When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Page 11

She hesitated, then said, “No. Not at all. I have this terrible suspicion that I am being, how do you Americans say it, pumped?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give that impression,” he said. “I’m just trying to find out what kind of a young man he was.”

  They turned left at the corner. “He seemed to be a nice, friendly young man,” she said. “I didn’t know him well,” she said, but her eyes called her a liar.

  “Like his father,” Trace said, but the young woman did not comment.

  The supermarket was in the middle of the block. Cheryl said, “I’ll have to leave now. I have a lot of shopping to do.”

  “I was going to offer to take you to lunch,” he said.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Perhaps sometime,” she said.

  “Good. That’s better than a ‘no.’”

  “Have a nice day, Mr. Tracy,” she said, turning away.

  He touched her arm gently. “How do I reach you?” he asked. “For dinner?”

  “Just wait in front of that car by the apartment. I pass by every day,” she said with a smile.

  “Fine,” he said. “If you need me, I’m in room thirteen-seventeen at the Plaza.”

  “Very good.”

  “It’s Devlin Tracy,” he said. “Call me Trace.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said, and walked into the store.

  Sarge was at the bar in the restaurant below his office. The dining room was filled with a lunchtime crowd from a fashion-design school a block away, and Trace grumbled that it looked like a punk rockers’ convention.

  “Keeps you young,” Sarge said. He was eating a roast-beef sandwich on rye and had a large mug of beer before him.

  “I’m used to Las Vegas,” Trace said. “Pushup bras, see-through blouses, black mesh stockings and garter belts. Wholesome Americana. This ripped sweat shirt and painters’ pants kink is more than I can take. It’s downright unwholesome.”

  “Downright upright,” Sarge said. He introduced Trace to the bartender and said, “This is my son. He wants to throw out all the degenerates in the place.”

  “Not until my notes are paid off. Please,” the bartender said. He was a wiry man with a bushy mustache and warm, but watchful, owner’s eyes.

  “Well, okay,” Trace said. “Just until then.” He ordered a glass of wine and Sarge said, “Still not drinking?”

  “Still just beer and wine. I’ve got a bet with Chico.”

  “You impress the hell out of me. I always worried about your drinking.”

  “It’s a pain in the ass,” Trace said. “I keep waiting to see some dramatic proof of how not drinking vodka anymore is improving my health. Making me stronger. Making me live longer. And I don’t see anything. My pulse is still as fast as a cheap clock ticking. I still wake up in the morning with sewage in my mouth.”

  “I know,” Sarge said. “And every two days you run across an article that says a little drinking is good for you. Keeps the blood flowing, helps your circulation, prevents stroke. It made me take the pledge.”

  “What pledge?” Trace asked.

  “I pledged not to read any more articles,” Sarge said. “Anyway, I’ve got the booze under control now, so I don’t feel too bad.”

  “How’d you do it without going buggy?” Trace asked.

  “It didn’t have anything to do with what was good for me. It was what was good for the rest of the world. I found out I was turning into a Wild West cowboy, rip-roaring, rooting-tooting drunk. And I was afraid that some night I’d turn into a rooting-tooting shooting drunk and get somebody dead that didn’t deserve to be dead. Although that might be hard in this city. So that’s when I quit for real.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Trace said.

  “Ten years now. And once in a while I cheat—I think a man’s got to be allowed to cheat once in a while—but when I do, I drink home so the only person likely to be a victim is your mother. And that woman’s indestructible, as you know.”

  “How is she, by the way?” Trace asked.

  “I didn’t talk to her yesterday, but she’s fine. She couldn’t reach me last night, so she called seven neighbors and made them all come over to the house to make sure that it wasn’t on fire or that I wasn’t lying dead in the kitchen.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I knew she’d do that. She always does. So I left a note on the door.”

  “What note?” Trace asked.

  “It says, ‘Dear neighbors, I am all right. I am just out. Patrick Tracy.’”

