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

Rob Burns is right. And they paid Senator Calvin Handley—murderer of Kandi Phillips and friend of the downtrodden prostitute—$25,000 to work on his fellow legislators.”
    Mickey opened her mouth and left it like that, which is an annoying habit she has on the rare occasions when she is speechless. “Look, Mickey,” I said, as patiently as I could. “Handley was the mysterious client I told you about.” I was still working the thing out in my head and couldn’t be bothered to explain further. Mickey closed her mouth and sat down on my bathroom floor. Finally she asked, “What makes you think he was taking payoffs?”
    “The feathers,” I said, not realizing I was more or less dithering. “Someone at the whorehouse was a courier. Who? Elena? No, she’d never have sent him out without his clothes. And Kandi’s the last person she’d have let near his stuff if she’d thought there was $25,000 in his pants pocket. Stacy! He requested Stacy specially that day.”
    “What the hell,” asked Mickey, “are you talking about?”
    “Stacy was the one who brought the money to the whorehouse. Omigod! So she must have known who the murderer was all the time. Now, why didn’t he—oh Jesus, she couldn’t have known because she didn’t know where the money was. No one except the senator would know Kandi had taken it. But after I shot off my mouth on TV, everybody would know.” I paused as I realized what it meant. “The senator would know that Stacy would know.”
    Mickey walked back into the living room and sat down, shaking her head. I knew it was confusing, but I couldn’t stop to explain. As long as my brain was in gear, I didn’t want to jar it. Besides, I didn’t think I had any time to waste. I joined Mickey in the living room, called directory assistance, and asked for Stacy’s number. She wasn’t listed. So I called Elena and got a busy signal.
    So I called the cops and asked for Martinez, who wasn’t there. Finally I got Ziller, and I think I said something like this: “Hi, it’s Rebecca Schwartz, you’ve got to put a guard on Stacy, the senator’s going to kill her.”
    “Nice to hear from you, Miss Schwartz,” said Ziller. “Do you think you could go over that again?” He really was a sweetheart.
    So I explained to him that I had deduced that one of California’s most respected state senators had accepted a payoff from the Mafia, killed a prostitute, and now was about to kill another prostitute because she had probably figured out that he’d committed the first murder. He may have already told the police he was at the bordello the night of Kandi’s murder, I said, and there might be a record of that.
    Ziller said he would look into it, and did I have any other proof?
    No, I said, but any fool could see…
    “Well, we’ll look into it, Miss Schwartz,” Ziller said.
    “But Stacy may be in danger right now,” I said.
    “Then again, she might not be,” Ziller said in a voice that indicated he wasn’t going to humor me much longer, and that the San Francisco police couldn’t go around acting on no evidence at all, especially where state senators were concerned.
    I thanked him for his trouble and rang off, getting more agitated by the second. I dialed Elena again and got another busy signal. I dialed the operator, told her I had an emergency, and asked her to break in on the conversation. But there wasn’t conversation; Elena had left the phone off the hook, which was something I knew she did every now and then when she wanted a little peace.
    It’s a tribute to Mickey’s faith in me that she hadn’t run screaming from the room by this time. She’d just sat there looking expectant and chewing her cuticle. She didn’t even protest when I said we had to get to Elena’s right then, no time to waste.
    She didn’t till we were in the car, anyway. As soon as I had the Volvo’s nose pointed toward Pacific Heights, she said, “Now. What is the purpose of this wild-goose chase?”
    “What do you mean?” I didn’t understand what she didn’t understand. “We have to find out where Stacy is. To warn her.”
    “I’ve got the basics,” she said. “I mean, I know you think Calvin Handley killed Kandi and might kill Stacy, but what I want to know is what in God’s name gave you that idea?”
    “Oh. The feathers.”
    She nearly lunged at me, but I held up my hand to let her know that if she would control herself, I would tell all. And I did:
    “When I saw the Flokati