And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) (6 page)

Trace was in the bathroom, but he came running out when he heard a shriek from Chico.

He found her as he had left her, sitting in a lotus position in the middle of the floor, wearing only a leotard. Except tears were now streaming down her face.

He knelt next to her. “What’s the matter?”

She turned her sloe black eyes toward him.

“Eeeeyou,” she squealed, and then collapsed backward on the floor, laughing, holding her sides, in such pain from laughing so hard that she rolled from side to side, trying to stop.

She finally did, looked at him, squeaked “Eeeeyou” again, and started all over. Trace stood up in disgust and put his foot on her stomach.

She pointed a finger at him. “National Anthem?” she said. Tears rolled down her face. She rolled out from under his foot.

“You’re listening to my tapes. I go into the bathroom and you start listening to my tapes. You’re not supposed to listen to my tapes.”

She was still laughing.

“At least a half-dozen beautiful women threw themselves at me today,” he said. “How are you going to feel when you hear all that on tape?”

“They all mistake you for a donkey?” Chico asked. “Eeeyou.” More laughter.

“You really have the capacity to be a hateful little coolie,” Trace said. “At least National, Anthem was friendly and pleasant. She held my hand for the longest time.”

“Probably trying to think of what came after eeeeyou,” Chico said. “And stop complaining. I always wind up listening to your tapes anyway because you can’t figure out what’s going on and I have to listen to them to make sense out of things.”

“That was true in the past,” Trace conceded. “When I was drinking too much. But now that I’m sobering up, my brain is functioning like a fine Swiss watch. I’ll never need your help again.”

“That’ll be the day,” she said. “You really stay sober today?”

“I haven’t had a drink,” he said. The one in Dan Rosado’s office really didn’t count because it was forced on him and he didn’t finish it all anyway.

“I’m proud of you,” she said.

“Too late now after all this abuse. What are you doing home anyway? I thought you’re supposed to be a convention hostess?”

“Don’t start,” she said grimly. “I am a convention hostess. I’ve been one all day. I baby-sat two surly little snotnoses. I helped some woman who was locked out of her room. I turned down four sexual offers. Why is it only guys named Mel attack me in Las Vegas? Let’s see. I told Bob Swenson that I didn’t want him to divorce his wife and marry me. Then I told him that I didn’t want him to adopt me and try to pass me off to his wife as a Cambodian foundling. I’ve had my ass pinched and my little tits brushed by more elbows today than I’ve had in three years of dealing at the Araby. If this is Middle America, give me gambling degenerates every time. I’m exhausted.” She looked at him and winked. “Of course, if you were a donkey, I could probably fit you into my schedule. Eeeeyou.
Asses Up
.” And she started laughing again.

“Will you stop? This is serious. You really shouldn’t be listening to my tapes.”

“You’re kidding,” she said as she raised herself back to a sitting position and twisted her legs again into a full lotus.

“No, I’m not. You think you’ve been listening to my tapes other times, but I edit them and launder them and leave some out so I don’t upset you. A very important thing. Tapes are private and we’ve always respected each other’s privacy.”

“Horse dookie,” she said. “Or donkey dookie, if you prefer. Respect privacy? Every time I’m out you want to know where I was and who I was with and did I make any money and was it good for me. Privacy? You don’t know the meaning of the word privacy.

“I never open your mail,” he said righteously.

“I never get any. I get a bill for magazines. Two book clubs. That’s it.”

“Why don’t you ever get any mail here?” he said. “Are you getting your mail somewhere else?”

“Sorry,” she said. “That’s a private matter.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” Trace said. “And I don’t appreciate your sitting there showing off, just because you’re able to twist your legs into a pretzel.”

“Sorry,” macho man. You’re the one who wanted to play football and wound up with glass knees. Don’t blame me.”

Trace sat on the couch and tried to look irritated.

“Trace, old buddy,” she said, “you can take your tapes and stuff them. You can metamorphose, if you want, into a donkey. You can spend the next six months in rut with National Anthem. Do donkeys rut? Moose rut.”

“I think donkeys kong. I think you say spend six months in kong with a donkey.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Trace, I don’t care what you do and what your tapes tell about it. I didn’t sign on here for fidelity. I know you: you’re about as constant as Old Will’s moon. You have screwed half of Las Vegas and the other half is on your schedule. You would sleep with a snake if you were sure it wasn’t dead. You are an unregenerate degenerate. You’re not faithful, you’re not loyal, and you’re not even nice.”

“And you came all this way home just to tell me that. Isn’t that nice?” he said.

“I told you I was exhausted. I came home to exercise.”