  “That should take care of it.”

  “No,” Sarge said. He bit into his roast-beef sandwich, washed it down with beer, and said, “No, it never does. After your mother calls the seven neighbors who are still talking to her, she decides that they’re trying to shield her from the truth, so she calls the police precinct to report me missing or dead. Mind you, this is all by long distance from Las Vegas. She carries a Rolodex with her of the people she can call to harass me.”

  “What do the cops do?”

  “I’m an ex-cop. They cover for me. If I’m going to be out, I let them know, and whatever time Hilda calls, they tell her I was just there but I left and I’m helping them out on a case.”

  “And she buys that?” Trace asked.

  “What choice does she have? The only alternative is for her to fly home, and if she did that, she might miss the million-billion-zillion dollar jackpot on the nickel slot machine.”

  “I tried calling you last night too,” Trace said.

  “You should have tried the police precinct. They would have told you I was just there but I left.”

  “Where were you? What’d you do? Have a big date?”

  “Some big date,” Sarge said. “You asked me to nose around with the cops about Armitage. See if anybody’s got it in for him. So I prowled around the city last night talking to every cop I still know who isn’t senile.”

  “So, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Armitage is running his nice, neat small protected narcotics business in his club. Nothing big, nothing troublesome. Everybody knows it but everybody leaves him alone. He apparently has a pretty large payroll wearing blue. But nobody’s been mad at him, nobody’s been moving in, and he hasn’t been trying to take over anybody else’s business. There wouldn’t be a reason for anybody to hit the kid as a lesson to him.”

  “That’s right. And you said the mob wouldn’t do that anyway,” Trace said.

  “Not the mob. But remember, Armitage is mostly dealing cocaine and you’re not talking the mob anymore. You’re talking Colombia and Venezuela and all those countries, all those Latins, and they’re all nuts. They’d blow up a school in session to erase a blackboard. But as I said, no sign of that. Everything’s peaceful.”

  Trace waved for another wine. He asked the owner if he had any scungille salad.

  “Not today.”

  “I told you, son, they never have it. That’s why it’s the cheapest thing on the menu.”

  “Next week, we’re advertising squab for a dollar,” the owner said. “That’ll take your mind off the scungille.”

  When the wine came, Trace asked his father if he had any word about what Nick Armitage might be doing.

  “That’s one of the things that’s funny,” Sarge said. “Armitage always had this reputation as a guy who takes out his own garbage, without anybody’s help. But there’s no word out on the streets about anything he’s doing about the dead kid. Nobody’s looking for the killer for him and there’s no money out on the street for a tip and not even a sign that he gives a damn. I heard he wouldn’t even go with the Connecticut cops to see the murder scene.”

  “Maybe he didn’t like the kid,” Trace said.

  “He’s got to save face, though,” Sarge said. “Hell, he could hate the kid, but it was his kid and somebody dropped him and he’s got to even the score. A very Italian trait. Well, you know that, you live with half an Italian.”

&n
bsp; “It’s the Japanese half that makes me miserable,” Trace said. “I was up in Connecticut yesterday. I saw some guy hanging around one of the kid’s roommates, and I think he might be one of Armitage’s men. I’m not sure, but I think I saw him in Nick’s club last night.”

  “Well, that’s something anyway. Does the roommate know anything, do you think?”

  “I’ve got to keep working on it. She wouldn’t talk to me,” Trace said. “So that’s all you did last night?”

  “Yup.” Sarge gulped his beer and pushed the empty glass back across the bar. “Do it again,” he said to the bartender.

  “Make it fast,” Trace said, “or he’ll steal your plants again.”

  “We only leave the dead ones out for him to steal. He’s harmless,” the bartender said.

  Trace told Sarge about his trip to the dead youth’s college, and then his and Chico’s adventures the night before in the Chez Nick disco. Sarge was laughing aloud when Trace finished telling him how Chico had left one of Armitage’s hired muscle men writhing in pain on the dance floor.

