Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) (3 page)

I picked up the envelope from his coffee-spilling secretary and stopped at Swenson’s office before I left the building.

“Hello, Moneypenny,” I said to his secretary. “Is S in?”

The secretary was this tall, very extravagant, very competent thirtyish blonde who had been with Swenson for six years and whom he was banging even though he had never told me that.

“No,” she said. “He’s in Toronto.”

I hesitated a moment, waiting I guess for her to invite me for lunch or something or at least to the leather sofa in Swenson’s office, but she didn’t.

I didn’t mind. Someday she was going to see the first wrinkle alongside her eyes and realize that she was spending the best years of her life on a married man, and then she’d look for me.

And I’d have to tell her, Not a chance, lady. Because while she was pretty good-looking, too bad, there was only one Chico in the world, and Chico made her look like goldfish food.

“Too bad,” I said. “I wanted to talk to him about Tony McCue.”

“The actor?”

“Yes. Gone Fishing’s got a policy on him. I’m supposed to keep him alive.”

“Get his autograph for me, will you?” she said.

“Sure,” I said, and left. I crossed her off my list. I didn’t want anything to do with women who collected autographs.”

The only thing wrong with Bogie’s Restaurant, aside from the fact that it’s right downstairs from Sarge’s office and much too convenient, is the people who hang out there.

They’ve got one whole wall covered with pictures of mystery writers who frequent the place—and if that’s not enough to make you water your lawn, they’ve got private eyes who hang out there too.

You’ve got to listen to them sometimes talking to each other. It’s enough to make you think there were two more Marx Brothers, Dope-o and Jerk-o. They’re bad enough, and they’re not all. Now, Bogie’s is getting out-of-town trade too. Only about a week before, there was this private detective from Boston who stopped in. He had a quiche cookbook under one arm and he ordered some kind of Yugoslavian beer and got drunk after two sips and then wanted to talk to the bartender about the meaning of courage.

See? Drinking in New York can be a risky business, but if you’re careful and if you go to Bogie’s at selected hours, you miss the private eyes and the stupid writers and then it’s the best restaurant and saloon in New York City, even if the owners are always complaining that I drink too much for my own health.

Coming back from Groucho’s, I looked through the front window, but I didn’t see anybody who might want to talk to me so I went inside and took my usual seat in the corner of the bar near the jukebox.

Billy, the owner, was tending bar while his wife, Karen, was trying to fix the tape deck.

“The usual?” Billy said.

Shakespeare was right: conscience does make cowards of us all. I remembered what I told Chico, promising her that I would have eggs.

“Hey, you awake yet? The usual?” Billy repeated.

The usual is Finlandia on the rocks. I won’t drink Russian Vodka and I can’t stand American, and what do the Canadians know about vodka anyway? Besides, I figured it’s only fair to drink vodka from Finland because I won’t eat their Swiss cheese. I mean, if their cheese was any good, wouldn’t they call it Finland cheese instead of Swiss cheese? I buy only Swiss cheese and Finnish vodka. This helps to bring order to a confusing world.

“No,” I told Billy. “Not the usual.”

“What, then?”

“An omelette. A vodka omelette. Hold the egg.”

“Sure,” he said as if it were suddenly the drink of choice in New York. His wife, Karen, is a shrink, and I thought maybe they’ve had orders like this before.

He poured vodka over rocks and put it in front of me, and I said, “When you see Chico, you be sure to tell her I had an omelette.”

“Naturally. What else?” he said, and then he walked away and let me drink in peace, which I did until I saw Sarge walking through our office entrance door and I went upstairs to meet him and tell him that Walter Marks was going to make our company rich for the next couple of weeks.

My father’s name is Patrick Tracy but everybody calls him Sarge because that’s what he was before he retired from the New York City police department. He’s almost seventy years old and maybe two inches shorter than me, but he’s still over six feet tall and he’s wider than me, and if you are ever thinking of messing with the man, first look at his hands. Sarge has hands…Well, if you cut two thick slabs out of a six-by-six beam, those would be his palms. His fingers look like those hot smoked sausages they sell in plastic packs in the supermarket.

