Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) Read online

  Tourist Trap is the THIRD Rebecca Schwartz Mystery by Edgar-winning author Julie Smith.

  “Warmth, wit and local color in a fast-moving story—with some neat twists and turns along the way. Smith’s best work so far.”

  —Kirkus

  “An attractive and amusing heroine.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Smith is a very funny writer with a nice feel for the absurdities of urban life.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  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.)

  TOURIST TRAP

  A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery

  By

  JULIE SMITH

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, LA

  Tourist Trap

  Copyright © 1986 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.

  Cover by Nevada Barr

  ISBN: 9781617507939

  Originally published in hardcover by The Mysterious Press. First Mysterious Press Paperback Printing: August, 1987

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: June 2012

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  To Jere Hoar, Evans Harrington, John Foster, Joan Heil, and Steve Gavin; and to the memory of Sam Talbert and Kevin Wallace.

  Contents

  Praise

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  Also by Julie Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  Also by Julie Smith

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  About the Author

  1

  I’ll see your quarter and raise you another quarter.”

  “I’m out.”

  “Me, too.”

  That meant it was my turn to bet. I had two kings and a nine showing, a pair of sevens down. We were playing baseball, a kind of seven-card stud in which nines and threes are wild and fours entitle you to another card. I already had what the others called a full boat, and I had another card coming. That sounds good, but in a game like baseball, as I had already discovered, five of a kind isn’t unusual.

  Alan Kruzick, my secretary, had three aces showing, though two of them were really nines. To have Kruzick take my last quarter was too much like real life. He was not only my secretary but also my sister Mickey’s boyfriend and the bane of my every working day. I was about to fold—true to my conservative nature—when I caught the blue and attractive eye of Rob Burns. He shook his head and pointed to the quarter. Since I’d never played poker before in my life, I thought I’d better take advice where I could get it. Reluctantly, I pushed the coin into the pot.

  Alan and I were the only two left in the game, but Rob was dealing. He gave each of us our last card, down. Mine was a two. Excuse me, a deuce. No help, as the others would say. Kruzick put in another quarter.

  “I’m out,” I said. “Flat broke.”

  Chris Nicholson, my law partner, put in her two cents: “Why don’t you go light?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s my boss,” said Alan. “The gutless wonder.”

  That settled it. I borrowed two cents from the pot. “Your quarter and another quarter.”

  “And another,” he said, throwing one in.

  There was a three-raise limit, so what could I do but continue to bluff? I took another quarter out of the pot. And Alan turned over a pair of sixes.

  “You’re fired,” I said.

  “You can’t fire me, I’m pregnant.”

  Mickey said, “Alan!”

  And then there was dead silence.

  Our friend Bob Tosi—who was Chris’s current flame—got up to get some more wine. Finally, I asked Alan what he meant.

  Mickey spoke. “He means I’m pregnant.”

  “Hey, I’m no sexist. We’re pregnant.”

  “Mickey, honey,” said Chris. “Congratulations. I mean, if they’re in order.”

  Mickey squirmed in her chair. “I’m not sure yet.” She looked at me as if pleading for mercy. “I mean I’m sure I’m pregnant. I’m just not sure what—Rebecca, I didn’t mean to tell you this way.”

  I could only think of one thing to say and it was the wrong thing: “How could this happen to a counselor at Planned Parenthood?”

  Mickey burst into tears. Instantly, Chris put her arms around her. “You poor peach.” She looked at me as if I’d hit my own sister. Rob, bless him, put his arms around me. I needed comfort as much as the next person.

  “So that’s why you aren’t drinking,” I said, still putting things together. “Mickey, listen, baby, I’m sorry. If it’s what you want—”

  She broke away from Chris. “I don’t know what I want. Yes, I do. I want to go home.”

  In about thirty seconds, she and Kruzick were out of there. And then Chris and Bob were gone.

  “It’s midnight,” said Rob. “Happy Easter.”

  For some reason, that broke me up. Things didn’t seem so bad all of a sudden. Mickey would have an abortion and everything would be fine. Lots of women did—she should know; she spent her life advising them.

  Rob found some brandy and gave me some. “You okay?” he said.

  “I think so. I’m a horrible sister, I guess. But for a minute there, I thought we might all be stuck with Kruzick for life.” Mickey phoned then. “Congratulations. I’ve made up my mind. You’re going to be an aunt.”

  “Listen, Mickey, I’m really sorry—”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I know it was a shock.”

