The Sourdough Wars

furthermore he had pistol-whipped me for no reason at all except that I had tried to defend my own true love and myself.
    Larson, as far as I could tell (I wasn’t listening too well), was claiming that Rob and I were the ones who clobbered him and stole the starter, then tried to throw him off the track by coming back and untying him. But he, Larson, had seen through our nefarious plot and rounded us up for the proper authorities. Alas, he had been thwarted when I magically transformed myself into a fearsome gorgon and leaped upon his back, allowing my accomplice to escape.
    I think he believed it, too. A true paranoid, that Larson. He probably thinks the CIA is in league with the Mafia, OPEC, and the DAR. He shouldn’t be allowed to carry a gun. He ought to use his talent constructively, maybe start a newsletter called
Conspiracy Times
or something.
    The fellows in the black-and-white apparently weren’t psychologists. Or even perceptive. They didn’t say, “Gee, Miss Schwartz, sorry this awful thing happened to you. We’re locking this maniac up right away and we hope your face gets better soon.”
    They said, “You have the right to remain silent…anything you say can be used against you in court…you have the right to talk to a lawyer….”
    Stuff like that. That is no way to talk to a nice Jewish girl from Marin County and I so informed the officers. Which, I guess, is why I was booked for resisting arrest as well as for assault.
    I had once been picked up for drunk driving, but this was ten times worse. A hundred times worse. Nightmare-strength ignominy.
    They actually threw me into a cell. That was bad, but it was nothing compared to what I knew I had to go through to get out. There you really got into your chamber-of-horrors material. I had to make a phone call.
    I actually had to call someone and say, “This is Rebecca Schwartz, and I’m in jail, and I wish you’d bail me out.”
    O degradation! O debasement!
    Who was I going to call? My mom? I could hear her already: “I’ll have to send the bail by messenger, because I’m sitting shiva for your father. His favorite daughter has just killed him.”
    Definitely not my mom.
    My dad? Isaac Schwartz, the famous criminal lawyer? I could hear him, too: “Beck, you’re a fine lawyer, a great little lawyer, but don’t you think if you weren’t so impetuous…” No. Not Dad either.
    And certainly not Rob. I’d had time to give him some thought, in the back of that black-and-white, and I was thinking of sending him a large bouquet of poison oak. He’d risked his skin—and mine, when you thought about it—for some stupid newspaper story, and not only that, he’d also put me in the position of having to duke it out with a lunatic to save his life and then getting tossed in jail for my pains. They’d be wearing fur parkas in Death Valley before I’d call him for a quick rescue.
    Who else was there? Chris, of course. Why hadn’t I thought of her in the first place? I dialed. “This is the recorded voice of Chris Nicholson,” said her machine, and gave message-leaving instructions. Where
could
she be? But then what did it matter? She wasn’t home and couldn’t help me. “Try me at home,” I told the machine. “If I’m not there, call City Prison instantly. I may still be moldering there.” A bit melodramatic, but that was the kind of mood I was in.
    That left Mickey. She wasn’t likely to have any money lying around, but surely she could raise some. Couldn’t she? Kruzick answered. “Yeah?” That was his style.
    “Alan, this is your boss, and you are fired if you give me any kind of crap whatsoever at this moment.”
    “You on the rag or something?”
    “Okay, that’s it. Darken my office door ever again and you are dead as well as fired. Please tell my sister that I am currently incarcerated at City Prison and wish to hear her sweet familiar voice.”
    “Uh, Rebecca, listen, we had kind of a little tiff and—”
    “And what?”
    “Well, she went out somewhere. I don’t exactly know where.”
    “Okay, Alan. You’re back on the payroll, you
momser
. Just get me out of here. Fast.”
    “But—”
    I hung up, knowing he wasn’t going to get me out. Nobody was. I was going to have to stay there the rest of my life, which wouldn’t be very long. I would die of exhaustion because I had to keep standing up. If I sat down on the bed in my cell, I was sure to catch something. Syphilis, probably, or worse yet, body lice. I