“WHAT are the odds of the prosecutor finding out the gory details about our client and his stepmother?” Al asked. I handed him a napkin, and he mopped up the grease on his chin. He took another huge bite of his French dip and mumbled something.
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” I said, trying to keep from looking as nauseated as I felt. I picked at my own soggy roll. This pregnancy was really going to be a bummer if it made me lose my appetite for Philippe’s. We’d stopped at the downtown culinary institution for a late lunch after our meeting with Jupiter. Al and I are in full agreement that the only way to get the stink of jail out of our clothes and hair is to cover it with something even smellier. Like the odor of roast beef au jus.
“I said, are you going to eat your macaroni salad?”
I pushed it across the narrow, scarred, wooden table. Al shoved a heaping forkful in his mouth and followed that with beet-red, pickled egg. I stared for a minute at his grinding jaws and then leapt to my feet and ran as fast as I could across the sawdust-strewn floor, dodging through the crowd of municipal employees in ill-fitting suits, construction workers in dirty overalls, and the occasional nattily dressed politician. I made it around the model train exhibit to the ladies’ room just in the nick of time. Lucky for me there was no line. There rarely was. Male customers outnumbered female by about four to one at Philippe’s. On occasion, I’d found myself to be the only woman in the place, other than the waitresses in their starched uniforms and little white caps.
After I lost what little of my French dip that I’d managed to swallow, I stood in line for a baked apple. As I put my money down onto the metal tray the waitress extended—the woman who makes your sandwich at Philippe’s never lets her hands touch the contaminated surface of your dollar bills—I I felt her eyes appraising me.
“How far alongare you?” she asked. She looked, like all the other women behind the counter, like a refugee from the 1950s. Her faintly blue hair was rolled into a bun and tucked up under the white frilly cap that perched on the top of her head. Her lipstick was drawn on just a bit larger than her actual mouth and her eye shadow was a shade of sea-green that I’d begun seeing on the teenagers who shopped on Melrose Avenue. I didn’t think the waitress was expressing the same ironic retro-chic as the kids who shared her taste in makeup.
“Seven weeks,” I said. “How did you know I was pregnant?”
“I saw you running for the bathroom. It’ll pass in a few weeks.”
“Let’s hope so.” I took my apple and went back to Al.
“What’s with you?” he said.
“I’m pregnant.”
He paused with the remains of his sandwich halfway to his lips. “Really?”
“Yup.”
He crammed the sandwich into his mouth, chewed twice, and swallowed. “Congratulations,” he said.
We sat for a moment in silence, while I took a few bites that seemed more sugar and melted butter than fruit. I handed the rest to Al, and he made short work of it.
“What’s your plan?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How long are you planning on working?”
“As long as I can, I guess.”
He nodded, looking a little troubled.
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.”