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

gloomy I forgot to drink it. I just sat there twirling my hair around my finger. Mickey was silent, too. I guess she needed time to assimilate the news about Uncle Walter. At last, she looked at her watch. “Want to catch yourself on the eleven o’clock news?”
    “May as well.” I didn’t want to have to think anymore.
    We went back to the bedroom, turned on the TV, and stretched out on the bed. I knew I wasn’t the lead story, so I didn’t pay much attention until I heard the words “mob-style violence.”
    I stopped examining Aunt Ellen’s rose satin comforter and looked up. The film showed a gurney being wheeled into a coroner’s wagon. According to the anchorman, it carried the body of Frank Jaycocks, who had been gunned down “execution-style” after leaving a restaurant with his wife.

Chapter Twenty
     
    Involuntarily, I grabbed Mickey’s wrist and held it tight till the story was over. They’d moved the interview with me up to the second lead story, but Mickey and I were no longer interested in my natterings. “He must have been working for the mob,” Mickey said.
    “Which means George must be a mobster.” I remembered what Rob Burns had told me about the Mafia moving in on prostitution, and suddenly George’s death threat against Kandi carried a lot more weight. So maybe Jaycocks
had
killed Kandi. But why had he been killed?
    “He knew too much,” said Mickey. “The cops would have to prove he was working for George to make the assault charge stick, and the investigation might have connected him with the mob. If it was just George, the independent operator, it wouldn’t be worth murder; George could just fold his tent like the Arabs. But if George’s operation were part of something much bigger—”
    “But shooting Jaycocks connects him with the mob.”
    “How’re you going to prove it? Now if Frank had talked, that’d be proof.…”
    “I see what you mean.” I was getting excited. “Listen, suppose the twenty-five grand was mob money.”
    Mickey stopped me. “Wait a minute. You’re forgetting Kandi already had bad relations with George, and hence with the postulated mob. What was she doing with $25,000 of their money?”
    “Back to the same old theory. She stole it.”
    “Who from? Frank? Then why’d he dunk you in the aquarium?’
    “Oh yeah. And anyway, as I keep pointing out myself, the mob doesn’t bludgeon people to death.” My head was spinning. “And the other same old objection, too—who would bring $25,000 to a whorehouse?”
    “Rebecca! We’ve been looking at this wrong. Remember what you said when I was stoned? No one would.”
    “But Elena says it wasn’t co-op money. So unless she’s lying, someone did.”
    “That’s what I mean about looking at it wrong. We should have been asking ourselves
why
anyone would. And once you have the answer to that, it’s perfectly credible that
anyone
at that party would have had $25,000 on the premises of a whorehouse. Because he
didn’t
bring it there. He picked it up there.”
    My head had stopped spinning and taken to pounding. “Omigod. Someone brought it there to give it to somebody else who was going to be there.”
    Mickey nodded, but she was frowning. “But why? Why transact business at a bordello?”
    “It could have been blackmail money for Kandi. But neither Uncle Walter nor the other man was there. My head hurts.”
    But Mickey was on a different track. “Some kind of bribe or payoff?”
    I scarcely heard her. “I’m getting a headache,” I said. I got up and went to the bathroom for some aspirin.
    That damn Flokati rug was still hanging over the bathtub. I forgot all about the aspirin. “Mickey!”
    She was there in half a second. “What? Are you all right?”
    “It was the senator.”
    “What was? And what senator, for that matter?”
    “The murderer. Oh, Jesus, it’s so clear—that sonofabitch and his damned righteous feminist stand on legalized prostitution! I ask you, who’d benefit by legal prostitution?”
    “Wait a minute! Are we unmasking a murderer or having a philosophical discussion?”
    “I’ll tell you who would—besides prostitutes, I mean—the mob. No messy busts, no tiresome payoffs, and probably a nice legal tax dodge for laundering illegal money. Now if the mob wanted to take over prostitution in San Francisco, wouldn’t it be to their advantage if it were all nice and legal?”
    “What
are
you talking about?”
    “Well, it would, and the mob wants it… If