Death Gets a Time-Out (18 page)

“I have so few memories of that time in Topanga. I was only five when my mom and I cut out. My dad was in charge of one small corner of the garden—that I remember. He used to grow these tall bushy plants.” She laughed grimly. “Pot, I’m sure. I remember sleeping on a mattress on the floor with my mother. But not with my dad. I guess old Raymond found other places to sleep. It was like that. People kind of fell into bed with whoever was around. You know, that whole sixties free love kind of thing.” Lilly’s face grew thoughtful and she frowned slightly. “I don’t think my mother liked it, though. I can remember her crying at night, sometimes.”

I remembered something I’d seen in a gossip column recently. The teaser was “When the cat’s away,” and the bit had mentioned a sighting of Raymond dining with a very young TV actress at a chi chi restaurant popular with the junior Hollywood set. Lilly’s stepmother Beverly had been on a political junket to Honduras, I believe. It didn’t look like Raymond had changed his ways much.

“Is that why she and Polaris got together? Because your father was sleeping around?” I asked.

She nodded. “I suppose so. At some point my father just kind of drifted away. I don’t know what happened; I just don’t have any more memories of him from that time.”

“What about your stepmother? Was she around back then?”

Lilly smiled. “I’m not sure exactly when she and my dad got together, but it was probably around that time, or soon
after. I think they might have met in the commune, too. I don’t really know; at the time I was a lot closer to my mother—my biological mother—than to my dad.”

“But you and your stepmother are close now, aren’t you?”

Lilly nodded. “Very. I think of her as my mother. I mean, you know that. Most people don’t even know that she’s not my biological mother.”

“And Polaris? How did he come into the picture, do you know?”

Lilly grimaced. “All I really remember is that he started sleeping in the same room as my real mother and me, and then a whole bunch of us moved down to Mexico.”

“Who moved there with you?”

She wrinkled her brow. “My mother and Polaris. Of course, he was Artie back then. And at least a few other people. I don’t really remember the grown-ups. They weren’t around very much. I do remember one night, though.” She paused and seemed to be straining to grasp a faint wisp of memory. “They were all sitting around a table with a white tablecloth. The room was really dark, but I remember the tablecloth sort of glowing blue. That’s weird. How could a tablecloth glow?”

“Maybe it was under a black light?”

She smiled at me. “That must have been it! And there was a shoebox on the table. I remember that, too. I wasn’t allowed to touch it, though. I remember Artie saying that. He said that there were mushrooms in the box, but that Jupiter and I weren’t allowed to touch them, because they were special magic mushrooms.”

I laughed. “Psychedelic mushrooms?”

She nodded. “I think so. And you wonder why I’m such a neurotic mess. My parents sat around tripping on mushrooms while I played under the table . . .” Her voice trailed off as she remembered that other source for her neurosis.

“I don’t think you’re a mess, Lilly. You’ve never seemed like a mess to me. On the contrary. You’ve always seemed absolutely sane, and incredibly sweet. Considering what you’ve gone through in your life, you’re a paragon of mental health.”

Tears puddled in her eyes and clung to the thick, sooty eyelashes that contrasted so sharply with her fuzz of blond hair. “I’m an actress, Juliet. It’s all an act. I’m just a really good actress.”

I
T
would be difficult to imagine an upbringing more different from Lilly’s than my own. My parents had waited until they were in their forties to have their family. Lilly’s had been teenagers when she was born. Lilly’s childhood was spent frolicking with bands of half-naked children in communes in Topanga Canyon and Mexico. And mine? Watching
Brady Bunch
episodes in a split-level in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Our parents’ political sensibilities may well have been more alike than different, however. Mine had made the uneasy transition from socialism to the Democratic Party back in the fifties, and had always been the most active of pacifists. They might have met Raymond and Trudy Ann at an antiwar rally, although my mother’s appearance would surely have caused Lilly’s some consternation. Her look has always been solidly Jewish Grandmother—permed hair, cardigan sweater with a wad of tissue peeping out the sleeve, and in the crook of her arm, a public television tote bag stuffed with knitting, boxes of raisins, and old copies of
Dissent
and
Commentary.

I couldn’t imagine having a parent who, like Lilly’s, practiced
free love and did drugs. Until my mother instructed me to smoke pot, that is.

