Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (4 page)

“One more question,” said Rob. “Did he tell you his name?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it, he did. Now, what the hell was it?”

We kept quiet, trying not to interrupt his train of thought. “Lee, maybe,” he said at last.

“You sure?”

“No, but something like that.”

“Last name?”

“He didn’t say. Listen, you want to take my picture or anything?”

And that was how Terry Yannarelli got the fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol assures us we will all achieve. Rob sent a photographer over and Terry made page one. Needless to say, so did I, though not my picture—only an account of my having accompanied intrepid reporter Rob Burns on his latest body-discovering expedition.

There were no plane crashes that day, no presidential surgery, and no uncovered civic corruption—indeed no other news of interest except an announcement of an early mussel quarantine. So the body on the cross was the lead story. Neither the Reverend Ovid Robinson nor Miranda Warning was mentioned—omissions I found oddly disappointing, but rereading the story, I didn’t see how Rob could have worked them in without digressing. It was a tight, well-told tale, and I wished I weren’t in it.

I was greeted at the office by my mother’s voice—or at least a first-rate facsimile: “Rebecca. Your father is lying down. The doctor says he may possibly be all right, though no thanks to you.”

“Alan, I am now going to count to five—”

“I just don’t see why you can’t find some nice boy like Mickey and stop tripping over bodies.”

“Very good, Alan—you get an Academy Award. Just shut up!”

“You’re almost thirty, you know, and your thighs are already getting kind of mushy.”

“There is nothing wrong with my goddamn thighs!”

“Nothing three miles a day wouldn’t fix.” He dropped the falsetto and went back to his normal voice. “You can run with Mickey on her prenatal exercise program. You gotta look good at the wedding.”

“I’ll accept you as a brother-in-law the day Charlie Manson gets out of jail—that is, if Charlie isn’t available.”

“Some aunt. Don’t you want your nephew to have a name?”

“Sure. Schwartz would be great. Or Yannarelli, maybe. Just so long as it isn’t Kruzick.”

I stomped past him into my office. I was definitely going to have to work on my attitude. Whether I liked it or not, I figured there was about a fifty-fifty chance I was really going to have Mr. Wonderful for a brother-in-law. Mickey’d shown poor judgment so for; it was too much to hope she was really smartening up.

“Why do I always have to read everything in the paper? You find a body nailed to a cross and you don’t even tell your nearest and dearest?” It was Mom’s voice again, but now it was coming out of Chris’s mouth. She was standing in my office doorway.

“I get the strangest feeling there’s an echo in here.”

“An echo?”

“We’ve got to fire Kruzick; you’re already sounding like him. What if you start to look alike?”

“My nose is getting longer already.” I laughed. Kruzick had a healthy schnoz, but Chris was six feet tall and her nose was in proportion; on her it looked elegant. “Who killed that poor man?”

“In the Castro, they seem to think it was a freak who hates gays.”

“But you’re not convinced.”

I shook my head. “I’m not even sure either one of them was gay. The killer—Lee or whoever he is—dumped the beauteous Terry Yannarelli for poor old Sanchez. I think maybe he already knew him. If Lee wasn’t gay and had simply arranged to meet Sanchez at the Yellow Parrot—maybe not even knowing it was a gay bar—that would explain it, wouldn’t it?”

“You mean they had a date and Terry horned in? But couldn’t that have happened if they were both gay?”

“Yes, but Terry thinks Lee was straight. It could just be ego, but there was a woman on the hill who said Sanchez was her man.”

I explained about Miranda, and then Chris left me to a pile of messages from various reporters in competition with the
Chronicle
. Out of loyalty to my true love, I declined to return their calls. Instead, I phoned Rob to brag about my faithfulness—and just happened to ask what was new.

“He was definitely gay. No question about it. Item one—he was staying at the Oscar Wilde Hotel. What does that tell you? Item two—I talked to his family in Gallup this morning. He had never once, not even in junior high, been known to have the slightest interest in females. Even a female horse. Item three—I had his sister poll the whole family and not one of them ever heard the name Miranda.”

“So who is she?”

“That would seem to be the key question—but for one. Dinner tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

And then I applied myself to my thriving practice. I’d been involved in a couple of murders before and noticed that they played hell with getting my work done. I thanked my stars I wasn’t really in the middle of this one. But the next night over Hunan food so hot I had to drink three beers, Miranda was still on my mind.

