Death Turns A Trick (Rebecca Schwartz #1) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (2 page)

He was quiet for a minute or two, so I tried again as we turned onto Fillmore Street. This time I tried to sound helpful and cheerful like a secretary or a wife, someone he could identify with. “Where can I drop you off?”

“Goddammit, young woman, take me back!” he shouted.

“You’re out of your senatorial head!” I shouted back. “Where the hell do you live?”

He reached over and grabbed the wheel. I lost control and we skidded to the right, tires squealing like seagulls. I jerked the wheel back in time to avoid plowing into a parked car, and slammed on the brakes. But I overcompensated and winged the parked car with the rear end of the Mustang. I heard a siren even as I felt the bump, and I looked in the mirror. The red light of a police car was half a block away.

Before I could get my bearings, that fruitcake of a senator had his door open and his bare feet on Fillmore Street. Without so much as a “thanks for the lift,” he rounded the car we’d hit, stepped up on the sidewalk, and took off running, with that silly black robe billowing behind him. In that context, he looked like just another San Francisco freak, only they don’t usually have a fine head of silvery hair. I leaned over and shut the passenger door, hoping the cops hadn’t seen him. They pulled up as he turned the corner.

The cop who got out of the patrol car had a lush silky mustache, and the rest of him looked okay, too. “Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked.

“I think so. I skidded in the rain and pulled too far back.”

“Let’s see your driver’s license.”

“I—uh—had an emergency. I don’t have it.”

“You’ve got your keys. They must have been in your purse with your license.”

“No, they were already in the car.”

“What’s your name?”

“Rebecca Schwartz.”

“You been drinking, Miss Schwartz?”

“A little. That’s not why I hit the car, though. I skidded.”

“How about parking the car over there on the curb, Miss Schwartz? I’ll be with you in a minute.”

I don’t do my best parking jobs in situations of stress, but I don’t think the cop noticed. He was doing something with his partner in the patrol car.

He joined me in a minute. “You got any ID at all?”

“I told you I didn’t.”

“We just ran this car through the computer. It’s registered to an Elena Mooney.”

“I know. I borrowed it from her.”

“Does she know you’ve got it?”

“Certainly.”

“Miss Schwartz, I’m going to have to ask you to take a roadside sobriety test. Would you mind just stretching your arms out horizontally? Good. Okay now, put your head back a little, close your eyes, and touch your nose with the tip of your index finger.”

“Left or right?”

“Both. Three times.”

I never have been good at silly games. I hit my nose three out of six times, and that’s as well as I can do cold sober. I know, because I’ve tried it a million times since. But I don’t have to tell you the attractive cop wouldn’t believe it was just a personal idiosyncrasy. I have to say he was nice about the whole thing, though. He seemed almost apologetic: “I hate to ask you on a night like this, but do you think you can walk a straight line, toe-to-heel?”

“I’ll get wet.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He was really nice, that fellow, especially considering I wasn’t looking any too respectable.

The rain pelted into my cleavage as I got out of the car. I got up on the sidewalk, put one shoe in front of the other, and kept on doing it until the cop told me to stop. I wanted to go on, because I knew that line would straighten up as soon as I got the hang of it, but the cop wasn’t convinced. I’d meandered pretty far off course.

“I’m afraid that emergency of yours is going to have to wait, Miss Schwartz. You’ve just had an accident in a car that’s not yours, and you got no driver’s license and no ID, and you can’t pass your sobriety test. And the car’s got 200 dollars’ worth of traffic warrants on it.”

“But…”

“I don’t think you’d better drive the Mustang. Just lock it, please, and get in the backseat of the patrol car.”

“Wait a minute. I can explain what I’m doing with the car.”

“All the explaining in the world’s not going to convince me you’re sober.”

So I locked the Mustang while they inspected the parked car for damage. Then we sat in the patrol car, the cop with the mustache and me, while his partner made out an accident report. I never did figure out why that had to be done at the scene instead of at the Hall, but it did give me time to pour out my story.

