Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

street on the basis of predictions by a psychic.”
    “You mean you wouldn’t have?”
    “Well, certainly not without consulting my own psychic.”
    Perhaps it
had
been a bit rash, and yet I wouldn’t have given up the experience. I hadn’t known there were people like that, people who seemed utterly normal, who by all accounts led perfectly normal lives, but who operated in a wildly different reality. Yet how was Roger DeCampo any different from a person who believed in the Judeo-Christian god, a concept no more provable than space aliens? The only difference I could see was that the prevailing culture supported one belief system and condemned the other.
    But there was no convincing Chris. To her, he was a nut case and that was the end of it. And honestly, I didn’t expect to convince her. I knew her, knew how her mind worked— or thought I did until the night she called me from the Hall of Justice.
    It was a Thursday night, nearly midnight, and I was snug in my bed, not yet asleep but well on the way. The thing she said, the first thing out of her mouth, was so urban, so typical of her, so nearly brittle: “Listen. Do you believe that she who acts as her own lawyer has a fool for a client?”
    I came bolt upright. “Chris, what is it?”
    Drunk driving, I thought. She didn’t drink that much, but what else could it be?
    This was her story:
    She’d been driving home, minding her own business, when a police car had stopped her. The officers therein had asked if she was Chris Nicholson, taken a good look at her car, wondered how it got all bent, and brought her down to the Hall of Justice where they’d asked a number of other impertinent questions. She’d made a scene, of course. They finally told her there’d been a hit-and-run a couple of hours before, and a witness had gotten her license number.
    At the Hall of Justice, she had been met by our old— I won’t say friends— our old acquaintances and rivals, Martinez and Curry of Homicide, who’d given her the notion she was in a heap of shit.
    I splashed water on my face, pulled on some clothes, and made it to the Hall in a little over twenty minutes. Thursday night was the worst possible time to get arrested. They could hold Chris for forty-eight hours without charging her, but since there was no court on either Saturday or Sunday, that meant my genteel Southern law partner had an excellent chance of spending three days and four nights in jail.
    There was only one solution— she had to talk her way out of it. It was ironic, since “clam up” was the first advice I usually gave anybody, but I desperately wanted Chris to sing like Pavarotti if that meant I could take her home that night. Because of course she had nothing to hide; not Chris.
    By the time I got to the Hall, she was the color of instant mashed potatoes, and she was smoking, something I’d never seen her do.
    “Since when,” I said, “have you been leading a double life?”
    She turned a becoming shade of pink. “What?”
    “Cigarettes. You’re a secret smoker.”
    “Oh.” She laughed nervously. “About three minutes. On the double life.” She wasn’t at ease, even with me.
    “What’s going on?” I said when we were alone.
    “Jason McKendrick was killed tonight.” She shrugged. “They think I did it. I can’t seem to talk them out of it.”
    “Jason McKendrick the critic? Is that who we’re talking about?”
    “Uh-huh.” He worked for the Chronicle, reviewed movies, music, and theater, and was more of a celebrity in our town than most people he covered.
    “Did you even know him?”
    She shook her head. But I thought uneasily about the way she’d blushed when I made the double-life remark. “Well, why you?”
    “Somebody plowed into him in a car that looks like mine, and apparently there was a witness who got the license number just screwed up enough that it came out the same as mine.”
    “Didn’t you say something about your car being bent?”
    “Well, yes, I didn’t even notice. I guess somebody backed into me in a parking space.”
    “Was there— you know— blood or hair or anything?”
    She turned red again. “I guess they’re checking that.”
    I sat back in my chair.
    “Did they give you a blood alcohol test?”
    “Just roadside sobriety. Which I passed.”
    “Did the witness describe the driver of the car?”
    She shrugged. “Martinez says so— he says they’ve got two witnesses. But he could be lying.”
    “This doesn’t look too