Death Turns A Trick (Rebecca Schwartz #1) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

by Julie Smith

  No worry about selecting an outfit, either. That had been done weeks ago: a red embroidered Chinese-style dress that had to be worn with pants, owing to the authentic side-slits. I’d discarded the tight black ones that came with it, found some soft jersey in the right color, and talked Mickey into making me some red ones. The effect was unorthodox, but very gay in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

  At 6:30, I looked out my window, saw no sign of Mickey’s Volkswagen, and cursed myself. Mickey was invariably twenty minutes late. If I’d remembered that, I wouldn’t have been sitting around crumpling up my new outfit. I was too impatient to read, and I was burned out on playing the piano. It wouldn’t take twenty minutes, but I could water my plants.

  After slipping on an apron to protect my dress, I filled my two-gallon watering can and emptied most of it on the potted palm. Moving on to the asparagus fern nearest the piano, I picked up the foliage to get the nozzle near the dirt and gave it the tag end of the two gallons. But it wasn’t nearly enough, so I refilled the can and splashed it liberally. Absentmindedly, I picked up the foliage of the other fern, stuck the nozzle in, and looked down to make sure I had it aimed correctly. A good thing, too, because if I hadn’t, I’d have defaced a bundle of United States currency, which is a crime. The nozzle was resting right on the bundle, which was snuggled down in the ceramic pot, nicely hidden when the foliage was in place.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I was so excited my hand jerked and I nearly drenched the bundle after all, but I deflected the flow in time, and it splashed harmlessly on the floor—harmlessly because I wiped it up right away, even before I took the money out and counted it. I did another thing before I handled the money: I put on gloves. Here, clearly, was the key to Parker’s release and possibly to the identity of the murderer. I didn’t want to risk smearing any fingerprints.

  There was $25,000 in that bundle. People had killed for a lot less. I was sitting there with the money in my lap, trying to put things together in my head, when I became aware of a petty annoyance somewhere outside—the persistent honking of a horn. I didn’t know how long it had gone on, but I knew what it meant. Mickey.

  Brought abruptly back to the real world, I practically panicked. For a few minutes I’d completely forgotten I was all dressed up and expected somewhere special. But when I thought about it, there was only one thing to do. There are few matters so pressing they could divert me from calling the cops immediately when I’ve just found a suspicious small fortune hidden in a flowerpot, but my parents’ thirtieth anniversary was one of them.

  In retrospect, I realize I could have just taken the money to the cops and driven my own serviceable Volvo to the party, arriving not more than an hour late. But at the time it seemed an either-or decision—the cops or the party. It had to be the party. I am nothing if not a good and dutiful daughter.

  I waved at Mickey to stop her infernal leaning on her horn. Then I realized I still had a problem. To take the money or leave it? The solution presented itself almost at once. No one with any sense walks around with $25,000 in her purse. For three days now, the bundle had eluded the murderer, the police, and me just by hunkering down in a flowerpot. There was no reason why it shouldn’t spend a few hours more there.

  My coat and purse were already lying across the back of one of the sofas, so I had only to replace the money and gather them up. I was in Mickey’s car not thirty seconds after making the decision.

  “About time,” she said. “There’s a creepy guy in that car.” She pointed to an undistinguished car parked on the curb in front of her ’66 Valiant. All I could see was the back of someone’s head.

  “How do you know?” I asked, fumbling with the seatbelt. “You can’t see him.”

  “Well, he’s just sitting there for no reason at all. And I did see him when I drove up. He looked around.”

  She started the car, and as we drove around the vehicle, I looked over. The man had put his hand to the side of his face, ever so casually, blocking it from view. But I did see something interesting: a hook on the visor above the passenger seat.

  I burst out laughing. “My dear girl, I’m under surveillance. That’s a police undercover car. Look at the hook.” But Mickey was concentrating on her driving. “What hook? I didn’t see anything.”

  “The hook on the visor; it’s to hang a red light on, in case there’s an emergency and the cop has to blow his cover to get through traffic. Now what the hell do the cops think I’m up to?”

