Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons Read online

  It was a Thursday night, nearly midnight, and I was snug in my bed, not yet asleep but well on the way. The thing she said, the first thing out of her mouth, was so urban, so typical of her, so nearly brittle: “Listen. Do you believe that she who acts as her own lawyer has a fool for a client?”

  I came bolt upright. “Chris, what is it?”

  Drunk driving, I thought. She didn’t drink that much, but what else could it be?

  This was her story:

  She’d been driving home, minding her own business, when a police car had stopped her. The officers therein had asked if she was Chris Nicholson, taken a good look at her car, wondered how it got all bent, and brought her down to the Hall of Justice where they’d asked a number of other impertinent questions. She’d made a scene, of course. They finally told her there’d been a hit-and-run a couple of hours before, and a witness had gotten her license number.

  At the Hall of Justice, she had been met by our old— I won’t say friends— our old acquaintances and rivals, Martinez and Curry of Homicide, who’d given her the notion she was in a heap of shit.

  I splashed water on my face, pulled on some clothes, and made it to the Hall in a little over twenty minutes. Thursday night was the worst possible time to get arrested. They could hold Chris for forty-eight hours without charging her, but since there was no court on either Saturday or Sunday, that meant my genteel Southern law partner had an excellent chance of spending three days and four nights in jail.

  There was only one solution— she had to talk her way out of it. It was ironic, since “clam up” was the first advice I usually gave anybody, but I desperately wanted Chris to sing like Pavarotti if that meant I could take her home that night. Because of course she had nothing to hide; not Chris.

  By the time I got to the Hall, she was the color of instant mashed potatoes, and she was smoking, something I’d never seen her do.

  “Since when,” I said, “have you been leading a double life?”

  She turned a becoming shade of pink. “What?”

  “Cigarettes. You’re a secret smoker.”

  “Oh.” She laughed nervously. “About three minutes. On the double life.” She wasn’t at ease, even with me.

  “What’s going on?” I said when we were alone.

  “Jason McKendrick was killed tonight.” She shrugged. “They think I did it. I can’t seem to talk them out of it.”

  “Jason McKendrick the critic? Is that who we’re talking about?”

  “Uh-huh.” He worked for the Chronicle, reviewed movies, music, and theater, and was more of a celebrity in our town than most people he covered.

  “Did you even know him?”

  She shook her head. But I thought uneasily about the way she’d blushed when I made the double-life remark. “Well, why you?”

  “Somebody plowed into him in a car that looks like mine, and apparently there was a witness who got the license number just screwed up enough that it came out the same as mine.”

  “Didn’t you say something about your car being bent?”

  “Well, yes, I didn’t even notice. I guess somebody backed into me in a parking space.”

  “Was there— you know— blood or hair or anything?”

  She turned red again. “I guess they’re checking that.”

  I sat back in my chair.

  “Did they give you a blood alcohol test?”

  “Just roadside sobriety. Which I passed.”

  “Did the witness describe the driver of the car?”

  She shrugged. “Martinez says so— he says they’ve got two witnesses. But he could be lying.”

  “This doesn’t look too good.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The witnesses say it looked like a deliberate hit— the car swerved to hit McKendrick, he tried to dodge it, then it backed up for another try and chased him almost up on the sidewalk. That’s why they’re handling it like a homicide.”

  I shrugged. “No big deal. It was clearly the most horrifying thing they ever saw. No wonder they screwed up the license number.”

  But I was blustering and we both knew it. They had plenty to arrest her on, especially if they found physical evidence on her car. A good alibi could save her in the long run, but they sure weren’t going to go checking it out that night.

  Desperate, I said, “How are we going to get you out of here?”

  “I told them I’d talk after you got here.”

  “Great. What are you going to say?”

  “I was lying. I thought you could talk Martinez into letting me go.”

  “Oh, sure. He loves me like a daughter.” I was impatient with her, couldn’t help feeling she didn’t understand just how much trouble she was in. “Did they say when McKendrick was killed?”

  “About eight-thirty. One of the witnesses called 911.”

  “Where were you then?”

  “At somebody’s house.”

  “Whose? A guy’s?”

  “No. Someone you don’t know.”

  “Fine. Who?”

  “A woman named Rosalie.”

  “Rosalie who?”

  “I don’t know her last name.”

  I didn’t say anything, just tried to digest all this, when she said, “I don’t know her. I was just … at her house.”

  “Was anybody else there?”

  “Yes. Three or four other people.”

  Oh, God, I was thinking. Three or four. Which? Three? Four? Couldn’t my law partner count anymore?

  This whole deal was crazy. I realized suddenly that I’d been pulling reluctant little factoids out of her as if she were a client referred by a third party— someone I’d never met; and furthermore, someone acting guilty. Someone with a lot to hide from her lawyer.

  I said, “Chris, what’s going on?”

  She looked at me a moment, then stared off into space. She was wearing a white cotton sweater, which didn’t help her color any. She was so washed out she was almost ghostly.

  Finally she clasped her hands, composing herself, and looked back in my direction. “It’s not something I can talk about.”

