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 yo
u 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.
Finally, she raised her head, sniffed loudly, and wiped her nose on her hand. “I’m okay,” she said.
I nodded. “I think it’s time for you to tell me what’s going on.”
Lilly inhaled with a shudder. “Jupiter killed Chloe to protect me,” she said.
“To protect you?”
She nodded. “I’m the one who wrote Chloe those checks. She was blackmailing me.”
Even though somewhere in the back of my mind I’d feared this very thing, even expected it, it still took me by surprise. I sat back heavily in my chair and stared at my friend. “Why? Why was she blackmailing you?”
Lilly laughed bitterly. “Why? Because she was a vile little bitch, that’s why.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know,” she said.
“What was she blackmailing you with, Lilly?” I said, my voice no more than a whisper.
Lilly’s eyes filled with tears again, and she took a deep breath. “She told me that if I didn’t pay her, she would go to the newspapers and tell them that I killed my mother.”
Twelve
FOR once, Peter didn’t object when I called to tell him he was going to have to pick up the kids at school. He must have heard something in my voice—the distant echo, I suppose, of a shot fired in San Miguel de Allende thirty years before.
Her head bent over, her eyes on the table top, and her hands wrapped around her mug as if trying to squeeze some warmth from the cooling coffee, Lilly told me that when she was five, she had found a gun in her mother’s bedroom.
“My memories are very vague, almost wispy,” she said. “I can remember playing with Jupiter out in the courtyard of our house in San Miguel. There was this fountain, and Jupiter and I were dropping leaves into it. He was too small to really reach over the side, so I would pick him up under the arms and kind of haul him up high enough to toss his leaves in and look at them floating in the water. I remember we were pretending that they were boats. We put ants on the leaves—they were supposed to be the sailors. But we couldn’t pick the ants up without killing them.” She smiled faintly. “We ended up floating these leaves dotted with dead, smushed ants around the fountain.” She shook her head, as if to remind herself that this childhood memory had no place in the story she was recounting. “Anyway, for years all I could remember was the leaves and the fountain, and then the screaming. I don’t know who was screaming. Probably one of the maids. Or maybe me. To this day those are my clearest memories. For a longtime I didn’t remember going into her room, or picking up the gun, or firing it. I completely repressed all that. I just remembered the leaves, and the fountain, and her . . . her . . .”
“Her body?” I whispered.
“Not even really clearly her body. Just her dress. She was wearing a long white dress. Like maybe a nightgown? Or one of those peasant dresses?” Lilly’s voice had a dreamy quality and her eyes were vague and unfocused. “I remember the white of the dress. And red. Red everywhere.” She shuddered. “The fountain, and then her white dress covered with blood. Those are still the clearest memories I have.”
“You repressed the rest?” I said.
She nodded. “It took years and years of therapy just to begin to remember what went on in that room.”
“Because of the trauma?” I said.
She leaned slightly against me. “For a little while after it happened I got sort of catatonic, or something. Overwhelmed by the guilt. I wouldn’t talk, would barely eat. After a while I got better, but it was as if I had just erased everything that happened from my mind. But I was lucky. I had a very good therapist. Over the years he helped me to remember most of what happened. With his help I recovered the memories of playing with the gun, and how it went off. And how she died.” Her voice trembled.
“And Chloe?” I asked. “What does she have to do with all of this?”
“About four months ago, she called. I’d never met her before, but she called my private line and told my assistant she was my stepfather’s wife. I happened to be around, so I got on the phone. She just said it flat out. She said she knew I’d shot my mother, and that if I didn’t want everyone in the world to know, too, I’d have to hand over some serious change. That’s what she said, ‘some serious change.’”
This explained why Archer had been so protective of Lilly. He had been trying to keep me from discovering that she had a motive for killing Chloe Jones.
“How did Chloe find out about what happened to your mother?”
“I don’t know. Jupiter swears it wasn’t him. I was sure it was Polaris. I mean, who else could it be? I went there today to tell him that what happened was his fault. If he hadn’t told her, she wouldn’t have blackmailed me, and I wouldn’t have gone to Jupiter for help. And then Chloe wouldn’t have died.”
“You paid Chloe off, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But why, Lilly? Why did you care if anyone found out? I mean, it was an accident. You were practically a baby. No one would blame you.”
She shook her head. “I’d be a freak. The actress who killed her mother. Anytime anybody saw me, that’s what they’d see. It’s hard enough to get cast in this goddamn town when you’re a woman who’s over thirty. Do you really think a director is going to want to deal with all that? There are two hundred other actresses he could use instead—actresses who don’t come with the same horrible baggage.”
“But you won an Oscar!”
“Two women win Oscars every year. Two a year, Juliet. At least six more are nominated every year. And not a single one of those killed her mother.”
It was hard to argue with that. I knew how hard Lilly had worked to break out of the B movies that had launched her career. I knew, too, how ambitious she was. It was one of the things that had always impressed me the most about her. “How did you get the money without anyone finding out?” I asked. “I mean, don’t you have financial advisors, managers, that kind of thing? Didn’t they notice that the money was gone?”
“My business manager would definitely have noticed. I had to tell her.”
“You told her?”
“Sort of. I mean, I told her that I was being blackmailed, but I didn’t tell her what about. I just said that I had to pay the person off, and that I wasn’t going to go to the police. She wasn’t happy, but she got the money for me.” Lilly smiled bitterly. “I think she figured it was some creepy sex thing.”
“What happened after you gave Chloe the money?”
“She asked for another hundred thousand, and I couldn’t do it. I mean, I could afford it, but I just realized that it was never going to end, that she would milk me completely dry. So I refused.”
“But she didn’t go to the media?”
Lilly shook her head. “She didn’t have time. When she called asking for more money, I called Jupiter and told him that Chloe had found out about my mother. I asked him if he told her. He swore that he hadn’t.”
“Jupiter knew about what happened?”
“Of course. He was there.”
I wasn’t surprised that he’d lied to me. Clients lied to me all the time, with even less justification. I did wonder, however, if Jupiter had lied to protect Lilly, or to protect himself.
“I begged Jupiter to help me,” Lilly said. “I figured that since he knew Chloe so well, he might know something I could use, or be able to find something out. Then I could sort of . . . well . . . blackmail her back.”
“And did he? Did he find out anything that could help you?”
“You could say that. He told me about their relationship. Jupiter said that if Polaris found out that she was sleeping with him, he would throw her out. And she certainly wouldn’t want that. I could only give her so much. Polaris is worth tens of millions.”
“So why was she blackmailing you to begin with? If he had so much money?”
“Jupiter said Polaris had her on a strict allowance. He didn’t give her that much more than he gave Jupiter. And that was barely anything.”
“But if he divorced her, she’d get half. At least half of whatever he earned while they were together.”
She shook her head. “His people had made her sign a prenup. Jupiter told me. She’d get basically nothing.”
I nodded. That made sense. Then something occurred to me. “But what about Jupiter? Wouldn’t Polaris have thrown him out, too?”
Lilly nodded, and the tears began streaming down her face again. “Yeah. But he said he didn’t care. That he cared more about me. And I would have taken care of him if Polaris had thrown him out. He’s my little brother—the only one I ever had. I would have taken care of him.”
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