There was also a full rehashing of the Chloe Jones murder, although the paper stopped just short of accusing Lilly of being involved. Nothing in the article was libelous as far as I could tell, but it certainly left the impression that Lilly’s violent past and Chloe’s violent end were not likely to be merely coincidental.
The descriptions of Lilly’s history, life, and troubles were intimate and detailed—how could they not be? Archer had told the newspaper everything he knew.
“I’m going to kill him!” Lilly screamed.
“Please don’t say that out loud, Lilly,” I said. I tossed some money on the counter and ran out of the store. I got in my car and locked the doors. Once I was safely away from prying ears, I tried to hush her tears. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How? How is it going to be okay?” She was no longer shouting—her sobs strangled all the volume out of her voice.
“Remember what Beverly said,” I murmured. “It will be hard, but you’ll end up okay. You’ll pull through. I promise.”
Lilly just cried harder. I leafed through the rest of the magazine. It was liberally sprinkled with photographs of Archer looking handsome, concerned, put upon. The long-suffering husband of a violent, irrational woman. Near the back was a small photograph of Beverly, standing in front of the state house. I skimmed the paragraph under her picture while murmuring words of comfort to a sobbing Lilly. Beverly and Raymond had survived the debacle relatively unscathed. They were, according to the paper, supportive and nurturing parents who had taken in a damaged and aggressive child and done their best with her. At some point, I knew Lilly was going to be grateful that they had been spared.
“Do you want me to come over?” I asked.
Lilly hiccupped. “No. I want you to go talk to Archer. Find out how much they paid him for this. I want to know what selling me out was worth to that son of a bitch.”
“Does that really matter?” I asked as gently as I could.
Her voice turned cold. “Yes. It matters. It matters to me. Can you do this one thing for me, Juliet? Can you?”
I tamped down my hurt feelings. Lilly was devastated, and enraged at Archer, at the newspaper, at the world. She didn’t mean to lash out at me.
“Yes, of course I can,” I said.
Twenty-three
AL met me at Archer’s house, a hypermodern monstrosity looming over its neighbors in a somewhat seedy part of Beachwood Canyon. “This will be fun,” Al said as we climbed the long flight of stairs to the front door. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was being sarcastic.
To my surprise, Archer answered the door. “Well, what do you know,” he said, flashing a tight, grim little smile. His dark hair flopped in his eyes, and a mottled flush crept from his neck up to his cheeks. He held the door halfway closed with his hand.
“Can we come in?” I asked pleasantly.
“No. I don’t think so,” he said.
Al stepped forward. “Sir, we’d like to just ask you a question or two, if you don’t mind.” He was using his cop voice, all professional courtesy and just barely contained menace.
Archer flushed a deeper red, and his fingers tightened on the door.
We stood like that, at a standoff, for another moment. Then I said, “Lilly wants to know how much they paid you.” I kept my voice benign—almost friendly.
He paused for a moment, and then shrugged. “I don’t care if she knows. Five hundred thousand.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Wow.”
Archer smirked, no longer quite as embarrassed. It was as if the sheer quantity of cash had given him a kind of confidence. “That’s not all,” he said.
Al and I waited.
“I have a book deal.” He paused, clearly for effect. “One point six million bucks. U.S. rights alone.”
“You’re going to write a book?” I said.
“About my life with Lilly. What it was like having to deal with someone like her. Someone with that kind of history.”
Al stepped forward. “And you’ve cleared all this with your lawyers, have you?”
I nodded. “You’d better do that, Archer. Libel laws. You know.”
“Go to hell,” he said, and closed the door in our faces.
Al shrugged, turned around, and stomped back down the stairs. I followed.
“Her lawyers’ll sue him. Try to get a restraining order,” I said.
“Will they succeed?” Al asked.
I shook my head. “Probably not. He can write about his life with her. He can write about almost anything he wants, as long as he doesn’t accuse her of something that isn’t true. It’s only libel if it isn’t true.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Al said.
I nodded. Yes, that was the question. Archer was bound to at least insinuate that Lilly was responsible for Chloe’s death. Would that be libel or wouldn’t it?
I punched Lilly’s number into my cell phone. The phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. She must have turned her machine off.
“The worst part of this is that it rules him out,” I said.
“For the murder?”
“And the blackmail.”
Al nodded. “He certainly wouldn’t risk this kind of exposure if he had that to cover up.”
“Nope,” I agreed.
“So, where to now?” Al asked.
“Wasserman,” I replied. “We don’t have much choice, do we?”
We found the lawyer in his office, the Daily Enquirer spread out on his otherwise immaculate desk.
“Al Hockey, I presume,” Wasserman said. Al’s strong hand disappeared into the grip of Wasserman’s oversized fingers.
“You saw it,” I said, pointing at the papers.
He nodded. “It’ll hit the mainstream press tomorrow. They’ll be embarrassed about the Enquirer getting the jump on them, so they’re liable to do longer, even more thorough, stories.”
I sighed. “How are you going to use it?”
