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

story about your call.”
    Once again she abandoned the endless fascination of her own reflection to look me full in the face. “What are you talking about? I don’t even know Katy Montebello.”
    I said sweetly. “Give me a break, please. We talked about her.”
    She resumed her mascara application. “I know we talked about her, Rebecca. But I didn’t say she was my bosom buddy. I didn’t call her Friday and I’ve never called her.”
    “Are you familiar with the Sheffield Pearl?”
    “Sure. Everyone around here knows about it. About every six months the local paper does a write-up on Katy, or she puts the pearl on exhibit at some benefit, and that gets written up. Nobody doesn’t know about it—why?”
    “How about Sadie? She was new in town—would she know about it?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe not. How do I look?”
    “Fine.” Ordinary. As usual. “Marty, on Friday night—the night Sadie died—you went out and came back after your date with Jim, right?”
    “Right. I had to meet you.” She started to rummage through her closet and now pulled out a white blazer, which she shrugged into. “This?”
    “It washes you out. You’re a summer, I think. How about something pastel?” I heard myself nattering on, realizing exactly how silly I sounded, and wished I had more fashion advice I could use to avoid getting on with it.
    “Oh.” She rummaged again. “Maybe I can have it dyed.”
    “Marty, as you were leaving, did you see Julio leaving, too?”
    “Julio?” She held up a light blue jacket. “How about this?”
    “Much better. Did you see Julio?”
    “I don’t think so. I can’t remember.”
    If he had left when Marty did, when he said he did, then that argued that he hadn’t been the one who had taken her letter opener and windbreaker. It didn’t prove anything, but it seemed to make sense that the murderer wouldn’t have drowned Sadie, then left the building for some reason, then come back to set up the frame. And as long as Marty had been there, so, probably, had her jacket and letter opener.
    Oh, damn! It suddenly hit me that they could have been taken in advance, for a premeditated murder. I’d been imagining one of passion.
    Try as I might, I couldn’t get Julio off the hook in my own mind. Here was the scenario that played on my mental movie screen on the foggy drive back to Monterey:
    Sometime Friday, probably before six o’clock, Sadie talked to Julio about Esperanza, but contrary to his story, she did show him the pearl. He thought he recognized it and understood its worth. He stole it, either calling Katy first to verify its authenticity or calling her later to see if she’d pay a reward for its return. However, Sadie, having told no one else about the pearl, accused him of stealing it and he killed her. But Marty saw him leaving the roof, and Warren saw him in the parking lot. To cover himself, he invented the story he’d told me.
    The call to Katy had me going—because Julio’s story certainly rang true in one respect. Everyone I’d talked to—except Marty—had loved Sadie. Sadie was universally thought to be a wonderful person and clearly adored by children. So she would have kept Esperanza’s secret. She would have told no one about the pearl—probably not even Julio, but he was the one person she
might
have told, in an effort to get Esperanza out of trouble.
    There in the safety of Marty’s utterly uninspired bedroom, it sounded far-fetched. I thought maybe I’d worked myself into a lather about Julio’s guilt because I was really just nervous about dating him. But what was I, a teenager?
    Certainly not, I told myself. I was an adult woman, temporarily too smitten to remember she shouldn’t date a murder suspect. It had taken a strange twist of the paranoia mechanism to avert a near-error. Good judgment had been restored. Fine.
    “Time to go,” said Marty. “I don’t have time to drop you at your hotel, but I could take you to the aquarium. You’re near there, aren’t you? You could walk or get a taxi, I guess.”
    “Thanks.”
    I thought I would walk. It was a nice night and I’d stop for a bite along the way. I didn’t dare drive the rented car again. I might go to a movie if I happened to stroll past a theater. I needed to be out, so that if Julio called I wouldn’t know about it. My talk with Marty hadn’t cleared up anything.
    I would have gone right away, but Libby wanted to look at the fish while her mom did her errand, and she