Death Turns A Trick (Rebecca Schwartz #1) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (3 page)

“My God!” I said. “It’s the Platonic cathouse.”

“Not exactly the word I’d choose under the circumstances,” said Elena.

“It’s stunning.”

She nodded. “No cliché overlooked. Except maybe a bead curtain. But the only place for it was the kitchen doorway, and I couldn’t take the chance of some john wandering into make himself a toasted cheese sandwich.”

She led me into the living room, which had a fireplace on the far side with the obligatory painting of a nude woman hung above it. Not a bad one, either. She was lying on her side on a brass bed, and she wasn’t actually nude. She wore boots.

There was a rose satin loveseat with fringe around the bottom, and there was another of carved mahogany and wine-colored velvet. Chairs that matched the mahogany loveseat were covered in rose velvet (the kind that looks antique, but isn’t). Naturally, Elena hadn’t forgotten a crystal chandelier.

Toward the back of the room on the left, there was a conversational grouping of Victorian chairs and tables. On the right was a grand piano covered with a very fine old piano shawl. More naked ladies dotted the walls, with beauty spots dotting their faces and fannies.

“Very cozy,” I said.

“Gaudy as hell,” said Elena. “But homey. That’s what the clutter’s for. It’s got to seem like a fantasy world, only not intimidating. And you have to make sure there’s plenty of room to move around. See, you can dance in the foyer or in this bare space between the double parlors.”

“It’s perfect,” I said. “Ever think of going into the decorating business?”

She laughed. “When I retire. Come on, let me show you the upstairs. There’s nothing else down here but the kitchen, and we’ll have some tea there afterwards.”

I won’t describe Elena’s bedroom, because I am trying to give you a glimpse of the demimonde and it wouldn’t be relevant. So you won’t be disoriented, though, I’ll tell you it was one of four bedrooms upstairs. The other three were for tricks.

The red carpet from the stairway snaked down the hall and into two of them. These two were furnished with marble-topped tables, gilt mirrors, and carved mahogany beds with red velvet covers.

The third had only one piece of furniture: the biggest waterbed I've ever seen. And every inch of wall and ceiling was mirrored. “Not very Victorian,” I observed.

“No,” said Elena. “There’s no accounting for taste. It’s our most popular offering.”

She led me back to the kitchen, which was much like any old kitchen except that it was big enough to get a fair-sized table into. I sat down as Elena made tea and English muffins.

“This is the only room I can really call my own, besides my bedroom,” she said. “It’s kind of awful living here, really, but somebody has to—we couldn’t just leave the place locked up except during working hours.”

Watching Elena move about the kitchen in her jeans, I could imagine she found living at the bordello “kind of awful.” She had glossy chestnut hair and fine heavy brows, which she was smart enough not to pluck. You’d never have guessed she was a hooker if it weren’t for her mandarin manicure.

It occurred to me that while I knew all about her life with the rollicking Chicago family, I didn’t know how she’d made the transition to feminist prostitute. I’d met a lot of HYENA members, and they all had similar stories; they had been secretaries or file clerks who turned to prostitution the first time someone offered them money for sex. They became feminists when the women’s movement made the point that it’s easier for men to make money than it is for women.

But Elena seemed more intelligent and better educated than the other hookers I knew. She sat down at the table with a pot of tea and the buttered muffins.

“Elena,” I said, “You’ve never told me how you, uh…”

“Fell from grace?” She poured tea.

“Well, yes.”

“Learned my trade in college, just like you did.” She laughed. “It was the University of Chicago. History department. It happened in my sophomore year when I was going to class and working full-time as a waitress. I was beat to hell, which wasn’t that hard to spot—I’d lost about ten pounds and I always seemed to have circles under my eyes. So one of my professors took a fancy to me and let me in on an easier way.”

“A man?”

“No. A woman. She’d worked her way through graduate school by turning tricks.”

“Oh, come on.”

Elena shrugged. “Well, I can’t prove it, but she did seem to know what she was doing. She said she knew a man who’d been wanting to meet me. He was willing to pay a hundred dollars, but the deal was, I had to give fifty back to the teacher.”

“A
history
professor?”