“Well, we can’t pretend it didn’t happen, that’s for sure. And she’s been painted in a pretty ugly light. The trick is going to be convincing the jury that she acted alone, that our client wasn’t involved.”
“So that’s your defense? That it was Lilly?” I said, although I’d known for a while that it would have to be.
He nodded. “Means I can’t keep taking her money, though, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “Just what my firm needs, another pro bono case. As for you two, you can’t stay on. You can’t accept money from her, either, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to work for free. Not to mention the little ethical dilemma.”
I nodded. I’d known that, too. I could feel Al’s sigh.
Wasserman rose to his feet. “Try to get me a final report as soon as you can.”
Al and I left in matching glum moods. We stood in the parking lot, leaning on his car. “Another paying client bites the dust,” Al said.
This time I did the sighing.
“Tell you what,” Al said. “I’m going to get back to work on that workers’ comp case. You go do what I know you’re planning on doing.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“Finding another murder suspect. Someone other than Lilly Green.”
He sure knew me, did Al. We said our goodbyes. I had just over an hour before school was over, not enough time to go see Lilly, or to go home. I drove to a café across the street from Isaac’s school and found a seat among the thirty or forty young men and women clicking and clacking assiduously on their laptops. The cafés of the city of Los Angeles are always lousy with wannabe screenwriters working on the next Chinatown or Citizen Kane. Something told me most of them probably weren’t trying to come up with something along the lines of Peter’s masterpiece, The Cannibal’s Vacation.
I made myself comfortable with a decaf, a piece of coffee cake the approximate size of my head, and my cell phone. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, other than sniff up every tree to try to find someone other than Lilly or Jupiter who m
ight have been responsible for Chloe’s murder. For lack of a better idea, I decided to make good on my promise to Lilly to follow up on Chloe’s mother’s story. Wanda Pakulski sounded a bit breathier on the phone than she had in real life, and I couldn’t help but wonder if her career in adult entertainment had included phone sex.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” I said.
“No, no. Not at all. I was just out in the garden planting a little Japanese maple tree. For Chloe. Once it gets big enough, I’ll put a little bench under it. Won’t that be pretty?”
Whatever the circumstances of her childhood, Chloe had had a mother who loved her, and who clearly missed her terribly now that she was gone.
“It sounds lovely,” I said.
“What can I do for you, Juliet?”
“I just want to be absolutely sure, Wanda. You know for sure that Reese Blackmore was sleeping with Chloe, and he was the one who arranged for Chloe to go to the rehab center?”
“Yes, as far as I know. I mean, that’s what Chloe told me. He was her client, and he paid for her to check into the clinic. Everyone at that clinic was so nice to her. She made some really good friends there. And you know, I never would have thought Chloe would go into rehab.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, I guess mostly because before she checked in, she’d never even admitted she had a problem. Once I’d quit the business and stopped using, I tried to encourage her to lay off the cocaine and crank. But she wouldn’t. She’d just tell me that I was being ridiculous, that she was only using a little, and that I should mind my own business. But then one day she called and told me that she was checking herself in.”
“Did she tell you why?”
Wanda paused. “No. Not really. She just said that she had a plan to change her life, and that Ojai was the first step.”
Had Chloe’s life-altering intention been to be drug-free, or had she had some other goal in mind?
“Have you seen the papers, Wanda? The Daily Enquirer?”
She hadn’t, and she was horrified at the story I told her. “That’s who Chloe was blackmailing?” she said. “Lilly Green?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“What?” I said.
“It’s just . . . I don’t know. A little while before she died, when Chloe came to visit me? The time she gave me the money for the gallery? She said something . . .”
“What? What did she say?” I asked, barely containing my excitement.
“She said something about knowing things about people that even they didn’t know. How exciting that was. I just assumed she was talking about Polaris. I mean, because they were married and everything. I told her I wouldn’t know, really, because I never had a husband, but I could remember things about her childhood that I was sure she’d forgotten.”
“And what did she say?” I tried to keep my voice calm, but it trembled despite my efforts.
Wanda sighed. “I don’t really remember. She just laughed, I guess. I’m not sure. We started talking about my plans for the gallery. I was so excited about that.”
I hung up the phone and absentmindedly nibbled on my coffeecake. Chloe must have been referring to Lilly. How she knew about what Lilly had done even though Lilly’s own memories were vague. I reduced the cake to a mere memory and glanced at my watch. I still had almost an hour before I had to pick Isaac up from school and then drive crosstown to get Ruby in time for her piano lesson. I looked around the café and saw, in a corner, a sign that said INTERNET ACCESS, TEN DOLLARS PER HOUR. The perfect way to waste some time.
I gave one of the bored young women behind the counter ten dollars and logged on to the cute little orange I-Book perched on the corner table. I clicked over to Google and input the full name of the Ojai Rehabilitation and Self-Actualization Center. The first site to come up was the center’s own, and it was beautiful. It offered a three-dimensional tour of the center, testimonials by satisfied clients, and a long essay by Dr. Blackmore himself explaining the link between repressed memory of traumatic events and self-medication. Blackmore’s theory appealed to me. It certainly isn’t a coincidence that drug users are generally, although certainly not always, people who’ve experienced some kind of personal trauma or pain. That was absolutely true of the many drug-using clients I’d represented. It made sense to me that a person might abuse drugs in order to achieve a release from the pain. The disease of drug addiction has always seemed to my uneducated mind to be one that combines physical symptoms with serious emotional problems. Dr. Blackmore’s hypothesis that these problems might have as their root the repressed memory of trauma made as much sense to me as any other explanation I’d heard.
