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

I said. “If I fire him, I’m taking bread out of the mouth of my own niece.”
    “Or nephew.”
    “Nephew, yes. At least she can’t name him Alan.”
    “Why not?”
    “You don’t know?” Rob is half Jewish, but doesn’t know the first thing about Jewish tradition. He shook his head.
    “You shouldn’t name a kid for a living relative.”
    “It doesn’t matter. Auntie Chris’ll call it Diddley-bop whatever its name is.”
    It was true. Chris could never remember names—or common household words—and substituted whatever nonsense syllables came into her head. Somehow, remembering that homely fact made me laugh again.
    Rob put a hand on my thigh. “You want to have an adventure?”
    “Sure,” I said, and got up. Having an adventure was our plan for the next few hours—an odd kind of adventure for a Bay Area native who thought she’d done everything San Francisco had to offer. I’d certainly done most of it in my nearly thirty years—I’d even once played the piano in one of our better bordellos, the dumbest prank of my life. But one thing I’d never done, partly because I’m Jewish and partly because I hate to get up in the morning, was go to the Easter sunrise service on Mount Davidson. This year, Rob, a reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, had the honor of covering it—a punishment, he said, for insubordination. He’d enlisted me for company and dreamed up the idea of an all-night poker game so we wouldn’t have to wake up. Everyone had accepted, but no one wanted to stay all night. So he came up with a new plan—we’d play poker
almost
all night, then borrow Bob Tosi’s van, drive it to the foot of Mount Davidson, and nap for a couple of hours before sunrise.
    The van was parked downstairs, equipped with a blown-up air mattress and sleeping bags. I fed the finny fellows in my hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium, and Rob and I were off.
    It was about 2 A.M. when we got to Mount Davidson, and very quiet. I, for one, was exhausted, faint even, heavy with alternating thoughts of Kruzick as a brother-in-law and breaking the news to Mom that her baby daughter was going to be an unmarried mother.
    Rob set his wristwatch alarm and we snuggled down in each other’s arms on the air mattress, still wearing our jeans—this I’d insisted on. If a cop knocked on the window, I wanted a layer of dignity between myself and him.
    “Rebecca,” said Rob, “if you were pregnant, would you marry me?”
    “Maybe—if you were responsible.”
    I don’t know what made me say a jerky thing like that—the strain, I guess—but it made him turn away from me. That was disconcerting enough, but then a dog started howling somewhere in the west. I couldn’t sleep at all.
    “Rebecca, will you be still?” was all the sympathy I got.
    And then, Mickey
was
getting married. I got the invitation in the mail and ripped it open. But it wasn’t Mickey after all. It was someone with a French name, and
she
was marrying Alan. Or Alan was her father. Or something. “Mr. and Mrs. Alan DuPis,” said the card, “announce the marriage of their daughter, Ani.” Ani DuPis. I’d had two years of high school French and I knew how to pronounce it—
Ahnee Dupee
. But who could it be?
    The effort of puzzling it out woke me up. That meant I’d been asleep after all. But how could that be? Because I hadn’t. But I must have because now I was awake and the dream was right—I did indeed need to pee. I’d heard that people dreamed in puns and now I’d caught my own subconscious at it. There wasn’t a public bathroom around, but there was certainly a wooded area—I could simply get out and pretend I was camping.
    It was just before dawn, but the fog was so thick it might as well have been midnight; a cop would have to have X-ray vision to catch me in the act. I went behind a clump of bushes, dropped my drawers, and found myself quite unable to answer nature’s call. I’ve been camping all my life, but the art of urination alfresco is something I’ve never quite mastered. Normally, I scoffed at the patriarchal notion of penis envy, but at times like this I thought the good Viennese doctor may have had a point. I breathed deeply and tried to relax the relevant muscle group. And then there was a crash followed by a loud “Oof.” Rob was out of the van in about half a second. “Rebecca? Rebecca!”
    “I’m over here. Peeing.” Lying, actually. By then I was standing up and tugging on my zipper; my bikini briefs