Once a Mutt (Trace 5) Read online

  “Exactly which of our facilities are you interested in?” she asked. “Mister…?”

  “Marks. Walter Marks,” Trace said. “Basically, I’m interested in redeveloping my trapezius muscles. I used to have the best trapeziuses when I was in college, but I’ve slipped.”

  “Trapeziuses go real quickly,” the clerk agreed. “Our Universal machines are wonderful for that.”

  “Well, I’ll probably need something,” Trace said. “I built them up in my family’s circus act. Maybe you heard of us? The Flying Markses?”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “That’s all right. We’re not as famous as we used to be when we were with Ringling Brothers. I was good then, but I got too big for the act. My father couldn’t catch me anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Trace saw Maggie come into the exercise area from a plain door. It must have been a women’s locker room, Trace decided, because she was now barefoot. She was wearing brown-tinted designer glasses and she looked very beautiful. She went instantly to a miniature trampoline and began jumping up and down. She looked nice bobbing up and down. Certainly a lot better than her next-door neighbor.

  “I’d like to look around at the equipment,” Trace said. “Is that all right?”

  “Sure, Mr. Marks. You’re familiar with this equipment?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay. If you have any questions, just ask me. I’m Connie.”

  Feeling very out of place in his jacket and tie, Trace sauntered slowly around the gym, occasionally pretending to test a piece of equipment, slowly working his way toward Maggie.

  She was doing military presses on a weight machine when he sauntered up and clicked on his tape recorder. He stopped in front of her and said, “You come here often?” He gave her his most winning smile.

  He got nothing in return. No smile, no comment. Just more presses. Was every woman in Westport either a nymphomaniac or an exercise freak? he wondered.

  He perched on the seat of the machine next to hers and made a halfhearted effort to press the bar, which was at his shoulder height. He couldn’t even move it.

  “I’m thinking of joining the spa,” he said.

  He waited.

  “How’s membership here? Do you like it?”

  He waited.

  “Would you recommend the lifetime membership or the monthly?”

  He waited.

  “I’m sorry about your affliction,” he said. “But many people have been known to get their voices back overnight.”

  She snapped her head toward him. He could only see her eyes slightly through the tinted glasses, but he knew they were glaring at him.

  “Leave me alone,” she spat out in a voice that was not much louder than a whisper.

  “Well, that’s a start,” Trace said. “Keep it up. Soon you’ll be inviting me for drinks. Chatting away into the wee hours. Making small talk like the grown-ups.”

  Without another word, Maggie Winters got up from the machine and walked briskly away. She pushed her way through the door into the women’s locker room. It closed silently behind her.

  Trace went back to the anteroom and to kill some time filled out an application for a lifetime membership at a fee of only three thousand dollars in the name of Walter Marks. He gave Marks’ home address and asked that the bill be sent there.

  Connie, the clerk, looked at the application and said, “You live in New York?”

  “Yes. But I spend most of the summer and my weekends in Westport.”

  “We could bill you at your Westport address,” she said.

  “No. That varies. Tax reasons, it’s better to get the bill in New York.” He winked. “You know, get my favorite big uncle to pay for half the membership.”

  “Okay, Mr. Marks. Whatever you want.”

  There was no sign of Maggie, so Trace went downstairs to wait. He sat in his car watching the front entrance to the bowling-alley building, and when he saw her come out, he walked quickly toward the red Saab.

  “Miss Winters,” he called out.

  She looked up from the car door as he approached, then made a hurried effort to unlock the car.

  “I just wanted to talk to you for a few moments,” Trace said.

  He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  As he spun around, a fist crashed into his jaw. He saw sparkles of stars behind his eyes. He winced from the pain. He was hit again on the other side of the face. He felt consciousness passing as he dropped toward the pavement. For good measure he felt a shoe kick him in the left side. Hard. He groaned once and brought his hands up to his side. A voice exhaled, “Leave us alone,” then Trace heard a car door slam, a motor start nearby, and then tires rolling over stones.