I said I’d been to a costume party—which I had hoped might explain my get-up—and that a friend had been suddenly taken ill. I was driving him to the hospital when I hit the parked car.

“So where is he now?”

“He got frightened when I hit the car and ran away.”

“How sick was he?”

I lowered my eyes. “I don’t know. He was acting very strangely. I think he was having some sort of nervous attack.”

The cop came to the conclusion I wanted him to. He raised an eyebrow. “Were there drugs at that party, Miss Schwartz?”

I said there were, and he didn’t ask any more questions.

On the way to the Hall, I assessed the situation. I was dressed like a hooker, so they probably thought I was one in spite of my lame little explanation; no one has costume parties three weeks after Halloween. So there was no use protesting that I was a lawyer without an ID to back it up. It wouldn’t do any good anyway, since they thought I was drunk.

I figured Elena and the others would be at the Hall. We could straighten out the ownership of the car and maybe establish my identification. Then we could call my partner to get us out.

But I wondered if she could. It might just be that Rebecca Schwartz, Jewish feminist lawyer, was about to spend a night in jail. I prayed I would pass my breathalyzer test. And when I got done praying, I mused on the dark and sinister forces that had gotten me into the backseat of a patrol car.

They were dark forces inside my skull, of course. I remembered the time my mother turned on the cold tap and threw me in the shower with all my clothes on, just because, at the age of nine, I decided not to be a concert pianist. I’m not saying there wasn’t provocation; I did come to the decision in the middle of a music lesson, and I did emphasize it by tearing up some sheet music and hurling a metronome. But it made a big impression on me. Maybe that’s why I agreed to Elena Mooney’s request—to get back at my mom. My shrink has since expressed the opinion that this was so.

But there could have been other reasons. Perfectly sensible reasons.

For one thing, I have led a dull life. I was twenty-eight at the time, and I had never done anything more exciting than make good grades and grow up to be a feminist Jewish lawyer. I never hitchhiked around Europe with nobody but my lover and nothing but my backpack. I never so much as spent a summer on a kibbutz.

I am not sure why, except that I am conservative by nature. I dislike change and am afraid to take chances; if I played poker, which I do not, I’d probably fold three kings unless I had a pair of aces to go with them. I grew up in Marin County, California, crossed the San Francisco Bay to go to law school in Berkeley, and crossed it again to practice in San Francisco. I come from a middle-class liberal Jewish family, and my politics and values don’t deviate a whit from what I was taught as a child, except maybe in the areas of drugs and sex—I probably have a more contemporary approach to these than my parents.

Basically, I am the kind of girl that mothers wish their sons would marry. But nobody’s son did, and anyway I couldn’t be bothered. I was too busy living up to my
father’s
ambition for me. Or what I imagined it to be. He always said, “Be a doctor, Rebecca. There’s no money in law,” but anybody could see he was joking. When I was a little girl, he used to take me to watch him in court, and when I was a teenager, he’d discuss his cases with me. What did I know from doctors? I had a lawyer for a role model.

Now if you had led this kind of life and someone came along and said, “Listen, how would you like to play the piano in a whorehouse for just one night—you’ll be among friends; nothing can happen,” wouldn’t you do it? Especially if it were a
feminist
bordello? It wouldn’t have to be a case of getting back at your mom.

Another thing: Elena needed me. I should turn down a friend who needs a favor just because I’m too good to hang around a bordello? What kind of sisterhood is that?

Let me explain about Elena. She is a prostitute, and she’s also very close to being a madam, only she isn’t quite because this is a co-op bordello we’re talking about. It’s co-op because ostensibly everyone has an equal say in decision-making and the money is split among the members, but Elena is actually the brains and the driving force of the thing. She’d be a madam in the old-fashioned sense if she weren’t political.

I got to know her when she got busted and Jeannette von Phister asked me to take her case. Despite certain reservations I have about prostitution as a feminist issue (“horizontal hostility,” Jeannette calls it), I was already on the legal staff of HYENA, the “loose women’s organization” Jeannette had founded. As you no doubt know, HYENA is an acronym for “Head Your Ethics toward a New Age,” and its ultimate goal is to get prostitution legalized.

