Death Turns A Trick (Rebecca Schwartz #1) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) Read Online Free PDF

to, but I have a date.”
    “For heaven’s sake, bring him.”
    “Oh no, I couldn’t. What if I ran into someone I knew?”
    “For Christ’s sake, it’s just a party. You were at the Strumpets’ Strut with every pimp and whore in San Francisco, and so were the chief of police and the sheriff. What’s the difference?”
    “That wasn’t at a bordello.”
    “Look, I live there. All it is is a party at Elena Mooney’s rather overdecorated Pacific Heights home. If no one’s turning tricks, how’s it a bordello?” She should have been a lawyer.
    “They got you last time for ‘keeping a disorderly house.’ How do you know the cops won’t raid it?”
    “Uh uh. Anybody gets disorderly, he gets thrown out. And don’t worry about the music. The fellow in the ice cream suit comes in every weekend and people are always dancing. The place is soundproofed.”
    I couldn’t see a single thing against it. If I bumped into some lawyer I knew, the incontrovertible fact was that he was there too. Anyway, everybody knows I’m Elena’s lawyer. What could be more natural than helping out a friend? I told Elena I’d call Parker and call her back.
    Parker jumped at it.
    “There’s just one thing,” said Elena when I called back. “Could you wear something sort of—uh—in keeping with the occasion?”
    I told her I had just the thing—my Magnarama outfit—and arranged to come early so she could work on my hair and face. Since the make-up session was bound to bore Parker, he and I decided to come in separate cars.
    It was still raining that night, and I had to wear a trench coat and boots. Once they were off, Elena breathed a sigh of relief. “That’ll do nicely,” she said. “In twenty minutes you won’t recognize yourself.”
    I handed over my eyelashes, and she wrestled them on in about two seconds. Next, she applied blue eye shadow and a lot of rouge that followed the cheekbones exactly and didn’t look half-bad. I said I wanted a beauty mark, and she obliged me—on the right cheek between the nose and mouth. She fossicked in her bureau for the right shade of carmine lipstick and let me apply it myself, a skill I learned in junior high. From another drawer, she pulled the pièce de resistance—a silver lamé turban, so help me. It covered every strand of my Montgomery Street coiffure and, with the addition of a pair of dangling silver earrings, transformed workaday Rebecca into the expensive courtesan of my fantasies.
    I didn’t look like a streetwalker, you understand. Merely a very high-class lady of uncertain reputation. I was profoundly pleased with the effect.
    Elena’s own hair was pulled back from her face and piled very high in front, but was left hanging loose in back. Sophisticated, but not quite nice. She wore a slithery black velvet number that was long on sleeves and short on skirt. In fact, I learned that night that the miniskirt has never gone out of style at fancy cathouses. I was the only one of us
filles de joie
whose knees were covered, but then I had a slit to the wazoo, so what did it matter?
    Elena took me to the kitchen for a spot of sherry before the guests arrived. The other hostesses were gathered round the table, drinking only tea and soft drinks. Though they were passing a joint around, they were pros and didn’t want to smell like alcohol. Hilary, Renée, and Stacy, the other members of the co-op, were also my clients, so we knew each other from jail. I was introduced to Kandi, whose last name could have been Floss or Apple or Kane with no suspension of disbelief required. If you’d told me she’d made it up and was really Stephanie or Betsy or Suzy Q, I wouldn’t have had any. She was a sugarplum that walked like a woman. Sensuous as homemade fudge, airy as cotton candy, and cloying as divinity. She wasn’t any of those, though: she was a meringue. (This is not a sexist remark, merely an observation: I am a cinnamon heart, Parker is English toffee, former President Carter