Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Listen,” he shouted. “I don’t know what those sons of bitches told you, but I was the last person in that room. Lilly was there, and so were Beverly and Raymond.” Suddenly, he spun around and yelped at Hyades. “Get them out of here. Now.”

  Hyades stepped away from the door and opened it.

  “Right this way,” he said. His face was blank, as though he found Polaris’s rage unremarkable.

  Al and I glanced at each other. Al shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and I nodded. We both understood that Polaris wasn’t going to talk to us anymore. We’d gotten something, though—if only the unwitting acknowledgment that there was a secret being kept. We walked through the open door. Hyades followed.

  “Let me escort you to your car,” he said pleasantly.

  None of us spoke until we were standing out in the parking lot, next to my car.

  “So you know that Beverly and Raymond Green were in San Miguel,” he said.

  “You knew?” I said.

  “Of course.” Right. He’d been there, in the house, when Trudy-Ann was killed.

  “Do you know who killed Trudy-Ann, Reverend Hyades?” Al asked.

  “Lilly Green killed her mother,” he said, a small smile playing across his lips.

  I said, “You don’t believe that.”

  “I believed that for many years.”

  “But you don’t anymore.”

  He shrugged. “Do you know what I would do if I were representing Jupiter Jones?” he asked.

  “What would you do?”

  “I’d look at the money Polaris Jones spent on his wife.” I noticed that he didn’t use the honorific. Suddenly, Polaris wasn’t the Very Reverend.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’d look at how much money he gave her. And I’d ask the question, why so much more in the months before she died than ever before? What had she done to deserve it?”

  “What had she done?” I wasn’t enjoying this game of cat and mouse, but I had no choice but to play.

  “Perhaps it’s not what she did, but rather what she knew, that inspired such tangible devotion in her husband.”

  I’ve never been one to pussyfoot around. If I want to know something, I ask it. So I did. “Did Polaris Jones kill Trudy-Ann? Did he kill Chloe?”

  Once again Hyades replied with a languid shrug instead of an answer to my question. “You know what else I would do?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’d review the support Polaris received from a certain well-placed politician. Why, you might wonder, has Beverly Green always been such an ardent champion of the CCU?”

  “Why?”

  Once again, the shrug.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  He gazed across the parking lot, toward the buildings and gracious lawns. “This is a lovely place, don’t you think?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Suitable for a strong and important religion.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “One that exists independently of any single leader, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Abraham never reached the Promised Land with the Children of Israel,” Hyades said, looking over my head, into the sky. “New spiritual leaders were needed to guide the chosen people to their homeland.”

  “True,” I said. “Look at Brigham Young.”

  “Exactly. I think each religion reaches a moment of transition. Polaris Jones is a prophet. But he is also a man. A complicated man, with a complicated past. It’s time now for the CCU to enter into a new future.”

  “Guided by you,” Al said.

  “Perhaps,” he smiled. “Or perhaps our cosmological arch-ancestors will make themselves known to someone else, and another prophet will emerge. Who can know?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Who indeed.”

  He extended a hand, shook mine, and then Al’s. His grip was strong and confident. “Good luck with your investigations,” he said, and with a rustle of robes, walked away across the parking lot.

  Al nodded at the reverend’s retreating back. “If we can find evidence of a payoff, that might do it,” he said. If Hyades was telling the truth, and Polaris had paid for his wife’s silence, and if we could prove it, then Wasserman would have the evidence he needed to get the prosecution to continue the case and take a closer look at Chloe’s husband.

  I nodded. “There’s the money Chloe gave her mother to buy into the gallery. And the assemblywoman’s support is all part of the public record. Remember, I found it online.”

  Al reached in the pocket of his red windbreaker and took out his keys. “Damn it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m supposed to finish the workers’ comp stakeouts today. Can you get a start sniffing out this money trail on your own?”

  “Sure.” I looked at my watch and swore under my breath. “I’ve got to drive carpool, but I’ll get on the phone to Wasserman’s office as soon as I get home. See if there are any bank leads nobody’s followed up on. And I’ll call Chloe’s mother, too.”

  Al sighed dramatically. “Carpool,” he muttered, heading off to his car.

  Thirty-three

  AS soon as I got in my car, I called Peter and told him what was going on.

  “Wow. Pretty intense day,” he said.

  “No kidding. Listen, would you be willing to pick the kids up for me?”

  “Um, I was about to head out for a meeting.”

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “Um. Story conference.”

  “With whom?”

  “Um, Sully?”

  “Jeff Sullivan?” A fellow screenwriter, and a terrible influence on my husband. “A story conference, huh? Is that what they’re calling spending the afternoon drinking beers and eating French fries at Swingers nowadays?”

  “No, really. He says he’s got a great idea for a movie we can write together.”

  I was about to tell my husband exactly what I thought of his alcoholic friends and their great ideas when my call-waiting beeped. “Wait a minute,” I said and clicked over to the other line.