  But I was feeling too giddy to care. I vaguely noticed the other car swing into motion behind us, and then I forgot about it. Let them follow me to Timbuktu, I thought, if that’s in their jurisdiction. It couldn’t do any harm.

  I gave Mickey an approving once-over. She had on a midnight blue dress with long sleeves, a sharp-pointed collar, and tailoring that made it cling like a natural integument. Her hair was gathered into a decorous coil on top of her head, an effect that conspired with prim pearl earrings to make a lady out of her.

  “Last Living Hippie Burns Jeans, Joins Military-Industrial Complex,” I said. “Tell me, Miss Schwartz, where have all the flowers gone?”

  She giggled. “You don’t look so bad yourself.”

  “After you, Alphonse. Listen, I’ve got $25,000.”

  “Mazel tov. Been to the track?”

  “You’re as bad as your boyfriend. I just found it. In my asparagus fern.”

  “Which one? And what have you been smoking?”

  “The one near the… Mickey! Are you paying attention?” The light, as they say, dawned. Her paranoia about the undercover cop, her seeming inability to be serious… She was the one who’d been smoking.

  “You’re stoned, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Ummm.” She smiled. “Half a joint left, if you want it.”

  I considered briefly, then decided against it. Very poor idea with that police car on our tail. “No,” I said. “But listen, get straight, will you?” Mickey can do this when she wants to.

  “Okay,” she said. “Please tell me in plain English how it is that you’ve struck it rich. If you continue to insist that money grows in flowerpots, I shall consider it my privilege to be as whimsical as I please.”

  I spelled it out for her.

  “Jesus Christ!” she said. “That’s what the murderer was looking for!”

  “Apparently.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  I sighed. “I wish I had one. The only thing that makes sense is that Kandi stole it from someone at the party who followed her to my house and killed her for it.”

  “As theories go, it sounds okay to me.” We rolled onto the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “I wish you were thinking straight,” I said. “There’s one gigantic flaw in it: who in God’s name would bring $25,000 to a whorehouse?”

  Mickey giggled some more. She seemed to enjoy the idea enormously, but I was plain cross. “What’s so funny about that?” I demanded.

  “Oh, but you poor fool,” she gasped. “You sure you don’t want some dope to clear your head? Nothing could be more obvious.” More inane giggles. I waited.

  “Don’t you see?” she said at last. “No one brought it there. It was already there.”

  “You mean she took it from Elena?”

  “Of course.”

  “Mickey, you really are exasperating. What is that stuff anyway?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Colombian something. Why not Elena?”

  “It’s the same problem. Who would have $25,000 lying around with 120 strangers in the house?”

  “Oh.” That stopped her. “I see what you mean. Elena isn’t exactly scatterbrained, is she?”

  I shook my head.

  “I know,” she said. “How about the fancyass client tied to the bed?”

  “So far as I know, he isn’t rich. Just influential. I don’t even know where he’d get $25,000. And, again, he wouldn’t be dumb enough to take it to a cathouse.

  “Come to think of it, tho
ugh, Kandi had a good chance to take it if he had. Elena said he came back for his clothes, and she’d had Kandi take them down to the basement. Kandi might very well have patted the pockets to make sure everything was there, discovered the money, and lifted it. Which would be perfectly safe because he didn’t know she was the one who moved his clothes. Elena told him she was going to do it herself.”

  “So he wouldn’t know Kandi had it,” said Mickey, “and therefore couldn’t have killed her for it. And furthermore, as you’ve previously pointed out, he didn’t have that kind of money and wouldn’t have brought it there if he did.”

  I groaned. “These are deep waters, Watson.”

  We were silent for a while, and my thoughts lightly turned to blackmail. Surely $25,000 was much too big a chunk for even Kandi to blackmail anyone out of—at one time, anyhow. But even assuming she had, it didn’t explain anything. A blackmailee wouldn’t just hand a wad like that over and then kill to get it back. Blackmailers got killed, sure, but not in those circumstances. If you were going to kill someone to stop her blackmailing you, you could just skip the charade of the last payment.

