Death Gets a Time-Out (11 page)

“No, I do
not
want you to pull over. It’s just the traffic. All this stopping and starting is making me carsick. Your truck doesn’t have the smoothest ride in the world.”

“So it’s my fault?”

I laughed. “Yeah. It’s your fault, Al. Everything is your fault. Anyway, what did you make of all that back at the center?”

He shook his head. “That Molly had the hots for Jupiter, that’s for sure.”

I nodded. “Yup. Do you think she and Jupiter were sleeping together before Chloe showed up?”

Al wrinkled his brow and thought for a moment. Then he said slowly, “I don’t think so. She doesn’t seem like someone who would break the rules.”

“Maybe not. Except she broke the rule on confidentiality.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. But the girl’s dead.”

“True. So we don’t think Molly was sleeping with Jupiter. Can we agree that she was in love with him?”

He nodded. “Looks that way. And maybe a little in love with her boss.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Or maybe she just admires him. How much weight do we give to her opinion of Chloe?”

Al frowned. “I believe her. That Chloe seems like a bad apple. Marrying her boyfriend’s father? Maybe we should use Molly as a character witness? In favor of Jupiter, and maybe even against Chloe if Wasserman can figure out a way to get that in without an objection from the prosecution.”

“I don’t know. I mean, she’d probably make a good witness. Juries like blondes. But I’m not sure she wouldn’t do more damage than good.”

“Why?”

“She cares for Jupiter, and she hates Chloe, that’s obvious. So she might seem biased in his favor. But even worse, she knows just how messed up Chloe made Jupiter. She told us that Chloe had really interfered with his therapy, that he’d loved her, and that he’d been utterly devastated when she’d married his dad. That plays right into the prosecution’s theory of motive.”

“Good point. Well, what about the doctor?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know how he’ll play. He’d have to give testimony about Jupiter bailing out on the program. And a jury might have a problem with the clinic. It’s pretty posh.”

“Disgusting. They should be sweating it out in jail, not in a hot tub,” Al said.

“Al, for God’s sake. Addiction is a disease.”

“Yeah, right. Show me a cancer ward that looks like that.”

We argued all the way back to Los Angeles and until Al dropped me off at the front gate of Isaac’s nursery school. I’d called when it became clear that we weren’t going to make it in time, and begged the school to allow Isaac to stay in the afterschool program until I showed up. I’d also called Peter, who had agreed to leave a meeting at the studio early to pick up Ruby. I found Isaac sitting at a table, gluing macaroni to a piece of construction paper and chatting with two other little boys.

“Mama!” He stood up, his hands on his hips. “You’re late! All the other one-ers went home and I had to stay with the three-ers. But I’m
not
a three-er.”

“I know, honey. I’m sorry.” I took him in my arms. “Did you mind being a three-er just for today?”

He kissed me on the cheek and rubbed his nose on mine. “It’s okay, Mommy. Except they only had apples for snack. And that’s not really a good enough snack. So I’ll need a cookie. Or some ice cream.”

“We’ll see, buddy.” I squeezed him tight. There was only the barest hint of baby left in him, around his soft full cheeks and tender-skinned neck. The rest of him was pure little boy—all pipestem legs, sharp elbows, and bony knees. The dimples were disappearing from his knuckles, and his sweet baby fragrance had been almost entirely replaced by a little-boy smell vaguely reminiscent of puppies, sand, and the contents of his pockets. In a few months this little boy would be my baby no more. He would stumble off into the world, pushed out of the way by another round, soft bundle. I wished I could keep him with me for just a little longer. As I clung to my son, and he clung to me, I rebelled against the end that I knew was coming. Someday, Isaac was going to stop wrapping his arms and legs around my body, stop hugging and kissing me. He was going to grow too big, too self-conscious to express his love with such utter abandon. I anticipated his abdication with dread. The tragedy of parenting is that if you do your job well, your love is doomed to become an unrequited passion. I would always remain as obsessed with Isaac as I was at that moment, but his job would be to find other objects for his adoration. I thought of my own mother, and how, while I loved her and my father, the real core of my life, the sun of my solar system, had become my own small family. Ruby, Isaac, and Peter. Someday, Isaac would feel the same. He would still love me and his father, but his focus would be his own partner and children. I held him closer, and tried to memorize the feel of his body in my arms. I inhaled the smell of his hair, buried my mouth in the silken skin of his neck, and willed myself to record the essence of Isaac for the day when it would no longer be mine in any way other than memory.

