Trace (Trace 1) (22 page)

Jack Ketch had gone. Trace dragged himself to a sitting position on the floor and a starburst of pain flashed between his eyes.

He felt the back of his skull, gingerly, then looked at his fingers. No blood. He shook his head to try to clear it, and slowly, holding on to the doorknob, he pulled himself to his feet.

How long had he been unconscious? He didn’t know. He seemed able to walk, and he started down the corridor toward the exit of Three East.

The guard was back at his desk.

“Who are you?”

“Later,” Trace said. He pushed past the guard out into the hallway to the steps leading downstairs.

On the first step he stopped.

His tape recorder.

He could feel it vibrating gently against his right hip; he reached back, pressed the rewind button, and then pressed the button to play the tape.

Muffy’s voice: “You idiot, Petey. You all right?”

 

Jack Ketch’s voice: “Get me out of here.”

 

Muffy: “Did you tell him anything?”

 

Ketch: “Jesus, that was tight. No. I didn’t tell him anything. What does he know?”

 

Muffy: “There’s nothing for him to know. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

 

Ketch: “Hurry up. My legs are killing me. I don’t know. He acted like he was onto us about something.”

 

Muffy: “I tell you. There’s nothing for him to know. What’d we do? There.”

 

Ketch: “Thanks. It feels like my blood stopped.”

 

Muffy: “All we did is I befriended an old lady. And you’ve been working as a nurse at night. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

 

Ketch: “Muffy, you got balls, I’ll tell you.”

 

Muffy: “Hell with him. He wants to cause trouble, we’ll give him trouble. Him tying you up. Threatening your life. We’ll have his ass in jail.”

 

Ketch: “I don’t know. I think we ought to just get out of here. He caught me with Carey’s oxygen off.”

 

Muffy: “Nonsense. I was just down there and Carey’s all right. So it’s your word against this creep’s. A million things. You wanted to see if the oxygen was working right. You were just checking inside the tent to see if Carey was all right. A million things. Come on, let’s go. (Giggle.) Dear old Nana is probably worried about me.”
(Sound of bed creaking. Footsteps. A loud crunch as if something hit the microphone.)

 

Muffy: “Leave him be. He doesn’t mean anything. We’re too close now to let go.”

 

Ketch: “I’d like to kill him.”

 

Muffy: “After we’re rich.”
(Sound of door closing.)

 

 

Trace saw the telephone on the wall next to the stairs and dialed the Careys’ number.

Chico answered. “Carey home.”

“This is Trace.”

“What’s the matter? You sound terrible. Where are you?”

“Actually, I’m about two steps from Three East.”

“What’s Three East?”

“It’s the nut factory at the sanatorium.”

“Trace, you’ve always been two steps from Three East.”

“Is Mrs. Carey all right?”

“Yeah,” Chico said. “She’s shook but okay.”

“All right. I think Muffy and her brother are on their way there. You get out of there with Mrs. Carey right now.”

“Okay. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I think I’m coming there,” Trace said.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Get moving.”

He hung up, remembered Mitchell Carey, and hurried down the steps to Room 213.

Dr Matteson was at Carey’s bedside.

“How is he, Doc?”

“He’s alive. Are you leaving town soon?”

“Why?” Trace asked.

“Since you’ve been here, there’s nothing but chaos. What the hell’s been going on here?”

“I don’t know. I think that night nurse has been cutting off the oxygen, letting him rebreathe his own carbon dioxide. Would that explain why your therapy wasn’t working?”

“It could. His brain would be starving. Cells dying. He wouldn’t have a chance.”

“What’s the chances now?”

“I don’t know,” Matteson said. “Time’ll tell. Hey, where you going? You look like hell. I think you ought to stay here, let me look at you.”

“Hospitals don’t agree with me,” Trace said.

“Well, well, the overbite twins. Bucky and Cluck,” Trace said.

Muffy wheeled and glared at him in the study door. “Where’s Amanda?” she snapped. Her brother was sitting on the couch, a bottle of beer on the table before him. He rose to his feet.

“I thought it was best to get her out of here for a while,” Trace said. “And shouldn’t you be calling her Nana?”

