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

happened next was that someone lost her cool and screamed. The way I knew it was me was I noticed my mouth had filled up with glass.

Chapter Twenty-One
     
    I spent the second longest night of my life lying on a gurney at San Francisco General Hospital, also known as Mission Emergency. I don’t remember getting there, so I can’t tell you what that was like. I just remember feeling I was going to throw up, which is how concussion sometimes affects you, and holding Mickey’s hand.
    I’d managed to break the senator’s hip, which I’m not the least bit sorry about to this day. The sonofabitch would have killed my sister if I hadn’t rammed him. He got most of the attention in the emergency room, and I vaguely remember Jodie Handley coming in at some point. Mom and Dad didn’t, because Mickey and I decided not to call them till we got back to my house. As it turned out, that was around daylight.
    Mickey made breakfast and brought it to me, and we both got under Aunt Ellen’s satin comforter to eat it. I felt a lot better after a couple of poached eggs on toast, but not well enough to call the folks.
    Mickey did, and laid it on so thick about how I’d saved her life that they were scarcely any trouble at all. Mom did say she’d be over later with soup, but I suppose that was inevitable. Dad just kept repeating Calvin Handley’s name in disbelief.
    They were so grateful about my saving Mickey that I decided I was a heroine and called Chris with quite a spirited version, heavy on grisly details but light on explanations. Unfortunately, I still needed some.
    Then I got a call myself—from a steaming Rob Burns wanting to know why I hadn’t turned up at Central Station. Imagine the fun I had with that one! In the course of it, I also learned that he’d heard about the senator’s mob connections from “sources,” which is why he was carrying on like some character from the Lou Grant show the night before. He never has named the sources—either to me or to the police.
    By then I was a big fan of Rob’s, but I could hardly wait to get him off the phone, which wasn’t easy considering he’d stumbled on a page-one story. Of course, in a couple of hours he could have gotten it from the cops, but then so could any other reporter, and he’d sewed it up for himself just by dialing my number.
    The reason I was so eager to get rid of him was that I wanted to call Martinez. I wanted to relish informing him from my bed of pain how his cockamamie theory about Parker had nearly caused two more murders, including that of my own sister, and how I had risked my life to straighten out his botched investigation and how if he didn’t let Parker loose in the next five minutes, I’d have his job.
    But it wasn’t any fun at all. It seems Jodie Handley had had a heart-to-heart with her hubby, and she’d called Martinez at home. Even as we talked, Martinez gave me to understand that my client was being released. Somehow he managed to convey that he’d solved the case himself, and he didn’t say he was sorry or even ask how my head was. The horse’s ass.
    I stayed in bed that day and the next, and Mom came, and so did Chris and Rob and a lot of other reporters, but I had Mom send them all away but Rob.
    Parker came too, with a couple dozen roses, but he didn’t stay long. We were distant with each other, both knew the romance was over. It would it be putting it mildly to say the time wasn’t right for it?
    The person I was happiest to see was Uncle Walter. He took my hand and ’fessed up and said he was sorry for the way he’d treated me. I said I was sorry for what I’d done too—suspecting him of murder and all—and we got back on solid uncle-niece ground again. Kandi’d tried to blackmail him, all right, but he hadn’t given her a cent. I’m proud of him. And I’m happy to say the police found his watch and gave it back.
    The senator pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and a few lesser charges. I was exactly right about what happened:
    He’d panhandled some change after he left me, called Elena, and gone back to the bordello to find his clothes with Kandi’s apricot feathers on them and the money missing. Then he’d gone out the back door again, retrieved his car, and waited for Kandi at the front of the house. When she came out with Stacy, he saw he couldn’t accost her on the street, so he followed her to my apartment. She went in immediately, leaving the note for me, and he rang my bell. She let