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

  Praise for Julie Smith and DEATH TURNS A TRICK

  “Funny and witty, with a clever, outspoken heroine.” — Library Journal

  “A lively romp of a novel which heralds an interesting new detective personality … Smith shows an Agatha Christie-like capacity for making much ado about clues, concocting straw hypotheses, and surprising us, in the end … Smith’s crisp storytelling, her easy knowledge of local practices, and her likable, unpredictable heroine will make readers look forward to more of sleuth Schwartz’s adventures.” — San Francisco Chronicle

  “The book gives readers an unusual look at San Francisco and introduces them to a delightfully modern sleuth.” — Minneapolis Tribune

  “Rebecca’s lively first-person narration brands her a new detective to watch.” — Wilson Library Bulletin

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  (in order of publication)

  DEATH TURNS A TRICK

  THE SOURDOUGH WARS

  TOURIST TRAP

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS

  Also by Julie Smith:

  The Skip Langdon Series

  NEW ORLEANS MOURNING

  THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

  JAZZ FUNERAL

  DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK

  (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)

  HOUSE OF BLUES

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION

  (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)

  82 DESIRE

  MEAN WOMAN BLUES

  The Paul Macdonald Series

  TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE

  HUCKLEBERRY FIEND

  The Talba Wallis Series

  LOUISIANA HOTSHOT

  LOUISIANA BIGSHOT

  LOUISIANA LAMENT

  P.I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF

  As Well As

  WRITING YOUR WAY: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL TRACK

  NEW ORLEANS NOIR (ed.)

  DEATH TURNS A TRICK

  A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery

  BY

  JULIE SMITH

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Death Turns A Trick

  Copyright © 1982 by Julie Smith

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN: 9781617507915

  Originally published by Walker & Co., a division of Walker Publishing Co

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: 2012

  www.booksbnimble.com

  Cover by Nevada Barr

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  All the characters and events portrayed in this story are fictitious.

  THIS BOOK IS FOR MY PARENTS, with gratitude for invaluable assistance with motivation and character development; also for many clues, a few red herrings, and the occasional solution.

  Special thanks to five people whose good advice helped shape this book: Inspector Dave Toschi, Betsy Petersen, Jon Carroll, Mary Jean Haley, and Mickey Friedman.

  Contents

  Praise

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  Also by Julie Smith:

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Thanks

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  Also by Julie Smith:

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  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The argument was getting loud, so I played loud to drown it out. I was looking at the keyboard, I guess, or maybe staring into space, I don’t know which. Anyway, I didn’t see two uniformed cops come in the door with guns drawn. I just heard a hush and then some screams. That made me look up. I saw them and stopped playing. People in the foyer were crowding back toward the stairs. Elena Mooney was backing toward the fireplace.

  “Awright, everybody quiet,” said one of the cops. “This is a raid.” Those very words.

  It’s funny how you react in a situation like that. I should have been terrified. I should have had visions of lurid headlines: “Lawyer Caught in Bordello Raid.” I should have despaired of my Martindale-Hubbell rating and started planning how I was going to explain to my mother. But I didn’t. I was looking down the barrel of a gun and hearing someone say “This is a raid”—a thing I’d done a million times in movie theaters. I gripped the piano so I wouldn’t holler, “Cheezit, the cops!”

  Then the lights went out. I don’t mean I fainted; I mean it got dark. A hand closed over my forearm, jerked me to my feet and started pulling. People started screaming again, and one of the cops fired. I didn’t know if anybody was hit or not, but the reality of the situation dawned on me and I offered whoever was pulling me no resistance. We bumped into a lot of people getting through the saloon room, but it took about two seconds, I guess. I vaguely heard things like “Don’t panic” and “Be quiet,” which I suppose came from the cops, and I heard two more shots and a lot more screaming.

  My rescuer pulled the kitchen door open and me through it. The kitchen window had cafe curtains, and there was a little light from outside, enough to see that I was with Elena. She dropped my arm, grabbed a flashlight from the top of the refrigerator, and opened a door that I imagined led to a pantry. But I was wrong. Elena shone the light on steps descending to a basement.

  She gestured for me to go first, then followed, locking the door behind us. There was a tiny landing at the bottom of the stairway and, on the right, a doorway to the basement itself. You couldn’t see into it from the stairs.

  When I got to the landing, I waited for Elena to join me with the light, but she turned it off as soon as she got there. I noticed a faint glow coming from the doorway to the basement. Elena put a finger to her lips and squeezed past me into the room. I followed.

