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

rape me, and then he nearly drowned me. Also, he told me he planned to kill me and why.”
    Ziller actually patted my hand. “You look like you’ve pretty well been through it, Miss Schwartz. Let’s move ahead to what happened tonight. First of all, why don’t you tell us about that $25,000 you brought in with you?”
    “I found it in a flowerpot just before I left to go to my parents’ house. I realize now I should have brought it right over here, but—”
    “Damn right you should have,” said Shipe.
    “Well, I meant to as soon as I got home. I was looking up your phone number when that brother officer of yours stepped out of my kitchen and stuck a gun in my ribs.” I gave them the details, faltering only when I got to the part about Jaycocks trying to drown me.
    Shipe held up a stubby-fingered hand. “Hold it, Miss Schwartz. Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Jaycocks was trying to get you to tell him where the money came from, right?”
    I nodded.
    “Let’s go back to your theory that he may have murdered Miss—ah—Phillips. I presume you’re assuming the money was the motive?”
    I hesitated; that theory wasn’t looking terrific even to me by then. “That’s what I thought at the time—and what I accused him of—but I don’t know; it just doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems too coincidental, for one thing, that he should first try to solicit, and then try to kill the very person in whose apartment he’d just killed someone else.”
    Ziller tried to be helpful again. “Stranger things have happened.”
    “Well, there’s more. If he killed her, he knew where the money came from, and there wasn’t much point in trying to find out whether I knew—I mean, assuming he’d already made up his mind to kill me, which I contend is what he was doing there. Also—I know it sounds strange considering I’m talking about a man who’s no doubt an accomplished liar—but he genuinely seemed not to know what I was talking about when I accused him of the murder.” I shrugged. It was the only way I knew of expressing my discomfort. “I don’t think he did it.”
    “Did he give any indication why knowing where the money came from was so important to him?”
    “No.”
    “Well, you’re full of theories, Miss Schwartz. Don’t you have one about that?”
    I was getting mad. “Hell, the guy’s a sadist,” I snapped. “How do I know what he considered a good excuse to play torture games?”
    “Well, think, Miss Schwartz.”
    Shipe was nearly as bad as Jaycocks. How was I supposed to know? But I’m as good a guesser as the next person.
    “The only thing I can think of,” I said, “is that he was trying to figure out whether it was safe to steal it.”
    “If he was going to kill you anyway, there wouldn’t be any witnesses. Why wouldn’t it be safe?”
    He had a point. Presumably nobody would know he’d killed me and therefore that he’d stolen the money. Unless of course he’d told someone he planned to kill me, but that wasn’t likely. Even if he were somebody’s sometime hit man—George’s, say—his reason for killing me was clearly personal.
    Then maybe the knowledge of where the money came from could be potentially more valuable than the money itself. Perhaps he could use it for blackmail. Or to curry favor with someone. But that meant he had to have some general knowledge of what it was doing there, and he was grasping for the specifics—a few missing tiles in a mosaic he could see, but I couldn’t.
    Personally, I didn’t think it was a bad theory, but I knew it wouldn’t cut any ice with Shipe, and anyway, I didn’t see why he was asking me.
    “It would seem,” I said, “to be your job to find out why he did it—probably by asking Officer Jaycocks himself. Why ask me?”
    For the first time, Shipe smiled. “Because you’re an intelligent woman, Miss Schwartz. You wait here a minute. We’ll be right back.”
    And they left, just like that. In a minute, a guy with a camera came in. “You Miss Schwartz?” he said. “Mind if I take a few pictures of those bruises?”
    “I hope you’ve got color film.”
    “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
    Ziller and Shipe came back when he was done, looking pleased with themselves. Smiling even. What was this?
    Ziller patted me again, my shoulder this time, and for the first time it occurred to me his concern might be genuine. “Looks like we’ve got a pretty good case,” he said. “By the way, you might like to