MARK EPSTEIN WAS NOT ARRAIGNED after all. We booked him, and he immediately got on the phone to his lawyer, who got on the phone with the district attorney’s office. The filing deputy at the DA rejected the case as not having sufficient evidence to stand up in a jury trial, and sent it back to us with the instruction to get more proof.
This made Susan boil, as she had been the one who instructed me to arrest Epstein. Against my better judgment, I must say. I wasn’t convinced it was him, and here’s why: because he’s so damn small. Not much bigger than I am, really. I couldn’t see that he had the strength to overcome a large, heavy man like Dr. Taylor. In any event, we’re back at square one, still looking for evidence. If Mark Epstein had been the killer, he’d been a clever one. If it’s someone else, they’re cleverer still. Either way, we don’t have sufficient evidence to arraign anyone yet.
54
Samantha
I WOKE UP TODAY THINKING of Helen, about her pregnancy. Was it intentional? I wonder. A deliberate attempt to thwart John Taylor’s edict against conceiving children? We’ll never know. Would it be motive enough for murder, wanting to keep her child? That didn’t make sense to me. Helen could simply have divorced John Taylor and had the child on her own. Although she possessed such an odd affect when I saw her in LA. And there is that issue of no alibi. My mind is going around in circles.
Peter and I have done this dance. Peter wanting a bunch of kids one day, me not being sure, naturally. Once we actually got pregnant, Peter and I. We took a chance one night after drinking too much, when we didn’t have any protection in the house or any safe way to get to the store to buy some. We got totally busted. I missed my next period and there we were—still in school and facing early parenthood.
Nature took care of it. I was surprised to find out that 10 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriages. I got every symptom in the book: the morning sickness, the bloating, the mood swings. And then we didn’t even have a chance to pick our jaws off the floor after the test revealed we were pregnant. The next day I started bleeding. End of the story. That night, in bed, Peter, trying to comfort me, placed his hand on my belly. But having those long fingers splayed out on my stomach repulsed me. As if he were probing for something. A center. My center.
Those twenty-four hours changed us. He began to truly long for grown-up status whereas I began pushing it away. I would have been up for the job of being a mother. But if I didn’t have to be? I celebrated that mattress on the floor, and the mismatched dishes. So it brought us together briefly and established just how far apart we were. We didn’t have to discuss it. Everything crystalized for us. Then we fell back into a rhythm: wake up, coffee, shower, work . . . but it was a different rhythm.
Poor Peter. Honest Peter. He’s not really cut out for this tough world. He once found a wallet with five hundred dollars in it, and promptly returned it to campus lost and found. This was during our starving days, and well before I became an arm of the law. I didn’t speak to him for three days.
But he’s got such a big trusting heart. Really, Peter is a sweet man—I’d be hard-pressed to find a sweeter one. Yet he lacks the backbone to forge his way in this world and get what he wants. I think of John Taylor’s skill as he changed lives, pulled skin away from thighs and attached them to cheekbones, made incisions, built up chins and noses, transforming dysfunction into beauty. He was truly a god, whereas Peter is all too human.
55
MJ
I HAD TROUBLE GETTING UP this morning. Even knowing the day was forecast for more glorious late summer sun couldn’t rouse me. I had that bad feeling. The feeling I thought I’d vanquished with years of therapy and yoga and mindfulness.
I don’t talk about that particular thing that happened very often. That’s how my parents referred to it. But all this bustle of police officers, this being called repeatedly to the station house, this aggressive, almost bruising questioning, reminds me of it.
I kept a diary of that time. Well, of the time before. Afterwards, I didn’t want to engage in any introspection. I took the diary out and read it the other day. How vapid and shallow was that girl! Nothing on her mind except boys, boys, boys. Everything in her world soaked through with budding sensuality. What a fool.