Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons (21 page)

His face sobered quickly. “Oh, shit.”

I agreed with him.

“Look,” he said, “I think I know who Adrienne’s ex-boyfriend is— Danno, I mean.”

“And you didn’t tell me before?”

He turned slightly red. “Well, it was kind of like Chris and the key— I just didn’t put it together. There was this copyboy named Daniel— you know how people like that can kind of be invisible? It shouldn’t be, but it is, especially if there’s an age gap. You kind of only see people your own age. I don’t know how long he was there, but he’s been gone awhile— at least three or four months. Today I heard a couple of copyboys talking while I was getting coffee, and they kept saying, ‘Danno.’ Danno goes to a lot of South of Market clubs and reports on them, apparently. So it was something on the order of, ‘Danno says the Skullcap is only good on Fridays, but Eraserhead’s rockin’ every night.’ Not exactly riveting for your over-thirty stay-at-home, and I hadn’t had my coffee yet. But even in my unswift state, after the third or fourth ‘Danno,’ a bell started ringing somewhere off in the distance. Anyhow, I made inquiries. His name is Daniel Piperis, and yes, he and Adrienne used to be an item. He now works as a bike messenger, and every day at lunchtime goes to hang out with the other messengers at the corner of Market and Sutter, by the Sharper Image.”

I looked at my watch: eleven-forty. “Meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

“If you get there first, he’ll be the one with the dreads.”

“Piperis is black?”

“Piperis is pretending.”

The bike messengers in San Francisco are an institution we all hope the fax machine won’t destroy. They’re known for their daredevil ways, utter disregard for convention, and flair for fashion statements. When I got there, I saw Rob watching from across the street. There was only one guy with dreads, and he wore two pairs of shorts, one on top of the other, each in a different plaid, topped with a short-sleeved shirt in yet a third. I was willing to bet when he wasn’t on a bike, you could find him on a skateboard.

“The chap in the McKendrick tartan?” I said. “Let’s go get him.”

He hollered, “Yo, Danno,” something I’d never have done, considering the kid might have something big to hide. But he didn’t take off, instead waited politely.

“The great Rob Burns,” he said. “Don’t tell me, it’s a nationwide talent hunt for the next Herb Caen.”

“We’re looking for Adrienne Dunson.”

He did what was very nearly a classic double take. “Adrienne. I haven’t seen her in months. Adrienne! What was I thinking of? I wasn’t— it was all her idea.” Most of this speech was delivered more or less staring off into space. He came back into focus. “Sorry. I talk to myself. It’s one of the things she didn’t like about me.”

“Well, there’s some bad news and some good news. I might as well say it fast. The good news is that she’s up and around. The bad news is she took sleeping pills a few days ago. She was in a coma for a while. And then she disappeared from the hospital. You didn’t know any of this?”

“God, no.” He certainly looked stunned, whether he was or not. “No. I didn’t know any of it. Did she say why?”

“She’s gone missing, Danno. We thought she might have gone to stay with you.”

He looked sheepish. “She left messages. I guess I just kind of ignored them.”

“I take it you parted acrimoniously.”

“I don’t know what the deal is with Adrienne. She grew up in a family where one kid was desperately, desperately ill. I’m not sure what was wrong with him, but something; the whole family revolved around the kid’s illness. Adrienne would say things like, ‘We weren’t in denial or anything; it was just a part of life.’ Like every family lived with that. Like nobody ever told her how awful it was; especially the way no one paid any attention to her. I mean, I guess that’s what happened; I don’t know.” He got the spacey look again, and then his eyes came in for a landing. “The upshot is, that’s the coldest bitch I ever met in my life. The day I let her stay with me I’d have to be the one in a coma.”

“Wow. Strong stuff.”

“It was like she’d think of ways to get me pissed off. To make an enemy out of me, really. And she couldn’t have been more amazed when I told her to leave. She said, ‘But we’re such a great fit. We like all the same bands and movies and everything.’ Like she never noticed a damn thing was wrong.” He spread his hands. “I guess she was friends with McKendrick; I don’t know. Maybe he was just nice to her for old times’ sake.”

“Wait a minute. Are you saying they were an item before she came to the
Chronicle
?”

