Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) (3 page)

“My wife. He’s checking on my wife.”

“You think she’s cheating on you?” Razoni asked.

Glumly, Alcetta nodded. “She left me,” he said.

“Can’t blame her,” Razoni said. He stuck the business card in his jacket pocket and tossed the billfold onto Alcetta, who was still on the floor. I think you two ought to leave now.” Alcetta got to his feet quickly, brushed off his suit, and walked toward the door. The other man, nose dripping blood on his suit, followed.

“Don’t figure on coming back,” Razoni said.

Just before the two men started down the restaurant’s stairs, Razoni called out, “Alcetta?”

“What?” the man said, turning warily.

“Where’d you get that suit?”

Alcetta brushed dust from his lapels. “I had it made in London.”

“Nice suit,” Razoni said. The two men started down the steps and Razoni called out, after them, “But get rid of that shirt and tie. You look like an idiot.”

After the two men left, Jackson said, “What’s-his-name, Alcetta, you know him?”

“He’s a jerk,” Razoni said.

“You sounded like you knew him,” Jackson said.

“That’s what I mean. He’s a jerk,” Razoni said. “The Alcettas are a big mob family in Brooklyn. Now what kind of family member would be doing this cheap muscle-man shit unless he was a loser? Mafia fathers don’t let their kids do restaurant shakedowns. They send them to law school or something so they can learn to steal legally. He’s got to be a real prince, this one.”

“All of you Italians are,” Jackson said. “Real princes.”

“Oh, shut up. What does the captain want?”

“He didn’t say.”

“One thing you can count on,” Razoni said. “If it’s work, it’s a shit job. That’s all we get are shit jobs.”

They locked the restaurant door and walked down the short flight of wooden steps leading to the street. The stairs creaked under their weight, even though both men moved lightly, like athletes.

Halfway down, Razoni said, “I hope if he has work for us, it’s real police work, not like this crap.” Three-quarters of the way down, he said, “I didn’t like this assignment from the start. I don’t like tape recorders and all that shit.” At the bottom of the steps, Razoni said, “And besides, your idea for handling it was stupid. Would anybody take me for a restaurant owner?”

“No,” said Jackson. “Everybody looks at your clothes and they take you for a pimp.”

“Who asked you anyway?” Razoni demanded.

In the brown Lincoln limousine driving away from the East Side restaurant, Sonny Alcetta rubbed his sore wrist and looked at the thick neck of Charlie Ribs, his driver.

“Assholes,” he said.

“That’s right, Sonny. They’re assholes, all them cops.”

“Big high and mighty. How much can they make anyway? Twenty, twenty-five a year?”

“That’s about it,” Charlie Ribs said.

“Turning down some dough like they’re big crusaders. You can buy ’em all for a dime.”

“That’s what I think too, Sonny,” said Charlie Ribs.

“They think they’re hot just ’cause they got some piece of tin in their pockets. Well, fuck ’em. They don’t get a single dime from us.”

“That’s right, Sonny. Not a fucking dime.”

“Aaah, fuck it. Let’s go out to Aqueduct and make some real money. One of the guys told me there’s this horse going in the fifth and the fix is in and he’s supposed to go off at sixty to…”

Trace’s Log
: Tape recording damnedest the last from Kansas City in the matter of the late and unlamented Robert Napier, Devlin Tracy reporting, early Friday morning.

Pardon me while I burst into song:

Nothing’s going down in Kansas City
And I’m about as low as I can go.
La, la, la, la, la.

I forget how it goes. Anyway, the last crime in this town was the Cardinals choking in the World Series. What do you expect from a team who had a player named Walking Underwear?

Anyway, no crime here. That’s right, folks. Old Robert Napier did indeed die in a boating accident and good old Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company is going to have to pay off on the policy.

Talk about one dull week. I have pooched around this city for a full week and found nothing more interesting than a woman with a low forehead and morals to match who knew the family and who took me by the hand and less public parts and showed me that the accident was indeed an accident. Stupid old Cap’n Bob couldn’t swim, and if you’re gonna go fishing from a boat, you should be able to swim or wear a life jacket.

