Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

possible from those people.”
    “Yes, but some of your ex-clients probably know people who know people. How about making some inquiries?”
    “People get killed for that kind of inquiry.”
    “Come on, Dad. Nobody’s going to kill Isaac Schwartz— who’s going to be the killer’s lawyer when his case comes to trial?”
    “With all due modesty, you have a point. Okay, I’ll phone around. But I just gave myself an idea with that remark about my esteemed clientele carrying my card. Maybe that’s why McKendrick had Chris’s number— because she’d been recommended as a lawyer.”
    “But why hasn’t the person who recommended her come forward?”
    “Well, that’s easy. Because they don’t know her car was used in the murder and couldn’t possibly know her name and number was in his pocket.”
    “I don’t know— I’ve talked to a lot of McKendrick’s friends.” But I knew it need not be a friend. It could be the most casual acquaintance. And the theory still didn’t explain why her car was used— unless that person was the murderer.
    Now that had merit. But still— why frame Chris?
    I figured I must have formed something in the neighborhood of fifteen theories about the type of person who’d killed McKendrick and the circumstances under which it had happened, yet none of them covered everything. Everywhere I turned there was some dead end, some unexplained detail. It was the most frustrating thing I’d ever run into.
    “Rebecca Schwartz. Roger DeCampo.” The Cosmic Blind Date was standing right in my path, blocking my way, sounding like a prison guard and holding out his right hand to be shaken. In a daze I obliged and introduced Dad. “What are you doing in these parts?” I asked.
    “You know that little problem I told you about? The one you’re going to help on? I came down to do a little work on that.”
    “But, Roger, I thought we agreed I couldn’t take the case.”
    “We didn’t agree to anything. You said you wouldn’t, that’s all. But you will.” He gave me one of those bottom-of-the-face smiles; frankly, I found it chilling.
    “Nice to see you, Roger.” I glanced at my watch. “I’m afraid we’re late.”
    I pushed past him, Dad following a little reluctantly— he hated rudeness.
    Roger shouted over his shoulder, “I’ll call you.”
    “Former client?” Dad said.
    “I’ll tell you all about it. But first, what’s your take on him?”
    “He seemed to be having a little trouble with reality- saying you’re going to take a case you’ve refused. And I didn’t like the smile.”
    I wondered if Chris had been right about Roger all the time.
    I told Dad the story. “What do you think?”
    “Well, I guess he must be a little nuts. I mean, even if the subject weren’t UFOs, how could a sane person get so involved with other people’s obsessions?”
    Suddenly I had a new thought. He’d said to me, “It may not be obvious to you, but I am one of the major players of the universe.” I’d thought he was joking, what else was I to think? But maybe he was just a guy who wanted to belong, and the UFO club was what had invited him.
    I thought about the human need to be special, how we all want to believe we’re somebody just a little more important than the next guy. What if you had nice friends, perfectly ordinary, but also very special people who told you you’d been seen at the Interplanetary Council? I tried to imagine people saying it to me: “Now, Rebecca, it’s written in the Akashic Records. You! Yes, you. Well, you’d better believe it because it’s true. You’re really a very important person, galactically speaking. Sure, the world’s full of lawyers, but how many of them are making the kinds of decisions that influence the course of history?”
    I’d at least be intrigued. And if they were people I really trusted, really liked very much— Chris and Julio, say— I might, in time, come to want very much to join their club, in much the same way I’d suddenly embraced Chris’s psychic world view. What a wonderful escape it would be! I wouldn’t be crazy, really. Just someone who had crackpot ideas. But if I started to live more and more in that world, I’d probably get weirder and weirder, much as Roger seemed to be doing. It was a little like a cult, I thought— sort of a pervasive self-hypnosis.
    Dad said, “Still, I knew a perfectly nice woman who’d been abducted by spacemen. Someone I respected. I didn’t know about the ETs until