Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons (19 page)

“Maybe she should try hypnosis.”

“It’s a thought.” A formidable thought. Here was someone who already spent lots of her time in a trance. If we could find a reputable hypnotist, it could be a great shortcut. I told Dad about Tommy La Barre.

He shook his head unhappily. “I don’t know, Beck. You better hope it’s not him. This is the kind of guy who’s going to have an unshakeable alibi.”

“If he hired someone, maybe they’ll turn up.”

“How? You think they’ll find Jesus and suffer remorse?”

“I thought you might have some ideas.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. When looking for a hit man, see Isaac Schwartz.”

“Omigod, that’s a great idea. I just meant I thought you might be able to think of a strategy. But come to think of it, you know half the unsavory characters in town.”

“And those I don’t know probably carry my tattered business card just in case. But La Barre’s probably connected. I stay as far as possible from those people.”

“Yes, but some of your ex-clients probably know people who know people. How about making some inquiries?”

“People get killed for that kind of inquiry.”

“Come on, Dad. Nobody’s going to kill Isaac Schwartz— who’s going to be the killer’s lawyer when his case comes to trial?”

“With all due modesty, you have a point. Okay, I’ll phone around. But I just gave myself an idea with that remark about my esteemed clientele carrying my card. Maybe that’s why McKendrick had Chris’s number— because she’d been recommended as a lawyer.”

“But why hasn’t the person who recommended her come forward?”

“Well, that’s easy. Because they don’t know her car was used in the murder and couldn’t possibly know her name and number was in his pocket.”

“I don’t know— I’ve talked to a lot of McKendrick’s friends.” But I knew it need not be a friend. It could be the most casual acquaintance. And the theory still didn’t explain why her car was used— unless that person was the murderer.

Now that had merit. But still— why frame Chris?

I figured I must have formed something in the neighborhood of fifteen theories about the type of person who’d killed McKendrick and the circumstances under which it had happened, yet none of them covered everything. Everywhere I turned there was some dead end, some unexplained detail. It was the most frustrating thing I’d ever run into.

“Rebecca Schwartz. Roger DeCampo.” The Cosmic Blind Date was standing right in my path, blocking my way, sounding like a prison guard and holding out his right hand to be shaken. In a daze I obliged and introduced Dad. “What are you doing in these parts?” I asked.

“You know that little problem I told you about? The one you’re going to help on? I came down to do a little work on that.”

“But, Roger, I thought we agreed I couldn’t take the case.”

“We didn’t agree to anything. You said you wouldn’t, that’s all. But you will.” He gave me one of those bottom-of-the-face smiles; frankly, I found it chilling.

“Nice to see you, Roger.” I glanced at my watch. “I’m afraid we’re late.”

I pushed past him, Dad following a little reluctantly— he hated rudeness.

Roger shouted over his shoulder, “I’ll call you.”

“Former client?” Dad said.

“I’ll tell you all about it. But first, what’s your take on him?”

“He seemed to be having a little trouble with reality- saying you’re going to take a case you’ve refused. And I didn’t like the smile.”

I wondered if Chris had been right about Roger all the time.

I told Dad the story. “What do you think?”

“Well, I guess he must be a little nuts. I mean, even if the subject weren’t UFOs, how could a sane person get so involved with other people’s obsessions?”

Suddenly I had a new thought. He’d said to me, “It may not be obvious to you, but I am one of the major players of the universe.” I’d thought he was joking, what else was I to think? But maybe he was just a guy who wanted to belong, and the UFO club was what had invited him.

I thought about the human need to be special, how we all want to believe we’re somebody just a little more important than the next guy. What if you had nice friends, perfectly ordinary, but also very special people who told you you’d been seen at the Interplanetary Council? I tried to imagine people saying it to me: “Now, Rebecca, it’s written in the Akashic Records. You! Yes, you. Well, you’d better believe it because it’s true. You’re really a very important person, galactically speaking. Sure, the world’s full of lawyers, but how many of them are making the kinds of decisions that influence the course of history?”

I’d at least be intrigued. And if they were people I really trusted, really liked very much— Chris and Julio, say— I might, in time, come to want very much to join their club, in much the same way I’d suddenly embraced Chris’s psychic world view. What a wonderful escape it would be! I wouldn’t be crazy, really. Just someone who had crackpot ideas. But if I started to live more and more in that world, I’d probably get weirder and weirder, much as Roger seemed to be doing. It was a little like a cult, I thought— sort of a pervasive self-hypnosis.

