Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7)

  DEADLY DIALOGUE

  Arden Harden, the scriptwriter, was in fine form.

  “Our producer is a real triple-threat man,” he said.

  “Yeah. He lies, he cheats and he steals.”

  “Does he hate McCue too?” I asked.

  “He ought to, Mr. Tracy,” said Harden. “Everyone—ought to.”

  “Tami Fluff seemed to like McCue enough,” I said.

  “Know why they call them starlets?” Harden asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because piglets was already taken.”

  “You ought to think about giving up Hollywood,” I said.

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  “Where else can I make a quarter of a million dollars for two weeks work?” Harden said. Then he said, “It’s going to be a miracle if we get through this weekend without a murder.”

  “Pray for a miracle,” I said.

  But I didn’t have a prayer….

  TRACE

  GETTING UP WITH FLEAS

  TRACE:

  GETTING UP WITH FLEAS

  WARREN MURPHY

  Copyright © 1987 by Warren Murphy

  Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7592-9054-9

  ISBN-10: 0-7592-9054-7

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  For Billy and Karen,

  Friends in deed

  1

  Trace’s Log:

  “You’d forget your head if it weren’t up your ass.”

  The nerve of the woman, saying that to me. It called for a snappy rejoinder.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah. Where the hell are the title papers for the condominium?” she said.

  And I said, “I don’t know. I can’t be expected to remember every little thing.”

  “Trace, you’re hopeless. You could solve America’s toxic-waste problem.”

  “Huh?” It’d been my morning for snappy rejoinders.

  “The government could give you all the waste to dispose of. You’d put it somewhere and five minutes later you’d have forgotten where. No one would ever see it again. End of problem.”

  “This kind of rancorous attitude isn’t helping us solve your problem,” I said graciously.

  “My problem? My problem? Trace, I am here in Vegas as a favor to you, subletting your condominium. I am willing to do everything, just as I have always done everything since the first day I met you. But I can’t do it without the title papers, you moron.”

  She kind of shrieked “moron.” I think she was getting upset with me.

  “Well, Chico, if they’re not in the medicine cabinet, there’s only two places I can think of where the papers might be.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Either rolled up inside my sneakers in the back of the closet or hidden under the sweat suit you gave me two years ago. I think it was a Halloween gift. It’s in a box in the back of the closet.”

  “Is there some logic to those two hiding places?” she asked.

  “Yes. Two places that are out of the way and never going to be disturbed by me.”

  “For your sake, I hope the papers are there.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Did my gun permit come yet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting ready to go see Groucho. He’s got some kind of job for the agency.”

  “Good,” she said. “Make money. Where’s Sarge?”

  “He’s got a divorce case.”

  “Anything interesting?” she asked.

  “No. Some nice, well-meaning guy wants to put aside the evil, ill-tempered Eurasian witch who has made his life a hell on earth. Just your routine case.”

  “Harrr,” said my evil Eurasian roommate. “Are you taking care of yourself? Have you eaten yet?”

  “Not yet. I was going to see Groucho and then I was going to grab some breakfast at Bogie’s.”

  “Breakfast? It’s already noon in New York.”

  “I don’t like to hurry things,” I said.

  “Have you been drinking a lot?” she said.

  “Hardly anything at all.”

  “What are you going to have for breakfast?” she asked.

  “I don’t know; I hadn’t given it any thought.”

  “That means you’re going to start drinking, doesn’t it?”

  “You are very suspicious for a woman twenty-two hundred miles away with no power to check up on me,” I said. “I’m going to have eggs. Yum, yum, I want eggs.”

  “What kind of eggs?”

  “An omelette. I’m going to have an omelette. Are you satisfied?”

  “If you’re not lying to me,” she said.

  “I never lie to you. Except about women. How long’s it going to take you to do whatever it is you’re doing out there?”

  “A week or so. I’ve got to pack and show this place to people and sign papers and quit my job, and it’s a real pain in the ass, Trace.”

  “I’m sorry, Chico.”

  “A week,” she said.

  “I count the minutes.”

  “Don’t forget. An omelette,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “Maybe a lingering illness,” I said. “Not death.”

  “That’s good enough,” she said. “Call tomorrow.”

  So I hung up the phone and I got out this stupid tape recorder, and here I am, killing time because I don’t want to go see Groucho. Talk about a midlife crisis. Here I am, forty years old, and I’m going to be a private detective because my roommate wants to carry a gun. What government in its right mind would let someone named Michiko Mangini carry a gun?