  “Juliet?” It was Lilly. She was crying so hard that she was almost unintelligible.

  “Lilly? Lilly? Slow down. I can’t understand you. What’s going on? What happened?”

  There was silence on the line for a moment, and then another voice spoke. “Ms. Applebaum? This is Rochelle, Lilly’s assistant. Can you come right over? Something terrible has happened.”

  “What? What happened?”

  “Somebody killed Mr. Green.”

  “What? Raymond? Raymond is dead?”

  “Please come, Ms. Applebaum. As fast as you can.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  I clicked back over to my husband and told him his afternoon plans were canceled.

  I drove as fast as I could across town, pounding my steering wheel in frustration whenever the traffic ahead of me forced me to slow down. I dialed Al’s number with one hand and cursed the vagaries of cell phone service that took him out of range when I knew he was no more than a few miles up the freeway from me.

  The front gate to Lilly’s house was ajar, and I tore through and up the driveway to the house. There were three police cars parked in front of the house. I pulled in behind them, slammed the car into park, and raced up the porch steps.

  “Grandpa’s dead,” a small voice said, just as I was about to walk in the door. I turned toward the sound of the voice and saw two pairs of sneakered feet poking out from underneath the porch swing. I crouched down. Amber and Jade were huddled together in the shadows underneath the swing. They were each chewing on the end of a braid, and it took me a moment to realize that each twin had the other’s hair in her mouth.

  “Hi, Amber. Hi, Jade,” I said.

  “Hi,” they whispered in unison.

  “It’s pretty scary in the house right now, isn’t it?”

  They nodded.

  “And pretty
sad, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Yeah,” one of them said.

  “Would you guys like to go bike riding, or scootering? Do you think that might help you feel better?”

  “No,” they said, again as one.

  “Can you think of something that would help you feel better right now? Maybe help you feel a little less scared?”

  They looked at each other for a moment and then back to me.

  “Maybe ice cream?” one said.

  “Great idea. C’mon out.”

  They shook their heads again.

  “Under here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’m going to send one of the nannies out with some ice cream, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I hoisted myself up—it had already become something of an effort, even this early in my pregnancy—and went into the house. Everyone was in the huge front room. The first people I saw were the staff. They stood in a small huddle of identical khaki pants and denim shirts. A few of the girls were crying. I walked over and put my hand on the sleeve of Patrick, the young man who had watched the kids that day at the beach.

  “Hi,” I said. “Listen, Amber and Jade are hiding under the porch swing. I told them you’d bring them some ice cream.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  I said, “I don’t think they should be all alone out there. And they want ice cream.”

  He seemed to come to life all of a sudden. “Right, of course. Sorry.” He took off in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Maybe one of you can go sit with them while they’re waiting for him.”

  One of the girls walked quickly out the front door to the porch. I turned back to the room in time to be greeted by a uniformed cop.

  “Can I help you?” he said sternly.

  “I’m Lilly’s friend,” I said. “She called me.” I looked over his shoulder and saw Lilly for the first time. She was curled up on the bench in the inglenook, her face buried in her arms. Beverly sat across from her; her face faded to a sickly gray. Two police officers stood next to the women. Two other men, out of uniform but with the unmistakably officious manner of detectives, were also nearby. One of the detectives crouched on one knee, using his other as a table to support the notepad on which he was scribbling. The other, a middle-aged black man with a shaved head and a neck so thick that even his open shirt seemed to be straining to encircle it, sat at the edge of a leather chair he’d pulled up to the inglenook. A tiny gold cross dangled from one of his ears, and he leaned forward, talking in a low voice.

  Ignoring the question of the police officer who had stopped me, I walked quickly over to Lilly. I squatted down next to her.

  “Lilly, honey?”

  She raised her ravaged face to me and grabbed my hands in both of hers. “Someone killed my father,” she whispered.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” a firm voice said. I turned to the seated detective.

  “May I ask who you are?” he said blandly.

  “She’s a friend of Lilly’s,” Beverly said, sending me a clear message with her eyes.

  “My name is Juliet Applebaum,” I said.

  “Detective Walter Stayner, Los Angeles Police Department. That’s Detective Robbins.” He didn’t bother introducing the uniformed men.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “That’s what we’re trying to determine,” the detective said.

  “They found Raymond’s body in a rest stop on the 101,” Beverly said. Her eyes were dry, but her hands were trembling violently.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “Gunshot wound,” Detective Stayner said.

  “Did you find the gun?”

  He paused, looking at me appraisingly. “No,” he said finally.

  “So the killer is still armed.”

  “Presumably.” He turned back to Beverly. “All right, ma’am, if you don’t mind going over this one more time. What happened this morning?”

  I considered for a moment stopping the questioning and telling Lilly to get a lawyer there immediately. I’m of the firm opinion that nobody—guilty or innocent—should ever talk to the police without the help of an attorney. There is just too much that can happen, too many things that can be said and misinterpreted. And goodness knows there was a hell of a lot more here than met the eye. I didn’t want the detective stumbling on any of the story before Lilly had time to decide, with an attorney, how and when to disclose it all. On the other hand, I didn’t want to make the detective think that Lilly might have anything to hide. I decided just to listen closely and put a halt to things if I felt they were treading on dangerous ground.

