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

just lucky the man who got the letters happened to be the defense lawyer’s sweetie; coming from him, the Trapper’s words packed about three times the normal wallop.
    After that, Terry Yannarelli and the bartender from the Yellow Parrot testified that a man resembling Lou, about the same height and weight, at any rate, had left the bar with Sanchez. I made a big point of their being unable to give a positive I.D., but considering the fact that the Trapper had worn a beard, shades, and a pulled-down hat, they’d really gone about as far as they could go toward putting Lou away for the next five hundred years, give or take.
    The afternoon testimony made my throat close. Martinez told the court he’d found Exhibit C, a nasty-looking .44 Magnum, in Lou’s monk’s cell of a room; and then a ballistics expert assured us all that the gun had killed Sanchez.
    All day Lou sat quiet in the new suit we’d gotten him for the trial, looking stony and sullen and utterly unlike anyone for whom a juror would muster up a shred of sympathy.
    When we left the courtroom, Art Zimbardo, sitting in one of the back rows, followed Dad and me with his amazing eyes, not speaking, just smoldering in that resentful, vulnerable way that got to me every time.

16
     
    Rob had left shortly before the session was adjourned for the day—to write his story, I supposed. We’d been seeing each other three or four times a week. Tonight I was avidly looking forward to hashing over the day and, not to put too fine a point on it, to crying on his shoulder. But he wasn’t home when I called and didn’t return my call.
    I had to get up at six o’clock to make it to San Jose on time, and I was bleary-eyed in the morning when I picked up my
Chronicle
. The headline woke me up: “Damaging Testimony in the Zimbardo Trial.” Oddly, the by-line wasn’t Rob’s, but Charlie Fish’s. I’d seen Charlie hanging around the day before, assigned to help Rob, I thought. Come to think of it, though, they hadn’t sat together.
    The story all but convicted my client, made both Dad and me look like asses, and portrayed Rob as practically an accessory to the Trapper’s crimes. Some excerpts: “In a highly unusual move, Assistant District Attorney Liz Hughes called defense attorney Rebecca Schwartz as her first witness.
    “Schwartz, who, along with
Chronicle
reporter Rob Burns, discovered the body of the Tourist Trapper’s first victim, showed no emotion as she told the court, ‘Jack Sanchez’s wrists had been nailed to the cross.’
    “On cross-examination by her father, Isaac Schwartz, she disclosed that she exchanged blows with a woman who then appeared on the scene and tried to detain Miss Schwartz in what the woman said was a citizen’s arrest for the murder of Sanchez. The Reverend Ovid Robinson of the Third Baptist Church, arriving to give the Easter sermon, broke up the fight, Miss Schwartz said.
    “The defense attorney said the woman told her and Burns a story about being in a car with a man who drove to the Yellow Parrot bar (where the murderer apparently met Sanchez), falling asleep in the car, and waking up to find the car parked at the foot of Mount Davidson. Isaac Schwartz, who bantered with his daughter as he might at the dinner table, seemed to be trying to establish the mystery woman as a suspect in the Trapper killings.
    “Hughes, on reexamination, followed a line of questioning apparently designed to portray the woman as a harmless derelict. ‘She looked bedraggled,’ the witness admitted, ‘and rather unhealthy. Her clothes were very poor. And she reeked of alcohol.’ Laughter broke out in the courtroom when it was learned that the woman, who fled before police arrived, gave her name as Miranda Warning, a term police use to describe the procedure advising a suspect of his rights.
    “In other testimony, Burns, the man chosen by the Trapper as his link with the public, admitted receiving letters from the killer threatening to ‘close this hellhole down’ by randomly murdering tourists.”
    Fish didn’t neglect the other witnesses, either, but the most damning part of the story was the last paragraph: “Outside the courtroom, Art Zimbardo, the defendant’s brother, told the
Chronicle
that his brother chose Miss Schwartz as his lawyer as a result of Art’s friendship with her and Burns.”
    I could see what had probably happened. Art had no doubt thought Fish was a friend of Rob’s and hadn’t realized he was being