Death Turns A Trick (Rebecca Schwartz #1) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

without damaging the garment. It fit as sleekly as a leotard.
    I am five-feet-five inches tall and weigh 125 pounds, which is not exactly fat, but it isn’t going to get me any modeling contracts. I wouldn’t say I have what novelists call a “copious bosom,” but I don’t think “generous” is going too far, and there’s no question it’s my best feature. This little silver number set it off to optimum advantage.
    You won’t believe what I found to go with it: a wrap-around black satin skirt that only continued wrapping for a few inches down from the waist, so it looked like it was slit up to the wazoo, but it actually revealed a good deal more than a slit would have. Like most of my left leg. What there was of it fell to the calf, slick and shiny as a wetsuit.
    The entire outfit cost me twenty-five dollars.
    I don’t know where drab, workaday Rebecca was that day, but whoever was impersonating her bought a pair of false eyelashes, a pair of sheer black nylons, and what my sister Mickey calls wicked-woman shoes—high-heeled, open-toed sandals.
    Then she stole Rebecca’s good gray Volvo from the parking lot, drove it to Rebecca’s Telegraph Hill apartment, and let herself in as if she owned the place.
    I am going to take time out to tell you what she found there, as I am very fond of my apartment, and you are going to be spending a lot of time there. The colors are stark, wintry ones. For warmth I have a grand piano, an enormous window with a great view and, underneath the window, the thing I love most in the world: a hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium. It teems with hermit crabs and fish in colors both subtle and bold, and even shrimp. But the anemones—translucent, pink, and always reaching for something just outside their grasp—are my favorites.
    Because the aquarium doesn’t quite fill the space under the window, it’s flanked by the fattest, most luxuriant asparagus ferns you ever saw, each like a green basketball on its white ceramic stand.
    It’s a beautiful, wonderful apartment, its sophistication marred only by a funny little Don Quixote sculpture on the coffee table—an incongruous, cornball item weighing about a ton. I’d bought it in Mexico with my ex-boyfriend, and I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.
    So that’s what the stranger saw when she went into Rebecca’s apartment that day. She walked right through to the bedroom, where she spent half an hour applying the eyelashes, cursing every minute, and then she slithered lamia-like into the rest of the caparison. Peering eagerly into Rebecca’s mirror, she gazed upon none other than Rebecca Schwartz looking like a silly ass.
    Having returned from whatever astral plane I’d been on, I looked in that mirror and hooted like a gibbon. When I’d finished making sport of myself, I peeled off the eyelashes, slithered lamia-like out of everything else, stepped into the shower, and washed that alter ego right out of my hair.
    I wore a black sweater and a pair of violet corduroys to Chris and Larry’s.
    Chris met me at the door, looking about nine feet tall in a yellow jumpsuit. Before you could say, “habeas corpus,” she plunged right in: “You’re gonna like this guy.”
    I didn’t take it as bad news. I was wearing boring old corduroys, but I had got up the nerve to put on the wicked-woman shoes, and I was feeling pretty reckless. “Tell me more,” I said.
    Chris led me into the kitchen on the pretext of getting some wine. “He’s Parker Phillips, who’s just moved here from pigball,” she said. “An architect.”
    Now of course I knew he hadn’t moved from pigball, but I’m used to Chris. Since Larry’s from Seattle, I deduced that was what she meant. Chris is a very good lawyer, but she gives the appearance of being scatterbrained because whenever she can’t think of a word, she just substitutes a made-up one. “Pigball” was her latest.
    “What’s he look like?” I asked. I don’t like to think I’m a female chauvinist pig, but I do set a certain store by a man’s appearance.
    “Very New England. Not a West Coast type at all. Six feet tall, smokes a pipe, light brown hair, good bones. Ready to meet him?”
    Who was going to say no after that description?
    Parker Phillips had a firm handshake and perfect manners to go with it. He also seemed a little on the shy side, a quality that I feel shows a person isn’t unduly impressed with himself.
    “Chris says you just moved to San Francisco,” I said