Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

what?”
    But he’d already given us the punchline. I said, “It was the same as McKendrick’s.”
    He nodded.
    “Okay, let’s catch her tonight. What about right after work?”
    He nodded again, looking so satisfied I don’t think the word “smug” would be amiss.

Chapter Four
    There was nothing to do at that point but face Curry and Martinez. I phoned first and discovered that by that time there was only Curry, which sounded like a good sign and was. Rosalie had refused to give him the names of the three other Raiders without Chris’s permission, and so Curry was there to get it— not to read Chris her rights. I could have supplied the names, but did I? Ha. I made a big show of phoning Rosalie and telling her it was fine with us to give the nice police inspector their names and addresses— in fact, I said, we encouraged it. Fortunately, since she had the grace not to answer the phone, I delivered the information by mechanical means and could only hope she’d gone to spend a few days in the country.
    Kruzick, forced into uncharacteristic mildness with the heat on the premises, started doing little Columbo bits the second we were alone. If it weren’t for Nicholson and Schwartz, the term “unemployed actor” would have perfectly described Kruzick and— too bad for the rest of us— to him all the world was a stage. He didn’t communicate, he did
bits
. I would have fired him except that he was my sister Mickey’s boyfriend and my mom would have killed me. That day I went in my office and closed the door.
    I had two clients to see that afternoon and lots of paperwork to do, but none of that kept me from turning over and over in my mind what was for me the strangest part of the whole deal— Chris’s metaphysical confession. She had been so sad while she was speaking, and so focused, that she hadn’t once forgotten anyone’s name. Usually, she did that. She got over- exuberant and talked too fast and ended up saying “Pigball” or “Whizbang” rather than stop long enough to retrieve the name from her memory bank. The exuberant, excitable Chris hadn’t been there at all. True, she was in big, bad trouble, but I sensed it was more than that— she was worried about driving a wedge between us by telling all, maybe irreparably damaging the friendship.
    I couldn’t say it was in perfect shape. She had driven a wedge, though possibly by her secrecy rather than her confession. Yet I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to get around. It would take me awhile to assimilate it— not only the feelings of betrayal, the changes in Chris, but the notion of “psychic” as something real rather than a close cousin to stage magic. I didn’t know it then, on that worried afternoon just trying to get through, but over the next few days my entire world view would change, would shift as a result of what I knew now, and would never return to “normal” again. It was like a loss of innocence.
    Rob picked me up at the office, having left just after Adrienne did. Our plan was to call on her immediately, before she had time to go out for the evening.
    “How’s Chris doing?” I asked. “Did she find anything?”
    “Not yet.”
    He had settled her in the library with miles of microfilm of Jason McKendrick’s reviews.
    Jason and Adrienne lived on California Street, a few blocks west of Nob Hill, in a neighborhood that didn’t thrill me. If the truth be told, it wasn’t that far from where Rosalie lived, and it was about as rundown. Adrienne spoke through the intercom: “Who is it?”
    “Rob Burns. I need to talk to you about Jason.”
    A sound that was probably a sob came out of her throat, and she buzzed us in.
    She must have had time to change after work because she wasn’t wearing black. She had pulled a bleached-out pink T-shirt over a pair of white pants that fit like skin and resembled nothing so much as thermal underwear. She hadn’t bothered with shoes, and her hairdo, which clearly owed its sassy panache to usually defiant spikes, had started to droop.
    The room itself was absolutely astonishing— that is, if you considered that two adults lived there, one nearly forty and well established, the other making at least union wages. All four walls were lined with orange crates and bricks and boards containing books and records— many of them vinyl records, the real thing instead of CDs. There was a mattress on the floor with some rumpled sheets and a pancake of a