When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Page 12

  “A miracle. A miracle. Call Lourdes,” he yelled exuberantly. “The power of your healing body next to mine.”

  He squeezed her tight to him and tried to kiss her.

  She turned her face away. “Conniving, horny mutt,” she grumbled.

  “Tell the truth. You love being wanted,” he said.

  “Not by you,” she said, but she turned her face back and let Trace kiss her.

  Later, feeling good, Trace called Walter Marks, the insurance company’s vice-president for claims, at his home.

  “Hello, Groucho.”

  “Where the hell have you been, Tracy?” Marks demanded.

  “Doing what you told me to do. Working on that Armitage case. It’s just what I thought. The case is riddled with Mafia types. I haven’t questioned anyone yet who doesn’t look like a gunslinger. I hired a detective agency to protect me. You’ll be happy to know I’m still safe and sound.”

  “Overjoyed,” Marks said sarcastically. “I’m sure you’re more than a match for the Mafia. Hit them with your expense account. That would crush anyone.”

  “You don’t think they’re anything to worry about?” Trace said.

  “Come on. I wasn’t born yesterday. Mafia. Pfff.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Trace said.

  “Why?” Marks’s voice suddenly reeked suspicion.

  “Because I’ve been worried. So I’ve been giving everybody I talk to your business card and telling them my name is Walter Marks. If some guys carrying a violin case come to see you, just stare them right down.”

  “What? You gave them my business card?”

  “Listen, Groucho, I have to go now. But I’ll check in every so often to see if you’re still around. Oh. Another thing. You ought to let your wife start the car in the morning before you get in it. Just a precaution. You can’t ever be too safe.”

  15

  “Welcome to Alphabet City,” Sarge said.

  “So what is this place that was so important that I come to?” Trace asked his father. They had parked Sarge’s car half in, half out of a bus stop, a few doors shy of a Lower East Side tavern named The Security Blanket. A cutesy-poo neon sign with those words inscribed inside what was supposed to look like a blanket stuck out over the front door.

  “What it looks like,” Sarge said. “Nick Armitage’s security blanket.”

  As they got out of the car, Trace asked, “Is that old police shield in the window still saving you from getting parking tickets?”

  Sarge nodded. “Except you get some of these new bastards on the force. They ticket the mayor so they can get on the six-o’clock news. Publicity hounds. You got traffic cops now who hire public-relations men.”

  “You’re being bitter. Maybe they just think the job’s on the level.”

  “Nobody who thinks anything’s on the level ever applies to join the NYPD,” Sarge said.

  “God, what a cynical old man.”

  “Mark it well. It’s the only thing I’ve got to leave you when I go.”

  Trace said, “Then don’t go until you can leave something better. So why is this Armitage’s security blanket?”

  “When he moved over from Brooklyn, where he was a real small-timer, this was the first place he opened in Manhattan. That must be twenty, twenty-five years ago. Then he opened a bunch of joints and now that big nightclub, but he keeps this one like he doesn’t want to let it go. It’s…I don’t know.”

  “I know,” Trace said. “When I was an accountant, I used to deal with this guy who did income-tax returns for people. He’d charge them ten, fifteen dollars. Then he got into a different business and got to be a millionaire. Hell, the interest on his interest was a millionaire’s interest. And still every April fifteenth, he’d sit down and fill out people’s income taxes for ten and fifteen dollars. I asked him why once and he said, ‘They can take all the money away, but this is my skill, they can’t take that away from me. As long as I’ve got that, I always have something.’”

  “What’d you think of that, Dev?” Sarge asked.

  “I thought it was dopey,” Trace said. “If I were making a million dollars a year, I’d be damned if I’d be filling out somebody’s freaking income tax for ten dollars.”

  “Me neither,” Sarge said. “Anyway, I guess you’re right. That must be the way Armitage feels about this place. He won’t let it go. And I thought you ought to take a look at it. Maybe somebody here knows something that you might not find out uptown. Hey, look at this.”

