by Julie Smith
“Fuck!” said Rob Burns of the Chronicle.
I had in mind to leave with a great screeching of tires, but the Volvo stalled. It’s an eccentric car and does this sometimes.
It took about five minutes to get the damn thing started, and I kept telling myself I wasn’t worried. I trusted Rob to deliver the message and Elena to be forceful enough to convince Stacy of the urgency of the situation and Stacy to be smart enough to wait for me and the senator to be canny enough to go immediately to Stacy’s and start booby-trapping her house or something. It would hardly serve his purpose—which was keeping her quiet—to hie his Mercedes over to Amelio’s and march in and gun her down.
As I said, that’s what I was telling myself. But the urgency to get there was almost unbearable. What if Stacy left the restaurant before Elena could call? What if Rob decided I was crazy and carried out his assignment of following the senator and didn’t even deliver the message? Oh God, what if the Volvo just plain gave up?
I heard a car start in the alley behind Elena’s.
“That must be the senator,” said Mickey in a controlled voice. “Let’s try it again.”
I shifted and the Volvo started, and we did great for four blocks until we hit a red light at Fillmore.
“God damn it!” I said. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
“Easy, girl,” said Mickey, who apparently had appointed herself my caretaker. “The thing I don’t get—”
The Volvo screeched forward again, faster than it should have with an officer of the court at the wheel, but Mickey kept on talking, either in a frantic effort to get me interested in something besides killing us both or in blind ignorance of the danger she was in; it couldn’t have been faith in my driving. “The thing I don’t get—”
“Christ on a crutch!” Some idiot was stopped in my lane, talking to someone on the sidewalk. I leaned on my horn. He didn’t budge. I kept going, and Mickey covered her head with her hands.
At the last second, I had to swing into the left lane to go around him, no matter if there was an oncoming car. There was. His brakes screeched. So did mine.
We both stopped in time, but it was a good thing Mickey and I had our seatbelts on, or we’d have ejected like a couple of characters in a James Bond movie.
The other driver—a large and angry-looking black man—got out of his car and came forward, no doubt with the intention of giving me a well-deserved piece of his mind, or possibly a rap in the teeth. I leaned on my horn.
“What you think you doin’, bitch?” he shouted over the din.
“My sister’s having a baby,” I shouted back, still honking. Mickey cowered in the shotgun seat.
“I don’t care if she’s havin’ a epileptic fit. You oughta know better—”
“Now, Rebecca!” shouted Mickey.
The car in the right lane had taken the hint and left rubber all over the street. I swung back into that lane and followed suit, fighting down the urge to give the other driver the finger. Sure, he was a jerk who’d have let Mickey give birth right in the Volvo, but after all, the whole thing was my fault.
It was a good thing I let him off, too, because I hit another red light at the corner, and he could have caught up with us and killed us if he’d wanted to. I swore and Mickey kept cowering until we got on the freeway at Gough Street and I got in the fast lane and gunned that little gray mother, a good fifteen minutes from takeoff.
Amelio’s was in North Beach, nestled on Powell Street just south of Washington Square. The senator could have already been there if he’d had any better luck than we had. But he wouldn’t be, I told myself. What was the point?
“What I don’t understand,” said Mickey, “is how he can kill Stacy now that Elena knows he was asking about her. I mean, doesn’t he have to kill her to cover his tracks?”
I’d thought of that too. “He’s not going to get the chance,” I said. “He doesn’t know we know what he’s up to, and if Stacy gets it, I’ve got an idea the police will listen to me for once.”
“Yes, but unless he’s gone completely mad, surely he wouldn’t take the risk. It doesn’t make sense, Rebecca. And neither does the other part, really. He’s always been a decent politician. Unless he’s in some terrible financial difficulty, why would he sell out to the mob?”
“Dammit, Mickey, we just saw him feeding Elena a cockamamie story. What kind of proof do you want?”
“I don’t say you’re wrong,” she said in a hurt voice. “I just don’t understand why, that’s all.”
“Power corrupts,” I snapped, aware that it was a facile answer, but I was tired out from thinking too much. I’d have to worry about that part later.
Mickey didn’t answer, and we were silent as we fetched up at the Broadway exit and began fighting our way through the North Beach traffic. It was much too slow going for my peace of mind, so I turned right on Sansome and went to Union, so as to approach from the north. We turned off Union Street onto Powell, and I pulled up kitty-corner to the restaurant. I couldn’t get directly across the street because of the parking garage there that’s always debouching cars at unsafe speeds, but it didn’t matter; we had a clear view of Amelio’s. Stacy wasn’t outside.
“I’ll have to go in and get her,” I said. “Take the wheel, and be ready to scratch off when we come out.”
“We’re in that big a hurry?”