He didn’t, and now he is dead and his wife didn’t have anything to do with it, except perhaps to wish hard for such a happy ending.

Damn. I really needed a murder.

This has not been one of my real best weeks ever. A week in Kansas City to start with. And is that a stupid name for a city in Missouri? If you’re going to be in Missouri—and who the hell would want to be?—at least have the sense to call yourself Missouri City. Not Kansas City. I think there ought to be a federal commission to go around America renaming names. Like in New Jersey, North Bergen is south of Bergen County. Does that make any sense to anybody? Aaah, the hell with it. Nobody listens to me anyway. So I got a week here in Missouri City to start with and no crime to continue with and so no cut of what the insurance company would have saved to finish with. Now, if I had found out that the old lady had wrapped stupid Napier in ten-pound test nylon line and chucked him overboard, I would have saved the company two hundred thousand dollars and got a piece for myself. Now, all I get is my retainer and whatever I can steal on expenses. And how much could I steal here? What is there in Missouri City that you could pretend you spent money on?

And where the hell is Chico? I’ve called the condo three times in the last week and she is never there. All I hear is my own voice on that stupid tape machine, and if I wanted to hear my own stupid voice on some stupid machine, I wouldn’t have to go to stupid Missouri City to do it.

So Chico’s not around and that’s not helping my week either. I wonder if my father ever has weeks like this. Knowing my mother, I guess so. Sarge, I guess, has decades like this.

I’m so depressed I don’t even feel like drinking. I feel like a damn businessman in a damn strange town and I’m not a businessman and I don’t want to be a businessman. I don’t like businessmen. The only one I think I’d like is whoever named that luggage Amelia Earhart luggage. Now, come on, is that the greatest name for luggage you’ve ever heard? Amelia Earhart luggage. Fifty years’ experience of being lost in transit. Now, there’s a guy I’d love. Him and the first person ever to call his eatery the Terminal Restaurant. And maybe that guy who runs a string of pizzerias named John’s and he advertises, “Women, if you’re tired of being stuck in the house, go cruising till you find John’s.” Great commercial. All the rest of the businessmen in the world you can have.

So what was I talking about? Right, drinking. I can’t remember things anymore and I think I’m getting What’s-his-name’s disease. Drinking. Right. I used to think I was going to drink until I had tasted every kind of drink in the world.

Well, did you ever see blue liqueur? I’ve been seeing that bottle of blue goo since I first started hanging out in saloons when I was a kid and I never saw anybody drink any of it. Actually, I think there’s only one bottle and they ship it around the country like a rotating trophy and every bar gets a chance to have it on the shelf for a while. Like a Christmas fruit cake. There’s only one of them in the entire country, but nobody ever eats it and they just keep mailing it around from family to family.

Anyway, last night, the big breakthrough. I drank some of that blue liqueur. It tasted like blue liqueur, which is to say it tasted like dragon barf. It’s a big moment, though. Now, there’s nothing left in the world that I haven’t drunk, and if they don’t start inventing some new liquor pretty soon—maybe something nice in a black—I may just decide to reconsider my position on drinking.

You can tell I miss Chico. Where the hell is she? I’m running off at the mouth this way because I drank all night, I haven’t been to bed yet, I’m bored, and I’m afraid to go to bed because my plane’s in just a few hours and I don’t want to miss it.

Yes, midwestern-type folks, I’m leaving and it is a far, far better thing I do than I have done for the last seven days. I’m going to buy Chico a present, maybe something nice in a T-shirt. Actually, she’s something nice in a T-shirt. I bet nobody ever gave her something nice in a T-shirt from Kansas City, Missouri. What a stupid name for a city. And where the hell is Chico?

To hell with it. To hell with everything. This is Devlin Tracy, crack investigator for Garrison Fidelity, signing off, unsuccessful and impoverished as usual. Crack investigator. Dat’s the most ridiculous ting I ever hoid.

