by Julie Smith
“But that can’t be!”
“Would Mom lie?”
That did it. Mickey had to accept the facts. “Not about that,” she said slowly. “But how could he have known her?”
“How do you think?”
“But Uncle Walter wouldn’t—wouldn’t go to a prostitute; he’s still suffering from Aunt Ellen’s death.”
I nodded. “I know. That’s what I’m clinging to to make sense out of it. A person might try anything to get over his grief.”
She looked skeptical.
“It’s the best I can do,” I said.
Mickey bit her little finger a moment before she spoke. “It wouldn’t work.”
“No, but he might try it.”
“Wait a minute. I’m a psychology student, remember? You wouldn’t try that to forget. You’d look for a nice widow.”
“But—”
“No, let me finish. Going to a prostitute might be a good way to avoid going on with your life, of wallowing in your grief. You could tell yourself you’re such a bad person no one would have you.”
Mickey is not dumb.
“Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense.” I was so sorry for Uncle Walter I was afraid I was going to cry again.
“Have you asked Uncle Walter about it?”
“Yes. He won’t talk about it.”
“So you think Kandi figured out what kind of man he is—that he’d die of humiliation if anyone found out. And that he had enough money to pay what she wanted.”
“Yes.”
“But wait. Uncle Walter may be naive, but he’s not stupid. Why would anyone take a prostitute’s word against his?”
“You know the watch Aunt Ellen gave him about ten years ago? He isn’t wearing it.”
“Omigod. Kandi lifted it.”
“Yes. And the police may have found it at her apartment.”
“Oh dear. So they might fingerprint it. It’s obviously a man’s watch.”
I nodded. “If they trace it to him, there’s nothing we can do about it, but what if they don’t? That’s almost worse.”
“Why?”
“Because I would then be withholding evidence that might help my client, who is also someone I’m dating, but which could incriminate my uncle.”
“You aren’t withholding anything.”
“Legally, no. But what about morally? If Parker had any other lawyer, he or she might have found out the same thing and would certainly—”
“No other lawyer’s mom saw Kandi at Uncle Walter’s.”
“Oh, Mickey, listen. It isn’t only that. Stacy—one of Elena’s partners—came to me with his name and the name of another man she suspected Kandi of blackmailing. And not only that—”
“What?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Uncle Walter was like a different person when I talked to him. I saw a side of him that I—that probably none of us has ever seen.”
“What are you talking about; did he threaten you or something?”
“No, nothing like that. It was just that his eyes—”
She rolled her own eyes. “His eyes, for Christ’s sake!”
“I’m not kidding, Mickey. You had to be there.”
“Rebecca, you are actually entertaining the notion that your own uncle is a murderer?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You are!”
“I just can’t get the whole thing out of my head; that’s all.”
I poured myself another glass of wine, but I was so gloomy I forgot to drink it. I just sat there twirling my hair around my finger. Mickey was silent, too. I guess she needed time to assimilate the news about Uncle Walter. At last, she looked at her watch. “Want to catch yourself on the eleven o’clock news?”
“May as well.” I didn’t want to have to think anymore.
We went back to the bedroom, turned on the TV, and stretched out on the bed. I knew I wasn’t the lead story, so I didn’t pay much attention until I heard the words “mob-style violence.”
I stopped examining Aunt Ellen’s rose satin comforter and looked up. The film showed a gurney being wheeled into a coroner’s wagon. According to the anchorman, it carried the body of Frank Jaycocks, who had been gunned down “execution-style” after leaving a restaurant with his wife.
Chapter Twenty
Involuntarily, I grabbed Mickey’s wrist and held it tight till the story was over. They’d moved the interview with me up to the second lead story, but Mickey and I were no longer interested in my natterings. “He must have been working for the mob,” Mickey said.
“Which means George must be a mobster.” I remembered what Rob Burns had told me about the Mafia moving in on prostitution, and suddenly George’s death threat against Kandi carried a lot more weight. So maybe Jaycocks had killed Kandi. But why had he been killed?