We were walking back to my place when I had my great idea: “Suppose she wasn’t Sanchez’s lover.”

“I have been. Haven’t you?”

“I mean, she has to fit in someplace. Maybe Lee was her man.”

Rob quit walking and stared at me. “Miss Schwartz. You may have something there.”

“So maybe she caught Lee with Sanchez and killed him out of jealousy.”

“Unlikely. She was too drunk, don’t you think? And not strong enough to get him on the cross.”

“That’s not the half of it. She’d have killed Lee, not Sanchez. At least I would. Kill you, I mean.”

He kissed my ear. “Um. Would you? With the knife or the candlestick?”

“The knife. Naturally. But suppose she lied about the way it happened.”

“You’re brilliant tonight. Like I said, I’ve been so supposing, haven’t you?”

“What if she were Lee’s woman and for some reason Lee thought Sanchez was having an affair with her, which he wasn’t, being gay. But anyhow, that’s why Lee killed him.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Chris says that, according to southern tradition, if you’re drunk and get laid, it doesn’t count. She says lots of southern women who’ve been to bed with half the men in the county still haven’t lost their virginity.”

“So if we make love it won’t count?”

“Nope. We’ll wake up as pure as Mormon missionaries.”

“I just remembered a previous engagement.” Sometimes Rob didn’t like it when I acted silly.

On the other hand, he did like it when I’d had a few beers and felt like staying up making love far too late on a weeknight. Which was what we ended up doing and why we decided to spend the next couple of nights recuperating instead of seeing each other. So naturally when Rob phoned Friday morning, I assumed he was merely missing me and eager to confirm our mud-bath date. But then I realized he sounded far too excited. “I want to read you something.”

“Okay.”

“It just came in the mail. I think it’s from the killer.”

“Read.”

“‘Dear Mr. Burns: I’m glad you were the one who discovered the body. You have always been my favorite
Chronicle
reporter; so here is a tip. Look for action at Pier 39.’
It’s signed,
‘Tourist Trapper.’
”

“Tourist Trapper! Sanchez was a tourist.”

“And Pier 39 is tourist heaven. I don’t like to think about the implications.”

“You really think it’s real?”

“I’m afraid I do. You’re always hearing about the police getting crank letters, but reporters don’t. The last time I remember anything like this was back in the sixties.”

“The Zodiac?”

“Yeah. Paul Avery was the reporter who covered the killings—the Zodiac decided Avery’d make a good pen pal.”

“The letters ran in the paper. I remember them.”

“Yes, but only after extensive conferences with the cops. It was decided that—”

“Don’t tell me. The public had a right to know.”

“Well? Don’t you think that’s right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it
is
some crank this time.”

“Let’s hope. Meanwhile, I’ve got to spend the day conferring with cops and editors. The last thing I want to do. You busy tonight?”

“Why, no, Rob—I’d just love to go to Pier 39. That’s my idea of a dream date.”

“Pick you up at seven. We’ll make it an early evening since we’re driving to Calistoga tomorrow.”

* * *

Know-nothing easterners with an unreasonable prejudice against what they call “kooks and gays,” as if the two groups are really one, should only know about Pier 39, a melanoma on the cheek of San Francisco. As late as 1976, it was indeed a pier; a scant thirteen months later, it was a municipal scandal of a shopping complex that looks vaguely like a misplaced New England fishing village, though some say it’s meant to evoke the Victorian era as translated by the Old West. It’s “weathered,” at any rate, or perhaps it better deserves that term applied to ersatz antique furniture—“distressed.” Distressed is certainly the way it makes the natives feel, those of us, at least, who do not operate shops or restaurants within its ticky-tacky confines.

One of us smart enough to know a lucrative thing when he saw it was our erstwhile city supervisor, Dan White, a kook who hated gays enough to gun down his fellow lawmaker, Harvey Milk, known as “the Mayor of Castro Street,” along with George Moscone, who was then mayor of the whole city. White was one of the first entrepreneurs of Pier 39, the proprietor of a stand that dispensed baked potatoes to the hungry hordes from the Midwest.

