And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) (4 page)

“Son, if I see one more nickel slot machine, I’m going to cut my wrists. And trapeze acts at Circus Circus. If I knew your mother had a trapeze fixation, I never would have married her. I’ve got a mind to saw through some of those ropes.”

“I told you to keep her away from that place,” Trace said. “Where is she anyway?”

“Ladies’ room. I think they give away free packs of Kleenex. This is the third time for her in an hour.”

“Maybe all the excitement under the big top has unsettled her kidneys,” Trace said.

The two men were seated at an otherwise-empty large table in the back of the main banquet room in the Araby Hotel. The tables on either side of them were empty also, but there was a high drone of voices in the room from five hundred other lunchers who sat in tables of ten, in front of a long head table, elevated three feet above the main floor. Robert Swenson sat in the middle of the head table, flanked on one side by Walter Marks and on the other by Chico.

She saw Trace and waved. He made a circle of thumb and index finger and gave her the okay sign.

Trace’s mother returned to the table. Without greeting her son, she said to her husband, “That woman didn’t give us much of a table, did she?”

“Hilda,” her husband said, “that woman’s name is Chico. By the way, this is your son, if you want to say hello.”

“Hello, Devlin,” she said without looking at him. Instead, she picked up a coffee spoon and began to examine it for flaws.

“Actually, Mother, Chico gave you the best table in the house,” Trace said.

“Way in the back here where you can’t see anything?” she asked.

“Yes. Way in the back here where no one can see you, either, when you walk out in the middle of the speeches. She was being kind to you. Who wants to listen to insurance speeches? Eat and leave.”

“God bless Chico,” Trace’s father said.

“Amen, Sarge,” Trace said.

“You would say that, Patrick. You like her, for some unknown reason. Did you see our son’s apartment?”

“It’s her apartment too, Mother,” Trace said.

“You can tell, with all those terrible striped fabrics and leather all around. A woman’s touch would do wonders for your place, Devlin.”

“It has exactly the woman’s touch I want, Mother,” Trace said.

“Hmmmph,” his mother said conclusively. Along-side a plate two places away, she finally found a spoon that passed inspection, and used it to put sugar into her coffee.

“Are you enjoying your vacation, Mother?” Trace asked. He winked at his father.

“I wanted to go to Miami. Everybody I know is in Miami. But your father wouldn’t go.”

“Exactly,” Sarge said. “Because everybody you know is in Miami. If everybody you knew was in Las Vegas,
then
, by God, I’d go to Miami.”

“Everybody I know should go to a tavern somewhere. You’d go
there
,” she said.

“Even the purest of us sometimes has to compromise on moral principles,” he said. “You’re right.”

“Will you two just drink your coffee?” Trace said. “You’re enough to send me back to the bottle.”

“Hear, hear,” Sarge said. “What are you up to these days, son? Working on anything interesting?”

“Nothing much. Just kind of scuffing around,” Trace said.

“I figured you were working on something because you’re wearing your microphone tie clip,” the gray-haired man said.

“A couple of interviews this morning. An insurance dead end,” Trace said.

“If you need any kind of help, you should call me,” his father said. “You know I’m going to be here all week and I used to be pretty good.”

“You wouldn’t take the lieutenant’s examination,” his wife said. “You could have been a lieutenant, but you wouldn’t take the examination.”

Trace’s father leaned over and whispered in his ear. “And it’ll get me away from this harpie for a while. A day without nickel slots.”

“What’d you say?” his wife demanded. “What’d you say?”

“I told Devlin that you’ve already dropped ten dollars on the nickel slots,” Sarge said.

“If those slot machines would pay off once in a while, I’d be ahead. They never pay off here. Slot machines in Atlantic City pay off, but not her. In Atlantic City, you can win a million dollars.”

“That’s a lot of nickels,” Sarge said.

“Play the machines by the front door,” Trace said.

“What?”

“Play the slots near the entrance doors to the casinos. They rig those to pay off the most because it helps drag more players into the casino.”

“Is that true?” his mother asked.

“Would I lie to you?”

“Why did you wait until now to tell me? I’m already ten dollars behind. I could have been a winner already. When I played in Paradise Island, I won enough to buy a piece of crystal. A beautiful piece of crystal.”

“It looked like a glass carrot,” Sarge whispered to Trace.

“I never win anything in this town,” Trace’s mother was saying. “I don’t know how you can stand to live here.”

“You forget, Mother, I made my living gambling here for three years. The place has its charms.”

“Sand and sun,” she said. “What charm?”

“No ex-wife. No What’s-his-name and the girl.”

“Must you refer to your children that way? They are your children, you know.”

“That’s arguable,” Trace said. “Not that they’re mine, but that they’re children at all. I’ve always regarded them as particularly repugnant midgets. Now, drink your coffee or I’ll pour salad dressing on your hat.”