  The room was unfinished, but the plasterboard was painted. The light came from a silver candelabrum on the floor, with all its black candles lighted. Attached to two beams on the far wall were manacles at ankle and shoulder level. Some scary-looking hoists and pulleys hung from ceiling beams, but I can’t say I was in a mood to examine them too closely. In fact, it’s a miracle I noticed them at all, considering what else was in the room—a brass bed with a naked man lying face up, spread-eagled on it.

  His wrists were tied to the headboard and his ankles to the footboards. Even without his customary conservative suit, I recognized him. He was State Senator Calvin Handley. That same week I’d seen him on TV holding a press conference about the bill he’d just introduced to legalize prostitution. At least he wasn’t a hypocrite.

  Elena still had her finger to her lips for his benefit. She removed it and started untying his wrists. “Rebecca, get his ankles.”

  She spoke to the cl
ient, without addressing him as “Senator”—on the off chance, I suppose, that I wouldn’t recognize him. “There’s been some trouble. The cops are here, but the door’s locked and we’ll have time to get you out of here. Where are your clothes?”

  “I think Kandi forgot to bring them down. We came down the usual way.”

  “Damn her!” Elena finished freeing the senator’s hands, and he sat up and rubbed them. She looked in an armoire at the front of the room. “She forgot, all right. You’ll have to wear this.”

  She picked up something black from a low chair. In the chair underneath the black garment were a pair of handcuffs and a square of black fabric fashioned into a blindfold. I figured it must be quite a trick to negotiate those stairs coming down “the usual way,” but chacun a son gout. Consenting adults and all that.

  I finished with the senatorial ankle bonds, and the lawmaker slipped the black garment on. It was a floor-length robe with full sleeves and a hood, perfectly decent but damn-all odd.

  “Shoes?” asked Elena. The senator shook his head. “Okay, come on. You too, Rebecca.”

  She pushed aside the armoire, revealing a crude passageway—a tunnel, really. She gave me the flashlight and fished a key from her bodice. As she handed it over, I could see that her hand was shaking. “Listen, both of you,” she whispered. “Shots were fired up there. For all I know, someone may be dead or hurt. This is my house and I can’t leave. Rebecca, this is… Joe. I’m depending on you to get him to his car. Then go home, change into street clothes, and get back here. We’ll be needing you. The door at the end of the tunnel is padlocked, and this is the key. My car is parked almost dead against the door. It’s unlocked and the keys are in it. Take the padlock with you; we may need to use the tunnel again tonight. Just get the sen—get Joe out of here. I’ll wait five minutes after I hear the car drive off before I go back up. Good luck.” She squeezed my hand.

  We had to bend nearly double in the tunnel. I went first with the light, the senator following with a hand on each of my hips. I felt this was not completely necessary, but I put up with it. It was the least of my problems at the moment. I cursed whatever insanity had made me comply with Elena’s request, and I cursed Elena for making it sound so safe.

  She hadn’t exactly lied. It was true no one was turning tricks at the party. But leaving out a naked senator in the basement seemed a rather serious sin of omission,

  Senator alter kocker took his hands off me long enough to hold the light while I unlocked the door. Elena’s Mustang was parked close, all right, but not close enough to avoid stepping in a mud puddle getting in. Since I had on sandals and the senator was barefoot, it was deuced inconvenient.

  The Mustang snorted a couple of times, then laid back its ears and reared. We were in a lane that led to Broderick Street.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked as we reached the street.

  “Oh my God. I’ve got to go back—I haven’t got my keys.”

  “Keys, hell. You can’t go back. I’ll take you home.”

  “But my money! My ID! They’ll find it. I’ve got to get it. Turn around.”

  “No.”

  “I said turn around.”

  “Look,” I said. “The cops don’t care about johns. They’ll probably just return your things discreetly. It’ll be embarrassing, but nothing compared to being caught traipsing around a bordello in that outfit.”

  “Goddammit, turn around.”

  A citizen likes to think her elected officials have at least a minimal amount of brains in their tiny heads, whatever their sexual proclivities. But this guy had fried eggs. I stopped trying to reason with him. I could see he wasn’t used to taking orders, except maybe from Kandi when they played amusing games, so I stopped being firm. I just drove, more or less in the direction of my apartment, and carefully, because of the rain.

  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 driv
e 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.