Anyway, when I got upstairs, Sarge was sitting behind the desk, looking through the mail, and if faces were weather forecasts, his was cloudy with a chance of rain.

He scowled at me when I walked in, and I said, “Should I come back next week when you get a chance to cool off?”

“No, come on in.”

“Why are you looking like hell hath no fury like an ex-cop scorned?” I asked.

“Goddamn divorce case,” Sarge said. “Nothing ever goes right.”

“Tough one?”

“Tough, my ass. It’s a snap. It’s so damned easy that it’s created a moral dilemma for me.”

“It’s what us big private eyes do best,” I said. “Didn’t you ever read Spenser?”

“To hell with Spenser. You want a beer?”

“No, I’m into eggs today.”

“That’s all right. I don’t mind drinking alone.” Sarge stood up and walked around the desk. You could tell fall was upon us because he had finally put away his gray plaid sports jacket and taken his dark-blue suit out of the closet. He went into the small bathroom where he keeps bottles of beer in the back of the toilet tank. This is a habit I find totally disgusting, but when I called him on it, Sarge told me it was because I didn’t understand plumbing and the water that goes into the back of the toilet tank was clean. I said if it was so clean, how come the inside of the tank is brown and has hair on it? Slimy hair.

He said it was my imagination. I offered him a glass of water from the toilet tank as a toast to my imagination. He poured it down the sink and suggested that I had become a quiche-eater in my later years.

He’s probably right. Anyway, Sarge got a beer from the back of the toilet tank, twisted the bottle cap off as if it had been personally responsible for the kind of day it had been, and took a long swallow before going back around to his desk.

“Oh, the divorce. Right. I told you, this guy hires us to check on his wife ’cause he thinks she’s tipping on him. So I’m stashed outside the house this morning and he goes to work, eight o’clock on the stroke. I’m ready for the long haul. I figure we can drag this one out for weeks, hundred and fifty a day plus, and we’ll knock them dead and make Chico happy when she comes back because we’re finally making some money.”

“Good plan,” I said. “What went wrong?”

“The husband leaves at eight o’clock. Eight-o-five, this florist delivery truck rolls up and this guy gets out who’s got muscles, twenty-five years old, rolled up T-shirt, tight-ass jeans, no socks. God, I hate people who don’t wear socks.”

“Very big in California,” I said.

“I know. I guess that’s why I hate it so much. Anyway, this guy gets out of the truck and walks up to the house. He bips the bell and the door opens like a flash of light. I figure he must have been parked down the block waiting for the husband to leave and then zipped up to the house. So now I got him inside with the wife, and I don’t know who the guy is or what’s going on, so I figure I’d better reconnoiter the house a little bit. First I wait five minutes or so, just to see if maybe he really came to take an order for flowers or something or ask directions, but when he doesn’t come out, I figure it’s time.”

“So far, so good,” I said. “Just the way they teach it at Famous Detectives’ School.”

“So I go down alongside the house, between the house and some high hedges, heading for the back yard. Nobody can see me because the hedges are so high, so I’m safe, and I stop alongside the windows to listen if I can hear anything.”

“Squealing? Oohs and ahhs?” I said.

“Right. But there isn’t any, so I get to the gate leading to the back yard and I’m wondering about going in, or maybe I should go up and ring the doorbell and ask for directions, and if the woman doesn’t answer or if she’s in a bathrobe, then I know I’ve got her.”

“Why didn’t you do it? It sounds smart to me,” I said.

“I was going to. Then I heard a sound.”

“A squeal? An oooh or an ahhh?”

“More like a little grunt, from the back yard. So I go up to the gate, and would you believe it, there’s the two of them on a picnic table in the back yard and he’s porking her, right there on the picnic table, right out in God’s good golden sunshine.”

“Sounds real romantic. What’d you do?”

“Don’t you want to know what she looked like?” he asked me. “It makes a better story.”

“Sarge, what did she look like?”

