Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  “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.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  He shrugged. “I design computer games. At least I’m trying to. I sold one game a few years ago, but it never really made it to the market. I’m working on another one. And I do a little writing. Mostly science fiction.”

  I nodded. “Okay, so you got up at around noon, and then what?”

  “Ruth, that’s the housekeeper, always saves breakfast for me. I got my plate and my coffee and went out to the pool.”

  “You ate by the pool?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I don’t know. I swam a couple of laps, I guess. Read the paper. Maybe took a nap.”

  “A nap? But you just woke up.”

  He shrugged again. “I was tired.”

  I could see Al’s lips pulling into a disapproving line. I knew what he was thinking. What a slacker, lolling around in bed half the day. It was hard not to think that myself.

  “And at some point Chloe came home?”

  He nodded.

  “Did she come out to the pool?”

  He nodded again. “We hung out for a while. Got some sun. You know.”

  Not really. My skin has all the lovely sun-kissed glow of the underbelly of a scrod.

  “And then?”

  “Mr. Jones’s semen was found in the victim’s body. There was a DNA match,” Valerie said in a voice much too loud for the small interview room. Jupiter and I both flinched. Al just kept jotting notes.

  “Ah,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about that?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Hey, Jupiter. I know this is hard. But we’re going to have to talk about it,” I said.

  He ducked his head and shrugged.

  “Did you have sexual relations with the victim on the day of her homicide?” This was the first question Al asked and he sounded exactly like the ex-cop he was. Al’s career with the L.A.P.D. Hollywood Division had ended when a jacked-up meth freak, two hours out of county jail, had fired a 38mm in Al’s general direction, and managed to hit him bang in the belly. Al always says he was happy to retire, and the shooting was just a convenient excuse to get out early with a full pension, but I know the injury must have been worse than he pretends. Only serious disability would have kept him from the job he loved.

  Jupiter was curled up into as small a ball as he could be and still be sitting on the chair. He was gnawing on his lips like they were chewing gum, and his Adam’s apple was working up and down. “Yeah,” Jupiter whispered finally. All that effort for such a small word.

  “We will be presenting a defense that the sex was consensual,” Valerie said.

  Would it have killed her to pretend that she believed him?

  “Do you mind telling us where it was that you . . . er . . . had sex?” I asked, tamping down the feeling of discomfort that always comes over me when I have to talk to clients about that kind of thing. I once had a client who was a cross-dressing bank robber. I had been young and naïve enough to let that embarrass me. Now I wish I could send the guy a picture of Isaac in the pink tutu he liked to wear.

  “In my room,” Jupiter said.

  “Was that the first time you and the victim engaged in sexual relations?” Al barked. I kicked him in the shins under the table. “What?” he said to me testily.

  “Jupiter, were you and Chloe romantically involved?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I knew her first. I introduced her to my father.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh.” He seemed to unwind a bit, and sat up a little straighter. “We were in rehab together.”

  “You met Chloe in rehab?”

  He nodded.

  “What were you there for?” I asked, keeping my voice as gentle and nonjudgmental as I could. It wasn’t difficult. I don’t condemn people for using drugs. Addiction’s a disease, not a moral failing, and I consider myself lucky not to suffer from it. And hell, if I were to condemn drug use, I’d have to start with my husband. He spent much of his teenage years stoned. What else could possibly have inspired his horror movies?

  “Coke. Her too.” I could barely hear his whisper.

  “Where were you in rehab?”

  “At the Ojai Rehabilitation and Self-Actualization Center.”

  I hadn’t heard of it, but then the kinds of centers my clients frequented were the places that accepted Medicaid or didn’t charge anything at all. I had a feeling that Jupiter Jones had experienced an entirely different kind of rehab.

  “Chloe got me through, you know?” Jupiter said. His words came out in a rush, but he was talking to the table, tugging on his lips with his fingers. “We did it together. The steps. All of it. We helped each other. We were, like, partners.”

  “Did your relationship continue once you were released?” I asked.

  “I thought it would. I got out two weeks before she did. I waited for her. I drove up to Ojai to pick her up. I even brought her back to my house. She didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “And that’s when she met your father?”

