Death Gets a Time-Out (2 page)

“It’ll do,” she said.

“I blame the children,” I said as I crammed myself into a cocktail dress that I’d last worn long before Isaac had made his appearance. If it weren’t for the fact that every woman I knew was suffering from the same ailment, I would have seriously considered having an MRI. What is it about child-bearing that lowers a fog over the brains of normally intelligent women? Here we all are, competent professionals, used to managing companies, handling crises, hiring and firing people, and now we stumble through our days with yesterday’s underwear peeping out the leg of our slacks. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe all the other moms juggle carpool, lunchboxes, doctors’ appointments, piano lessons, religious school, parent-teacher conferences, karate, diaper changes, soccer, and babysitters with the same aplomb they brought to graduate school and appellate arguments. Maybe I’m the only one with
drifts of unwashed laundry taking over the living room and toilet paper stuck to her shoe.

I pinned a large broach to the bodice of my dress and stuffed my feet into a pair of three-inch black heels with silver buckles that had fit before I’d had two children and grown half a shoe size. They were too fabulous to throw away.

“Okay?” I said to Stacy, as I executed a limping pirouette.

“Hair? Makeup?” she barked.

“Right. Right.” I ran into my bathroom and scrawled a bright red smile on my chapped lips. A little mascara and I was done. My hair, however, was hopeless. I wrapped a towel around my shoulders and dunked my head into the sink. I slicked my wet hair back with most of the contents of a bottle of hair gel and hoped that the cresting wave of eighties nostalgia had reached Joan Jett.

“Done,” I said, coming out of the bathroom. Just then Ruby walked into my room, her hands behind her back.

“I found it, Mommy.”

“What sweetie, what did you find?”

“My princess crown!” With a flourish she presented me with a silver plastic tiara. Much of the paint had chipped away, and one side had been chewed to a frayed stub.

“Wow,” I said. “That would definitely complete my outfit.”

“Now you can have a tiara just like Aunt Stacy’s. Put it on!” my daughter ordered.

“It is not a tiara,” Stacy said. “It’s a diamond hairband.” She had the grace to blush.

“Um, honey, I just did my hair. I’ll put it on later, okay?” I said to my daughter. Her eyes began to fill, and her plump lower lip trembled. “Okay, I’m putting it on right now!” I said, and balanced the tiara on my head. “It’s perfect!”

She smiled and said, “Don’t take it off.”

“You know why we’re friends?” I asked Stacy as I disentangled the plastic teeth of Ruby’s crown from my hair, and struggled to buckle my seatbelt while Stacy peeled out of my driveway.

“Because we know each other better than anyone else does, and that includes our husbands,” she said.

“Nope. Because I make you look so good.”

She smiled at me and, reaching over, pinched my cheek. “You look beautiful, Jules. Fix your pin so it covers up more of that stain.”

W
E
were just the wrong side of fashionably late to the benefit. The other women at Stacy’s table, all of whom worked with her at International Creative Artists, were already taking delicate quantum-particle bites of their radicchio and fig salads. I noticed that most of them had pushed aside the Gorgonzola cheese. I wondered if it would be acceptable to scrape their plates onto my own.

Stacy and I made our apologies and sat down. She swept a practiced eye over the crowd. The yearly All-Girl Gala for the Cure, sponsored by the Breast Cancer Action League, was a chance for the women of Hollywood to do good while strutting their stuff, without having to bother finding a beard in a flashy Armani tux. The gowns were fabulous, and the deal-making was formidable. Hollywood runs on an old boys’ network, and it wasn’t often that the women were given the chance to engage in the same kind of billion-dollar bonding. The Gala was one of the few times in a year where a young female director could catch a studio executive’s eye without being upstaged by that week’s boy wonder, or a woman with
some money to spend could find a script worth investing in without having to funnel her cash through a patronizing tough-guy producer. Since I wasn’t part of the Industry other than as the wife of a middling successful screenwriter, I’d never had a reason to go to the Gala. When Stacy invited me to be her date for what she called Babes for Boobs, I jumped at the chance to see the glitterati do what they do best—glitter.

“Miyake. Armani. Miyake. Valentino. Miyake. God help us—Versace,” Stacy said, pointing a polish-tipped finger at the gowns gliding by our table.

