THE next morning I got a welcome phone call from Wasserman. The judge had agreed to an inpatient placement for Jupiter. He could get out of jail, as long as he checked into a rehab facility approved by the court.
“It was really your insistence that inspired me to press for his release,” Wasserman said to me. “Why don’t you tell him the good news.”
I rushed down to the jail as soon as I dumped the kids at school. Despite all my pleading, and my threats to get sick right on the desk to prove to them how much I needed it, I could not get the marshals to allow me to take my Ziploc baggy with half a lemon in it into the visiting room. I was about to give up and deposit the lemon in the locker that already held my cell phone, purse, and shopping bag full of nausea-abatement snacks when a female guard approached the front desk.
“What’s up?” she asked. She looked familiar; then I recalled that she’d been working at the jail back when I was at the federal defender. In those days, even though I’d spent most of my time at the federal lock-up, I’d still gone to county often enough to know most of the guards. I knew which ones would keep me waiting in between the security doors for no reason other than that they just didn’t like defense lawyers. I knew which ones would cinch my client’s handcuffs just tight enough to hurt. And I knew which ones would wish me a pleasant day, or take an extra moment to allow an inmate a lingering goodbye with a wife or child. She was, I remembered, one of the good ones.
“This lady’s trying to bring food into the visiting room,” said the guard who’d been giving me a hard time, holding up my lemon in its plastic bag.
The female guard was small, not much taller than I, and round. Her uniform strained over the shelf of her breasts, and her hair was ironed into a precise bob. Her skin was nut brown, and she had a pleasant smile that she shone my way. “Morning sickness?” she said.
I nodded.
“I read about that lemon trick in one of my pregnancy books,” she said. “Never did much for me.”
“I thought the lemon might help with the smell in there,” I said. “It’s just awful when you’re pregnant.”
“Don’t I know it. I’ve got five kids, and I was sick as a dog with every single one of them. You think the smell in the visiting room is bad, you should try it up in the SHU, when the inmates plug up their toilets and they overflow into the halls. It’s enough to make you want to die.”
I groaned. “You know what? I think I’ll give that a miss.”
“You can keep that lemon,” she said. “It’s not going to do you a bit of good, but go ahead and bring it on in with you.”
She was right, of course. The lemon didn’t do a bit of good. I kept myself from throwing up only by stuffing my mouth full of Spicee Hot, the ginger-flavored chewing gum Peter had found for me in a Chinese grocery store.
Jupiter mustered a smile when he saw me waiting for him, and I saw a flash of the charming boy that lurked under the miserable inmate he’d become. I smiled back, and said, “I’ve got really good news.”
His eyes widened and his lip began to tremble. “Bail?” he whispered.
“Yup,” I said. His eyes filled with tears and he laughed. “Wait,” I continued. “Before you get too excited, you’re going to have to go into an inpatient drug treatment facility.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I mean, it’s better. I want to be in rehab. Can I go back to Ojai? Would that be okay?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I mean, the court might decide it’s too far away. You need to be back in Pasadena for your court appearances.”
“That wouldn’t be a problem. At least I don’t think it will.”
He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I jumped a little. This was the first time he’d touched me other than to shake my hand. I patted him on the wrist and said, “I’ll talk to Wasserman about it. Maybe. We’ll see, okay? Now it will take some time to engineer the release; to get the rehab center approved, and all that.”
His face fell and he dropped my hand. “How long?”
“Maybe a week,” I said.
He sighed. “Okay. I can handle that. A week.”
“But now we’ve got work to do,” I said. Jupiter and I made a list of every teacher he’d ever had who thought he was a decent student, every person he’d been close to who thought he was a decent human being. We carefully listed every job he’d ever worked, from his stint as an usher in a movie theater in high school to the Mexican surf shack he worked in during his escapes to Baja, to the computer game companies that had expressed interest in his designs. Finally, when I was confident that I had the names of absolutely everyone who would have a remotely kind word to say about him, I stacked up my papers and buckled them up in my briefcase. Jupiter began to rise from his seat, but I put out a restraining hand.