  “Yeah.” A tide of red crept over his face. For the first time he didn’t look scared and beaten down. He looked angry. Very very angry.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think happened? She took one look at the house, and the cars, and him. She knew what was what.” With that, he tore another piece of skin off his lower lip, and the blood gushed. He looked down at his red-speckled fingers with surprise. I closed my eyes and swallowed, willing away the nausea. Al and Valerie were both staring at Jupiter—Al with a kind of sick fascination, and Valerie with a moue of disgust so prissy it was comical. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a packet of baby wipes. I freed one and handed it to Jupiter.

  “Press hard,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he whispered, and winced as he pushed the cold, damp cloth against his mouth.

  “So Chloe broke up with you when she met your dad,” I said.

  “She didn’t have to. I saw what was happening. I took off.” He took the cloth away from his lips and looked at it. It was smeared with brownish blood. He looked around, as if searching for somewhere to put it. Then, he carefully folded it, and tucked it into the sleeve of his shirt.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “I flew down to Mexico. For a couple of months. When I got back, they were married.”

  I nodded. Then I remembered how we’d started talking about this in the first place. “But you were still sleeping together at the time she was killed.”

  He smiled, a grim, tight smile. “My old man is, you know, old. And Chloe’s not the kind of girl to do without, if you know what I mean.” He puffed up a bit, as if the memory of his father’s failures, and the contrast with his own presumed success, made him feel less vulnerable, stronger.

  Valerie wrinkled her nose in obvious disgust. The truth was, I might have joined her, but I had better control. I’d spent plenty of time pretending not to be horrified and disgusted with my clients. Some of them had even done worse things than sleeping with their stepmothers.

  “And what about you, Jupiter?” I asked. “Why were you doing it?”

  He shrugged.

  “Jupiter? Why did you keep sleeping with her, after she’d left you for your dad?”

  He shook his head silently.

  “Jupiter?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then he looked me in the eye for the first time since he’d sat down at the table. “Love?” he said, his voice rising, as if asking me if that were the reason.

  “Did you kill Chloe?” I asked softly.

  “Don’t answer that question!” Valerie nearly shouted. She glared at me. “We don’t need to know the answer to that.”

  There are two breeds of criminal defe
nse attorneys—one likes to know the truth and the other would just as soon stay in the dark about his or her client’s actions. I’d been both types in my career. Sometimes, knowing your client is guilty can put a serious cramp in your style. An attorney is not allowed to suborn perjury. So, if I knew for sure a client had committed the crime with which he was charged, I couldn’t allow him to take the stand and testify that he was innocent. I never asked those clients the ultimate question. I neither wanted them to lie to me, nor confess their guilt, and thus limit their own options. However, there had definitely been times, like this one, when I wanted to know the truth. Valerie was obviously of a different breed—she was a lawyer who was always convinced of her client’s guilt, and thus never wanted to take the chance of hearing it spoken aloud.

  “Walk away, Valerie,” I said softly.

  “Excuse me?” Her indignation was palpable.

  “If you don’t want to hear the answer to this question, just walk away.”

  “I will not! I’m going to call Mr. Wasserman as soon as I—”

  “I didn’t kill her,” Jupiter interrupted, his voice firm and loud. “I loved her. I would never have hurt her.”

  The four of us sat silently for a moment, and then I leaned forward and put my hand on his arm. “I have just one more question, Jupiter. Did you and Chloe stay clean? Did you use again? Did she?”

  He shot a quick glance at Valerie. “Yeah. Yeah, we stayed clean.”

  Jupiter Jones was a lousy liar.

  Valerie and I didn’t speak as we packed our bags, said goodbye to Jupiter, and waited for the guards to buzz us out of the visiting room. Al winked at me once, and I rolled my eyes in reply. Once we were finally out into the waiting area, I turned to Valerie to give her a piece of my mind, and the benefit of my greater experience, and found myself staring at her Dior-clad back as she raced to the bathroom. I followed her in—at least this way I could be sure she wouldn’t be able to walk away from the dressing-down she was owed. I was just in time to hear her gagging in a stall. My own nausea hit me full force at that moment, and I banged open the door to the neighboring stall and leaned over the toilet, trying desperately to keep from actually touching anything while I lost what little remained in my stomach. God only knows what microbic horrors lurk in the bathroom in the county jail.

