I rested my head in my hands. “I’m so sorry, Al. Really I am. I know I’ve been a lousy partner. I’m always late. I don’t even make it to work half the time. I can’t imagine how I’m going to manage with a new baby in addition to everything else. I completely understand if you want to fire me. Really, it’s okay.”
He shook his head. “I can’t fire you.”
I raised my face. “What?”
“You don’t work for me; we’re partners. I can’t fire you.”
“Oh. Well, I understand if you don’t want to be my partner anymore.”
He sighed and popped another crimson egg in his mouth. Whole. He chewed noisily, and then swallowed with an audible gulp. I willed my stomach to settle.
“I’m not worried about that,” he said.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“I’m not bothered by your schedule. In case you haven’t noticed, we have barely enough work to keep us both working part-time. Once you have the baby, you’ll do stuff at home for a while. On the computer. Whatever. I’m not worried about it. We’ll work it out.”
Relief flooded me. I had been so sure that Al would dump me and find someone whose workday wasn’t dictated by the exigencies of carpools and playdates. Truth be told, I couldn’t really understand why he hadn’t. Whatever he said, I knew it couldn’t be easy dealing with me and my schedule. But I wasn’t going to press him too hard. I loved this job. I made a vow to myself to be better organized, to be a better partner, to somehow limit the wrench a baby was going to throw into the already shaky works of my burgeoning career as a private investigator. “Thank you so much, Al. I promise I’ll figure it out. Like you said, I’ll work from home or something. And we’ve got over six months before I’m going to need to worry about any of this. I’m going to put in six really good months.”
“Now, that’s what I’m worried about,” he said, interrupting me.
“What?”
“Look, Juliet, I don’t want to have any repetition of what happened when you were pregnant with Isaac.”
I assured him that I had no intention of getting shot again—recovering once from a C-section and a bullet wound at the same time was once too often even for me. He replied with a grunt.
“No, really. I’ll be careful.”
He shook his head. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Rather than argue with him, I decided to answer the question he’d asked before I’d made my elegant sprint across the room. “If Jupiter doesn’t tell the prosecutor about his little sex-for-drugs arrangement with Chloe, I don’t honestly see how it can come out at trial.”
“Unless she told someone else.”
“True.”
“You think he did it?” Al asked.
“What, the murder?”
Al nodded.
For all that Jupiter had lied to us about his drug use, I still had an oddly unshaken belief in his innocence. Maybe it was because of Lilly, maybe because of my own stubbornness. It’s not like I have an infallible instinct for evaluating the truth. I just didn’t think he could have done it. “Jupiter says he didn’t kill her. And given what he told us about Polaris, I’d put my money on the father, rather than the son, wouldn’t you?”
Al shrugged. “That’s if the son is telling the truth.”
It wasn’t unusual in our partnership for Al and me to wait this long to have a conversation about our client’s guilt or innocence. When we’d worked together at the federal public defender’s office, we’d learned to avoid the subject altogether. The few times it had come up, Al had quickly grown disgusted with my willingness to consider the possibility that the guys we were defending hadn’t committed the crime of which they were accused. Al was wrong—I wasn’t naïve. I knew as well as he that our clients were, by and large, guilty. I simply believed that as the one person in the system whose job it was to be on their side, I owed it to them to have some faith. So if my client told me he thought he was delivering a pound of flour wrapped in a black plastic bag to a one-eyed Hell’s Angel named Snake, rather than the half a kilo of premium-quality Afghani heroin the cops found on him, then that’s what I believed. Or at least, that’s all I would admit to believing. I just wasn’t cynical enough to present a defense to a jury in the morning, and then denounce it to my colleagues as nonsense in the afternoon.
“You met Polaris. Don’t you think he seems like a more likely suspect?” I said.
Al raised his eyebrows. “I’m not the one who thought he was . . . what did you call him? Compelling?”