By making it a feminist issue, they’ve managed to acquire a certain amount of clout, and they’re quite colorful, so they get a lot of publicity. When I agreed to work for them, it may be that somewhere in my subconscious, I knew some of the publicity was bound to rub off on their lawyer. As a matter of fact, it did when I became Elena’s lawyer.

Elena (nèe Eileen, I’ll bet anything, but I’ve never had the nerve to ask) had been running this co-op feminist bordello for about six months. She had brains, but not a lot of experience. I think she probably didn’t look carefully enough into the matter of police payoffs, but that’s a fine thing for her lawyer to say, so pretend you didn’t hear it. Anyway, she and her three partners got busted, and Jeannette called me to defend them.

The case made quite a splash. Elena ran a pretty classy house, and there were whispers of influential names in a certain address book found there. Also, HYENA did a lot of hollering about harassment; Jeanette and I held a press conference at which we berated the police department for wasting its time on consensual transactions between adults. I declared that my clients were the victims of a hypocritical society that kept wages for women low and yet persecuted them when they were forced into a life of prostitution, all the while winking at the part their clients played in the transaction. My pronouncements led to appearances on talk shows, but probably had nothing to do with the fact that Elena and the others got probation. It was a first offense for all of them.

Elena and I got quite friendly, though. I liked her. She had a kind of unflappable earthiness that I suppose grew out of being one of six children in a poor family. She also had a good sense of humor, which probably had the same roots. Being the uptight, middle-class lawyer I am, I wished she’d give up her life of crime and go back to school, but you can’t run other people’s lives for them.

When the case was over, we had lunch together a lot and I became conversant with curious and intimate details of a prostitute’s life. But nothing hard on the stomach, you understand. Being Irish, Elena is a born raconteuse, and she can make life in a bordello sound like a Restoration comedy.

Sitting over crab salad and white wine in my gray flannel blazer and Cacharel blouse, I felt pretty naive as she spun tales about a world of crystal chandeliers and high-heeled sandals. A world where indulgence of personal vanity was not only not condemned but was actually applauded. I loved getting a peek at it. And there was a part of me that was attracted to it.

It must have been plain to Elena that drab, workaday Rebecca had certain fantasies not altogether suitable for a Jewish feminist lawyer, because first she sent me tickets to the Strumpets’ Strut, an annual fund-raising ball HYENA holds at Halloween. Then in that atmosphere of feathers and sequins, she broke the news that she was back in business and invited me to tour her new place.

I wasn’t her mother or her probation officer, and I didn’t figure it was my place to lecture. Clearly, the civil thing to do was accept the invitation, admire her bordello, and do everything I could for her the next time she got busted.

We made a date for the following Saturday—in the morning, so she could open at noon as usual.

We got to the Hall of Justice at 12:45, and I was arrested for suspicion of driving with intoxication. It was an ignominious moment for the Schwartz family.

The cops took me to the traffic bureau, which is a big room with a lot of desks and typewriters like a business office. I asked if I could call Elena.

“Sure, but first let’s do your sobriety test. Blood, breath, or urine?”

“Breath,” I said.

Then they gave me some time to myself. I tried to muster some positive thoughts about passing the test and getting out of there, but it was no good. My mind replayed the events that led to my being there, starting that Saturday a few weeks before, the day of my first visit to a bordello.

* * *

Elena’s house was in Pacific Heights, but if you think I’m going to pin it down better than that, you’re much mistaken. Client-attorney privilege.

It was a gracious example of the style known as Queen Anne Victorian, painted white with dark blue and gold trim. Dignified as you please.

Elena answered the door in jeans, but stepped quickly aside so I could get the full effect. The floor of the foyer was bare, but the staircase, which was eight or ten feet away, was carpeted in red. The walls of the foyer and the one that led up the staircase were covered in honest-to-God red-flocked whorehouse wallpaper. An old-fashioned oak coatrack was the only furniture in the foyer, and there was a chandelier of ruby glass with crystal prisms suspended from it.