Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (19 page)

“She said she was making a citizen’s arrest. She had her hand in her pocket, as if she had a gun.”

“And what did you do?”

“I held out my hand for the gun and said, ‘Let’s talk it over.’”

“Did she give you the gun?”

“No. She hit my hand with it—without taking it out of her pocket.”

“And what did you do then?” Dad asked this question because we didn’t want Liz asking it—it would look better if I admitted voluntarily that I’d hit Miranda.

I said: “I fought her for it.”

“You fought her for it?”

He sounded absolutely amazed.

“Yes.”

“Well! You
look
properly brought up.” The courtroom broke up. Dad knew he’d get reprimanded, but he’d scored big with the jury. I was more or less respectable once again, and had a funny father who joked with me in public. As for Dad, he was the cutest thing since Sam Ervin, and every juror who’d resisted his charm so far was now deeply in love. It wouldn’t win the case, but it couldn’t hurt.

The judge, naturally, was fuming. After restoring order, he said, “Mr. Schwartz, I’ll ask you please to remember that this is a murder trial in a court of law and not a forum for stand-up comedy.”

“I apologize, Your Honor.”

It would have been great to leave them laughing, but we still had to get Miranda out in the open. Rob hadn’t ever been able to write a word about her, but he could if her story came out in the trial. Then maybe someone who knew her would see the story and phone us. It was a big if—I was horribly afraid she was dead—but we had to try. It wouldn’t hurt to establish an element of mystery in the case as well, to send the jurors’ imaginations in directions of reasonable doubt. “Who won the fight?”

“No one. The Reverend Ovid Robinson, who was scheduled to give the sermon, turned up and broke it up.”

“Well, I’m sure you
would
have won.”

Dad was really pushing it. Again, the judge gaveled for order. “Mr. Schwartz, my patience is not on trial here. Please confine your paternal feelings to your home.” He said that, but his face was all twisted up from trying not to smile. “Did the woman tell you her name?”

“She told Mr. Burns—Rob.”

“And did you hear her?”

“Yes. They talked for several minutes. She said she’d been with a man—apparently her boyfriend. She hid in his car, and he drove to the Yellow Parrot, a bar on Castro Street. He went in, but she remained in the car, drinking. Then she fell asleep. When she woke up, she was still in the car, but it was parked near Mount Davidson. She heard noise and came up the hill. She tried to arrest me because she thought I’d killed the man on the cross.”

“And what did she say her name was?”

“She said it was Miranda Warning.”

“No further questions,” said Dad, and left them laughing, after all.

Liz came back strong on redirect. In chambers, she’d fought to keep out the testimony about Miranda, but the judge felt it was relevant. Naturally, she was going to belittle the tiny seeds of doubt we hoped we were sowing.

“What happened to Ms.—uh—Warning?”

“She ran away before the police came.”

“Why didn’t you try to stop her?”

Dad objected in his world-weary voice.

“Very well. I’ll rephrase the question. Did you try to stop her?”

“Of course. I chased her until Inspector Martinez threatened to blow my head off.” Score one for me.

“I beg your pardon?”

“When the police came, Inspector Martinez couldn’t see what was going on. He yelled, ‘Freeze, or I’ll blow your head off.’”

“And you froze.”

“Yes. But Miranda—Miss Warning—got away.”

“Tell me something about Miranda Warning. What did she look like?”

I could have tried to be cagey, but ultimately Liz would have got what she wanted. I spat it out: “She looked bedraggled and rather unhealthy. Her clothes were very poor. And she reeked of alcohol.”

“Alcohol!”

“Yes.”

“Did you get the impression she was a derelict?”

“Objection—counsel is calling for a conclusion.”

“Sustained.”

“No further questions.”

I was shaking when I left the stand. Rob was to be the next witness and the plan had been that I’d cross-examine him, but Dad took one look at me and said he’d do it. Things had gone no worse than we expected, but then we’d expected the worst. The only good thing that had happened was that Dad had made the jury love him; but he always did that. On the down side: They probably weren’t too fond of me even though I was the daughter of their hero, and I was sure they hated Miranda. I realized that when our turn came, we could call the Reverend Ovid Robinson to confirm my testimony, and we could have Lou testify that he had no girlfriend and no car, but there wasn’t a chance in hell the jury’d believe him. Also, once we got him on the stand, if he made just the tiniest reference to having been in prison, if any little inkling of it slipped out, we were done for. My morning was off to a completely lousy start.