“Oh, God no. I mean, I guess not, I never even thought about it. He was pushing forty, I guess—” He stopped, mused, and shook his head. “Uh-uh. No way. But their families had been friends for centuries or something.”

This was more interesting still.

“They, you know, grew up together, sort of. Or I guess they would have if he hadn’t been a whole generation older.”

I’d like to think it was that conversation that most influenced my decision to fly to Atlanta. As Rob said when we had left Danno, he made Adrienne sound like a classic psychopath— definitely not someone you wanted gunning for you. Maybe, I thought, I could uncover the hidden motive, the ancient reason she’d finally had enough and run Jason down, and Martinez and Curry would pull out all the stops. I already had a theory to fit the keys— one so natural and obvious it had to be right. Adrienne was after all Jason’s assistant— he’d probably given her Chris’s keys and asked her to return them. Adrienne had copied down Chris’s address— maybe Jason had even read it off to her, on the telephone, perhaps— and he’d absentmindedly returned his own scrap to his pocket.

I did what Maurizio said, talked to my partner about going to Atlanta. She responded by closing her eyes and checking it out.

And so I cling to Danno; otherwise I’d be a person who had once more agreed— even after two dates with a flying saucer enthusiast— to meet someone because a gang of roving psychics thought it was a fine idea.

It was good for me to go to Atlanta. I hadn’t been before, and I found it humbling. There is just the tiniest tendency on the part of someone from San Francisco to imagine that she is sophisticated, cosmopolitan, a woman of the world, and that a person from Atlanta may be just a trifle less worldly wise. Five minutes in the Atlanta airport should dispel such fantasies.

In case there is anyone who hasn’t yet been— which I doubt, as I was told by the natives I was the last— you have to take a train to get from one concourse to another and said train, like those en route to the Interplanetary Council, travels at the speed of thought. Already it’s like science fiction, and you might just lean back to take it all in. Whereupon the train will scold you in a robot voice: “You are being delayed because someone has interfered with the doors closing. As soon as the doors close, we will depart.” I hear there’s an airport in Sarasota that’s similar; maybe there are more. I’m sure Roger DeCampo wouldn’t be half so strange if computers didn’t run trains.

I couldn’t figure out exactly how the thing is built, but what I think is that most of the airport is underground, and so you get that odd mole-like feeling you get in a casino, with no windows, only artificial light, and a general sense, in my case at least, of claustrophobia and depression; even, sometimes, a bit of desperation, the sort of thing spelunkers report when their candles go out.

Somewhere, somehow, after a ten- or twenty-mile journey from the gate, with robots yelling at me and my eyes trying to adjust to the dimness, I spotted a familiar sight— my own name hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard.

The person holding it can only be described as a hunk— about six-feet-two, shoulders like Atlas, and a face that reminded me a little of Richard Gere. A face that went with that voice. He wore shorts and an open-necked polo shirt. A lightning bolt on a chain nestled into thick, lovely chest hair.

“Maurizio?” I hadn’t expected a psychic to be so physical.

“Rebecca. I’d know you anywhere.”

“You’d know me? How could you know me? Surely you aren’t that psychic.”

“Oh, but I am. I closed my eyes, and I pictured you exactly. Only I thought you’d have red hair.”

My hair is dark, my eyes brown, my skin close to olive; surely if I had red hair I’d have green or blue eyes and pink or gold skin— in other words, I could hardly look more different. I said, “Two eyes, two arms, that sort of thing.”

“No, really, I got your height and build exactly. And the hairstyle.”

“No fair on the hairstyle— everyone wears their hair like this nowadays.” Side-parted, shoulder-length— my hairdresser calls it the “triangle.”

“Not your sister. She still has long, thick, seventies hair; cascades of non-nineties curls.”

I had no answer for that one. She did.

We had arrived by now at Maurizio’s car, and he announced that he was taking me to my hotel, where I would be left alone until dinnertime, when Michael McKendrick would arrive to take me to dinner— at Maurizio’s.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “All this and you’re cooking, too?”

He shrugged. “Just some chicken and a few amusing little Cuban dishes. Most of it I made for my last dinner party and froze the leftovers.”

“Come on. You’re going to a lot of trouble.”

