Death Gets a Time-Out (16 page)

I closed the door again, to keep Ruby from hearing any more of the conversation. “What exactly are you saying, Archer? It sounds like you’ve got something to hide. It sounds like you’re threatening me.”

He jumped down off the car. “Of course I’m not. Why would you say that? I’m not hiding anything, and I didn’t threaten you. I would
never
threaten you. I’m just letting you know how painful this is for your friend.” He opened his car door and got in. Then he leaned his head out the window again. “I know you’d never hurt Lilly. I trust you. Give Peter my regards.” With that, he took off down the street. I stood staring after him for a moment, then shivered and got into my car.

“Why was Amber and Jade’s daddy parked in front of our house?” Ruby asked.

“He just came by to say hi,” I said, and pulled my car into the driveway and around back to the garage. I got out of the car and unbuckled Ruby from her car seat. Then I grabbed her and hugged her, hard. She wriggled in my arms. “Don’t be afraid,” I said.

She tipped her head back and scowled at me. “I’m not afraid!” she said disgustedly. I hugged her again. She might not be, but I sure was.

I had a hard time explaining to Peter why Archer had unnerved me so much. While he agreed that it was weird for him to have shown up at the house, he told me that I was
jumping to conclusions by assuming that Archer was trying to warn me off the case.

“He’s probably just worried about Lilly. She’s clearly taking this incredibly hard, and he doesn’t want her more upset,” Peter said. We were sitting on the couch, enjoying a few minutes together after we’d put the kids to bed and before he went to work.

“Lilly’s not some delicate creature who needs to be protected. Anyway, Archer certainly never bothered to take care of her in the past. More like the other way around. She was always the one worrying about him.”

Peter shrugged.

“What?” I said.

“I don’t know that she ever really worried
about
him. More like worried about what he was
up
to.”

I nodded. “I guess so. But still. How do we get from that to him lurking in front of our house like some extra from
The Sopranos
?”

Peter shook his head.

“What?” I said again, irritated now.

“Maybe he’s changed. You said yourself they seem to be having some kind of reconciliation. Maybe he’s trying to do more for her.”

“Like terrorize her friends?”

Peter poked me in the side with his toe. “You were hardly terrorized. Don’t be so melodramatic.”

I pushed his feet off my lap. “He was waiting in front of the house in the dark. He told me to back off my investigation. It sure seemed to me like he was trying to scare me. And guess what? It worked. I’m scared.”

Peter leaned over and hugged me. “Don’t be scared,” he murmured into my hair, except he said it in a Bugs Bunny accent, and then he giggled.

I shook him off and jerked to my feet. “I can’t believe you. What, are you and Archer in some kind of husband brotherhood? Why doesn’t this bother you?” I’m afraid my voice was a little shriller than I would have liked.

Peter sat back and shook his head. “I’m sorry, honey. It’s
just that I know Archer a little better than you do. He’s just trying to impress Lilly by playing the macho husband.”

I stomped off into the kitchen to call Al, sure that he would find Archer’s behavior as suspicious as I did. I’d forgotten about his crippling sexism.

“What do my hormones have to do with anything?” I shouted.

“They’re all out of whack. It makes you overreact.”

“Overreact? Overreact? I don’t get this. You and Peter are always on me to be more careful, to take more precautions. Hell, you even want me to carry a gun! And now you’re saying I’m overreacting? I’ll give you overreacting!” I clapped the phone down in his ear.

It rang a moment later. “Sorry,” I said into the receiver.

“That’s okay,” Al said. “Like I said. Hormones.”

I gritted my teeth and didn’t reply.

“Tell you what, how about I get one of my buddies to put him through the computer, check on any priors. Would that make you feel better?”

“I guess so.” Was I overreacting? I didn’t usually scare easily. That was actually one of my problems—sometimes I didn’t scare easily enough.

“Why don’t you try a bath?” Al said.

“What?”

“That’s what Jeanelle always does when she’s upset.” The condescension in his voice was palpable, and it was all I could do to keep from hanging up on him again. “Anyway, if you’re really worried, you should call your friend Lilly and ask her what’s up with her ex.”

That wasn’t a bad idea. I decided to do that first thing in the morning. I did end up taking a bath, but not because Al told me to. The idea had been in the back of my mind ever since Lilly had announced her plans to have one. I only wished that I also had someone on staff to give me a massage. If I was substantially more serene when I got out of the tub, that certainly wasn’t something I was ever going to admit to Al.