“What did you say?” I said, sure that I’d misheard.

“I’ve been doing research on this, and I have every confidence it will help.”

“Ma. Let me get this straight. You want me to take an illegal drug for my morning sickness?”

“Oh please. Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not a drug, it’s medicine. That’s why they call it medical marijuana.”

I took the phone over to the couch and plopped heavily onto the cushions. I was going to need to sit down for this conversation. I’d woken up at dawn the day after my morning with Lilly and had spent a long half-hour in what had become an all-too-familiar position, on my knees in the bathroom. It was way too early in the morning to bother any of my friends, so I’d called my mother two time zones away to whine about how lousy I felt.

“It’s illegal,” I said.

“It is not. Not with a doctor’s note. Remember Marcia Feinman’s aunt, the one who lives in San Francisco?”

I didn’t—it would take a government research grant to plot the tangled network of my mother’s friends and relatives, and all their ailments. “Sure,” I said.

“Well, she has cancer. Poor thing. The woman is a mass of tumors. They’re chewing through her internal organs one at a time.” I winced. When it comes to diseases, Margie Applebaum has always had a way with words. “The chemo was making her so nauseated, poor thing, that she couldn’t keep a single thing down. The starvation was going to kill her before the cancer could. Her doctor wrote her a prescription for marijuana. It’s totally changed her life. I mean, the poor thing is still going to die, but at least now she can eat! She’s a member of a club. She goes there, she eats a brownie, and she feels a thousand times better.”

“Mmm. A brownie.” I considered making a batch, but decided that just looking at a raw egg would make me throw up. “You know, call me crazy, Mom, but when they passed
the medical marijuana law, I don’t think California’s voters envisioned pregnant women smoking pot.”

“Well, why
not
?” She bristled. “It’s one of the most benign substances known to medicine! Chinese midwives have used it for centuries!”

“Mom, how do you know this stuff?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake. You think I’m an idiot? The Internet!”

I laughed. “Of course, I don’t think you’re an idiot, and I am grateful to you for surfing the web on my behalf, but I’m not going to smoke pot. Honestly, Mom, you should hear the grief I get for drinking
coffee.
Do you really think my OB is going to let me toke up?”

“Listen, little miss smarty pants. You know how many people die from taking Tylenol every year?” She didn’t wait for my answer, not that I could have given her one. “Over
two thousand.
You know how many people have ever died from using marijuana? None. Zip. Zero. But you do what you want. Spend the next nine months throwing up if you want. Just don’t come complaining to me.”

“I won’t,” I said, my voice rising in response to hers. I bet she’d tell you that I started the fight. It was always like that.

“Kiss my grandchildren for me,” she said, still yelling.

“I will,” I shouted back.

“Call me tomorrow.”

“Fine!” I slammed down the phone.

“Who was that?” a little voice said. I turned to find Isaac standing in the doorway. His face was swollen with sleep, and one leg of his Batman pajamas was hitched up above his knee. The Velcro cape had become detached from his shoulders and restuck itself on his tush.

“Hey, you!” I said. “Come on up here.”

He jumped up on the couch and burrowed into my side. I winced as his little toes dug into my belly. I moved his cape to its proper position and kissed the top of his head.

“Who was that, Mama?”

“Grandma.”

“How come you always yell at Grandma?”

“I do not always yell at her!”

“Yes you do.”

I considered this for a moment. “Well, because she always yells at me.”

“You should use your words, Mama.”

“Okay, buddy. From now on, I’ll use my words.” He snuggled in closer to me and I moved back a bit. “Careful of my tummy, honey,” I said.

“Because of the baby?” he said. I sat up and stared at him.

“How do you know about the baby?”

“Ruby told me.”

“How does Ruby know?”

He shrugged. As far as he was concerned, Ruby knew everything. I picked him up and carried him into his sister’s bedroom. I dumped him on her bed and shook her awake.

“Ruby, wake up,” I said. She pulled her pillow over her head. “Wake up, Rubes. It’s time for school.” She sat up, rubbing her eyes. When I finally got her alert enough to answer a question, I said, “How did you know I was going to have a baby?”

“Because you’re fat, and you keep throwing up.”

“But how did you know what that meant?”

She shrugged and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “That’s what happened when Isaac was in your tummy.”