  “I love that woman,” Sarge said. “I truly do. Don’t let her get away, son.”

  “More her choice than mine,” Trace said. “If she ever decides to change career fields, maybe the two of us’ll have something to talk about. Anyway, I saw Martha Armitage today.”

  “Oh?” Sarge turned on his seat to look at his son.

  “I went up there to talk to the husband. How’d she get involved with him anyway? He’s a nasty bastard.”

  “Don’t know. Just somebody from the neighborhood, I guess. A kid’s romance, and then it gets to be a marriage and then somehow he gets to be connected and rich. It happens that way sometimes, even to nice ladies, and before they know it, they’re mobster’s wives.”

  “Enough to make a woman drink,” Trace said casually.

  “Yeah. I guess so,” Sarge said.

  “How well do you know her?” Trace asked.

  “I think I told you. I met her once on a case. You sound really interested, Dev.”

  “I met her sister too. Anna Walker?”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “She was up at the apartment. I saw her and Nick in a clinch.”

  Sarge sipped at his beer. “That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the kid’s murder, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Trace said. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  14

  “I’ve got bad news,” Trace said.

  Chico was lying naked on the large bed in the bedroom of their hotel suite. Her long, tapered fingernails were drying under the fifth coat of blood-red nail polish, and she waved them about her head like an out-of-synch orchestra conductor. The movement of her hands and arms created corresponding waves of motion in her breasts which Trace found very erotic.

  “Please stop staring at my tits,” she said.

  “You need only cover them to prevent that,” Trace said.

  She reached for the edge of the sheet and he said, “Don’t you dare. Will you stop worrying about whether or not I like you shamelessly flaunting your body and listen to me? I said I’ve got bad news.”

  “Well, try this for bad news,” she said. “The answer is no. No matter how you beg and plead, I am not getting involved in this murder matter of yours. I already did more than I wanted to when I kneed that gorilla last night at the disco. No more. I am in New York on vacation. This town is made blessed by the fact that your mother is absent from it. I intend to enjoy these days. I will not work. Repeat, will not work.”

  “For your information, that isn’t the bad news I had in mind,” Trace said.

  “Oh? What is?”

  “I wanted to tell you that I would not be able to spend this evening with you. I have to go out with Sarge. I didn’t want you to be hurt or feel left out or neglected. I wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t be bored.”

  Chico began to giggle. She was a tiny woman and all of her was tiny, in perfect proportion, but for each day of the last three years, Trace had found her more beautiful than the day before. Except for her giggle. It was the dirty snicker of someone with an evil mind.

  “Bored?” she said. “Because you won’t be with me?” The giggle became a deep-throated laugh.

  Trace felt that his potential absence from her side did not actually call for such hilarity. “I don’t see what’s so terribly funny,” he said.

  “Trace. I am perfectly capable of amusing myself in New York City.”

  “But you won’t have as much fun as you’d have with me,” he said hopefully.

  She laughed again. “That is one of the most idiotic statements I’ve ever heard you make,” she said. “For instance. I love to go to the ballet. The last time you went with me and snored through the entire performance.”

  “I told you. Somebody must have put something in my drink before the show.”

  “Yes. Alcohol. You drank eight doubles during dinner.”

  “I was tense. I needed relief,” he said.

  “You didn’t have to spell relief v-o-d-k-a-d-o-u-b-l-e.”

  “I didn’t snore loud,” he said. “It was just a little snore.”

  “And then, remember, we went to the opera? Remember the opera? You insisted upon singing along.” She waved her arms over her head again. Her breasts moved. He wanted to jump on her. “You mistake Pavarotti for Mitch Miller. ‘Sing Along with Luciano.’ I thought you were going to get us arrested.”

  “I regard opera as one of the last strongholds of participatory democracy,” he said. “And I don’t sing. I hum. I like to hum along.”