I blushed. “I never said I thought he was a good guy, or anything. He’s just got some . . . I don’t know. Power or something. That doesn’t make him more likely to be innocent, or Jupiter to be guilty.”
Al snorted. “What about Jupiter’s positive DNA test?”
“Consensual sex.”
Al shook his head. “Anyway, it’s hardly relevant. We’re not gathering evidence for the guilt phase. Just the penalty phase. Next step?”
“Don’t we have to report in to Wasserman’s office at some point?”
“That, my dear, is a job for you,” he said, getting to his feet.
“For me? Why?”
“Because you’re the lawyer. You know how to talk lawyer-talk. I’m going to go back to the office.” He ignored my smirk at this glorified description of his garage. “I’m sure I can find something else to keep me busy. Your friend Lilly may be rolling in dough, but I doubt she’ll stand for us double-billing her forever.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Lilly watches her money, and this isn’t a two-person job.”
Ten
“I don’t like clothes shopping with you. I like shopping with Daddy,” Ruby said as I disentangled a sweatshirt with a sequined collar from her copper curls.
“What’s wrong with shopping with me?” I made my voice sound nonchalant, but really my feelings were hurt. This was our special time. The time I’d set aside just for Ruby, per the instructions in every parenting manual I’d ever read. She was supposed to treasure these moments of my undivided attention. I’d been promised by those pediatricians and psychologists who seemed to be primarily in the business of inducing feelings of guilt and failure in overextended mothers like me that special time was the glue that would hold the rest of our lives together.
“Because Daddy never looks at the price tags.”
No wonder we never managed to save enough in our house fund actually to buy a house. My darling husband was spending his entire income on miniature flared jeans with unicorns embroidered on the seat, and pastel-colored, high-heeled sneakers. “You know, Ruby, it can be fun to look at the price. Isn’t it neat when we get a bargain?”
Ruby looked at me with a combination of disgust and pity, and flicked disdainfully at the pile of fleece sweatshirts and miniskirts I’d plucked from the sale rack.
“These are preschool clothes. In kindergarten we have to wear jeans. And belly shirts like this one.” She held up a metallic green scrap of fabric that she’d somehow managed to smuggle into the dressing room with us.
“Belly shirts?”
“You know, the ones that show off your belly button.” Were the other kindergarten mothers really letting their daughters go to school looking like lip-synching nymphets from a Destiny’s Child video?
I looked at the price tag and gasped. “I’m not spending forty dollars on half a shirt.”
“That’s okay. Daddy will.”
“No he will not.” Special time. What a delight. “I have an idea,” I said, faking a smile. “How about we get some lunch?”
By the time we’d finished eating, Ruby and I were friends again. Maybe it was because I made no objection to her chosen meal of French fries and a chocolate milkshake. Au contraire—I shared it with her. In my first trimester, I try to consume as much sugar and fat as possible. They’re the only things that don’t make me feel like vomiting.
Ruby had no school because of one of the many in-service, out-serv
ice, parent-teacher, teacher-teacher conference-meeting-seminar days that her school instituted specifically to destroy any hope I had of getting in a decent day’s work. I could afford to blow my morning on outfitting a miniature Las Vegas street walker, but I’d received a summons to appear that afternoon before Raoul Wasserman himself to update him on the status of our investigation, and so some arrangements had to be made. I’d never managed to find a decent babysitter after one disastrous early attempt, so I’d tried to prevail upon Peter to reschedule his own afternoon meeting. He had reminded me that studio executives don’t take kindly to last-minute cancellations, and my suggestion that he take Ruby along had been greeted with a gasp of horror. He had asked me if I really thought he should remind the money men that he was old enough to have a kid her age. Peter harbors a neurotic fear that there are hordes of postadolescent screenwriters yapping at his heels, eager to steal his ideas and take his assignments. Given the glorification of youth culture endemic in Hollywood, where nineteen-year-old film school dropouts get million-dollar multipicture deals while middle-aged Oscar winners can’t get a job lettering cue cards, his paranoia may not be that unreasonable.