  When I came out, I found her rinsing out her mouth with a travel-sized bottle of Scope. I blinked, impressed that there even existed a person who traveled so utterly prepared for such eventualities. She passed me the bottle, and I smiled, grateful for her unexpected generosity. And to think I’d been about to call her an insensitive fool.

  “God, I hate this,” she said.

  “Me too. As my five-year-old would say, totally gross.”

  “So this isn’t your first? I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It’s more like all-day sickness. I’m only eight weeks pregnant and I swear I’m not going to make it. How far along are you?”

  Pregnant? Was she crazy? I was most assuredly not pregnant. “I just ate some bad fish.”

  “Oh, sorry. I just assumed . . . not that you look pregnant or anything. I mean, you’re not . . .” Her voice trailed off before she could say it. Fat.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. I was a bit on the plump side, but surely I didn’t look fat enough to be pregnant. Then, the question I’d been suppressing all day, the question I’d refused to allow Peter to ask, made its inevitable way to the front of my consciousness. Was I pregnant?

  I wracked my brain, trying to remember the last time Peter and I had made love. With two kids, Peter’s demanding job, and my pathetic attempts to build a career out of the rubble of carpool and playdates, our sex life wasn’t as, well, vigorous as it used to be. Don’t get me wrong, we still managed to find time to be together, it just wasn’t as often, or as memorable, as in our preparenting salad days. Suddenly, I recalled a dinner at our favorite local Italian, a bottle of Chianti, and an empty package of condoms. “Congratulations,” I said.

  Valerie smiled and pressed a hand to her belly. “Thanks. I hope you feel better.”

  “I hope so, too,” I said, and looked at myself in the mirror. Did my face look fleshier? Was I breaking out? Was my waist thicker? I surreptitiously pressed a hand against my breasts. Were they tender? I winced. Yes, they were. I felt my stomach seize up again, but this time not from nausea.

  Five

  “WE need a bigger house,” I told Peter. We were in the kitchen, putting away the groceries.

  “Why? The kids don’t seem to mind sharing a room. Eight boxes of macaroni and cheese?”

  I made a face. “I hate shopping with them. I always end up with a cart full of ridiculous junk.” I brandished a bag of veggie chips. “You should see the crap I refused to buy.”

  “Worse than this?” Peter held up a package of Mango Mania yogurts, each equipped with a foil pack of orange and black Halloween sprinkles. “Just because it’s yogurt doesn’t mean it’s healthy.”

  I threw a roll of paper towels at his head. “Give it a rest. If you don’t like what I buy, you can do the shopping. And then you can try to convince the kids that carob-covered raisins count as a treat.”

  He smiled, but I wasn’t having any of it.

  “We need a bigger house,” I said again, and left him with the rest of the unpacking. I went into the living room, where the kids were staring, slack-jawed, at the TV set, pulled Isaac onto my lap, and nuzzled his neck. He gave me an absent-minded kiss and dug his little feet into my thigh. I winced, and closed my eyes. I was just so tired. And I’d promised Al that we’d spend the afternoon interviewing witnesses on the Jones case. I’d bought the afternoon off from parenting duties by taking the kids with me on an early-morning grocery run, leaving Peter snoring under a mound of blankets. He didn’t usually get to sleep late on Saturdays, so he owed me.

  I dozed for a few moments, and then hoisted myself off the couch, tumbling Isaac onto the floor next to his sister.

  “Mama?” he said.

  “What, honey?”

  “You’re my best friend.”

  I tapped his behind with my toe. “Thanks, little guy. You’re one of my three best friends, too.”

  “Me and Ruby and Daddy?”

  “Ruby, Daddy, and I,” his sister corrected him. My little grammarian. I once overheard her respond to a babysitter’s request to take a nap, “I can lie down, but I can’t lay down.” I wonder why I could never get that sitter to come to our house again?

  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 l
eft 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?”