  Two young men were walking down the street toward them. They were about twenty years old, and they wore neat tweed jackets and knit ties and button-down collars, and they looked like Jeff and John, the Preppie twins. They were jabbering excitedly at each other, all smiles and orthodontia.

  Sarge said angrily to Trace, “It’s like this all the time. This is the most murderous vicious drug-dealing part of the city, and these rich kids who don’t know any better, they come over here to score drugs. They don’t even have enough sense not to go flashing a big bankroll. They think it’s some kind of gentleman’s game, buy a little nose candy for the boys back at the dormitory. Like it’s neat and civilized and they’re not dealing with the degenerate scum of the world. There’s people around here who’d kill them, who’d slip ice picks into their hearts, if they just got wind that somehow these two twits have an extra couple of hundred in their pockets or hidden in their socks. Men of the world always hide their extra money in their sock,” Sarge said.

  He shook his head. “These assholes just don’t know. They think this is panty raids and giggles. There’s one or two of them killed every week or so, and they still keep coming back because you can buy anything you want down here.”

  Trace knew that “down here” referred to what Sarge had called Alphabet City, a section of Lower Manhattan that covered Avenues A through D. The streets were named with letters, in contrast to New York City’s usual system of numbering its main north-south avenues.

  “Cops can’t stop it?” Trace asked.

  “They control it. When they see raw meat like these two, they try to chase them so they don’t get hurt. But if they really tried to stop the drug-dealing, they’d just wind up scattering it all over the city again. At least if they keep it here, they can keep hoping that someday there’s a federal grant and they can blow up these blocks and get rid of the problem once and for all.”

  “Until the next week, when it opens up again somewhere else,” Trace said.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Trace saw the bitter hurt on Sarge’s face. He knew how his father hated criminals. He could talk like a world-weary sophisticate about smart money, about cops on the take, about the system being designed only to help the rich, and all the rest of the fashionable saloon talk of cynical losers, but Trace knew that in Sarge’s heart, the old man wanted the system to work and was upset when it didn’t. He remembered every arrest he had ever made in twenty-five years on the police force. He was proud of every one of them too.

  The two Preppies were now almost up to them, ignoring Sarge and Trace, violating the first rule of life in Alphabet City by not continually checking on their surroundings—who was on the street, who was behind them. Sarge was right, Trace thought. These two were hamburger.

  He heard his father growl a little deep in his throat and then step out in front of the two youths. They were of average size, but Sarge was tall and broad, and with his shock of white hair, his anger-reddened face, and hands the size of canned hams, he had a tendency to be terribly imposing.

  The two young men stopped short, startled by this burly apparition that loomed in front of them.

  Sarge pulled out his hip-pocket wallet and snapped it open, showing his old gold New York City police sergeant’s badge.

  “What are you two doing here?”

  The two hesitated. “Just walking around,” one of them finally said. His voice almost broke in the middle of the sentence.

  Sarge nodded, then snarled, “Bullshit
.” His face twisted in anger. “I’ve been watching you since you got here and you’re on your way to buy drugs.” The two started to protest, but Sarge snapped at them and cut them off. “Don’t deny it, you two piss-willows. I want you the hell out of here. Right fucking now before I run your asses in for vagrancy.”

  “You can’t—” one started.

  “And resisting fucking arrest. And assaulting an officer. My partner over there…” He nodded toward Trace, who was leaning against their car. “He saw you try to take a punch at me.” Sarge paused a beat, then leaned his face in closer to the two young men. “Listen. I’m giving you a break. There are special raids going down around here tonight. We’ve got three hundred cops in the area. Buy something and you’ll be bagged.” He straightened up again. “Now you get your little lily-white asses out of here or you’ll have to call Daddy in Westport to come and make bail for you. You understand?” The last two words were a vicious nasty snarl.

  The two young men nodded. Neither spoke.

  “Then move it. If I see you two again, you’re in deep shit.” The Preppies looked at each other, turned, and started to walk away.

  “I said move it,” Sarge yelled. “This ain’t no fucking boulevard stroll.”

