Once a Mutt (Trace 5) (3 page)

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“But I can’t call Groucho and tell him I changed my mind,” Trace said.

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t bear the humiliation of it all,” Trace said.

“So you want me to call him and tell him to order you to take that job?” Swenson said.

“Something like that. But you could tell him to ask me nicely. He could plead a little bit.”

“Trace, he needs a little stroking now and then too. Let him order you. It’s good for his undersized ego.”

“All right. As a favor to you, he can order me.”

“Anything else?” Swenson asked.

“No, that was it,” Trace asked. “You never told me what that racket was.”

“Oh,” Swenson said. “I’ve got a few friends over. The wife’s out of town.”

“Swell,” Trace said sarcastically. “I’m going through a crisis and you’re giving parties.”

“Crises come and go,” Swenson said. “But parties are forever.”

It was almost daylight when Chico returned and walked quietly into the bedroom.

Trace didn’t ask her where she had been or what she had been doing. He knew and didn’t care to think about it. She spent a long time in the bathroom, then slid into the bed alongside him.

Without rolling over, he grumbled, “If you’d invest your money wisely in a New Jersey restaurant, you wouldn’t have to supplement your income this way.”

“Get off it,” she growled.

“Don’t come begging to me later,” he said, “because I’m withdrawing the offer.”

“Good. I’d hate for it to always be between us.”

“I’m going east tomorrow,” Trace said.

“Why?”

“I’ve got a job for the company.”

“I thought you turned it down,” she said.

“I changed my mind.”

When Walter Marks called in the morning to order him to take the Paddington case, Trace was already packed.

He said, “Okay, Walter. I’ll do it for you. As a favor.”

“Just do it,” Marks said sourly.

When Trace went downstairs to get a cab to the airport, Chico was still sleeping.

He left a note on the kitchen table. It read, “I hope you know what I’m going through, trying to make our old age secure.”

When Trace arrived at Kennedy Airport in New York, a man was waiting outside the gate, holding a hand-painted sign over his head with the name “Devlin Tracy” hand-lettered on it.

Trace ran up to him and snatched the sign away, crumpled it, and dropped it to the ground.

“Hey, what you doing?”

“My ex-wife. She’s got spies everywhere,” Trace said. “If she knows I’m in the East, I’m as good as dead.”

“You Tracy?”

“That’s right.”

“Here.” The man pushed forward a manila envelope. “They told me at the insurance company to deliver this to you.”

“No chance it’s filled with money, is there?” asked Trace.

“No. It’s reports or something.”

“Well, thanks, I guess,” Trace said.

As he waited for his bag, he looked around occasionally to make sure his ex-wife wasn’t lying in wait for him. It wasn’t that he owed her money; his alimony and child support were always paid precisely on time. It was because every time he ran into her, she wanted to talk.

“Look,” he had said once. “If I wanted to talk to you, I would have stayed married to you.”

“This concerns the children.”

“They’re no concern of mine,” Trace said. “You spawned them, you take care of them.”

“They need a father,” Cora had shouted.

“Well, rent one, for Christ’s sakes. Just leave me out of it.”

And that had ended the conversation. He had found it very satisfying because she had gone a full six months before trying to contact him again. But you could never be too sure, so he checked the people waiting around the baggage area.

From time to time, he glanced into the manila envelope the messenger had brought him. It seemed to contain a thick file on Helmsley and Nadine Paddington. He folded it and stuck it into his back trouser pocket.

After retrieving his bag, Trace walked over to the car-rental office, where he had to take a number and stand in line, as if he were in a bakery on Sunday morning.

He hated car-rental companies. They were always advertising things like “One week, $119, no charge for mileage,” but after you got through with everything, the car cost you $98 a day and had a soft right rear tire. As close as he could figure out, the special $119 weekly rate was only for visiting diplomats who booked six months in advance.

When he got to the head of the line, the car-rental clerk asked him, “What kind of car would you like?”

“A blue one,” Trace said.

“I don’t mean that. I mean compact, intermediate, or full size.”

“You got a Stutz Bearcat?”

“Very funny,” the clerk said.

“Well, if you don’t have that,” Trace said. “I’ll take anything. As long as it’s blue. And none of that crappy sky-blue either. I mean a real dark blue.”

Fifteen minutes of paperwork later, as he surrendered the keys, the clerk said, “Would you mind telling me why you have to have a blue car?”

Trace said, “Because blue cars never get stopped by the cops. You watch from now on. You’ll never see a dark-blue car pulled over at the side of the road.”

