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

futile gesture. I put a notebook and pen in the middle of the table so he’d have something to fidget with. “I’m having a very hard time believing any of this is actually happening.”
    “I know. So am I. But we’ve got to talk about it.”
    “Yes. Rebecca, she was only twenty-four. God! Just twenty-four!” He picked up the pen and made two fists around it. “I remember how jealous I was when she was born. Everyone adored her because she was so pretty. I did too, by the time I got over my jealousy.
    “It’s funny the things you remember.” Animation came into his voice. “Mom had a black velvet cape that she used to wear to the opera.
    “One day—around Halloween—I got a pair of those fake glasses with a nose and mustache. You know, Groucho Marx glasses—and I put them on along with the velvet cape and sneaked up behind Carol. We used to watch that weekly horror show on TV—
Creature Features
, I think they call it now—and we'd recently seen one of the versions of ‘Dracula.’ Anyway, I tapped her on the shoulder and she screamed. No one else was home, so I could do anything I wanted. I chased her around the house for about ten minutes, until finally I cornered her and she just kind of sank down, whimpering.
    “She was so defenseless and so terrified and so
pretty
, I realized I loved her.
    “I was a teenager, and she was only about seven; I wasn’t used to moments of sentiment. I picked her up and took off the glasses. She put her arms around my neck and wouldn’t let go.”
    Parker’s voice was choked, but he went on. “She was, well, wild in high school. Ran away from home, and we didn’t hear from her for over a year. She came home strung out. She got straight and stayed home long enough to graduate. Then she went away again. To San Francisco. This time she kept in touch, and in a way that was even more heart-breaking. We knew she was on every kind of drug but heroin. Acid, speed, downers—coke, I guess, when she could get it. She’d always been a bright girl, and she was wasting herself. She was a vegetable. I swear to God, all she said was ‘Hey, man’ and ‘Far out’ for three years. But a couple of years ago her boyfriend got busted for dealing, and that seemed to sober her up.
    “She wrote me that she was going back to school. Our parents had stopped giving her money a long time ago, so I offered to do what I could. She said no, she had a job as a waitress. And I respected her for that. For not taking money. If I’d known what she was doing…”
    He put a hand over his eyes. I patted it and told him to take a break while I got him some water.
    Perhaps I should tell you now that I wasn’t exactly pleased by this narrative. Here I was, looking for a man I wouldn’t have to mother, and I had a six-footer crying all over me. I told myself I was being unreasonable; that people go through periods of unhappiness and have to help each other through them; that Parker would do the same for me if the roles were reversed. But our relationship was just beginning, and this was no way to start. In retrospect, it seems funny that I thought that, when I didn’t even know if he was about to confess to murder or what, but I did. I’m afraid it wasn’t a very professional attitude.
    If what I said seems cold, let me tell you that I was nearly in tears myself. That was the trouble.
    I got the water, and he drank it. “Anyway,” he began again, “when I saw her at Elena’s, you can imagine how I felt. I saw her right after you’d told me you could tell the hookers by the length of their skirts. I saw a pair of legs and I looked at them first, and then there was… was Carol. I couldn’t take it in. I mean I did and I didn’t. Do you know what I mean?”
    “Yes,” I said. “That’s what happens when you get a shock. You know it’s true because your senses tell you, but you resist it. Because you want it not to be true.”
    He took my hand and squeezed it. “Exactly, yes. Well, I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want to be in the same room with her. I’m sorry I left you like that, but it was so sudden… It was as if someone else actually walked out of that house. I felt disembodied. I wasn’t thinking.” I squeezed back to let him know I understood.
    “Somehow, I got myself to a bar. I remember getting in the car and not having any idea where to go or what to do, and then I just saw a bar, and I stopped and went in. I didn’t even remember where it