  The only thing you can be sure of about life is that it’s going to get complicateder and complicateder. I used to think things were pretty good. I had a condo in Las Vegas, and I worked once in a while investigating claims for the insurance company, and Chico and I got along.

  Everything’s all right, see. Maybe not perfect, but when you consider my ex-wife and her kids, it’s about an eight out of a possible ten.

  I know how this world works, though. God waits for you to reach eight and then he gives you trouble. If you stay at seven out of ten, he leaves you alone forever. But get to eight, and it’s flashing red lights and sirens all the way and people throwing rocks through your windows.

  So God sees me at eight and He strikes and Chico decides she’s going to leave me because I have no future and one thing leads to another, and before you know it, here I am, sitting in my father’s office in New York, the worst city in the whole goddamn world except for Bombay, being an operative in my old man’s private-detective agency. Chico too. She’s back in Vegas now, renting out the condo and packing up al
l our crap, but then she’s going to come out here and be a private detective and I know she’s going to shoot somebody first thing because all that woman wants is power. I bet that if the Japanese were all six feet tall instead of midgets, World War II never would have happened.

  Little people are sneaky. This is one of my rules. And nasty. Like Chico. She’s always telling me I’ve got my head up my butt and I don’t know anything, and this is not true. I know a lot of things. I think all the time. Just this morning I was thinking that people who think Marilyn Monroe was a tragic figure are generally the same people who think that Robert Blake is a good actor. And I was thinking that Telly Savalas isn’t the kind of guy you’d trust to watch your car while you were walking around the corner, but he’s perfect for doing casino commercials because they’re trying to attract people just like him.

  See? I think all the time, and another thing I think is that I’m never going to tell Chico her gun permit arrived. I don’t want her to have it. Mine came too, and I don’t want that one either. I don’t want to use a gun. I don’t trust guns.

  You know how it is, you have a gun and one day you’re getting the hell kicked out of you. Now, if you don’t have a gun, you just cover your head and whimper a lot and pretty soon the guy who’s beating up on you will go away, laughing. But suppose you’ve got a gun. Now, you’re getting your head beat in, and instead of covering your head and whimpering, you start to worrying. This guy’s going to kill me. If he doesn’t stop soon, I’m going to lose my brain because it’s going to all leak out my ears. I’ve got to stop this. How can I stop it? I know how. And then, boooooommmmm. And another one bites the dust, and then he turns out to be some Unitarian bishop from Poughkeepsie, New York, and your ass goes to jail, and that’s terrible because it’ll be in all the papers and your ex-wife and ex-children will find out about it and they’ll come to visit you and you’ll have to see them.

  Maybe you don’t. I’ll have to check visiting regulations in various prisons because you can’t be too prepared in this world.

  That’s why I’m sitting here with this silly tape recorder, just in case somebody comes in and throws herself across my desk and shouts, “Take me, I’m yours”

  I want it on tape that I said, “A hundred dollars a day plus expenses or I’m keeping it zipped.”

  That, my friends, is called honor, and I have a great sense of honor even if Chico doesn’t believe it. Who cares what a Japanese-Sicilian believes anyway?

  Chico’s so beautiful I ache to see her. I hope she never finds this tape ’cause there goes my bargaining position.

  Until Groucho called and said he had work for us, this was a nice morning, a nice day for thinking good constructive thoughts, and I’ve thought of a lot of them, all of them about how to make money. I sure as hell am not going to sit in this office for the rest of my life waiting to hit the Pick-Six. Money doesn’t find you; you have to go out and find money.

  I almost did a couple of times too, except…Well sometimes things don’t work out just right.

  Like that restaurant I bought into in New Jersey. That could have been my grand slam. Except the guy I expected to run it wound up not running it, and the two trapeze artists who did wind up running it couldn’t direct traffic in a cemetery.

  So maybe the restaurant wasn’t such a good idea. But I’ve had others. Mark my words, someday somebody’s going to come out with a product that’s after-shave lotion and mouthwash combined and all the travelers in the world of the male persuasion are going to bless him and buy a thousand jillion bottles each. I hope so because I’m getting tired of using diluted after-shave for mouthwash. But everybody laughs when I mention it to them.