  “Let’s analyze that,” she said. More arm-waving, more breasts. Chico had always felt that her breasts were simply too small. She had always demanded to know the chest sizes of all the other women he slept with. She was sure that he went to other women, only in search of pneumatic fulfillment. The fact was that he thought her bosom was, like the rest of her, perfect, but as many times as he told her this, she refused to believe him. Frustrated, he finally realized that a late-blossoming bosom in childhood could scar an adult for life.

  “You say you hum,” she went on. “That’s more or less true, only because you can never remember lyrics. The words to every aria are not ‘Oh, dolce, oh, screamo, insufferato.’ You hum. The trouble is, Trace, that your range is only three notes. And they’re not consecutive. You hum an A, a D, and an F.”

  “A perfect D chord.”

  “D minor, idiot. Be that as it may. I do not mind one fractional bit of an infinitesimal iota that you will not accompany me wherever I choose to go tonight. There is ballet, opera, dance recitals, all the things that they don’t do in the desert in Nevada, so you can do whatever you like with Sarge. As long as you stay sober. I like you a lot more now that you’re sober.”

  She looked up from her nails and saw that Trace had taken off his shirt and was unzipping his trousers.

  “Why are you taking off your clothes?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I think that you think you’re going to climb into bed here and jump my bones.”

  “I think you’re right,” Trace said.

  “Not a chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have just bathed and powdered and perfumed myself.”

  “I don’t care if you’re clean,” Trace said. “I can deal with that.”

  “I would have to do all that again,” she said.

  Trace snickered. “I just wanted to show you how self-centered you really are. The reason I’m taking my clothes off is so that I can exercise. It’s time for me to do my daily half-hour of aerobic exercise. Dancing in place. Calisthenics. All part of my self-improvement program.”

  “You mean those thirteen times you fell down this morning and called them pushups, that wasn’t all?” she said.

  “That was just part of it. This is the new me. I’m not drinking anymore. I haven’t had a cigarette since I came back to this room and I’m alre
ady two packs behind my daily average. I’m exercising like a whirling dervish. I’ve sworn off self-abuse. I haven’t scored a woman for the longest time, except for you, and I wouldn’t have you now on a bet. It’s the new me, Chico.”

  “Some people will do anything for five hundred dollars.”

  “Some people will do anything not to have to call What’s-his-name and the girl,” Trace said. “Suppose the ex-wife answered the phone. What would I do then? What could I say? ‘Hello, Bruno, let me talk to Thing One and Thing Two? This is their alleged father’? No way I’m going to lose that bet.”

  He lay down on the floor to do a pushup. He got halfway up and fell forward onto his face. “But I’m not joining Sarge’s firm,” he gasped, lying on the floor, panting. “I can’t do all this stuff and think big thoughts too. And I’m not really that hot for gourmet cooking either.”

  He tried another pushup. This time he was able to straighten his arms completely before he collapsed and fell onto his face.

  “Come on, Trace,” Chico said cheerily. “I’m proud of you. On your feet and do toe-touches. I’ll call out cadence for you. Come on. Stand up. You’re terrible at pushups.”

  “I lack incentive. If I had something under me besides this rug, I might amaze you.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. On your feet.”

  He slowly rose to a standing position.

  “All right,” she said. “Bend over and touch your toes.”

  He bent over once. His fingertips reached halfway between knee and ankle.

  “I can’t touch my toes,” he sniveled.

  “Practice. You’ll get better. All right, now straighten up and reach high over your head. Don’t just hang there like that, you look like a rag doll with an empty belly. Come on. Up, down, up, down, one, two, three, four. Up, down, dammit, not just down.”

  “I’m stuck. I can’t go down and I can’t get up.”

  “Your back?” she said.

  “Yeah. Help,” he said softly.

  She rose from the bed and walked to him. She put her right hand flat, palm side down, on the small of his back and cradled his chest across her left arm. Suddenly, he straightened up and threw his arms around her.