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

up, but it couldn’t be helped. I pressed the manager’s bell first. It’s her job to be inconvenienced.
    Her voice was husky over the intercom: “What is it?”
    “Mrs. Garcia, it’s Rebecca Schwartz. I’m locked out. Could you buzz me in?”
    “Oh Lord. Okay, come to my apartment for your key. I’m too tired to meet you at yours.”
    “It’s okay. I have an extra key on the doorsill. All you have to do is buzz me through the gate.”
    She did, and I said thanks, but she didn’t answer.
    I’m foolhardy enough to keep a key on my doorsill because I have a tendency to lock myself out when I go to the garbage chute. It’s not the safest thing in the world, but I feel like an idiot having to beg Mrs. Garcia to let me in my own apartment, so I’m willing to take the chance.
    I decided I’d probably wake up everybody in the building except Kandi if I banged on the door. I’d use the extra key and if I scared her, it was too bad. I felt for it and unlocked the door. Even though the lights were on, I reached automatically for the light switch to the right of the door. I did it even though I could plainly see that someone had ransacked my house and left Kandi dead on my Flokati rug. The mind is a funny thing.
    Kandi was lying half-on and half-off the rug, with one leg kind of folded under her and the other stretched out under the aquarium stand. Her hair and my rug were stained and so was the base of my Don Quixote statue, which had been tossed carelessly on the rug, apparently after serving to bash Kandi’s brains out. (I meant that figuratively—there weren’t any brains in view. If there had been, I know for a fact I’d have screamed, which I didn’t.) I suppose Kandi must have fought for her life because a lot of fluffy apricot feathers had settled on the rug and on my two white sofas. I think I hated the feathers most of all. They reminded me of something: a cat Gary and I had kept that came and went as it pleased through a cat door. More than once, we came home and found feathers all over the living room. That was the cat’s way of showing us he’d made a kill. I hadn’t had much experience with death, but I associated feathers with it.
    A few books had been torn from my bookcase, my purse and Kandi’s had been emptied on the coffee table, and the sofa pillows were on the floor. That was about all there was to the ransacking. There aren’t many secret crannies in my living room.
    Now, as I have mentioned, I did not scream. But I wasn’t altogether brave and true about the situation either. I probably should have gone and felt Kandi’s pulse to make sure she was dead. But I didn’t; I just assumed she was.
    After absorbing death and ransacking, my quicksilver brain hopped right on to the next subject: the whereabouts of the murderer. He might still be in the apartment, and it wasn’t big enough for both of us.
    Although it’s Mrs. Garcia’s job to be inconvenienced, I didn’t go to her apartment. I went to Tony Larson’s. I did this not because he is a man and she is a woman, but because he lives next door. I figured no murderer would have the
chutzpah
to sashay out my door with me banging and hollering right outside. If he was there, I’d have him trapped.
    I banged and hollered. Tony came to the door still wrapping some sort of Japanese robe around him that came to about mid-thigh. I had thought he might still be up, since he’s a bartender and the bars don’t close until two. As it turned out, he was and so was his date; they just didn’t have any clothes on.
    Apparently, Tony grasped the urgency of the situation, because he didn’t complain that I’d halted Cupid on his appointed rounds and he didn’t comment on my outfit. He put his arms around me and I let him. Just for a second. Then I got down to business:
    “There’s a dead woman in my apartment.”
    “Christ,” said Tony and started out the door, but I caught him.
    “Wait, Tony. She’s been murdered. I don’t know if