I nodded. “I think so, yes.”
“I’m not sure I can handle your car.” She had a point. When the Volvo gets temperamental, no one but me can figure out how to coax it into submission. “Okay, you go,” I said.
“But she doesn’t know me. Elena told her to wait for you, remember?”
“Damn! Okay, here—take my driver’s license for proof you’re with me.” I fumbled for it and described Stacy briefly.
“If she has any doubts, just have her peek out the door and I’ll wave.”
“Okay.” She darted across the street, slender and lithe in her jeans.
I waited about five minutes, clenching my teeth and every now and then taking my hands off the steering wheel and wiping them on my pants. I also kept glancing at my watch, which is how I know how long I waited. I don’t have to tell you how long it felt like.
Mickey and Stacy came out looking like a couple of old-fashioned butch-femme lesbians having a lover’s quarrel, the way they were dressed—Stacy was in some sort of floaty white dress—and the way Mickey was practically dragging her kicking and screaming. Stacy looked briefly my way, and I waved as promised, but that didn’t seem to relieve her mind any. Apparently, the problem wasn’t whether the right person was calling for her; she didn’t seem to want to be called for at all. I figured it had something to do with the hundred bucks she stood to lose by cutting the date short, and shifted into drive as they started across the street.
As I glanced back up from the gearshift, a Mercedes whipped out of the parking lot, heading right for them.
I made no decision, or if I did, I don’t remember it. All I remember is stomping the accelerator flush with the floor, and then a godawful crunch as I hit the Mercedes broadside.
I couldn’t see if the driver was the senator, or if Mickey and Stacy were safe. I don’t remember seeing anything at all. All I really know about what happened next was that someone lost her cool and screamed. The way I knew it was me was I noticed my mouth had filled up with glass.
Chapter Twenty-One
I spent the second longest night of my life lying on a gurney at San Francisco General Hospital, also known as Mission Emergency. I don’t remember getting there, so I can’t tell you what that was like. I just remember feeling I was going to throw up, which is how concussion sometimes affects you, and holding Mickey’s hand.
I’d managed to break the senator’s hip, which I’m not the least bit sorry about to this day. The sonofabitch would have killed my sister if I hadn’t rammed him. He got most of the attention in the emergency room, and I vaguely remember Jodie Handley coming in at some point. Mom and Da
d didn’t, because Mickey and I decided not to call them till we got back to my house. As it turned out, that was around daylight.
Mickey made breakfast and brought it to me, and we both got under Aunt Ellen’s satin comforter to eat it. I felt a lot better after a couple of poached eggs on toast, but not well enough to call the folks.
Mickey did, and laid it on so thick about how I’d saved her life that they were scarcely any trouble at all. Mom did say she’d be over later with soup, but I suppose that was inevitable. Dad just kept repeating Calvin Handley’s name in disbelief.
They were so grateful about my saving Mickey that I decided I was a heroine and called Chris with quite a spirited version, heavy on grisly details but light on explanations. Unfortunately, I still needed some.
Then I got a call myself—from a steaming Rob Burns wanting to know why I hadn’t turned up at Central Station. Imagine the fun I had with that one! In the course of it, I also learned that he’d heard about the senator’s mob connections from “sources,” which is why he was carrying on like some character from the Lou Grant show the night before. He never has named the sources—either to me or to the police.
By then I was a big fan of Rob’s, but I could hardly wait to get him off the phone, which wasn’t easy considering he’d stumbled on a page-one story. Of course, in a couple of hours he could have gotten it from the cops, but then so could any other reporter, and he’d sewed it up for himself just by dialing my number.
The reason I was so eager to get rid of him was that I wanted to call Martinez. I wanted to relish informing him from my bed of pain how his cockamamie theory about Parker had nearly caused two more murders, including that of my own sister, and how I had risked my life to straighten out his botched investigation and how if he didn’t let Parker loose in the next five minutes, I’d have his job.
But it wasn’t any fun at all. It seems Jodie Handley had had a heart-to-heart with her hubby, and she’d called Martinez at home. Even as we talked, Martinez gave me to understand that my client was being released. Somehow he managed to convey that he’d solved the case himself, and he didn’t say he was sorry or even ask how my head was. The horse’s ass.
I stayed in bed that day and the next, and Mom came, and so did Chris and Rob and a lot of other reporters, but I had Mom send them all away but Rob.
Parker came too, with a couple dozen roses, but he didn’t stay long. We were distant with each other, both knew the romance was over. It would it be putting it mildly to say the time wasn’t right for it?
