Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (17 page)

Well, anyhow, I could help Ricky out—that is, if he wanted some Sunday morning amateur psychologizing. I’d thought more about Esperanza and I was dying to get my theories on the table. “The pearl was just a trigger,” I said. “Or rather, Sadie’s death was. I think the kid’s depressed about her parents’ divorce. Julio tells me she still draws pictures of the whole family all together.”

“Jeez,” he said again. “Amber stopped doing that a long time ago.”

“Esperanza’s just going to have to work through it. Maybe Julio will send her to a therapist or—who knows?—maybe that plunge in cold water will have a reviving effect.”

For good luck I didn’t say it aloud, but I thought it already had. I’d felt it in her body language, in that way I could tell she’d made a decision for living.

Ricky looked at me like I was nuts.

Who needed it? I changed the subject.

“Ricky, I need to know some things.”

I watched his face for flickers of fear or guilt, but a waitress stepped between us, pouring champagne.

When he had drained half his newly filled glass, he said, “You’re the lawyer,” and collapsed laughing. I didn’t know if it was strong drink or if he was always a dim bulb. Probably, as Marty had suggested, effect followed cause.

“We really need to talk about yesterday.”

“About Katy—finding Katy’s body?”

I shook my head. “About what you were doing in the warehouse yesterday morning.”

“What warehouse?” He shoveled in a mouthful of hash browns.

“The old Hovden warehouse. The one the aquarium uses for office space. I’ll spell it out: where Marty’s and Sadie’s offices are. The third floor.”

He made a face, picked up a bottle of ketchup, gave it a few whacks, and drowned the remaining hash browns. “Yesterday morning? Saturday?”

“Uh-huh. You were running away. I was chasing you. We met at Julio’s about an hour later.”

He stared at me, chewing with his mouth open, revealing things a doctor shouldn’t have to know about, let alone a lawyer. But I was damned if I’d avert my eyes.

Finally he swallowed and wiped his mouth as daintily as if he hadn’t just showed me a scene out of Fellini’s
Satyricon
. “Could you run that by me again?”

“Ricky, I saw you. We were both there. I chased you all the way down the stairs. Don’t play dumb with your lawyer.”

I paused, hoping I sounded like his most feared school teacher. “What the hell were you doing there?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“If I was there, I must have been walking in my sleep.”

“Running in your sleep.”

“Rebecca, can I ask you something? Do you do drugs? Because if I’ve got a lawyer who does drugs, I gotta rethink this.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I was at a job yesterday morning. Working on somebody’s addition in Pacific Grove. Remember what I told the cops? Did you think I was lying about that?”

I did remember. It was easily checked. But couldn’t he have left and then returned? I didn’t want to think about it. If he could have left to go through Sadie’s desk, or whatever he’d been doing at the warehouse, he could have left to kill Katy.

I said, “I hope your alibi is as ironclad as you think it is.”

“Me, too. If my own lawyer doesn’t believe me … Jeez.” He inhaled a little more champagne.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just that there are a few pieces of the puzzle we haven’t talked about.”

“There’s
more
?” His tone said he was sick and tired of answering these dumb grown-up questions and couldn’t wait to get back outside to his little friends.

“Quite a bit.”

The waitress reappeared. “More coffee?”

“Please.” I wanted to make the point that we were going to be here awhile.

I added cream and no-cal sweetener, a contradiction, but who cared? Stirring slowly, I said, “What kind of terms did you and Sadie part on?”

“Sadie and me? Huh?” His voice rose; his brows drew together in fury.

I nodded.

“You mean, did the mighty Ms. Swedlow grace my humble abode that day and say, ‘Rick, I think I’ll get murdered this afternoon and I wanted to make sure I checked it out with you first’?”

I was sick of his kids’ games. “I mean, when the two of you broke up.”

“Broke up? What do you mean broke up?” He sounded so taken aback, I knew I’d made a mistake.

“You didn’t break up then. You were still seeing each other.”

“Seeing each other? You mean romantically?”

I nodded.

“I don’t get this. First you tell me I’m where I’m not, and then you tell me Sadie was my girlfriend.”

“She wasn’t?”

“No. Read my lips: Uh-uh. Never. Not even a little bit. No way, Jose.”