“And yours?” I asked.

“Donna Karan.”

“And mine?”

“Back of your closet, circa 1993. No, wait—1992.”

“Man, you’re good,” I said.

I finished gobbling up my rare grilled ahi with mango cilantro salsa, and made my own perusal of the room. The lights were dim, in honor of the carefully sculpted cheekbones and Botoxed foreheads. Plastic surgery looks best in soft light. The tables were set with mint green china that matched the papered walls and complemented the gilded chairs. A lavish arrangement of white lilies and tuberoses spilled over the center of each table. The hum of conversation was pitched at a higher level than normal—there was no bass drone to disturb the soprano whirr. Noticeably absent was the noise of clicking silverware. I appeared to be the only woman eating anything at all.

At a table close to the front, I saw my friend Lilly Green. She was leaning forward, her perfect, pointed chin resting on one delicate hand. Her mouth was open in a warm and inviting smile that, if I hadn’t known her so well, I would have assumed was absolutely real, signifying nothing so much as her complete absorption in and delight with her tablemates’ conversation. The truth was most likely that she was bored—she usually was at events like this. Unlike other movie stars, Lilly would much rather have spent an evening playing Scrabble with her kids than reveling in the glitz of Hollywood.
But she was also invariably polite, and while not the kind of person either to suffer fools gladly, or engage in phony small talk, she also hated to hurt people’s feelings.

Lilly caught my eye, and waved. I waved back. Stacy looked over at me. “Are you
ever
going to introduce me to her?” she asked.

“To whom? Lilly?” I pretended innocence but I knew exactly what Stacy was after—a client. I had gotten to know Lilly Green when she made her acting debut in one of Peter’s slasher movies. My husband made his living writing screenplays that appealed to teenage boys and pretty much no one else. They starred cannibals and mummies, supernatural serial killers and bloodthirsty ghouls. Lilly had played a lovely young victim who turned into a homicidal walking corpse. Despite the part my husband had written for her, we became friends. She’d won an Oscar for her next film, and gone from B-movie starlet to full-fledged star. We’d remained close, but I have to admit that I’d grown a little uncomfortable around her. She tended to be surrounded by a retinue of managers, publicists, and assistants, and even though she was still the same, unpretentious woman who picked up Ruby every Wednesday and took her along to riding lessons with her own girls, because Ruby had once mentioned that she liked horses, it was hard for me to figure out how to interact with her. Maybe it all came down to my uncomfortable suspicion of my own motivations. Was I Lilly’s friend because I liked her and had things in common with her, or was I her friend because I liked being friends with a movie star? I didn’t really know the answer to that question.

“Introduce me,” Stacy said, already halfway out of her chair.

“Okay,” I said. “But you have to promise me you aren’t going to try to poach her from her agent.”

Stacy looked shocked, wounded, but I knew better.

Lilly had shaved her head for her most recent role, the Oscar-friendly tale of a mentally retarded woman with breast cancer, and the hair had just begun to grow back. If anything, her shorn skull highlighted her almost luminous beauty.
Next to her, Stacy, who always looked so impeccable, so perfectly put together, seemed a pale contrivance. After Lilly and I rubbed cheeks in an approximation of a kiss, I stroked the top of her head. “You have a mohair head,” I said, and she laughed, although it seemed to me that it wasn’t quite the belly laugh I was used to getting out of her. One of my favorite things about Lilly was how she invariably cracked up at my jokes. Peter says I’ll like anyone who thinks I’m funny, and it’s probably true. Although he’s wrong that that’s the only reason I married him; it was just as important that he makes
me
laugh.

I introduced Stacy, and Lilly politely shook her hand.

“So, what are you doing here?” I asked. “You hate parties.”

She shrugged.

“Lilly’s being honored tonight,” Stacy said. “Didn’t you look at the program?”

“Honored?” I asked.

“For dying of breast cancer on screen,” Lilly said. “I guess they couldn’t find a woman what was really sick to drag up onto the stage.”

“You’ve performed a profound service,” Stacy said. “Raising people’s consciousness, increasing awareness. You certainly deserve the award.”