  And what about my idea for putting signs on the front of cars, printed backward, so that people can read them in their rearview mirrors? This could have been a big novelty item, like AMBULANCE printed backward so that people can see it. And don’t tell me it’s stupid. It’s not any more stupid than AMBULANCE printed backward. I mean, is that dumb or what? There you are, Mrs. Fahrblungit, putzing along at thirty miles an hour and suddenly bearing down on you from behind is this vehicular apparition, siren screaming, red and blue lights flashing, whoop, whoop, whoop, scream, scream, scream, and are you really going to wait until he’s only ten feet away and you can read AMBULANCE backward in your rearview mirror before you pull off to the side of the road? That whole idea fits like a Ralph Nader invention, solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

  But the signs would have been a great novelty item except I couldn’t find a backer. The only person I know with any money who would lend it to me is Chico and she won’t lend it to me either.

  Oh, well. I guess I have dallied enough. It’s time to go see Groucho and find out what’s on his alleged mind. Time to go. Devlin Tracy, boy detective, signing off…no richer but wiser in the ways of the world.

  And I am leaving this tape recorder in the desk.

  2

  Think about a squirrel. You know how they are. They freeze in one place, look around, do whatever the hell it is squirrels do, then race five feet away and do it all over again.

  Now you have a picture of Groucho.

  Groucho is Walter Marks and he is the vice president for claims of the Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company. Back in the blessed days when my only income was what I got investigating claims for Garrison Fidelity, I guess you could call him my boss. Now he was just another client for the far-flung Tracy and Associates Detective Agency. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Tracy and Associates. Until you find out it’s a retired cop (my father), a drunk (me), and a homicidal maniac (Chico).

  Groucho wasn’t crazy about the change from employer to client because it meant that he could no longer fire me. The truth, though, is he couldn’t fire me even when I was a claims investigator. He and I both knew that I had the job because Robert Swenson, the president of the company, is my friend and wouldn’t let me be fired. Also, even if I am a little dopey, somehow I get things figured out—usually thanks to Chico—so I’ve saved the company a lot of money over the past few years.

  Back to squirrels. That’s the way Marks moved. He would sit behind his desk, look around as if he was always surprised to see you there, and then there’d be a wild flurry of activity on his desk, like shuffle papers or something. Then he’d get up and run across the room, pause, look around, and then, arms flying, he’d do it all over again.

  Now, as a characteristic, this isn’t so bad—I’ve known women who floss their teeth in restaurants—but what was wrong was that Marks never really accomplished anything. You can forgive this in a squirrel, since they don’t have anything to do anyway, but I couldn’t forgive it in Marks. Actually, I couldn’t forgive anything in Marks.

  At any rate, there I was in his office and he’s running around, from here to there, stopping and sniffing the air for walnuts or something, then running someplace else. And he’s talking. Yap, yap, yap, yap. And he’s little, like a squirrel.

  “So it’s got all the potential for a disaster,” he said.

  “What does?”

  “What we’re talking about. Have you heard a word I said, Trace?”

  Actually, I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to what he was talking about. What I was interested in was this big stack of supermarket newspapers on his desk, you know, The Globe and Midnight and The Enquirer and like that. The top one that I could see had a headline that said:

  NEVER WORK AGAIN. THE AMAZING, SECRET FORMULA FOR AMASSING WEALTH WHILE YOU SLEEP.

  It was one of those headlines that you’re supposed to shout out loud when you read it.

  “Of course I’ve been listening to you,” I said. “It has all the potential for disaster. I remember you saying that.”

  “Trace, do you want coffee?”

  “No.”

  “You look like you need coffee,” he said.

  “How does a person look when he needs coffee?”

  “Drunk. Eyes bloodshot and rolling back in his head. Spit dribbling d
own the side of his mouth, dropping onto his suit. The way you look. Have some coffee,” he said, then ran across the floor to his desk, picked up the phone, and told his secretary to bring in two black coffees.

  I didn’t think he would appreciate it if I told him to lace mine with vodka. I decided I’d drink it raw. But I wouldn’t like it. He couldn’t make me like it.

  We waited for his secretary and I had a chance to reflect on the fact that Walter Marks was the singular most uninteresting human being I had ever met. I could not remember his ever saying one thing that was even mildly informative, entertaining, or interesting. His clothes were dull, always three-piece navy-blue suits, and his shoes were shined, thick-soled, and practical. Even his haircut was uninteresting, smooth and neatly polished and not a hair out of place, and his fingers were always clean and his fly was always zipped. He always had socks on. He never had a flask in one of his pockets. He had average skin and some average-color eyes that I don’t really recall, and the only thing unusual about him what was that he was short, real short. Minute might be the right word.