  Mickey and I were now climbing into the hills of Marin County, where my parents live. I hadn’t seen the undercover police car for quite a while, and it wasn’t behind us anymore.

  In case you are not familiar with California, I will tell you that Marin is the richest county in the state. It is the ultimate suburbia, because there you can have the convenience of being only a few minutes from San Francisco and the luxury of not having a neighbor in sight. The houses are built on large, frequently vertical lots along narrow, winding roads, and the lots are overgrown with redwoods and eucalyptus so that the nearby houses are blocked from view. You can walk your grounds and pretend to be a country squire; you can see rabbits and raccoons; you can let your cats and dogs run freely; your children need not play in traffic. But if you cough loudly, your neighbors will hear and arrive with chicken soup—or, more likely, with some nostrum from a health food store. It is a place where, if you can afford it, you can have a good many things both ways.

  My parents live on one of these winding roads, but their lot is nearly level. Their house is redwood and modern. The rooms are large, and windows are plentiful. Sliding glass doors across the back of the house open onto an indecently large deck. The evening was warm, so the party would doubtless spill out onto it.

  One of the few hardships of life in Marin County is the parking problem, but the denizens manage to keep a stiff upper lip. Mickey found a parking place about a quarter of a mile from the house.

  As we walked to the party, I was grateful it wasn’t raining. I was wearing my wicked-woman shoes, and they’d had about all the encounters with puddles they could take.

  Mom met us at the door, looking handsome in a black dress. One thing I’ll say for Mom; even though she was still young when her hair started to gray, she didn’t fight it. It’s coarse hair, and it turned a lovely silver, not white, with a black streak or two. I’d say it’s her best feature.

  She kissed us and we “mazel toved” her. We did the Alphonse-Gaston routine about our various outfits. “How’s Alan?” Mom asked Mickey. “I’ll never forgive him for missing our party.” But she would. Alan had the one acceptable excuse: a performance with a small, poverty-stricken theater group—which was as close as he ever got to gainful employment. We Schwartzes may be Jewish, but we are very big on the Protestant ethic.

  Mickey said Alan was fine and working hard. I smirked at both descriptions and Mom gave me a “tut-tut” or something close to it. My folks seem to like Alan, perhaps merely because he is Jewish. That gets you a long way with some families.

  It was a good thing Alan wasn’t there because he would have been eaten up with jealousy. Like all actors, he likes to be the center of attention, but there wasn’t a chance that night. Not with me there. There wasn’t a person at the party who hadn’t seen me on page one of the paper that morning, and precious few of them had missed me on TV. And there must have been three hundred people there.

  I didn’t know Mom and Dad had so many friends. There was the usual gaggle of relatives and old family friends, who kept pinching Mickey and me on the cheek and calling us “shana madeleh.” But there were tons of people I didn’t recognize, and some I knew from other contexts.

  In fact, it was rather a star-studded gathering: several local politicians, from San Francisco as well as Marin; some rather fancy folk from what is sometimes called “the business community”—toilet-paper satraps, hotel suzerains, well-known investors—but, refreshingly, no pimps or whores that I recognized.

  A thing I couldn’t help noticing was that, in this older crowd, most of the achievers were men. Not all—there was Betty Blaine, one of the county supervisors—but most by far. So I felt perfectly justified in playing up my little celebrityhood. It kind of balanced things.

  If I had a dollar bill for every time I told my story that night, I could take a week off and go to Mexico. I was on my third drink, and rather relieved when Daddy came along and insisted I eat something. Much more of that nonsense and I would have fallen on my face.