  The two men started jogging down the block, away from them, and Sarge replaced his wallet. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink,” he said to Trace, his voice totally calm.

  Trace pushed himself away from the car. “You did good, Pop.”

  “No, I didn’t. They’ll go back to their fancy campus and tell their friends, who’ll say, ‘Why, that pig violated your civil rights, he can’t chase you off the street,’ and they’re going to wind up back here and maybe dead. Did you see them? They were wearing gold watches. Gold watches, for Jesus’ sake. In Alphabet City. God save the children.”

  “Maybe you did,” Trace said. “Maybe they’ll live now and grow up just like their daddies. To be advertising writers and bank presidents.”

  Sarge looked at him, then at the vanishing figures of the two young men. Mockingly, he called out softly, “Come back. Come back. I was only fooling.”

  The tavern was spotlessly clean. From the outside, it looked like a local bar and Trace had expected to see a scene out of Walpurgisnacht: degenerates, junkies, pushers, prostitutes, pimps. But instead the half-empty bar looked as normal as any New York City bar could be. Which meant that there was no one there with hair dyed pink.

  The bar ran straight along one wall of the building to a partition that led to a backroom that was a combination dining room and cocktail lounge, where a woman singer was working under a small spotlight. Trace saw that she was a small redheaded woman in jeans, sitting on a high stool in front of a microphone, accompanying herself on a guitar.

  The bartender nodded at them as they came in and sat at the bar. He was barely thirty, Trace guessed, an open-faced young man, but he looked as if he had already begun to suffer from the ravages of his profession. His face was getting a little fatty in the cheeks, the skin of his neck was loosening, and the whites of his eyes, while not really red, were an unwholesome pink. Trace thought that the bartender had started to go to seed a little earlier than usual. Most of them seemed to be protected from aging by the alcohol they lived with, until about their fortieth birthday, and then they went to hell all at once. This one seemed to have a ten-year head start on degeneration.

  Sarge told Trace, “I’ll be right back. Phone call.”

  As the bartender approached him, Trace thought of ordering vodka. He hadn’t had a real drink in a long while, and what the hell did Chico expect of him anyway. It wasn’t part of the bet that he would stop drinking totally, only that he would moderate his habits. He thought about it for a moment, then decided reluctantly that it was too early in the evening to start on vodka. He would stick with milder stuff until late in the night and then have a vodka as a reward. The thought gave him something to live for.

  “Draft beer for him,” Trace said. “I’ll have red wine straight up.”

  The bartender nodded. A speaker system was mounted over the bar and the young singer’s voice filled the room. When Trace and Sarge had walked in, she was singing “Streets of London” and now she was singing “Willie McBride,” another depressingly sad song, but her crystal-pure soprano voice gave the song a beauty he had never heard in it before.

  The bartender brought the drinks back. “Start a tab?”

  “Sure.” Trace sipped at the red wine.

  “You like that shit?”

  Trace looked to his right. The man who had spoken was big, with a chain gold necklace, a marine crew cut, and a pullover sweater that bared his neck so you could see the necklace. He was big. The crew cut made him look like a marine drill sergeant on furlough.

  “What’s that you’re drinking?” Trace asked, nodding at the man’s shot glass.

  “Sour mash. Straight,” the man said.

  “I like this shit better than that shit,” Trace said, and turned away. So much for good intentions. If he had ordered vodka, instead of being sanctimonious and drinking wine, this creature would never have spoken to him.

  The man’s voice followed him. “Only fairies drink wine at a bar. Faggots.”

  “Hey, Ernie,” the bartender said, “cool it.”

  “Shut up. I drink here. I can talk if I want. Everybody knows faggots drinks wine. Madison Avenue fairies. Dress designers.”

  “Sounds right to me,” Trace said amiably.

  “Which are you?” Ernie asked sullenly. He obviously did not want Trace agreeing with him.

  “I design ladies’ underwear. You’ve heard of Frederick’s of Hollywood? I’m Frederick’s of Ohio.”

