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

got done praying, I mused on the dark and sinister forces that had gotten me into the backseat of a patrol car.

Chapter Two
     
    They were dark forces inside my skull, of course. I remembered the time my mother turned on the cold tap and threw me in the shower with all my clothes on, just because, at the age of nine, I decided not to be a concert pianist. I’m not saying there wasn’t provocation; I did come to the decision in the middle of a music lesson, and I did emphasize it by tearing up some sheet music and hurling a metronome. But it made a big impression on me. Maybe that’s why I agreed to Elena Mooney’s request—to get back at my mom. My shrink has since expressed the opinion that this was so.
    But there could have been other reasons. Perfectly sensible reasons.
    For one thing, I have led a dull life. I was twenty-eight at the time, and I had never done anything more exciting than make good grades and grow up to be a feminist Jewish lawyer. I never hitchhiked around Europe with nobody but my lover and nothing but my backpack. I never so much as spent a summer on a kibbutz.
    I am not sure why, except that I am conservative by nature. I dislike change and am afraid to take chances; if I played poker, which I do not, I’d probably fold three kings unless I had a pair of aces to go with them. I grew up in Marin County, California, crossed the San Francisco Bay to go to law school in Berkeley, and crossed it again to practice in San Francisco. I come from a middle-class liberal Jewish family, and my politics and values don’t deviate a whit from what I was taught as a child, except maybe in the areas of drugs and sex—I probably have a more contemporary approach to these than my parents.
    Basically, I am the kind of girl that mothers wish their sons would marry. But nobody’s son did, and anyway I couldn’t be bothered. I was too busy living up to my
father’s
ambition for me. Or what I imagined it to be. He always said, “Be a doctor, Rebecca. There’s no money in law,” but anybody could see he was joking. When I was a little girl, he used to take me to watch him in court, and when I was a teenager, he’d discuss his cases with me. What did I know from doctors? I had a lawyer for a role model.
    Now if you had led this kind of life and someone came along and said, “Listen, how would you like to play the piano in a whorehouse for just one night—you’ll be among friends; nothing can happen,” wouldn’t you do it? Especially if it were a
feminist
bordello? It wouldn’t have to be a case of getting back at your mom.
    Another thing: Elena needed me. I should turn down a friend who needs a favor just because I’m too good to hang around a bordello? What kind of sisterhood is that?
    Let me explain about Elena. She is a prostitute, and she’s also very close to being a madam, only she isn’t quite because this is a co-op bordello we’re talking about. It’s co-op because ostensibly everyone has an equal say in decision-making and the money is split among the members, but Elena is actually the brains and the driving force of the thing. She’d be a madam in the old-fashioned sense if she weren’t political.
    I got to know her when she got busted and Jeannette von Phister asked me to take her case. Despite certain reservations I have about prostitution as a feminist issue (“horizontal hostility,” Jeannette calls it), I was already on the legal staff of HYENA, the “loose women’s organization” Jeannette had founded. As you no doubt know, HYENA is an acronym for “Head Your Ethics toward a New Age,” and its ultimate goal is to get prostitution legalized.
    By making it a feminist issue, they’ve managed to acquire a certain amount of clout, and they’re quite colorful, so they get a lot of publicity. When I agreed to work for them, it may be that somewhere in my subconscious, I knew some of the publicity was bound to rub off on their lawyer. As a matter of fact, it did when I became Elena’s lawyer.
    Elena (nèe Eileen, I’ll bet anything, but I’ve never had the nerve to ask) had been running this co-op feminist bordello for about six months. She had brains, but not a lot of experience. I think she probably didn’t look carefully enough into the matter of police payoffs, but that’s a fine thing for her lawyer to say, so pretend you didn’t hear it. Anyway, she and her three partners got busted, and Jeannette called me to defend them.
    The case made quite a splash. Elena