Dad said, “Still, I knew a perfectly nice woman who’d been abducted by spacemen. Someone I respected. I didn’t know about the ETs until I’d known her a few years— she got tipsy at a party and told me about it.”

“Do you think she was lying?”

“Actually, I’m inclined to believe it. She seemed pretty damn sure.”

“You believe in ETs?”

“Well, I didn’t till then.”

Chris hadn’t been in the office when I left, but she was very much there when I got back— and practically on fire: “I’ve got the missing piece.”

I sank down in her clients’ chair. “Well, for God’s sake, what is it?”

“It’s something in the past all right, just like Rosalie said. But it’s so trivial, just so
tiny
, you’d never think of it. And you’d never in a million years connect it with some big drama in your life.”

I was going to jump up and down and scream if she didn’t tell me soon.

“I went home and looked in my kitchen, like Moonblood said, and there wasn’t a damn thing there that isn’t always there. But then I went to bed and I had this weird dream, about hanging up my clothes on a hook. Then when I got up, there it was— the hook, bigger than life, right in my kitchen, exactly like Moonblood said.”

“What hook?”

“The one where I keep my extra keys— to the house, I mean. But there might— just very, very possibly might— have been a car key, too. The hook’s behind the door, which I never close, so I didn’t even notice they weren’t there; I guess Pigball forgot to return them.” Her normally charming habit of forgetting names was now up there— for irritation value— with guys who call you “doll.”

“May I ask which Pigball?”

“My friend Roxanne, who cat-sits when I go away for the weekend, or on vacation or something. I’ve known her forever— well, since high school, actually; she’s from my hometown. We don’t have much in common, but we’ve always kept in touch. Anyway, she’s a freelance something— editor, I think, and she does this kind of stuff for a few extra bucks. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve been anywhere at all— but for all I know she’s had the keys a lot longer; I never think about whether she does or doesn’t have them because she’s a good friend and I trust her— and I always know I’ll be calling her again for the same job.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“Her phone’s disconnected.” Seeing my fallen face, she said, “But not to worry. I have her mom’s number in Virginia. I was just about to call when you came in.”

“I’ve got to ask you something; I just have to. How could you forget your extra set of keys?”

She looked hurt. “Well first of all, in my mind they weren’t missing. I just never thought— because they’re always there, where they’re supposed to be.” She touched her long nose. “And second, they’re house keys. I seem to have this dim, dim recollection of once putting a car key on the ring, so I’d have a complete set. But I don’t know if I did it or just thought about it once or twice.”

Kruzick, who’d been lurking in the doorway, trotted out his best Eddie Haskell voice: “May I make a suggestion? How about calling Roxanne’s mother?”

“Roger,” Chris said, and for obvious reasons the word made me laugh.

She dialed. “Mrs. Niekirk? Chris Nicholson. Oh, gosh, it has, hasn’t it?”

Been a long time
, I filled in, and hoped the pleasantries weren’t going to go on at the normal Southern length.

Finally, she said, “I was wondering— I think Roxanne’s moved and for some reason I don’t have her phone number. Do you think— oh, she’s there? Well, yes by all means.” Pause. “Roxanne Niekirk, whatever do you think you’re doing, leavin’ town without tellin’ me?” Her accent had kicked back to life. “Oh, hey. Darlin’, what’d I say? Listen, I’m really, really sorry.”

I gathered that Roxanne’s reasons for leaving town weren’t the happiest. But neither Kruzick, who by now had come in and sat down, nor I, were delicate enough to leave. We listened as Chris soothed her friend and then worked up to asking about the keys. Which apparently provoked a whole new flood of tears. Chris soothed a little bit more and then her end of the conversation began to tend more toward the occasional “uh-huh” or “yes”, accompanied by alert nods and vigorous finger drumming; even note taking now and then.

After a time, she said, “I think I might have some bad news for you. Jason McKendrick died about a week ago.”

Judging from what followed, Roxanne hadn’t heard yet. But from Chris’s sudden alertness, I knew we’d hit pay dirt. Yet when she finally hung up she hollered a loud and heartfelt, “Shit!”