Mrs. Hilda Tracy looked horrified for a moment, then bent “over her coffeecup with total concentration. Sarge leaned toward his son and whispered approvingly in his ear, “Firm, firm, very firm.”

There was a clinking of glasses and Trace looked up as Bob Swenson began his speech of welcome to the assembled national sales force of Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company.

“It’s a pleasure to welcome you all here,” he said, his actor’s voice resounding through the room over the speaker system. “And I think you’ll all agree with me that we owe a special vote of thanks for the arrangements to our lovely convention hostess, Miss Michiko Mangini.” He leaned over to his right and kissed Chico on the top of her head.

She looked embarrassed. Walter Marks, watching, looked pained.

Later, when Marks was reading off the names of everyone in the company who had sold more than a million dollars’ worth of life insurance in the past twelve months, Chico met Trace at the doorway to the banquet hall.

“Ah, it’s the famous Miss Michiko Mangini,” Trace said. “Introduction, kiss on the head from the boss. What’s next?”

“He had his hand on my knee all during lunch. I prefer the kiss on the head. I wish he hadn’t mentioned my name, though. Now all these insurance lunatics will be after me to find their lost children, complaining about crooked dealers, what can their wives use for sunburn?”

“Two grand,” Trace said.

“I still don’t know if it’s worth it,” Chico said. “How’s it going with you?”

“Just splashing around,” he said. “Listen, if you feel really depressed, look at Sarge over there. He’s stuck with my mother. At least Swenson likes you.”

“Trace, sometimes you have an absolute genius for making the sun shine.”

“No extra charge. It’s the kind of wisdom we elderly develop naturally as the years go on.”

Countess Felicia Fallaci’s home was fifteen minutes outside of Las Vegas, set back from a secondary road that sliced its way through the untidy, weed-cluttered desert. It was surrounded by ten-foot-high stone walls, topped with barbed wire, as was the large iron gate cut into the walls. Today the gate was wide open and Trace drove his white Mazda up the long straight drive and parked it next to Felicia’s burgundy Rolls Royce, a Jeep convertible, and a small and totally impractical English sports car, the kind with the foot pedals so close together that one normal-size shoe could cover clutch, brake, and accelerator all at once. Which always left the question of what to do with the other foot, since there was no room for it on the narrow little sliver of auto floor.

The front door of the house was open too and Trace stepped into a hallway that passed through into the swimming pool and patio area, located between the two main wings of the house. Without bothering to ring or knock, he walked through the hall and out toward the pool, where a half-dozen, people were lounging around on chaises.

Trace stopped in the open sliding doors and looked at Felicia. She was at the far end of the pool, lying on her back on a padded lounge chair, wearing only a very skimpy white bikini bottom that looked garish against the warm copper tan of her body. Her bare breasts were tanned the same color as the rest of her body, and they were very good breasts indeed, Trace thought. Four other people were on lounges near her and there were two more on the far side of the pool, sitting at a table, but Trace couldn’t see them because a sun umbrella was in the way.

“Felicia,” Trace called.

She sat up, saw him, waved, and came toward him.

“Hi, Trace. You bring a bathing suit?”

“No.”

“No matter. Take off your clothes anyway. You can climb on me and I’ll walk you around the pool. Or not walk you around the
pool
, whichever you prefer.”

“Will you explain it to Chico? When she sends her family of Samurai warriors around to remove our heads?”

Felicia sighed, a sigh that raised her bosom and lowered it again. Trace thought it was one of the two or three best sighs he had ever seen sighed.

“Rejected again,” she said.

“Not that I love you less but that I love life more,” he said.

She threw her arms around his neck and tried to insert her breasts into his chest cavity.

“Well, feel me up a little bit anyway,” she said and kissed him on the mouth hard.

“How come your door’s open?” he asked “Your gate too?”

She shrugged, one of the half-dozen really great shrugs. “Nothing left to steal,” she said. “You here on work?”

“Yeah. You know, Felicia, I’m sorry about this, but once in a while my company gets a bug up its butt and I’ve got to check things out.”

“Not your company,” Felicia said. “That horrible little Munchkin, what’s his name?”

“Groucho.”

“Marks. Right. Walter Marks. I hope
he’s
heavily insured.”

“Who’s your company?” Trace asked, nodding toward the other end of the pool.

“Usual crowd of hangers-on. Come on. If you’re not going to jump my bones, I guess I ought to introduce you. But listen, if you change your mind and want to trick, we can go inside. You piss me off, Trace. I’m a fucking countess. I can get any man I want and you keep turning me down.”

“That’s why you keep coming back,” Trace said. “I’m different.” He looked down at her. “God, what, a set of knobs. I’m weakening.”

“Eat your heart out, faggot,” she said, took his hand, and walked him toward the back of the enclosed patio, sealed off in the rear by a wooden wall that matched the rough unhewn wood of the stucco house’s exterior trim.

