“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 th
at 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.
I shook off the sensation, reminding myself that I was here to do an investigation, not be converted to a crackpot religion, and continued with my questions. “What was it about his mother that explains his . . . his actions? Was she unusual in some way?”
“Unusual?” He smiled thinly, and looked back up at the ceiling. I was relieved to be out from under his stare. “It isn’t particularly unusual, but Roberta was an acid freak of the highest order. In fact, it was as close as she came to a vocation.” Given the formality of his normal speech, his use of slang was jarring, an effect that was not, I thought, unintentional. But whatever his purpose, he had given us useful information. If Jupiter had any lingering effects of his mother’s drug use, we might be able to argue that he was as much a victim as a victimizer, and deserved some kind of leniency.
I glanced over at Al, who was scribbling away in his notebook, his mouth a thin line. My partner does not approve of drug use of any kind, other than alcohol. He considers it a sign of weakness. In fact, “pothead” has always been one of his favorite insults. On the other hand, he is violently opposed to the criminalization of drugs. Al’s a staunch libertarian, and can’t abide anything that smacks of big government trying to tell people what to do with their lives. He feels nothing but disgust for politicians, the media, and folks that don’t get that a gun is man’s best friend, and that people have a right to be as ignorant and stupid as they want to be. He manages to overcome his abhorrence when it comes to me, though. Don’t get me wrong, he doesn’t hide his contempt for my lily-livered liberalism—he just likes me anyway. Maybe he figures that he’ll convert me, and one day I, too, will end up a pistol-packing libertarian.
“Was Jupiter ever evaluated for brain damage or anything else stemming from his mother’s drug use?” I asked.
Polaris held me once more in the beams of his altogether too acute eyes. It was downright disconcerting. “My son is a remarkably intelligent young man. A genius, if you will. His Stanford-Binet score is well over 170. It’s his soul that’s damaged, not his brain.”
So much for that. I made a note to myself to do some research on the effects of prenatal drug exposure on emotional development. Maybe I’d find something useful. It wouldn’t hurt to have Jupiter evaluated in any case.
“Do I understand that you were never married to Jupiter’s mother?” I asked Polaris.
He laughed, and it was strictly Brooklyn. A loud bray of mirth. “Hell no,” he said, and his robed attendants winced.
“But you had a child together?”
He nodded and flicked a finger at the pious attendant, who rushed off. I raised my eyebrows at his departing back, but no one bothered to tell me where he’d gone. “Roberta and I had a brief fling, and Jupiter was the outcome. I probably wouldn’t even remember the woman’s name if it hadn’t been for the fact that she gave birth to Jupiter nine months after we had sex.”
I didn’t know how to phrase this delicately, so I decided not to bother trying. “Are you sure that Jupiter is your son?”
He nodded, and sighed. “I took a paternity test when the boy was a baby, and then again in the late 1970s when they invented the white blood cell antigen test. It was state of the art, back then. They both came out positive. I wanted to check again about fifteen years ago, when they began using the DNA test, just to be sure, but Jupiter would have none of it. He was over eighteen by then, and I couldn’t force him. Perhaps,” Polaris said, turning to his lawyers, “we can resolve that issue now, while he’s in custody.”
“If you like, I can speak to the prosecutor about it,” the older attorney responded, and then glanced meaningfully in my direction. “I think we should discuss this later, in private.”
Polaris nodded. “Let’s.”
“I understand that Jupiter grew up with you,” I said.
At that moment, the man who had left the room at Polaris’s signal came rushing back. He carried a small wooden tray with an iron teapot and a single miniature, black teacup.
“Thank you, Aldebaran,” Polaris said. The assistant poured a cup of tea and handed it to Polaris.
“Do you drink green tea?” the Very Reverend asked me.
“Sometimes,” I said. My old trainer Bobby Katz had been a big green tea drinker.
“It’s a tonic with remarkable curative powers; brought to us from the heavens. Studies have found it to be effective at reducing incidences of cancers. It’s also quite soothing. I recommend it.”
I could certainly stand a little soothing, although I’d always thought that tea grew on bushes, rather than dropping from the sky. “I’ll give it a try,” I said. “We were talking about Jupiter, how he grew up with you, rather than with his mother.”
“Roberta abandoned the boy. That and her weak genetic legacy are surely what have made him what he is. She left for India when my son was an infant. Some kind of pilgrimage, she said, although I imagine she was seeking mind alteration rather than transcendence. She never returned. Or perhaps she did, but not to her child. I remember someone saying that she became the third or fourth wife of a Saudi Arabian oil sheik, but that mi
ght just be a rumor.” He sipped his tea and frowned. “Aldebaran, if the tea steeps for any more than forty-five seconds, it takes on a rather unpleasant, bitter flavor, as you know.”
“I’m so sorry, Very Reverend Polaris. Shall I make you a new pot?” Aldebaran asked, his lips pursed in concern.
“It’s fine. I’ll drink this. Just remember next time.” Polaris smiled gently at the man, who blushed, and then slowly smiled back, his face transformed with something that looked almost like rapture.
“Of course, of course I will.” If he had bowed and scraped any lower, he would have gotten rug burn on his chin.
“So Jupiter lived with you?” I continued.
“Yes.”
“And where was this? In Topanga?”
“In the commune in Topanga for a while. And then in Mexico.”
“Mexico?” I said, pretending I knew nothing about their time there.
“Yes. After Roberta made her great escape, I met a girl at the commune. A very lovely girl.” His voice grew soft and I could swear his eyes were misty. “This girl I married—as soon as she would have me. We moved together to Mexico.”
“Why did you move to Mexico?”
He laughed. “Why not? We were free spirits. We went where the wind blew us. A group of people were heading down to San Miguel de Allende and we decided to join them.”
“And you took Jupiter?”
“Of course. And Trudy-Ann’s little girl, Lilly.”
“The four of you moved down to Mexico,” I prodded him.
“Yes. San Miguel is a remarkable place. A true spiritual nexus.” He seemed to enjoy his recollections, was almost lost in them. “We lived in a massive old colonial mansion that we rented for no more than a hundred dollars a month. You know, Chloe would have loved it. I’ve never really thought of that before. She was a true aficionado of Mexican art and furniture. She was a woman with brilliant taste, was my young wife.” He waved his hand around the room. “She designed this room herself.”
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