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

by Julie Smith

  “Please do,” said Ziller.

  “Well, there’s also the possibility he showed up at the bordello for some reason having to do with Kandi Phillips, who once worked for the High-Life service, and that he followed her to my apartment and killed her.”

  I gave them a moment to chew on that, and then I continued with the rest of Ziller’s question.

  “Okay now, about that meeting at the restaurant yesterday. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I looked very different then from the way I looked the night before. I don’t think someone I’d met casually for five minutes would have recognized me, unless he’d expected me and known I’d be with Jeannette von Phister. Another thing—Jaycocks didn’t approach me until Jeannette went to the ladies’ room, which makes me think he might have been watching and waiting till he could get me alone.”

  “You mean he went there deliberately to see you.”

  I shrugged. “He said ‘I’ve been looking for someone like you.’ I don’t get it either, considering I’m just an average-attractive workaday woman, but I did notice at Elena’s that each of the prostitutes was a different type; I mean, each one made an attempt to cater to a different kind of fantasy. It could be that whatever meager attributes I have just weren’t represented at the High-Life service.”

  I don’t mind telling you that this speech made me pretty uncomfortable, but I said it because I thought it was true—I still do, though I must admit there’s no accounting for taste in matters of sex.

  Shipe lit a cigarette and blew the smoke rather artfully, so that it didn’t seem it was aimed for my face, but that’s where it went. He let his glance stray contemptuously over my disheveled person, letting me know what a preposterous idea I’d just proposed.

  “Why didn’t he just call you up?” he asked finally.

  “He didn’t know who I was, which is why he tried to kill me.”

  “We’ll get to that. Suppose you tell me now how he knew where to find you, and when and with whom.”

  “Jeannette reconfirmed the date at the bordello the night before. He must have overheard us.”

  “Pretty farfetched.”

  “Look, I saw him standing within earshot. The man is a policeman, presumably trained in eavesdropping techniques and in retaining what he hears. I can’t prove he overheard us, but I can tell you that’s the only time I ever saw him, and he showed up the next night where I said I’d be and handed me that card.” I was harping on the card because it was the only tangible bit of proof I had.

  “Okay,” said Shipe, weary, doing his best to show me how he suffered at the hands of liars and screwballs who tried to undermine the honor of his brother officers. “Okay. Let’s get to the part about—uh—trying to kill you. Why would he want to do a thing like that?”

  “About a half hour after he handed me that card, Inspector, I appeared on the eleven o’clock news of every television station in this town, clearly identified as a lawyer rather than a prostitute. This morning my picture appeared on page one of the San Francisco Examiner. The accompanying story identified me not only as a lawyer, but also as a lawyer for HYENA—that is, a lawyer who handles the cases of prostitutes, a lawyer he was almost sure to meet on a case sometime, who might actually cross-examine him while defending some prostitute he’d busted. And if that happened, I’d know he was a cop. And I’d realize he was a crooked cop. And I’d tattle on him, and he’d be not only out of the police department, but most probably in jail. Knowing too much will get you dead in every cheap novel ever written—and apparently in real life, too.” The last came out a little bitterly, a little too defensively, as I remembered how close I’d come to drowning in my own living room.

  “I came home and found him pointing a gun at me,” I continued quickly, “and then he slugged me, and then he tried to rape me, and then he nearly drowned me. Also, he told me he planned to kill me and why.”

  Ziller actually patted my hand. “You look like you’ve pretty well been through it, Miss Schwartz. Let’s move ahead to what happened tonight. First of all, why don’t you tell us about that $25,000 you brought in with you?”

  “I found it in a flowerpot just before I left to go to my parents’ house. I realize now I should have brought it right over here, but—”

  “Damn right you should have,” said Shipe.

  “Well, I meant to as soon as I got home. I was looking up your phone number when that brother officer of yours stepped out of my kitchen and stuck a gun in my ribs.” I gave them the details, faltering only when I got to the part about Jaycocks trying to drown me.