  “We were having breakfast. He got a phone call and said he had to go meet someone,” Beverly said.

  “But he didn’t say who it was that called him?” the detective asked.

  She shook her head. “No. I mean, he said he needed to meet someone who had some information about a wetlands reclamation project he was involved in. He didn’t say who.”

  My legs were beginning to ache, and I inched down to a sitting position. Lilly still held my hands in hers, but she’d lowered her head once more.

  “What time did he leave?” the detective asked.

  “I told you. I think around nine,” Beverly said. “Lilly, it was about nine o’clock, right?” Lilly didn’t reply. “I think it must have been around nine,” Beverly said. “Because Saraswathi came at nine-thirty.”

  “And that’s the yoga teacher?” the detective said.

  “Yes,” I said. He looked at me sharply, probably wondering why I knew so much about what was going on. I tried to smile reassuringly, but he wasn’t buying any of it.

  “She came at nine-thirty, we had a ninety-minute class, Lilly and I took showers, and then at about twelve we had lunch,” Beverly said.

  “You and Ms. Green?” the detective asked.

  “And my staff.” Beverly waved in the direction of a group of three young men and an even younger woman standing in a far corner of the living room. I hadn’t noticed them before. They were all, every one of them, talking intently into their cell phones. “And Lilly’s assistant.”

  “And after lunch?” the detective asked.

  “I had work to do, so Lilly left us in the dining room.”

  “Did any of you leave the room at any time?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Someone may have gone to the bathroom. I don’t really remember. But we were working until . . . until you came to tell us what happened.” Beverly’s voice caught in her throat.

  Lilly lifted her head. “Don’t you dare,” she whispered.

  We all stared at her.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said again. “Don’t you dare cry. Don’t you dare pretend you care that he’s dead.”

  “Be quiet, Lilly,” Beverly said in a low, firm voice.

  In the sudden silence, the only noise was the detective’s pen scritch-scratching across his pad.

  “Don’t . . .” Lilly began again.

  “Enough,” Beverly said. Lilly’s head sank back on her arms.

  “And you, Ms. Green?” the detective said in the direction of Lilly’s prone form. “What did you do after lunch today?”

  She didn’t answer, but I felt her hands grip mine more tightly.

  The detective tried again. “Where did you spend the afternoon, Ms. Green?”

  “She was with me,” a voice said. We all turned and saw one of the uniformed assistants standing near us. “She was with me,” she repeated.

  “And you are?”

  “Rochelle Abernathy. I work for Lilly. We were in her office. She had a stack of photos to personalize, and then we had a live online chat set up. That lasted about an hour.”

  “A chat?” the detective said, obviously puzzled.

  “On the computer. Fans write in questions and Lilly answers them.”

  “And you were there together the entire time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there other people who can verify that
?”

  “The nannies, I guess. And the rest of the staff. Oh, and a bunch of people called on the phone, too.

  “Who?”

  “Her agent. Her business manager—she called twice.”

  “Were you and Ms. Green together the entire afternoon?” the detective asked.

  “Yes,” Rochelle said. “Up until you got here.”

  Suddenly, Lilly sat up. “Juliet, I need to talk to you. Now. In my bedroom.”

  “I’m afraid I need to ask you a few more questions, Ms. Green,” the detective said.

  I stood up. “Come, Lilly, let’s go to your room.”

  The detective put out his hand to stop me. “We’re going to need to go over this one more time.”

  “Lilly, do you want to keep talking to this detective or would you like your lawyer to be present for any further discussion?”

  She looked at me blankly for a moment and then seemed to understand what I was doing. “I want my lawyer,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you anymore without my lawyer.”

  Beverly stood up quickly. “Right. Right,” she said.

  “Are you asking for a lawyer, too?” the detective asked her.

  Beverly seemed to consider this for a moment. One of her aides, a young man wearing jeans and a sweater who managed to look imposing despite his casual attire, walked quickly across the room, talking as he approached. “I think the Speaker has been very cooperative, Detective. But it’s probably time now for the family to be left to their private sorrow.”

  The detective stood up. “I’m going to need interviews with everyone who was here today,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” the aide said. “Why don’t we do that at our office downtown. Do you have any objection to that?”

  The detective agreed, and then, with a troubled glance at us, pulled a card out of his pocket. “I’ll just leave my number for you,” he said. The aide plucked it from his hand and ushered him and the other police officers out the door.

  Lilly grabbed my hand and dragged me down the hall and up the stairs. When we got to her room, she shut the door behind us and leaned against the closed door. I stood in the middle of the room, facing her.

  “I remember,” she whispered urgently. “I remember everything.”

  “What?”

  “I remember what happened.”