“What is it?”

“You’re not going to believe this. It’s way too labyrinthine. You’re just not gonna believe it.” Long pause. “I don’t know where to start.”

Kruzick said, “The bottom line, as you Yanks so crudely put it, would be ever so appropriate, Mum.”

“She left the keys in McKendrick’s car.”

“Shit!” Kruzick and I spoke together and then fell silent, staring into space.

Finally, I said, “I think the shock’s worn off. You can hit us with the rest of it.”

She drummed her desk again, something I’d never see her do before— an ugly habit, usually, but on Chris it looked good. She’d painted her nails a fetching Chinese red, and she was wearing a long-sleeved cream silk blouse. The long, long fingers, backed by silk-swathed wrists, tipped with red, were as elegant, even in her impatience, as a musical instrument.

“Roxanne’s … how to say this … well, she’s probably carrying about fifty more pounds than she’d like to be. She wears glasses; she’s short; and she’s shy. Now does she sound like a Jason McKendrick woman or what?”

“One kind, anyway.”

“What a weird dude. I’m not kidding, it’s a crime what he did to that girl. She wasn’t making it as a freelance editor, so about three months ago she went down to the
Chronicle
and applied for a job.”

“Don’t tell me.” Kruzick was rolling his eyes. “She met him in the elevator.”

“How’d you know that?”

“All the best lives are ruined that way. It’s something about the motion.” He wrinkled his nose. “And the slipping standards, of course. One day the Orient Express, the next elevators.”

“Anyway, she was bowled over, she couldn’t believe the likes of
him
could possibly be interested in
her
, and one day they left her house for a drink— at her insistence, after she’d been screwing him for about a month— and then she didn’t hear from him for about a week and a half. Finally, he called and asked her if she’d dropped any keys in his car. Well, she didn’t realize she had mine, so she said no, but she’d missed him and could they get together soon. So he dropped the news that he thought the relationship ‘wasn’t really going anywhere….’”

“Men are swine,” sniffed Kruzick.

“Anyway, she fell into a decline, and things began to get more and more desperate with her work situation. Meanwhile she actually got the
Chronicle
job she’d applied for, but she couldn’t face McKendrick every day. Can you imagine? That poor girl.

“So finally she decided there wasn’t anything left to do but go home to Virginia for a while and maybe try to find a job in Richmond or someplace like that. Anyhow, on just about the last day, she’d decided to treat herself to a movie all by herself, but the theater was in a neighborhood she wasn’t crazy about, so she was putting money and things in a belly pack when this little heart fell out of her purse— a piece of the key ring I kept my extra keys on, and she realized she must have had my keys somewhere in her purse. When she couldn’t find them, she knew she must have dropped them in McKendrick’s car. So she decided to call him to tell him he had to send them to me and also give him a piece of her mind, kind of let him know what he put her through.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he was very cold and said he could certainly understand her position, or, as she put it, ‘my fucking position,’ and he was sorry things had worked out that way. And he took down my name and address.”

“Eureka!” I shouted.

Kruzick said, “So how was the movie?”

We looked at him blankly.

“I mean, was she late because of the phone call, or did she bag it, or what?”

We ignored him.

I said, “It’s over, do you realize that? Now we know why he had your name and address, and we know who had access to your car key.”

“Yeah. The victim.”

“How long was it between the time Roxanne said they weren’t hers and the time she gave him your name?”

“I don’t know. I had the impression it was a week, at least. Roxanne had to pack up to move, after all.”

“Well, he could have done anything with them in the meantime. My guess is he did one of two things. Maybe he took them over to some woman’s house— or even some other friend’s house— thinking that person was the one who left them in his car. Then he later phoned to say they belonged to you and gave that person— henceforth known as the murderer— your name and address to mail them back. If she happened to be a woman scorned— especially recently scorned— she might have hatched a plan then and there. All she had to do was watch you and steal your car. Maybe she didn’t mean to implicate you at all. Maybe she meant to sit in front of McKendrick’s house until he came home, cream him, and then abandon the car wherever— no! She always meant to take it back to where you’d left it, because she had to park her own car there to save the space. So she must have known he’d be coming home when he was— but that would be easy enough. He was pals with most of his old girlfriends. She could just have asked him.”