Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

by Julie Smith

  The Ship’s Galley, where hundreds chowed down on Bay burgers, bagels, and Kabuki Yakitori, was dark, noisy, and normal. And so it went. The Trapper, so far as we could see, was not lurking at the Art Fair Outside Gallery (featuring framed San Francisco posters and cute animal pictures), nor at Chocolate Heaven, nor at the Music Box Store. Mostly, we were taking a cursory look wherever we went, not knowing whom or what to keep our eyes peeled for, but the Palace of Magic took Rob’s fancy.

  Here you could buy fascinating paraphernalia for the childish mind—bald wigs, fangs, frothing blood capsules, glow-in-the-dark face paint, thumb cuffs, switchblade combs, and smoke that came out of your fingers when you said “Abracadabra!” We got so engrossed the Trapper could have trapped us and held us for ransom. I may as well admit it—we bought one of each of the above. (At Rob’s instigation, of course. I feel quite sure I could have resisted if I’d been alone.)

  Somewhere near the middle of the complex is Center Stage, where a juggler was keeping three chain saws in the air. If anyone had given him the slightest little push, the carnage would have been horrific. But no one did. We walked past the crowd around him, past more stores. But all was serene.

  We still had the second tier of the complex to explore—the one where restaurants with a close-up Bay view are crowded in among the souvenir shops. And by now I was so hungry I was as cross as two sticks (a southernism I learned from my Virginia-born law partner). So we went to the Eagle Cafe, the jewel of the pier and the one authentic Only in San Francisco bit of memorabilia in the whole place. It had green Formica tables with ketchup bottles on them, and the entire restaurant, dating from 1927, had been moved from its previous location to Pier 39 in 1978. We felt almost at home there.

  As I demolished my burger, I mused. “Nothing’s happening,” I said at last. “Why don’t we go home?”

  “I’ll send you in a cab if you like—I feel I ought to stay. It’s sort of like a deathwatch.”

  I shivered.

  “That’s the news biz. Say the President comes to town to make a speech; theoretically that’s the news, but what if he has a sudden heart attack or someone shoots him? Then that’s the real news. So you’ve got to send someone to sit in the bar of his hotel and drink, just in case.”

  “How boring.”

  “Not really. The place is always full of other reporters on deathwatch.”

  “Trading sizzling repartee.”

  “And topping one another’s war stories.”

  “But the Trapper, assuming he’s real, didn’t say he was going to strike tonight. It might be tonight, or tomorrow, or six months from now. You can’t camp here permanently.”

  “Listen! What’s that?”

  I listened. I heard sirens, getting closer. Rob knocked over his chair running out the door.

  5

  Ambulances were drawing up to the Pier—one after another as if they’d been called to a disaster area. Feeling queasy, I realized I was about to learn firsthand why deathwatches were invented.

  Rob was nowhere in sight, but I figured it was going to be no problem to find him. He’d be where the action was. And there was beginning to be quite a lot of action, as paramedics ran up the stairs and rubbernecks followed. If I didn’t hurry, there was going to be such a traffic jam I’d get shut out—which was the only thing I could imagine worse than being at the center of the carnage. And carnage it had to be—I’d now counted six ambulances.

  Following the crowd, I ended up at a fish restaurant called Full Fathom Five, mentally cursing the management for giving it such a bad-luck name in the first place. Cops had the entrance sealed off and had a path cleared for the paramedics, who were going in with empty stretchers and coming out with full ones. The people on the stretchers were strapped down, and some seemed to be gasping for breath; one young man was screaming. And an elderly man who looked dangerously white was very still.

