And 47 Miles of Rope (Trace 2) Read online

  Trace opened his mouth but Chico wasn’t finished yet.

  “You think she didn’t leave clues? I’ll give you a clue. Come here.” She grabbed his right wrist and jerked him toward the bedroom.

  “Good idea,” he said. “We’ll hold each other until the hurt passes away.”

  “Shut your face,” she said. “There. Look.”

  Trace looked. On the bed were four two-inch squares of wallpaper samples, ranging from atrocious to hideous without even a moment’s hesitation at passable. And there was a note. It read:

  I think your white painted walls are terrible. They’re very ugly and they’re all stained yellow with cigarette smoke. I will wallpaper this room for you before I go. With your father busy, I don’t have anything else to do because I am not made of money and can’t keep throwing ten dollarses into slot machines that never pay off, despite promises to the contrary. Besides, I think you should have a nice house to live in and it is obvious that this place needs a woman’s touch. Please pick out which one of these samples you like best.

  She had signed the note “Hilda Tracy.”

  Trace held the note up to the light from the window.

  “It’s her handwriting, all right. I can tell by the pinched way she makes the loops in her e’s.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Trace said.

  “If talking to her would help, I’d talk to her,” Chico said. “You can’t talk to that woman. It’s like talking to an obelisk with a hat.”

  “She’ll listen to me,” Trace promised. He knew she would never listen to him.

  “She won’t listen to you,” Chico said. “All that woman understands is force. All right, she wants force, I’ll give her force.”

  She picked up the telephone and dialed a three-digit number.

  “Hello, Harold? Okay, this is Miss Mangini in three-seventeen. If that woman comes back tomorrow, these are our instructions. Shoot her on sight. Right between the eyes…. Don’t worry, I’ll get you a gun…. You can’t shoot her? You never shot anybody? Okay. Slice her Achilles tendons with a sharp knife. People have been known to linger for weeks that way before dying. She’ll have time to crawl off to the elephant graveyard…. No? Okay. If she bullies past you, you call the cops and have her arrested for trespassing and illegal entry. Try burglary if you want. Theft. I think she lifted a pair of my ornamental chopsticks…. Of course, I’ll press the charges. So will Trace. I’m warning you. If she gets by you tomorrow, she dies and I report you to the tenants’ management board…. You think you’ve got troubles now? I’ll give you troubles. You’ll be happy to die when I’m done with you.”

  She slammed down the telephone.

  Trace tossed the wallpaper samples into a waste-paper basket in the corner and flopped down onto the bed. He put his hands behind his head.

  “So how you doing?” he said brightly. “Have a nice day?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Chico said. “I’m not forgetting your culpability in this.”

  “What culpability?” he demanded.

  “You could have been an orphan.” She stomped out of the room and a few seconds later Trace heard her grunting, and he knew it was time now to choose sides or be marked rotten forever. He rose from the bed and went inside to help her move the furniture back where it belonged.

  “Do you know, I dream about that woman?” she said as she grunted, lugging a corner of the heavy sofa.

  “I never dream,” he said.

  “You’re lucky. I dream. She comes up to me in a dream, I always know it’s a dream because she’s talking to me and she doesn’t talk to me in real life. She says, ‘I’ve got a piano for my son’s apartment.’ I say, ‘We’ve got a piano.’ She says, ‘How much did you pay for it?’ I say, ‘Six thousand dollars.’ She goes, ‘Hah! Fifteen hundred dollars, a beauty.’”

  “What happens then?” Trace asked.

  “I don’t know. I always wake up in a cold sweat. You know your mother. Fifteen hundred dollars. She got it in Piano City and it’s got yellow flowers painted on it. She gets everything at some kind of city. Food City. Shoe City. Embalming at Funeral City. She’s making me into Crazy City.”

  “A little more to the front on your end,” Trace directed. “That’s good. You shouldn’t let her bother you. She’ll be gone in a couple more days. You can do a couple more days’ standing on your head.”

  “Yeah? That’s what you think. Try telling that sometime to somebody who’s really standing on her head. The blood pools in your head after just three hours and your feet start to die. Your toes fall off in a couple of days. I’ll never dance again. Your father will have to take me around dancing. Your mother can carry me in a pack on her back.”

  “You can go to Ankle City dancing,” Trace said. “My mother’s got a discount pass.”

  “We can all go to Nuthouse City,” Chico said. “We can go together. Rent a bus from Bus City, me, your father, and that woman. She can drive. We can bibble our lips—”

  “Bibble? Bibble our lips?”

  “You know. Bibibibibibibibble,” Chico said, running her fingers up and down over her lower lip. “We can all bibble our lips and slobber and wet our pants. We can get a room together at the Ha-ha House Your mother can decorate it She can smear dirt on the walls.”

  They finished moving the other couch and Trace pushed Chico down onto it. “Sit there,” he said. He kissed her on the mouth “I don’t know how a nice girl like you ever got hooked up with this traveling circus anyway,” he said.

  She sat and he put the cocktail tables back where they belonged. He heard Chico giggling, so he knew the worst was over.