“Maybe,” Lilly said, although it didn’t sound like she really believed it. I had to agree with her. Looking around the room, I wondered how many of the women were struggling in anonymity with the horrible disease from which Lilly had only pretended to suffer. Didn’t they deserve acknowledgment more than she did? After all, when the cameras stopped rolling, she went home. The black cloud never disappeared from
their
skies.

“So, what are you up to, Juliet?” Lilly asked. “Still solving murders?”

I smiled uncomfortably. “Not murders.” I shifted my weight. My feet had begun to ache in their too-tight shoes.

She cocked an eyebrow at me quizzically.

“Go ahead, tell her,” Stacy said, prodding me in the side with her elbow. “Juliet’s become a private eye!”

I blushed. I was still a little embarrassed about my new career. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it—on the contrary, I was absolutely in love with the job. I’d finally succumbed to the entreaties of my good friend Al Hockey, whom I had met when I was a federal public defender and he was an investigator in the same office. We’d worked on a lot of cases together, and we stayed friends even after I quit to stay home with my kids. When Al hung out a shingle as a private investigator, he asked me to join up with him. As happy as I was with my new identity as sort-of-working-mother, I had the nagging sensation that there was something almost ridiculous about turning my fundamental nature as a nosy snoop into a career.

“Really? A detective?” Lilly asked.

“Well, an investigator. I don’t have my license yet. And it’s only part-time,” I said. At the time Al had made his offer, I’d been slowly going crazy. I know there are women who skillfully and happily manage the transition from full-time, productive member of the work force to stay-at-home mother. I’ve met them in the park. Those are the women who swap homemade Play-Doh recipes and puree their own babyfood from organic produce they grow in their backyards. I’d rather be forced to
eat
the Play-Doh than make it. And I honestly can’t remember the last time I served a vegetable that didn’t come out of my freezer, unless pickles count. Don’t get me wrong. I love my kids with a ferocity that sometimes scares me. I love their dirty little faces and stubby toes. I love the absurdly funny and piercingly insightful things they say, and the way they tangle their fingers in my hair when I lie down with them to take a nap. But the prospect of spending an entire day alone with them fills me with dread. Keeping two people with a collective attention span of three minutes entertained for an entire fourteen-hour day is a task that makes Sisyphus’s look like playing marbles. Half the time I feel like hiring a nanny and getting my bored, frustrated, rapidly expanding butt back to work as a lawyer. I spend the other half convinced that there’s a point to being there day after day, hour after hour, driving from playdates
to piano lessons, doing endless loads of very small laundry, and clinging to sanity with one exhausted fingernail. Al’s offer seemed like a way to do both—be with my kids, and do some work that didn’t involve very short people and a very dirty house.

I had initially suffered from the delusion that it would be a breeze to work part-time while the kids were in school. However, I hadn’t yet ever managed more than a forty-five-minute workday. By the time I dropped Ruby and Isaac off at their two different schools, and ran whatever errands were absolutely critical to the continuation of our existence as a family, I had exactly enough time to make two phone calls or write half a letter before I had to race off to pick them up again. So far Al had been remarkably patient with my glaring absence from our joint venture, although he
had
taken to calling me his invisible partner.

Lilly narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. “What kind of work are you doing?”

“Criminal defense work, primarily,” I said. “Lawyers hire us to investigate their cases. You know, take pictures of the crime scene, track down witnesses, that kind of thing. And we’ve done some death penalty mitigation work, too.”

“What’s that?” Stacy interrupted. “How do you mitigate the gas chamber?’

“We dig up what we can on a defendant’s background to help the lawyer convince the jury that executing him wouldn’t be fair. You know, like if he was an abused child, or was really nice to his grandmother. That kind of thing.”

Lilly stood up and grabbed my arm. Her face was flushed and beads of sweat stood out on her upper lip. “I need to talk to you,” she said in a low voice.

“Um, okay,” I said, taken aback by her vehemence.

Lilly glanced quickly around and met Stacy’s eye. She bit her lip. “In private,” she muttered.

Stacy raised her eyebrow and smiled stiffly. “I’ll see you back at our table, Juliet,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Green.” But Lilly had already started to hustle me across the ballroom floor. I stumbled along, doing my best to keep from
looking as though I was being dragged against my will.