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

a few hours’ work a week.”
    “So did you finish school?”
    “No. I got through my junior year, but by that time I was so successful, I thought: what’s the point of school if I can make this kind of money without an education? So I decided to try the big-time in San Francisco. I worked bars for a while and did okay, then I got to know a few of my colleagues. Jeannette formed HYENA, and I liked the approach. You know—prostitution as a profession, with a union and everything. Then Stacy and Renée and Hilary and I decided to set up the co-op.”
    “Do you ever regret not getting your degree?”
    “I can always go back and get it if I want to. But, look, I know what you’re getting at. I’m not dumb, and I have a talent for decorating, as you pointed out. I could probably do other things, right? So why be a prostitute when I have a choice?”
    “Well?”
    “I don’t know. I try not to think about it too much. It probably has to do partly with manipulating people, playing roles, working out fantasies. But more than that, it’s a fear of failure at something else—and fear of being poor again. This is something I’m good at, and a good way to make money, so I’m not ready to give it up yet.
    “But you know, don’t you, that every prostitute dreams of the day she can retire? I’ll tell you something—I probably
will
be a decorator someday. Or do something in that field—maybe a nice little antique store. Somebody who hasn’t been poor, though, I can’t figure out why they’d do this. We’ve got a part-timer named Kandi who comes from a good family; she could have done anything.”
    Elena shrugged. “Maybe she’s just a greedy, manipulative, lazy little bitch. And maybe I am, too.”
    On the way out, I stopped to admire the piano shawl a little more carefully, and my fingers went automatically to the keys. I’d never have made a professional musician—Mom was dead wrong about that—but I have a good ear and I love a piano. Before I stopped to think, I sat down on the old-fashioned stool and started banging out “Maple Leaf Rag.”
    Don’t ask me why that tune came into my head—maybe because it was exactly right for the setting.
    Elena looked at me as if I’d pulled a family of rabbits out of my bra.

Chapter Four
     
    A breathalyzer works like this: You breathe into the mouthpiece of a small machine and your breath is captured in a cylinder and then run through some sort of chemical solution. You have to do it twice, and it takes less than 15 minutes for both tests.
    Nothing to it. I say this because I passed.
    “Am I still under arrest?” I asked when I got the good news.
    “Not for drunk driving,” said the cop with the mustache. “But we'd better talk with the owner of the Mustang. Can you get her for us?”
    “Sure.” They didn’t know all they'd have to do was go up to City Prison on the sixth floor to talk to her, and I didn’t tell them. My plan was to call Elena’s and then pretend I’d gotten a message she was at the Hall. That way maybe it would look like I’d left before the raid.
    But Elena herself answered the phone.
    * * *
     
    I left Elena’s, and not having so much as a tennis date for the afternoon, I went shopping for something to wear that night. I was just having dinner with Chris Nicholson, my law partner, and her long-time love, Larry Hughes, but there was going to be another guest—a friend of Larry’s they thought I might like. Maybe I had in mind dolling myself up so irresistibly that he’d want to fall into my arms, but I don’t think so, judging from what I brought home. I think it’s more likely that I was motivated by whatever quirk it is that makes me hungry for fresh fish after a visit to the aquarium. I’d just been to a bordello, remember.
    I went to Magnarama at Stonestown, where you can sometimes find astonishing bargains. I was pawing idly through a rack of shopworn blouses when my eye caught a metallic glint. I’m not much up on fabrics, but I think it was silver lamé. In about two seconds, I was in the dressing room tearing up my fingernails on the thing’s thirty-or-so silver-covered buttons. It was a sort of jacket, made in a 1940s style. Shoulder pads, narrow waist, and a little flounce around the bottom. It had long, tight sleeves with eight or ten more of those pesky buttons and a prim, rounded collar that must have been a good eighteen inches long before it was attached, because you could have shot me through the heart