I spent the next hour winding my way through the web, reviewing every reference to either Dr. Blackmore or the center. Just as Lilly said, her doctor was nationally recognized as a leader in the field. He’d written more than thirty articles on the link between repressed memory and drug addiction, the most recent dozen of which he’d coauthored with his assistant, Molly Weston. Unlike the majority of theorists whose research concentrated on repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse, Blackmore’s writings explored a wide range of trauma susceptible to repression, including the death or injury of a parent. I found the Little Girl Q articles and E-mailed them to myself so that I could read them at my leisure. Then I spent some time looking for the source of the center’s funding. I knew from my visit to the center that the majority of clients paid their own way, or benefited from generous health insurance programs. However, I soon discovered that Dr. Blackmore treated enough indigent clients to allow the center to receive a hefty share of public funds. One of the most important things the web has given investigators is access to records to which the public is entitled, but whose request used to involve an elaborate series of forms, and infinite patience. Searching through the records of the California Budget Office, I found a number of references to the Ojai center, including a notation of the unanimous approval by the California Assembly of Speaker Beverly Green’s inclusion of the center on a list of state and private agencies singled out as models of effective drug rehabilitation. This made the center eligible for special consideration in the allocation of state funding. Beverly had obviously been very grateful to Dr. Blackmore for the work he did with Lilly.
It took a while longer to find the other major source of the center’s funding. Finally, a web page publicizing the recipients of private foundation grants linked me to a list of the CCU’s philanthropic activities. In the twenty-five years that the Ojai center had been in operation, it had received almost ten million dollars from Polaris’s church.
I sat back in my chair and blew out between my lips. Dr. Reese Blackmore’s center was funded in large part by the CCU, and by the State of California. Both Polaris and Beverly had been remarkably generous to Reese Blackmore. Was it gratitude that inspired their benevolence? Or was there a more nefarious reason for it? Had he threatened to expose Lilly, and thus their own roles in keeping her secret? Were they funneling money to the Ojai center to keep him doing work they admired, or to keep him quiet? And what, if anything, did all this have to do with the murder of Chloe Jones?
I clicked back through the web pages, looking for anything I might have missed. This time, something new caught my eye. I hadn’t bothered going to this site initially because it was an individual’s home page. The graphics were plain black and white, and the text was full of typos. The page was called Stephanie’s Story, and it was written by her mother.
Stephanie, I read, had been a lovely little girl, but had become lost in adolescence. Stephanie’s mother wrote that, despite her family’s attention and concern, Stephanie became addicted to heroin. After an overdose that nearly killed her, the girl checked into the Ojai clinic for treatment. That was, according to her mother, when the worst began. Much of the webpage was a screed by Stephanie’s mother, accusing Dr. Blackmore of implanting false memories of abuse in her daughter.
&
nbsp; Dr. Blackmore had, the web page insisted, convinced Stephanie that her father had molested her when she was a child. In therapy, and out, she recounted specific acts of violence that horrified all who heard them. Ultimately, her father was prosecuted for multiple counts of rape and child sexual abuse stemming from her accusations. Stephanie’s mother, sure of her own memories, and of her husband’s innocence, stood by him, testifying in his favor at trial. He was acquitted, but the family was torn apart. Years later, much to the mother’s relief, Stephanie had recanted her claim, calling herself a victim of False Memory Syndrome.
I did a quick search for False Memory Syndrome, and hit pay dirt. The World Wide Web had become the theater of war for a bitter conflict between proponents of recovered memory theory and those of False Memory Syndrome. Cases like Lilly’s, where the traumatic memory was one of the death of a parent, seemed to be rare; the battle was being fought almost exclusively over the issue of memories of childhood sexual abuse.
The proponents of the existence of repressed memory, I learned, argue that children who suffer victimization at the hands of someone from whom they cannot physically escape often suffer a kind of selective amnesia in order to cope with the trauma. Later in life, when their psychological survival does not depend on the repression of the traumatic memories, they begin to recall the events. This psychological theory has spawned a cottage industry of therapists, support groups, and self-help books and has led to the prosecution of crimes as old as thirty or forty years. Inputting “Recovered Memory” into Google led me to sober articles—some by Nobel Prize—winning neuroscientists—that tracked memory repression using tried-and-true scientific method, and to websites that encouraged individuals suffering every kind of emotional ailment from anxiety to insomnia to attribute their distress to repressed memories of sexual abuse at the hands of their parents. There were even a disturbing number of sites devoted exclusively to the idea that there was a huge movement of Satanic worship in the United States that had as its focus the sexual abuse, torture, and murder of children.
Death Gets a Time-Out Page 21