My calm lasted through the next morning. I woke up early,
feeling peculiar. I jumped out of bed, got dressed in the dark, and went out to enjoy a solitary cup of coffee before waking the kids. Then I had an inspiration that might have been motherly, but probably had more to do with my own cravings. It was while I was painstakingly pouring out the pancake batter into Mickey Mouse ears, and placing the chocolate chip eyes just so, that I identified the strange sensation that had come over me. It wasn’t anything I was feeling—it was what I wasn’t feeling. I wasn’t exhausted. For the first time in weeks, I actually felt rested. I smiled in surprise. I’d better enjoy it—it wasn’t going to last. Pretty soon I’d be spending my nights waddling off to the bathroom every fifteen minutes. Then, when the baby came, I’d be even worse off. If the new one was anything like the others, I was doomed to become a test case for a sleep deprivation study.

For once the kids didn’t give me a hard time about getting dressed and ready for school. They were like little hound dogs, with the scent of pancakes in their noses. They whipped on their clothes, snapped the Velcro on their sneakers, and were sitting at the kitchen table, faces covered in syrup, in no time.

Isaac gobbled his Mickey Mouse as fast as he could, and then came around the table to bury his face in my stomach. “Mama?” he said.

“What honey?”

“You look pretty in those pajamas.”

I looked down at my T-shirt and red Capri pants. “These aren’t pajamas, sweetie. These are clothes.”

He looked at me critically. “Well, you’re pretty, anyway.”

I kissed the top of his head. Ninety-nine mornings out of a hundred, the kids do nothing but bicker and drive one another and me crazy. And then, every so often, generally when I’m just about at the end of my rope, one of them fills my tank, recharges my batteries, and gives me the energy to keep driving through my days.

“You’re not bad yourself,” I said.

Once I had the kids fed and settled in front of morning television, I picked up the phone. It took a while for Lilly’s
assistant to clear me, but I finally heard my friend’s voice. When I told her what had happened the night before with Archer, there was silence on the other end of the line. “Lilly,” I said. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. Listen, I’m sorry. Archer’s just worried about me. I don’t need to tell you how freaked out this whole thing has made me. He was just overreacting. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize. It’s just . . .” My voice trailed off.

“What?” she said.

How did I go about telling her that I thought her ex-husband was a scary creep and that I wished she’d cut him loose once and for all? “He just doesn’t seem like the most stable guy in the world,” I said lamely.

She sighed. “I’ve got to go, Juliet. I’ve got
In Style
magazine showing up in fifteen minutes and I’ve got to go get made up.”

After I made the school rounds, I drove out to Pasadena, to the CCU campus. I didn’t know if I’d get in to see Polaris without an appointment, but even if I wasn’t admitted to the inner sanctum, it wouldn’t hurt to nose around a bit.

I got off the mobbed freeway as fast as I could and made my way on surface streets through the less attractive parts of Pasadena. There are vast stretches of Los Angeles that look the same—interchangeable districts of long, straight avenues with strip malls on either side. The stores are a hodgepodge of Vietnamese donut shops, Guatemalan mail centers, Mexican travel agencies. The telephone poles and streetlights are festooned with campaign posters:
ERNESTO ACOSTA FOR SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE, RUTH TAGANES FOR CITY COUNSEL, VOTE NO ON 6, YES ON 113
. I love these ugly parts of the city as much or more than the neighborhoods of ostentatious homes with Astroturf green lawns, or the winding canyons where the houses cling precariously to the hillsides, raising a defiant fist to the god of earthquakes and landslides. This schizophrenia of gracious elegance and decaying tackiness, of natural beauty and urban blight, is the essence of Los Angeles.
It’s what makes those of us who love the city defend it against its many and vocal detractors. In all cities poverty exists side by side with wealth, but here we don’t pretend otherwise.

The CCU campus was set on a broad boulevard of palatial homes, behind a high iron fence. I pulled off to the side of the road so I could take a minute to figure out how I was going to weasel the guard in the gatehouse into just letting me onto the grounds. As I sat there, a black BMW SUV came tearing down the driveway from inside the compound. The driver paused only long enough for the guard to begin to lift the barrier arm that blocked the exit. I heard a squeal of metal as the car jerked forward, driving through the gate before the bar was fully raised. The bar smacked against the roof of the car, and the guard leapt out of his box, arms raised in astonishment and anger, shouting after the car as it sped away. The Beemer tore off down the block, and without thinking clearly about what I was doing, I set off in pursuit. I had managed to catch a glimpse of the driver, her face red and twisted in a tortured scowl. It was Lilly.