“She was beautiful, son. Long red hair and a wonderful body and just beautiful.”

“What’d you do then?”

“I used my handy-dandy little camera and I sneaked a dozen pictures of them flagranting the delicto and then I got out of there.”

“The guy didn’t spot you? You didn’t get punched in the face or arrested or something?”

“Hey. I said the guy was big. I didn’t say he was that big,” Sarge said.

“After you left, you lost the camera?” I said.

“No.”

“The film was exposed to the light.”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t understand then what’s making you look like a commercial for Alka-Seltzer.”

“Because I’m on the job for fifteen minutes and it’s done. A hundred and a half a day for a divorce and I wind up with some round-heeled bimbo who’s screwing the first guy she sees. I thought we had at least a week’s. work out of this job.” He finished the beer with one gargantuan pull on the bottle that made it seem like he was going to suck the color off the inside of the brown glass.

“And now I’m stuck,” he said. “I don’t want to be lying to a client, telling him I didn’t find out anything when I already did. All the private eyes I used to run into on the job would do that, just keep their meter running as long as they could, and I hate that ’cause it’s cheating. I don’t want to do it. But I don’t think it’s fair either that I’ve got this case nailed down inside a half-hour. See? I told you. A moral dilemma.”

“No big deal,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. He said, “Why couldn’t I draw an ex-nun who’s got to be wooed and wined and seduced slowly, not somebody who’s getting pronged by some delivery boy right in the middle of the back yard?”

“Maybe it was rape,” I said hopefully. “Rape doesn’t count. You’d have to give her credit for a rape.”

“I thought of that. Until she started cooperating in other ways. I remember that old joke. Feel sorry for her, her mother went down on the
Titanic
. This was the mother.”

“As I said, it’s no big deal. You’re making a mistake in logic. You’re forgetting that one swallow does not a summer make.”

“I saw her swallow too,” Sarge said. “And I’ve got it on film.”

“But it’s not enough. You give just this much to the husband and you’re going to find out in divorce court that the woman was on medication today that affected her judgment, or she met this delivery boy who was her long-ago first boyfriend, the one who first plucked this innocent flower, and in a moment of madness, she succumbed to him again and it’s a terrible thing that she did and she’ll regret it for the entire rest of her life and she doesn’t want to be divorced from her husband, the only man she ever really loved. She knows that now, even if she didn’t know it when she was playing Holland Tunnel for the muscle-bound zinnia salesman. It could go on like that in court.”

“What are you getting at?” Sarge said.

“Just this. You’ve got to make sure. You got a picture of the flower truck’s license plate?”

“Of course. I’m not stupid.”

“Fine. You’ve got to find out who he is. Where he’s from. Has he got a rape record? Then you’ve got to find out if this is just an isolated incident or if she’s putting out for everybody within ten miles of the World Trade Center. No isolated incidents allowed. I think you’ve got to park yourself outside that house and track the traffic. I think you’ve got to see if other people come, or if Flowers comes again.”

“He came once. I saw him.”

“Once is not enough,” I said. Sarge looked doubtful and I said, “Sarge, you sent me to Jesuit college. Don’t you think I know something about mental reservations?”

“About lying too,” he said. “All right. I’ll give it a couple more mornings, but then that’s it. I won’t run the fee up on our client, no matter how much we need it.”

“We don’t need it anymore,” I said. “I’m making us rich.”

“You’ve stopped drinking,” Sarge said.

“Please. One Chico Mangini in the firm is enough. I’ve got us a big job from the insurance company.” I told him what it was about and he said, “Five hundred dollars a day for nursemaiding a drunk? Sounds like work you were born for, boy. How long do you think it’ll run?”

“I figure I might squeeze a couple of weeks out of it anyway,” I said. “Just until Chico gets back here.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“This arrived just in time, then.” He held up the piece of paper. “Your gun permit.”

“Yeah. Chico’s came too. You didn’t tell her about it, did you?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t talked to her.”

“Good. Don’t tell her about it. She’s just going to shoot somebody.”

