Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons Read online

  Praise for Other People’s Skeletons, the FIFTH book in the REBECCA SCHWARTZ MYSTERY SERIES by Julie Smith:

  “An interesting new detective personality … Smith shows an Agatha Christie-like capacity for making much ado about clues, concocting straw hypotheses, and surprising us, in the end…. Smith’s crisp storytelling, her easy knowledge of local practices, and her likable, unpredictable heroine will make readers look forward to more of sleuth Schwartz’s adventures.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A delightful modern sleuth.”

  —Minneapolis Star & Tribune

  “Rebecca’s lively first-person narration brands her a new detective to watch.”

  —Wilson Library Bulletin

  “An attractive and amusing heroine.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  Other People’s Skeletons is the FIFTH Rebecca Schwartz Mystery.

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  DEATH TURNS A TRICK

  THE SOURDOUGH WARS

  TOURIST TRAP

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS

  Also by Julie Smith:

  The Skip Langdon Series

  NEW ORLEANS MOURNING

  THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

  JAZZ FUNERAL

  DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK

  (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)

  HOUSE OF BLUES

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION

  (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)

  82 DESIRE

  MEAN WOMAN BLUES

  The Paul Mcdonald Series

  TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE

  HUCKLEBERRY FIEND

  The Talba Wallis Series

  LOUISIANA HOTSHOT

  LOUISIANA BIGSHOT

  LOUISIANA LAMENT

  P.I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF

  As Well As

  WRITING YOUR WAY: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL TRACK

  NEW ORLEANS NOIR (ed.)

  Other People’s Skeletons

  A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery

  By

  JULIE SMITH

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Other People’s Skeletons

  Copyright © 1993 by Julie Smith

  Cover by Nevada Barr

  ISBN: 9781617507953

  Originally published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1993 by Julie Smith

  www.booksbnimble.com

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: October 2012

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Acknowledgments

  Guarantee

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  Also by Julie Smith

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  About the Author

  To Mittie, the best in the business

  Chapter One

  I once said to one of my clients, a man who’d killed someone in self-defense, that it must have been the hardest thing he ever had to live through.

  “Not even close,” he said. “Not nearly as hard as my divorce. Learning that someone I thought I knew was so different; living with that. That’s the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

  The night Chris Nicholson, my law partner, was nearly arrested for murder I started to see what he meant. It was a time when everything I thought about the world changed, everything I thought I knew about human beings and who they are turned upside down and inside out. And it was probably a change for the better.

  I can say that now that it’s over. I can even say that I think I’m a better person for it, a bigger and more aware person. I’m certainly a weirder person. But I notice I’m a little more careful about whom I call weird these days. Who among us is exactly like the rest of us? And more to the point, who hasn’t got a secret? Even, maybe, a whole secret life.

  I think I should go back to the old Rebecca for a moment here, just to illustrate the progression of the thing; the Rebecca of the Cosmic Blind Date.

  I was standing in line at the post office one day, mailing a birthday present, a job it’s not ethical to give to my secretary— and anyway, he wouldn’t do it. I was impatient, in a hurry because I had to go home and pack for a business trip to Seattle. And a man was staring at me. He was sort of a nice-looking man, in fact a very nice-looking man, nothing wrong with him except that his hair was a little long and he was rumpled. That could have meant nothing or a lot, like maybe he was crazy and didn’t care how he looked, or maybe he was homeless and didn’t have a mirror, which also might have meant he was crazy. Without being narrow-minded about it, most urban women would agree, I think, that men who stare at you and might be crazy are probably best avoided.

  I was busily keeping my distance and avoiding eye contact (or trying to) but I couldn’t help it, I kept sneaking little nervous glances to see if he was still staring. And he was, every time.

  Finally, he simply walked up to me and said, “Excuse me, I know this sounds crazy, but you aren’t named Rebecca, are you? By any chance?”

  “Do we know each other?”

  “You mean you are? I don’t believe it— I’m scaring myself.”

  “Apparently, you know me, but I don’t know you.”

  “Well, I have to know one more thing. There’s no chance you’re from Seattle, is there?”

  Ordinarily, I’d have been too irritated to answer, but it was so odd, his bringing up Seattle, that I blurted, “No, but I’m going there tomorrow.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. I don’t believe this.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, as coldly as I could. By now I was thoroughly sorry I hadn’t called the nearest cop, and it was my turn at the window.