“You remember that? How can you possibly remember that? You were only two years old!”

She shrugged. “I remember everything, Mama.”

I sat down on the bed next to her and pulled a kid close to me with each arm. “Well, guys, how do you feel about having a new baby?”

Isaac looked over at his older sister, as if looking for instructions on what emotion she would permit him under these circumstances. Ruby wrinkled her eyebrows and thought for a moment. “We’re okay with it,” she said. Isaac nodded.

I breathed a sigh of relief and squeezed them close. I couldn’t help at that moment to compare my daughter to Lilly. Was Ruby’s memory unusually precise? Lilly’s was so
foggy—although that surely was a result of the horrors she’d experienced. Still, memory was a strange thing. Would Ruby’s remain as acute, or would the memories that were so clear to her now fade with time? Then I had a truly horrible and self-indulgent thought. If I died now, would Ruby remember more of me than what dress I was wearing.

A
L
was coming up from Westminister for a meeting with the courier company that had retained him to investigate its employees. We had arranged to meet for breakfast after I dropped the kids off at school. I’d promised to give him a mini-lesson on the intricacies of workers’ compensation law and had done an hour or so of research the night before. People think that being a lawyer means that you have a wealth of laws, rules, and cases filed away in your memory. That’s a myth. The most important thing, really the only thing, that law school teaches you is where to look to find the answer to a legal question. That’s enough, frankly. A good lawyer doesn’t necessarily know anything at all—she’s just adept at research.

Al and I made our discussion of insurers’ assumption of liability, wrongful termination, ERISA, and other scintillating topics more palatable with biscuits and sausage gravy. Then, as we sopped up the last of our meal, I told him about Lilly and her mother. When I was done, Al leaned heavily back in his chair, cupping his hands around his mug of coffee.
He shook his head and said, “You going to Wasserman?”

That was, of course, the ten-thousand-dollar question. Should I give this information to Jupiter’s defense attorney? I knew exactly what I would have done with Lilly’s story if I were the one representing Jupiter at trial. I would have used it to deflect attention away from my client. I would have argued that there was one person in Chloe’s life with a motive to kill her, one person whose future depended on her perpetual silence: Lilly Green. I would have subpoenaed the movie star and convinced the jury that hers was the finger that pulled the trigger. Not even the fact that Lilly was one of my very good friends would have dissuaded me.

“I’ve got to tell him,” I said.

Al nodded.

“I sure as hell don’t want to, though.”

He nodded again, and said, “What do you make of it? Do you think she did it?”

I pushed my plate away, suddenly not feeling hungry anymore. “I honestly can’t imagine her doing it. I can’t imagine her killing anyone.”

“So, who then?”

“Lilly thinks that when Jupiter confronted Chloe about the blackmail, something happened. Somehow things got out of control, and he ended up killing her.”

Al shrugged. “I guess it’s possible.” He raised a hand and waved at the waitress. We sat silently while she filled our cups. I moved mine aside, having drunk my allotted single cup of coffee.

Once she’d gone out of earshot, I said, “It’s certainly no more unlikely than Lilly killing her. Lilly’s not a murderer. She’s ambitious, she’s strong willed, but she’s also unpretentious, and thoughtful. She’s got an amazing sense of humor. She’s not a killer.”

“But she is.”

“Excuse me?”

“She
is
a killer, isn’t she? She killed her mother.”

“A gun went off accidentally when she was five years old. That hardly makes her a killer.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“What?” I said. “You don’t believe any more than I do that a five-year-old is responsible for a gun accident. If anything, it was her parents’ fault for leaving the gun around.”

“Maybe it wasn’t an accident.”

“What?” I said.

“Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe she shot her mother on purpose. Maybe that’s why she’s so afraid of the story getting out.”

I reached across the table and snatched the cup of coffee I had just pushed aside. I took a gulp. When I was sure that I was calmed sufficiently that I wasn’t going to bite my partner’s head off, I said, “No five-year-old shoots her mother on purpose. She wouldn’t have known how to do it, for one thing. And even if the gun didn’t just go off, even if she meant to pull the trigger, a child that age doesn’t understand what she’s doing. She has nothing even remotely like the
mens rea
, the state of mind, necessary to make her guilty of murder. A kid that age doesn’t even know what death means.”