  He opened his eyes and got up to a sitting position. His ribs felt as if they were on fire. The red Saab was leaving the parking lot.

  Trace got to his feet and carefully touched his ribs. They were sore, but nothing seemed broken. He took a deep breath without added pain. No lungs punctured. He looked out at the road, but the red Saab was long gone.

  Trace walked slowly back to his own car. Somehow, he was getting the impression that Maggie Winters didn’t want to talk to him.

  Back in his room, Trace undressed, took a shower, and then surveyed the damage. He had a mouse growing under his left eye and a bruise on the right side of his jaw. His lower ribs on the left side were tender and swollen, but nothing was broken.

  He put on his underwear, sneaked out into the hallway to get ice from the ice chest, came back inside, and settled down with a drink.

  He watched the end of the Tuesday Night Movie and the late news. He turned on Johnny Carson, hoping for Joan Rivers, but instead he got Johnny Carson, so he turned on Nightline and watched Ted Koppel skewer a diplomat from India.

  He decided a recovering body needed nourishment, so he ate a bag of peanuts and a Slim Jim. It hurt him to chew.

  He finished one bottle of Finlandia and started on the next. He watched Vincent Price and Peter Lorre trying to frighten each other in a movie that would have frightened no one except Edgar Allan Poe, who was blamed for the story.

  Finally, he took his tape recorder and microphone from the top of the dresser.

  11

  Trace’s Log: Devlin Tracy in the matter of the Paddingtons, two A.M. Wednesday, Tape Number Two. One tape in the master file.

  Nothing much to report today because I only left my room once and then just for a few minutes to get the shit kicked out of me. The tape has me trying to be charming with Maggie Winters and her telling me to leave her alone. It probably has me grunting as I got hit and kicked, but I don’t know. I didn’t have the heart to play it back.

  I am swimming in crap soup. My forty thousand dollars is buried in that submersible New Jersey restaurant and is going to float away and no one will give me the money I need to keep alive.

  One vodka bottle is empty and the other one’s threatening. I don’t think I drank that much. I think Finlandia evaporates faster than other vodka. I have to check this out. Maybe I can invent an evaporation meter or something. For the wary consumer.

  I don’t think anybody’s going to give me ten thousand dollars for it, though. I have to get to work tomorrow. This being an entrepreneur is tough.

  I guess it was Ferd who kicked the shit out of me, but I don’t know why. I don’t want to think about it. Tomorrow is another day. Maggie Winters is pretty, Chico, real pretty, and I’m sure when I have more time to work on her, I’ll have her eating out of my hand.

  Oooops, spilled my drink. Damn, it’s on the rug, unsalvageable. I’ll blot it up later. I have so many things on my mind. So many things. Goooooddd…

  12

  There might be more boring places in the world than New Hampshire. Trace was willing to give the state the benefit of every doubt, but only because he had not been to every other place in the world. The state, as he drove through it and through it, was kind of like Tulsa, Oklahoma, only bumpier and b
igger. But it was possible that Switzerland was worse. Trace had never been to Switzerland. Holland must be a beaut. Iceland too. North Dakota had to be high up on any list, and Tibet must be a drag.

  But New Hampshire was in their league.

  Trace ached for the whole four-hour drive, along the Connecticut and Massachusetts turnpikes. He always traveled with surgical tape, which he used to tape his recording machine under his clothing, so he had used it to tape his ribs tightly.

  A Band-Aid under his left eye hid 60 percent of the bruise there. His jaw was still sore. But he was alive, and if he hadn’t been going through New Hampshire, he might have felt like celebrating.

  The town of West Hampstead was more of the same. The name of the Paddington’s doctor in West Hampstead was Alphonse Bigot, and Trace wondered who the hell had a name like Bigot.