“I was a bit shocked myself, but I’ve since learned that’s the way these things are done. Pretty soon I was making twice what I made at the waitress job for only a few hours’ work a week.”

“So did you finish school?”

“No. I got through my junior year, but by that time I was so successful, I thought: what’s the point of school if I can make this kind of money without an education? So I decided to try the big-time in San Francisco. I worked bars for a while and did okay, then I got to know a few of my colleagues. Jeannette formed HYENA, and I liked the approach. You know—prostitution as a profession, with a union and everything. Then Stacy and Renée and Hilary and I decided to set up the co-op.”

“Do you ever regret not getting your degree?”

“I can always go back and get it if I want to. But, look, I know what you’re getting at. I’m not dumb, and I have a talent for decorating, as you pointed out. I could probably do other things, right? So why be a prostitute when I have a choice?”

“Well?”

“I don’t know. I try not to think about it too much. It probably has to do partly with manipulating people, playing roles, working out fantasies. But more than that, it’s a fear of failure at something else—and fear of being poor again. This is something I’m good at, and a good way to make money, so I’m not ready to give it up yet.

“But you know, don’t you, that every prostitute dreams of the day she can retire? I’ll tell you something—I probably
will
be a decorator someday. Or do something in that field—maybe a nice little antique store. Somebody who hasn’t been poor, though, I can’t figure out why they’d do this. We’ve got a part-timer named Kandi who comes from a good family; she could have done anything.”

Elena shrugged. “Maybe she’s just a greedy, manipulative, lazy little bitch. And maybe I am, too.”

On the way out, I stopped to admire the piano shawl a little more carefully, and my fingers went automatically to the keys. I’d never have made a professional musician—Mom was dead wrong about that—but I have a good ear and I love a piano. Before I stopped to think, I sat down on the old-fashioned stool and started banging out “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Don’t ask me why that tune came into my head—maybe because it was exactly right for the setting.

Elena looked at me as if I’d pulled a family of rabbits out of my bra.

A breathalyzer works like this: You breathe into the mouthpiece of a small machine and your breath is captured in a cylinder and then run through some sort of chemical solution. You have to do it twice, and it takes less than 15 minutes for both tests.

Nothing to it. I say this because I passed.

“Am I still under arrest?” I asked when I got the good news.

“Not for drunk driving,” said the cop with the mustache. “But we'd better talk with the owner of the Mustang. Can you get her for us?”

“Sure.” They didn’t know all they'd have to do was go up to City Prison on the sixth floor to talk to her, and I didn’t tell them. My plan was to call Elena’s and then pretend I’d gotten a message she was at the Hall. That way maybe it would look like I’d left before the raid.

But Elena herself answered the phone.

* * *

I left Elena’s, and not having so much as a tennis date for the afternoon, I went shopping for something to wear that night. I was just having dinner with Chris Nicholson, my law partner, and her long-time love, Larry Hughes, but there was going to be another guest—a friend of Larry’s they thought I might like. Maybe I had in mind dolling myself up so irresistibly that he’d want to fall into my arms, but I don’t think so, judging from what I brought home. I think it’s more likely that I was motivated by whatever quirk it is that makes me hungry for fresh fish after a visit to the aquarium. I’d just been to a bordello, remember.

I went to Magnarama at Stonestown, where you can sometimes find astonishing bargains. I was pawing idly through a rack of shopworn blouses when my eye caught a metallic glint. I’m not much up on fabrics, but I think it was silver lamé. In about two seconds, I was in the dressing room tearing up my fingernails on the thing’s thirty-or-so silver-covered buttons. It was a sort of jacket, made in a 1940s style. Shoulder pads, narrow waist, and a little flounce around the bottom. It had long, tight sleeves with eight or ten more of those pesky buttons and a prim, rounded collar that must have been a good eighteen inches long before it was attached, because you could have shot me through the heart without damaging the garment. It fit as sleekly as a leotard.

I am five-feet-five inches tall and weigh 125 pounds, which is not exactly fat, but it isn’t going to get me any modeling contracts. I wouldn’t say I have what novelists call a “copious bosom,” but I don’t think “generous” is going too far, and there’s no question it’s my best feature. This little silver number set it off to optimum advantage.