  He waited for me. When I turned back toward the door, I saw that he had smoothed his hair and tucked in his shirt. “I'm Max Bruner,” he said, offering his hand and looking as normal as an oatmeal cookie. “I know you think I’m crazy, but I wonder if I could just talk to you for a minute. I teach religion at a college in Oregon.” He stopped suddenly as if he’d had a brainstorm. “I know! Come and meet my wife.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She’s right outside. Really. Waiting in the car.” Dazed, I walked out with him. “There she is.” He pointed to a blue Nissan driven by a perfectly attractive, sensible-looking woman who looked as if she couldn’t possibly be married to a crazy man. By this time I was a lot more curious than annoyed. I walked over with him.

  “Dear, this is Rebecca…”

  “Schwartz.”

  “Rebecca Schwartz. My wife, Lorraine. Honey, remember what those psychics told Roger DeCampo? About the dark-haired woman in the pink suit?”

  “Ah, yes, the one named Rebecca.”

  “Well, I saw… uh… this lady in t
he post office and that was her name.”

  She looked dismayed. “But Roger’s gone back to Seattle.”

  I was dark-haired, wearing a deep rose suit, and not at all liking the turn the conversation was taking. “She’s going there tomorrow.”

  Lorraine lit up. “I don’t believe it; this is much too weird.” It was obvious she thought it was a good kind of weird. “Tell her, Max.”

  He turned to me. “Well, we both just finished a six-week seminar over in Berkeley. Roger’s a— well, a specialist in the Eastern religions. We hung out a lot this summer and Roger got it into his head to go to a psychic— being in Berkeley and all. And the psychic told him he’d meet a dark-haired woman in a pink suit with whom he’d have— get this— an ‘important’ relationship.”

  I was starting to be amused. “Oh, no. Not another learning experience.”

  “The psychic said her name would be either Rosalind or Ruth, something like that. Well, he kind of got into it and went to another psychic and that one saw a woman in his life too, but all she said was that she was named Rebecca. So he asked what she looked like and sure enough, she was dark and wearing pink. So you know what he did?”

  “Placed an ad in the East Bay Express.”

  “No, he went to a third psychic. That one only said she’d be dark and about five-feet-five— how tall are you, Rebecca?”

  “About that.”

  Exactly that. I’d gone from amused to intrigued. “But the only thing was, he looked all over Berkeley and couldn’t find her. Then when I saw you, you so perfectly answered the description.”

  Was this some kind of setup? Were these people trying to pull something? They could have been except for one thing— the business trip to Seattle had come up at the last moment. No one but my law partner and my travel agent even knew I was going.

  Lorraine said, “Why don’t you give Rebecca Roger’s phone number? What do you think, Rebecca? Would you want to call him?”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about him.”

  They spent the next ten minutes singing the praises of their friend, who, aside from having a sterling character and all that, was lots of fun, “especially for a professor,” they said.

  The upshot was, I said they could give him my number. I was listed, anyhow, and the whole thing was starting to look larkish. I was quite giddy with the encounter, shaking my head on the walk home and murmuring, “Only in San Francisco.”

  When I walked in, my phone was ringing. “Rebecca. Roger DeCampo in Seattle.” He had a rich, deep voice that I liked at once.

  He was divorced, had a kid— pretty generally sounded like an eligible man. I wasn’t especially in the market for one; I was dating a very nice marine biologist.

  But Julio lived in another town, and we weren’t seeing each other exclusively. Since the cosmos had apparently gone to all the trouble of arranging a blind date especially for me, it was the least I could do to accept. I said I’d stay overnight in Seattle and have dinner with him.

  It was a lark and it made me giggle, but I certainly wasn’t going to meet a strange man at a strange restaurant in a strange city without telling Chris where I was going and with whom.

  And far from advising caution, she got right in the spirit of it. “Let’s see, you met the friend in the post office, right? So if you marry this dude does that make you a mail-order bride?”

  “Listen, do you think it’s weird about the three psychics? It kind of gives me the willies.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, three out of three. It’s just strange.”

  “It’s strange, all right. They don’t call it Berzerkley for nothing.”

  Roger was about five-nine, skinny, brown hair, brown eyes— nobody’s dreamboat but certainly not repulsive. And he was interesting. He knew a whole lot about pop culture as well as the more serious subject of Eastern religion, which I’ve always found fascinating; and he knew about western religion as well. And he was a movie fan who liked country music. A curious combination. A great talker. A good first date.

  We got to talking so hard and fast they closed the restaurant down and started stacking chairs before we took the hint and left. And all the time I kept wondering: What are we really doing here? What could possibly be ‘important’ about the two of us meeting?

  Nothing, I thought— just a cute meet, a pleasant time, that was the end of it. But then Roger called and said he’d like to come see me in San Francisco.

  What was the harm, I thought?

  He took me to Tadich’s, an old-fashioned restaurant he’d liked when he visited before. I liked it too, and thought there was a lot to be said for continuity in a city where the half-life of a restaurant is about the time it takes to read the menu.

