Read Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) for Free Online Page A

lawyer to say. Come help me phone in my story.”
    Rob is one of those rare reporters who can dictate off the top of his head. He tells me all the hawks and hens of the Ben Hecht era could do it—it was just part of the job—but it’s now a dying art, technology making it obsolete. He told me about a time when he left a trial to phone in the verdict, getting the booth next to the AP reporter. For some reason, his city desk had put him on hold for a minute or two; by the time he actually got through, the verdict had already come over the wire, phoned in, indirectly, by the guy in the next booth. Now there was no point in rushing to beat the competition—the machines did it for you. But my pal Rob took pride in his craftsmanship; he’d probably have been a lot happier back in the days of
The Front Page
.
    I listened admiringly as he was transferred to a “rewrite man” named Kathy, and went into his act.
    “Eleven persons were hospitalized last night after dining at Full Fathom Five, Pier 39. Police Captain Michael (‘Slim’) McGarrity characterized it as ‘the worst disaster in the history of the pier.’ McGarrity said diners began to fall ill shortly after 9:00 P.M. , but he declined to comment on possible causes of the mysterious ailment. Asked whether poisoning was involved, he said, ‘I can’t say—forgot to renew my medical license…’”
    That last, I knew, was going to end up on the cutting-room floor. Rob was always putting jokes into serious stories and complaining when editors took them out. He couldn’t help it, he said—he was only quoting. But his city editor seemed to believe in certain kinds of censorship—on grounds of “good taste.”
    I tuned in on Rob again as he was switched back to the city desk. “Listen,” he was saying. “You know what McGarrity said after he made that crack about his medical license? He said you didn’t have to have one to know it was poisoning—but don’t quote him on it. The thing is, it’s got to be the Trapper’s work. The cops will say so in the morning, just in time for the
Examiner
to get it first; if we don’t go with it… oh, okay. I guess not.”
    He hung up. I said, “You guess not what?”
    “I guess we’d look like fools if we ran the Trapper’s note and it turned out the chef spilled soap powder in the soup or something. So I guess we can’t.”
    “I see what you mean.”
    “Listen, the police have the place sealed off, but I’m going to wait and see if I can talk to people on their way out. Want to hang around, or will you be bored?”
    “I need to move around a little. I think I’ll take a walk; I’ll meet you back here in a little while.”
    “Okay.” He gave me a good-bye kiss.
    I walked mindlessly toward Fisherman’s Wharf—I say mindlessly because no one would choose that clogged and congested part of the Embarcadero for a late-night stroll if she were thinking. I had to nudge and elbow my way through clumps of possibly endangered tourists taking carefree ganders at the neon. Ordinarily I would have considered their presence annoying—who were they to get in the way of a genuine resident?—but now I was afraid for them. I found myself looking at their faces, at the way they looked at each other, at the pleasure they took in pointing out the sights to each other. Elderly couples especially; people who seemed to have spent most of their lives together and who now held on to each other for support. I thought of the old man I’d seen being carried out of Full Fathom Five, the one who’d been so white and so still. I wondered if he had a wife, and children and grandchildren.
    For the first time in my smug little native San Franciscan’s life (I’m from Marin County, but it’s all the same), I found myself wondering about the tourists instead of considering them merely economically important nuisances. I wondered who they were and where they were from and what they did there and who wanted to kill them and why. Most of