  Shipe held up a stubby-fingered hand. “Hold it, Miss Schwartz. Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Jaycocks was trying to get you to tell him where the money came from, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Let’s go back to your theory that he may have murdered Miss—ah—Phillips. I presume you’re assuming the money was the motive?”

  I hesitated; that theory wasn’t looking terrific even to me by then. “That’s what I thought at the time—and what I accused him of—but I don’t know; it just doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems too coincidental, for one thing, that he should first try to solicit, and then try to kill the very person in whose apartment he’d just killed someone else.”

  Ziller tried to be helpful again. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Well, there’s more. If he killed her, he knew where the money came from, and there wasn’t much point in trying to find out whether I knew—I mean, assuming he’d already made up his mind to kill me, which I contend is what he was doing there. Also—I know it sounds strange considering I’m talking about a man who’s no doubt an accomplished liar—but he genuinely seemed not to know what I was talking about when I accused him of the murder.” I shrugged. It was the only way I knew of expressing my discomfort. “I don’t think he did it.”

  “Did he give any indication why knowing where the money came from was so important to him?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re full of theories, Miss Schwartz. Don’t you have one about that?”

  I was getting mad. “Hell, the guy’s a sadist,” I snapped. “How do I know what he considered a good excuse to play torture games?”

  “Well, think, Miss Schwartz.”

  Shipe was nearly as bad as Jaycocks. How was I supposed to know? But I’m as good a guesser as the next person.

  “The only thing I can think of,” I said, “is that he was trying to figure out whether it was safe to steal it.”

  “If he was going to kill you anyway, there wouldn’t be any witnesses. Why wouldn’t it be safe?”

  He had a point. Presumably nobody would know he’d killed me and therefore that he’d stolen the money. Unless of course he’d told someone he planned to kill me, but that wasn’t likely. Even if he were somebody’s sometime hit man—George’s, say—his reason for killing me was clearly personal.

  Then maybe the knowledge of where the money came from could be potentially more valuable than the money itself. Perhaps he could use it for blackmail. Or to curry favor with someone. But that meant he had to have some general knowledge of what it was doing there, and he was grasping for the specifics—a few missing tiles in a mosaic he could see, but I couldn’t.

  Personally, I didn’t think it was a bad theory, but I knew it wouldn’t cut any ice with Shipe, and anyway, I didn’t see why he was asking me.

  “It would seem,” I said, “to be your job to find out why he did it—probably by asking Officer Jaycocks himself. Why ask me?”

  For the first time, Shipe smiled. “Because you’re an intelligent woman, Miss Schwartz. You wait here a minute. We’ll be right back.”

  And they left, just like that. In a minute, a guy with a camera came in. “You Miss Schwartz?” he said. “Mind if I take a few pictures of those bruises?”

  “I hope you’ve got color film.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Ziller and Shipe came back when he was done,
looking pleased with themselves. Smiling even. What was this?

  Ziller patted me again, my shoulder this time, and for the first time it occurred to me his concern might be genuine. “Looks like we’ve got a pretty good case,” he said. “By the way, you might like to know Jaycocks was at the bordello on police business—got a tip, like you said.”

  “Sorry we had to be so hard on you, Miss Schwartz,” said Shipe. “But when the suspect is a policeman, you’ve got to be about five times as careful that you’ve got a good witness.”

  I was having trouble assimilating the seeming change of heart. “You mean you believe me?”

  “Look, ma’am, rubber hoses are one thing, but good cops usually don’t hit lady lawyers and then dunk them like doughnuts. Your appearance kind of spoke for itself; what is it you lawyers say?”

  “Res ipsa loquitur.”

