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

floor-length robe with full sleeves and a hood, perfectly decent but damn-all odd.
    “Shoes?” asked Elena. The senator shook his head. “Okay, come on. You too, Rebecca.”
    She pushed aside the armoire, revealing a crude passageway—a tunnel, really. She gave me the flashlight and fished a key from her bodice. As she handed it over, I could see that her hand was shaking. “Listen, both of you,” she whispered. “Shots were fired up there. For all I know, someone may be dead or hurt. This is my house and I can’t leave. Rebecca, this is… Joe. I’m depending on you to get him to his car. Then go home, change into street clothes, and get back here. We’ll be needing you. The door at the end of the tunnel is padlocked, and this is the key. My car is parked almost dead against the door. It’s unlocked and the keys are in it. Take the padlock with you; we may need to use the tunnel again tonight. Just get the sen—get Joe out of here. I’ll wait five minutes after I hear the car drive off before I go back up. Good luck.” She squeezed my hand.
    We had to bend nearly double in the tunnel. I went first with the light, the senator following with a hand on each of my hips. I felt this was not completely necessary, but I put up with it. It was the least of my problems at the moment. I cursed whatever insanity had made me comply with Elena’s request, and I cursed Elena for making it sound so safe.
    She hadn’t exactly lied. It was true no one was turning tricks at the party. But leaving out a naked senator in the basement seemed a rather serious sin of omission,
    Senator
alter kocker
took his hands off me long enough to hold the light while I unlocked the door. Elena’s Mustang was parked close, all right, but not close enough to avoid stepping in a mud puddle getting in. Since I had on sandals and the senator was barefoot, it was deuced inconvenient.
    The Mustang snorted a couple of times, then laid back its ears and reared. We were in a lane that led to Broderick Street.
    “Where’s your car?” I asked as we reached the street.
    “Oh my God. I’ve got to go back—I haven’t got my keys.”
    “Keys, hell. You can’t go back. I’ll take you home.”
    “But my money! My ID! They’ll find it. I’ve got to get it. Turn around.”
    “No.”
    “I said turn around.”
    “Look,” I said. “The cops don’t care about johns. They’ll probably just return your things discreetly. It’ll be embarrassing, but nothing compared to being caught traipsing around a bordello in that outfit.”
    “Goddammit, turn around.”
    A citizen likes to think her elected officials have at least a minimal amount of brains in their tiny heads, whatever their sexual proclivities. But this guy had fried eggs. I stopped trying to reason with him. I could see he wasn’t used to taking orders, except maybe from Kandi when they played amusing games, so I stopped being firm. I just drove, more or less in the direction of my apartment, and carefully, because of the rain.
    He was quiet for a minute or two, so I tried again as we turned onto Fillmore Street. This time I tried to sound helpful and cheerful like a secretary or a wife, someone he could identify with. “Where can I drop you off?”
    “Goddammit, young woman, take me back!” he shouted.
    “You’re out of your senatorial head!” I shouted back. “Where the hell do you live?”
    He reached over and grabbed the wheel. I lost control and we skidded to the right, tires squealing like seagulls. I jerked the wheel back in time to avoid plowing into a parked car, and slammed on the brakes. But I overcompensated and winged the parked car with the rear end of the Mustang. I heard a siren even as I felt the bump, and I looked in the mirror. The red light of a police car was half a block away.
    Before I could get my bearings, that fruitcake of a senator had his door open and his bare feet on Fillmore Street. Without so much as a “thanks for the lift,” he rounded the car we’d hit, stepped up on the sidewalk, and took off running, with that silly black robe billowing behind him. In that context, he looked like just another San Francisco freak, only they don’t usually have a fine head of silvery hair. I leaned over and shut the passenger door, hoping the cops hadn’t seen him. They pulled up as he turned the corner.
    The cop who got out of the patrol car had a lush silky mustache, and the rest of him looked okay, too. “Are you all right, ma’am?” he