Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

I’d have picked for someone like Jason.
    I was thinking how different people can be from their public personas when Adrienne said, “Maybe I could go to my dad’s. I could stay in my old room and act like a hermit.”
    I nodded. “Good. We’ll take you.”
    “But it’s so quiet there.”
    I looked around. It had to be better than this.
    Rob and I waited while she packed a few things, pulling clothes out of a vanity in the bathroom— an odd place to keep them, but nothing about the household seemed ordinary. And then we drove her across the Bay, me in the backseat, Adrienne next to Rob.
    “I’m assigned to the murder story,” said Rob. “I guess you know that.”
    “Murder. Jeez! It’s so fucking hard to believe.”
    “I was wondering if you know of anybody who was mad at him; you know, had a grudge, anything like that.”
    Slowly, she shook her head. “The police asked me that, and I really can’t think of anyone. I mean, people threatened to get him fired all the time, but that was just business as usual. It was just a thing. You know, after a bad review. A day or two of temper tantrums, and that was that.”
    “Really? Because if anyone would know, you would. You must have been the person closest to him in the world.”
    She shrugged, her face angry. “I don’t know if he was close to anyone.”
    “But you were his girlfriend and his assistant. You can’t get much closer than that.”
    She turned toward him abruptly. “I wasn’t his girlfriend.”
    “But…”
    “Oh God, no. Do I look like his type? He was just letting me stay at his place for a while. I mean, after I broke up with Danno, I didn’t have any place to go.”
    “Well, I’m glad to hear that. I thought he was cheating on you with all those other women.” He paused, made the next question casual. “Who has he been dating, by the way?”
    “Oh, Jason. He always had a million women. Usually one at a time, though. Lately, I guess, Felicity Wainwright was the most usual. She’s an oncologist. Weird, huh? But I think he was about to dump her. He was starting to have lunch with Sabrina Gelderman. That was usually how he started out. But women called him all the time, you know. He had a ton and a half of them.”
    “Always dangerous,” I said. “If he dated them, he must have dumped them— at least some of them.”
    She shrugged. “They never seemed to get mad. But then, he did have a little secret.”
    “What?” Rob and I spoke together.
    “Oh, it’s just something I think. I can’t prove it or anything.”
    “But what?” A reporter never gives up.
    “Just talk to Felicity, why don’t you. And maybe Vanda Ragusin— she was right before Felicity.”
    “Ms. Ragusin didn’t get mad when she got dumped?”
    “I don’t know. It was like the people he reviewed. For a day or two, maybe. Yeah, she might of called up a couple of times and left snotty messages.” She turned up a palm. “But that was about it.”
    Rob said, “He must have been a pretty smooth guy. I’d be pretty pissed if someone dumped me.”
    Maybe he was trying to tell me something. I had dumped him— he’d found out when he saw my picture in the paper with someone else— but he hadn’t seemed even slightly pissed about it. Which, of course, was one of the reasons he needed dumping. Mr. Passion.
    Before we dropped Adrienne off, we extracted more names from her— those of Jason’s closest men friends and couple friends; there were no women friends, she insisted, even herself.
    It was early yet, and I had a date with Julio, the man Rob thinks I dumped him for (though of course it wasn’t like that), but nothing was so urgent as keeping Chris out of jail. I’d called Julio and told him what was going on— told him not to come up from Monterey, where he lived. But his daughter was with her mother that weekend and he was lonely, I guess. He didn’t care how late I was going to be— he’d come, let himself in, and see me when I got home, he said.
    I wasn’t happy about that— I was wildly preoccupied— but I was too distracted to say so. I tried not to think of him as Rob and I talked about what to do next. The police might work all weekend— who were we to slack off? But as it happened, we had little choice. Only one of the people whose names we had was home— Vanda Ragusin— and she was just going out. But she could see us first thing in the morning if we’d like.
    A capital idea, we thought. We’d call on not only Vanda, but as