God, am I bored. Nothing ever happens anymore. Especially here.

There was no roommate and no dinner. Trace had had this expectation that he would walk in the door and find candles on the dining table, the silver set for a four-course dinner cooked by Chico’s loving hands, Chico herself walking around in a French upstairs maid’s costume, cut short, waiting on her man, a banner across the living room that read: WELCOME HOME, DEVLIN TRACY.

That was his vision. The reality was a note on the coffee table, written on a deckle-edged piece of note paper imprinted with the drawing of a teddy bear.

Trace.

 

I am getting tired of writing this note every day. But if you come home, I had to go out early tonight. Probably won’t be home, Chico.

 

Trace crumpled the note and dropped it into the ashtray. The ashtray was a small piece of Italian leaded crystal, two inches across, and Trace looked at it unhappily, then went to a drawer in the kitchen and found hidden a nine-inch-across plastic ashtray. He put it on the coffee table, uncrumpled and read the note again, then squashed it up and put it in the big ashtray. With a large glass of vodka in one hand, a cigarette in the other, he lay down on the sofa and wondered what was happening with Chico.

They had been roommates for three years and they were about as good a three years as Trace could remember in his life. Chico made her living as a blackjack dealer at the Araby Casino. She supplemented her living by doing occasional favors for the casino management and—she called it—“entertaining” high-rollers who were pushing a lot of money across the gambling tables.

She and Trace didn’t talk about that part of her life. He didn’t like it, but she never offered to stop it, so there didn’t seem to be much to talk about.

Lately, though, it seemed that she was out “entertaining” more and more, and while he’d been away in that hellhole, Kansas City in freaking Missouri, he hadn’t been able to reach her at night at all. Something was going on. Trace was sure of that, and it made him uncomfortable.

He didn’t want to say it, even to admit it to himself, but the fact was that he kind of liked the way things were and the thought of their changing made him uneasy.

He drank a lot and smoked a lot and broke the stereo because he could never figure out how to work it and ignored the telephone when it rang because he knew it wasn’t Chico and even if it were, he wanted to punish her so he wouldn’t talk to her, and before he fell asleep on the couch, he got a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut the T-shirt he had bought Chico into four separate pieces.

He was going to put the sections in the kitchen garbage, but if he did that, she might not see them, so he left the remnants of the shirt on the coffee table.

He wrote her a note. In the living room desk he found a pad of her note stationery with teddy bears on it. He drew a mustache and eyeglasses on the biggest bear, then wrote:

Dear Miss Michiko Mangini,

 

Mr. Devlin Tracy requests the pleasure of your company at dinner at 8 o’clock this evening. RSVP regrets only.

 

He sealed it in an envelope. He wrote her name on the front of the envelope, then scotch-taped it to the outside of the apartment door where she’d have to see it when she came home. If she came home.

Then he fell asleep on the couch.

Trace slept soundly only when drunk. When he woke up, he realized that he must have been drunk because he had slept hard and late and he saw that Chico had been home and had gone out again.

His invitation lay in the middle of the coffee table. Neatly printed under his note was her response:

Miss Michiko Mangini accepts. If you’re buying. By the way, you got ripped off in Kansas City. This is some shitful excuse for a T-shirt. See you tonight. Chico.

“I don’t mind that you’re nothing. Less than nothing,” Chico said. “What I mind is that you choose to be nothing. Less than nothing.”

Trace looked at her across the table. The dining room was dark, and their table was lit only by a pair of candles in hurricane lamps. Which meant that Trace wouldn’t eat. He didn’t eat much anyway, but he especially ate little at restaurants that featured dim lighting because, while he knew it was supposed to be romantic, he was always afraid that the restaurants turned the lighting down just to make it easier to get rid of the leftover food from the kitchen.

In the soft diffused light at their table in the quiet far corner of the room, Chico’s fine Eurasian face was fine indeed. Her lips were a full bow, her cheekbones high, and her skin smooth and healthy-colored, without looking as if she spent any of her free time “working on her tan.” Chico had to work on nothing where her beauty was concerned; it all had come free, from God.