  “That’s it.” He looked doubly pleased with himself, now that he’d shown off his erudition. “Look, I guess it’s okay to tell you now. There’ve been rumors about Jaycocks for a long time, and everybody knows he’s a mean son of a bitch as well. This doesn’t come as the greatest surprise in the world. We had to get the best story we possibly could from you, but if you think we were tough, you should have seen what Jaycocks has been going through. We just went out to see the guys who interrogated him; his story stinks.”

  “So what does that mean—a departmental investigation?” I didn’t have much faith in those.

  “It means he’ll be booked for aggravated assault in a few minutes.”

  Well, lordy, lordy. The system wasn’t worthless after all.

  They sent me home in a patrol car and had an officer walk me to my door and everything.

  I flung myself into a hot bath and then into bed, but that proved to be a mistake. I should have made a few phone calls first.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I slept for about two minutes before the phone woke me up. At least that’s what it seemed like, but the sun was already coming through my eyelet curtains.

  “Darling, are you all right?” said my mother. Crossly, I wondered if she possessed any other conversational gambits. “Certainly, Mom. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Thank God.” She started sobbing. Then it dawned on me what had happened: Rob Burns’s story must have made the home edition of the Chronicle. I’d foolishly assumed it was too late for that.

  “Oh God, Mom, you must have seen the paper. I had no idea it was going to be in or I’d have called you. Look, I’m perfectly all right. Really. Just a couple of bruises.”

  “Darling, you could have been killed.” There was some truth to this, but I thought it best to play it down.

  “I’m tough, Mom. You raised me to look after myself.”

  “Rebecca, sweetie, I’m asking you. I’m begging you. Think of your father if you won’t think of yourself. If you got killed, you wouldn’t even know about it. But your father would have a stroke. He’d be paralyzed for life. You’ve always been his favorite, Rebecca—”

  This was pretty extreme, even for Mom, and it frightened me instead of making me angry. I was putting her through a lot.

  “Mom, Mom, take it easy,” I said. “I’m really sorry about all this. I—”

  Seizing the advantage, she jumped right in. “Darling, turn the case over to your father.”

  “Oh, Mom, I can’t. Listen, let me talk to him.”

  “I’m here,” said Daddy. He was on the extension. Unnecessarily, I told Mom to stay on too. I knew she’d as soon have joined HYENA as hang up.

  “I haven’t even seen the paper,” I said. “Could somebody read it to me?”

  Daddy did. According to Rob, Frank’s story was that I’d solicited him for prostitution and given him my key, like he’d told Pink-face, and he’d planned to arrest me as soon as money changed hands, but I’d resisted. The piece also contained a detailed account of my story and a vivid description of my bedraggled and bruised appearance. Apparently, Rob had gotten the whole thing from the police.

  But there wasn’t a word in the story about the money. For some reason, the cops hadn’t seen fit to mention it; probably because it knocked a big hole in their case against Parker. I told Mom and Dad about it. Also, I told them about meeting Frank at Elena’s and then again at the Washington Square Bar and Grill.

  “Frankly, I think he twisted my arm and pushed me in the aquarium because he was actually trying to get information,” I said. “I don’t really think he killed Kandi for the money—and the police must not think so, either, since they didn’t book him for murder. Which means the attack had nothing to do with the case; it would have happened whether Kandi’d been killed or not. I mean, the danger came from his trying to solicit me, not my working on the case.”

  “He could have been trying to find out how much you knew about the money even if he were the murderer,” Daddy suggested.

  “No. I accused him of the murder and said I thought Kandi’d left the money there. If he actually were the murderer, he’d already gotten as much information as he needed. He didn’t have to drown me.”

  Daddy conceded the logic of that. “Okay, Beck,” he said. “Just let me know if you need any help.”

  But Mom wasn’t done. “Rebecca, darling,” she said, “why did you have to go to that silly bordello party in the first place? Weren’t you brought up to realize the criminal element is dangerous? You of all people? Darling, I just can’t understand why a nice girl like you would dress up like that and…” It was the speech I’d been dreading.

