Death Gets a Time-Out Read Online Free

as if that were the only way she could keep them under her control. “I want to hire you,” she said.
    I blinked in surprise. “For what? We don’t have any experience doing domestic cases. Not that we
couldn’t
do one, it’s just that we haven’t really done that kind of work. Yet.” Lilly’s ex-husband, Archer, had taken her for a rather remarkable amount of money when they’d divorced, and I figured she was trying to get some of it back.
    Lilly ran a hand over her shorn head and looked around the empty room, as if searching for concealed paparrazi and gossip columnists. “It’s not a domestic case. It’s a criminal case.”
    I leaned back in my chair and looked at her. She had knotted her hands together so tightly that her knuckles were white.
    “No one can know about this, Juliet.”
    “I’m still a lawyer, Lilly. Everything you say to me is in confidence.” I waited.
    After a moment she seemed to steel herself. She nodded once and looked up at me. “I want to hire you to help in a capital murder case.”
    I couldn’t help it—I gasped. “Capital murder? Who? What case?”
    Lilly paused again, and then finally said, “Jupiter Jones.”
    I felt a rush of something that I’m embarrassed to say was a lot like excitement. The rape and murder of Chloe Jones, the very young wife of the Very Reverend Polaris Jones, founder and leader of the Church of Cosmological Unity, had sent the entire city of Los Angeles into a tailspin. Mrs. Jones had been found raped and murdered in her San Marino home. For a while all of Southern California had been engulfed by paroxysms of terror, convinced that some new Manson Family had come to town. Movie stars decamped to their Aspen and New York lodgings. One televangelist crackpot made the national news by insisting God was exacting revenge for our city’s hedonism; the Chief of Police blamed the city counsel’s assertion of limitations on racial profiling; and the newlyelected and xenophobically insane mayor insisted that the influx of illegal immigrants was responsible. When Jupiter Jones had been arrested for the crime, there had been a collective sigh of relief, and then a buzz of titillated horror because the culprit was the victim’s own stepson.
    I leaned forward in my chair. “What do
you
have to do with Jupiter Jones?”
    Lilly bit her bottom lip and narrowed her eyes at me, as if to assess my trustworthiness. Finally, she spoke. “He’s my brother.”
    My mouth gaped open in what surely must have looked like a caricature of astonishment—or a wide-mouth bass on a hook. “What?”
    “Well, my stepbrother,” she said, twisting her hands.
    “How is it that the papers haven’t managed to get hold of that piece of information?” It certainly seemed like something
The National Enquirer
might have been interested in printing. I could write the headline myself. CANCER STAR SISTER OF OEDIPAL MATRICIDE .
    “I pay people a lot of money to keep things like that out of the papers. Anyway, my mother and Polaris were together years ago, when Jupiter and I were really little.”
    Now I was really confused. “Your mother? Your mother was married to Polaris Jones?” Beverly Green, Lilly’s mother, was the first woman Speaker of the California Assembly. I could write that headline, too. POLITICAL POWERHOUSE LINKED TO NEW AGE CULT LEADER .
    “Not my mom. I mean, not Beverly. Beverly is my stepmother. My real mother was married to Polaris Jones. A long long time ago.”
    “Your real mother? Who is she? Where is she?” I asked, putting my hand over the knot Lilly had made of hers in her lap.
    “She . . . she died. When I was five. I don’t really remember her. We were living in Mexico then—my mother and me, and Polaris. Except he wasn’t Polaris. Back then his name was Artie. Jupiter lived with us, too. And a bunch of other people.”
    I raised my eyebrows. She shrugged. “It was kind of a commune, I guess. We all moved back here after my real mother died. I