Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

the killings—the Zodiac decided Avery’d make a good pen pal.”
    “The letters ran in the paper. I remember them.”
    “Yes, but only after extensive conferences with the cops. It was decided that—”
    “Don’t tell me. The public had a right to know.”
    “Well? Don’t you think that’s right?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe it
is
some crank this time.”
    “Let’s hope. Meanwhile, I’ve got to spend the day conferring with cops and editors. The last thing I want to do. You busy tonight?”
    “Why, no, Rob—I’d just love to go to Pier 39. That’s my idea of a dream date.”
    “Pick you up at seven. We’ll make it an early evening since we’re driving to Calistoga tomorrow.”
    * * *
     
    Know-nothing easterners with an unreasonable prejudice against what they call “kooks and gays,” as if the two groups are really one, should only know about Pier 39, a melanoma on the cheek of San Francisco. As late as 1976, it was indeed a pier; a scant thirteen months later, it was a municipal scandal of a shopping complex that looks vaguely like a misplaced New England fishing village, though some say it’s meant to evoke the Victorian era as translated by the Old West. It’s “weathered,” at any rate, or perhaps it better deserves that term applied to ersatz antique furniture—“distressed.” Distressed is certainly the way it makes the natives feel, those of us, at least, who do not operate shops or restaurants within its ticky-tacky confines.
    One of us smart enough to know a lucrative thing when he saw it was our erstwhile city supervisor, Dan White, a kook who hated gays enough to gun down his fellow lawmaker, Harvey Milk, known as “the Mayor of Castro Street,” along with George Moscone, who was then mayor of the whole city. White was one of the first entrepreneurs of Pier 39, the proprietor of a stand that dispensed baked potatoes to the hungry hordes from the Midwest.
    I don’t mean to sound bitter, but if you had a blight like Pier 39 in your city, no one would accuse you of sounding like that other Rebecca, either—the one from Sunnybrook Farm. We have other shopping complexes favored by our brothers and sisters from Paris, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois. We have, for instance, the Cannery, where canning was once performed, and Ghirardelli Square, where chocolate was once contrived, and I am wholly in support of both of these rehabilitated buck factories. To compare them with Pier 39 is to compare the Tivoli Gardens with Coney Island. The place makes my skin itch, as if it’s turned to polyester.
    When Rob and I got there, there were almost more cops than tourists—about 3 million of each, conservatively speaking.
    “Chief Sullivan seems to have heard about your note.”
    Rob nodded. “I think he’s taking it seriously.”
    “Are you going to run it?”
    “Not now. Why scare people?”
    That would normally have been my position, but I found myself arguing. “Why indeed? Wouldn’t want to stem the flow of tourist bucks. Even if spending them is hazardous to health.”
    “But we don’t know that. You think we should have gone ahead and run it?”
    I thought about it. “No. But I’m beginning to see what kind of back-and-forth goes into these decisions.”
    “Aha. So you admit it’s something more than cheap sensationalism.”
    “I’m reserving judgment. If something does happen, you can run it then and still have an exclusive.”
    “And you think it’d be wrong to run it then?”
    “Oh, not really. I’m just being ornery.”
    “Which probably means you’re hungry. Let’s prowl around a little and then we’ll find something to eat.”
    “Okay. Funtasia or Only in San Francisco Memorabilia?”
    “I hate to say this, but—”
    “Oh, no!”
    “Right. Both.”
    He steered me into Only in San Francisco. Never, outside of a cattle car, have so many been packed so tightly. It was wall-to-wall with buck-bearers, plunking down for T-shirts adorned with the Golden Gate Bridge and misshapen mugs that said, “I Got Smashed in San Francisco.” I took an elbow in the midsection and hollered, “Ouch!”
    “What is it?”
    I pointed to one of the mugs.
    “Right,” said Rob. “Let’s go.”
    We did, retracing our ten or so steps in roughly three and a half hours, thereby satisfying ourselves the Trapper, if he existed, would strike there only at the risk of becoming the Trapped. Off to Funtasia.
    Here you had your bumper cars, your video games, your skeeball, your