Al was working a fraud investigation for a new client, a courier company convinced that its employees who were out on disability and workers’ comp were actually shirkers. He was due to spend the next few days following burly men and women around with a camera, waiting for someone to pick up a heavy box, or go windsurfing, or do cartwheels on the front lawn. Meeting with Wasserman was my responsibility, anyway. It was the least I could do, since in about seven months I was going to be even more nonexistent a partner than I already was.
So Ruby came with me. I packed a bag with gel pens and black paper, a Walkman with two hours’ worth of story tapes, and enough gummy worms to choke a flock of robins. I ignored the glare of the receptionist, and cleared a few glossy magazines off the coffee table in the waiting area outside Wasserman’s office. I laid out Ruby’s supplies and poked the straw into her juice box.
“Okay, honey,” I said. “I’ll be back in half an hour. When the big hand is on the six.” I pointed to the ornate clock hanging on the wall over the receptionist’s head.
“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”
“Just ask the nice lady. She’ll tell you where to go.” I smiled at the receptionist, a sour-faced young woman with short, spiky hair dyed platinum blond. A silver chain dangling across one of her eyes connected the ring in her nose to the one through her eyebrow. Ignoring me, she flicked open a compact and examined her goth makeup in the mirror. She pushed aside the chain and scraped an invisible trace of kohl out of the corner of her eye with a long pinkie nail polished in black with a tiny, silver death’s head appliqué.
“You don’t mind showing my daughter the way to the ladies’ room if she needs it, do you?” I asked her. The receptionist shrugged and murmured into her headset.
“Mr. Wasserman will see you now,” she said.
“Okay, Rubes. I’ll be right back. You behave yourself.”
Rubes nodded and put her headphones on. She pulled out a piece of black paper and began drawing with her fluorescent pens. Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, I followed the receptionist’s pointed finger down a long hall.
Raoul Wasserman’s office contrasted sharply in its Spartan décor with the oriental carpets and faux antique furniture of his waiting room. His desk was a vast expanse of burnished steel. It was empty except for something that looked like the controls of a jumbo jet, but might have been only a telephone. He directed me to a couch with a steel back and armrests, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I’d left Ruby with the pierced young thing out in the waiting area. I could only imagine the short work she and her pens would have made of the white leather seat.
I sat down and Wasserman joined me, folding his lanky body into something that looked more like a metal mesh basket than a chair. His knees poked up on either side of him, and when he leaned forward, they were about level with his shoulders. It couldn’t possibly have been comfortable, but his athletic grace made it seem the most natural of seating positions.
“So, Ms. Applebaum, you are a friend of Lilly Green’s,” he said.
“I am.”
He leaned back in his chair, resting his large hands on his jutting knees. “I don’t normally allow my clients to tell me which investigator to hire.”
I felt a tiny bead of sweat forming on my brow. What had I expected? Of course the man was going to resent having been forced to hire me. “I can understand why Lilly’s request might have bothered you. After all, you surely have investigators you normally use.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I have three investigators whom I employ on a full-time basis.”
This was a big firm. Normally, criminal defense attorneys hire independent private investigators on a case-by-case basis. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Wasserman was the most important criminal lawyer in the city, maybe even the state. Of course he had enough investigative work to keep three people busy full time.
“Mr. Wasserman, let me assure you, my partner and I understand that we work for you. My friendship with Lilly is the reason she feels comfortable having me here working on her brother’s behalf, but it will have nothing to do with how I do my job. Our role in this case is to gather information for the penalty phase of the trial, if there is one. That’s what we plan to do.”
He looked at me appraisingly, and I got the sense that he appreciated my deference. “Thank you, Ms. Applebaum. I appreciate that.”
“Please, call me Juliet.”
