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

watch. “In fact, promise to do it by three o’clock. No later. I’ll call Jacobson and tell her to expect your call.’’
    “Okay.” He masticated some more. “Jeez. I feel terrible about Esperanza. I mean about her trying to kill herself.” So that was why he’d called. He wanted me to tell him it was all okay. I sighed. Esperanza felt guilty about Sadie, and now Ricky felt guilty about Esperanza. The Sheffield Pearl had left a trail of carnage and guilt. I was beginning to think it had a curse on it.
    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