This, to Trace, was absolutely, indisputably true. That the rental clerk shook his head in disbelief didn’t change the facts; it just meant that the clerk was a fool. And who but a fool would work for a car-rental company? Of course, it took a bigger fool to work for an insurance company, he reminded himself sourly.

Westport, Connecticut, a hundred minutes away, didn’t have a hotel, not a real one with many floors and elevators and candlelight dining on the top floor, so Trace had called to reserve a room in the Ye Olde English Motel.

He hated motels. He was forty years old and many years had passed since motels had been fun, since they had represented a warm bed, a warm body, and a warm farewell. And usually, a quick head-down walk through the parking lot so no one would see the woman’s face.

Now he was more interested in room service, and motels never had any. He was interested in talkative bellhops, and motels didn’t hire bellhops. He was interested in finding his room waiting for him, but motels always told you that the room wasn’t ready yet and if you would just wait four hours in the lobby, they would have it done right away.

And now motels had computers. Trace was convinced that computers were the biggest timewaster that the hotel industry had ever been inflicted with. It used to be that when he reserved a room, he just had to show up, sign the registry, and let them take a print of his credit card. Now, a clerk took his name, then spent endless minutes having the computer search for vacancies in the motel’s south wing, then north wing, then rooms with a view, and then finally announce that Mister Devlin Tracy had not made any reservation and there were only sixty-three rooms available but he couldn’t have any of them. Computers might make some things work smoother but motels weren’t among them.

Trace had had the good sense to stop at a liquor store on the Post Road for a bottle of Finlandia. It was evening and he had already chalked the day up as a total loss, so he took off his clothes and sat in the chair by the window looking out over the highway, and read the file that Walter Marks’ office had compiled on Nadine and Helmsley Paddington.

Mrs. Paddington had been born Nadine Grand in Honolulu, the only child of a career naval officer and his wife. Her parents had died in an automobile accident while the family was living in Tampa, Florida, and Nadine was a senior in high school.

She had no other relatives and lived alone for the remainder of the school year. Then she sold the family home and used the proceeds, and the military insurance her father carried, to send herself to Great Britain to study at the Royal College of Veterinary Medicine.

There she met Helmsley Paddington. He was a native of Minneapolis and his parents too had died just a few years before. According to one of the Xeroxed news clippings enclosed, he was an Eagle Boy Scout but no great scholar. He spent his summer vacations from school working on a dairy farm and as a volunteer at the county’s animal shelter. He wound up in Great Britain after having won a scholarship from the Minnesota 4-H Clubs for outstanding community service.

Neither graduated from veterinary college. Instead while they were both in their second year, they invented a device for turning dog droppings into compost, efficiently and without odor. The Doo-Right, the name they gave it, was a great success in a land of dog lovers and subsequently throughout the world. It led to a string of pet products marketed under the Paddington name.

The couple married and stayed in England for ten years, then moved to West Hampstead, New Hampshire, where they lived in a big estate on a lake. Their home was called Paddington’s Com-Pound and was filled with dozens of dogs of every description.

When he first saw the thick pile of newspaper clippings, Trace thought that the Paddingtons were simply publicity hounds, but reading them changed his mind. It was true that the Paddingtons had vigorously courted publicity, but in each story about them, they managed to insert a strong endorsement for kindness to animals and a commercial for whatever cause they were promoting that day.

They loved animals, they said, pure and simple. They raised money to stop the slaughter of the harp seal. They gave money to save dolphins, to save seals, to stop research vivisection. They headed up an effort to stop the sending of live animals into space, calling it “cruel and unusual” punishment.

Trace shook his head and poured another drink. Apparently humans didn’t count, he thought, because there was no effort on the Paddingtons’ part to stop people from going into space.

After reading the clippings, Trace thought there must have been as many reporters as dogs at the Paddington Com-Pound most of the time. But if there had been any friction between the couple, none of the stories showed it. Invariably, the Paddingtons were described as inseparable, held together by love and their commonality of interests, and as much as Trace wanted to dislike them, because he thought that all zealots were nuts and these two obviously had won degrees in animal zealotry, the stories always showed an honest, sincere, and loving couple and he found himself liking them.

And then the stories had stopped. The last big interview was dated 1978 and the clippings after that, instead of being full-blown feature stories, were more often on the order of a single paragraph that said basically that the Paddingtons had become reclusive, or that the Paddingtons could not be reached for comment.

One of Walter Marks’ legal beagles had done some research into the Paddingtons’ wealth. When they left England, they had sold their interests in the Paddington Pet Line to a small conglomerate, Metrogeneral, Ltd., in return for shares of stock.

On paper, the stock deal had made them rich because their shares were worth on the open market approximately three million dollars and dividends alone amounted to more than two hundred thousand dollars a year.