  “Mom, look, it was a silly thing to do, and I’m sorry. I promise I won’t—”

  “But darling, I don’t understand—”

  “I don’t really understand it myself, Mom. Gotta go now.” I hung up and stretched, trying out my right arm to see if it still worked. It was stiff, but the pain was bearable. I figured another hot bath would do a lot of good.

  So I walked into the bathroom, squeezed the Flokati rug as usual, picked off a few feathers and, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, looked at myself in the mirror. And made a vow never again to say an unkind thing about another woman’s appearance.

  Half the right side of my face was an arresting shade of purplish brown and twice its normal size. All the make-up at Elizabeth Arden wouldn’t disguise it.

  So I’d just have to be brave. I soaked for a long time, putting off going to see Parker. But it had to be done sometime; he was probably going to be charged that day and arraigned the next, unless Martinez had evolved overnight into a person of normal intelligence.

  Parker’d seen the paper, so he didn’t do a double take when the Bride of Frankenstein walked in. He kissed my bruises ever so gently, even the one on my right wrist left by Frank’s beefy fingers. “How do you feel?”

  “Fine. The worst part was being interrogated down here.” That wasn’t strictly true, but I thought he might be able to identify with it.

  “Rebecca, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t go getting guilty on me, you ape. It had nothing to do with Kandi or the case or you.”

  I was pretty happy with the way he reacted to the thing; he was coming back to his old self: the Parker who liked me—loved me, maybe—but didn’t need me for a surrogate mother.

  So I said: “Let’s talk about you.”

  “Okay. I took my polygraph.”

  “Good. Did you pass?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll ask Martinez. But tell me something else first. How much money were you carrying the night of Elena’s party?” I watched to see if his face gave anything away. There wasn’t even an eyelash flicker. “About fifty dollars. Why?” I told him. I may not be a physiognomist, but I swear I couldn’t see a thing in his face except bewilderment, then pleasure, as he realized the money could get him off the hook. He whistled. “It kind of blows the theory that I hit her in anger.”

  “That’s my opinion. But Martinez has a lot invested in that little theory. I’m going to see him right now. With any
luck, I’ll have you out today. Otherwise—uh—they’ll charge you today and I’ll meet you here at nine o’clock tomorrow for your arraignment.”

  * * *

  Martinez was chewing on a pencil and looking grumpy. “You look like hell,” he said. I asked him what he made of the money. “We’re investigating,” he snapped.

  “It’s what the murderer was looking for, you know. It kind of argues that Parker didn’t do it.”

  “You don’t have to prove motive in a murder case. We got witnesses that saw him at the scene, and we got a print on the murder weapon.”

  “He told me he took his polygraph,” I said, holding my breath.

  “Inconclusive.”

  Damn! The things aren’t admissible in court, but the cops love them. If Parker’d passed, Martinez probably would have been a lot more reasonable.

  “He was probably nervous when he took the test.”

  “How do you get around the fingerprint?”

  “That’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about. Whereabouts was that print?”

  “Around the middle of the statue, I think. What difference does it make?”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as an awkward way to grab a club? I mean, wouldn’t you grip it near the top?”

  “I might. Your client apparently wouldn’t.”

  “You’re pretty determined to charge him, aren’t you?”

  “Damn straight.”

  That Martinez should see a shrink. I’ve never seen a man more hell-bent on self-destruction.

  It would have been unladylike to stalk out, so I just made a dignified exit without another word. Then I broke the news to Parker that he was probably going to be charged.

  Seething, I went back to my office and made coffee, to have something to do with my hands, since Chris was on the phone and I couldn’t buttonhole her quite yet. I counted to a hundred while the coffee cooled and noticed my hand didn’t shake when I picked up the cup.

  Chris and I have only two tiny little rooms opening off a tiny little entry way, so I could easily hear when she hung up. I poured another cup of coffee for her, went into her office, and plunked myself down in the client’s chair. “Oh, you poor peach,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d look this bad.”