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

by Julie Smith

  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.

  Chapter Two

  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.

  Chapter Three

  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.

  “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.

  Chapter Four

  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.