But seven years earlier, just about the time of Paddington’s disappearance, Metrogeneral stock had taken a beating. The price of its shares had dropped by 90 percent and it had stopped paying dividends.

The Paddingtons, the financial report said, still held their shares of Metrogeneral stock.

What it meant, the report said, was that the Paddingtons’ three million dollars in shares had shrunk in value to about three hundred thousand dollars; and their regular dividend income of two hundred thousand dollars a year had been turned off when Metrogeneral cut out paying dividends.

Unless the Paddingtons had saved a lot of money, Trace thought, it meant that the couple might well have been facing a sharp financial pinch.

He thought about that for a while as he refilled his vodka glass. He hated the plastic glasses he found in most motel bathrooms. And there were never ice cubes to be found. Still, warm vodka in a plastic glass was better than no vodka at all, and it tasted especially good after months of trying to make it on just wine.

The last item in the folder was a letter from Adam Shapp, an attorney, in Westport.

The letter read:

Claim is hereby made for payment of policy number AF12425848 in the amount of two million dollars.

On October 17, 1978, the insured, Mr. Helmsley Paddington, of West Hampstead, New Hampshire, disappeared while on a private flight from that town to Newfoundland. No word has been received from him and this office has petitioned the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut to officially declare Mr. Paddington dead of accidental causes.

We call for payment of the policy on behalf of Mrs. Nadine Paddington, the widow, now resident in Westport, Connecticut, who is represented by our firm.

Trace leafed through the thick pile of papers again to see if he had missed anything, and found a sealed manila envelope.

Inside was a one-page report from C.S. Brunner Investigators, who had been hired by Garrison Fidelity to look into the Paddington story.

The report said that the plane did take off as reported from the lake in West Hampstead, New Hampshire, where the Paddingtons lived, neighbors having heard the motors revving up.

The Paddington plane was on its way to Newfoundland, a distance of slightly more than five hundred miles, where Paddington was planning to take part in a protest against the slaughter of the harp seal. The plane, a twin-engine Cessna seaplane, never landed, and no wreckage was ever spotted.

At the time of the flight, however, there was a heavy storm in the Atlantic and the normal path of the plane would have taken it right through that storm.

“There is no indication,” the report said, “of there having been any trouble between Mr. and Mrs. Paddington, and it is the conclusion of this office that Mrs. Paddington’s claim is valid.”

That was the entire report, and Trace felt good thinking about Walter Marks spending good money for detectives who wound up telling him to pay up.

He celebrated by topping his glass with more warm vodka.

Idly, he looked through the clippings at the reproduced photos of the Paddingtons. Helmsley Paddington had been a tall, thin man who looked very tweedy in the photographs, even in those where he was wearing jeans and an old army shirt and wrestling with some of his dogs. He had an open, uncomplicated face with thinning mud-colored hair.

Nadine Paddington stood next to him in most of the photos, and it seemed to Trace as if she were trying consciously not to smile. She was a pleasant-looking, regular-featured woman with ashy blond hair, and wide-set intelligent eyes.

But why didn’t she smile?

Another picture showed why. Mrs. Paddington had a mouthful of teeth that splayed out at a forty-five-degree angle from the vertical. With teeth like that, he wouldn’t have smiled either.

He tossed all the newspaper clippings onto a pile with the other papers, then carried his glass to the bed and lay down to smoke. The ashtray was already filled and he mumbled to himself about motel ashtrays always being designed for nonsmokers or for people who smoked one cigarette every six days. He hated that.

Actually, he hated everything right at the moment, most of all being in Westport, having to look into the Paddington case when the guy was dead. All he was doing here was trying to figure out how to steal ten thousand dollars from Garrison Fidelity for a fee so he could pay for the restaurant’s repairs.

It was all Chico’s fault.

If she would have parted with some of her ill-gotten gains, he wouldn’t have had to do this. He could just have stayed in Las Vegas, waiting for the restaurant profits to come rolling in. His friend Eddie expected the restaurant and bar to gross three million dollars the first year, with a half-million of that as profit. That meant that Trace, as a 20-percent owner, would make a hundred thousand dollars as his share.

And against that, he’d be able to write off his taxes the depreciation of the building and the purchase of new equipment and a lot of other stuff, and why didn’t Chico understand that he was on his way to Easy Street?

No, she was tight, so tight she squeaked. And she had no vision. That was what was wrong with Michiko Mangini. She had no vision, no way to see the big picture.

She lived in a world of petty mortals. She would never understand his dreams. She would never fly. She would always walk. Sometimes she might walk fast, but it would still be walking.