I leaned back, exhaling. “I guess I was misinformed.”

“Someone
told
you that?” He was starting to get red in the face, either from the champagne, the sun, or high emotion.

I didn’t say anything.

He whispered, “Marty.” And then he practically yelled, “That
bitch
!"

People turned to stare, and he dropped his voice. “
Marty
and I were involved. Not Sadie and me. Not that I wouldn’t have loved to. But Sadie wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t like what? Didn’t sleep around?”

“Didn’t even flirt. All business. But in a nice way.” He got that look men get when they’re talking about a woman they’ve admired but couldn’t get—kind of like brown-robed saints in religious paintings, staring up at the sky, at angels, or maybe at Lucy-with-diamonds. To be perfectly frank, it’s a look of utter idiocy.

“Tell me about you and Marty,” I said.

“She hit on me at a party, after we got that last exhibit up. Amber was at her mom’s, so why not?”

“When was it?”

“I don’t know. Eight or ten months.”

“Can you get any closer? It’s important.” (Well, maybe not important, but it would sure provide some insight into Marty’s marriage.)

“I remember now. It was at Christmas—I was feeling sorry for myself.”

“Before Sadie came here?”

“Oh, sure.”

“So Marty cheated on Don.” I shouldn’t have said it aloud.

“With anything in pants.”

“What?”

“Hubby traveled a lot.”

“I wonder how he met Sadie.”

“Party at
their
house. Marty was always throwing them—I guess she thought it was the corporate thing to do. I watched it happen. Marty was so busy chasing Julio, she didn’t even notice they sat down on the floor by the hearth and stayed there for an hour and a half.”

That I could believe. I said, “How long did you and Marty keep seeing each other?”

“Month or two, I guess. It kind of petered out. Just one of those things.”

“Can you think of any reason she’d say you and Sadie were involved?”

“Oh, she thought so. I guess she and I ran out of gas about the time Sadie got here. So then when Sadie’d been here a couple of months, and she saw how much competition she was, she, like, started calling me again.” He pulled his hat down against the sun. “I wasn’t interested, you know what I mean? I guess I was in love with Katy. I didn’t want to see her anymore. So she accused me of porking Sadie. She had this
thing
against Sadie.”

“Well, Sadie did shoplift her husband in her own house.”

“Sadie, hell. That dude was
ready
, you know that?”

“Want some more coffee?”

He swiveled his neck for the waitress. “Wouldn’t mind another drop of champagne.”

“I’m going to the ladies’.”

I felt as if I’d been the one drinking to excess. This brunch was beginning to feel like time spent in the Twilight Zone. Ricky seemed to be taking each of my assumptions and systematically destroying them. Could I believe him?

On some things, probably. But which ones?

I’d have to sort that out later. For now, what was left? Ah, yes, I remembered. His changed status at the aquarium.

Returning refreshed and re-lipsticked, I said, “Could we talk about something that could help your case?”

“What case? I thought I was off the hook.”

“I hope you are. But I thought of something that might help if Tillman and Jacobson start sniffing around again.”

“Which one’s which? Is Jacobson the woman?” He was starting to slur.

“Yes. Sergeant Paula.”

“She’s kind of good-looking.”

I lifted an eyebrow, which prompted a slightly unwelcome knee-pat: “Course, you are, too.”

“Tell me, Ricky, who were you hitting on at Marty’s party? With Marty and Sadie busy?”

“God, I can’t remember… . ” He looked as if he were genuinely trying to.

I took pity on him. “I was just kidding.”

“Oh. Guess you think I’m the kind of guy that—”

“Honest, I don’t think anything.” Anything much. “Listen, two important things.”

“Two!”

“Two. Remember when you came over to Julio’s yesterday? Before I was your lawyer?”

He nodded.

“You sounded as if you were worried about your job, with Sadie gone.”

“That wasn’t because Sadie loved me so much. I guess she thought I’m pretty much of a good-for-nothing asshole like everybody does. Listen, I still do my art, you know? Nobody thinks so, and I hardly have time with Amber and all, but I do, goddammit, I do!” His face was decidedly red now, but not from the sun, and not from anger.

I steered him back to the subject. “So if Sadie wasn’t your special advocate, why were you worried?”