  He found the doctor’s house-cum-office on the far edge of the town. It was a California-style house, all natural weathered wood and glass and porches and decks. Trace had a theory that people like to see that their doctors are successful and rich, sort of on the theory that seventy million sick Frenchmen can’t be wrong. In that case, he thought, Bigot’s patients must be delighted.

  Trace parked and walked up the chipped-stone path to the large house. A door next to the garage was marked office, but when he got closer he saw a sign that read: HOURS MONDAY, TUESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

  Damn. It was Wednesday. Doctor’s day off. Now, where would he find an Alphonse Bigot, M.D., in West Hampstead, New Hampshire, on a Wednesday? Golf course? Tennis courts? Boating? Sitting around the stove at the corner grocery?

  He rang the door bell, but there was no answer. He tried to peer in the two-car garage, but the windows were painted over.

  He was about to leave when he heard a sound that seemed to come from the back of the house. There was an eight-foot-high gate in a tall wooden fence whose color matched that of the house and its shingles. Trace tried the gate. It pushed open easily and he found himself on a broad wooden deck that was pretty but totally unnecessary because it was elevated only six inches above the ground level, and the same white stone used in the driveway could just as easily have been used for a walkway around the house.

  As he walked toward the back, he could see that the house stood alone atop the small hill, surrounded first by the tall high fence and then by a cluster of thick pines.

  The sound he had heard was laughter.

  Two people laughing. They sat in a wooden hot tub drinking from crystal champagne glasses. Trace assumed they were naked, although the water bubbling in the tub made it impossible to see clearly. From the woman’s cleavage, though, he guessed she was naked or was wearing nothing but pasties. She was blond, with that platinum color found naturally only in albino mutations. Her hair was piled up loosely atop her head and stray tendrils curled along the sides of her pretty but over-made-up face. Her skin was delicately tanned, and she wore heavy red nailpolish.

  The man sitting alongside her looked as if he had been weaned on carpeting. Heavy black hair covered his chest, his back, and his shoulders, and as was so often the case, his head was at least semibald because he was wearing a hairpiece that Howard Cosell might have rejected.

  He finished clinking his glass with the woman’s and sipped. His other hand was under the water. Soft music played from a portable tape deck a few feet from the wooden-walled tub.

  The man looked up suddenly and saw Trace.

  “Hey. Who are you? What the hell do you want here?”

  “I’m looking for Dr. Bigot. Sorry to intrude.”

  “Off today. Can’t you see the sign out front? Get out of here.”

  The woman slid down in the water so her breasts were totally submerged. Trace had the feeling that if waited long enough she might pop to the top like a navy mine.

  “Are you Dr. Bigot?”

  “It’s Big-O. Big-O. It’s French. Will you get out of here?”

  Trace decided the man was naked, or else he would have jumped up and taken a run at Trace. It was hard to make a threatening run when you were in the altogether.

  “My name’s Tracy. I’m from the Garrison Fidelity Insurance Company.”

  “I’ve got all the insurance I need. G’wan, get out of here.”

  “Garrison Fidelity. I think my office told you I was coming.”

  “Oh, yeah. Garrison Fidelity. You’re Tracy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I talked to a Mr. Marks. He said you’d be a troublesome pain in the ass.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Trace said.

  “I don’t. So what do you want?”

  “You’re Dr. Bigot, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about the Paddingtons.”

  “Helmsley and Nadine?”

  “You know any other Paddingtons?” Trace asked.

  “All right, I guess I’ve got to talk to you. What the hell happened to your face?”

  “I got beat up,” Trace said.

  “Jumping into somebody else’s backyard?” Bigot asked.

  “I never got as far as the backyard,” Trace said.

  “All right. This is Nurse Teddy, my nurse.” He clapped a big hairy hand on the blonde’s slim shoulder. Trace nodded at her and she smiled back.

  “Look, it’s hard to talk to you hovering out there,” Bigot said. “Why don’t you take off your clothes and sit in here with us?”