Her large brown eyes were staring at him with, he thought, a kind of sadness, maybe even loss. He wondered if that was the kind of look children had when they learned finally that there wasn’t any Santa Claus. He tried to remember how his two children had looked when he had broken the news to them, but each of them had only been six months old when Trace had made the no-Santa-Claus pronouncement and neither had seemed to mind.

Chico was chewing. She swallowed, finishing her roll, and reached across the table for the one on his bread plate. Apparently there was no emotional crisis deep enough to ruin Chico’s appetite, he thought.

“What is this choose-to-be-nothing business?” he asked.

“Less than nothing,” she corrected. “Just what it sounds like. You don’t want to do anything. You don’t want to be anything. You just want to drift along—”

“With the tumb-a-ling tumbleweeds,” Trace sang. He tried a smile, but her eyes flashed without humor and he stopped smiling.

“That’s it,” she said. “It’s a joke. Everything’s a joke. Dammit, Trace, you’re almost fifty years old.”

“Hey, hold on,” he said. “I’m forty years old.”

“The blink of an eye,” Chico said airily, waving her hand to dismiss the triviality of a mere decade. “In no time at all, you will be fifty and you’ll still be nothing. Well, I don’t want to be nothing with you,” she said.

Trace looked around the room for a waiter. They were always hovering around, their big noses in the way between you and your coffeecup, except when you really needed them for something important, like refilling your drink. He lit a match, held it over his head, and looked at Chico again.

“I’m something,” he mumbled lamely. “I’m me.”

“Yeah. You’re you and your you is getting less and less interesting. You know how much you drink nowadays?”

“Only half as much as I used to. Then I faw down, go boom.”

“It’s common with old drunks,” Chico said. “Maybe you are drinking half as much, but you spend twice as much time doing it,” she snapped.

“Oh, damn. I’ve been confusing drinking with sex again. I never can remember which one’s supposed to go slow.” He tried another unanswered smile which died a-borning.

She had finished his roll and now she grabbed his salad plate and started eating that too. With her mouth full, she said, unable to keep the disgust from her voice, “Always jokes. Maybe we should just write each other a letter.”

“We’ll talk,” Trace said. “We’ve always been able to talk.” The match burned his fingers and he dropped it to the table with a curse. He looked around again, caught the waiter’s eye, and signaled for another drink.

Chico gulped and swallowed. “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk. I don’t like things. I don’t think I like you. I sure don’t like much about you. You don’t know what’s happening in the world. You don’t care what’s happening in your life. Every day’s just like the day before it: sodden, dumb, and dull. I’ve had it with that.”

Trace raised himself to his full sitting height. “I resent that. Don’t know what’s happening in the world? Piffle. Piffle and rot. I know everything that’s going on in the world. Ask me anything. Go ahead. Ask me about foreign relations.”

“Tell me about foreign relations,” she said, numbly, wearily.

“They’re okay if they don’t spend the night,” he said.

“Fine,” she said softly. “Good joke, Trace. But then your jokes should be good by now. You’ve had a lot of practice. Everything’s a joke to you.” Her dark eyes flashed, flooded with accusation. He thought of blowing out the candles on the table so he didn’t have to look into her accusing eyes.

“That’s not true,” he said. “A lot of things are serious and I know it.”

She gave back Trace’s empty salad bowl. “Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me something’s that’s serious.”

“The Statue of Liberty,” Trace said.

“Now I’m supposed to ask you why that’s serious,” Chico said. “Tell me, Trace. Why is that serious?”

“It’s serious because it looks just like Sylvester Stallone,” Trace said. “I think that’s real serious. I think people come to America looking for freedom, like your folks when they escaped from Sicily and Japan with the cops after them, and then they get here and there’s Sylvester Stallone standing in drag in the harbor, glaring at them. I think they raised all that money to fix the statue and they should have given it a nose job, and that’s damn serious. Screw Lee Iacocca and Sergeant Slaughter. I’ve been thinking of starting my own fund to get the statue a nose job. You don’t think that’s something a man can dedicate his life to?”