He stood up and said, “Beats getting shot.” He walked to the file cabinet in the corner of the room and took out a package wrapped in newsprint.

“Here. This is for you.”

He handed me the package. It weighed a ton. When I opened it on the desk, I found inside a well-oiled .38-caliber Police Special.

“Careful. It’s loaded,” he said.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said honestly.

“It was my first gun when I joined the force. I want you to have it, now that it’s legal for you.”

“That’s wonderful, Sarge. I’ll always treasure it.”

A little later, he got ready to go home. Home, for him, is Middle Village, Queens. Home, for him, is my mother. Fortunately, that’s his problem, not mine.

I had taken two tissues out of the box on his desk and was dusting off my shoes, a job I do once every six months whether they need it or not.

“Want to come home for dinner tonight?” Sarge said.

“No. Jesus Christ, where did you get these tissues?”

“Your mother bought them. What’s wrong?”

“Where’d she get them, Tissue City? They feel like they’re made out of crushed Uneeda biscuits.”

“Waste not, want not, as your mother says.”

“And says and says and says,” I said. “Give her my love. I’ll pass on dinner.”

“I wish I could,” he said, and when he left, he made me promise to call him from upstate as soon as I had the job figured out.

I waited until I heard the downstairs door slam shut before I unloaded the gun and put the bullets in the desk drawer.

Then I put Chico’s gun permit and the pistol under one of the couch cushions.

First of all, I wasn’t going to carry a gun.

Second of all, if I did carry a gun, it wasn’t going to be this relic from the O.K. Corral.

Third, if I ever did decide to carry it, I’d have to hire someone to carry it for me because it weighed forty pounds.

Fourth, I was on my way to upstate New York to make sure some drunk didn’t wind up killing himself for no good reason. Who’d need a gun?

The permit and gun would be safe under the cushion because Sarge and I would never disturb them by cleaning. Chico might but only when she was convinced that Sarge and I didn’t expect her to clean.

Later I realized I hadn’t eaten all day and I went down to Bogie’s for a sandwich. Fortunately there weren’t any private detectives or writers there, so I didn’t miss carrying Sarge’s elephant gun. Later I took a shower in Billy and Karen’s back apartment.

Then I went upstairs again and slept on the couch. I was supposed to be looking for an apartment, but I thought I’d leave that job for Chico when she arrived.

Sarge didn’t know I was staying here. He thought I was staying with friends. He should have known that that wasn’t very likely. I don’t have any friends.

I spent the shank of the evening lying on the crusty old coach, trying not to be impaled on Sarge’s elephant bazooka and reading the files Groucho gave me on Tony McCue.

McCue was born in the Midwest and had been the star of a couple of mediocre television series. He was making large amounts of money, and then, to the consternation of the business, he had packed it all in and gone to England. He was, he had said, a fraud who couldn’t act as well as Lassie, and he was going to England to learn his trade. He stayed overseas for seven years, doing stagework, avoiding cameras, minding his business, and letting his name generally be forgotten. When he returned to Hollywood, he returned with a roar, starring in four hit movies in succession and quickly moving to that top rank of stars whose presence in a film could make it a hit. He had been on top now for a dozen years, and reading the newspaper clippings about him, I decided Groucho had a reason to be worried about the insurance company’s investment.

I don’t want anybody to think that I just generally believe everything I read in supermarket newspapers. For instance, I don’t think that Michael Jackson is the marooned commander of a wrecked alien spaceship, waiting on earth for a rescue craft to come. At least, I don’t believe all of it.

But I do believe that where there’s a lot of smoke, there’s usually at least a little fire, and all these stories made McCue out to be a nut case. He went from fistfight to lawsuit to paternity battle. He fought with directors, producers, and costars. One day he gave his stuntman the day off and spent the whole day doing dangerous stunts on a rope hanging down the side of a mountain, until the producer found out and got him down. Then the producer fired the stuntman for dereliction of duty. This prompted McCue to walk off the picture until the stuntman was rehired. That scored him one point in my book.