“He knew too much,” said Mickey. “The cops would have to prove he was working for George to make the assault charge stick, and the investigation might have connected him with the mob. If it was just George, the independent operator, it wouldn’t be worth murder; George could just fold his tent like the Arabs. But if George’s operation were part of something much bigger—”
“But shooting Jaycocks connects him with the mob.”
“How’re you going to prove it? Now if Frank had talked, that’d be proof.…”
“I see what you mean.” I was getting excited. “Listen, suppose the twenty-five grand was mob money.”
Mickey stopped me. “Wait a minute. You’re forgetting Kandi already had bad relations with George, and hence with the postulated mob. What was she doing with $25,000 of their money?”
“Back to the same old theory. She stole it.”
“Who from? Frank? Then why’d he dunk you in the aquarium?’
“Oh yeah. And anyway, as I keep pointing out myself, the mob doesn’t bludgeon people to death.” My head was spinning. “And the other same old objection, too—who would bring $25,000 to a whorehouse?”
“Rebecca! We’ve been looking at this wrong. Remember what you said when I was stoned? No one would.”
“But Elena says it wasn’t co-op money. So unless she’s lying, someone did.”
“That’s what I mean about looking at it wrong. We should have been asking ourselves why anyone would. And once you have the answer to that, it’s perfectly credible that anyone at that party would have had $25,000 on the premises of a whorehouse. Because he didn’t bring it there. He picked it up there.”
My head had stopped spinning and taken to pounding. “Omigod. Someone brought it there to give it to somebody else who was going to be there.”
Mickey nodded, but she was frowning. “But why? Why transact business at a bordello?”
“It could have been blackmail money for Kandi. But neither Uncle Walter nor the other man was there. My head hurts.”
But Mickey was on a different track. “Some kind of bribe or payoff?”
I scarcely heard her. “I’m getting a headache,” I said. I got up and went to the bathroom for some aspirin.
That damn Flokati rug was still hanging over the bathtub. I forgot all about the aspirin. “Mickey!”
She was there in half a second. “What? Are you all right?”
“It was the senator.”
“What was? And what senator, for that matter?”
“The murderer. Oh, Jesus, it’s so clear—that sonofabitch and his damned righteous feminist stand on legalized prostitution! I ask you, who’d benefit by legal prostitution?”
“Wait a minute! Are we unmasking a murderer or having a philosophical discussion?”
“I’ll tell you who would—besides prostitutes, I mean—the mob. No messy busts, no tiresome payoffs, and probably a nice legal tax dodge for laundering illegal money. Now if the mob wanted to take over prostitution in San Francisco, wouldn’t it be to their advantage if it were all nice and legal?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, it would, and the mob wants it… If Rob Burns is
right. And they paid Senator Calvin Handley—murderer of Kandi Phillips and friend of the downtrodden prostitute—$25,000 to work on his fellow legislators.”
Mickey opened her mouth and left it like that, which is an annoying habit she has on the rare occasions when she is speechless. “Look, Mickey,” I said, as patiently as I could. “Handley was the mysterious client I told you about.” I was still working the thing out in my head and couldn’t be bothered to explain further. Mickey closed her mouth and sat down on my bathroom floor. Finally she asked, “What makes you think he was taking payoffs?”
“The feathers,” I said, not realizing I was more or less dithering. “Someone at the whorehouse was a courier. Who? Elena? No, she’d never have sent him out without his clothes. And Kandi’s the last person she’d have let near his stuff if she’d thought there was $25,000 in his pants pocket. Stacy! He requested Stacy specially that day.”
“What the hell,” asked Mickey, “are you talking about?”
“Stacy was the one who brought the money to the whorehouse. Omigod! So she must have known who the murderer was all the time. Now, why didn’t he—oh Jesus, she couldn’t have known because she didn’t know where the money was. No one except the senator would know Kandi had taken it. But after I shot off my mouth on TV, everybody would know.” I paused as I realized what it meant. “The senator would know that Stacy would know.”