You won’t believe what I found to go with it: a wrap-around black satin skirt that only continued wrapping for a few inches down from the waist, so it looked like it was slit up to the wazoo, but it actually revealed a good deal more than a slit would have. Like most of my left leg. What there was of it fell to the calf, slick and shiny as a wetsuit.

The entire outfit cost me twenty-five dollars.

I don’t know where drab, workaday Rebecca was that day, but whoever was impersonating her bought a pair of false eyelashes, a pair of sheer black nylons, and what my sister Mickey calls wicked-woman shoes—high-heeled, open-toed sandals.

Then she stole Rebecca’s good gray Volvo from the parking lot, drove it to Rebecca’s Telegraph Hill apartment, and let herself in as if she owned the place.

I am going to take time out to tell you what she found there, as I am very fond of my apartment, and you are going to be spending a lot of time there. The colors are stark, wintry ones. For warmth I have a grand piano, an enormous window with a great view and, underneath the window, the thing I love most in the world: a hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium. It teems with hermit crabs and fish in colors both subtle and bold, and even shrimp. But the anemones—translucent, pink, and always reaching for something just outside their grasp—are my favorites.

Because the aquarium doesn’t quite fill the space under the window, it’s flanked by the fattest, most luxuriant asparagus ferns you ever saw, each like a green basketball on its white ceramic stand.

It’s a beautiful, wonderful apartment, its sophistication marred only by a funny little Don Quixote sculpture on the coffee table—an incongruous, cornball item weighing about a ton. I’d bought it in Mexico with my ex-boyfriend, and I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.

So that’s what the stranger saw when she went into Rebecca’s apartment that day. She walked right through to the bedroom, where she spent half an hour applying the eyelashes, cursing every minute, and then she slithered lamia-like into the rest of the caparison. Peering eagerly into Rebecca’s mirror, she gazed upon none other than Rebecca Schwartz looking like a silly ass.

Having returned from whatever astral plane I’d been on, I looked in that mirror and hooted like a gibbon. When I’d finished making sport of myself, I peeled off the eyelashes, slithered lamia-like out of everything else, stepped into the shower, and washed that alter ego right out of my hair.

I wore a black sweater and a pair of violet corduroys to Chris and Larry’s.

Chris met me at the door, looking about nine feet tall in a yellow jumpsuit. Before you could say, “habeas corpus,” she plunged right in: “You’re gonna like this guy.”

I didn’t take it as bad news. I was wearing boring old corduroys, but I had got up the nerve to put on the wicked-woman shoes, and I was feeling pretty reckless. “Tell me more,” I said.

Chris led me into the kitchen on the pretext of getting some wine. “He’s Parker Phillips, who’s just moved here from pigball,” she said. “An architect.”

Now of course I knew he hadn’t moved from pigball, but I’m used to Chris. Since Larry’s from Seattle, I deduced that was what she meant. Chris is a very good lawyer, but she gives the appearance of being scatterbrained because whenever she can’t think of a word, she just substitutes a made-up one. “Pigball” was her latest.

“What’s he look like?” I asked. I don’t like to think I’m a female chauvinist pig, but I do set a certain store by a man’s appearance.

“Very New England. Not a West Coast type at all. Six feet tall, smokes a pipe, light brown hair, good bones. Ready to meet him?”

Who was going to say no after that description?

Parker Phillips had a firm handshake and perfect manners to go with it. He also seemed a little on the shy side, a quality that I feel shows a person isn’t unduly impressed with himself.

“Chris says you just moved to San Francisco,” I said when Larry and Chris had faded discreetly into the kitchen.

“Yes. My marriage broke up last year, and I’d been wanting to get out of Seattle for months. So when I got a job offer here, I took it. It seemed like a good place to live, and anyway I already knew two people here—Larry and my sister Carol, who’s a student at San Francisco State.”

Then he asked me about my law practice, and I started to warm up to him. I like men who ask me about myself. That old high school advice—that you should talk to men about what they’re interested in—is a good way to bore yourself silly.

I told Parker all about my star client. Then, as he still seemed interested, I told him about my bordello tour and regaled him with a few of Elena’s stories. I even confessed my silly shopping trip. He was kind enough to admire my wicked-woman shoes and asked if they were good for dancing. I said I’d show him sometime.