She said this in a way that convinced Trace that she really believed it was a logical statement and that one thing followed the other. Actually, it probably was. She was a dancer by training, and when her head got fuzzy, she unfuzzed it by making her body work. Her wonderful dancer’s body. He looked at her again, taut and trim in her leotards. He approved.

“Get that look out of your eye,” she said. “I’m mad at you, for openers, and anyway I’ve got to shower and get back to the zoo for tonight’s reception. Trace, tell me true. Your mother’s not going to be there tonight, is she?”

“If the food’s free, my mother’s going to be there,” he said.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Someday I’m going to take up your father’s offer and run away with him.”

“He won’t let you listen to his tapes either,” Trace said.

“Hey. You’re lighting another cigarette,” Chico said.

“A necessary prerequisite to smoking it,” he said.

“You’re smoking too much.”

“Listen, I’ve almost quit drinking for you. Have you been put on earth to harass me?”

“I don’t want you to get cancer.”

“I don’t believe in cancer,” he said.

“What do you mean, you don’t believe in cancer?”

“Them freaking rats get cancer from everything. Alcohol, tobacco, saccharin, asbestos, blue cheese. Did you ever think that maybe rats are just cancer-prone? Or maybe they’re allergic to laboratories? Maybe laboratories give cancer. Call Sloan-Kettering. I’ve just had a flash.”

“Just watch the cigarettes,” she said.

“Hai, Michiko-sama,” he said.

Still in a lotus position, she put her hands in front of her on the floor, then lowered her head until it rested on the floor between her hands. Slowly she worked her body forward and then moved it upward, until she was balanced in a headstand, her legs still in lotus configuration.

“Can National Anthem do this?” she asked.

“She’d better not. If her boobs fell out of her leotard, she’d-crash through into the apartment downstairs,” he said.

She rolled forward lightly, onto her feet, and walked to the bathroom. “There you go with the big-jug remarks again,” she said. “Got to shower. Duty and lunacy call.”

While she was in the shower, Trace went back to reviewing the days’ tapes. Sometimes he caught something the second time around that had gone over his head the first time. More often, he didn’t.

It was a lousy and a slow way to work, he often thought, but it was the only way he knew. And Chico was right. Making tapes of everything not only let him review them; it let her review them later if he needed help. He usually did.

He had just finished listening to the last of the tapes when Chico came out of the bedroom, cloaked in a floor-length golden gown that intensified the bronze color of her skin.

“God, you look splendid,” he said honestly.

“Thank you.”

“Hey, I’m sorry I got under your skin,” he said. “If this job hostessing is getting to you, just quit it if you want. It’s no skin off my nose, you know.”

“Thanks, Trace. I appreciate that. But I signed on for the duration and I’ll stick with it. You coming over later?”

“After I’m finished with my report,” he said.

“Good. You can keep your mother off my back.”

She kissed him and left.

When she was gone, he poured himself a glass of vodka, put an operatic tape into the stereo, and placed a fresh tape into his own small recorder.

Trace’s log:

Tape Recording Number One, 7:15 P.M., Monday, Devlin Tracy in the matter of Early Jarvis et al.

So we’ve got a murder and a million-dollar jewel heist. Why is my life filled with this kind of trivial bullshit? I’m almost forty. I’ve got only three more days to live in the thirties and I should be partying with all the other wonderful folks who infest the insurance industry, and Groucho has got me doing this instead.

I should have been born rich instead of handsome and sensitive. Then I could tell Groucho to stick it. I could grab Chico and take her off and buy her her own shogunate somewhere. I’m mad at her. That’s the first time she’s ever done that, listen to my tapes, just because I left the recorder out while I was going to the bathroom.

My ex-wife, Jaws, used to do that. Not tape recordings. She’d open my mail. When I bitched about it, she stopped opening my mail, but she’d run to the door every day to get the mail and then she’d hand it to me and stand there, shifting her weight from foot to foot, waiting for me to open it. She’d follow me around until I opened my mail.

So I used to make her crazy by going into the bathroom and locking the door behind me. I knew she’d be outside listening, so I’d make a big point of ripping open the envelopes with a lot of noise. It was always some stupid business crap about somebody having reserved a special Visa card just for me, but I’d tear up the envelopes into confetti-size pieces and throw them in the waste-paper basket and hide the letters inside my shoe.

Then, when I’d walk out of the bathroom, Bruno would make believe she was just strolling by and she’d throw her arms around me, as if she was overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of love for me, and she’d frisk me, trying to find out what pocket I was hiding my secret mail in.

I think I was the only American in history who hoped that one day, even in peacetime, he’d get a letter that said, “Greetings, your ass has been drafted.” No such luck. Who needed a war anyway? I was surrounded by enemies. Bruno. What’s-his-name and the girl. God.