  “The nerve of her,” Chico said. “Trace, the woman’s a wonder. Just when I think she’s figured out every way to make me nuts, she finds a new one. How’d you manage to escape quasi-sane?”

  “’Twaren’t easy, little girl.” He sat alongside her and she put her arms around his neck and kissed his forehead.

  “You poor thing,” she said. “Remind me to show you some compassion in the future.”

  “I will. You can count on it.”

  “You know,” Chico said, “my mother wanders around like a geisha, wearing kimonos, with her hands hidden inside the sleeves. But all she ever did was threaten suicide if she thought my skirt was too short. Nothing like this. It’s like being violated.”

  “Speaking of which,” he said.

  “Sorry, pal. Duty calls,” she said.

  “I could be quick,” he said.

  “I couldn’t.” She started to laugh again.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “We forgot something.”

  She pointed toward the white lavabo. Trace nodded, got up, and took the wretched thing down from the wall and carried it into the bedroom. In the closet there, he found the print that had been on the wall and he brought it back out and hung it up again.

  He sat back down.

  “What’d you do with it?” she asked

  “Circular File City,” he said.

  15

  There was nothing to see in Jarvis’ room except neatly hung clothing and sparkling clean furniture.

  “I cleaned it for you,” Felicia said brightly.

  “I didn’t want you to clean it for me,” Trace said. “I wanted to root around in the dirt and grime myself. Rubbish can be very informative. Ask Henry Kissinger.”

  “I’ve got four garbage pails outside the kitchen,” she said. “You can root around in there. Find out what we had for breakfast. I didn’t throw anything out. I just straightened things up in here to make it easier for you.”

  “He didn’t have anything? No phone books? No notes? No papers?”

  “No nothing,” the countess said. “I didn’t find anything either.”

  “This whole trip out here was a waste,” Trace said. “I could’ve stayed home.”

  “I resent being called a waste. If you had stayed home, could you grab my wrist and dr
ag me kicking and screaming up off to my bedroom—it’s two doors over—and toss me on the bed and rip off my clothes and punish my body? Huh? Could you do that at home?”

  “Felicia, someday I’m going to take you up on your offer and you’re going to be the most surprised person in town.”

  “Uh huh,” she said. “You will. When you find out what you’ve been missing, you’ll mourn for time wasted, never to be found again.”

  “Didn’t he even have a checkbook? Everybody’s got a checkbook,” Trace said.

  “If he had one, I don’t know where he kept it. It wasn’t in here,” she said. “Come on, Trace. Let’s go over my room and trick.”

  Trace looked at her. She was wearing shorts made from cut-off white jeans, and they showed off her long tan legs and a little north of that. A man’s shirt was tied around her waist, exposing her navel and her flat little belly. The shirt buttons were open, and as she moved, her breasts moved, sweetly, independently, bouncily.

  He walked to where she stood in the doorway, put his arms around her, and kissed her hard. Her tongue slid into his mouth as easily as a family car rolling into the house garage.

  “Keep a civil tongue in your head,” he said “Two doors over in what direction?”

  “You serious?” she said

  “I never joke about important things,” he said.

  “Then let’s make this a very important thing,” she said as she led him into the hallway and toward her room.

  While she slipped out of her clothes, Trace reached under his shirt and yanked the tape recorder arid the surgical tape from his waist and stuck the machine in his jacket pocket. He hung his tie over the door so that the microphone was aimed at Felicia’s bed.

  She was beautiful, silhouetted against the dying light from outside, as she turned and walked toward him.

  “Let me help you undress,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  They lay side by side in bed. Through the open window, Trace could hear the sounds of her house guests, talking, tinkling glasses, punctuated occasionally by the lunatic squawk of one of her parrots: “Polly want a hit, Polly want a hit.”

  “Well?” she said.

  “I like a woman who keeps her promises,” Trace said. “It was a very important thing.”

  And it was a lie. The sex had been routine acrobatics, a highly polished practiced routine that had all the emotional significance of scratching one’s neck to get fid of an itch. The only thing it needed right now, to round it off, he thought, was for someone to jump into the room and hold up two signs: 9.9 for technical merit, 9.1 for artistic achievement.

  “I knew I’d get you in this bed someday,” she said. “It’s just strange that it took a murder for it to happen.”

  “Things are complicated sometimes,” Trace said meaninglessly, and waited to see if she were going to pump him.

  She was.

  She curled her head onto his shoulder and kissed his neck.

  “Have you found out anything yet?” she asked softly.

  “No. Nothing really. No leads, no trace of the jewels, nothing.”

  “And that detective, Roberts? He’s got nothing either?”

  “No, I don t think so.”

  “It’s strange,” she said. “I would have thought someone would contact me by now.”

  “Why you?” Trace asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just thought, I don’t know, maybe the thief, I don’t know.”

  “But no one’s contacted you,” he said

  “No. Except you.” She laughed softly in the darkened room. “I think we’ve just gotten into very close contact.”

  “The closest,” he said, and wondered how long he would have to lie there to be considered civil, before he could get up and dress.

  Felicia seemed content to stay in his arms. “Do you think you’ll catch Jarvis’ killer?” she asked.