Mickey walked back into the living room and sat down, shaking her head. I knew it was confusing, but I couldn’t stop to explain. As long as my brain was in gear, I didn’t want to jar it. Besides, I didn’t think I had any time to waste. I joined Mickey in the living room, called directory assistance, and asked for Stacy’s number. She wasn’t listed. So I called Elena and got a busy signal.
So I called the cops and asked for Martinez, who wasn’t there. Finally I got Ziller, and I think I said something like this: “Hi, it’s Rebecca Schwartz, you’ve got to put a guard on Stacy, the senator’s going to kill her.”
“Nice to hear from you, Miss Schwartz,” said Ziller. “Do you think you could go over that again?” He really was a sweetheart.
So I explained to him that I had deduced that one of California’s most respected state senators had accepted a payoff from the Mafia, killed a prostitute, and now was about to kill another prostitute because she had probably figured out that he’d committed the first murder. He may have already told the police he was at the bordello the night of Kandi’s murder, I said, and there might be a record of that.
Ziller said he would look into it, and did I have any other proof?
No, I said, but any fool could see…
“Well, we’ll look into it, Miss Schwartz,” Ziller said.
“But Stacy may be in danger right now,” I said.
“Then again, she might not be,” Ziller said in a voice that indicated he wasn’t going to humor me much longer, and that the San Francisco police couldn’t go around acting on no evidence at all, especially where state senators were concerned.
I thanked him for his trouble and rang off, getting more agitated by the second. I dialed Elena again and got another busy signal. I dialed the operator, told her I had an emergency, and asked her to break in on the conversation. But there wasn’t conversation; Elena had left the phone off the hook, which was something I knew she did every now and then when she wanted a little peace.
It’s a tribute to Mickey’s faith in me that she hadn’t run screaming from the room by this time. She’d just sat there looking expectant and chewing her cuticle. She didn’t even protest when I said we had to get to Elena’s right then, no time to waste.
She didn’t till we were in the car, anyway. As soon as I had the Volvo’s nose pointed toward Pacific Heights, she said, “Now. What is the purpose of this wild-goose chase?”
“What do you mean?” I didn’t understand what she didn’t understand. “We have to find out where Stacy is. To warn her.”
“I’ve got the basics,” she said. “I mean, I know you think Calvin Handley killed Kandi and might kill Stacy, but what I want to know is what in God’s name gave you that idea?”
“Oh. The feathers.”
She nearly lunged at me, but I held up my hand to let her know that if she would control herself, I would tell all. And I did:
“When I saw the Flokati rug in the bathroom, I remembered how Kandi’s dress had been shedding feathers Friday night. Now Elena had told me that Kandi took the senator’s clothes back down to the basement that night, and that he got them later. So that came back to me when I saw my rug with the feathers all over it, and I realized that she couldn’t have handled his clothes without getting feathers on them.”
“And,” finished Mickey, “that if he’d happened to miss $25,000 from his pants pocket, he’d deduce that she stole it.”
“Right. And if he were the one with the money, it would explain why he’d been so insistent about going back to the bordello even though he thought it was crawling with cops. I missed that before because I eliminated him as the one with the money, because (a) he didn’t have that kind of money, and (b) he wouldn’t bring it to a cathouse.
“Once we got the idea that someone brought the money there to give it to someone else, and I got the idea the recipient was the senator, I naturally started thinking about why. And came up with the idea of a payoff from the mob to push legal prostitution. If that was the case, then who was the courier?
“Elena told me his routine had been completely different that Friday—for one thing, he’d come in the afternoon, and for another, he’d especially requested Stacy as well as Kandi. Ergo, Stacy must have been the courier.”
“Aha!” said Mickey. “And until tonight Stacy couldn’t have known Kandi was killed for the money, because she assumed the senator still had it. But after you told the whole world that $25,000 had turned up in your apartment, Stacy was bound to hear about it, put two and two together, and become dangerous to old Calvin. Hence this wild-goose chase.”