  “I’m glad you’re not mad. I’ll dance at your wedding to make it up to y
ou.”

  “Who said anything about a wedding?”

  “But I thought—”

  “Oh, I’m going to have the baby, all right. But I’m not sure I want to be tied down.”

  Alan took the phone from her. He said, “She’ll come around,” and hung up.

  Rob poured me another brandy. “Mom Schwartz is going to love this.”

  I nodded. “Thank God she’s in Israel.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Woozy. I think I need a Coke.”

  He got me one and sat on the white sofa across from the one I was sitting on, looking as if he’d be glad to speak if only someone hadn’t cut his tongue out. “This is awful,” I said. “If I fire him, I’m taking bread out of the mouth of my own niece.”

  “Or nephew.”

  “Nephew, yes. At least she can’t name him Alan.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know?” Rob is half Jewish, but doesn’t know the first thing about Jewish tradition. He shook his head.

  “You shouldn’t name a kid for a living relative.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Auntie Chris’ll call it Diddley-bop whatever its name is.”

  It was true. Chris could never remember names—or common household words—and substituted whatever nonsense syllables came into her head. Somehow, remembering that homely fact made me laugh again.

  Rob put a hand on my thigh. “You want to have an adventure?”

  “Sure,” I said, and got up. Having an adventure was our plan for the next few hours—an odd kind of adventure for a Bay Area native who thought she’d done everything San Francisco had to offer. I’d certainly done most of it in my nearly thirty years—I’d even once played the piano in one of our better bordellos, the dumbest prank of my life. But one thing I’d never done, partly because I’m Jewish and partly because I hate to get up in the morning, was go to the Easter sunrise service on Mount Davidson. This year, Rob, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, had the honor of covering it—a punishment, he said, for insubordination. He’d enlisted me for company and dreamed up the idea of an all-night poker game so we wouldn’t have to wake up. Everyone had accepted, but no one wanted to stay all night. So he came up with a new plan—we’d play poker almost all night, then borrow Bob Tosi’s van, drive it to the foot of Mount Davidson, and nap for a couple of hours before sunrise.

  The van was parked downstairs, equipped with a blown-up air mattress and sleeping bags. I fed the finny fellows in my hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium, and Rob and I were off.

  It was about 2 A.M. when we got to Mount Davidson, and very quiet. I, for one, was exhausted, faint even, heavy with alternating thoughts of Kruzick as a brother-in-law and breaking the news to Mom that her baby daughter was going to be an unmarried mother.

  Rob set his wristwatch alarm and we snuggled down in each other’s arms on the air mattress, still wearing our jeans—this I’d insisted on. If a cop knocked on the window, I wanted a layer of dignity between myself and him.

  “Rebecca,” said Rob, “if you were pregnant, would you marry me?”

  “Maybe—if you were responsible.”

  I don’t know what made me say a jerky thing like that—the strain, I guess—but it made him turn away from me. That was disconcerting enough, but then a dog started howling somewhere in the west. I couldn’t sleep at all.

  “Rebecca, will you be still?” was all the sympathy I got.

  And then, Mickey was getting married. I got the invitation in the mail and ripped it open. But it wasn’t Mickey after all. It was someone with a French name, and she was marrying Alan. Or Alan was her father. Or something. “Mr. and Mrs. Alan DuPis,” said the card, “announce the marriage of their daughter, Ani.” Ani DuPis. I’d had two years of high school French and I knew how to pronounce it—Ahnee Dupee. But who could it be?

  The effort of puzzling it out woke me up. That meant I’d been asleep after all. But how could that be? Because I hadn’t. But I must have because now I was awake and the dream was right—I did indeed need to pee. I’d heard that people dreamed in puns and now I’d caught my own subconscious at it. There wasn’t a public bathroom around, but there was certainly a wooded area—I could simply get out and pretend I was camping.

  It was just before dawn, but the fog was so thick it might as well have been midnight; a cop would have to have X-ray vision to catch me in the act. I went behind a clump of bushes, dropped my drawers, and found myself quite unable to answer nature’s call. I’ve been camping all my life, but the art of urination alfresco is something I’ve never quite mastered. Normally, I scoffed at the patriarchal notion of penis envy, but at times like this I thought the good Viennese doctor may have had a point. I breathed deeply and tried to relax the relevant muscle group. And then there was a crash followed by a loud “Oof.” Rob was out of the van in about half a second. “Rebecca? Rebecca!”