  Martinez would have loved to arrest her, and Curry always went along with Martinez. But she’d agreed to a voluntary mug shot, which they’d probably showed to the witnesses, or would in the morning. Either way they didn’t have an ID. We figured that out because they let her go.

  But if their physical evidence panned out, and if they turned up anything at all that passed for a motive, I was pretty sure they were going to arrest her.

  Chris knew it, too. As soon as we got in the car, she said, “Oh, man, am I in trouble. Jesus shit, Rebecca, this is unbelievable.”

  “Tell me about it.” It was partly just a remark and partly a plea.

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “I’m sorry— it’s just that I’m going to look guilty as hell. And that’s still not the worst of it.”

  I was getting impatient. “Look, were you having an affair with McKendrick? You know I’m not going to get judgmental about something like that.”

  “Yeah, but you will about what it actually was.”

  “Well, just tell me, Chris. Then we’ll deal with it.”

  “You’ll never speak to me again.”

  I decided to let it go. It was a decision that lasted all of two-and-a-half seconds. A horrible notion at the back of my consciousness was inching forward and starting to nag. “Drugs?” I blurted.

  She turned toward me. Watching the road, I couldn’t see her face, but I felt the indignation that flamed in every cell of her being.

  “Of course not. It’s nothing illegal, Rebecca.”

  Just something so shameful she wouldn’t even tell her best friend and partner about it.

  She didn’t talk for the rest of the ride, but she said a strange thing when I dropped her off: “Go see Rosalie. Talk to her and the others. I want you to see what we’re up agai
nst.”

  Chapter Two

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to be in court the next morning.

  I phoned our secretary, Alan Kruzick, filled him in, told him I wouldn’t be in until ten or eleven, and asked him to cancel my one appointment. For once— and I almost gave him a raise for this— he behaved in a businesslike and responsible manner.

  It was an odd request Chris had made, to spend the morning chasing strangers. But she was my most important client now, and she must have had a reason, I thought. So eight-thirty found me driving to a rundown building on Larkin Street, very near the Tenderloin. Chris had given me Rosalie’s address, but I didn’t know if “the others” lived there or somewhere else.

  Parking, I thought maybe it was drugs after all— this was the neighborhood for it. I began to wonder if I should have come alone.

  But Rosalie didn’t look even slightly scary. She seemed to be a trusting soul happy to let someone who claimed to be Chris’s lawyer into her apartment. She was in her sixties, I guess, dressed in brown polyester pants and a Kmartish green sweater. Her shoes were thick-soled brown lace-ups, good for hiking— I guessed she probably didn’t have a car and did her errands on foot. Her hair was short, brown going gray, and a little thin. It looked a lot as if a neighbor or perhaps her sister had cut it, or maybe she had lost at six-dollar-salon Russian roulette. She was overweight, someone who probably found those errands I imagined adequate for her exercise. She wore no makeup, and most of her appearance suggested she didn’t give a damn how she looked, except for one small but attractive bow to feminine adornment— a pair of earrings depicting the goddess Isis.

  The Egyptian theme was apparent in some of her furnishings as well, such as a miniature pyramid that may have been a sculpture; I wasn’t sure. There was also a black jackal-headed statue, ceramic perhaps, which would have been a little frightening if I hadn’t recognized it as the Egyptian god Anubis. The room was furnished with makeshift furniture brightened with ethnic throws, some quite lovely, one or two plain shabby. The beige rug was stained. The bookshelves were bricks and boards, and jam-packed— one or two titles I could see indicated an interest in the occult. And there were plenty of candles, which may have been another indication. On the walls were posters, one for a psychic fair, the other depicting a mermaid or some-such ethereal creature.

  It was an unusual room for the neighborhood. Here was a woman who was obviously educated, clearly a nonconformist of some description, and poor. Despite the lack of luxury, I guessed that Rosalie was quite comfortable and cozy here. A hand-thrown teapot with matching cup sat on the coffee table, along with the morning paper, one section open and folded back. The place was clean and got lots of light. It had a nice feel to it— good vibes, positive energy, something of that sort. (The jargon had leapt into my head, making me feel like a New Paradigm woman.)

  “I like Chris so much,” said Rosalie, when I was sitting on one of her shabby chairs, having refused her offer of tea. “Is she … all right?” She had hesitated a moment, caught between curiosity and discretion.

  “She’s fine, absolutely fine. But there’s been a mix-up, and I’m afraid it might develop into a court case. So I’m trying to determine what our chances would be.” I was trying hard to make it sound like a civil case, a simple lawsuit. “I was just wondering if I could get your version of what happened last night.”

  “You mean what happened here? I think you’d better tell me what’s going on.” She looked a little under fire.

  “Oh, no. Nothing to do with what happened here.” Damn! I was never going to find out what it was. “The main thing I need to know is when Chris arrived and when she left.”

  “Well, our meeting was set for eight o’clock, but nobody’s ever on time, so I never even bother to look. Let’s see, Ivan got here first, and then Moonblood; and Tanesha, finally. It was Chris’s first time, and she got lost on the way over— oh, and she had trouble parking. By the time she got here, it might have been after eight-thirty. But I’m not really sure, it could have been a little bit before.”

  “What kind of meeting was it?”