“I like Michael even if he did dump me. And anyway, it’s part of the job—Rosalie pays me to read for her, you know.”

I stared out the window and thought you’d never guess from the cool cocoon of the car that it was a blast furnace out there. They called freeways expressways here. Did I feel free to express my doubts?

Finally, I said, “You mean psychics have to take care of perfect strangers from three thousand miles away?”

“I like to help people. This job has been good to me.” There was infinite dignity in the way he said the simple words, not a wasted one in the bunch. He didn’t look at me, kept his eyes on the road, just spoke as if stating he enjoyed eggs for breakfast.

“Do you make a living at it?”

“Reading the cards?” He shrugged. “Did I mention I read on the psychic line? You know, as advertised on TV? Call a number, get a reading? Whathehell, it’s
almost
a living. I’m a gardener, too— or I was. Right now I’m mostly a caregiver— a sort of nurse— for someone who’s very ill. I take my psychic line calls at his house. You see, I can do both jobs at once, and it almost adds up to one good job. And I do the nursing for love; it’s an old friend who’s dying. I’m all he has left now, and he can pay me something, but not much. With the psychic line I can do it.”

“That’s how the job has been good to you?” Maybe he was a saint, but then again maybe he was just a little too good to be true.

“Oh, no, it got me out of Miami. You know how ugly that town is right now? Anyway, I wanted to come here because my parents moved here a few years ago— couldn’t take it down there anymore. But I had a good business— a gardening business with five employees and three trucks. I was afraid to move. The psychic line gave me something to tide me over, just enough, till I could get going here. And I did some good readings for myself. I knew I had to come here.”

For the first time, he looked at me. “I forgot something, I realized. I didn’t read the cards until I got the job.”

“What, you’re an amateur?”

“Hey, you have it or you don’t.”

“But what happened? Why did you apply for a job you didn’t know how to do?”

“I didn’t. I got into it through my mother. I guess I should really start at the beginning. My mother read cards when I was a kid. This isn’t Cuban, you know, but she learned it— it went with the other stuff she did. Santeria, you know what that is?”

“I don’t think so.”

“A kind of magic. A funny religion that came to Cuba from Africa. Or, that is, it wasn’t Santeria then, but it got all mixed up with Christianity. Like voodoo— you know voodoo?”

“Not intimately.”

“But you know what it is?”

“Haitian magic, I guess. I don’t know much about it.”

“And you probably don’t want to, right? It gives you the creeps. How would you like it if your mother had a secret altar in a closet and you were always finding eggs sunk in weird liquids and stuff like that? Believe me, we kids were grossed out. And embarrassed. How unassimilated can you get, huh?

“But all Cubans do it, I’m convinced of it: at least all the women. They go to church on Sunday, and then they go home and make an offering to their saint.”

“Saint? That isn’t Christian?”

“See, Santeria and Christianity are mixed up, like I said. The santeros call them saints, but really, they’re Yoruba deities. See this?” He dangled the lightning bolt around his neck. “My mom gave it to me. It means I’m a child of Chango, a black, male deity. But if you opened my mother’s secret closet, you’d find a statue of Santa Barbara there. That’s Chango also— the early practitioners had to disguise what they were doing.”

I could imagine.

“Well, anyway, I’m off the subject. I just meant to say I grew up a little weird— at least compared to the other kids. We always had magic around the house, and so when my mother learned the Tarot it was just another thing. By the way, the Santeros have all kinds of divination, but you have to go to a professional and pay money. I guess Mom got tired of it. Anyway, the cards weren’t even half as weird as most of the stuff she did. I was just a little kid and wanted to see what Mom did, so she taught me. And I was damned good, too— right away I was good. In fact, I was a lot better than she was. Like I said, you have it or you don’t. But of course a boy couldn’t do stuff like that. The other kids might find out. So I quit and forgot all about it. You’re not going to believe what happened next.”

“Your mother called the psychic line and the psychic said have your son call me.”

He turned around and stared so long I feared for our safety. “How’d you know that?”

I shrugged. “Lucky guess.” Then I got pleased with myself. “Is that it? Really?”

“Oh, well, I guess it was easy. Anyway, I started reading, and I got popular, so they gave me a raise and pretty soon I got out of Miami. So I guess the moral is listen to your mama.”