  “I’m over here. Peeing.” Lying, actually. By then I was standing up and tugging on my zipper; my bikini briefs were caught in it. No time to straighten it out then; I pulled my sweater down as far as it would go and nipped out in the open. Rob was already running up the hill. I caught up with him and we kept running. There was more noise up ahead, some sort of scrapings, so we figured we were headed in the right direction. We could see about two inches in front of us.

  We ran for about a week and a half—why, I’m not sure. The “oof,” I guess. Perhaps someone was being attacked under the giant cross at the top of the mountain. On the other hand, running, even uphill, just before dawn in an eerie fog, with the smell of eucalyptus pungent in our nostrils, wasn’t the worst way to spend Easter morning. But I was getting tired. Rob was one curve ahead of me. “My God!” he said as he rounded it.

  At first I couldn’t see what had startled him. I could see the cross, and it was very impressive indeed. I hadn’t realized it had a carved Jesus on it. The fog swirled then and I caught a glimpse of color—green spattered with red. “Jesus!” I said. But I was lying again. It wasn’t Jesus, or an artist’s depiction of Jesus, or even a prank. There was a man nailed to the cross—a man with white hair, wearing jeans and a green cowboy shirt, satin, I thought, with blood all over it.

  2

  The ladder was lying at the base of the cross, along with a rope. Somewhere quite near, a large animal scuffled in the brush and began to run, off to our left. Rob’s head swiveled toward the noise, then back to the cross. “He might not be dead,” I said, meaning the man on the cross. But his chin was on his chest and his eyes were staring open. And the running animal was, by now, clearly a two-footed one—no dog or deer ever crashed through brush quite so clumsily. Rob followed the noise, leaving me staring at a corpse.

  But how could I be sure it really was a corpse? To my regret, I had some experience in these matters, but no expertise. If he wasn’t dead, I couldn’t just let him hang there. That was my first thought, I guess, but it was more or less subconscious. Consciously, all I could think of was how mad I was at Rob for leaving me alone.

  The fog had lifted suddenly and I felt very naked. Maybe the person Rob was chasing wasn’t the killer. Maybe it was just some derelict, or even a solid citizen who’d come early for the sunrise service, like us. Maybe the real murderer was lurking about, and now I was all alone. I was terrified.

  It was all I could do not to turn around and go running right back down the hill, but I still wasn’t sure the man was dead. I had to do something; or so my pathetic excuse for reasoning went. With quite a lot of effort, I lifted the ladder and leaned it against the cross. Then I started climbing up, about as distasteful an activity as I’ve ever undertaken. Not only was I frightened of any long-legged beast that might be in the neighborhood, I wasn’t too keen on ladders at the best of times. I took it slow and easy, breathing deeply on each rung, not courting hysteria by looking down. “Hold it right there!” said a female voice. I slipped off the ladder, knocking it over as I fell.

  “Oof!” I said as I landed and rolled to the ri
ght, so as not to end up under the ladder. I realized as I did it that what I’d surely heard a few minutes ago was someone making precisely the same sort of wrong move.

  I raised my hands over my head, outlaw fashion, and turned, sitting up, to see who’d captured me. I was expecting a police officer, maybe; I hadn’t really thought about it. But my nemesis was a scrawny woman in her thirties with straggly brown hair and no makeup. If she’d paid $2.50 for her outfit at the local Goodwill, she’d been robbed. One hand was in the pocket of a tattered ski jacket, and there was a bulge in the pocket large enough to be a gun. Or a beer bottle. I was betting on the latter. She took a step closer. “Are you hurt?”

  I shook my head, too stunned to speak.

  “Stand up.”

  I did, and took a step toward her, still holding my hands up. She moved back, but not before I caught the reek of alcohol. “That’s not really a gun, is it?”

  “Stand back!”

  I moved forward again. “If that’s a gun, let me see it.” I can’t really explain why I wasn’t terrified, except that the woman seemed so frail. Even if she had a gun, she didn’t look as if she’d have enough strength in her trigger finger to use it. Or maybe I could smell fear, like an animal. They say you revert to a primitive state under extreme stress. And this was extreme stress. I’d just discovered a body on a quiet Easter morning, been deserted by my own true love, fallen off a ladder, and was now being threatened by a ragamuffin who was either drunk or had recently been drunk. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I was in very real danger of wetting my pants. I was not about to brook any nonsense.