  Roger had by this time become so convinced we were going to be important together that he’d decided to tell me his secrets. He said some things about “new paradigms,” for instance, that I didn’t begin to get the hang of. I thought perhaps it was a kind of password, a phrase like, “Are you a friend of Bill Wilson?”— an invitation to declare yourself if you’re in the club. I didn’t, but Roger was undaunted. He went right ahead and told me about his deep and abiding interest in UFOs. He didn’t stop there either. He wanted to know what I thought of all that.

  I thought it was weird.

  But I said it wasn’t something I’d thought much about. And then it occurred to me to ask him why he was interested, if he’d ever seen one, or what. I can still remember his exact words.

  “Not exactly,” he said, “but I’ve been present at at least three meetings of the Interplanetary Council.”

  Whereupon I nearly choked on my cioppino.

  “Mm— what’s that?” I tried to keep my voice casual. He looked at me seriously.

  “It’s what it sounds like.”

  “And where were the meetings?”

  “They were— well— not in this galaxy.”

  “But how did you get there? I mean, it’s impossible, even traveling at the speed of light.”

  “You just travel at the speed of thought, that’s all.” So there I was, right in Tadich’s, as safe and warm a harbor as you can hope to find in this galaxy, talking about the Interplanetary Council. Well, hang on to your hat, I thought; might as well enjoy it. I made the poor man tell me every detail.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t know too many because he couldn’t remember his trips to the other galaxy, he just knew about them because the story was written in the Akashic Records, which, according to him, chronicled everyone’s lives, both current and past, from time immemorial. He was really vague about where they were, but he did know that they comprised such a huge library that it took ten thousand sentient beings (of who knew what description) to keep track of them. Which didn’t strike me as nearly enough if the Interplanetary Council implied what I thought it did.

  He knew about all this because he had friends who were in daily contact with extraterrestrials and who lived a kind of shadow existence that shaped life on Earth. The setup reminded me of the premise of Slaughterhouse Five, in which, if you recall, a race of aliens called Tralfamadorians control the lives of Earthlings.

  Roger described a few potentially earth-shattering disasters his friends had averted by using technologies not dreamed of by most of us, and then he swore me to secrecy on the details. After that, he told me how I fit into all this.

  It was the funniest thing, actually. One of his friends, that same person who’d invented some of the futuristic technology, was involved in a legal battle over patents, and I was the lawyer who could get him out of it.

  “Oh, gosh,” I said, “I’m afraid I couldn’t handle something like that on a pro bono basis.”

  Roger looked absolutely horrified. “It won’t be pro bono. Stewart’s loaded. It’s just that… you’re the one.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t. Stewart does. When I got back to Seattle, I told him about the psychics, and he said, ‘I already know about her.’”r />
  “How did he know?”

  “Stewart knows lots of stuff. You’re gonna love this guy— I can’t wait for you to meet him.”

  Somehow, I just wasn’t interested.

  I still don’t know if Stewart is a real person or the imaginary playmate of an adult with a child’s imagination. Or if Roger DeCampo has somehow been victimized by a gang of screwballs who’ve managed to convince him they have daily commerce with extraterrestrials.

  Or if, as Chris flatly declared, “He’s crazy.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure. I’ve called the college where he teaches, and he really does teach there. I’ve seen pictures of his kid, so he’s real. And I even have a book he wrote.”

  “A published book?” She looked down her ski jump of a nose.

  “Uh-huh. A comparison of Eastern religion with Western monotheism. I thought it was good.”

  “A crazy person could write a book.”

  “A crazy person isn’t supposed to be able to function, and he does that perfectly well. He’s very interesting when he’s talking about his subject— meaning religion, not UFOs.”

  “Look, anybody who sees little green men is out there.”

  “But the thing is, he doesn’t. Only his friends do.”

  “He’s a fruitcake, partner. And sometimes I’m not so sure about you.”

  “Me?”

  “After all, you went on a blind date with somebody recommended by a stranger on the street on the basis of predictions by a psychic.”

  “You mean you wouldn’t have?”

  “Well, certainly not without consulting my own psychic.”

  Perhaps it had been a bit rash, and yet I wouldn’t have given up the experience. I hadn’t known there were people like that, people who seemed utterly normal, who by all accounts led perfectly normal lives, but who operated in a wildly different reality. Yet how was Roger DeCampo any different from a person who believed in the Judeo-Christian god, a concept no more provable than space aliens? The only difference I could see was that the prevailing culture supported one belief system and condemned the other.

  But there was no convincing Chris. To her, he was a nut case and that was the end of it. And honestly, I didn’t expect to convince her. I knew her, knew how her mind worked— or thought I did until the night she called me from the Hall of Justice.