  Daddy looked reasonably presentable that night. He is a short man with good white hair, as opposed to Mom’s elegant silver, and he wears it collar-length. He has a fine hook nose that doesn’t make him look harsh, probably because his light blue eyes are always joking. Unlike the rest of us, he is fair. And unlike the rest of us, he affects clothing that seems to come out of free boxes at Berkeley communes. His pants are always too short, and brown if his socks are gray, gray if they’re brown. His suit jackets are two sizes too big, his shirts are always rumpled, and he generally sees to it that several grease spots are arranged artfully on his ties. Mom complains, but he says it’s good for jury sympathy. Establishes his credentials as a folks-mensh or something. All this probably has something to do with my feelings about personal vanity, but I don’t know what, exactly. If you want to know the truth, I think it’s cute. He is a folks-mensh, so he may as well look like one.

  That night he had on a dark blue suit—not expensive, but not aggressively ill-fitting, either—and a light blue shirt. I told him he was the handsomest man at the party.

  “I should be, darling,” he said. “I’m the youngest. Come and eat.”

  Like the obedient daughter I am, I followed him through the buffet line. My parents had gone all out. There was everything from chopped liver to fried wonton to poached salmon. I avoided most of the salads and took a lot of meaty things, on the theory that protein would keep me from getting drunk.

  It was warm enough for the deck if you had a couple of drinks in you, so we headed out there.

  “How’s it going, Beck?” Daddy asked, and I knew I was in for trouble. He is the only person in the world allowed to use that childhood nickname, and only under conditions of the most egregious seriousness. Even he had better not mess with “Becky” or “Becca.”

  Wary, I asked, “How is what going?”

  He stopped nibbling at a wonton. “The case.”

  “You haven’t told me how you liked my TV performance.”

  He shook his head. “I worry.”

  “What, you didn't like it?”

  “You didn’t tell me you implied you knew who the killer was.”

  “So?”

  “So it could be dangerous. Maybe the killer believes you; he goes after you next.”

  “Oh come on, Daddy.”

  “Beck, I think you’re in over your head. I want you to turn it over to me.”

  I felt tears swim in my eyes, tears of rage and disappointment. My father, of all people!

  “That’s what Parker’s mother wants me to do too. Nobody west of the Rockies seems to think I’m grown up or capable of doing a damn thing for myself!”

  I put my plate down, preparing to flounce away in a swirl of righteous indignation. But Daddy caught my arm, and I looked at him. There were tears in his eyes, too. “Bubee, it isn’t that. Your mother di
dn’t sleep last night.”

  “She’s got to learn I’m not a little girl anymore.”

  He patted my arm. “I know, darling. I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all. Will you forget I said anything?”

  “Okay,” I said. But I said it sulkily.

  “Rebecca?”

  “Yes?”

  “If it helps any, I’d feel the same way if you were a boy.” Oddly enough, it did help. Parents, after all, will be parents. “Daddy, will you tell me something honestly?” He nodded.

  “Don’t you think I’m a good enough lawyer to know when I’m in too deep? Don’t you think I’d call you in a minute if I thought I couldn’t handle it, or Chris couldn’t?”

  He considered for a few moments. Then he raised his eyes and looked straight at me. “You’re an excellent lawyer, Rebecca. Maybe a little inexperienced, a little bit rash…” He shrugged. “But you would not hurt your client by taking on something you couldn’t do. I have never seen your considerable arrogance get in the way of your judgment.”

  I laughed, because everything was all right again. “Arrogant, am I? Well, let me tell you something; if it goes to trial, God forbid, I’m going to need help.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you come in as co-counsel?” He squeezed my hand and nodded.

  It was a decision I’d made from the first. I knew I couldn’t let Parker’s safety ride on my narrow experience. Or, for that matter, on the impaired judgment of a person who was emotionally involved with him. But I was still hoping it wouldn’t go to trial.

  My appetite was back, so I went in to get some cake. Mom caught me this time. She didn’t say anything. She just engaged my glance, letting me know she couldn’t look at me without tears in her eyes. I was damned if I’d let her get away with it.

  “Take it easy, Mom,” I said. “I’m going to be all right, and so is my client.”

  “Rebecca, tell me the truth.”

  “Okay.”

  “She was a whore, wasn’t she? This, this,…Carol Phillips?”