“Because that goddamn Warren Nowell hates my guts. I just met that bastard a few years ago, but I feel like I’ve known him my whole life. You know that? This town’s like that.”

I waited.

“His mother was my fifth grade teacher, can you believe that? The teacher from fuckin’ hell. Ran her goddamn classroom like fuckin’ Auschwitz. Bitch. Goddamn harpy.”

He belched, a faraway look in his eyes—or maybe he was just having trouble focusing.

“You know what she used to do? We had this mother-fuckin’ white rat in there, and this little kid named Willie-little Willie Oppenheimer—he was terrified of rats. Couldn’t stand to look at the thing. Started to shake whenever it was time for the science lesson and we had to feed the animals—we had some snakes, all kinds of things, they didn’t bother Willie. The rat was all that did.

“Well, that bitch of a Nowell, she told him the only way to get over it was to make friends with the thing you’re afraid of, and she said a certain day was the day he was going to have to feed the rat, and the poor kid stayed home, but I guess he couldn’t stay home forever. So he came back and she made him do it, and he was shakin’ and sweatin’ and turnin’ blue and everything, but she made him do it anyhow.

“He must’ve moved too fast or something, he was so scared—I don’t know exactly what happened, but the rat ran up his shoulder and got loose in the room. Kid was so scared, he peed his pants. So was that enough for Mrs. Adolf Nowell? Not even close.
She didn’t let him go home
. Made him sit there the rest of the day with his pants soaking wet.
And
she tried to make him catch the rat, but he got sick.”

“You mean threw up?”

“Nah, I think he almost fainted. Had to put his head between his knees and lie down on the floor and everything. Smelling of pee the whole time.”

Pretty horrible, but was he ever going to get back to the point?

I said, “So you hold Warren’s awful mother against him?”

“Hell no!” His fingers closed into a fist, with which he banged the table. People would have stared again if there’d been any left, but we were living it up in lonely splendor. “Warren’s a goddamn wimp. I can’t stand a wimp, can you?”

“I thought you said he was the one who hated you.”

“He knew about Katy and me.”

“I don’t understand. Why would he care?”

“Because he was a goddamn wimp! Because he could never get a woman like Katy in a million years.”

“What are you getting at, Ricky? He wouldn’t need one—he’s got a perfectly good wife, and doesn’t strike me as the roving-eye type. Frankly, I don’t buy jealousy as the reason he hated you.”

He laughed, too far gone to get his feelings hurt. “You’re a sharp one, you know that? Pretty sharp lawyer I got. Okay, okay, he wasn’t jealous. He was a snob. Katy was his mother’s best friend—they went to college together or something—that’s how Warren got his damn job in the first place. With a little help from ‘Aunt Katy.’ That’s what he called her. He didn’t like the help messing with her. It was that simple.”

“How would he even know you were seeing her?”

“He saw us at a party once. He saw her looking at me. Katy never was good at hiding her feelings.”

Right. I decided to admit what I knew: “Frankly, Ricky, I hear Warren has good reason other than ‘Aunt Katy’ to be angry with you. I hear you like to bait him.”

He looked astonished. “Bait him?”

“That’s what I heard.”

He rested his chin on his fist. “You mean like calling him fatty and stuff?”

I shrugged, waiting for more.

“Like teasing him about not knowing how to swim? Oh, yeah, he really did get mad that time I introduced him around to all these girls at a party and said what a stud he was. I don’t think that’s it, though.”

“You don’t think that’s what?”

“Why he hates me. He knows I hate him, that’s all. He just knows. By instinct. The dude’s gonna fire me, you know that?”

“I hope not. I know you need the work.”

“I’m really going to miss Sadie.” His eyes were the soft, sincere ones of the very loaded.

As he walked me to my car, I remembered I’d told him to go straight to the police after our brunch. Now I had second thoughts. “Ricky, why don’t you go home, have a half-hour nap, get up, drink some more coffee, and then call the police—don’t go over there—and tell them about the pearl.”

He adjusted his baseball cap—nervously, I thought. “Think I’m drunk, huh?”

“I’m just giving you good legal advice. You never want to walk into a police station with alcohol on your breath. Especially not with a semi-fantastic story to tell.” And then something that had been nagging at me came into consciousness. “That reminds me. The maid you remodeled the cottage for—”