  After the first half dozen ambulances, another four or five came. I was beginning to lose count and not to feel very well myself. The crowd was buzzing, repeating two words over and over, high, low, soft, loud. “Food poisoning,” they were saying. “Food poisoning, food poisoning. Food poisoning.” But I didn’t for a second think it was. Even a restaurant dumb enough to name itself for a watery grave could hardly screw up this badly. Further, I imagined that food poisoning wouldn’t really get into its nastier manifestations until a few hours after one had dined. Also, I knew something no one else in that crowd knew—someone who signed himself Tourist Trapper had written Rob to ‘look for action at Pier 39.’ Not only had Jack Sanchez been a tourist, but San Francisco’s Castro district—our gay ghetto—was certainly the hottest attraction in town for gay tourists. Pier 39 was frequented almost exclusively by tourists; as for Full Fathom Five, it was unlikely any native other than its employees and the random health inspector had even passed its swinging doors. If this was the Trapper’s work—and I felt sure it was—there was certainly no doubting his intent; he was out to kill or hurt tourists in San Francisco.

  But why? I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he could possibly have against them. I spotted Rob and waved him over to me. “Think it’s the Trapper’s work?”

  “It has to be. But I can’t get the cops to say so. In fact, I can hardly get a word out of them. All they’ll say is that eleven people fell ill after dining at Full Fathom Five.”

  “Eleven!”

  Rob nodded, his face unfamiliarly grave. “You’d think since I told them about the Trapper in the first place, they’d cooperate. But suddenly, it’s ‘Forget it, Charlie; who needs you?’ Next time I’ll keep it to myself.”

  “You had to tell them.”

  “Oh, I know. But you’d think—”

  “You’d think there’d be justice in the world. Guess again, pussycat.”

  He grinned. “Fine thing for a lawyer to say. Come help me phone in my story.”

  Rob is one of those rare reporters who can dictate off the top of his head. He tells me all the hawks and hens of the Ben Hecht era could do it—it was just part of the job—but it’s now a dying art, technology making it obsolete. He told me about a time when he left a trial to phone in the verdict, getting the booth next to the AP reporter. For some reason, his city desk had put him on hold for a minute or two; by the time he actually got through, the verdict had already come over the wire, phoned in, indirectly, by the guy in the next booth. Now there was no point in rushing to beat the competition—the machines did it for you. But my pal Rob took pride in his craftsmanship; he’d probably have been a lot happier back in the days of The Front Page.

  I listened admiringly as he was transferred to a “rewrite man” named Kathy, and went into his act.

  “Eleven persons were hospitalized last night after dining at Full Fathom Five, Pier 39. Police Captain Michael (‘Slim’) McGarrity characterized it as ‘the worst disaster in the history of the pier.’ McGarrity said diners began to fall ill shortly after 9:00 P.M., but he declined to comment on possible causes of the mysterious ailment. Asked whether poisoning was involved, he said, ‘I can’t say—forgot to renew my medical license…’”

  That last, I knew, was going to end up on the cutting-room floor. Rob was always putting jokes into serious stories and complaining when editors took them out. He couldn’t help it, he said—he was only quoting. But his city editor seemed to believe in certain kinds of censorship—on grounds of “good taste.”

  I tuned in on Rob again as he was switched back to the city desk. “Listen,” he was saying. “You know what McGarrity said after he made that crack about his medical license? He said you didn’t have to have one to know it was poisoning—but don’t quote him on it. The thing is, it’s got to be the Trapper’s work. The cops will say so in the morning, just in time for the Examiner to get it first; if we don’t go with it… oh, okay. I guess not.”

  He hung up. I said, “You guess not what?”

  “I guess we’d look like fools if we ran the Trapper’s note and i
t turned out the chef spilled soap powder in the soup or something. So I guess we can’t.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Listen, the police have the place sealed off, but I’m going to wait and see if I can talk to people on their way out. Want to hang around, or will you be bored?”

  “I need to move around a little. I think I’ll take a walk; I’ll meet you back here in a little while.”

  “Okay.” He gave me a good-bye kiss.

  I walked mindlessly toward Fisherman’s Wharf—I say mindlessly because no one would choose that clogged and congested part of the Embarcadero for a late-night stroll if she were thinking. I had to nudge and elbow my way through clumps of possibly endangered tourists taking carefree ganders at the neon. Ordinarily I would have considered their presence annoying—who were they to get in the way of a genuine resident?—but now I was afraid for them. I found myself looking at their faces, at the way they looked at each other, at the pleasure they took in pointing out the sights to each other. Elderly couples especially; people who seemed to have spent most of their lives together and who now held on to each other for support. I thought of the old man I’d seen being carried out of Full Fathom Five, the one who’d been so white and so still. I wondered if he had a wife, and children and grandchildren.