  “Chris didn’t tell you?”

  “She was kind of shell-shocked.”

  Rosalie frowned. “I think I’d better talk to the cards.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She started to unwrap what looked like a silk scarf she’d scooped up from the top of a bookshelf. It was knotted and contained something fairly heavy. She didn’t answer me, just pulled out her Tarot deck and went to work. I sat in amazement as she put on a pair of glasses, shuffled, and laid out cards. When she had made a sort of cross with them she gathered them up without even seeming to pay much attention, certainly not taking time to contemplate, just took them up, nodding to herself.

  “You seem okay,” she said. “But I think we should leave the content of the meeting out of this. If Chris wants you to know, she’ll tell you.”

  “You read the Tarot?” I asked, rather redundantly.

  “Yes.”

  “I mean … um … professionally?”

  She nodded. “Would you like a reading?”

  I looked at my watch. “Thanks, but not right now. I’ve got to get back to work. When did Chris leave exactly?”

  “Exactly isn’t my cup of tea, exactly. Ten-thirty, I guess. Something like that. I was too tranced out to notice. Sometimes I get like that— good thing I don’t have a car.”

  “A car?” Why had she mentioned a car if she didn’t know what was going on?

  “I’d probably be a menace in one.” Was she watching me, trying to see if she’d hit a nerve? I decided I was being paranoid.

  “I wonder if you could give me the names and addresses of the other people who were here last night.”

  “I think you should get them from Chris.”

  “But she told me specifically to see them. Somehow, I got the idea she didn’t know their last names.” Rosalie closed her eyes for a minute, scowling almost. Finally she opened them and said, “I think it’s best. She’s in too much trouble to take this lightly. And we have to move fast.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I really couldn’t tell you.” Just those few words and then a serious clam-up. But she hesitated once again, as if she’d have loved to tell me, actually, but didn’t see the point. Maybe she was in touch with some garrulous ETs. I didn’t think so, though— I’d never heard of them being invisible.

  “Just a second,” she said, and disappeared. She came back with a piece of paper that had three names on it, along with addresses and phone numbers: Ivan Shensky; Moonblood Seacrystal; and Tanesha Johnson.

  “Do you know where they work?” I said. “I’d like to go see them now.”

  “Ivan’s a night worker. He’ll be home. Tanesha works for the Bank of America, in the B. of A. building downtown. Moonblood’s a carpenter— you never know where she’ll be from one day to the next. Or she might be between jobs. But her roommate’s an artist— she’s always home; she’d probably be able to point you in the right direction.” I tried to imagine what the roommate’s name might be. Spiderweb Riverbed Shalecliff Earthnurture? But nothing I thought of surpassed Moonblood Seacrystal— some things just can’t be satirized.

  Moonblood lived in Noe Valley, and as I drove over, I found myself profoundly uncomfortable. So far I had Chris arriving “about” the time of the murder (if that was what it was). But Chris might have been late— I didn’t even know where McKendrick had been killed, how her arrival might fit the time frame.

  Next I had a potential witness who couldn’t be bothered looking at clocks, who consorted with people named Moonblood, who got too “tranced out” to notice little things like arrivals and departures, and who closed her eyes and screwed up her face before answering certain questions— that is, if she didn’t whip out a Tarot deck. I had to hope at least one of the three others at the “meeting” would show up a little better in court. And if that person was Moonblood, I had to hope she had a ni
ckname.

  Moonblood lived in a cottage behind a larger house, a dollhouse almost, barely big enough for one, much less two and canvases. The yard was beautifully kept, boasting an elaborate herb border, flagstones, even a hammock. A lot of love and effort had gone into it, which boded well, I thought. A completely crazy person couldn’t have designed it. Folk music of some sort, guitars and women’s voices, blared from the cottage. I was about to knock on the newly painted dark green door when a voice behind me said, “Can I help you?” The woman who’d spoken was short and compact, wearing overalls over a T-shirt. She had biceps that looked as if they’d driven many a nail, and a buzz haircut with a minute semblance of a curl over one eye— something like James Bond’s comma of black hair except that it was light brown and too short to punctuate a sentence. She was somewhere in her thirties, I thought.

  “Are you Moonblood Seacrystal?” I hoped I was keeping a straight face.

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “A problem? No, I just … I mean, I don’t even know you.”

  “I meant my name.”

  “Mine’s Rebecca Schwartz,” I said, and stuck out my hand, which she ignored. “I’m here about my law partner, Chris Nicholson.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “It’s a woman. I think you were with her last night. On Larkin Street, at Rosalie’s.” Damn. I’d been so flustered I hadn’t even gotten Rosalie’s last name.

  “Oh, Chris. The new kid. Has something happened to her?”

  “Well, in a way. The police think she was involved in an accident on her way to Rosalie’s. I’m wondering if you can remember what time she got there.”

  “I don’t know. She was already there when I arrived.”

  “What time was that?”

  She shrugged. “About eight-twenty, maybe. Who knows?”

  I felt little drops of sweat pop out at my hairline. “It could be important.”

  She held up her left arm, which was bare at the wrist. “Do you see a watch? I don’t know what I don’t know.”