Why am I doing this? What is this lust for reminiscence? I know. Anything is better than working. Come on, Trace, do your duty to God and your country, obey the Scouts’ law, keep yourself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

But first a drink and a cigarette.

Okay, I’ve vamped till ready and I’m still not ready, but I’ve got to do this anyway.

Why? Chico says that Walter Marks is up to something. It must be a very short thing for him to be up to it. Haha, Trace, there’s been no one wittier than you since Noël Ca’ad. What’d Groucho say? “I’ve got the bastard now.” Chico heard him, and who else could he mean but me? And Swenson told me the same thing when he woke me up today. I don’t need this crap.

I think I handled R. J. Roberts beautifully. I didn’t hit him. I didn’t rip off his plaid shirt and strangle him with it. I didn’t grab him by the hair and march him off to a public bath for ablutions.

On the other hand, I didn’t get any information out of him either—at least not anything that I couldn’t have gotten by reading the papers. But negative information is information in a way. Now I know a thousand things that don’t work.

It’s nice and consoling to think that even an unprincipled bastard like R. J. Roberts has labor problems. Lip Service, his head hooker, is obviously being eased out. It’s got to be tough, hooking, turning forty, watching the wrinkles start to show. What do you do when you reach the end of the line and you still haven’t gotten anywhere, especially in a town without one visible stretch mark? Someday I’ll point this out to Chico. She’s got fourteen years left.

Hell, in fourteen years, that woman will own the western world. As well as me.

Anyway, I didn’t think it was possible for Roberts to be embarrassed by anything, and I was right. He wasn’t embarrassed at all by Lip Service coming in to bitch at him for getting somebody younger to run his stable of whores. “Stable” might be exactly the right word in this case.

So what does Roberts know? He knows that Jarvis called Spiro from the airport, but he wasn’t there when Spiro arrived. And Roberts said he hasn’t heard anything about the jewels being fenced, and as a working fence, he’d be in a position to know. So maybe he’s right. Maybe it wasn’t a local thief who hit the plotzo. The insurance company hasn’t heard anything yet either from any thief, and I’ll have to ask Groucho to stay in touch with them for me.

How do people like Roberts stay out of jail? I’d suspect that he’s got a very large budget item called incidental expenses and it greases a lot of palms.

And then, on that same tape we’ve got Dan Rosado. Danny’s my friend, but he’s a lousy detective. I always get this feeling too that he knows that. He can’t figure anything out and he’s reached a decision in life: he doesn’t want to figure anything out. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Put in the years, take the pension, and sit home and play opera records.

What’s he got? Zilch. The countess got her jewelry as gifts. So what? When you look like she does, it would be very strange not to get a lot of things as gifts.

The Jarvis suitcase: shaving kit, aspirins, airline magazine. A man after my own heart, traveling light.

And Danny’s got pictures. Jarvis lying facedown near the goldfish pond in enough blood to make Quincy sick. What the hell was he wearing gloves for? I’d like to publish a book.
Great Police Photos
. Pictures of people lying on railroad tracks with their heads cut off. Disemboweled hookers. Dead junkies with needles still sticking in them. Mangled car-crash victims. Make it coffee-table-size. People sitting around, sucking up a cocktail, and they look at these pictures and upchuck. What the hell. If pictures of cats sell, this ought to be a runaway. Cats make
me
throw up.

All right. More photos, more blood, overturned tree, dirt all over the floor, that’s what you get for having trees in houses. And Jarvis bled to death. So it might not have been a murder. Technically No prints anywhere. What did I expect? An easy one?

Jarvis really did travel light. Wallet, couple of bucks, a photo of him and Felicia, driver’s license, American Express card. Keys to the house and the rented car. Why the hell did he leave the car on the road and not just drive up to the house?

And where was his passport? Poor Danny didn’t even think of that, but how do you get into the country without a passport? I don’t know, but at least I thought of it. God, does this mean I’m going to become a good detective? Are people going to come beating a path to my door? Like Banacek. “Our center fielder vanished on a long fly to the outfield. Can you find him before his next turn at bat?” I don’t want to be a detective. I’m not one. I piddle around for the insurance company and sometimes for other people, but this is not what I do well. What I do well is be a retired accountant. A formerly married man. Father of two creatures. Maybe
they’ll
be detectives. They deserve it, not me.