Muffy paused, then said confidently, “It’s all right. She’ll be back. This is her home. And mine.”

“That simple, is it?” Trace said. He stepped into the study, closing the door behind him.

“Actually, it is,” Muffy said. “Make you a drink?”

“You’re a cool one. I’ll say that for you. I’ll pass on the drink.”

“Why not cool?” Muffy said. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken. You’ve done a lot wrong.” He turned to Ketch. “Sit down.”

“Why don’t you make me?”

“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” Trace said.

“Petey, sit down. Let’s let our guest talk. He seems to want to. And I do want him out of here before Amanda, Nana, comes home. He does have a way of disturbing her.”

She had mixed herself a highball and she joined her brother on the couch. She sipped her drink, looked at Trace, and said coolly, “So?”

“You had me going for a long time,” Trace said. “I couldn’t really figure your game out.”

“And now you have?” Muffy said.

“Yeah, pretty much. You, dummy, pay attention ’cause I’ll ask questions later.”

“I’m going to have fun taking you apart,” Jack Ketch said.

“Not on your best day, Junior,” Trace said. He leaned back against the study door. “The trouble with a pair like you is that you’re stupid. And when you try to be smart, you’re even more stupid and you get into trouble. Fish shouldn’t try to fly.”

“Sis, why are we listening to this? Why don’t I just throw him out?”

“Aaah, let him talk. Maybe he can tell us how we went wrong.” She smiled, as if sharing a private joke.

“I didn’t like you, Bucky, right from the start,” Trace said.

“Don’t call me Bucky. That name’s dead,” Muffy said.

“You left a whole lot of pieces around for me to pick up,” Trace said. “Coming back here after Buffy’s death. What was it you saw? That Mrs. Carey was shaky and on the edge? So you started combing your hair the way Buffy used to. You started calling her Nana the way Buffy did. There was an old lady whose husband was near death and you were worming your way into her life like a second daughter.”

“She’s my friend’s mother. I came here to help,” Muffy said.

“But I couldn’t figure out why you had Mrs. Carey talk to Bob Swenson. If you were figuring on killing off Mr. Carey, why have some insurance snoop looking into it?”

“Why indeed?” she said.

“That threw me for a while. I’ve been dealing with smart devious people so long I wasn’t used to something that was dumb and obvious. You were afraid that Doc Matteson or his people might really get Mr. Carey to change his will or his insurance or whatever. Before you had a chance to get yourself cut in for a piece of the pie. You couldn’t take a chance that he had already done that. If you planned to kill him, that put a stop to it. Maybe I will have that drink.” Trace poured some vodka into a glass and sipped at it.

“Mr. Carey steered me wrong there. When I first came to town, he said that ‘they’ were trying to kill him. But he was wrong. You weren’t trying to kill him. Not then. You were just trying to make sure that he didn’t recover. That’s why you had Earthquake McGoon here cutting off his oxygen at night, letting him breathe back his own carbon dioxide. Just to make sure that Matteson’s oxygen therapy didn’t have a chance to work. The lawyer told me about your checking into wills. It wasn’t hard to figure out that you were nervous about Mr. Carey’s. Even if you wanted to kill him, you couldn’t. Not until you were sure that he hadn’t made sure that you were written out somehow. What was it? When he was at the first hospital, did he catch onto your game. Is that what it was?”

“Maybe he didn’t like my hairdo,” Muffy said.

“And maybe he recognized it for what it was, an attempt to swindle your way into an old woman’s confidence.”

“Interesting story.”

“It gets better. But you had to know if Mr. Carey had done anything about his will and Jeannie Callahan wouldn’t tell you. That’s when you had little brother here break into her office and rifle her files to find out. He hadn’t counted on her coming back, and when she did, he knocked her out.”

“What a lot of crap,” Muffy’s brother said.

“Not so much, dirtbag,” Trace said. “Jeannie remembered that the guy who hit her grunted when he punched. I should have tied that together with you being a karate freak. That’s the way you guys punch.”

“A lot of guys do that,” Ketch said.

“But not a lot of them are dumb enough to steal an apple from the lawyer’s refrigerator, take one bite, and leave it where it can be found.”

