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

was that he was there too. Anyway, everybody knows I’m Elena’s lawyer. What could be more natural than helping out a friend? I told Elena I’d call Parker and call her back.
    Parker jumped at it.
    “There’s just one thing,” said Elena when I called back. “Could you wear something sort of—uh—in keeping with the occasion?”
    I told her I had just the thing—my Magnarama outfit—and arranged to come early so she could work on my hair and face. Since the make-up session was bound to bore Parker, he and I decided to come in separate cars.
    It was still raining that night, and I had to wear a trench coat and boots. Once they were off, Elena breathed a sigh of relief. “That’ll do nicely,” she said. “In twenty minutes you won’t recognize yourself.”
    I handed over my eyelashes, and she wrestled them on in about two seconds. Next, she applied blue eye shadow and a lot of rouge that followed the cheekbones exactly and didn’t look half-bad. I said I wanted a beauty mark, and she obliged me—on the right cheek between the nose and mouth. She fossicked in her bureau for the right shade of carmine lipstick and let me apply it myself, a skill I learned in junior high. From another drawer, she pulled the pièce de resistance—a silver lamé turban, so help me. It covered every strand of my Montgomery Street coiffure and, with the addition of a pair of dangling silver earrings, transformed workaday Rebecca into the expensive courtesan of my fantasies.
    I didn’t look like a streetwalker, you understand. Merely a very high-class lady of uncertain reputation. I was profoundly pleased with the effect.
    Elena’s own hair was pulled back from her face and piled very high in front, but was left hanging loose in back. Sophisticated, but not quite nice. She wore a slithery black velvet number that was long on sleeves and short on skirt. In fact, I learned that night that the miniskirt has never gone out of style at fancy cathouses. I was the only one of us
filles de joie
whose knees were covered, but then I had a slit to the wazoo, so what did it matter?
    Elena took me to the kitchen for a spot of sherry before the guests arrived. The other hostesses were gathered round the table, drinking only tea and soft drinks. Though they were passing a joint around, they were pros and didn’t want to smell like alcohol. Hilary, Renée, and Stacy, the other members of the co-op, were also my clients, so we knew each other from jail. I was introduced to Kandi, whose last name could have been Floss or Apple or Kane with no suspension of disbelief required. If you’d told me she’d made it up and was really Stephanie or Betsy or Suzy Q, I wouldn’t have had any. She was a sugarplum that walked like a woman. Sensuous as homemade fudge, airy as cotton candy, and cloying as divinity. She wasn’t any of those, though: she was a meringue. (This is not a sexist remark, merely an observation: I am a cinnamon heart, Parker is English toffee, former President Carter is a Mr. Goodbar, Richard Nixon is a licorice whip, Pat Nixon is a frosting rose from a birthday cake. I could go on forever.)
    Kandi had frilly blond hair and a figure that bounced with self-congratulation. But I don’t have to describe her too much because you know her: think of the homecoming queen at your high school, and there you have it. Half all-American girl, half budding starlet, and so radiant your eyes hurt to look at her. Only Kandi had passed out of the girl stage and the budding stage, and had flowered into a confectioner’s idea of a prostitute. She wore an apricot chiffon dress, long-sleeved and form-fitting, with a furbelow of a skirt like skaters wear. Neckline, cuffs, and hem were fluffy with tiny, downy apricot feathers.
    As for Hilary, Renée, and Stacy, if they’d come to court in the outfits they had on, they’d have been spending that November in the pokey. Hilary had on a nurse’s uniform, thigh-high with white sequins all over.
    Renée—a large, fortyish woman—wore a scarlet, plunging blouse of some shiny material, a wide belt, and a tight black skirt that hugged her opulent fanny and fell nearly to her knees, but not quite.
    Stacy, scarcely five feet tall and flat as a boy, wore a dress of white dotted swiss trimmed with a Peter Pan collar and tied in the back with an old-fashioned perky sash. She had braided her hair, tied it with pink ribbons, and painted freckles across her nose.
    I had to admire Elena. She had certainly