Death Gets a Time-Out (35 page)

“I’m putting my money on the Reverend,” Wasserman said. “Go do some digging at the CCU. See what you uncover. I’ll be home in two days. Get me enough for a continuance by then. And watch your hours; your money’s coming out of my pocket now. Hey, Mike! How’s it look on the black?” The phone went dead.

“Yes, sir,” I muttered at the mute box of the speakerphone.

T
HE
Very Reverend was having his photograph taken against the backdrop of a wall of windows that overlooked the carefully tended lawns and low, shingled buildings of the CCU campus. Stars and planets embroidered in shiny gold thread decorated his dazzling white robes. He held his arms aloft, and his sleeves tumbled about his shoulders, revealing white forearms covered with wiry black hairs. He glanced once in our direction then glared at Hyades, who calmly ushered the photographer and her two assistants out of the room. He closed the door behind them and stood with his back to the door, watching me confront his boss.

Al and I had had surprisingly little difficulty convincing the Very Reverend’s aide to arrange an audience for us. I’d called him on my way home from Wasserman’s, and he’d instructed me to be at the campus the next day. When I’d finally reached Al and brought him up to date on the twists and turns of the case, and on our renewed status as paid investigators, he had insisted on joining me for the interview.

“What do you want?” Polaris barked, his thick Brooklyn accent sounding harsh to my ear.

“To ask a few questions about the death of Trudy-Ann Nutt,” Al said in his politely intimidating cop’s voice.

“I was under the impression that Lilly Green told you everything there is to know about that. What more can I possibly tell you?” In his anger, he had stripped his voice of the compelling smoothness that I’d found nearly spellbinding when I’d seen him for the first time.

I said, “You can tell us what you were doing in your wife’s bedroom when the gun went off.”

“What are you talking about? I wasn’t in her room. I didn’t get there until after she was shot.”

“Where were you?”

He paused and looked at me, his eyes mistrustful slits. “In another room.”

“I know that Lilly didn’t kill her mother,” I said.

“What are talking about? Of course she did.”

“No. I have witness statements from individuals who will testify that she was playing in the courtyard and ran to her mother’s room only when she heard the shot.”

“Who? Who are your witnesses?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

A light seemed to dawn in his eyes. “No . . . no. They would never have talked to you.” I was willing to bet every dime I had that the “they” in that sentence were Beverly and Raymond. And whatever his words, there was enough doubt in his voice to reveal that he was not at all sure of their silence.

“Who got there first, Artie?” I said. “Raymond and Beverly, or you?”

“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.

A
S
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?”