“You catch on fast, kid.”
Elena’s porch light was on, and it wasn’t red. Anybody could have seen us get out of the car and walk up to the door. I realized someone had when I heard light footsteps running across Elena’s tiny garden from the right side of the house. Mickey gasped. I wheeled around, clutching my purse like a weapon, ready to wrangle with a seven-foot plug-ugly. But the figure coming at us was slender and barely five-feet-ten. It was nattily attired in jeans and a corduroy jacket, and it was stage-whispering my name. It stopped in midyard and beckoned us over to it.
“It’s all right,” I told Mickey. “It’s only a reporter on special assignment—Rob Burns, the Chron's illicit-sex expert.”
Rob put a finger to his lips as we joined him. I introduced Mickey. “You’re not going to believe who’s in there,” Rob said, hardly able to contain his delight.
“The senator!” Mickey mouthed, and her face was so genuinely horrified that Rob sobered up.
“You know?” he said.
“Calvin Handley’s in there?”
Rob nodded.
“Let’s go.” I turned and started grimly back to the porch. But Rob grabbed my arm.
“No. Listen, there’s a place on the side of the house where the drapes don’t quite meet. Mickey and I could boost you up high enough so you could look in—and maybe hear what he and Elena are talking about.”
“Is that the way reporters normally work?”
He had the grace to look sheepish. “Of course not. But dammit, Rebecca, you don’t know what I know. He’s up to something pretty sleazy.”
“Damn straight,” I said. “Lead on, MacDuff.”
When I had one foot in each of their clasped hands, with the wall of the house for support, I could just see in the crack. Elena and the senator were sitting on the rose velvet loveseat, and the crucial moment seemed to have arrived.
“But you didn’t come here to find out how I’m getting along,” Elena said, or something quite close to it; I could catch most of the
words. “You must have a pretty compelling reason to take this kind of risk.” Her eyes were shrewd.
“You’re an astute observer, Elena. I wouldn’t have come unless it was a life-or-death matter. Stacy may be in danger.”
“What sort?”
“I can’t talk about it, or tell you how I got the information, but I want to warn her.”
“And you want me to deliver that message?” Elena looked puzzled.
“No, no—there’s a specific message, and I—well—to tell you might endanger you as well. I must talk to her myself.” Elena shrugged. “I can give you her address and phone number, but I sent her out on a dinner date, and she won’t be home for hours.”
“Uh—forgive my ignorance, but how does a dinner date work?”
“Just like the amateur kind, only the guy pays for the pleasure of your company. Mostly guys from out of town. They want to take a good-looking woman to an expensive restaurant like Amelio’s, which is where I sent Stacy, and they want to make damn sure the evening’s going to end up with sex.”
“At his hotel?”
“Usually, yes.”
“And does the woman stay all night?”
“If the john pays for it. This guy didn’t, so Stacy ought to be home by about one o’clock at the latest.”
I’d heard enough. I told Rob and Mickey to let me down. Rob was so excited he was practically doing a jig. “What’s going on in there?”
“That man is going to commit a murder tonight, unless we stop him,” I said. “Rob, you wait for him to leave and then bang on the door until Elena answers. Tell her to call Stacy immediately and tell her I’m on my way to get her at Amelio’s. Tell her to tell Stacy to get rid of the john and come with me, and not to leave under any circumstances until I get there.”
“What? Are you crazy? I’m supposed to be following the senator. Also, I haven’t a clue who Stacy is or what any of that means.”
“It’s an emergency, okay? Come on, Mickey.”
But she balked. “Don’t you think we should call the cops?”
“I’m damned if I’m going to make a fool of myself again. We’ll just pick up Miss Stacy Clayton and take her to the nearest cop shop, which I believe is Central Station. Why don’t you meet us there, Rob, and I’ll explain everything? No time now.”