  “Fairy. All designers are fairies. What do you think of that?”

  Trace beckoned the bartender. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Brian,” the bartender said.

  “Is it that this asshole wants to hit me? Is that what it is?”

  “What?” asked Ernie. “Who you calling an asshole?”

  Trace raised a hand for silence. “Time out, asshole. One conversation at a time. You’re next. First I’m talking to Brian here. Does he want to hit me?”

  “Does the Pope say Mass?” Brian answered.

  “Who’d you call an asshole?” Ernie demanded, and since it seemed to be important to help Ernie find himself in this world, Trace turned and was about to answer when Sarge’s voice said, “He’s not calling anybody an asshole. But I am, you asshole. Now shut up your big ugly face.”

  Trace saw that Sarge had his big hand upon Ernie’s shoulder and was squeezing with his thumb and fingers deep into the trapezius muscle between shoulder and neck.

  “Ow, goddammit.” Ernie wrenched away, jumped to his feet, and faced Sarge.

  Sarge was a lot older, but just as big and wider and burlier, and his face was a lot meaner.

  “Who the hell are you?” Ernie demanded.

  “Hold on, Sarge,” Trace said, getting off the bar stool.

  “Why?” Sarge asked.

  “You promised me that I’d get the next ugly one. It’s my turn.”

  “Well, I was talking about ugly human beings,” Sarge said. “I don’t think this thing counts.”

  “It’s human,” Trace said. “I heard it try to talk before.”

  “Real words?”

  “Yes. I definitely heard it say wine. And fairy. It said fairy better than wine.”

  “Probably it’s had more practice saying fairy,” Sarge said.

  “Maybe, Sarge. But it’s mine anyway.”

  “What is this shit?” Ernie snapped. “Why you calling him Sarge?”

  “Because he’s a cop, and after I punch your ugly fucking face off, Ernie, he is going to book what’s left of you and throw you in the can. There are a lot of fairies in there on a Friday night. You should really enjoy it.”

  Ernie’s mouth moved.

  “Here it comes,” Trace said. “Now it’s going to say, ‘Yeah? Says who?’ and you
’re going to have to hit it to shut it up.”

  “Aaaah, you two are nuts. I’m getting out of here,” Ernie said.

  “A wise decision,” Sarge said. “If the nuts are here, can the fruits be far behind?”

  Ernie snatched his money from the bar and left, and Sarge and Trace both sat back down.

  “Boy, he had me frightened for my life,” Trace said. “I’m glad you were here to protect me.”

  “What are fathers for?” Sarge said. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “My pleasure. Your phone call go through?”

  Sarge shook his head. “Nobody home.”

  The bartender came over and apologized for Ernie. “He’s not a bad guy, but he’s kind of a local. Doesn’t like strangers.”

  “Bars are filled with them,” Trace said. “Looks like you run a pretty tight ship.”

  “We try,” Brian said.

  After he walked away, Trace told Sarge, “It does look like a pretty clean bar.”

  “Don’t let it fool you,” Sarge said. “Armitage sells drugs uptown, and I bet when he started this place, he sold them here. Maybe he doesn’t anymore, probably doesn’t need to, but if he needed a buck, he’d sell drugs here or in a damned schoolyard. Don’t let that tuxedo and that Chez Nick crap con you. He’s still a goddamn knee-capper.”

  “That’s what annoys me about this whole thing. Nick ought to be out kneecapping somebody right now about his kid. Tearing his hair out. Shooting people. It doesn’t figure.”

  “Unless he already knows who killed his kid and he’s just waiting for the right time to get even,” Sarge said.

  “That’s not bad, Sarge. Not bad.”

  Sarge finished his beer. “Order me up another,” he said, and walked toward the telephone again.

  Trace ordered two more drinks, then watched in the mirror as Sarge was talking to someone. He could see Sarge smile when he said hello and then some pleasant conversation that he could not overhear but that ended with another large smile and a nod of the head.

  When he came back, he still did not volunteer anything about the telephone call.