Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

the sentence a question so I’d sound properly submissive—almost as little and cute as one of the fuzzy beasts I’d mentioned.
    “You do? My kid loves those things. He can watch them for hours.”
    “I know you. You belong to Friends of the Sea Otter.”
    He looked wary. “No, I—”
    “Would you like to join? I think I’ve got a brochure here.” I rummaged in my purse. “We really need your support—there’s only three thousand California sea otters left in the wild, and one good oil spill could wipe every one of them out. Did you know that?”
    “Miss—uh—Schmidt—”
    “Schwartz.” I gave him a great big, all-American, conservationist grin. “You know, they’re not like birds. Our feathered friends—‘pelagic birds,’ we biologists call them—do pretty well unless they get oil all over them. With an otter it’s like Brylcreem—a little dab’ll do him.” I cut my throat with my finger. “And it’s not true they’re eating all the shellfish. An abalone’s just a giant snail in the first place, did you know that? I bet you wouldn’t eat little escargots, so why would you eat a giant escargot? And anyway, think about it. Three thousand sea otters and millions of human beings—who do you really think is gobbling up the goodies?”
    He stepped away from me. I was charming him like a mongoose charms a cobra.
    He was still groping for a polite squelch when I stepped back myself. “I’m so sorry. I was being pushy.”
    A warm blanket of relief spread over him. “It’s okay. Are abalones really snails?”
    “Honest.”
    “Yick. Wait’ll I tell my brother-in-law. He hates snails. Loves abalone. This’ll kill him.”
    I squinched up my nose, schoolteacher-style. “I’ll bet he’s a diver, too. Hates sea otters, right?”
    He blushed, all but shifted from one foot to the other. “You, too, I’ll bet.”
    “Hey, I’m a conservationist. I brake for trees.”
    Having established myself as Miss-Grundy-of-the-deep-blue-sea, I permitted myself to point a finger in his face. “Oho. You’re a funny one.”
    We guffawed together like the fun-lovin’ fellas he and his brother-in-law were, and then he said, “Okay, Miss Schwartz. Let me see your name tag and I’ll let you in.” Name tag! Damn Marty Whitehead’s liver and lungs! She could have lent me her damn name tag, and she hadn’t even mentioned it.
    I said, “Omigod, I don’t know if I brought it. See, I switched purses—” As I spoke, I began to pull things out of my purse: a flashlight, a paperback copy of an aquarium book I’d found at Marty’s, my calendar. “Oh, no! I really have to feed the little critters. Did you know they have to eat ten times their body weight every six hours?”
    My acting teacher had said you could get the effect you wanted just by wanting to. As I kept my eyes lowered and chattered, frantically pulling things from my purse, I imagined a tank full of poor orphaned sea otters, separated from their mothers in stormy seas, and now at the mercy of human beings who were after all only human and sometimes left their name tags at home and therefore couldn’t get in to feed them. I imagined how lost and miserable and, above all,
hungry
an otter in such a tank would feel. When I felt genuine tears, I looked up.
    “I overslept,” I said. “I was supposed to feed them at eight.”
    Quickly, as if embarrassed at having been caught crying, I looked down again and found my keys, including the ones Marty had turned over to me. “Look, how about if I show you I really do have a key that’ll open that gate—wouldn’t that prove I work here?”
    He looked around to see if he was being observed and I knew I had won.
    “Sure,” he said. “Hardly anyone remembered their name tag this morning. You guys must have pretty casual security.”
    I only wished my acting class, before which I was as likely to flub my lines as not, could have seen my award-quality improvisation.
    In Marin County, where I grew up, all kids take nearly every kind of lessons they can fit into their schedules—
except
acting. That could lead to a career in the arts and a life of poverty.
    I took acting after I got beat in court by a DA who’d done it—Raymond Fanelli, damn his soul. His opening statement had the jury in tears. By the time the trial was over, they wanted my client’s blood. Since she was a battered wife who’d finally fought back (if a little too hard), I had plenty of histrionic material myself. I’m