when your belly is sticking out two feet in front of you, your gums are bleeding, and your bra size is a letter in the second half of the alphabet.

“Actually, Valerie and I were just evaluating a new wrinkle in the Jones case,” I said. She stifled an expression of surprise.

“New wrinkle?” Wasserman said, and walked into the
room. “What new wrinkle?” He sat down on the edge of her desk.

I took a deep breath and told him about Lilly. I reminded him of the death of Trudy-Ann, and although I refrained from saying anything about it, we both recalled the conversation in which he’d told me that a thirty-year-old homicide had nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of our client. He didn’t speak as I described Chloe’s blackmail, just motioned to Valerie, who had already begun taking notes on a yellow pad.

“Did you get all that?” he asked her when I was done.

“I think so,” she said.

He began to pace back and forth in the small office. “We’re going to have to be very careful with this information.”

“We can use it to argue lack of premeditation,” Valerie said. “He goes to talk to Chloe, to convince her to stop her blackmail. There’s an argument, and he kills her.”

Wasserman shrugged. “I liked the sex for that better, frankly. They make love, he begs her to leave his father, she refuses, he kills her. Crime of passion. With the blackmail, it’s too easy for the prosecution to argue that he decided to murder her to help out his stepsister. And then the sex works against us. The jury’s already predisposed to dislike a man who has sex with his victim before he kills her. If we’re arguing that he loves her, and that her rejection caused him to have a sudden burst of anger, that’s one thing. If we tell the jury that she’s a blackmailer, and that first he had sex with her, and then he killed her while he was trying to convince her to leave his movie star sister alone . . .” Wasserman shook his head. “I don’t like this. This doesn’t help us.”