The next morning I called my doctor to make my first prenatal appointment. Miraculously, they had had a last-minute cancellation, and could fit me in that morning. If I timed everything perfectly, I would be able to drive east to Los Feliz to take Isaac to preschool, dropping off Ruby at her school on the way, go back west to the doctor’s office near Cedar’s Sinai, and make it back downtown in time to meet
Al at the county jail for another interview with Jupiter. I’d have to traverse the city three times, but if the traffic cooperated, I’d be fine. Ask a Los Angelino how long it takes to get somewhere and you’re guaranteed to get the response “twenty minutes.” By some magical arrangement of denial and automotive optimism, all points in the city are exactly twenty minutes away from all others. Except when there’s traffic. Then multiply that twenty minutes by a factor of ten, and you’ll still be sitting on the road, engaged in the eternal debate: Should you risk getting off the freeway and trying the surface streets?

I had my routes down pat. I whipped down side streets, using the speed bumps as launching pads, and was on my back, knees up and feet in the stirrups, before my hair was dry from my morning shower. The doctor confirmed what I already knew. I was pregnant. Seven weeks and eleven pounds along. Well on the way to whale-dom.

At the receptionist’s desk, I made a trimester’s worth of appointments, and received a goodie bag full of prenatal vitamins, coupons for hand lotion, and pamphlets from infant formula companies instructing me that while breast was
of course
best, they were ready and waiting to make my life easier with a steady supply of chemically and nutritionally perfect milk for my new baby. I hefted the bag in my hand, wondering if I should toss it in the trashcan behind the counter, or wait to throw it out until it had rolled around in my car for a few months.

“First baby?” a voice said. I turned to find another pregnant woman standing behind me. She was tall, with one of those bullet-shaped bellies very thin pregnant women manage to acquire.

I shook my head. “Third,” I said.

Her eyes widened and her smile grew stiff. “My goodness,” she said, and backed away from me as if my fecundity were contagious. Hers was the first of what was to become an all-too-familiar reaction. Being pregnant with your first baby is, in the eyes of the world, cute. Your second is less interesting, but still acceptable. By the time you’ve imposed your genetic
material on the universe for the third time, people are much less inclined to approve of you. Reactions range from shock to disapproval, even occasionally to disgust. Every so often another mother of three or more greets you with a sympathetic smile. I find those the most terrifying, frankly. It is a moment of kinship like that shared between strangers who realize that their jobs force them to wear the same unflattering uniform or that they are suffering from the same disfiguring disease. Rueful recognition of mutual doom. That’s what you get from those other mothers smiling down from their cereal-encrusted minivans.

I drove back across town, imagining myself chasing three kids, juggling three sets of activities, doing three children’s worth of laundry. A nanny. I was definitely going to need a nanny. I was pretty well freaked out by the time I got to the county jail. I had planned to break the news of my pregnancy to Al, but I couldn’t seem to find the right moment. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could say while we were going through the rigmarole of metal detectors, identification inspections, and bag searches necessary to enter the jail’s visiting room. I almost said something while we were killing time, waiting for them to bring Jupiter down, but Al was on one of his tears about the conspiracy to silence libertarian voices of dissent, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“Do you really think it’s an accident that websites critical of the liberal media’s hegemony are so much slower to load?” he said as he pulled his notebook out of his pocket. “It’s all about AOL/Time Warner. They control the Internet. They decide what speed everything runs on. They’re counting on everyone getting restless, waiting for the truth to appear on their screens. They’re figuring Americans are so damn impatient that they’d rather click over to a website that serves up nothing but bogus half-truths than wait for a minute. And they’re right. The herd would rather slurp at CNN’s trough of lies than take a minute to learn the truth. But not me, girlie. Not me. I’m a patient man. I’ll wait until kingdom come before I get my information from a media conglomerate.”

