Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

“Danno.”
    “Eureka!” I shouted, but didn’t yet press the button. This was delicate— required face-to-face contact— and I wasn’t at all sure he’d simply invite us over.
    “I’ve got it,” said Chris, grabbing the receiver and pressing the button. “Hi,” she said, “is this Daniel, uh … Piperis. Is the last name right? I couldn’t quite read it. This is UPS, and we have a package for you, but it looks as if it got wet— the ink’s so smeared we can’t make out the address.
    “Where’s it from? Let me look again. New York, it looks like.” Short pause. “Well, I can’t read that either. Look, do you want the package or not? … Okay.” She gestured for a pencil and took down an address. For a minute I thought she was going to have the chutzpah to ask directions, but she hung up. “What a grouch. But no one can resist a mysterious package.”
    “Let’s get out of here.”
    It would certainly have been no shock to me to learn that Danno lived in a loft South of Market, but in fact he inhabited a shabby building not far from Chinatown and cheek by jowl with the Tenderloin, a slightly unsavory area that drew people who were new in town, who hadn’t much money or time to find a better place.
    Sleepily, he said, “I’ll be right down,” and when he appeared he looked like someone who’d just gotten home from a rave and hadn’t yet come down from it. He said, “Oh. I thought you were UPS.”
    “We’re looking for Adrienne.”
    “I remember you. Look, I already told you— I don’t know where she is.”
    “Danno, remember telling us about her brother? The one who was so ill?”
    “Sure; Sean. Adrienne and I were together when he died. She was real, real upset about that.”
    “We think she might have flipped out. Do you know what happened to Sean? Why he was brain-damaged?”
    “Some accident, I thought. When he was a baby.”
    “An accident caused by Jason McKendrick.”
    He whistled.
    “You know what we think that means?”
    He nodded. “First her mother, now her.”
    “Her mother?”
    “Well, Sean’s death flipped her out. The whole family’s kind of … oh, well, I guess they had reason. What do you want Adrienne for?”
    Chris said, “Whoever killed McKendrick did it with my car.”
    “Oh. Well.”
    “And then, a couple of nights ago, we were with some friends, and someone shot at us. It happened the day Adrienne ran away from the hospital.”
    “Boy, she’s really flipped.” It was a telling reaction, I thought. He might as easily have said, “Adrienne wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
    “Can you think of anywhere she might have gone? Is there anyone she felt she could trust? Who’d take care of her?”
    He scratched his nose. “Well, now that you mention it, yeah. Yeah, I think there might be somebody. But it might have been just one of Adrienne’s stories. She always brought up this ex-boyfriend when she was mad at me. She said the guy would take her back in a minute; she liked to point out how rich he was. And famous— he’s real famous, too. For a gangster.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Tommy La Barre.”
    “Holy shit.” I’d be a lousy poker player.
    “Yeah. I never quite believed her on that one.” He shrugged. “But you never knew with Adrienne. Maybe it was true.”
    Confronting a guy like Tommy La Barre wasn’t my idea of a fun afternoon, but the fact that he’d seen me with Rob would help. At least he wouldn’t kill someone so close to a reporter.
    Where the hell was Rob, anyhow? I phoned him again; again no answer.
    “I’m starving,” said Chris. It was nearly two. “Why don’t we drop in to Dante’s for a little something?”
    “Sure. Maybe Adrienne’s waiting tables over there.” La Barre was sitting in exactly the same place Rob and I had found him before.
    I hailed him. “Tommy. Remember me?”
    “Sure. The cub reporter. How’s it going?”
    “I got a weird tip. I heard you were involved with Jason McKendrick’s assistant.”
    His nasty little eyes glittered at me. “You heard that, did you?”
    “Yeah. I heard that.”
    He didn’t answer, just kept staring. For a while I held his gaze, but then I remembered that in my rational moments I think staring contests are stupid. I smiled. “Is it true?”
    “No, it’s not true.”
    I said, “Tommy, I think she killed Jason,” and regretted it almost immediately. What if the two of them were in it together? I’d been so caught up in the idea of Adrienne as