  “Probably,” he said. “I’m smarter than I look.”

  “And the jewels?”

  “They’re not really my concern,” Trace said. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’re long gone.”

  “Do you think Spiro had anything to do with it?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “But who’d know where the safe was? Who’d know I had jewels?” she asked.

  “You’d be surprised. All your friends. One piece of chitchat leads to another piece of chitchat. Everybody gossips, and before you know it, somebody you don’t even know knows everything about your house and its layout and your schedule.”

  “I try to avoid that,” she said. “I stay off charity boards and I don’t go and join fund-raising organizations. I’ve been in this town a year and I don’t think I’ve gone to anything formal yet. I turn down all those invitations just because I don’t want a lot of strangers hanging around here, finding out things.”

  “Well, somebody found out something,” Trace said.

  He waited, holding her, for another ten minutes and then he rose and tripped over something in the dark.

  “What the hell’s that?” he growled.

  “Oh. My luggage. I haven’t unpacked yet. I’m hiring a maid. Throw me my clothes from the chair,” she said.

  They dressed and went down to join Felicia’s guests, who were sitting around, under smoky oil lamps, near the pool.

  Felicia went to fix Trace a drink and he sat on a chaise next to Baron Hubbaker, who was wearing a white polo shirt and white trousers.

  “I take it you didn’t think much of my theory about the Rustinayles,” Trace said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “When Walter Marks called you today. After I told him that I thought Jarvis was a ritual murder.”

  “Oh. Having a bit of fun tweaking his nose, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Trace said. “That nose was made for tweaking.”

  “You had him believing it,” Hubbaker said.

  “Why’d he call you?”

  “Damned if I know,” the baron said. “I think maybe he’s a little crazy. I like to play detective as much as the next fellow, but Walter Marks is obsessive.”

  Ferrara was sitting on the other corner of the pool. He roared, “Willie,” and Parmenter came to him from out of the house. “Let’s get out of here,” Ferrara said. “I don’t like the direction this neighborhood is taking.”

  He glared pointedly toward Trace, who said, “Don’t be nasty. Life’s too short to hold grudges.”

  “In your case, I hope that would be true,” Ferrara said as he walked toward the house.

  “Not exactly a new warm friend, is he?” Hubbaker said.

  “I wouldn’t call him if my car broke down late at night,” Trace said. “What do you think about Spiro?”

  “He’s a terrible cook,” Hubbaker said. “He made a thing tonight with peppers and rice that should be used to patch stucco.”

  “I meant involved in this case.”

  “The jewels? Jarvis? I don’t know. I think he’s harmless. Why do you ask?”

  “I just wondered if you had an opinion,” Trace said.

  “None at all,” Hubbaker said.

  Felicia joined them and handed Trace a tall vodka and tonic. He drank it quickly, then went into the kitchen to get a refill.

  Spiro was doing dishes. The television set played softly in a corner of the room.

  “Hello, Mr. Tracy.”

  “How’s it going, Spiro?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything strange happening to you lately?” Trace asked.

  “No.” He shrugged. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Trace said. “I’ve heard a couple people drop your name in this investigation. I wondered if you had anything, like detectives trailing you or like that.”

  Spiro shook his head. “Jesus Christ, I don’t think so. Nobody’s going to try to pin this on me, are they, Mr. Tracy?”

  “You didn’t do it?”

  “I swear to God. I only know what I told you.”

  Then don’t
worry about anything,” Trace said

  “Easy for you to say.” Spiro said as he turned back to the dishes

  Chico was already home when Trace got there. As he feared, she was in bed with a look in her eye that made come-hither sound wishy-washy.

  “Climb in here and feel me up a little,” she said.

  How do women get such insanely bad timing? he wondered. He had been pure for weeks and Chico had looked at him with not much more interest than if he had been an advertisement for lawn mowers. One night he goes out tipping on her, and she picks that night to be horny, and aggressive about it.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “My idea exactly.”

  “Don’t talk about it. Do it,” she said.

  “I’m going to,” he said. “I’m going to pound your body flat. I’m going to make you sorry for all the times you’ve rejected me. You’re going to be nothing but a repository for my stored-up passion.”

  “You got laid tonight, didn’t you?”

  “You’re disgusting,” he said. “Honest, you are. I come home, exhausted from working, and you’re lying there with your filthy little Oriental-Sicilian mind filled with disgusting fantasies.”

  “Who was it? I bet you hit that big-uddered cow.”

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with a comment,” he said.

  It was good that she picked the wrong woman. Now he could spar with her and let her get herself all worked up about his bagging National Anthem, and then he could tell her, with honesty and sincerity just oozing out of his every word, that, no, he had not slept with National Anthem and he was really tired of her sick suspicions. If he did it right, maybe he could even make her feel guilty. Timing was everything. The trick was not to deny it now, but first let her get it firmly implanted in her mind that National Anthem was the woman in the piece.

  “Was she good? Was she as good as I am?”

  “Nobody could be as good as you are,” he said. Very clever, he thought. Just the right kind of answer. An all-purpose nondenial.