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

Gina—you don’t pull your mother’s hair!”
    Chunky-schmunky, I hung up without waiting for an answer—I didn’t need my ears assaulted and I could call back if there wasn’t a Fuller at Les’s address. “Alan, what about the other woman?”
    “She said she’d call back about noon.”
    “Damn!” I’d have to cancel my lunch date.
    “Don’t take it out on me; this isn’t Babylon, you know.” Hardly. If it were, I could kill Alan for relaying bad news, but I was afraid I’d go through quite a few replacements as well. Could it be I was a pessimist? No. Absolutely not. If I erred, it was surely on the side of optimism—I actually expected that woman to call back at noon.
    By two o’clock my stomach was doing a fair imitation of a pride of lions. “Alan, could you do me a favor?”
    “Yes, ma’am, Miz Boss—I’ll get y’all a hamburger
toute de suite
. There’s nothing I loves more than fetchin’ and carryin’.”
    “How’d you know what I wanted?”
    “Your tum growlin’ like a ol’ houn’ dog.”
    “Know what, Alan?”
    “Yes’m. I ain’t never caught a rabbit and I ain’t no friend of yours.”
    “Quite correct. And one other thing.”
    “I know, I know. Never use y’all in the singular—Miz Chris done filled me in.”
    I reached for my wallet, but my hand closed on one of the frothing blood capsules Rob and I had bought at the Pier 39 magic shop. It burst. As I drew a gory hand out of my bag, Kruzick drew back: “Stigmata! Lord help me, I ain’t gon’ study war no more.”
    One day, I thought, I was really going to have to clean out my purse. But for the moment I was glad I had a little bag of tissues in it. Kruzick calmed down as I fossicked for them: “You aren’t really hurt, are you? I mean, that’s gotta be nail polish, right?”
    Nail polish! I’d worn it twice in my life—at my senior prom, and once when I had an interesting occasion to impersonate a hooker. “Look, Alan—how about if I pay you later?”
    “Why not just give me a raise and we’ll call it even?”
    I made one more dive into the purse: “Here’s five bucks. Keep the change.”
    “Maybe I can find a
cheap
burger somewhere.”
    Being hungry makes me mean and so do Kruzick’s adorable little
bits
; at the moment I was feeling quite as murderous as the Trapper himself. It was a fine time for the phone to ring and of course it did. “It’s about your ad.” A woman’s voice.
    “I’ve been waiting for your call.” Perhaps I spoke a bit testily; at any rate, I got a defensive response.
    “I been at the doctor’s. My leg’s actin’ up again, and with the diabetes I’m in there two, three times a week. Sometimes more.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.” I waited, but she seemed to have forgotten what she called about. “You saw my ad?”
    “I can tell you what you want to know.”
    “Wonderful.”
    “Come on over and bring the hundred dollars.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “I said come on over. You deaf?”
    “What was that about a hundred dollars?”
    “You want to know about Miranda and Les, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “The way I read your ad, you’re offering fifty for Les and another fifty for Miranda.”
    I was so taken aback by the matter-of-fact way she peddled information, so much like the way Kruzick and company had played poker on Easter eve, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I was thinking: “See your Les and raise you one Miranda.”
    “I got gallstones, you know. My leg’s been actin’ up lately, and ever since that attack last winter, I ain’t been the same. Even close to it. Doctor said he never saw nothin’ like it.” I didn’t care if it kept me from catching the Trapper, I wasn’t going to ask about her attack. Instead, I said, “Of course. If you can tell me what I need to know, I’ll be glad to pay you a hundred dollars. If you’ll give me your address, I’ll come over in an hour or so.”
    “Doctor says I got to get some rest. I told him, ‘Don’t you worry. You know I’ll be in bed by three o’clock.’ He said I got to have two hours rest every afternoon, but I got to be up at five to fix supper for my son. He works nights, you know, so I always got to make sure I do that. I got no choice but to be in bed by three.”
    My watch said 2:25; that meant good-bye to my burger. It also meant there wasn’t time to get someone to go with me, in case I needed a witness, but she left me no choice. “Okay. What’s your name and