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

Rob.”
    “Admit it. It’s been hell without my acerbic wit.”
    “There’s always Kruzick.”
    “That reminds me—how’s the little mother?”
    “Still determined to go through with it; I think she’s working up the nerve to tell Mom and Dad.”
    “Marin General better double their emergency room staff.”
    “Let’s don’t talk about it.” Mickey’s pregnancy was an area of my life—along with Rob—that I’d managed to put out of my mind since taking Lou’s case. Thinking about it—especially Mom’s reaction to it—depressed me too much. “Sorry,” he said. “Let’s talk business first.”
    “And then what?”
    “How about a rousing game of gin?” He reached in his pocket and took out an envelope. “Look what I brought you.”
    “Clips!”
    He nodded. “Clips indeed. Guaranteed to make you the happiest lawyer on Montgomery Street.”
    “You found something on Les Mathison.” I’d asked him to look, realizing it was only an outside chance.
    “Not just something, babycakes. I’ve got what you want.” I’m no good at coquettish looks, but I attempted one: “I’ll bet you do.” And then I fell upon the clippings like a cop on a box of doughnuts.
    There were two, the first a routine crime story about a woman killed in a random incident of violence aboard a cable car. The woman’s name was Darlene Mathison.
    The second was an interview with the bereaved husband, Leslie Mathison, formerly of Turlock. The reporter, one Annie Ballard, had hit pay dirt, turning up a human interest story so good she’d written a long, moving feature about it—a story detailing the life of a simple man who grew up on a ranch, who knew only an innocent kind of life in which he’d been a churchgoer and a member of the 4-H Club; a man who after moving to San Francisco with his wife and daughter, had found the same kind of hardships any city dweller might have. And then the hardships began to multiply. He had frustrations with banks, buses, and restaurants as anyone would—the sort of problems all city dwellers take for granted. But Les didn’t take them for granted; he found himself frustrated everywhere he turned and had no armor to cope with his frustration. He took a job at a flooring company in South San Francisco.
    His family suffered because banks wouldn’t take out-of-town checks without a waiting period, because a decent apartment for a family of three was for beyond his means, because everything cost too much. He found himself horrified by the crowds on the bus, in restaurants, everywhere he went on business, everywhere he took his family for fun. He was a man who’d never before had to wait in line to see a movie. Because his rent was so high, he’d had to sell his car. Aside from the inconvenience of having to leave for work an hour before he had to punch in, aside from the vandals and druggies on the MUNI, there was a very real problem with that—the buses sometimes didn’t run on time, sometimes broke down, and caused him to be late to work. He would have left earlier, he told Annie Ballard, but his wife worked a morning shift as a waitress, which meant he had to get their daughter, Kathi, ready for school. Even so, he had to leave Kathi alone for half an hour: “I’d see that kid sitting there, hardly able to hold her eyes open, looking so forlorn every morning when I left I just couldn’t stand to think of making her get up at 6:30, and stay alone an hour in the house just so I could make sure I got to work on time for some bozo who didn’t care about anything except the almighty dollar.” Ms. Ballard noted that his voice shook as he spoke.
    The inevitable happened: He was late to work once too often and lost his job. Before he found another, his daughter was killed in a motorcycle accident—hit by a lad on drugs. It was hardly a month after that that Darlene was stabbed to death on a cable car, having gotten in the middle of someone else’s fight.
    It was almost too much to believe. “Annie Ballard,” said Rob, “must have thought she’d died and gone to heaven when ol’ Les started letting down his hair.”
    “Oh, Rob.”
    “Sorry,” he muttered, and had the grace to flush a bit. “Great quotes, though.”
    I couldn’t argue with him. For instance: “When I lost Kathi, I don’t mind telling you, I about lost my faith in God. But I was raised to be a Christian and I kept on prayin’, kept on going to church. Now that Darlene’s dead, I don’t feel that way.