As he walked alongside her, Trace looked past her bosom and saw the sliding doors that led to the living room, and before them the small square goldfish pond with the large ceramic fish sculpture alongside it. The pond itself was filled with plants and floating lily pads, and the water seemed green and murky. He wondered if it held any fish. He had had an aquarium as a young boy, and whenever the water turned that color, the fish went belly-up. He-heard a squawking sound near his head and looked up to see two parrots sitting in a tree.

“Hey, they chained?” Trace asked.

“No. They’re quite gentle,” Felicia said. “Eat right out of your hand.”

“Yeah. Your palm. No, thank you.”

They were at the feet of two people who lay side by side on a double-width chaise longue. The man was short and bald, but he made up for the scarcity of hair on his head by a surplus of it all over his body. Even his kneecaps were hairy. The woman next to him was short and dumpy. She wore a one-piece bathing suit with a skirt and her legs looked like the “before” advertisements from a cellulite clinic. If you are what you eat, Trace thought, this woman has been eating nothing but orange peels all her life.

“These two things are the Neddlemans,” Felicia said. “They say they’re in shipping, but basically they’re just a pair of spongers who go anywhere there’s a free meal.”

Neddleman removed a pair of red eye-shields that had made him look like an extra from
The Village of the Damned
. With his right thumb and forefinger, he made a mock effort to pry open his right eye, bloodshot and rheumy. He fixed his eye on Trace, mumbled “Charmed, I’m sure” in a basso-profundo voice, closed his eye, and replaced his eye shields. His wife lowered her sunglasses and looked at Trace.

“Actually, we are in shipping,” she said. “Felicia just has a strange sense of humor. Who are you?”

“Devlin Tracy.”

“What are you in?”

Trace hated people who asked him what he was “in.” “Ladies’ underwear, when I’m lucky. Most of the time, insurance. Want to buy a sunburn policy?”

“How pedestrian,” Mrs. Neddleman said. “Do people still buy insurance?”

“If they’ve got something to lose.”

Mrs. Neddleman closed her eyes.

“Don’t waste your time talking to them, Trace,” Felicia said. “They’re absolute scumbags as people. I keep them around because both of them are named Francis. Francis and Frances Neddleman. I think that’s cute.”

“No accounting for taste,” Trace said.

“You say you’re in insurance?” said a man who was lying on a large towel a half-dozen feet away. He was very tan and wore the smallest bathing suit Trace had ever seen on a male. He had wavy, long dark-blond hair, swimmer’s muscles, and was good-looking. His accent was vaguely continental.

“You might say that,” Trace said.

“At the airport, those lunatics scratched my luggage,” the man said. The accent was Italian, Trace decided. “Can you help me collect?”

“No.”

“What good are you?”

“I make a very good potato-chip dip. With chives,” Trace said.

“Trace,” Felicia said, “this is Paolo Ferrara. He says he’s a count, but he’s not. He’s just a rich playboy.”

“What’s he into?” Trace asked her.

Ferrara answered. “Drugs, basically. Coke, grass, hash. Want something?” He reached for a little leather case that lay next to him on the pool deck’s rough tiled surface.

“No, thanks. I’m into alcohol basically,” Trace said.

There was another man lying on a towel on the deck. A copy of
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
covered his face. He slid it down to his chin. Another foreign accent.

“Are you a detective?” he asked. He was a painfully lean man with a neatly trimmed moustache and beard and treebark-brown hair. He had laugh lines in the corners of his eyes.

“Kind of,” Trace said.

“Investigating the murder, right?” The man’s own words seemed to interest him, and he slapped the magazine aside, sat up, and shook Trace’s hand.

“This one is real,” Felicia said. “He’s a baron. Edvel Hubbaker. He’s after my body. This is Trace.”

“Of course I’m after her body,” Hubbaker said. “Did you ever see tits like that anywhere else?”

“Nice butt, too,” Felicia said.

“Are you going to catch the killer?” Hubbaker asked.

“If you do,” Ferrara said, “Please do it somewhere else. I’m not into sordid.”

Trace ignored him and said to Hubbaker, “I don’t know. I’m just looking around.”

“You have a theory, though, right? All detectives have theories. What is it? Burglar surprised while cracking a safe. What does that mean, anyway? Cracking a safe? Why not busting a safe? Anyway, safecracker surprised, fights to escape, bops poor Jarvis on the noggin, and flees with ill-gotten gains. Like that?”

“It’s as good as anything else,” Trace said, and then he stopped talking to Hubbaker because the two people on the far side of the pool stood up and Trace could see them. Or, more specifically, one of them.

