Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

feathers, his face and body painted— when I thought of it that way, my heart speeded up.)
    “I’m telling you I’ve been.”
    “What? ” I said again.
    “Hang on to your hat. That’s not the end of it. I’m a member of a men’s drumming circle. That’s where I’ve been tonight— want me to prove it? I left my drum in the car.”
    “Holy shit.”
    “Yes, we of the men’s movement feel that way. If it’s of the earth, it’s holy, shit included.”
    “Julio, not you. I can’t take it.” I was holding my face in my hands, rocking back and forth.
    He was laughing like a loon. “Rebecca, you are the silliest woman I ever met, you know that?”
    I don’t know how I knew— perhaps by one of those nonrational methods of Julio’s— but I was suddenly aware of a deep trust between the two of us that I hadn’t had a clue about. He’d told me his deepest secret, and even as I was telling him I couldn’t take it, I was aware how much I loved him for it— for telling me and knowing it wouldn’t make a particle of difference to me. Because I was just realizing it didn’t— the same way Chris’s confession didn’t change the way I felt about her.
    Julio had called it a few minutes ago— what was changing was the way I viewed the world. The downside was, it was against my will, my better judgment, probably nature, and undoubtedly the law.
    I said, “Has everybody in the world got some fucking horrible skeleton in the closet?”
    He was falling on the floor laughing.
    “Oh, can it. I’m not that cute when I’m mad.”
    “Yes, you are.”

Chapter Nine
    I stayed the night and got up early to drive back— no problem since Kruzick had canceled all my appointments. And as I was saying good-bye to Julio, having climbed into my Jeep so that I towered above him, he stood on tiptoe and got me to bend toward him so he could whisper something. “I was just kidding last night. I’m not really in a drumming circle.”
    I was outraged. “You shit!”
    “Or maybe I’m kidding now.”
    So if he didn’t have a secret before, he had one now— I had no idea if he was or wasn’t in the men’s movement. And I still had my secret. I hadn’t even slightly felt like bringing up such a downer as the big C, but at least he’d distracted me from it.
    At the moment I was deeply in love with him. We’d made love after he’d mocked me to his heart’s content (and convinced me I deserved it), and in the afterglow I thought back to what he said about the body being as important as the mind, and said to him that surely there couldn’t be a higher truth than this. As further proof (if any is needed) that men are less sentimental than women, he’d just laughed and said that was the sort of thinking that got people into trouble. At first I was pissed that he wasn’t as carried away by the moment as I was, but I knew he was right. It was the proper blend of truths that we strove for and could never get right. Damn him for being so alert at such a moment.
    Yet, what a man. Rob seemed so distant and cold compared to him. So obsessed with the trivia of being a star reporter while Julio was a virtual merman, swimming with the fish and seals, exploring the ocean, flowing with nature. It was such a terribly romantic concept. Yet what would my life be in Monterey? And in San Francisco he’d have no life at all. It was like the movie Splash — interspecies love.
    Rob was sitting in my office when I got there, obsessed as usual, annoyed that I was an hour late, and hot to get going. Chris, said Kruzick, was in court. Afterward, she was going to go over to the Chron and read some more clips.
    Rob said, “Could we get going, Rebecca? We’ve got an appointment with Tommy La Barre in half an hour.”
    “You actually made an appointment with him?”
    “Sure. Saturday night.”
    I realized I was so sure he was the killer I hadn’t thought of confronting him directly.
    We saw him at Dante’s, a marvel of high-tech black- and-white sophistication that managed to convey— I can’t think how— that this was the very zenith of Italian high-tech sophistication. And that it had cost roughly three smidgens more than the Giotto doors in Florence. He was drinking Pellegrino at the black marble bar, under a light fixture of cutting-edge simplicity. The sleeves of his white starched shirt were rolled to exactly the same spot on both arms, as if arranged by a well-trained robot. He was just under six feet, about five-ten I’d