Now, my father. Sarge would like to be a detective. He’d like to be anything that gets him out of the house, away from my mother. Sarge. Please. The woman’s my mother. One bullet in the brain will do. You don’t have to make a mess of her. And don’t do it right now. They’re changing the trapeze act at Circus Circus. The last trapeze act I saw was something where there was this mechanical dummy and it was all alone on the stage, hanging from this bar. The bar went through holes in the dummy’s hands. And then, I guess by radio controls or something from offstage, it started to swing and it did handstands and flips and giant slaloms or kips and tucks, whatever they call those things and I never know what they’re talking about. Anyway, I’m sitting there with Chico and this stupid audience is applauding. I want to jump up and yell, Why are you applauding a mechanical dummy? You think it’ll make it work harder? You think it’s listening? Stop it, you morons. Save it for Wayne Newton. But Chico wouldn’t let me.

Anyway, my mother likes trapezes and hates Chico and thinks my apartment is ugly and she’d rather be in Miami and she hates me too. I asked Sarge once why that was. He’s a very wise man sometimes. He told me that she never forgave me for my divorce. He said she had this big picture of herself, in a flowered apron, being family matriarch at Thanksgiving dinners and like that, with her grandchildren bringing her boxes of chocolate, and I screwed it all up by getting divorced.

To hell with that.

Felicia killed no one. You can’t prove a negative; that’s one of the rules of science. Prove that there aren’t flying saucers. You can’t do it. All I can do is prove somebody else killed Jarvis, but I’m not off to much of a start.

I didn’t learn anything at Felicia’s, except I met some wonderful people, really the salt of the earth. There were Francis and Frances, the non-talking mules who are into shipping and not into insurance. From now on, I think I’m going to be into not being into anything. Paolo Ferrara abuses Willie, the servant, and I don’t think that’s the only reason I might like to take a slice out of Paolo Ferrara. And then there’s our nosey friend, Baron Hubbaker. His theory sounds right—burglar surprised, burglar cracks head, burglar grabs jewels and runs, Jarvis dies—but I still don’t trust him.

I trust National Anthem, though. I’d trust that woman with anything. I mean, can a woman who loves animals be all bad?

Asses Up?
It’s one movie I will not miss. I’ve missed every Academy Award-winning film of the last twelve years. I have intentionally missed every Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine movie made since they were old enough to open their mouths. I don’t want to encourage them. Add Warren Beatty to the list. I mean, how can you plunk down four dollars to go see the history of Communism written and directed by Shirley MacLaine’s brother, for Christ’s sake?

Visiting the scene of the crime never does any good. I mean, I saw it all on police photos and I never see anything at the scene that isn’t in the photos. I could stay home, like Mycroft Holmes, and have them mail me reports and pictures and then solve everything just by the overwhelming power of my intellect. Screw this nose-to-the-ground, tail-up-in-the-air kind of search for the truth. That’s for pigs digging up truffles. Give me photos every time.

So I saw where Jarvis’ body was found and where he hit his head on that ceramic fish, and I saw the holes in the safe. Hold it. None of the holes ever got through into the safe, so how’d the thief get the safe open? Felicia says that she and Jarvis were the only two with the combination. Every time somebody tells you something like that, they’re wrong. Sure, they’re the only two. Except one of them wrote it down on the inside cover of the phone book and the other one painted it in nail polish on the bedroom mirror. I know what people are like. They don’t have any sense.

Probably somebody from out of town did steal the stuff. Everybody at the place is out of the pool of suspects ’cause they were all in London with Felicia when Jarvis got it. Poor Felicia. She seemed more concerned about her tree getting knocked over than about Jarvis getting knocked off. And her missing ashtray.

Then we’ve got Spirakos Spirakodopolous, and he makes you realize what a debt we all owe Cassius Clay. What’s that, you say? What debt? Well, he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and now all fighters are named Muhammed to imitate him. Suppose he had changed his name to Spirakodopolous? How would you like to hear Howard Cosell broadcast a fight between Willie Spirakodopolous and Tyrone Spirakodopolous? It’s truly frightening.

I called the TV station before. The midnight movie that night really was
Mildred Pierce
. But I’d better remember to check Spiro’s record. Just in case.

Why, dammit, why was Jarvis wearing gloves? In July. Where is his passport? Felicia doesn’t know and neither do I. I wish National Anthem knew. I’d get it out of her, someway. Why didn’t Jarvis wait at the airport for Spiro? Why’d he park on the road instead of in the driveway?

So many questions, so few answers. I have been very good all day and I think it’s time to go now to an insurance party and see if I can figure out anything else and watch Chico complain and hear my mother whine and watch my father suffer. What a world. Beam me up, Scotty. This one sucks.

Even though this is my home town and I’ve got my reputation to protect and therefore I should be expected to spend a little extra on tips and stuff to buy information, I’m just going to stick with my usual hundred-and-fifty-dollars-a-day expenses. Until further notice.