“There’s something else we need to talk about,” I said.
He sat back down and looked at me, his eyebrows slightly raised.
“Lilly told me about what Chloe was doing to her. About the blackmail. And she told me that she asked you for help.” Jupiter grew very still, except for his fingers, which were spread out on the tabletop. They trembled, tapping the Formica. Suddenly, he clenched his fists and shoved his hands into his lap.
“You don’t need to tell me anything,” I said. “I’m a part of your defense team, and what you say to me is confidential, but at the same time, I have certain obligations. I’m sure Wasserman told you this, but I’ll say it again. A defense attorney is an officer of the court. As such, we aren’t allowed to put testimony that we know is perjured on the stand. Let me explain what that means. If you tell me something, like, for instance, if you tell me that you killed Chloe . . .” He opened his mouth to object, but I raised my hand. “This is purely hypothetical. If you admit something like that to me, then your options will become limited. If you choose to take the stand, Wasserman will not be allowed to have you testify that you were innocent of the crime. A lawyer can present testimony that he doesn’t personally believe, but he’s forbidden to present testimony that he knows for certain is a lie. So if you tell him, or me, that you did it, you won’t be able to testify that you didn’t. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Understanding what I just explained to you, is there anything you want to tell me about what happened between you and Chloe?”
He chewed his lip. “I didn’t kill her. I’m going to tell that to the jury. I didn’t kill her.” He looked up at me. “I’m not just saying that because of what you told me. It’s true. I didn’t kill her.” He stared into my eyes unflinchingly.
“Was she blackmailing Lilly?”
“Yes. I mean, that’s what Lilly told me, and I’m sure it’s true. She wouldn’t lie.”
“Why did you tell me that you didn’t know how Trudy-Ann died?”
He blushed. “Because . . . you know. For Lilly.”
“But you do know, of course.”
He nodded.
“Did you see it? Did you see Lilly shoot her mother?”
“No. I was looking for Lilly, I think. I was in the hallway when everything started happening. I remember seeing some stuff, mostly just the blood, I guess. And the sound of everybody screaming.” His voice faded away.
“Do you remember anything else?”
“No, not really. I was really little. I don’t remember very much from Mexico at all. I remember Lilly, though. I loved her so much.”
“Do you still?”
He nodded. “She’s my sister, you know? Even if our parents were only married when we were little kids. She’s my sister. She’ll always be my sister.”
“Did you confront Chloe about what she was doing to your sister?”
“I tried to. When we were lying out at the pool together. I told her she had to stop blackmailing Lilly, but she just told me that I was in over my head, and then she laughed at me.”
“And then what happened?”
He paused, and a dull red flush crept up his neck. “Then she . . . she got up and went into my bedroom.”
“And you followed her?”
He nodded.
“To have sex?”
He nodded again.
“Did you talk any more about Lilly when you were . . . done?”
He shook his head. “No. It felt, I don’t know, wrong or something, to keep talking about it. You know, while we were in bed. I knew I had to talk to her. I mean, I promised Lilly I would get her to stop. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it there, in bed. I guess I figured I’d talk to her about it later.”
“And did you talk to her about it later?”
He shook his head. “There wasn’t any later. She was killed before I had a chance to see her again.”
I believed him.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe that Jupiter had killed Chloe in a fit of rage after she’d refused to stop blackmailing Lilly. I wanted the murder to have taken place like that, because then Wasserman could argue that it was an unpremeditated homicide, carried out under the influence of emotion or provocation. Premeditation is a necessary part of first-degree murder. Without it, the murder is at worst second degree, and not subject to the death penalty. Presenting the argument would also allow the defense to introduce evidence of Chloe’s scheming behavior, her flouting of the law, her lack of anything resembling a sense of moral decency. I wanted Jupiter not to be innocent, but to be guilty of that lesser crime, because the other possibility was intolerable to me. The idea that my friend Lilly was guilty of murder was unacceptable. But I believed him. God help me, I believed that Jupiter Jones was innocent.