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

fern.”
    “Which one? And what have you been smoking?”
    “The one near the…
Mickey!
Are you paying attention?” The light, as they say, dawned. Her paranoia about the undercover cop, her seeming inability to be serious… She was the one who’d been smoking.
    “You’re stoned, aren’t you?” I said.
    “Ummm.” She smiled. “Half a joint left, if you want it.”
    I considered briefly, then decided against it. Very poor idea with that police car on our tail. “No,” I said. “But listen, get straight, will you?” Mickey can do this when she wants to.
    “Okay,” she said. “Please tell me in plain English how it is that you’ve struck it rich. If you continue to insist that money grows in flowerpots, I shall consider it my privilege to be as whimsical as I please.”
    I spelled it out for her.
    “Jesus Christ!” she said. “That’s what the murderer was looking for!”
    “Apparently.”
    “So what’s your theory?”
    I sighed. “I wish I had one. The only thing that makes sense is that Kandi stole it from someone at the party who followed her to my house and killed her for it.”
    “As theories go, it sounds okay to me.” We rolled onto the Golden Gate Bridge.
    “I wish you were thinking straight,” I said. “There’s one gigantic flaw in it: who in God’s name would bring $25,000 to a whorehouse?”
    Mickey giggled some more. She seemed to enjoy the idea enormously, but I was plain cross. “What’s so funny about that?” I demanded.
    “Oh, but you poor fool,” she gasped. “You sure you don’t want some dope to clear your head? Nothing could be more obvious.” More inane giggles. I waited.
    “Don’t you see?” she said at last. “No one brought it there. It was already there.”
    “You mean she took it from Elena?”
    “Of course.”
    “Mickey, you really are exasperating. What is that stuff anyway?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. Colombian something. Why not Elena?”
    “It’s the same problem. Who would have $25,000 lying around with 120 strangers in the house?”
    “Oh.” That stopped her. “I see what you mean. Elena isn’t exactly scatterbrained, is she?”
    I shook my head.
    “I know,” she said. “How about the fancyass client tied to the bed?”
    “So far as I know, he isn’t rich. Just influential. I don’t even know where he’d
get
$25,000. And, again, he wouldn’t be dumb enough to take it to a cathouse.
    “Come to think of it, though, Kandi had a good chance to take it if he had. Elena said he came back for his clothes, and she’d had Kandi take them down to the basement. Kandi might very well have patted the pockets to make sure everything was there, discovered the money, and lifted it. Which would be perfectly safe because he didn’t know she was the one who moved his clothes. Elena told him she was going to do it herself.”
    “So he wouldn’t know Kandi had it,” said Mickey, “and therefore couldn’t have killed her for it. And furthermore, as you’ve previously pointed out, he didn’t have that kind of money and wouldn’t have brought it there if he did.”
    I groaned. “These are deep waters, Watson.”
    We were silent for a while, and my thoughts lightly turned to blackmail. Surely $25,000 was much too big a chunk for even Kandi to blackmail anyone out of—at one time, anyhow. But even assuming she had, it didn’t explain anything. A blackmailee wouldn’t just hand a wad like that over and then kill to get it back. Blackmailers got killed, sure, but not in those circumstances. If you were going to kill someone to stop her blackmailing you, you could just skip the charade of the last payment.
    Mickey and I were now climbing into the hills of Marin County, where my parents live. I hadn’t seen the undercover police car for quite a while, and it wasn’t behind us anymore.
    In case you are not familiar with California, I will tell you that Marin is the richest county in the state. It is the ultimate suburbia, because there you can have the convenience of being only a few minutes from San Francisco and the luxury of not having a neighbor in sight. The houses are built on large, frequently vertical lots along narrow, winding roads, and the lots are overgrown with redwoods and eucalyptus so that the nearby houses are blocked from view. You can walk your grounds and pretend to be a country squire; you can see rabbits and raccoons; you can let your cats and dogs run freely; your children need not play in traffic. But if