She was a platinum blonde, six feet tall, stark naked. Her body was an erotic fantasy, and looking at her bosom, Trace thought of words like “ballooning,” “bazooming,” “galoomphing.” Standing still, she quivered with sexuality. She was either a natural blonde or had a very close relationship with her hairdresser.

“Gee whillikers,” Trace said softly.

“You like that, huh?” Felicia said. “I’m disappointed in you, Trace. I thought you were into subtlety, hints of smoldering sensuality. A lowered eyelid, a pouty lip, that kind of thing.”

“I am. But for her, I make an exception. Raw, sweating sex. Gee whillikers.”

“Well, come on, I’ll introduce you. But be warned, you’re not her type.”

“I can change.”

“Did you ever read
The Golden Ass of Apuleus?
” Felicia asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you know the struggle that awaits you,” she said. She grabbed Trace’s elbow and pulled him toward the woman.

“Sweetheart,” she called out, “there’s someone here I want you to meet.”

The blond woman turned around to face them fully. She had a face of unreal innocent beauty. Her eyes were sky-blue, her cheekbones pronounced, but soft instead of angular. She was enough woman to fill the dreams of ten generations of farm boys, Trace thought.

“Trace, this is National Anthem.”

“What?” he said.

“National Anthem.”

“Give me five seconds and I’ll be able to salute.”

“Slob,” Felicia said. “We call her Nash for short. Nash, this is my friend, Trace, who thinks you’re absolutely spectacular.”

He knew it. It was too good to be true. He could see it in the blonde’s eyes. There was a hesitation, as if she were trying to figure out what the countess had said, whether it was good or bad, and what she should do about it.

She finally decided it was good and smiled radiantly, jiggled a little up and down, setting her breasts into alarming motion, and squealed.

“Eeeeeyou,” the sound came out. It was accomplished somehow by inhaling on the “eeee” and quickly expelling the “you” sound at a higher pitch. “Pleased to meetcha, I’m sure.”

So much for passion, Trace thought. It was no-man’s-land between the girl’s ears. Not a brain in her head. And a New York Forty-second Street accent.

She stuck out her hand for Trace to shake and he had the fleeting desire to pump her hand up and down hard to see how her breasts would react, but he restrained himself and shook hands gently. She squeezed him hard and fingered his palm with her index finger.

“Eeeeyou,” she squealed again.

“Trace is into insurance,” Felicia said. “Nash here is into films. And donkeys.”

“I’m gonna be a star,” Nash said. “That’s what they tell me anyway. No more loops.” She was still holding Trace’s hand, still tickling his palm. Maybe she would keep doing it until he told her to stop, Trace thought.

Felicia explained to Trace patiently, with a hint of a smile in the corners of her lovely mouth, “Nash has just finished her first feature film. She takes on nine men and a donkey.”

“Let me tell ya, the donkey was the nicest one of the bunch,” National Anthem said with a giggle, happy and secure because she was obviously repeating a phrase she had used many times before to good response. And she squealed again, “Eeeeyou.”

Felicia would show no mercy. “It’s called
Asses Up
, starring National Anthem.”

“It’s going to be bigger than
Deep Throat
” National Anthem assured Trace. She was still tickling his palm. “It’ll gross millions, won’t it, William?”

And for the first time since meeting this astonishing creation, Trace noticed, really noticed, that there was a man standing behind her. Like Trace, he wore a jacket and tie, but unlike Trace, he was short and mousy-looking with thinning hair, average color skin, average features. He wore eyeglasses that seemed too large for such a small face.

“This is William Parmenter,” Felicia told Trace. “Everybody calls him Willie.”

“I keep forgetting,” National Anthem said. “I keep calling him William.”

Trace shook the man’s hand. It was a surprisingly firm handshake from a mouse.

“William, ooops, Willie says my picture will gross millions, isn’t that right, Willia…Willie?”

Parmenter seemed embarrassed to be discussing it. “I’m no expert,” he said.

“Willie’s an expert on everything else,” Felicia said. “He works for Paolo over there.”

“What do you do, Parmenter?” Trace asked

“Whatever Mr. Ferrara wants me to do,” the man said. He was an American, Trace noticed, with the broad vowel sounds of the Midwest in his voice.

“Willie’s like an accountant and a valet and an assistant and a gofer,” Felicia said. “But he’s nice.” She put her arm around the short man’s head and squeezed him, pulling him toward her bosom. His face reddened with embarrassment. National Anthem finally stopped tickling Trace’s hand. She had found something else to do. She put an arm around Willie’s head and squeezed him too.

There he was, with his tiny little head squeezed in between two wonderful chests. Mouseman’s paradise, Trace thought.

“Willie,” bellowed Ferrara’s voice from the other side of the pool.

“Yes, sir?”

“If you can extricate yourself from all those tits would you fix me a drink?”

“Yes, sir,” Willie said. He nodded to Trace, slipped free of the two women, and walked quickly away.