Lilly made it easy for me. She stopped at the first café we passed. I followed her into the parking lot and pulled into a spot at the far end. I slouched down in my seat and angled my rearview mirror so that I had a clear view of her. After a moment, the driver’s side door opened. Lilly got out, looking pale and wan, and walked into the café. I sat up and tapped my fingers on my steering wheel, trying to figure out what to do. I was horribly torn. I wanted to jump out of my car and comfort my friend, to help her with whatever it was that was causing her so much pain. At the same time, however, a worm of suspicion wriggled its way through my concern, and I couldn’t help but wonder why Lilly had gone to see Polaris, why she was so upset, and what any of this had to do with the murder of Chloe Jones. Finally, I followed her. When I entered the café, I saw her standing at the far end of the counter, waiting for her coffee. When she saw me, her face grew even paler.

“Hi,” I said, walking over.

“Uh, hi.”

“Let’s sit down and talk, okay?”

She nodded and walked across the room to a small table tucked behind a row of tall plants.

I placed my order and waited a few moments for my own latte.

“That’ll be seven seventy-five,” said the young woman behind the counter as she handed me two mugs.

I stared at her. “For a cup of coffee?”

She rolled her eyes. “Two decaf lattes. Yours and your friend’s.” Lilly had stuck me with the check. Again. I invariably ended up paying when Lilly and I went out. It’s not that she was cheap, exactly. The basket of muffins, cheeses, and wine she sent us every Christmas probably cost as much as a month of Isaac’s preschool. I think it’s that Lilly, like all movie stars, never had to deal with the minutiae of life, like paying the bills. There was always someone else around to take care of that kind of stuff—a studio executive, a talent manager, a personal assistant. A short, chubby friend.

Once I’d sugared up my latte and sprinkled on enough powdered chocolate to compensate for the lack of caffeine, I joined Lilly at the secluded table she’d chosen.

“How’d you find me?” she asked as I sat down and handed her her coffee. “Are you following me?” I didn’t think she sounded angry, merely resigned.

“Sort of. Not really. I was just pulling up to the CCU campus when I saw you tear out of there. Then I followed you.”

She nodded and sighed. Her shoulders shook slightly.

“What’s going on, Lilly? What were you doing there?”

“I went to see him.”

“What for?”

She took a trembling sip of her drink and darted her tongue out to lick the foam off her lips. “To convince him to help Jupiter.”

“What did he say?”

“He threw me out. Well, he didn’t, the coward. He had those bathrobe-wearing goons do it for him.” Her voice held
just the barest hint of the girlish spunk that was her stock-in-trade.

“How did you even get in there in the first place? Didn’t the guard stop you?”

“He asked for my autograph.” She didn’t seem pleased with the ease of access her fame had bought her—on the contrary. She appeared disgusted—with the guard, but perhaps most of all with herself, for taking advantage of it.

“What did you think you could tell Polaris that would change his mind?”

“I could tell him
why
Jupiter killed his wife.”

I had just taken a sip of my drink and I froze, the coffee scalding the inside of my mouth. I swallowed, and carefully put the mug on the table. “What are you talking about?” I said.

Whatever spirit she had managed to muster dissolved, and her face collapsed. “I’m the reason Jupiter did it. It’s my fault. He’s going to die, and it’s all my fault.” She began to cry—dry soundless sobs that shook her whole body. I’d watched her blue eyes fill with tears time and time again on the screen and always envied her ability to weep so prettily. It turned out that in real life Lilly Green, like me and like everyone else, looked haggard, blotchy, and ugly when she cried. She put her head down in her arms. I reached across the table and laid my hand on her shorn head. I stroked her stubbly hair for a moment and then, when she didn’t move, brought my chair around the table and put my arm around her. She leaned heavily against me, and continued to cry. I was grateful for the plants that screened us from the view of the other people in the café. The last thing she needed was to see an item in
Movieline
detailing Lilly Green’s breakdown in a Pasadena coffee bar.