I don’t mean to sound bitter, but if you had a blight like Pier 39 in your city, no one would accuse you of sounding like that other Rebecca, either—the one from Sunnybrook Farm. We have other shopping complexes favored by our brothers and sisters from Paris, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois. We have, for instance, the Cannery, where canning was once performed, and Ghirardelli Square, where chocolate was once contrived, and I am wholly in support of both of these rehabilitated buck factories. To compare them with Pier 39 is to compare the Tivoli Gardens with Coney Island. The place makes my skin itch, as if it’s turned to polyester.

When Rob and I got there, there were almost more cops than tourists—about 3 million of each, conservatively speaking.

“Chief Sullivan seems to have heard about your note.”

Rob nodded. “I think he’s taking it seriously.”

“Are you going to run it?”

“Not now. Why scare people?”

That would normally have been my position, but I found myself arguing. “Why indeed? Wouldn’t want to stem the flow of tourist bucks. Even if spending them is hazardous to health.”

“But we don’t know that. You think we should have gone ahead and run it?”

I thought about it. “No. But I’m beginning to see what kind of back-and-forth goes into these decisions.”

“Aha. So you admit it’s something more than cheap sensationalism.”

“I’m reserving judgment. If something does happen, you can run it then and still have an exclusive.”

“And you think it’d be wrong to run it then?”

“Oh, not really. I’m just being ornery.”

“Which probably means you’re hungry. Let’s prowl around a little and then we’ll find something to eat.”

“Okay. Funtasia or Only in San Francisco Memorabilia?”

“I hate to say this, but—”

“Oh, no!”

“Right. Both.”

He steered me into Only in San Francisco. Never, outside of a cattle car, have so many been packed so tightly. It was wall-to-wall with buck-bearers, plunking down for T-shirts adorned with the Golden Gate Bridge and misshapen mugs that said, “I Got Smashed in San Francisco.” I took an elbow in the midsection and hollered, “Ouch!”

“What is it?”

I pointed to one of the mugs.

“Right,” said Rob. “Let’s go.”

We did, retracing our ten or so steps in roughly three and a half hours, thereby satisfying ourselves the Trapper, if he existed, would strike there only at the risk of becoming the Trapped. Off to Funtasia.

Here you had your bumper cars, your video games, your skeeball, your video games, your boomball, and your video games. Mirrors everywhere to make the place look twice as big as it was; that funny land of lighting like they have in casinos that resembles neither day nor night nor dusk nor dawn. And 93,000 kids. A rough estimate, but not entirely off, I think. A true nightmare, to think of the Trapper in here, but as far as we could tell, all was normal.

The Ship’s Galley, where hundreds chowed down on Bay burgers, bagels, and Kabuki Yakitori, was dark, noisy, and normal. And so it went. The Trapper, so far as we could see, was not lurking at the Art Fair Outside Gallery (featuring framed San Francisco posters and cute animal pictures), nor at Chocolate Heaven, nor at the Music Box Store. Mostly, we were taking a cursory look wherever we went, not knowing whom or what to keep our eyes peeled for, but the Palace of Magic took Rob’s fancy.

Here you could buy fascinating paraphernalia for the childish mind—bald wigs, fangs, frothing blood capsules, glow-in-the-dark face paint, thumb cuffs, switchblade combs, and smoke that came out of your fingers when you said “Abracadabra!” We got so engrossed the Trapper could have trapped us and held us for ransom. I may as well admit it—we bought one of each of the above. (At Rob’s instigation, of course. I feel quite sure I could have resisted if I’d been alone.)

Somewhere near the middle of the complex is Center Stage, where a juggler was keeping three chain saws in the air. If anyone had given him the slightest little push, the carnage would have been horrific. But no one did. We walked past the crowd around him, past more stores. But all was serene.

We still had the second tier of the complex to explore—the one where restaurants with a close-up Bay view are crowded in among the souvenir shops. And by now I was so hungry I was as cross as two sticks (a southernism I learned from my Virginia-born law partner). So we went to the Eagle Cafe, the jewel of the pier and the one authentic Only in San Francisco bit of memorabilia in the whole place. It had green Formica tables with ketchup bottles on them, and the entire restaurant, dating from 1927, had been moved from its previous location to Pier 39 in 1978. We felt almost at home there.