The person I was happiest to see was Uncle Walter. He took my hand and ’fessed up and said he was sorry for the way he’d treated me. I said I was sorry for what I’d done too—suspecting him of murder and all—and we got back on solid uncle-niece ground again. Kandi’d tried to blackmail him, all right, but he hadn’t given her a cent. I’m proud of him. And I’m happy to say the police found his watch and gave it back.
The senator pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and a few lesser charges. I was exactly right about what happened:
He’d panhandled some change after he left me, called Elena, and gone back to the bordello to find his clothes with Kandi’s apricot feathers on them and the money missing. Then he’d gone out the back door again, retrieved his car, and waited for Kandi at the front of the house. When she came out with Stacy, he saw he couldn’t accost her on the street, so he followed her to my apartment. She went in immediately, leaving the note for me, and he rang my bell. She let him in, apparently stashing the money in the fern pot while he mounted the stairs. She told him she didn’t have it, they quarreled, and he lost his temper and hit her with the statue, holding it by the head as I’d postulated. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it immediately, unknowingly leaving Parker’s print on it. Then he went into the kitchen and found my rubber gloves to wear while he looked for the money.
He lied to Elena and me about telling the police he was at the bordello the night of the murder.
When I told every reporter in town I’d found $25,000 in my apartment, he assumed Stacy would hear about it and realize that Kandi had stolen the money from him and that he’d killed her to get it back. So he tried to kill Stacy before she could talk. He’d thought that if he made it look like an accident, Elena either wouldn’t put two and two together or would find it to her advantage not to mention his interview with her at the bordello. After all, she wanted prostitution legalized, and he was a state senator working on that project—as well as a good customer. He counted on her being just enough outside the law to take that attitude and just straight enough not to try to blackmail him.
At least that’s what he told Jodie. But I say a person who’s committed two murders probably wouldn’t stop there if he thought there was any doubt about his own neck.
Jodie got the job as lobbyist for HYENA, and we had lunch not too long ago. She told me she’d filed for divorce, a capital idea, I thought. She also described—fairly painfully for both of us—the deterioration of a once-decent man. It had to do with the same things the senator was telling me about at Mom and Dad’s party—about making compromises and so many things in politics being about half-crooked anyway. He’d just kind of gotten jaded after years of being forced to make this or that compromise or deal to get his bills through, and his integrity had begun slowly to crumble. Jodie had seen it and worried about it, but she had no idea how far it had gone.
When he’d gotten the offer from the mob, it hadn’t seemed such a bad thing; after all, they were asking him to do something his wife was already pressuring him about, something she thought right and moral. Why not do it and get something out of it as well? It was a kind of self-destructive game, a kind of weary giving in to his worst side almost as a sort of self-punishment, like those games he’d played with Kandi. He just took up legislative residence in Edge City.
But he hadn’t become so grasping and corrupt that he’d kill someone for money. After he’d played his nasty little game with the mob, the payoff did assume a great deal more importance in his mind than his actual need for it, so he confronted Kandi about it. But he killed her because she taunted him. She called him a sicko and a weirdo and a crook who made her want to throw up. It wasn’t exactly an insult Dorothy Parker would have been proud of, but it was effective on two counts: it was exactly his opinion of himself, and it came out of Kandi’s mouth. Before that, he’d thought of Kandi as some sort of mechanical doll—not even a real person, never mind a worthy one—and here she was setting herself up as his superior.
He told Jodie that in retrospect he believed he had turned his own guilt and self-hatred on Kandi for the split second it took to bash her head in, and I expect that’s not far from the truth.
Jodie’s bounced back pretty well, and I’m going to introduce her to Uncle Walter at the first opportunity; I think they just might hit it off.
Stacy got immunity for telling a grand jury who it was she’d delivered the money for, and a whole string of indictments followed for various offenses, including the murder of Frank Jaycocks. None of the indicted men was named George, but I always thought that was a pseudonym.
Elena the incorrigible found herself a new house and went right back into business. If she gets busted again, I don’t know what I can do for her, I’m so swamped with clients. I’m almost as big a name as Daddy now, but I haven’t let it go to my head. I’ll make time for Elena if I have to; don’t worry.
The police gave back my Don Quixote statue, but I couldn’t bear the sight of it anymore, so I gave it to Rob Burns for a souvenir. He and I are quite a heavy number now. In fact, he promised to give me something to replace the statue, and I know exactly what I want: one of those heart-shaped red ceramic boxes you can get at a gift shop on Polk Street for about twenty dollars. They only sell them around Valentine’s Day, but I can wait.
Next in the Rebecca Schwartz series is THE SOURDOUGH WARS. Find out more info at www.booksbnimble.com
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.)
And don’t miss ALWAYS OTHELLO, a Skip Langdon story, as well as the brand new short story, PRIVATE CHICK, which asks the question, is this country ready for a drag queen detective? More info at www.booksBnimble.com.
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