Again, she was not amused. Somehow dinner didn’t seem to be going as swimmingly as Trace had planned. He had this vision that he would take Chico to dinner and he would wine her and dine her and find out what was bothering her and tell her a few jokes and get everything straightened out so that they could go back to being the way they had been. It didn’t seem to be working out that way.

“That’s exactly what I mean, Trace. You don’t take anything seriously. Before you left for wherever the hell you were, you were talking about a foundation to cure AIDS.”

“I changed my mind about that,” Trace said. “We’ve got to keep AIDS.”

“Why’s that?” she said.

“AIDS is God’s way of canceling the Phil Donahue show. I can’t get involved with stopping that,” he said.

Trace’s drink—his third—came, and they took time out to order dinner. Chico ordered for both of them, one veal dish, one fish entree, and Trace knew they were both for her and he would wind up only picking at a baked potato. The rest of the food would vanish into the maw that was Chico’s mouth. How could she eat like that and always weigh 105 pounds? A metabolic freak. If Trace could burn up alcohol the way Chico could burn up food, he would never leave the bar. Come to think of it, he considered ruefully, he rarely did. He had never told her, but that was one of the reasons he liked living in Las Vegas so much: the bars were always open.

When the waiter left, Chico drank half her glass of Perrier water and smiled sadly at him again. “You know, Trace, you told me once that there were horses for courses, different animals that run better on different kinds of track. Well, I think you were a pretty good horse for a short sprint but I don’t think I want to be harnessed to you for the long run. You don’t have any future.”

“And this explains why you’re trying to turn more tricks than anybody else in Las Vegas all of a sudden,” Trace snapped. “That’s your future?”

“I’m trying to put some money away, Trace,” Chico said. “I’m leaving this town soon. And you.”

“After twenty years together?” he said.

“Three years. It just seems like twenty.”

“I gave you the best three years of my life,” Trace said. He dabbed at his eyes with his napkin.

“You gave me grief, heartburn, and an overwhelming desire to get away,” Chico said.

“What are you going to do?” Trace asked. “Where are you going to go? You’re pretty old now to be thinking about changing lives.”

“I’m twenty-six,” Chico said. “A lot of people are just getting out of college at twenty-six. I’m going back to Pennsylvania and start a business. Who knows? Maybe I’ll join the FBI.”

“You’ll never make it,” Trace said. “The Restaurant League of America will hand you up and tell them that you steal food.”

The waiter came. Their conversation had been slow, stretched out, painful, taking longer than it should. Chico stopped talking so she could concentrate on the food. She started with the fish platter and allowed the veal to rest in front of Trace.

“Maybe you can get a job as a professional taster,” Trace said.

“I’ve had a large taste of misery,” Chico said. “Does that qualify me?”

“Eat and shut up,” Trace said. He stuck a fork into a baked potato, decided he wasn’t hungry, and sipped at his drink while he watched Chico eat.

Save for her part-time profession, Chico behaved like a lady in every particular but one. She ate like Robinson Crusoe must have when they got him back aboard ship, head down, over her plate, total concentration on the food, oblivious to everything else. Trace saw only the top of her shiny blue-black hair.

Leaving him? She sounded serious this time, he thought.

Well, easy come, easy go. He had found her naked in a hotel corridor one night and had taken her in. He had helped her get her job at the Araby Casino. How quickly they forgot. Everything good in her life had come from him.

But did she see it that way? Oh, no. What had she said? He gave her grief, heartburn, and an overwhelming desire to get away. Swell. Just because he had a drink once in a while. Was there anything in the world so selective of memory, so ungrateful for kindness, as a woman?

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

But what the hell would he do without her? A succession of warm bodies in his bed that he just wanted to vanish afterward? Who would he talk to? He thought for a moment and realized that, with Chico gone, the only people he would have to talk to were people who worked in bars and cocktail lounges.

