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

you cough loudly, your neighbors will hear and arrive with chicken soup—or, more likely, with some nostrum from a health food store. It is a place where, if you can afford it, you can have a good many things both ways.
    My parents live on one of these winding roads, but their lot is nearly level. Their house is redwood and modern. The rooms are large, and windows are plentiful. Sliding glass doors across the back of the house open onto an indecently large deck. The evening was warm, so the party would doubtless spill out onto it.
    One of the few hardships of life in Marin County is the parking problem, but the denizens manage to keep a stiff upper lip. Mickey found a parking place about a quarter of a mile from the house.
    As we walked to the party, I was grateful it wasn’t raining. I was wearing my wicked-woman shoes, and they’d had about all the encounters with puddles they could take.
    Mom met us at the door, looking handsome in a black dress. One thing I’ll say for Mom; even though she was still young when her hair started to gray, she didn’t fight it. It’s coarse hair, and it turned a lovely silver, not white, with a black streak or two. I’d say it’s her best feature.
    She kissed us and we “mazel toved” her. We did the Alphonse-Gaston routine about our various outfits. “How’s Alan?” Mom asked Mickey. “I’ll never forgive him for missing our party.” But she would. Alan had the one acceptable excuse: a performance with a small, poverty-stricken theater group—which was as close as he ever got to gainful employment. We Schwartzes may be Jewish, but we are very big on the Protestant ethic.
    Mickey said Alan was fine and working hard. I smirked at both descriptions and Mom gave me a “tut-tut” or something close to it. My folks seem to like Alan, perhaps merely because he is Jewish. That gets you a long way with some families.
    It was a good thing Alan wasn’t there because he would have been eaten up with jealousy. Like all actors, he likes to be the center of attention, but there wasn’t a chance that night. Not with me there. There wasn’t a person at the party who hadn’t seen me on page one of the paper that morning, and precious few of them had missed me on TV. And there must have been three hundred people there.
    I didn’t know Mom and Dad had so many friends. There was the usual gaggle of relatives and old family friends, who kept pinching Mickey and me on the cheek and calling us
“shana madeleh.”
But there were tons of people I didn’t recognize, and some I knew from other contexts.
    In fact, it was rather a star-studded gathering: several local politicians, from San Francisco as well as Marin; some rather fancy folk from what is sometimes called “the business community”—toilet-paper satraps, hotel suzerains, well-known investors—but, refreshingly, no pimps or whores that I recognized.
    A thing I couldn’t help noticing was that, in this older crowd, most of the achievers were men. Not all—there was Betty Blaine, one of the county supervisors—but most by far. So I felt perfectly justified in playing up my little celebrityhood. It kind of balanced things.
    If I had a dollar bill for every time I told my story that night, I could take a week off and go to Mexico. I was on my third drink, and rather relieved when Daddy came along and insisted I eat something. Much more of that nonsense and I would have fallen on my face.
    Daddy looked reasonably presentable that night. He is a short man with good white hair, as opposed to Mom’s elegant silver, and he wears it collar-length. He has a fine hook nose that doesn’t make him look harsh, probably because his light blue eyes are always joking. Unlike the rest of us, he is fair. And unlike the rest of us, he affects clothing that seems to come out of free boxes at Berkeley communes. His pants are always too short, and brown if his socks are gray, gray if they’re brown. His suit jackets are two sizes too big, his shirts are always rumpled, and he generally sees to it that several grease spots are arranged artfully on his ties. Mom complains, but he says it’s good for jury sympathy. Establishes his credentials as a
folks-mensh
or something. All this probably has something to do with my feelings about personal vanity, but I don’t know what, exactly. If you want to know the truth, I think it’s cute. He
is
a
folks-mensh
, so he may as well look like one.
    That night he had on a dark blue suit—not