Liz called Rob. He told about chasing someone down the hill after we heard the ladder fall, and then admitted getting the first Trapper note when he wrote the story about Sanchez. Liz introduced the note as People’s Exhibit A.

“After getting that note, Mr. Burns, did you then go to Pier 39?”

“Yes.”

“Did anything unusual happen while you were there?” She really had us: first me describing the grisly sight of a man on the cross at Mount Davidson, and now Rob on the subject of mass poisoning at Pier 39.

“I heard sirens, and followed the noise to Full Fathom Five.”

“And what did you see there?”

“I saw paramedics remove some people on stretchers.”

“Could you see any of the peoples’ faces?”

“Yes.”

“Were any of them speaking, or making any kind of noise at all?”

“Some of them were trying to catch their breath.”

“Would it be fair to say, from looking at their faces and hearing them trying to catch their breath, that these people were suffering horribly?”

“Objection!” Dad and I shouted together. I’d forgotten he was supposed to be taking over.

“Very well; I withdraw the question. Mr. Burns, did you later get another letter signed ‘Tourist Trapper’?”

“It was just signed ‘The Trapper’.”

“Is this it?” She produced Exhibit B.

“It seems to be.”

“Will you read it for us, please?”

She was unbelievably tricky—you can’t have a witness read something he didn’t write. “Objection,” I said, trying to sound as world-weary as Dad. “Hearsay.”

“Sustained.”

“Very well, Mr. Burns. Can you tell us in your own words what the note said?”

“It said the writer had had nothing but trouble since he’d come to San Francisco and the whole city was going to pay. Then I think it said something like, ‘What would this crummy joint be without tourists? Too bad a few of them have to suffer for the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ And then it said that the people who stayed away would be better off in the long run, and that they’d thank him. And the last line was something about closing the city down.”

“Would you like to look at the note to refresh your recollection?”

Rob flushed. He’d spoken almost in a monotone, keeping it as low-key as possible, and he’d paraphrased as well as he could. But of course he knew the note by heart. “No, thanks,” he said. “I remember. The last line was, ‘Watch me close this hellhole down.’”

A literal gasp went around the room. I’d heard about courtrooms being electrified, but I hadn’t seen it before. Probably most of the jurors and spectators had read the note in the paper, but hearing those words like that gave you that same sickish feeling in the viscera as a fingernail on a blackboard.

“Was there a postscript?” asked Liz.

“Yes. The writer said he hoped the tourists liked the local mussels and noted that he had put what he called ‘the good ones’ in the cabinet in the men’s room.”

“And how was the note signed?”

“The Trapper.” Rob’s voice was very low.

Liz left it there. She’d played Rob like a violin—like a kazoo, really; it had taken no skill at all. She was 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.

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 interviewed when Fish sauntered up and passed the time with him. But knowing that didn’t keep me from wanting to kill the little dope—along with Charlie Fish.

The story was as good a reason as I’d ever seen for admonishing jurors not to read papers. I knew Fish was jealous of Rob and desperate to make his reputation, but I still didn’t see how this could have happened. Where was Rob, anyhow? He didn’t answer his phone, and it was too early to be on the road to San Jose.

He wasn’t in the courtroom that morning, but there was a much worse problem—neither was Dad. Everybody but me seemed to know why—even Lou. He looked concerned this morning, not stony at all: “Have you heard anything about your dad?”

“No. Why?”

“You don’t know about the crash on the bridge?”

Like the Rebecca in Fish’s story, I showed no emotion as I spoke; but my hands were as cold as whatever nasty little thing was beating in Fish’s chest: “What crash?”

“Eight or ten cars piled up; there’s a huge tie-up.”

I asked for a recess.

I knew I should call Mom; she might even be able to reassure me—maybe Dad had heard about the tie-up on the radio and hadn’t tried to take the Golden Gate Bridge. Most likely, he was still stuck on a bridge approach, probably walking around and schmoozing with the other trapped commuters. But there was always the chance he’d been in the wreck; Mom would think that, too, and we’d feed on each other’s paranoia. The only thing I could do to keep myself from feeling utterly helpless was go to the bridge and find out for myself.

But traffic was backed up for miles on the San Francisco side as well as the Marin approach; I was stuck for forty-five minutes.