  For the first time in my smug little native San Franciscan’s life (I’m from Marin County, but it’s all the same), I found myself wondering about the tourists instead of considering them merely economically important nuisances. I wondered who they were and where they were from and what they did there and who wanted to kill them and why. Most of all, I wondered whether they’d be safe, these people who wandered so innocently, so unsuspecting, down the seemingly harmless Embarcadero, stopping to stare at kids in punk garb, listen to a drummer, absorb the exotica they wouldn’t find back in Illinois. I was beginning to understand what Rob meant by “fear stalks.” I was terrified for these people—and for myself, a little bit. How could the Trapper be absolutely sure of hitting tourists instead of natives?

  “Easy,” Rob would have said. “Test their clothes for polyester count.”

  Thinking of Rob made me smile, and turn around and head back toward him. I still had to slither my way through a slow-moving mass of bodies, but at least I had a goal. A well-marked goal at that—a line of police cars was still parked in front of Pier 39. I slithered past the Balclutha, the old squarerigger anchored in the bay, and past the punks and past the police cars; past the first one, past the second, and almost past the third. The cop inside the third was talking on the radio, quite audibly, and to my mind, quite interestingly. He was a macho kind of guy, I’d guess, who just couldn’t keep his voice down if there was a chance to make himself sound important by raising it. He came in clear as a foghorn: “Nothing on Zimbardo yet.”

  I hesitated, hoping to hear more, but the cop lowered his voice, catching on, I guess, that he’d been indiscreet.

  Back outside the restaurant, I found Rob winding up an interview with a couple from Oregon. He turned to me: “Nice walk?”

  “Productive. How’d you do?”

  He shuddered. “It must have been awful in there. What do you mean, ‘productive’?”

  “Does the name Zimbardo mean anything to you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I think he or she might be a suspect.”

  I told him what I’d overheard.

  “Let’s find a phone book.” His blue eyes were bright with the thrill of the chase. Sometimes I get upset with the newshawk side of Rob, but when he’s infused with energy like that he’s irresistible. I was getting drawn into his excitement against my better judgment—and not for the first time. Once we’d gotten involved in a high-speed car chase, caused an accident, and one of us had landed in jail by the end of the evening—not, I’m afraid, the one with the bright blue eyes.

  “Zimbardo, Zimbardo—” Rob was tracing a finger up and down a page of the phone book. “Art Zimbardo; on Bush Street—let’s go.”

  Zimbardo lived on the edge of the Tenderloin, not far from the Stockton Tunnel. A poor place for parking, normally, but Rob pulled up in front of a fire hydrant, put his Working Press Parking Permit in his windshield, and hopped out. I caught up with him as he was pressing the buzzer for a third-floor apartment. It was a long time before a sleepy voice answered. “Who is it?”

  Rob drew a deep breath. I knew what he was thinking: The Trapper would know his name. “Rob,” he said finally, and quite as heartily as if he were visiting his mother.

  “Rob?” The voice sounded genuinely puzzled. “I think you’ve got the wrong apartment.”

  “No.” Rob spoke urgently. “You’re Art Zimbardo, aren’t you? It’s important.”

  “Important? It’s not about Lou, is it?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  Zimbardo buzzed us in without another word. The hallway was dim; the carpet on the wide, no-longer-grand stairs smelled of feet. As we started to climb, Rob said, “Listen, Rebecca, just withhold judgment a few minutes, okay? I know I lied, but being from the Chronicle has a strange effect.”

  He knew me well enough to know I hadn’t liked the lie, and I could see he was sheepish about it himself. But I thought he must know what he was doing if he said so; if I didn’t withhold judgment, at least I held my tongue.