He smiled for the first time, and it was a broad, friendly smile. Suddenly, he looked more like the amiable basketball player he must have been, and less like the superstar lawyer by whom, I’ll admit, I was pretty intimidated. “The truth is,” he continued, “we have a number of cases that are keeping this office quite busy. I’m happy to have the help. My investigative team has been preparing for trial, but they had not yet begun the mitigation work when Lilly made her wishes known. Your presence frees them up to work on other things.”
I leaned back in my seat and felt myself relax. I hadn’t even realized I’d been so tense.
“I understand from my associate that you were once an attorney,” he said.
Once? Wasn’t I still? I always thought that once you passed the bar, you were a lawyer until your dying day. It was like being Jewish. Or Catholic. You might convert, practice another religion or profession, but in some inner core of your being, you remained a member of the tribe. “I was with the federal public defender’s office.”
“The practice of law didn’t agree with you?”
“No, it wasn’t that. I left work when my daughter was a baby.”
“Ah,” he said, and nodded with a kind of condescension I recognized so well—it had been a constant theme of the movie industry parties that had come to make life on the fringes of Hollywood so unbearable to me. Before I’d quit my job, I had enjoyed regaling people with my tales of life among the bank robbers and gang bangers. The studio executives and agents had no stories to compare with those, and even the directors and writers were interested—more than one had tried to pick my brain for ideas for a movie. I would still find myself talking to empty air if even a minor television actress walked into the room, but at least among the hangers-on I could hold my own. Once I traded in courtrooms for changing tables, however, I became a pariah. The low moment came when a supercilious female producer who was compelled to chat with me only because of her desire to hire Peter for a project said, “Oh, you’re a mommy! How sweet. I just wish I weren’t so ambitious and successful. It would be so nice to be able to be satisfied with spending the day just playing with my kids.” I stared at her, mouth agape, trying to think of a biting rejoinder, but managed only to come up with, “It’s not all fun and games.” She smiled patronizingly, as if to let me know that although whiling away the hours with a pack of children would be a waste of the abilities and talents of some
one like her, she was sure it was a fine life for someone like me. It added insult to injury that I could have worn her black miniskirt as a leg warmer.
Wasserman’s smile inspired in me the usual rush of humiliation, and I winced at the thought of the blush that was surely creeping up my neck and face. When was I going to stop being so defensive about staying home with my kids? Why wasn’t it enough for me to know that I was a competent, educated person who had made a reasonable, even worthy, decision? Why did I feel like I needed to prove that to everyone else? The insecurity that now seemed a defining feature of my personality hadn’t been so obvious before I quit my job, when I was getting daily validation of my professional skills and intelligence. Once I became a stay-at-home mother, I lost whatever self-assurance I’d had. Maybe it was because I had serious doubts about my own competence as a full-time mother and had never had any about my abilities as a lawyer.
I reminded myself that I was a fine attorney and an able investigator and mustered up some confidence. I launched into a description of the course of our investigation into Jupiter Jones’s life. I had rushed the kids to bed the night before so that I would have time to type up my notes on my conversations with Polaris, Dr. Blackmore, and Molly Weston. I briefly told Wasserman what we’d accomplished thus far and handed him a stack of impressive reports. He skimmed through them, and as he turned the last page, I saw a little round circle stuck to the back of the document. A Cheerio. So much for any appearance of professionalism I might have managed to fake. I reached over and, excusing myself, peeled the remnants of Isaac’s breakfast off the page. Wasserman frowned, and I muttered, “Cheerio,” holding it up for him to see. Then, not seeing anywhere to throw it away, I raised it to my lips. He frowned, and blushing again, I put it in my pocket.
We talked for a few minutes about the investigation, and I managed to redeem myself by providing a cogent assessment of each potential mitigation witness I’d interviewed. Then I asked, “Do you have a trial date?”
“I think we’ll go in about two months. If we go.”
Death Gets a Time-Out Page 10
