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

address?”
    “Nola Pritchett; the Bonaventure Arms on Eddy Street.” The address she gave me was one of the seediest in the Tenderloin; my confidence wasn’t vastly increased when she said, “Come alone.”
    “May I ask why?”
    “Three people in my building right now got AIDS, a couple got TB, and I don’t even know how many’s walkin’ around with hepatitis. Strangers carry germs, so I don’t like ’em comin’ in and out, know what I mean?”
    It was just as well about the burger. I was fast losing my appetite. Mrs. Pritchett certainly didn’t sound dangerous, but just in case, I wrote a memo explaining where to look for me before I went out to find a taxi. I’d walked to work but I’d cut into Mrs. Pritchett’s naptime if I tried to hoof it to the Bonaventure Arms; or considering the neighborhood, I might not even get there. I mentally slapped my wrist for thinking that last thought. The Tenderloin was unwholesome, certainly, but maybe less so of late, as families of Asian refugees moved in because of the rock-bottom rents. It was not the kind of place where a Marin County native was completely comfortable, but plenty of hookers ranged about unmolested at all hours of the day and night; not to mention the unsuspecting tourists who booked rooms at the Hilton, not knowing the neighborhood wasn’t exactly Beekman Place West.
    There were plenty of junkies, crazies, and small-time thugs roaming the Tenderloin’s streets and juicing it up in its sleazy bars, but its true chambers of horrors were the filthy flophouses where who knew how many had serum hepatitis, and where crime—robbery and up—was as much a way of life as pasta in North Beach. The Bonaventure Arms was one of the vilest. The stink of vomit, urine, and rot was instantly evident, followed by equal assaults on the eyes—forty or fifty years of dust and piled-up crud on walls, floors, stairs, windows, and worse yet, what fragments there were of carpets. Specimens of Tenderloin humanity seemed almost to be blinking in the half-light, as if they’d been languishing like the Prisoner of Zenda. Surely Mrs. Pritchett’s ailments could only get worse in this atmosphere.
    I still stand by that opinion, but after learning that she owned the building and managed it—if you could call it that—I found my sympathy stretched to the thickness of poor-grade plastic wrap. Her own chambers, while larger, I surmised, than most in the building, surely couldn’t have been much better than the famous hole in Calcutta. “I hope you can stand the mess,” she said by way of greeting. “I haven’t felt much like tidying up lately.” By “lately” she had to have meant in the last ten years, as I saw a ten-year-old newspaper among the others piled on her floor. Every surface was crammed with litter and bottles and pill vials, all covered not with dust, but with accumulated gunk, reminding me of spices I bought for dishes I cooked once a year or so; whenever I needed saffron, say, or sage, I’d pull the bottle off my spice rack and find it sticking to my fingers. I had the feeling anything I picked up in Mrs. Pritchett’s living room wouldn’t be easy to put down again.
    My hostess cleared a place for me on the tattered sofa and took a seat herself in an armchair that would have made Goodwill turn up its nose—not because it was old and sprung, but because there were stains on it in places where one would have to be an acrobat to get in position for landing a spill. Mrs. Pritchett barely fit into it; she was shaped like a fluffed-up pillow, and she was the color of one you might find in a hospital—dead white.
    Her hair also was white and tightly permed, but scrupulously clean. Her apricot dress, which was meant to have a waist but didn’t, looked fine as well. One of her stockings, however, looked like a cat’s cradle, revealing random longish leg hairs and stark white patches of skin. It had been stretched to its limit, I imagined, by legs the shape and thickness of Doric columns. I thought a lot of her health problems might be traced to her weight, but in one sense the extra fat had served her well—her face was unwrinkled and rather pretty. It was also nicely made up (though a bit heavy on the blusher). She was an odd combination of fastidiousness and utter decay.
    The apartment was not only a monument to hoarding, it was made doubly oppressive by heavy drapes drawn over all the windows. I was sure if you patted one gently you’d raise