  The kid who opened the door had on jockey shorts; his eyes widened, horrified, when he saw the two of us. “Excuse me. Just a minute. Oh, man.” And he shut the door again.

  I relaxed. I hadn’t known exactly what we were getting into, and still didn’t, but it didn’t look as if we were about to enter the den of a mass poisoner.

  The kid came back, dressed and shamefaced: “I didn’t know you were bringing a lady.” His eyes were nearly black, and they smoldered at Rob. The kid was resentful and angry, maybe about me, maybe something else.

  He led us into his living room, obviously furnished by the management. The black plastic of the sectional sofa was torn, the beige carpet hopelessly stained. A fifties Danish-style blond-veneered end table held a dime-store plaster lamp, its paper shade still in cellophane.

  “I’m from the Chronicle,” said Rob, and told Zimbardo our names.

  “The Chronicle?” Rob fired his first questions fast, not giving the lad time to think.

  “Do you work at a restaurant at Pier 39?”

  “Sure. Full Fathom Five—I’m a waiter.”

  “Were you there tonight?”

  “No. It’s my night off. Say, what is this? You said it was about Lou.”

  Rob told him what had happened. I watched Zimbardo as he took it in. He was very young, no more than nineteen or twenty, I thought, and would never have a weight problem. He was short, but well muscled, and lean as a fish. He had curly hair, lovely full lips, and those big, black, resentful eyes, coaster-sized, sad and pleading. They made him look deprived and rather desperate, like a child who’s forgotten his lunch box. When Rob got to the words I’d overheard near the police car, the kid crumpled onto the sofa. “Oh, man.” He held his face. “Oh, man. Lou was there, man. He was there.”

  “Is Lou your brother?” I asked.

  The kid only nodded, didn’t speak for a moment. Then: “I gotta get to him. You guys have a car?”

  “Yes. But why don’t you call?”

  “He’s got no phone. Just a room over on Jones Street. I offered to let him stay here, but he wouldn’t—said he needed privacy after being in the joint.”

  “Your brother’s been in prison?”

  He nodded. “Rob, listen, he didn’t do it, man. No way he’d do it. Can you put that in the Chronicle?”

  Rob said, “Shouldn’t we go find him?”

  “I think he might need a lawyer. I think I better get him a lawyer.” He was putting on a cheap vinyl jacket, made to look like leather but succeeding hardly more than the sofa had. “Rebecca’s a lawyer.”

  “Yeah? You a lawyer, Rebecca?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We w
ent quickly down the stairs and out to the car. It was only a few blocks to the flophouse to which Art directed us, but this was no time to walk. “But why,” I said when we were settled, “does Lou need a lawyer? It’s you who works at the restaurant—why would Lou have been there?”

  Art looked glum. “I got him a job in the kitchen. Tonight was his third night.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe he’s still there. We should try to call him.”

  “No, man. He ain’t there. There’s cops around, Lou ain’t.” His voice shook a little and I thought his shoulders did, too, under the mock-tough jacket.

  Seeing Lou’s room, I thought he’d have done better to move in with Art, privacy or no. Surely his last cell couldn’t have been much smaller. This one contained only a single metal bed with sloping mattress, nightstand, chest, and plain, hard chair. Not a single personal possession in sight except a beat-up TV. I opened a drawer of the chest to assure myself the place was occupied, and was surprised to find socks. Lou hadn’t moved out, it appeared, but he wasn’t home. Art was starting to lose control of his face. He knew he couldn’t cry in front of us, but the effort of control was turning his pretty features into a strained-looking mask.

  A car skidded and stopped outside. “This one,” someone shouted. A someone Rob and I knew. It was the all-too-familiar voice of Martinez, the last person I wanted to see—or wanted Art to see—right then. Rob and I looked at each other, to see if we were in agreement. We were.

  Rob spoke quickly to Art: “The cops are outside. Is there a back stairway?”

  Art shook his head, pale.

  I said, “Let’s go up a floor”

  It worked beautifully. We went up, listened till we heard Martinez and Curry go into Lou’s room, then crept down and out the door. Silently, we drove back to Art’s.