I spent the next two weeks overwhelmed with work, following up on the lists that Jupiter and I had made of people who knew him. I drove around the city, interviewing school teachers and Boy Scout troop leaders, neighbors and distant relatives. I talked to CCU members whose children Jupiter had babysat when he was a teenager, and even to two windblown surfers who had taken lessons from him down in Mexico. I interrogated his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor and his therapist. I concentrated on creating a dossier on Jupiter, and did my best to suppress my fears about Lilly. Thankfully, I didn’t have to see my friend. She had left for Japan as promised, to shoot a series of commercials for Suntory beer.
Wasserman engineered Jupiter’s release to the Ojai center, which made my life a lot easier. I could call Jupiter with questions and for follow-up information, and could relax a little, knowing he was being waited on by pool boys and not tortured by oversized inmates looking for a girlfriend.
Every few days, I prepared a thick packet of witness statements for Wasserman and dropped them off, along with the tapes I made of my interviews. I never saw the man himself. Valerie and I compared belly sizes and swollen ankles, and I ignored my responsibility to tell Jupiter’s defense lawyers about what I’d discovered about Lilly. Finally, however, the guilt overwhelmed me.
I was in Valerie’s office, listening to her describe, in excruciating detail, the size of the needle that had pierced her abdomen during her last obstetrical appointment, when Wasserman poked his head in her office door.
“Honestly, the thing was the size of a meat thermometer. Richard looked like he was going to faint. He was more afraid than I was,” Valerie was saying.
“What are you ladies chatting about?” Wasserman asked.
“Uh, CVS,” Valerie mumbled, a flush creeping up her neck. “It’s a test for genetic problems. Like an amniocentesis, but you do it earlier.”
“I’m having mine this afternoon,” I explained, “and your associate was doing her best to terrify me in anticipation.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Girl talk.”
Valerie’s face turned a mottled red, and I could imagine the calculation going on inside her head. Just how much extra work was she going to have to put in now, to remind her boss that she was a competent professional? Criminal defense is a brutally macho field of practice. It’s where the most aggressive men end up, the ones with the most to prove. It’s also a field with more than its share of dinosaurs—lawyers who much prefer to see a woman holdinga stenographer’s pad and not a litigation briefcase. A woman defense lawyer has to work double time to prove that she’s as tough, as determined, and as ruthless as the men around her. Being pregnant adds an extra burden. It’s hard to be one of the guys when your belly is sticking out two feet in front of you, your gums are bleeding, and your bra size is a letter in the second half of the alphabet.
“Actually, Valerie and I were just evaluating a new wrinkle in the Jones case,” I said. She stifled an expression of surprise.
“New wrinkle?” Wasserman said, and walked into the room. “What new wrinkle?” He sat down on the edge of her desk.
I took a deep breath and told him about Lilly. I reminded him of the death of Trudy-Ann, and although I refrained from saying anything about it, we both recalled the conversation in which he’d told me that a thirty-year-old homicide had nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of our client. He didn’t speak as I described Chloe’s blackmail, just motioned to Valerie, who had already begun taking notes on a yellow pad.
“Did you get all that?” he asked her when I was done.
“I think so,” she said.
He began to pace back and forth in the small office. “We’re going to have to be very careful with this information.”
“We can use it to argue lack of premeditation,” Valerie said. “He goes to talk to Chloe, to convince her to stop her blackmail. There’s an argument, and he kills her.”
Wasserman shrugged. “I liked the sex for that better, frankly. They make love, he begs her to leave his father, she refuses, he kills her. Crime of passion. With the blackmail, it’s too easy for the prosecution to argue that he decided to murder her to help out his stepsister. And then the sex works against us. The jury’s already predisposed to dislike a man who has sex with his victim before he kills her. If we’re arguing that he loves her, and that her rejection caused him to have a sudden burst of anger, that’s one thing. If we tell the jury that she’s a blackmailer, and that first he had sex with her, and then he killed her while he was trying to convince her to leave his movie star sister alone . . .” Wasserman shook his head. “I don’t like this. This doesn’t help us.”
“Well, it could,” I said.
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows, waiting. I continued, “It could help, if what you’re arguing for isn’t just second-degree murder. You could use it to present a defense of innocence.”
Wasserman stopped his pacing. “Innocence?” he said, as though the very idea that his client might not be guilty of the crime were anathema to him.
“Yes. Jupiter has said all along that he didn’t commit the murder. These allegations of blackmail seem, to me at least, to lend credence to the idea that someone else killed her.”
He stared at me incredulously. “Isn’t Lilly Green a close friend of yours? Are you seriously suggesting that I mount a defense that she killed Chloe?”
“Yes, Lilly’s my friend. And Jupiter is my client. I’m not suggesting that you pin the murder on Lilly, necessarily. Anyone who cares about Lilly might have done it. Her husband, her manager, her agent, her parents. Anyway, you don’t necessarily need to pick a suspect. You could present the jury with a whole host of potential killers.” I knew as well as Wasserman did that it is always better to give the jury a coherent and believable story, and that that generally requires a specific suspect. But I couldn’t bring myself to suggest that he convince the jury that Lilly committed the murder. Something else occurred to me. “Maybe Lilly wasn’t the only person Chloe was blackmailing. If she did it to Lilly, she may well have done it to other people. One of them might have killed her.”
Wasserman sat back down on the edge of Valerie’s desk. I could see that he wasn’t convinced by any of my possible scenarios. He still believed Jupiter to be guilty, and if anything, the information I’d given him had served only to affirm that belief. At the same time, he was a good lawyer. He was responsible and thorough. He knew he couldn’t just dismiss what I’d told him as at best unhelpful and at worst damaging, even if that was what he believed. His obligation to his client required more. “Are you willing to investigate this? Both Ms. Green’s story, and the possibility of any other potential blackmail victims?” he asked me.
“Of course,” I said.
He paused and looked at me.
“For free?” he said.
I swallowed. Al was going to kill me.
“We can’t exactly expect your friend to pay us to explore the possibility that she is a murderer,” Wasserman continued.
He was right. It would be absolutely unethical to charge Lilly for this part of the investigation.
“For free,” I agreed. And sighed.