What would he talk with them about? Bartenders wanted to talk about football and their bookies, and Trace had stopped finding that interesting years ago. Cocktail waitresses only wanted to talk about how the hostess was a bitch or the maître d’ a bastard. Saloon singers wanted to talk about musicians in New York and the good hotels they had played that provided the best free meals for the help. Hat-check girls were always married and wanted to talk about their children.

And Trace didn’t want to talk about any of those things. Not one.

The only person in the world, besides Chico, that he could talk to was his father, and Sarge lived three thousand miles away in New York. They could talk by telephone, but Sarge didn’t like to talk on the phone any more than Trace did. But Sarge was all he had. Trace couldn’t talk to his mother; he’d never been able to talk to his mother. His ex-wife spoke in grunts and snarls, and his two kids—What’s-his-name and the girl—were still in diapers. Or in college. Or somewhere. Wherever they were, he didn’t want to talk to
them
.

He waited for Chico to finish both their meals. It didn’t take long.

“I think you’re selling me short,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“Think about it. You’ve got to admit, I’ve had a lot of good ideas for inventions. Things that will make me independently wealthy. Make
us
wealthy.”

“Sure,” she said. Her voice was soft and, except for an occasional Pennsylvania-ism, as unaccented as a television news reader’s. “Wonderful inventions. Great ideas. If you leave out the ones like making Tulsa into a parking lot. But some pretty good ideas. And you haven’t followed through on any one of them, except when you bought into that stupid restaurant at the Jersey shore and lost your shirt. The rest of your inventions and schemes go no-where. You know, Trace, I don’t think I’d mind if you were some kind of lunatic inventor working on a bench in the back of our garage.”

“We live in a condominium. We don’t have a garage. Otherwise I’d be there right this minute.”

Chico ignored him. “I wouldn’t mind that,” she said. “At least you’d be doing something. But not you. You just don’t do anything. You don’t even want to work when the insurance company calls you.”

“I don’t ever want to get to the point where in my own mind I believe that I work for an insurance company,” Trace said. “That’s why I just get a retainer and fees and don’t go on their payroll.”

“It’s honest work,” she said. “And it’s work.”

“It’s disgusting and I refuse to have any part of it,” Trace said.

They looked at each other across the table, eyes locked. Except for the soft, sad expression on Chico’s face, they might have been gunfighters locked in a test of wills and courage.

“Well, it really doesn’t matter to me anymore,” she said finally. “You were yesterday. This is today and I’m thinking about tomorrow. And you’re right, I’m not getting any younger.”

“You get more beautiful every day,” he said.

“I know. It’s a bitch, isn’t it? Every day I look in the mirror and say, ‘Cheez-o-man, Michiko, you’re better looking than you were yesterday. When’s it all going to end?’”

“With death and decay, in the grave, the way all good things wind up,” Trace said glumly.

She shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of “That’s the way it goes.” She said, “Everything dies. Except your mother.”

He waited a long time, swirling the ice in his drink, and then said, “All right, what do you want? Lay it out, and whatever it is, if it’s in my power to give without compromising my high standards, it’s yours.”

Chico giggled. “Standards? High standards? The only high standard you’ve got is that you never cheat on me with a homely woman.”

“Everybody’s got to start somewhere,” Trace said. “Anything you want.”

Chico shook her head, then leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “They’ve got little luminous dots in that ceiling. Like little stars. We’ve been coming here for three years and I never noticed that before,” she said.

“How could you when you’re always looking straight down, diving into your stolen soup?”

She straightened back up and took a deep breath. “Trace, you don’t understand,” she said. “You’ve got this idea that I’m negotiating, that I want you to cut down on your drinking or your smoking or buy some new clothes instead of those rags you always wear.” She shook her head. “That’s not the way it is. I could put up with all that if I thought we were going somewhere, but we’re not. You’re not. I thought there was a chance when Sarge asked you to come into the private-detective agency with him.”