Muffy snapped her head to look at her brother, the young man looked shocked.

“Remember? You dropped it in the ashtray out in the hall. We had a dentist make a mold of it. It’ll match your teeth exactly. Muffy, you both had beaver teeth when you were kids. Why’d you get yours fixed and not him?”

“We could afford only one. Petey’s next.”

“Maybe the state prison’ll do it for him for free.”

“Not on the basis of that cock-and-bull story,” she said.

“Now this is just a guess,” Trace said, “but the cops figure a pinch bar or a tire iron was used to bust into Jeannie’s file cabinet. I wouldn’t be surprised that they find that pinch bar in the trunk of Petey’s VW outside. Probably with some little paint smears from the file cabinet still on it. But that’s just a maybe.

“So there’s no new will in the Carey file. That’s last night, when you did your séance bit with Mrs. Carey. Very cute and very easy for two stage magicians like you two.”

“You’ve done your homework, haven’t you?” Muffy said.

“I try. That’s why Buffy’s picture was missing the first day I was here. You were having a transparency copy made at the photo shop in town. I saw the receipt the first day I broke into the house here.”

“You what?”

“You heard me. That’s when I saw the big green tank in your bedroom. I figured it was to fill your scuba tanks from. But scuba tanks take compressed air. Green tanks are a universal symbol. They mean oxygen. You had that here just for show, for when you got Mr. Carey home, maybe you could convince Dr. Matteson that you were continuing the oxygen treatments.”

Trace put down his vodka glass.

“There was something Matteson said last night at the sanatorium. I went there to see Jeannie, but I bumped into him and asked him how Mr. Carey was. He said that he was fine and that the nurse said he was resting comfortably. But he called the nurse ‘she.’ And Petey was supposed to be on duty last night. I saw him there. But he had to sneak out to come play ghost here with you and then break into Jeannie’s office.”

“
And
eat an apple,” Muffy said.

“Right. And eat an apple. I still couldn’t figure it all out, though. This was a crime without a crime. Why didn’t you just kill Mr. Carey? Okay, you had to wait until you were sure he didn’t change his will. So now you know that. You could just have put a pillow over his face and that’d be that. Why not?”

“Tell me why,” Muffy said.

“Yeah,” Petey said.

“I kept thinking you were worried just about Mr. Carey’s will. But you weren’t. It wasn’t just that. That book upstairs in your room about making wills. That didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Carey. It was Mrs. Carey. You know, I’d like to take credit for figuring it out, but I missed it entirely. You went to talk to Jeannie Callahan right after you got into town, and you were talking about wills then. That’s before the Plesser case, before you had any reason to worry about Mr. Carey changing his will to benefit the sanatorium. It was Mrs. Carey all along. You were planning to get her to leave everything to you, weren’t you?”

“What do you think?” the girl said. Trace noticed that she had stopped sipping from her drink.

“I think you wanted to keep Mr. Carey a vegetable until you got Mrs. Carey to really start thinking of you as her own daughter and leave you everything. Then I think you planned to get rid of Mr. Carey. And then Mrs. Carey. So many ways to do it. An accident down at the pond. Heartbroken, she takes an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe she falls in the pond and drowns. Or she just gets old and dies. That’s what I think. It’s no fun if you don’t tell me if I’m right or wrong.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Muffy said.

“Muffy,” said her brother, “stop.”

“It’s all right, Petey. Nobody’s here to hear anything. You’ve got it just about right, Mr. Tracy. One thing you didn’t know is Mrs. Carey signed a new will today, leaving everything to me. You forget that Buffy herself told the old lady to trust me. I brought Buffy back here once and I can bring her back here again.”

“That dog won’t hunt,” Trace said. “I showed Mrs. Carey how that dodge works.”

Muffy shook her head. “You really don’t know a great deal about it, do you? People who believe in spooks, they want to believe. Petey and I are good. We’ve got a whole bag of tricks, spirit photos, messages inside sealed envelopes, a whole list of things that’ll keep Mrs. Carey believing until she dies.”

“Which won’t be long,” Trace said.

Muffy shrugged. “You never know. She’s very old and she’s going to be crushed when her husband dies.”

“Nice little swindle,” Trace said.