“Maybe you should get a DSL line,” I said.

He looked at me, obviously pitying my inability to recognize the reality of my own victimization, and opened his mouth to launch into another explanation of why the threat of global terrorism was really a media-created stunt to increase revenues, when Jupiter finally arrived. He greeted us with a nod of his head and sat down at the table. He looked less agitated. He’d stopped chewing on his lips, and he wasn’t fidgeting quite so much.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Better, I guess. I’m working. In the laundry. It’s pretty awful work—it’s a furnace in there, and you’re on your feet, bending over and picking up these huge, stinking piles of filthy sheets and clothes and stuff. But I don’t mind it. At least I’m somewhere away from everyone. I don’t just sit there in my house waiting for someone to jump me.”

I’ve never gotten used to hearing inmates refer to their cells as houses. There is something so sad about it—the very attempt to replicate normality serves only to highlight how truly constricted their world is. It was probably a good sign that Jupiter was getting more comfortable with jailhouse lingo, though. It meant he was getting accustomed to his situation; that he was figuring out how to swim in the admittedly poisonous waters. It was better than drowning.

“Jupiter, I want to ask you something. Do you remember what happened to Lilly’s mother? How she died, I mean?”

Jupiter looked up at me blankly. “What do you mean?”

“I know that she died in Mexico, and your father said something about an accident. I was wondering if you remember what happened.”

He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at his hands. “I was really young.”

I leaned forward, ready to press him. “About two or three, right?”

He shrugged again and began chewing his lip. “Yeah.”

I thought of my Isaac. He was more or less the same age as Jupiter had been back then. I had a hard time believing that if something happened to me, he wouldn’t remember it.
Jupiter remembered. I knew he did. Why wasn’t he willing to talk about it? Why wouldn’t anyone tell us anything about Lilly’s mother’s death?

“Come on, Jupiter,” I said, letting my impatience show. “We can’t help you unless you’re straight with us. What happened in Mexico?”

He glanced up at me anxiously, his face pinched and his teeth once again clawing at his lips. “Did Lilly tell you anything?” he asked.

“What happened in Mexico? I asked again.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice the nervous whine of a young child.

I wasn’t getting anywhere by confronting him. Maybe it made more sense to pretend to believe him. “You never talked about it with your father?” I said gently.

He shook his head. “My father and I never talked about anything. Except what a lousy son I was.”

None of us spoke for a minute, and then Al said, “Jupiter, we went up to Ojai. To the rehab center where you met Chloe.”

Jupiter said, “How’s Dr. Blackmore?”

I replied, “Fine. Molly sends you her regards.” At the sound of her name, his face brightened. “She likes you,” I continued.

“She’s the best,” he said. “If I’d listened to her four years ago, none of this would have happened.”

“She doesn’t seem to have been too fond of Chloe.”

He smiled ruefully. “Molly saw right through her. She tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.”

“Did you know that Chloe had checked back in to the center a couple of months ago?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Did your father know that she was using again?”

He nodded his head ruefully. “He caught her doing a line in her bathroom. I thought he was going to kill her.”

The three of us stared at each other for a moment, as it dawned on us what he’d said.

“Did you mean that?” I asked him.

He paused for a moment, as if considering my question. “No. No, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think my father could have killed her. He loved Chloe. He really did. I can’t believe he’d go that far.”

“How far
did
he go? Was he angry?”

He grunted. “You could say that. He busted open her lip. That counts as angry, doesn’t it?”

“He hit her?”

Jupiter nodded. “Yeah.”

“Was that the first time?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not. He’s that kind of guy, you know?” Was he? Was that remarkably magnetic man really violent?

“Did he ever hit you?”

He rolled his eyes. “All the time, man. All the time.”

Evidence of child abuse is terrifically useful in a mitigation case. It doesn’t work unless the jury is already predisposed to give the guy life instead of death, but if they want to save him, it can be the hook on which to hang their hats.