  “Yes, why not?” Nurse Teddy said.

  Trace, remembering the tape recorder whirring on his hip, said, “No, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got herpes,” Trace said. “This doctor I know in La Jolla said that hot tub temperature can keep the virus alive indefinitely. I’d better not.”

  “You’re damn right, you’d better not,” Bigot said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “So I guess you’re wondering what we’re doing here?” Bigot said.

  “I came to talk to you, remember?” Trace said.

  “I mean Teddy and me.”

  “That’s your business,” Trace said.

  “That’s a good attitude. People around here are very bigoted and narrow-minded.”

  “Anti-Bigot?” Trace said.

  “Big-O. French,” Bigot said.

  “Okay. Let’s talk about Paddington,” Trace said.

  “He’s dead.”

  “When’d you find out?”

  “When I read it in the paper last week,” Bigot said.

  “No inkling before that?”

  “No.”

  “What’d you think about it?” Trace asked.

  “I thought it was a shame.”

  “Why a shame?” Trace asked.

  “Just a regular shame. You know, a guy dies before he should, it’s a shame.”

  “Just a general all-purpose shame? Not a special-attachment personal shame?”

  “No.” Bigot seemed to sit up straighter and more of his torso came out of the water. Trace saw that his neck was crisscrossed with four different gold chains, two of them with some sort of medallions hanging from them.

  “You were the Paddingtons’ doctor?” Trace asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How well’d you know them?”

  “Well as anybody else around this town, I guess. Maybe even better. Hell, I guess better than anybody except the vet. He saw them all the time.”

  “What’s the vet’s name?”

  “William Palmer. He died last year, so don’t bother looking him up,” Bigot said.

  “He saw the Paddingtons a lot?”

  “If you were a vet and you had patients—you know, I never know, do vets call the owners patients or the dogs patients?”

  “Let’s call them clients for identification,” Trace said.

  “Okay. You’re a vet and you’ve got two clients who own twenty-seven dogs, Jesus, I guess you’re going to see a lot of them.”
/>   “So what kind of people were they, the Paddingtons?” Trace asked.

  “Fill these up, will you?” Bigot took Nurse Teddy’s champagne glass and held them forward to Trace. “There’s a fresh bottle in the cooler there.”

  As Trace opened the bottle and poured wine, Bigot said, “They were the dullest couple in the world. If they didn’t have money, no one would ever have noticed them.”

  “Why do you say that? What makes a couple dull?”

  “Sitting around playing Scrabble at night,” Bigot said.

  “There’s got to be more than that,” Trace said. He handed Bigot one of the glasses. Nurse Teddy snaked up an arm to take her glass. Her right breast followed the arm out of the water and Trace thought it was a very nice right breast.

  “First of all, Nadine was homely,” Bigot said.

  “A lot of women are homely, though.”

  “Not homely like she was homely,” Bigot said. “I mean, those teeth, she could eat corn on the cob through a mail slot. Bad, man.”

  “Paddington wasn’t bad-looking, though,” Trace said. “I saw his picture.”

  “No, Hemmie was all right. But he was funny. He was poor and hardworking and then he made a lot of money and he was one of those guys who, well, it wasn’t so much that he didn’t know how to enjoy being rich, it was more like he never even realized he was rich. You know, there are people like that.”

  “I’m not one of them,” Trace said. “When I’m rich, I’ll know it.”

  “See, that’s what I mean. You’d know it and I’d know it,” Bigot said. “But not Hemmie. I mean, come on, even his nickname. Hemmie? That’s a wimp nickname. If I had his money, my nickname would be Pad. Or Heller. Or Lee. Something, not Hemmie.”

  “He couldn’t have been all that dull,” Trace said.

  “He was. Trust me, he was. Like he thought all that bullshit about the sperm whale and stuff was on the level. He thought that all those entertainers who get involved in crap like that, he thought they were legit. He didn’t even know that they did all that crap for publicity.”